Architectural Standards and the Cookie Cutter

I have recently been involved with a revamp of the zoning and subdivision ordinances for the City. There is a lot to do. It's been overwhelming at times.

One of the things that has come up, however, is the need for some architectural standards.

In order to understand the need for these standards, it may be helpful to look at the history of modern residential construction in the United States.

One of the songs I grew up hearing was Herman's Hermits Silhouettes on the Shade, wherein a young man feels jilted when he sees two silhouettes on the shade of the house he thinks belongs to his lover. He is told that he is actually on the wrong block and runs to the correct block to find his girl waiting for him and all is well.

One may well ask - how is this song even possible? After World War II, there was a severe housing shortage (which actually began in the Great Depression) and young people returning from service found that they needed a place to stay. VA loans made home ownership possible for many of these veterans, and the boom was on. People with an eye for business, if not variety and creativity, began building homes and subdivisions in great numbers. These new homes were built not on the "one off" model which had been largely followed up to that point and turned to a new "mass-produced" model, with an eye to efficiency. The highlight became quantity over quality. Levittown is born.

The Levits made a pile of money, and land development suddenly looks like a real way to make a lot of money. Developers became the people who were satisfying a basic human need - housing - while making the economy grow. These subdivisions were installed with no thought to the natural environment. They are explicitly dependent on the automobile. And because they worked so well, the model was expanded all over the country.

Now we needed commercial structures to support all of these new folks living in old potato fields miles away from any services. Again, developers rushed in to fill basic needs - clothing and food - and packaged it all in a motorist-friendly package that related to the degree that these areas had been designed to depend on the automobile. Restaurants, dry cleaners, drugstores, and many other places of traditional social interaction and employment were altered forever.

Fast forward 50 years. The model that the Levits perfected is still going strong. Even so-called new urbanism falls victim to the continuing dependence on the automobile, and the architecture of these places becomes mundane and common. Cities, despondent over the loss of character and distinction, are looking around for new ideas with which they can promote their communities values and make their communities stand out. Urban sprawl has already filled in many of the physical spaces that used to delineate one place from another. When it comes to these places, how would you know you had ever even been anywhere different?

There are many strategies to combat this problem:

1. Preserve historical buildings and spaces to provide guidelines. Steps should be taken to ensure the viability of these buildings and spaces.
   
2. New buildings in these areas should take visual cues from the older buildings. New buildings do not need to copy exactly the styles, but should compliment existing historically valuable buildings.
   
3. Older neighborhoods should be preserved.
   
4. Newer neighborhoods should take advantage of the existing infrastructure and housing stock in the downtown areas rather than mowing down more farmland to sprawl.
   
5. City officials should familiarize themselves with options that make neighborhoods attractive and viable, including transfers of development rights, mass-transit inter-modal transfer points, access to transportation alternatives, housing alternatives (density, type, live-work spaces, etc.), and other planning and architectural related ideas that help places stay viable and livable.

Architectural standards are something that are usually not very appealing to anyone. Developers fear additional expense. City officials fear litigation. And citizens fear a continuation of poor development seen everywhere. So what to do?

The answer is that a wide-reflective architecture that speaks to the values of the community. The inspiration for this kind of could come from vernacular architecture, architecture of indigenous people, environmentally friendly architecture, and/or architecture that reflects a sense of what makes the community unique. Developers need to understand that while the initial costs to them may be larger, the long-term pay off is much greater. People will appreciate the building, tenants will be attracted to nice looking architecture and lower energy costs, and city officials will appreciate the distinction this kind of building lends to the community.