Common Place No. 14

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: NOTES ON THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIALIZED HOUSING COMMON PLACE NO. 14 | AUTUMN 2019

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW: NOTES ON THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIALIZED HOUSING

By John J. Parman Introduction “The technology that carries the promise of mass production too easily turns multiplication into forms of degrading repetition.” – Colin St. John Wilson1 “I wonder, as for the future of our profession and for society as a whole, what the hell we’re going to be doing in 20 years? We’re all going to be living in 1,000-square-foot apartments, because that’s all we can afford to have.” – Chuck Davis2 In the early 1970s, Professor Richard Bender led a team in the Department of Architecture at U.C. Berkeley that evaluated Operation Breakthrough, an industrialized housing demonstration program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—HUD—under Nixon appointee George Romney, a former CEO of American Motors, a car company. I was part of the team, and Bender and I concluded at the time that HUD and the various large companies involved in Operation Breakthrough misjudged the actual productivity of conventional construction. Despite industry fragmentation and regulatory differences from locale to locale, contractors made effective use of lightweight power tools, and components, materials, and products that were prefabricated to standard dimensions. Building sites were industrialized and their output could be readily tailored to local markets.

Today, after a 45-year hiatus, factory production of housing is enjoying a comeback the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. National and even global companies are offering modular housing “products,” including volumetric and panelized systems. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is also in the picture as component of multi-story timber buildings. The high cost of conventional multi-unit housing construction in the Bay Area’s urban core gives modular housing an edge. As a result, Factory OS, the largest local manufacturer, has succeeded when earlier ventures like Blu Homes and ZETA failed.

For industrialized housing to have long-term viability, it will have to prove its competitiveness on cost, schedule, technical performance, and design quality against conventional construction. In the early 1970s, conventional construction readily beat factory-build systems on each of these measures. The socalled Great Recession of 2008 pummeled the Bay Area’s construction industry, depleting its workforce of experienced people. The overall cost of housing rose, driven by a glacially slow entitlements process, fast-rising land costs, prevailing wage agreements in the urban core (raising the cost of labor), and growing inequality among prospective homebuyers. Factory-built housing is a response to these factors.

If they change, will it persist? Right now, it has an edge on cost, schedule, and technical performance. Its weak point is customization—even panel systems are less flexible than conventional construction. But factory-built systems are acceptable now in part because what for-profit and non-profit developers and some tech companies offer are variations on fairly standard solutions, each aimed at a price point.

While a downturn in new housing starts is widely expected, that event may prove less significant to regional companies like Factory OS than the evolution of housing development in a broader sense. That larger context takes in regulation, technology, lifestyles, and many other factors, known and unknown.

As they reshape the design-build-occupy-service-upgrade trajectory, the landscape could transform disruptively. The distinction we make now between factory-built and conventional construction could be meaningless. An outlier like Katerra, which wants to optimize across that trajectory, may the real model.

Or it may have arrived too soon.

This paper considers “then and now,” but has “next” in mind. But my speculations are more urban than technological. The question is still how region can finally get the housing it needs and deserves.

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Industrialized Housing in the U.S. through Operation Breakthrough Operation Breakthrough followed earlier efforts by the federal government to industrialize housing production. During the Johnson Administration, HUD and New York City’s Urban Development Corporation tried to renovate older apartment buildings with prefabricated units. Two decades earlier, immediately after World War II, the Veterans Emergency Housing Program (or Wyatt Program, for Wilson Wyatt, the Truman Administration “housing czar”), anticipating a shortage of middle-income housing for returning veterans, set an ambitious goal in 1946 of building 2.7 million new units per year, partly in wartime factories retooled for prefabrication. Had it gone forward, the Wyatt Program would have involved the federal government directly in a mass housing strategy, extending the central planning model adopted by the U.S. Government in World War II.3 Operation Breakthrough and the UDC project reflected the production goal set by the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act—a goal similar to the Wyatt Program’s 22 years earlier: Building or rehabilitating 26 million housing units in 10 years—a rate much higher than any previous production level. To achieve this goal, HUD anticipated in 1969 a progressive increase in required construction of housing units over the 10-year period, reaching 2.6 million units in 1973.4 Nixon and Romney sought to enlist the private sector to provide housing at a mass scale. They assumed that if housing could be produced like cars, higher volume would make units cheaper. Harold Finger, who came to HUD from NASA to run Operation Breakthrough, believed that the advent of housing manufacture would disrupt the conventional housing “industry” and cut through the regulatory and labor issues that contributed to its fragmentation and inefficiency.

This optimism was shared by the private sector. Part of it was grounded in the belief that the U.S. Government would be an active partner in housing production.

Most Operation Breakthrough manufacturers anticipated Government housing programs would be a large market for their housing systems. In 1969, HUD estimated that 4 million new housing units would be constructed under Government housing programs during the next decade, an average of 400,000 a year. In the beginning of 1973, the Federal Government suspended its major subsidized housing programs pending a complete reevaluation of the Federal role in housing. … This suspension has a major effect on several Operation Breakthrough manufacturers. In 1974, the national housing construction rate dropped below 1.4 million units a year, about half the construction rate assumed

by Operation Breakthrough plans.5 There was also clear initial investor interest in industrialized housing’s potential. These different public and interests converged in Stirling Homex, a publicly listed company in New York that drew headlines when it shipped its volumetric units to Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Camille and proposed to build a factory there with Federal Housing Authority—FHA—participation.

[On July 2, 1975], the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the bankrupt Stirling Homex Corporation, once one of the nation's leading modular homebuilders, of creating phantom sales, making illegal political contributions, using illegal bugging equipment and making payoffs to union officials. The suit charged in particular that from 1970 through 1972 Stirling Homex materially falsified its records by the fraudulent recording and reporting of fictitious sales. About $12.5 million of sales reported in a 1971 financial report were either fictitious or improperly recorded, the S.E.C. said, including about $8 million of sales from a proposed $15-million project in Mississippi with the Greater Gulf Housing Corporation.6

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A news report that Stirling Homex’s delivered modular housing to Corinth, Mississipi, New York Times, 16 July 1970.

Note that Harold Finger, who led Operation Breakthrough for HUD, is quoted. Stirling Homex needed public-sector support to be viable. When it wasn’t forthcoming, it acted as if it had secured it. Widely reported, its ability to ship units to Corinth should have raised the question, “Why did it have so many on hand?”

Stirling Homex went bankrupt and its founders went to jail. Alodex, a Memphis-based modular housing company backed by the founders of Holiday Inn, failed less dramatically. According to Larry Dodge, who consulted with Alodex, it decided to test its concept in a deliberately chosen “hardest case”: scattered site housing in East St. Louis, Illinois. Alodex won the endorsement of the city’s mostly African-American leaders by proposing to open a factory there and build some 2,000 units of scattered-site housing.7 At its peak, around 1970, Alodex had nearly $90 million of construction work in progress and a staff of 250 people. It was operating in 10 states under the leadership of Lloyd Clark, a builder.

Alodex's problems became apparent shortly after it was reorganized as a national company rather than a Memphis area operation. In 1969 Mr. Clark, a well-known building contractor, approached [Alodex] with a proposal to merge [their] operations. … As part of the expansion, Alodex stock was offered for sale to the public. Under Mr. Clark, who left Alodex in 1973, the company expanded from single-family residential work to construction of turn-key housing for government agencies and big projects, none of which included provisions to cover cost increases. The company also expanded into … condominiums and multifamily units. Problems appeared in the summer of 1971, a few months after a public offer of Alodex stock. The prospectus did not make clear the large losses suffered by the company on some projects.8

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Larry Dodge, as an architect with Building Systems Development (BSD), a consultancy founded by U.C. Berkeley Professor Ezra Ehrenkrantz, consulted with Aerojet General and TRW on a spun-glass fiber modular housing concept, which they proposed to apply to an Operation Breakthrough demonstration site in Sacramento. The initial concept was a two-story module spun on a mandrel. Developed at TRW’s R&D campus in Redondo Beach, California, it was housing as imagined by scientists and engineers who worked on NASA and military aerospace projects. “What’s the minimum size a window can be?” was a typical question. However, TRW’s head marketer rejected the concept, opting for more conventional housing produced using glass-fiber panels enclosing a layer of honeycomb Hexcel insulation.9

TRW’s Operation Breakthrough concept (left), the Townland concept (right), and the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) concept (below).

The aerospace industry’s interest in manufactured housing reflected its ambition to diversify with a product that could take up slack in its factory production lines. (Boeing was involved in the Townland project in Seattle.) It also reflected a belief in the applicability of the so-called systems approach, first pioneered in World War II, to the challenge of meeting ambitious housing production goals set in 1946 and renewed in 1968. Others involved in the building industry—aluminum, glass, steel, and timber companies—also participated in these initiatives, hoping to find new outlets for their products and demonstrate how their materials and housing innovations together could deliver superior performance.

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One precedent for Operation Breakthrough was the mid-1960s School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) program, in which Building Systems Development was heavily involved. At the time, California was building public schools in substantial numbers. Legislation allowed districts to band together to bid these projects, which generated interest in industrializing their construction. SCSD proposed a modular, steel-frame system. Inland Steel was an investor, eager to get a foothold in the market. While SCSD failed, one of its components—a multi-zone roof-top air-conditioning unit designed

by Lennox—found a national market in conventionally built school projects. “We enjoyed 15 years of spin-off work,” according to Ted Gilles, who helped develop the product for Lennox. What made it successful was its flexibility: “With flexible ducts, we could jiggle the layout,” he said. Flexibility was one of SCSD’s design criteria for the components, which applied equally to any new school that fell within the standard mid-1960s typology. This was “why packaged units wound up on the roof,” Gilles added.10 When Richard Bender’s research team looked at conventional tract housing in the Bay Area—the kinds of projects that Operation Breakthrough envisioned shifting to factory production—it found the consistent use of locally produced prefabricated components like roof joists and handheld tools like nail guns that could be used by small crews of builders to frame and enclose units quickly. Houses produced in this manner used materials and elements that were geared to fast assembly by semi-skilled labor. The only skilled workers on those jobs were the “mud guys” who smoothed over sheetrock imperfections. It resulted in housing that hit its price point, met local codes, and let the developer offer a range of types.

Operation Breakthrough’s prototypes, in contrast, were hindered by code fragmentation and undone by their inability to support the kind of mass customization the housing market required.11 Only the kind of captive market that public housing can deliver or a substantial cost difference could have saved them.

Demonstrating the latter on a national basis in the absence of a captive market would have required deep-pocketed investors to accept heavy early losses before achieving full-scale mass production.

From Operation Breakthrough’s Demise through 2008 Operation Breakthrough resulted in “model” legislation enabling states to issue permits for modular housing that override local inspections. (California has such a process, focused on volumetric units.) It failed to shift most housing production to factories. Until the “Great Recession” of 2008, conventional construction was the norm for all types of housing except mobile homes and vacation “kit homes.” Yet, across this period, market-rate housing typologies became increasingly standardized, especially in the use of prefab assemblies like window walls and curtain walls, and interior elements like kitchen cabinets.

While mass customization continued, the band of customization narrowed while the cost advantages of field construction were eroded by prevailing wage contracts in the urban core and the multiplier effect of general contractors working with subs, each adding their markup. The “Great Recession” stopped new construction in general in its tracks and flushed skilled construction labor out of urban markets.

Downturns leave some players as the last ones standing. The Great Recession divided the urban housing world between “marketecture,” which emphasizes the residential unit, either by pushing its luxury or subdividing it aggressively, depending on the price point, and “community” developments that, even if they mix subsidized and market-rate housing, engage communities of neighbors and residents in their planning and design. In general, “community” developments emphasize shared settings, including open space, over residential units. The real estate consultant David Chen, who recently surveyed western European housing, identified projects commissioned by building associations there as having similar traits.12 While it can and has been applied to community projects, factory-built housing is geared to “marketecture,” which lends itself to standard building forms and layouts. (The simplest applications are hotels and serviced apartments that use single modular units without side-wall penetrations.)

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Industrialized Housing’s Revival in the Bay Area and Elsewhere In a 1967 paper, Richard Bender wrote of building systems that were then being put forward, These systems make buildings, but they do not make buildings with properties important in relation to the whole problem. … We must avoid the approach that says, “Here are the technologies available to make buildings. Now let’s figure out how to build better buildings with these.” This approach starts from a solution and goes looking for a problem to solve. Creating building systems is not enough. We need a new, more subtle kind of building system which does more than produce buildings. We must produce buildings which will function in the fullest social, human sense.13 In 1973, commenting on the industrialized housing of the Operation Breakthrough era, Bender added, For those whose picture of modern production is the auto assembly line, building seems far from industrialized. But perhaps it is just this view of industrialization (as only machinery, tools, production lines, and automation) that has been standing in the way of significant advances.14 When Bender and I visited Factory OS’s factory in March 2018, we saw prototype units—6-sided woodframe boxes—that shift conventional construction to an assembly line. This is industrialized housing as George Romney envisioned it half a century ago. David Baker told me later that Factory OS’s 6-sided units are more weatherproof and damage-resistant when shipped by truck than 4-sided units. Locking off the units while the building is finished around them minimizes damage as the trades do their work.

That damage can be considerable, he said, requiring a hefty budget for ongoing repairs.15 That Factory OS is successful also reflects the region’s current situation: an acute shortage of skilled construction workers; conventional construction costs that exceed what the housing market can support; a long-term shortfall in new housing construction in the urban core, especially around the rail transit corridors that San Francisco and other cities have prioritized for new development; and the possibility of tapping semi-skilled but unionized construction labor at the region’s edge and bringing it into factories to produce volumetric modules for multifamily housing. Factory OS now serves the West Coast and cities as far east as Denver, with a catalogue of 20 different supportive (ex-homeless), affordable, market-rate “workforce,” and student housing designs, including studios and 1- and 2bedrooms. The company is producing employee housing for Google. Its designs have width, length, and height constraints, but can support façade articulation. A 2-year Carpenters Union contract keeps wages stable. The company aims to increase its cost savings over convention from 20% to 30%.16 RAD Urban produces 4-sided steel-frame volumetric units in a factory in Lathrop, CA.17 Z-Modular, in Birmingham, AL, owned by a steel foundry, gives away the design and technology of its steel-frame volumetric units to local factories, supplying the steel to fabricate them.18 Katerra, founded by Wolfe Homes entrepreneur Fritz Wolfe, attracted a $2 billion investment from Mayoshi Son’s Vision Fund. Katerra has aggressively acquired talent and manufacturing capacity in its quest to vertically integrate housing production and extend the reach of industrialization from the factory to the building site. Shipping is seen as an extension of the factory floor, which led Katerra to focus on component-based rather than volumetric systems. “Why ship air?” they ask. Katerra sees itself as a technology company that builds “platforms” for developers with enough backlog of new housing projects on flat sites to support large-scale production. Katerra rationalizes designs to meet these constraints, producing “tiers” of housing to meet market and regulatory requirements. A given tier offers the quality and performance expected by the developer’s targeted buyers. Katerra believes that its platforms can deliver better cost-to-value than its competition, with greater customization than is possible with volumetric units. Like the auto industry, it chose California’s residential energy regulations

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as its standard. This is a higher standard than some other states, and some developers have resisted paying for the higher performance. Katerra’s vertical integration includes manufacturing cross laminated timber (CLT) components, lighting components, and plumbing fixtures. Prefabricated plumbing walls are “in planning,” I was told in February 2019.19 Although Katerra advertises the design freedom it offers developers, one architecture firm I interviewed said its decisions sometimes prioritized manufacturing by allocating square footage where it wouldn’t generate a return for the developer. A Bay Area developer questioned its track record here and noted that its “closed system” would work against it compared to “open-source” competitors.20 Katerra’s Seattle architecture team pointed to the challenge of working nationally. In California, it ran into problems getting state inspections for its panelized units, as the company that handles them only had experience with volumetric units. They see Katerra as a work in progress, appreciating its Katerra’s efforts optimize housing production by eliminating waste and harnessing technology to bridge between the different steps involved more effectively. What sets it apart from its competitors is its view of housing production as an end-to-end manufacturing process that links factories, shipping, and building sites. Its efforts to vertically integrate are part of this, aimed at reducing costs, limiting waste and unneeded variation, and optimizing cost to value on a tiered basis for quality and performance.21 Other developments in industrialized housing Ikea recently announced that it will take a modular approach to its numerous products, developing “platforms” for products that previously varied slightly in their dimensions. By standardizing height, width, and depth, Ikea hopes to rationalize manufacture and tailor it to changes in its retail model—a consumer preference for smaller in-city stores and for products that are delivered preassembled or put together at the buyer’s residence by Ikea personnel or designated third parties.22 Ikea and Skanska jointly own a company, BoKlok Housing AB, that builds affordable multi-unit housing in Scandinavia and the U.K. using a volumetric system fitted out by Ikea. Aiming at younger buyers with modest incomes, BoKlok has produced 11,000 units since 1997.23 ByggHouse and Lindbäcks are two Swedish companies involved with industrialized housing. Interest in it there and also in Japan has continued without interruption over the decades when the idea was dormant here. ByggHouse makes components and tools for housing producers, while Lindbäcks Bygg AG produces 2- to 4-story modules for student, family, and senior multi-unit housing of up to 16 stories. According to David Baker, Lindbäcks cranes temporary roofs over its buildings during construction to deal with bad weather. Its modules hang the floors from the exterior walls to eliminate redundancy in unit floors and ceilings.

According to Baker’s colleague Brad Leibin, Lindbäcks’s factories are designed so a person weighing as little as 130 pounds can perform any step the manufacturing process requires. Lindbäcks’s goal is for women to make up at least half of its factory workforce, he added.24 While Japan has had an equally long involvement in prefabricated housing, it faces a shortage of homebuyers owing to its aging, declining population. Two manufacturers, Toyota and Panasonic, are merging their housing businesses as Prime Life Technologies to focus on “town development” and to integrate smart houses with smart cars and other accessories of a younger-generation lifestyle.25 Sekisui House, which claims to be the largest housing producer in Japan, has teamed with Woodside Homes to produce a concept home for Builder magazine to be unveiled at Summerlin, a planned community near Las Vegas. Sekisui House applies a proprietary metal joint system to its housing projects, which are marketed as healthy and sustainable. Expanding globally is its response to declining sales in Japan.26

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Industrialized housing and modularity Companies that produce panelized and component-based systems are tapping industrialized housing’s longstanding interest in modularity. While construction in general has considerable “default modularity” due to the standard dimensions of its most ubiquitous components, Europe, including the former Soviet Bloc, applied modularity to large-scale housing development before World War II and then through the 1980s, initially in the service of postwar reconstruction.

Reinier de Graff recounts part of this history in his 2016 essay, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften” (“Architecture without Qualities”).27 Building on prewar and wartime experience, East Germany’s DDR evolved panel systems, applied to urban housing development, until its collapse in 1989. In 1999, I saw newly repainted examples in the former East Berlin, strikingly midcentury modern, but Graff writes that by 2014 many were torn down or reconfigured beyond recognition, “an ideological cleansing.”

The East German standardization effort is generally viewed as a radical phenomenon of the past. But how radical was it? It can also be explained as simply the all-out pursuit of a universally available minimum standard. Like communism itself, the whole effort contains a curious paradox. Even though it necessitated “radical” change, its ultimate goal—“normal” conditions for the largest possible number of people—was surprisingly mundane.28 Graff describes parallel developments in the Netherlands, noting the French influence on its systems.

The technical adaptation of the French system to suit Dutch building regulations had been made possible by large public subsidies to help solve a pressing housing shortage in the Netherlands— such policies being, at least during those years, as common in the West as in the East.29 Following Germany’s reunification, large scale housing was steadily “normalized” to the market. Now, Graff writes, “Normal (East) German workers can barely afford the ‘normalized’ homes.”30 For a while the East and the West, despite their political differences, seem to have run on parallel tracks. Produced in the millions, abundantly applied in both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, the prefabricated panels are—at almost improbably poetic level—an expression of a global bond, a form of consensus in the context of an otherwise deep ideological rift, a universal response to a globally felt urgency.31 This looks back to modernism’s early ambition to provide worker housing of a high standard at mass scale, in contrast to the tenement housing that modern architects regarded as a blight. Modular, panelized systems that could be manufactured locally and erected quickly in different configurations was an accepted solution that government programs and subsidies made possible.

In 1977, I spent three months as a visiting researcher at Stichting Architecten Research (SAR), founded by John Habraken at the Technical University of Eindhoven. SAR was a clearinghouse for research on modular approaches to housing components, buildings, sites, and communities. Its “tissue method” aimed to provide a basis for user participation in multi-unit developments, a goal of specific interest to such architects of that era as Herman Hertzberger, Lucien Kroll, and Frans van der Werf.

SAR developed two related approaches to housing focused on “supports” and on “territories.” This reflected the nature of Dutch postwar Dutch housing, especially in new towns and rebuilt areas—row houses of different heights with a uniformity that spoke to cultural aspirations for equality but made for blocks, neighborhoods, and districts that appeared as “built diagrams.” But SAR also had proposals like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City in mind as it focused on what it called the support and tissue levels.

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At the support level, the support plan makes allowances for different materials and construction systems, so that the basic spatial character of a given support can be maintained despite those differences. It also provides opportunities for variations in dwelling arrangement and configuration. At the tissue level, similar allowances are made for the problems of fitting a given tissue model to actual site conditions, and for its elaboration at the support level.32 The tissue level is “a planning level…more specific than a land use plan, but less specific than a support plan in terms of stipulating the characteristics of a given territory.”33 SAR’s tissue method was a later development in its thinking, reflecting its interest in making users active participants in housing’s development and evolving use. This reflects another aspect of Dutch housing at the time: the residents were responsible for more of the interior fit-out—for example, for the hardwood floors, which were designed to be demountable—than is normal elsewhere. The units were delivered as shells, whether they were to be owned, rented, or held cooperatively (through building societies, for example).

Lucien Kroll’s MéMé project in Louvain, Belgium of 1970. The photo is from Architectural Review, 28 August 2018. AR’s Paul Davies wrote that, “In negating his authority as expert and subverting the mode of production, Kroll probably got as close to the work of social theorists Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord as it might be possible for an architect to get.”

Users can alter the façade and transform the interior as their needs change.

Projects like van der Werf’s Molenvliet Project in Papendrecht and Lunetten Project near Utrecht applied SAR’s approaches to fairly large developments that, despite their size, “allowed users to have control over the volume, layout, and façade detailing.” Lunetten extended this to the site plan.34 While not directly informed by SAR’s methodology, Lucien Kroll took its underlying philosophy further. His MéMé (Maison Médicale) Project at the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert campus of UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain) was inspired by Giancarlo de Carlo and French social theorists. Kroll engaged the faculty and students to create housing that can be radically altered, inside and out. Visiting it in 2010, Rafffaella Poletti wrote that “the years have witnessed a succession of incongruous and disrespectful alterations perpetrated by the university, which has never wanted to accept the value of this architecture.”35

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MéMé realized John Habraken’s dream of granting housing’s users a “fine-grained exercise of power.”36 Habraken’s original proposal was that the specifics of the dwelling unit should be left to its occupants, while the specifics of the support (the building housing the dwelling or the block in which the dwellings are situated) should be determined jointly by the dwellers and the community. This argument has now been extended: as the dweller controls the dwelling, so the neighborhood controls the neighborhood, and the district the district. Each exercise of decisionmaking power at the given level of territorial use involves the interaction of the users of the territory and the users of the broader territory to which that territory belongs. Decisions that are appropriately made by the neighbors themselves are left to them, with the framework of rules about the formation of neighborhoods.37 SAR initially embraced industrialized housing, but with a focus on infill. “SAR’s founders looked forward to the possibility of industrial production of ‘detachable units’ (SAR’s term for those parts of the dwelling under direct control of the household.) These were pictured…as consumer products.”38 An effort “to develop a panel system (for infill) based on SAR’s principles of dimensional and positional coordination…was stymied by…Dutch government standards for residential living spaces” that were “irrational” from SAR’s standpoint but inflexibly enforced, resulting in panels of too many widths.39 We are back to the problem Ikea is trying to resolve: the need to develop platforms of products with standard dimensions to simplify manufacture and still meet consumer demand and regulatory fiat. In developing comparable platforms for a given line of housing, Katerra has the same issue. “Principles of dimensional and positional coordination” are again relevant, and SAR and the DDR laid the groundwork, among others. (The UK’s Building Research Establishment did similar work to support Council Housing.)

Getting housing out of its box Even a casual survey of contemporary multi-unit housing in the Bay Area reveals the similarities across a range of projects of the same scale. What you find more and more are decorated boxes that reflect their zoning envelope. Kroll’s MéMé is admirable for its effort to break out of the box by playing radically with form. It gave residents the possibility of altering the supports, not just the infill—a freedom reflected in its freewheeling façade. Potentially, with UCL cooperation, alterations could have continued indefinitely.

David Baker Architects’ Union Flats in Union City, CA, a project of Fei Tsen’s Windflower Properties. Photo

by Bruce Damonte.

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In the Bay Area, the main exceptions to the decorated box are affordable multifamily projects with strong participation by likely residents and neighbors. The work of David Baker Architects includes some of the best of these projects. They standardize repetitive elements—dwelling units, hallways, and the housing blocks that enclose them—and tailor shared settings to the needs of the community. The repetitive elements are set off by minor but telling variations like color, balconies, and solar shading, while the shared spaces are concentrated so they work together synergistically to give residents collectively a greater sum than the usual box can provide, effectively extending their personal space.

Open spaces are an important part of this, connecting the housing with its neighborhood and supporting activities like urban agriculture that are popular but rarely found in market-rate multi-unit housing.40 In the Bay Area, David Baker Architects’ projects are starting to incorporate factory-built housing. A recent example, The Union Flats, sustains the quality it has achieved with conventional construction.

The challenge, especially on smaller sites, is the tail-wags-dog nature of volumetric units, for which the box is ideal for fast erection. The Garden Village project by Stanley Saitowitz’s Natoma Studio for RAD Urban in Berkeley uses the units as “building blocks” to create visual interest. RAD Urban’s next project on Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in Oakland’s Temescal district is less differentiated. New laws that override local zoning and a pervasive regional sense of “housing crisis” are leading cities to approve big boxy schemes, out of scale with neighboring buildings, that they might have rejected in the past.41 Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Studio’s Garden Village project in Berkeley for RAD Urban.

Missing Middle Housing seeks to revive prewar multifamily housing typologies that were supplanted by postwar suburban tract housing and garden apartments; and urban “boxes above parking podiums” and residential towers. This repertoire of developer “products” is seen as lacking nuance, especially in its ability to fit housing into existing neighborhoods. Co-founders Daniel and Karen Parolek argue for the variety of multifamily housing options that prewar towns and cities offered, given their potential to contribute significant added density. The idea is to minimize the need for dramatic increases in height and bulk by enabling more modest increases in density across the existing fabric.42 Karen Parolek sees form-based codes as a bulwark against the “big crap” likely to be built as new state laws in California override local control of development through existing zoning.43 Form-based codes specify “street and building types (or mix of types), build-to lines, number of floors, and percentage of built site frontage.”44 SAR anticipated this approach in its 1977 report, Deciding on Density.45 A 2014 redevelopment plan for BART Pleasant Hill Station takes a form-based approach, as does Missing Middle Housing’s 2018 proposal to redevelop BART North Berkeley Station. 46 Aside from preserving local communities’ decision-making power through zoning, form-based codes encourage a mix of buildings and open spaces that, even at a higher density, produce a richer, more urbane fabric.

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California’s new laws put housing production above other factors, which may create a Hobson’s choice between a lack of housing production in the transit-served urban core and a lack of urbanity as developers takes advantage of bonus densities and expedited, state-mandated entitlements. Bigger, boxier housing projects could soon be the Bay Region’s norm. Is this the price of being housed at all?

Graff might say, “Don’t pay it. Look for an ‘ordinary’—a ‘new normal’—that delivers livability.”

Looking beyond housing to regional livability “Speeding up housing production” was the starting point of my research. Various factors slow it in the Bay Region, including the growing inequality of would-be buyers and renters of housing. A recent Financial Times article on housing trends points not only to factory-built housing but also to corporate ownership and management of rental housing and potentially of the neighborhoods where it’s located.

This is controversial—not all tenants are happy, and some cities are wary of the loss of competition and potential for monopoly pricing—but both trends relate to a third: the higher energy and ecological demands that governments and consumers impose on housing. They make data more important and dwellers more amenable to smart home systems and third-party digital management. If new housing is Alexa-controlled, developers like Google-owned Sidewalk Labs want to extend this to districts.47 The new term “modern methods of construction” (MMC) reflects the way the design-build-operate trajectory that defines the building industry is being transformed. Katerra and others are trying to shape this, but their focus is U.S. housing developers. Some European multifamily projects, like Germany’s baugruppen, share the livability of affordable projects here that also engage residents and neighbors as active participants in their planning and design.48 If we want housing to “function in the fullest social, human sense,” as Bender argued in 1967,49 then we have ask what such livability means in a given urban context. With these place-specific requirements in hand, we also have to ask how a metropolitan region and its communities can achieve it. Focusing on livability frees us from seeing housing as “things”—as density targets, unit counts, and production targets. They still matter, of course, but they may blind us to livability’s bigger picture: the opportunities that come with it and the strategies it implies.

Horst Rittel saw housing as a wicked problem—intractable and complex, its presenting issues symptoms of larger problems. Our housing problem falls squarely in his definition. With a regional economy the size of the Netherlands, our metropolis is an entrepôt of ideas and innovation. Yet we struggle to house people decently and provide other basic services effectively. Despite our wealth, our public realm is frayed by decades of underinvestment. It is becoming less and less livable.

Singapore is a city-state, so any comparison to the Bay Region is inexact, but it’s worth considering.

Its welfare-capitalist mass housing strategy combines ownership through long-term, inheritable leases with the possibility of moving “up, down, and across” the public housing on offer. Size, location, and quality are based on family means and preferences, with a consistently high minimum standard.

Education, healthcare, and transit are part of Singapore’s welfare-capitalist mix. Subsidies are tied to employment, but the children’s social mobility isn’t harmed if their parents don’t earn very much. They get good housing and their kids get a good education. Healthcare is universal. And this is accomplished without a huge tax burden—Singapore levies globally competitive flat taxes on companies and workers.

Can we, as a region, up the ante on Singapore’s benchmark? Can we overcome our chronic housing shortages in our transit-served core by rethinking the region as a public realm? How will this impact existing housing in our communities and neighborhoods? Can we have housing and urbanity?

In my second year of research at U.C. Berkeley, I will turn to successful examples of mass housing and urban infrastructure programs and strategies that emphasize livability even as they aim for increased development and higher densities. If the goal of multifamily housing is to build community, as David Baker argues, such examples will be relevant here and to other U.S. metropolitan regions.

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Notes 1. Colin St. John Wilson, “Two Letters on the State of Architecture,” 1964 and 1981,” Journal of Architectural Education, XXXV: 1, Fall 1981, p. 10.

2. Transcript of Bay Area architect Chuck Davis in conversation with his former EHDD Partner, the architect Marc L’Italien, Albany, CA, March 29 2018.

3. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction, California Management Review, XVIII: 3, Spring 1976, pp. 47–48. https://www.academia.edu/11910783/Factory_without_walls_Industrialization_in_residential_cons truction 4. Operation Breakthrough—Lessons Learned About Demonstrating New Technology, Comptroller General of the United States, November 2 1976, p. 2.

5. Op. Cit., p. 18, https://www.gao.gov/assets/120/117465.pdf 6. Robert J. Cole, “U.S. Says Stirling Homex Reported Phantom $ales,” July 3, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/03/archives/us-says-stirling-homex-reported-phantom-salesupstate-homebuilder.html.

7. Notes of a conversation with the architect-planner Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019.

8. Regentald Stuart, “Alodex Millionaires’ Pitfall,” New York Times, April 8, 1976, page 55. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/08/archives/alodex-millionaires-pitfall-fiasco-follows-motelsuccess.html.

9. Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019. The TRW and Townland drawing are from Richard Bender, Larry Dodge, and Nicholas de Monchaux, “Looking Back at Operation Breakthrough,” arcCA, no. 4, 2007 http://arccadigest.org/looking-back-at-operation-breakthrough-from-arcca-07-4-prefabiana/ 10. SCSD image from “Prefabrication experiments – 32 – The School Construction Systems Development initiative,” 29 September 2014 http://prefabricate.blogspot.com/2014/09/prefabricationexperiments-32-school.html; Barbara A. Checket-Hanks: “The 1960s: Heat Pumps, A/C Blast Off,” ACHR News, 25 April 2001. https://www.achrnews.com/articles/84046-the-1960s-heat-pumps-a-cblast-off 11. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction,” California Management Review, vol. XVIII, no. 3, Spring 1976, pp. 46–56.

12. Kriestien Ring and Geoffrey London, “Owner Occupied,” Assemble Papers, 3 March 2017, reprinted from Future West, University of Western Australia Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, and Education, Perth, https://assemblepapers.com.au/2017/03/03/owner-occupied/ 13. Richard Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” paper, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, 1968, pp. 3–4.

14. Richard Bender, A Crack in the Rear-View Mirror, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973, p. 1.

15. Notes of a conversation with David Baker, FAIA, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 31 January 2019.

16. Notes of a conversation with Andrew Meagher, Design Director, Factory OS, 15 October 2018.

17. Sara Pacelko, AIA, at a SPUR panel on modular housing, Oakland, 13 November 2018 and at an AIA San Francisco panel on modular housing, 18 July 2018. Pacelko is a design director with RAD Urban.

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18. Fei Tsen, SPUR panel on housing innovation, 5 June 2018, comment to the author. Tsen is the founder of Windflower Properties, a multifamily housing developer. She was Board President, Treasure Island Development Authority and Real Estate Director, Port of San Francisco.

19. Notes of a phone conversation with Craig Curtis, Michelle Ha, Peter Spruance, and Chester Weir, Katerra, Seattle, 8 February 2019. Curtis is the head of architecture, formerly with Miller-Hull.

20. Katerra phone conversation, 8 February 2019.

21. Conversations with BAR, 5 December 2018 and 22 January 2019; conversations with Fei Tsen, 26 April and 5 June 2019.

22. Richard Milne, “Ikea dismantles tradition to see inspiration from car industry,” Financial Times, 2 October 2019.

23. India Block, “Ikea is bringing its low-cost modular units to the UK,” Dezeen, 26 June 2019 https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/26/ikea-build-low-cost-housing-uk/; Hilary Osborne, “Ikea gets green light to build affordable homes in UK,” Guardian, 25 June 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/26/uk-council-ikea-affordable-housing-worthingboklok; BoKlok Housing AB website https://www.boklok.com/ 24. ByggHouse has an outpost in the U.S. https://bygghouse.com/; Jack Balderrama Morley, “Production Line: How Sweden is Pioneering Automated, Prefab Construction,” Architizer, https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/industry/swedish-modular-housing/ David Baker, “A Traveler’s Perspective on Housing Affordability,” DBA Blog, https://www.dbarchitect.com/us/news_blog/364/A%20Traveler's%20Perspective%20on%20Housin g%20Affordability.html?; notes of a meeting with Brad Leibin and Jonas Weber, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 1 February 2019; David Baker’s comment on Lindbäcks’s craned-on roof was made in passing during a meeting at his San Francisco office in the summer of 2019.

25. Kyodo Reuters (news service), “Toyota and Panasonic to merge housing units and team up on ‘smart town’ business, Japan Times, 9 May 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/09/business/corporate-business/toyota-panasonicmerge-housing-units-team-smart-town-business/#.XZ1GXCVlDBJ 26. John McManus, “Sekisui and Its Woodside Homes Will Team up on BUILDER Chöwa Concept Home for 2020 Unveiling,” Architect, 24 March 2019 https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/sekisuiand-its-woodside-homes-will-team-up-on-builder-chowa-concept-home-for-2020unveiling_s?utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=Brief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=AN _032519%20%281%29&he=cf21dc3f08679adb883cbd3f4114953428d7af12 27. Reinier de Graff, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften,” Four Walls and a Roof, Harvard, 2017, pp. 31– 53.

28. Graff, ibid., p. 53.

29. Graff, ibid., p. 52.

30. Graff, ibid., p. 53.

31. Graff, ibid., p. 53.

32. John Parman, “A Visitor’s Observations,” Open House, Vol 3, No. 1, 1978, p. 37.

33. Parman, Ibid., p. 37.

34. Parman, Ibid., p. 39.

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35. Rafffaella Poletti, “Lucien Kroll: utopia interrupted, Domus, 30 June 2010 https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2010/06/30/lucien-kroll-utopia-interrupted.html 36. Parman, op. cit., p. 37.

37. Parman, ibid., p. 38.

38. Parman, ibid., p. 37.

39. Parman, ibid., p. 37. See also SAR 73: the methodical formulation of agreements concerning the direct dwelling environment, which sets out these principles for supports and tissue (or fabric).

40. I’m working with David Baker Architects on a book on multi-family housing, and have reviewed its portfolio in detail and discussed it with principals David Baker, Daniel Simons, and Amanda Loper.

41. This reflects my own observations and conversations with Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg.

42. Remarks of Karen Parolek, SPUR San Francisco modular housing panel, 18 July 2019. Missing Middle Housing’s website: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ 43. Parolek, ibid.

44. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Form-Based Codes Defined”: https://formbasedcodes.org/definition/ 45. Deciding on Density, SAR, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 1977.

46. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Pleasant Hill BART Station,” with links to the February 2014 plan https://formbasedcodes.org/codes/pleasant-hill-bart-station/; Missing Middle Housing, A Thoughtful Approach to Form and Scale: Envisioning the Future of North Berkeley BART, October 2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/08-Opticos.pdf 47. Aleksandra Wisniewska, “How will we live in the 2020s?” Financial Times, 12–13 October 2019 https://www.ft.com/content/0dfb7bb4-e8fc-11e9-a240-3b065ef5fc55 48. Call with Daniel Chen, who made a four-month tour of examples of this work in Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere. Chen was formerly an investment banker with Morgan Stanley focused on real estate. For baugruppen, see Geoffrey London in conversation with Kristien Ring: “Owner Occupied,” Assembled Papers, 3 March 2017 https://assemblepapers.com.au/2017/03/03/owner-occupied/ 49. Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” op. cit., pp. 3–4.

John J. Parman is a Visiting Scholar in the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Architecture.

He started Common Place, a personal journal, in 2008. He co-founded the quarterly Design Book Review in 1983, publishing it through 1999. He is on the editorial and design advisory committee of ARCADE, and is an editorial advisor to ORO Editions’ AR+D research imprint, Architect’s Newspaper, and Room One Thousand, a journal edited by graduate students in architecture at U.C. Berkeley. © 2019 John J. Parman Cover photo: Windflower’s Union Flats, by David Baker Architects, under construction in Union City, CA. complace.j2parman.com

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