ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Reusing Suburbia’

Strategies for Subdivisions in Puerto Rico

 

 

“The dwelling is the basis of both architectural design (as archetypical shelter) and physical planning (as the replicable unit used to form neighborhoods, cities, and regions). Because the form of housing carries so many aesthetic, social, and economic messages, a serious misfit between a society and its housing stock can create profound unrest and disorientation.”

 

—Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, p. 58)

 

 

 

In Puerto Rico, suburban residential subdivisions and the insecurity derived from crime have crystallized in a peculiar and perverse form of living within gates. Detached, modernist-style, single-family houses—mostly one-story with open carports—are the most extensive housing type. These houses are also the least environmentally appropriate for the tropics, having uninsulated flat roofs, low ceilings, limited cross ventilation, and especially high thermal mass that turns them into nocturnal heat radiators.

 

The island’s struggle with insecurity has transformed its built environment, as well as the social relationships among its citizens. Seeking protection from intruders, residents have installed grilles and gates in openings, including carports. Sociability and communication are challenged by these barriers, with neighbors chatting through them and children playing within them as urban inmates. Along with vegetation that is increasingly cut back by residents to improve surveillance, the resulting suburbanscapes express fear. 

 

Students confronted this ignored suburban panorama with proposals for reusing and transforming these isolated, climatically inadequate structures into socially and environmentally meaningful places. Each student was assigned a Levittown Puerto Rico house plan in an imaginary plot. Goals for the projects were to: 1) Improve the spatial and thermal conditions of the existing houses; 2) Increase density by expanding the houses with lightweight materials; 3) Create open-ended spatial configurations to accommodate changing lifestyles and needs, as well as non-family households; and 4) Design replicable strategies to speculate on a new block type and neighborhood for diverse uses and users.

 

The studio focused on contingency and constraint as positive values, and projects aimed to reframe quotidian issues embodied in architecture and dwelling that were specific to the place, such as sociability, anonymity, privacy, conflict, community, ventilation, insects, heat, and noise. 

 

The comprehensive aspect of the studio was understood as a holistic approach, and early strategic thinking around energy, structure, resources, materials, and program was adopted for creating environmentally informed architecture. Students investigated spatial sections to support solar energy and rainwater collection and to increase natural ventilation through air shafts, solar chimneys, and layered shading. 

 

A visit to Puerto Rico provided experiences about culture, climate, vernacular architecture, and the evolution of urban forms, from the Spanish colonial city to contemporary suburban sprawl. By embracing design challenges and the opportunities afforded by extreme climate, students contributed to ongoing research, informing a vision for the island’s ecological future in light of recent economic and natural catastrophes.