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Growing
Urban Habitats: Seeking a New Housing Development Model
by William R. Morrish, Susanne Schindler, Katie Swenson
William Stout Publishers, 2009
Paperback, 256 pages
HoCo:
Density Housing Construction & Costs by
Aurora Fernandez Per, Javier Mozas & Javier Arpa
a+t architecture publishers, 2009
Paperback, 464 pages
The design of housing in the 21st-century
is as exciting as -- if not more than -- single-family houses,
the typical domain of experimentation and investigation
by modern architects. While houses for individuals or families
still get their fair share of press, many of the topical
ideas explored by architects today (social justice, sustainability,
urban regeneration, etc.) are better suited to the large
scale of multi-family projects. These two books provide
numerous examples of how architects are pushing the boundaries
of housing in various ways. Neither is exhaustive, but each
stakes out a niche and finds overlap in the subject and
some shared sensibilities.
Growing Urban Habitats
documents the 2005 Urban
Habitats competition, organized by Habitat
for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville and the Charlottesville
Community Design Center, but it goes beyond merely presenting
the winning designs for reworking a trailer park in the
Virginia city. The book aims to be a resource for designers,
developers, city officials, community groups and residents.
It does this by using the competition as a structure for
presenting other multi-family housing projects in the United
States. Each project is fitted into one of four chapters
dedicated to an urban habitat goal (affordable, dense, compact,
sustainable), with each chapter further broken down into
four different mind sets for achieving the goals. In effect
a spectrum of categories is created, highlighting different
approaches and areas of emphasis for the projects included,
allowing urban actors to use the book as a guide for rethinking
problems of urban housing. What this means after 75 pages
of material almost exclusively devoted to the competition
is that the winning entries get lost in the mix, since the
book's design puts all projects on an even plane within
the 4x4 framework. So as a competition document the book
is flawed, but as a resource for "growing urban habitats"
it is an exemplary collection of built and unbuilt projects
diverse in character, geography and demographics. It's a
refreshing collection of designs that stresses ideas over
eye candy. The book also draws attention to some up-and-coming
architects in the competition entries; that they creatively
address problems of urban housing bodes well for the typology
and the profession's future.
HoCo, on the other hand,
presents the primarily European examples of completed housing
on their own terms, within the framework of a+t's consistent
and high-quality graphic design and drawing standards. The
projects are ordered, like other titles on housing by the
publisher, but instead of density ruling it is costs. So
as one moves from front to back the budgets increase, from
$436/sm ($41/sf) to $2,248/sm ($209/sf). Other data is illustrated
(density, area, #units, demographics), but as the title
indicates, the latest entry in the Density
Series investigates the relationship between cost and
construction. Within each of the 32 projects this relationship
is not always clear, as it depends on the text supplied
by the architects as much as the objective data and the
excellent construction details provided. An appendix with
"construction solutions" compares the facades
and roofs in as close an apples-to-apples manner as possible;
brick facades are presented side by side, green roofs are
done in the same manner, etc. All tolled the information
provided goes well beyond what other publications fail to
take the time and effort to produce. The extras allow a
fuller understanding of the individual projects but also
a means of seeing how they relate to each other. What becomes
particularly important in these collections is the editorial
selection of projects, and the fairly narrow geographical
reach is not surprising from a+t. Here it is a limitation,
as the interrelated factors of construction and costs still
reflect local conditions as much as global markets and migrations.
for Growing Urban Habitats
or 
for HoCo
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