Suburban Architecture Research Articles

Распространение «швейцарского стиля» в загородной архитектуре Санкт-Петербурга

«Swiss style» as an international phenomenon of the romanticism era has imposed a considerable impact on the suburban architecture of St. Petersburg. The article presents a description of two periods of the style existence: the middle of the XIX century, when this style popularity was at its peak, the bright examples referring to this period, apart from cottages, were park pavilions of the aristocracy, and the late XIX - early XX centuries, when the style popularity was in its decline, which occurred during intensive cottage construction in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. The influence of the «Swiss style» is manifested through application of the chalet elements in the architecture of summer cottages not only during the period of the style greatest popularity, but also in the early XX century and even later, in subsequent decades.

‘Inner’ suburbanisation – Background of the phenomenon in a polycentric, post-socialist and post-industrial region. Example from the Katowice conurbation, Poland

The article discusses the issue of ‘inner’ suburbanisation – a unique spatial and social phenomenon. The process of ‘inner’ suburbanisation involves the development of low-rise housing estates (characteristic of ‘classical’ suburban architecture) within highly urbanised areas. This phenomenon, with its anti-sprawl effect, develops in polycentric systems on account of the specific distribution of ground rent and the availability of free land for new housing developments. This paper presents ‘inner’ suburbanisation in a post-industrial example, in the post-socialist Katowice conurbation in southern Poland. Referring to that example, the factors of the advancement of ‘inner’ suburbanisation are discussed, as well as the typology of spatial manifestations of this process within the metropolitan core. It was established that ‘inner’ suburbanisation processes developed in the surroundings of most towns in the core of the polycentric urban region.

Suburbanization, National Space and Place, and the Geography of Heritage in the UAE

This article describes how the idea of the “national” as a spatial category emerged in the United Arab Emirates through integrative and segregative processes exemplified in the experience of suburbanization. While other works have focused on UAE’s physical boundaries, this article focuses on “national” circulations of narratives, symbols, and identities rooted in the spatial experience of UAE citizens. These are illustrated with reference to suburban architecture, popular memory, and non-state heritage practices.

1970년대 이후 미국 교외건축 유형의 도시적 변용 연구 - 미국 다운타운 재생과 복합상업시설 개발을 중심으로 -

This paper is intended to argue that the suburban architecture has acquired present state and universality in metropolitan built environment, not just been architectural solutions to specifically the suburbs. In this regard, the transitional period, when the suburban architectural typology transformed into the urban one, is highlighted, focusing on the downtown regeneration in the 1970s and commercial architecture in Las Vegas. These two historical moments had acted to urbanize suburban interior public spaces by the means of corporate atriums and artficial pedestrian networks, and reinforce the economic impacts on commercial mixed-use buildings. The language of Las Vegas architecture developed by theme parks and brand-oriented design transformed suburban shopping centers into urban entertainment centers applicable to the metropolitan built environment. This implies a typological identity between the suburban architecture and the metropolitan architecture.

Vulgar Modernism: J. M. Richards, Modernism and the Vernacular in British Architecture

In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of theArchitectural Review (AR)and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitledThe Castles on the Ground(Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reasonThe Castles on the Groundis most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.

Home in Jerusalem: the American Colony and Palestinian suburban architecture

Urban development outside the walls of Jerusalem began only after 1850. These new suburbs embodied the spatial traditions of their different religious and ethnic patrons. Russian, French, English, German, and particularly Jewish émigré complexes have been well researched. Less thoroughly studied are the new Palestinian suburbs. The largest house of the Husseini neighbourhood is the focus of this analysis. An investigation of the fabric of the building and its written and photographic archive allows a reconstruction of the structure's developmental stages. Its changing form records the cultural shifts in Ottoman Jerusalem affected by the growing presence of Western interests in the region.

Constructing Identity and Tradition

In an increasingly globalized world, national governments appropriate vernacular building traditions to support national identity-building political agendas. In England the neo-traditional house has become an established feature of suburban architecture. This is not, however, as is often assumed, indicative of the nostalgia of the consumer. Rather, neo-traditionalism is the result of planning policies introduced by the government to preserve regional architectural identities and maintain a visual “Englishness” in the built environment. These policies have, in turn, been undermined by the nationwide standardization of “traditional” designs by national house-building companies.

Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000 (review)

Reviewed by: Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000 Amanda Rees Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000. By John Archer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2005. At the beginning of the new millennium 66% of the U.S. population owned homes and over 50% of population lived in suburbia. As the housing crisis unfolds at the end of the millennium's first decade with massive mortgage defaulting in urban and suburban spaces, along with the increasing costs of automobile transportation, we have good reason to meditate on the concept of suburbia and its relationship to the American Dream. John Archer helps us do that. Spanning four centuries, Archer argues that suburban architecture and the idea of the American dream home are deeply rooted within seventeenth-century English philosophy and material culture. From John Locke to New Urbanism, Archer embraces, built, discursive, and lived spaces as he places the American dream home in a broader context. Breaking the book into three major historical periods: eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the suburban house became the location in and from which a growing bourgeoisie explored the concept of identity. Domestic architecture becomes a powerful instrument to construct the self in multiple contexts, and the role of aesthetics forms a central element of identity in terms of class as well as the production of a national taste. Indeed, Archer's aesthetic analysis should not be limited to his response to New Urban practitioners. We can also apply his work to analyze the reiterative articulation of suburban architectural, landscape architectural, and interior design tastes in television networks such as HGTV or the taste-maven corporation Martha Stewart Living Omimedia. When surveying three centuries, the type of data accessible and useful to such a project changes dramatically. In Archer's case, this results in a distinct bifurcation of the book. The first section focuses on interpreting architecture and landscape architecture using floor plans, maps, and photographs of elevations, while the later section utilizes romance novels, advertising, and film. Though his central theme does a reasonable job of [End Page 149] connecting the sections, the bifurcated feel might have been reduced if Archer had placed his theoretical framework (embracing Bahktin and Bourdieu) at the beginning. Having set himself the monumental task of articulating ideal suburban architecture Archer does miss some important elements. For example, a variety of British and American industrialists including Lever, Cadbury, Rowntree, and Pullman created aesthetically complex suburban communities for working class residents. These communities provided a nursery for suburban home architects and landscape architects of the City Beautiful and Garden City movements. However, Archer's focus on the bourgeoisie limits his scope. Not only is there little mention of working class suburbs, there is scant mention of suburbs inhabited by ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, for example Latino, African-American, and Jewish communities. Questions this book raises include: how was identity constituted in minority suburbs, was it the same, did it differ, and why? I was surprised not to see mention of Kenneth Jackson's masterful Crabgrass Frontier (1987) especially his reflections on nineteenth-century suburbs. Nor did Archer mention the single most powerful tool to expand U.S. twentieth-century suburban home growth and identify formation: the fixed rate 30 year mortgage. That said, Archer's masterful and expansive work will interest a board spectrum of scholars from architectural, cultural, planning, suburban, and urban studies, and is an important contribution to the study of suburbia in the United States. Amanda Rees Columbus State University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Accommodating Open Plan: Children, Clutter, and Containment in Suburban Houses in Sydney, Australia

Open-plan living areas are one of the defining features of contemporary suburban architecture in spatially expansive nations like Australia, the United States, and Canada. In these contexts, the European and modernist meanings of ‘open plan’ are joined by relations between parents and children and identities associated with motherhood and homemaking. Using a feminist and material-culture analysis of the practices of living open plan in this distinctive historical and geographical context, this paper offers a different interpretation of the social significance of the open-planned domestic interior. Drawing on research conducted with residents of new, open-planned houses on the outskirts of Sydney and, in particular, mothers' narratives of the materialities of their home and the place of children and open plan within it, I show how open plan is held together, as a material and imaginative space, by a balancing of aesthetic considerations and the materiality and anxieties produced by children. The processes of living open plan entailed accommodating family ideals and practices to suit the house and/or altering the house to suit the family: banishing children from open-plan areas to maintain their simplicity; embracing children's presence; placing furniture to enclose it; knocking out walls to open it.

Vehicle aesthetics and their impact on the pedestrian environment

Cars are designed to appeal to the buyer’s self-image, many of them evoking an impression of speed and power. Such an impression conflicts both with the aesthetic language of suburban architecture, and the needs of pedestrians. The research described in this report was conceived as a preliminary investigation of how members of the public view the aesthetic impact of cars in the residential street environment, particularly from the pedestrian’s point of view. The results suggested that people use two distinct sets of criteria when evaluating the motor car and the residential environment in visual terms. When asked to ‘match’ different models of car with different street scenes, respondents avoided referring to abstract visual qualities such as shape, colour and texture, but concentrated instead on the owners: the imagined driver and the imagined householder. The problem of visual harmony was reduced to one of social and cultural harmony. Could the imagined householder be expected to drive this or that car? However, SUVs were singled out as visually intrusive because they blocked the pedestrian’s view. Members of one of the groups, boys aged 11–12, found it difficult to visualise the impact of cars on pedestrians at all, or even to question vehicle design from the pedestrian’s point of view. They just wanted to be in the driving seat.

Frank Lloyd Wright: designs for an American landscape, 1922-1932

During the 1920s Frank Lloyd Wright designed five projects, none of which were ever built, but which were architectural prototypes of far-reaching consequence. In them, Wright explored new technologies, geometric patterns and site-specific ideas which he continued to develop in many subsequent works. This book discusses the importance and context of these schemes using new sources and illustrations. Predicting the eventual dissolution of the American city, Wright emphasized the importance of the suburb, and this title looks at the designs produced by him during this period which offered compelling prototypes for suburban architecture. It contains essays by Anne Whitson Spirn, C. Ford Peatross and Robert L. Sweeney and gives a detailed chronology of Wright's life and work between 1922 and 1932.

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Boundary Control and Legal Priniciples. Curtis M. Brown, Walter G. Robillard and Donald A. Wilson. Lost Initiatives: Canada's Forest Industries, Forest Policy, and Forest Conservation. R. Peter Gillis and Thomas R. Roach. The Navajo Atlas: Resources, People, and History of the Dine Bikeyah. James M. Goodman. The City and the Sign. M. Gottdiener AND Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, EDS. The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890–1930. Alan Gowans. Arabic-Islamic Cities. Building and Planning Principles. Besim Salim Hakim. Contemporary Climatology. Ann Henderson-Sellers and Peter J. Robinson. A Trace of Desert Waters. Samuel G. Houghton. Geography, Resources and Environment. Vol. 1: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White. Vol. 2: Themes from the Work of Gilbert F. White. Robert W. Kates AND Ian Burton, ED. Spatial Dimensions of Unemployment and Underemployment (A Case Study of Rural Punjab). Gopal Krishan. Maps of the Holy Land: Cartobibliography of Printed Maps, 1475–1900. Compiled by Eran Laor, assisted by Shoshana Klein. The Geography of Third World Cities. Stella Lowder. A Perspective on U.S. Farm Problems and Agricultural Policy. Lance McKinzie, Timothy G. Baker AND Wallace E. Tyner. Soil Erosion and Its Control. R.P.C. Morgan, ED Geopolitics. Patrick O'Sullivan. Landscape, Meanings and Values. Edmund C. Penning-Rowsell AND David Lowenthal, EDS.

Reviews: The Built Environment Series. Local Planning in Practice, the Political Economy of British Regional Policy, the American Family Home 1800–1960: The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890–1930, the London Research Series in Geography 4. Urban Hospital Location, An Organisational Approach to Regional Planning

Reviews: The Built Environment Series. Local Planning in Practice, the Political Economy of British Regional Policy, the American Family Home 1800–1960: The Comfortable House: North American Suburban Architecture 1890–1930, the London Research Series in Geography 4. Urban Hospital Location, An Organisational Approach to Regional Planning

The William Dorsheimer House: A Reflection of French Suburban Architecture in the Early Work of H. H. Richardson

The city of Buffalo, which is best known to architectural historians for its buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, also occupies an important place in the career of Henry Hobson Richa...

The William Dorsheimer House: A Reflection of French Suburban Architecture in the Early Work of H. H. Richardson

The William Dorsheimer House: A Reflection of French Suburban Architecture in the Early Work of H. H. Richardson

Romantic Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood: Downing, Wheeler, Gardner, and the “Stick Style,” 1840–1876

BY the later nineteenth century, American domestic architecture had clearly begun to demonstrate positive characteristics of originality and invention. In order to understand the character of this architecture, now acclaimed by critics in all countries, it is most important that we familiarize ourselves with the theoretical and formal tradition out of which it grew. The present study is therefore concerned with the rural and suburban architecture of the mid-century. To understand it, and, moreover, really to see it, we must look into the opinions of the theorists of the time, and examine their proposals for a new domestic architecture as they really intended to present them. In this way, we may hope to acquire an understanding of this architecture as it was intended to be, and a vision of it as it was intended to be seen.