The Housing Shortage: Solutions Are Out There (Part 6 of a Series)

Sitting in a coffee shop recently, I heard two guys in their thirties complaining about the unaffordable housing in the Boulder area. Not a novel topic, but what struck me was that these guys were a doctor and anesthesiologist, people we tend to think don't worry much about housing costs. So I decided to do a little digging.  The price of the average single family house in the US during 2022 was 5.6 times the median income; in Boulder it was 8.5 times the median income. And these guys were complaining that in the neighborhoods they'd checked out, all the newer houses were just plain too big, as if they'd been designed in (and for) a different generation. Ironically, this conversation took place just over 5 miles from Prospect New Town* in Longmont, Colorado, which was founded in the mid-1990s by Kiki Wallace and designed by the architects at Duany Plater Zyberk. Their design brief was to provide a variety of housing types, from small apartments to townhouses, and including attempts at reinvigorating the old single family formula...

By the time I first visited these traditional but tastefully-proportioned and detailed townhouses facing a park in Prospect, the Great Recession had brought its own woes to the economy, and many builders who left the construction industry never came back. 

Owing to shortages of cash and labor, architects began to check into the "tiny house" movement, and that, in turn, led to revisiting the notion of prefabricating houses and housing subassemblies in factories, in the same way cars are built.  We heard that if a Chevy Impala was built in the same way as the average home, that is, outdoors, by framing, mechanical and electrical crews who were strangers to each other, it would cost as much as a Rolls-Royce, and be kind of a crummy car.  The idea of fabricating entire bathrooms in factories was hatched by Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg soon after WWII, using enameled steel, below. By the time I stayed in a medieval stone building in Regensburg, Germany in 1997, fiberglass was the material largely forming a standardized, manufactured plug-in bathroom that worked just fine.

Come to think of it, the other notably expensive room in the average house, the kitchen, is also the site of pretty familiar activities that could be addressed by standardization.  Somehow it's a relief that the suppliers of the efficiency kitchen below have gone with a cheerful color out of step with the current fashion for dull gray.  Also, the glossy finish is easy to achieve in a factory.

By 2016 our practice had designed several small standardized houses that could be suitable for factory production; the largest, the 982, was named for its area in square feet.  The roof on the house was designed to resist high winds; it only rolls back in the video so you can check out the efficient plan layout.  One tiny house was built in Big Sur to our design in 2008-09; at 660 sq. ft., it was efficient but not standardized in any way, as its trapezoidal plan needed to nest between a cliffside and a larger house on Hurricane Point.

Also in 2008, I visited "Home Delivery" exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This was a now-famous exposition of architects' efforts to design manufactured housing for easy delivery, in the case of "tiny houses" as complete units, and in the case of multi-story structures, as an easily-assembled kit of parts.  One that caught my eye was the Micro-Compact by Horden Cherry Lee Architects in London.  It was designed for easy delivery by helicopter as emergency housing for workers in disaster zones. The display unit was fabricated in steel, but later ones were built in aluminum for easier transport.

When I checked recently on the fate of the Micro-Compact idea, it turned out that while a demonstration village of Micro-Compacts had been built in Munich in 2005, only 16 units had been built by 2012, and that the 1.8 ton modules originally costing around 35,000 GBP each had been adopted by several clients as high concept vacation homes.  Visionary architect Richard Horden died in 2018.

Architects and urban planners who took projected population growth figures seriously focused on cities fairly early.  Moshe Safdie had schemed out his futurist housing complex, Habitat 67, for Expo 67, a "universal exposition" in Montreal.  Relying on intriguing alternation of mass and space, the reinforced concrete complex positioned landscaped terraces on the roofs of many units. Designing the lower units with enough strength to support upper ones added to complexity, and would've been easier with computer-assisted design, which had just barely arrived in the mid-Sixties, when it was used to assess dynamic loads on race car frames by Ford... 

By the current era, computers had made it relatively easy to design stackable modular housing using engineered lumber and mass timber techniques, saving concrete along the way.  And not a moment too soon; the United Nations predicts that while 55% of the world's population lives in cities today; 68% will be city dwellers by 2050. More ominously, it predicts that the ecosystem, already stressed under the weight of 8.2 billion people, will need to support 2.5 billion more by 2050.  What this means is that to allow for all these new city dwellers, the world needs to build the equivalent of a new New York City every month between now and then.  A friend who is not an urban planner immediately asked the right question anyway upon hearing this: "Where is all the water going to come from?"  Not only drinking water in drought-prone regions like the American West and Sub-Saharan Africa, but water for all that concrete.

This leads back to the idea of finding natural limits.  As education spreads through societies, their birth rates drop. As storms, floods and fires caused by climate change affect more regions, insurance companies may have more of an effect on where people settle than zoning laws; in some regions of the US, that's already the case.  And in a world of limited resources, the need to limit carbon (and thus concrete) leads us back to a house we admired at that 2008 MOMA show.  It's the 5-story Cellophane House by Kieran Timberlake Architects.  It was built of off-the-shelf aluminum framing components with steel connectors, and was 80% complete in only 6 days, a pretty impressive feat when you factor in the foundation placement, and the limited access to the site in Midtown Manhattan. Though the firm has gone on to design larger, award-winning projects, their exhibit is the most memorable one from the "Home Delivery" show.  If we're going to house humanity in urban environments, spatial efficiency and time savings are essential.  The lightweight, light-filled Cellophane House still holds real promise for an urban-centered future.

*Footnote:  We featured Prospect New Town in this series on February 22 of this year, in "Housing Part 5: Finding the Missing Middle."  We revisited industrialized housing systems in earlier posts, reviewing the post-WW2 Lustron system, along with the Case Study Houses and a parallel French project, in "Modern Housing Solutions Part 3 (or 4): The Case Study Era and the Lustron Adventure", posted here on March 30, 2023.  For a look at kit houses, starting with a surviving 1920s Sears kit house in Boulder, see "Kit Houses: A Solution to Overpriced Housing", posted Jan. 15, 2023.  For Part 2 of a rambling series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, you can visit "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017.  In that post, we provided detailed descriptions of the MOMA project houses.  The first in this series was "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile:  Bowlus and Airstream", posted July 30, 2017.

Photo Credits

Top & 2nd, 6th & 10th (bottom): the author

3rd:  HB-09418-C: Chicago History Museum, Hedrich-Blessing Collection

4th:  buildingandinteriors.com

5th:  Video by Ben Lochridge, design by Poeschl Architecture

7th:  Horden Cherry Lee Architects, featured in Dezeen

8th:  wikimedia

9th:  archdaily.com

 

Housing Part 5: Finding the "Missing Middle" in Prospect New Town

As the world around us seems determined to fly apart at the seams, we decided to foster a bit of hope by taking another look at a problem which actually seems to have some readily available solutions: the shortage of housing, and its high cost.  It turns out that one of the things driving the high cost and low availability of housing (beyond our failure to adopt the Scandinavian model of factory-built houses) is the disappearance of housing types beyond the standard (and mostly oversized) single-family house, partly due to the prevalence of single-family-only zoning.  It wasn't always thus.  Before the post-World War II explosion of bedroom suburbs, cities and towns offered a healthy mix of housing types including duplexes, townhouses (attached or stacked), and bungalows sharing courtyards. These alternatives between small apartments and large single-family houses have been called the "missing middle" in today's housing market by urban planner Daniel Parolek*.

Prospect, the first town planned around New Urbanist principles in Colorado, was designed by the architectural and planning firm of Duany Plater Zyberk to restore that kind of variety to the housing mix, and to offer a walkable townscape with shops and restaurants in easy reach.  Work on developer Kiki Wallace's dream town, within Longmont city limits, started in the mid-1990s.  I recently went back to take another look...

Attached townhouses mix with single-family houses around a central park, convenient for biking or walking dogs.  DPZ intentionally mixed traditional and modernist styles while also mixing housing types and sizes.  By providing a mix of housing sizes and types, including carriage houses and live / work lofts along with apartments, townhouses, and courtyard houses, DPZ anticipated and avoided the problem that young families face in many markets: they can't fit into small apartments, and can't afford the standard-size single-family house, which now averages nearly 2,500 square feet.

The mix with modern design language becomes more apparent when you walk east of that park to visit the commercial area, with apartments sited above shops and restaurants, also around a pedestrian-friendly park.  The New Urbanist framework allows up to 3 stories in overall building height...

Here's the view looking north from that park.  All the ground-level commercial spaces were occupied save one; that space was under renovation.  We found an architect's office at one edge of the park, a possible sign that commercial space is still affordable.  A built-in advantage of the 16 to 40 unit per acre density that goes with mixing housing types (and including smaller sizes) is tthat you get a walkable townscape with commercial and recreational facilities within easy reach.  In my case, it took about five minutes to get from the residential park to the commercial one...

Because of the attention given by planners to these park spaces and to the generous plantings of trees, there is a relaxed feel even to the higher-density areas of the townscape.  

Along with colorful attached dwellings, there is the occasional single-family house.  This one follows Mid-Century Modern themes, with bands of clerestory windows, even above the garage, and a brick privacy fence with perforations to add textural interest and human scale...

This street, a pedestrians-only mews, is lined with townhouses...

No matter what you think of the mix of Dwell Magazine modern and more traditional residential styles, you'll probably admit that the town planners have done a good job with human scale, and with hiding garages in alleys.

After a brisk afternoon walk around Prospect, we're back where we started, looking at the other side of those three nicely-scaled, gable-roofed brick townhouses.  Prospect fared well in the autumn 2013 flood, and the trees have grown up to make it feel like the established neighborhood it is...

Anyone looking for subdivision where alternatives to the single-family house are not offered, and where you won't be able to walk to a coffee shop or restaurant (unless you walk over to Prospect), can check out the development next door.  Rainbow Ridge  borders Prospect along Pike Avenue, and it has a relentless bedroom suburb vibe.  Comically, considering its name, there's nothing like the riot of colors you find in Prospect; everything seems beige or brick-colored. The prevailing design language, much favored by developers in the 80s and 90s, is something we call the Garage Door Festival style...

*Footnote:  The best summary we found of the "missing middle" in US housing is 8 years old, but still relevant:  "Will U.S. Cities Design Their Way Out of the Housing Crisis?", by Amanda Kolson Hurley, posted Jan. 18, 2016 at nextcity.org.  We examined other housing solutions in earlier posts, reviewing the post-WW2 Lustron system, along with the Case Study Houses and a parallel French project, in "Modern Housing Solutions Part 3 (or 4): The Case Study Era and the Lustron Adventure", posted here on March 30, 2023.  For a look at kit houses, starting with a surviving 1920s Sears kit house, see "Kit Houses: A Solution to Overpriced Housing", posted Jan. 15, 2023.  For Part 2 of this series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017. The first in this series was "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile:  Bowlus and Airsream", posted July 30, 2017.

Photo Credits

All color photos are by the author.

The monochrome shot of Rainbow Ridge is from ColoProperty.com and was reproduced on the Zillow website.

Modern Housing Solutions Part 3 (or 4): The Case Study Era and the Lustron Adventure

This is Part 3 of a long, rambling series on innovative efforts to house people...Part 4 if you count the post on Bowlus and Airstream trailers* that kicked off the whole thing.  Those early streamlined trailers appeared during the Great Depression and were inspired by the forms of modern aircraft, but after World War II, architects and planners looked instead to the industrial production lines that made thousands of aircraft (and tanks and jeeps) for the war effort.  They reasoned that the same efficiencies and standardized parts could be applied to providing housing for the returning millions of US military veterans who had served overseas in the war.

Early after the war, this focus on using industrial processes and standardized parts took a couple of different directions.  In one, architects reasoned that houses reflecting the latest thinking on space and materials could be made of largely standard parts, but in a way that permitted a wide variety of different designs.  The modern preference for plans provided open living space with few internal divisions, as well as large glass areas opening onto the great outdoors, led to an architecture with floor-to-ceiling glazing, and long spans supported by steel trusses or beams...

This was the approach taken by Charles and Ray Eames, a husband and wife team of industrial designers, in their LA house and studio.  Their project was one of around two dozen houses featured in the Case Study program organized in the mid-Forties by publisher John Entenza and featured in his magazine, Arts & Architecture.  Also known as Case Study #8, the Eames house was one of five Case Study projects that were eventually sited on a bluff in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.  The glassy, steel-framed rectangles of the elevations reflect the open simplicity of the plan, and the use of black framing to set off primary colors against larger zones of white plaster recalls the pre-war paintings of Piet Mondrian.

The interior view shows how the designers dissolved the visual barrier between the outdoors and interior space, and how they made use of low-cost commercial steel trusses and metal decking to support the roof.  Along with the use of "off-the-shelf" steel parts, the house provided a place to test the Eames duo's ideas about using new materials in furniture, including the molded plywood chairs that appeared the same year as their house and studio, 1949.  Their house and studio design appeared in the May 1949 issue of Arts & Architecture, and Charles and Ray moved in that December.  

Pierre Koenig designed the Bailey House (Case Study #21) for a young couple in 1959.  Sited on a small plot in the Hollywood Hills, Case Study #21 was intended to serve as a prototype for a steel-framed house that could be duplicated in a large series.  The street side elevation below shows how the largely blank facade provides privacy.  Shallow pools of water (empty on the street side view) were intended to provide a cooling effect...

The carport view below on the Bailey's north side shows how the house opens to the front and rear, with floor to ceiling glass and nearly transparent living space.  In this view the reflecting pool is filled, and provides emphasis to the adjacent entry path.  Despite the original goal of the Case Study program to provide affordable modernity to young families, the houses are now treated as prized artifacts with prices to match; one recently sold for over $3 million. In 2013, ten of the houses in the Case Study series were listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  

The era of these Case Study houses coincided with the explosive growth of Los Angeles and the phenomenon of suburban sprawl across the USA.  In what was understood at the time as an effort to provide a piece of the American Dream to Everyman on a small plot of land, developers took over agricultural land around major cities, and highways moved out to serve new "bedroom communities" (most with more bedrooms than community), along with gas stations and what would soon be called shopping centers.  Fast food entered our language not long after it entered our diets.  Few took time to ponder what the implications might be for energy consumption, wild land, or wildlife. The surge of postwar optimism was reflected in the Interstate Highway System, begun in 1956 when President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, and was echoed (not without a bit of irony) in artist Ed Ruscha's paintings of gas stations in the next decade...

The enameled steel panels that formed many of those gas stations had first appeared in the 1930s during the Streamline Moderne period, and in the Midwest, Carl Strandlund had developed a prefabricated version before the war that he thought might provide a format for housing after the war ended...  

He hired two Chicago architects, Roy Burton Blass and Morris Beckman, and they came up with 3 models of small ranch house designs with up to 3 bedrooms.  The houses were structured in steel, with prefabricated steel stud walls that were shipped to construction sites on special trucks. Interior as well as exterior wall finishes were enameled metal; with enameled metal tile roofs the new houses would be fireproof and largely maintenance free. Strandlund obtained a $12.5 million loan from a Federal agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corp., and his Lustron Corporation began production of the houses in 1948 at a repurposed Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory in Columbus, Ohio.

Lustron houses featured lots of built-in features like storage shelves and cabinets, easily-cleaned enameled metal bathroom surfaces, and radiant heating at the ceiling level. The latter might have worked a bit better as a floor-mounted system.  Also, because Lustron began production before insulated glazing had become widely available, there were some complaints about window performance. Those who took delivery of a Lustron were generally happy, though...

The angled, truss-shaped porch support shown below was a distinctive Lustron feature, and included a built-in downspout for drainage... 

The houses sold for $8,500 to $9,500, and though they were a bit more pricey than conventional construction, orders piled up at the 234 franchised Lustron dealers.  Strandlund had aimed to manufacture 100 houses per day, and identified the break-even point at 50 houses.  Production peaked, however, at just 26 houses a day, and at that rate Lustron was losing money, customers were facing long waits for deliveries, and Reconstruction Finance was getting nervous about repayment of that big loan...

Because of the lag in getting production up to speed, and also because of pressure placed on politicians by the building interests and unions representing conventional construction, the government moved quickly to foreclose on Lustron's loan, and the company folded after a year in manufacturing.  In that time, though, Lustron produced and delivered 2,680 houses, of which about 1,000 remain in use. In the realm of all-steel construction, only multi-family efforts delivered more housing, and not so soon after the war. During this same period, French architect Jean Prouvé traveled an intriguingly similar path, producing a prototype prefab gas station design...

...as well as several prototypes of steel-structured houses intended for large-scale production.  Sadly, Prouvé's own house, which incorporated many of his ideas on using steel, aluminum and open glazed spaces, was only built in 1954, after his housing design and construction workshops closed. Prouvé's efforts formed a kind of link between the Lustron mass-production concept and the more adventurous and open design ideas of the Case Study houses, and will be the subject of a future story. 

These early initiatives might have had more success had society framed the shortage of housing as the kind of crisis that it now presents in many 21st century American cities, and adopted the same level of commitment and dedication that the US applied to winning World War II.  As it turned out, the Case Study and Lustron projects, and their French equivalents by Jean Prouvé, attracted attention to the housing problem, but ran into obstacles presented by business as usual, politics as usual, and a kind of "not invented here" mindset...

*Footnotes:  We found an informative essay on the Lustron housing effort, in "Lustron, The All Steel House" with photos and drawings, from Sept. 4, 2015, at www.handeyesupply.com.

Part 3 of this series, entitled "Kit Houses: A Solution to Overpriced Housing?", appeared here on Jan. 15, 2023, with a look at a 1920s Sears kit house and some modern Scandinavian equivalents. For Part 2 of this long-interrupted series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017. In that post, we visited modular and prefab housing exhibits in Chicago and New York, reported on an innovative reconfiguring of a mobile home by CU students here in Boulder, and also showed a factory-built house in Finland.  And we looked at mobile homes in "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile: Bowlus and Airstream", posted July 30, 2017.  

Photo Credits

Top photo, plan drawings + 2nd & 4th photo:  eamesfoundation.org 

3rd photo:  Wikimedia

5th photo (Case Study #21):  Niels Wouter

6th photo:  Wikimedia

Standard Station:  Artist: Ed Ruscha; featured on Los Angles County Museum of Art website

Gulf Station Photo:  pinterest.com

9th photo thru 12th (Lustron houses in Iowa):  Dr. Marcus Nashelsky.

13th (Prouvé gas station):  Wikimedia

14th & 15th (Prouvé house:):  wikiarquitectura.com

Bottom (Lustron house in Kansas):  Dr. Marcus Nashelsky; we want to thank him for his Lustron research.

Kit Houses, a Solution to Overpriced Housing? A 1920s Sears Kit House in Boulder Revives the Question...

On University Hill in Boulder, you happen upon this Craftsman style bungalow in what looks like its originally intended form.  There's a welcome absence of those awkward second-story additions that real estate agents have taken to calling "pop-ups", as though all old houses are somehow yearning to release their inner Clashing Additions, like English muffins springing out of a toaster... 

Intrigued, you walk around the place.  It's well-maintained, with an array of photovoltaic panels on the roof that shows the owners' concern for their carbon footprint.  Another thing that would keep the carbon footprint down is the actual footprint; the house is modestly sized. In a country where the average new single family house in 2021 was just under 2,500 square feet, this one appears well under the average. If you're a follower of historic residential architecture, though, there is something vaguely familiar about this house, so you take some pictures before you move on...

From 1908 until 1940, Sears, Roebuck & Co. offered kit houses as part of their Modern Homes catalog. Over 70,000 of these kit houses were sold in a variety of styles (around 370) and sizes, before sales wound down during 1942. These houses were shipped to buyers in boxes containing wood framing elements, doors, windows, siding and trim, all marked for location. Think of that IKEA bookcase you may have bought, only even more of a pain to assemble. It turns out, though, that buyers saved plenty of money by ordering the components this way, compared with paying a contractor to source them. Also, as the houses were already designed, there was no architect's fee (hmm...sorry, fellow architects), though there was the cost of engineering and building the foundation, which needed to relate to various soil conditions, sloping vs. flat sites, etc.  Our University Hill example happens to be a Sears Oakdale...

In the mid-Twenties, when the Oakdale was still offered in this friendly-looking Craftsman style, the kit price was just under $1,800.  For comparison, in 1925 a new Ford Model T was yours for $260, in factory-fresh black. By the Thirties, Sears had restyled the Oakdale, removing some of its homey charm.  But it was still a bargain...

This version of the Oakdale turns out to have an enclosed back porch in compatible style, and a garage that is not of Sears origin.  The overall condition of the house is evidence of the likelihood that people still feel at home here...

This might be a good moment to point out that after World War II, shortly after Sears got out of the kit house business, there was a revival of interest in manufactured housing in the USA, in order to meet the demand for housing created by legions of young people leaving the military and starting families. One effort launched in Chicago was Lustron Homes, prefabricated in steel using manufacturing techniques employed in the car industry, and with enameled steel exterior panels. Unlike the kit houses, the components on these prefabricated houses were combined into subassemblies for speedier results.  Opposition to these prefab designs came from construction unions, who saw them as a threat, and from various building and zoning departments, whose expertise was based on traditional construction techniques and whose codes failed to allow for new methods.  Lustron folded after 1950.  Most of the suburban sprawl that accommodated the postwar housing boom was achieved using conventional on-site construction.

How much of it was conventional?  Well, according to eyeonhousing.org, the total US market share of non site-built single-family houses (that is, modular or panelized) was only 2% in 2021. According to Dwell Magazine, the prefabricated share of the new single-family housing market in Scandinavia that year was 80%.  By the late Fifties, Scandinavian firms were pioneering prefabricated, modular and panelized designs. Their design, detailing and provisions for energy efficiency in these have kept up with technical advances. Equally important, zoning codes throughout Scandinavia encourage these houses, and building codes address the technical aspects.  By contrast, when we designed a house addition based upon modifying steel shipping containers in Denver in 2014, the building department was uncertain about whether this constituted a prefabricated house, and delayed approval while searching for a category under which it could be evaluated.  Manufacturers like Pluspuu in Finland offer a variety of configurations emphasizing energy efficiency, in sizes that have increasingly vanished from American cities and suburbs owing to land costs.  The logic seems to dictate that with land prices high, one needs to build as big as zoning allows to maximize profit.  As a result, the late 70s was the peak period for small home builds (averaging 1,400 sq. ft.), averaging over 450,000 per year, but that number is now around 60,000 in the US.

Allowing accessory dwellings on standard lots would help provide more affordable housing, at the small cost of rewriting some low-density single-family zoning. Adapting zoning to allow more multi-unit housing and allowing modular construction for that would also offer a path out of the housing crunch.  A coordinated approach encouraging multi-use zoning and adaptive re-use of often-abandoned but sound buildings in rural downtowns could also provide housing, especially for those who can now work at home, and don't need to be near a large urban center...

It's all enough to make you wonder if Scandinavians know something we Americans don't know. As potential first-time buyers are confronted with an impenetrable housing market offering oversized, wasteful, uninspired choices, it's probably time for zoning changes that allow greater density, and for building code changes that allow for more prefabrication, including kit and modular houses, and for architects and designers to offer something more connected to the way a whole new generation of housing consumers wants to live.

*Footnote:  For Part 2 of this long-interrupted series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, please see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017.  In that post, we visited modular and prefab housing exhibits in Chicago and New York, reported on an innovative reconfiguring of a mobile home by CU students here in Boulder, and also showed a factory-built house in Finland.

Photo Credits

Color shots of the Sears Oakdale house in Boulder are by the author.  The monochrome shot of the Oakdale with plan is from the Sears Roebuck Modern Homes Division, while the perspective of the Craftsman style version above it is from searshouseseeker.com. The color shots of the Pluspuu houses are from pluspuu.fi.  The bottom shot of the Norwegian kit structures is from katus.eu.

Roadside Attraction: The American Alley

Alleys have always had some kind of appeal to city planners and architects…to this architect, anyway. They not only permit delivery of goods and supplies (especially construction supplies) and removal of refuse and recyclable stuff, but they provide a less-traveled path for cyclists and pedestrians.  To understand the importance of alleys, you need only visit a city that lacks them, say San Francisco or New York, and witness the daily crises of delivery, removal and parking that result.

At another level entirely, alleys provide a glimpse into the inner workings, and the inner lives, of our cities.  In Everett Shinn's "Alley Cat" from 1938, a needy feline experiences the human touch...

When Charles Sheeler painted "MacDougal Alley" in 1924, his focus was not on the inhabitants, but on the way light revealed form, color and space...

John Register's paintings of American alleys give attention to light and form, but also manage to convey a sense of loneliness and abandonment that he also captured in cross-country surveys of empty diners and forgotten motels*.

Register's "Inner City" from 1994 is one of those almost hidden, corner-of-the-eye cityscapes that urban dwellers miss in the daily rush of activity on city streets.  Register takes out the streaming traffic and human figures, and leaves us the stillness revealed when the first light hits the alleyways...

In the Seventies, not long after John Register started painting alleys, architects and urban planners started taking an interest in alleyways. Printers Alley in Nashville was an early example of reconfiguring an alley that once warehoused an industry into a pedestrian space lined with restaurants, bars and music venues.

Similar efforts are under way across the country.  The example below shows what can be done with more emphasis on greenery, and a bit more restraint in the signage department.

Cady's Alley, in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., has been renovated into a lively area of shops and restaurants, with a glazed pedestrian bridge adding spatial and structural intrigue. Plantings and patterned pavers add human scale.  Places like these may experience a boom when crowds return after the pandemic, if small businesses can hold on that long...

In towns like Boulder, there's been a growing interest in residential spaces on alleys as well. As real estate prices escalate, there will be pressure on cities to allow more density, and on architects and builders to create energy-efficient, small scale dwellings along our streets and alleys. Unlike most alleys in town, Turner Alley now has a street sign and a couple of modernist alley houses. The one shown here has a south-facing greenhouse space.

Under a standing-seam metal roof, it also features bands of clerestory windows bordering a "light shelf" surrounding an open, sunny interior.

In my own neighborhood, about a mile north of downtown, I found this cleverly articulated cube. A studio perches above concrete walls, with full-height glazing facing south for solar gain, and west for the mountain views. 

A wood rain screen wall encloses the space from the middle of the west-facing garage, and around the north side of the structure, with its small windows, clearly intended as the "utility and storage" side of the living space...

Part of the appeal of this alley house is the privacy and quiet it provides by facing an alley that has less than one-tenth the traffic of the streets that border the block.  It's hidden in plain sight, like those fleeting, light-filled glimpses of alleys sketched by artists like Charles Sheeler and John Register.  And alley houses like it offer the possibility of providing our towns and cities with more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly streetscapes, as well as more affordable housing.

*Footnote:  For a visual essay on John Register's paintings, see our post for February 24, 2018, entitled "Roadside Attraction: John Register's Abandoned Diners and Sleepy Motels". 

Photo Credits:  

Top & 2nd from top (alley near Union Station, Denver 1980):  the author

3rd from top: Everett Shinn, posted at en.wahooart.com

4th:  Charles Sheeler

5th & 6th: The Estate of John Register

7th:  Wikimedia

8th:  mjarchitecture.com

9th:  From "The Hidden History of D.C's Alleyways", at dcist.com

All other photos: the author