Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [35]
Despite the way that it sounds, the “twenty-minute house” is not a derogatory label. Quite the opposite—it refers to the fact that a house has only twenty minutes to win the affection of a potential buyer, since that is the average length of a realtor visit. The building industry has responded to this phenomenon by creating a product that is at its best for the first twenty minutes that one is in it. Specifically, the house is usually organized around a tall “great room” from which, immediately upon entering, the potential buyer is astounded by partial views of almost every other room in the house. The disadvantage of this organization is that there is no acoustical privacy for the individual rooms, something that is not discovered until after moving day. Similarly, because so much of the budget is spent on the front of the house (much to the detriment of the street space), the back of the house ends up being a few sliding glass doors in a dead-flat wall, such that the backyard offers no privacy either. You exit the rear door to find yourself completely exposed in a windswept lot, directly visible to the occupants of five other houses identical to your owns as
When houses were designed for more than twenty minutes of occupancy, they looked like this—simple in front, with limited decoration, their beauty derived primarily from excellent proportions. Indeed, it may take extra time for an architect to work out such a façade, but the result can be profoundly satisfying. And like a row of town houses, a simple, flat house façade contributes to the quality of the street space, while leaving some of the budget for rear articulations such as wings and breezeways. These “back buildings” turn the rear yard into an enclosed court, such that complete privacy can be created even on small lots.
Five plus four and a door: the simplicity of a traditional façade acknowledges the presence of a larger community. Variety occurs not within the single house but among many
A fairly continuous, relatively flat street wall is one of many preconditions to pedestrian comfort. Another is limited street-space width. If a street is to provide the sense of enclosure that pedestrians desire—it it is to feel like a room—it cannot be too wide. To be precise, the relationship of width to height cannot exceed a certain ratio, generally recognized to be about 6:1. If the distance from building front to building front is more than six times the height of those building fronts, the feeling of enclosure is lost, and with it the sense of place. Even the 6:1 ratio is wider than most successful public spaces. Many theorists locate the ideal ratio at 1:1; above 6:1, streets fail to attract pedestrian life.at
The appeal of the narrow street: paradoxically, the less money spent on excessive infrastructure, the more valuable the real estate
Designed for the apocalypse: gold-plated infrastructure built to satisfy exaggerated emergency vehicle requirements
This formula should come as no surprise to observant travelers, many of whom have no doubt used the words narrow and charming in the same sentence to describe the famously walkable streets of our older cities. Whether it be in Montreal’s Old Town, Boston’s Beacon Hill, or Elfreth’s Alley in Philadelphia, the narrowest streets are typically the ones most cherished by tourists and residents alike. In fact, some statistics suggest that property values are inversely proportional to street width. In other words, the less space and asphalt wasted, the more valuable the real estate.