plans, as if they were taking up the conversation from the Bauhaus and translating it into American terms. I emphasize this social vector in the conversation on courtyard housing, because mainly for reasons of space and time, it is not given such explicit treatment in the pages that follow. One example will suffice to illustrate the conjunction of the technical and the social, in which the design manual necessarily carries within it the flame of the manifesto. One of the generic problems of the courtyard house is scale. If the dwelling unit is scaled within reasonable limits to be a single family house – between say, 1,000 to 1,800 square feet – then the true courtyard, a private space with rooms on all four sides, not only has four internal corner conditions but the court itself is severely restricted and in northern latitudes is a place in which, for considerable periods, the sun does not shine.6 If on the other hand, the perimeter is expanded to enlarge the court, shared to a greater or lesser extent with other units, then the discussion immediately becomes as much one of community as it is of privacy. The family house based on the Roman impluvium stands at one end of the spectrum, Cerda’s Barcelona grid with its communal courts serving hundreds of units, at the other.7 The dialectic between community and privacy, the social and the individual, is inherent in every one of the plans represented in this volume.
Pragmatism as Program Tim Love’s suggestion, in his treatment of the methodology
of the studio, that the courtyard house is worthy of investigation on the grounds that “it is a type that does not yet commonly exist in Boston…” and “because there are no regulatory or economic impediments to the implementation of the type” is consonant with the broader aim of the studio – and Northeastern itself – that “seeks to uncover the underlying pragmatics of contemporary market driven building”. The combination of courtyard house plans presented here and the urban forms they predicate shown in street and aerial views and blockplans, underwritten by this provocative methodological premise, all indicate a welcome revival of this subject on American soil, in American terms, with a long overdue alternative to the last generation of architectural pedagogy. This manual is surely a manifesto.
Notes 1 The Greater London Council (1965-86) was the municipal authority for the entire metropolitan region of London, the heir to the London County Council (1889-1965) which had jurisdiction over a much smaller area. In addition to the Boroughs, both the LCC and the GLC had vast portfolios of public housing in the city and were responsible for pioneering design in social housing. Of its many publications the GLC’s Preferred Dwelling Plans published in 1978 set standards and provided design templates for low-rise, high density development in the city. 2 Schneider, Friederike, Floor Plan Atlas: Housing, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1994 (Third edition, 2004). 3 The work of Sir Leslie Martin, Lionel March and others at the Cambridge Centre for Land Use and Built Form provided much of the theoretical underpinning through mathematical and quantitative analysis of patterns of residential densities and vehicular circulation.
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