For Sale: Keck's Sloan House

George Fred Keck's Sloan House is for sale.

The house, commissioned by Howard Sloan and built in 1940, is of major historical significance.  It is, strictly speaking, the first solar house---the first to be given that label and promoted as such.  It was the first house in the development that Sloan called Solar Park.  It was also the first example of an architect calculating passive solar gains, calculating the losses, and determining the savings.  The Sloan House is discussed in great detail in The Solar House.

Here's a link to the sales website: link

See also:
Keck's Solar Park today
Keck's Sloan house II: a new look

Speculative Redesign: Unité d'Habitation

Here's a half-cooked idea which might interest some people. I tried to improve upon the design of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation.

The original design (borrowed from Russian architects; see Frampton's Modern Architecture) was quite clever and remains a fascinating prototype.  Practically every student of architecture studies it and designs a variant.  The appeal of Le Corbusier's design is that it's very efficient but also very humane.  Because of the sectional composition (see image below) each unit is allowed to have a "double orientation"—east and west in Le Corbusier's case—whereas a typical plan with a double-loaded central corridor gives units access to only one orientation, single-aspect.  In Le Corbusier's design, each unit also has a double-height living room.  And because the central corridor is only needed on every 3rd floor, the building becomes quite efficient (although it is inefficient for each unit to have its own staircase within).  

From www.dezeen.com

Le Corbusier oriented the Unité d'Habitations—all of them—to face east and west (as I explained in Le Corbusier and the Sun and Zeilenbau orientation and Heliotropic housing).  This is somewhat problematic, as half the units have their double-height space dark in the mornings, the other half dark in the evenings.  Nobody gets the excellent south exposure, and shading is very difficult on the east and west.  For general energy efficiency, a long, narrow building ought to face south.  If you simply rotated Le Corbusier's design 90 degrees, half the residents would have their living rooms facing north and be sequestered to a kind of 'thermal ghetto' (see Public Housing and the ‘Thermal Ghetto’).

So how could the Unité d'Habitation concept be refined, to be rotated 90 degrees, and give each unit access to the sun?  Here's my rough idea.  South is to the left.

©Anthony Denzer

This creates a 4-bedroom unit, and a 2-bedroom unit, each having a 1.5-height living space (LR) facing south.  Of course it could also be imagined as two 3-bedroom units with three-dimensional interlocking.  In any case, balconies and shading could be added.  Kitchens and dining areas (K&D) are 'buried' in the center of the building, though I think these spaces would have a view of the sky through the living room and in winter the sun can penetrate deep.  Bedrooms face north.  (The section has no depth, so the bedrooms indicated are two-deep.)

This scheme retains the value of a central corridor on every 3 floors.  And, as in Le Corbusier's design, each unit has cross-ventilation.  Emergency egress issues have not been resolved.  Above, the sloped lines represent stairs; they could alternatively run perpendicular to the section view as shown here: 

©Anthony Denzer

Worth developing?  Comments welcome!

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Edited to add:  A friend suggested ascending from the living room to the bedrooms, rather than descending.  It would be nice to look down to the landscape from the kitchen & dining area. Here's how that would look:

©Anthony Denzer

More variants based on feedback:

©Anthony Denzer

©Anthony Denzer

As explained in the excellent Single Aspect Blog, this form is known in Europe as the "scissor maisonette" or "scissor block planning." Here I’ve learned that the 'ascending' scheme above unknowingly recapitulated a 1960 Kenneth Frampton housing block in London, though Frampton's building was oriented facing east and west.

No B.S.

If you're a young person interested in a career as a homebuilder, our system of education for Architects and Engineers doesn't suit you.  I make this case in a fun piece for Home Energy magazine, published on their blog today: No B.S.

Related, subsequently: only 3% of young people are interested in the construction trades.

A Brief History of Unsustainable Architecture

Seamen's bethel, or mariners' chapel, New Bedford, Mass. From loc.gov

It seems to me there isn't much attention paid to the history of "unsustainable" industries in American history, how they die, the trauma, and the material culture they leave behind.  So this is a brief outline of a bigger subject which deserves more thought and more research.  The American landscape is richly marked by structures which represent industries that died because they were not environmentally sustainable.  These were huge industries, central to the economy, and represented by extensive infrastructures and forms of cultural expression, not just a few quaint obsolete buildings.

Whaling

Left: Houses with Captain's Walks, Nantucket, Mass. From loc.gov
Right: Gordon Folger Hotel detail, Nantucket, Mass. From loc.gov

The whaling industry was one of America's major industries in the 18th and early 19th century.  The direct labor force of whalers topped 10,000 at its height.  Whale oil was one of America's most important energy sources, along with wood and draft animals, and wind and water.  Whale oil was the primary fuel for lamps, before gas.  New Bedford, Massachusetts, is known as "The City That Lit the World."  As a widespread commercial activity, American whaling became unsustainable in the late-19th century, due to overfishing and new fuel oils (though it continued internationally).

There is a distinctive architecture of whaling to be found in the New England and Pacific seaports which were home to this industry.  This is most pronounced in Nantucket and New Bedford.  The Captain's Walk (or Widow's Walk) is a distinctive feature of houses in those cities, and became a widely-used representational stylistic feature.

Fur Trading

Fort Vancouver. From wikimedia.org

The Fur Trade was the economic engine of America's westward expansion.  In the 40 years after Lewis & Clark's 1805 expedition, the west was "virtually cleared" of otter and beaver, for example.  John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company became one of the wealthiest companies in the country.  The importance of this industry is also indicated by the fur-related place-names throughout the United States, including my current location---Laramie, Wyoming, named for Jacques La Ramée.  The American fur trade became unsustainable in the 1850s, when fashions changed and global prices collapsed.  (Astor wisely withdrew from the fur trade in 1834 because he foresaw its decline.) 

The architecture of fur trading is most pronounced in the forts and outposts built across the country in the 17th and 18th centuries.  These were multi-purpose establishments, like small cities.  Fort Vancouver, shown above, is an excellent representation.  Here's a brief summary from the National Register of Historic Places:

Despite the 'iconic' character of the image above, American Forts varied widely in terms of construction type and style.  There is not a uniform type or style which can simply be called the architecture of the fur trade.  Stone, brick, and later concrete were also common.  After the decline of the fur trade, Western forts served the great overland migration and most had a military purpose.  So the type can be seen (again like the city) as durable and mutable, at least for an era.

Silver & Gold Mining

Left: Shenandoah-Dives Mill, San Juan County, CO. From loc.gov
Right: Standard Gold Mill, Bodie, CA. From loc.gov

It is easy to overlook how significantly and rapidly the California Gold Rush changed the American West.  About 300,000 people moved to California alone between 1848-55.  Silver Rushes in western states like Colorado and Nevada were also profound.   It took a massive infrastructure to support this migration --- emigrant trails and all kinds of associated structures were developed.  Most people would probably think about Pony Express stations and general stores.  Ships were built on the east coast and harbors were built in San Francisco.  Soon, the ripple effects of this new economy demanded a much more advanced infrastructure, the railroads.  With saloons and brothels and livery stables, mining towns certainly speak to a particular social history.  Gold and Silver mining was found to be unsustainable at different times in different places, but generally by the beginning of the 20th century.

The architecture of mining communities speaks to expedience and commercial utility.  For example, the "false-front" stores were meant for exaggerated signage.  The architecture of mining has a distinctive strain illustrated by the structures shown above, with wood and corrugated tin construction, and additive forms.  This "style" remains intact and prevalent in many Western communities today, though perhaps applied with a postmodern sense of distance.

Slavery

Left: Old slave market, St. Augustine, Fla. From loc.gov
Right: Slave quarters, Bourbon County, KY. From loc.gov

Slavery is, of course, the great moral problem of American history.  It can also be viewed as an unsustainable industry in the sense of those above.  This is not to equate humans with whales or beavers; it is to say that all economies, even the worst ones, have an expression in material culture.

The architecture of slavery is especially important to preserve and recognize, because its political content is so powerful.  Again, there is no 'architecture of slavery' in the strict sense of traditional architectural history; it's a category whose coherence is conceptual rather than physical or visual.  However, it does have a fairly robust scholarly record.  In particular, there is John Michael Vlach's excellent book Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (1993).

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These stories may help inform the future of communities like Gillette, Wyoming, whose economy is built on coal mining.  That industry is crippled and its future looks bleak, due to regulatory decisions.  The reality is that our social/political systems have effectively decided that coal is unsustainable and should be phased out.  (That reality could change, or not, in November.)

What can a community like Gillette learn from the examples above?  Honestly, I don't know.  Nantucket survived and thrived by developing a lobster industry then a tourist industry, while Bodie became a ghost town.  Some slave-holding regions are quite wealthy today while others remain among the nation's poorest. 

And what kind of architectural legacy did Gillette create during its coal boom?  That too is not clear.  It will likely take historical distance and perspective to discern the answer.  Its charms are not immediately apparent.

More broadly, I sense that the economic lessons are more optimistic.  The nation overcame the loss of these major industries, though some individuals certainly suffered.  Major convulsions are not only survivable, but they are associated with progress.  (The great world cities have major convulsions all the time, in fact it is likely what makes them great.)  During these great shifts, huge amounts of structure and infrastructure, representing massive capital investment, are abandoned.  Whaling villages, trading posts, mining towns, and plantations become historic sites, visited by tourists who may even work in the new industries which supplanted them.

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Surely we live among buildings which represent industries whose future sustainability is in doubt.  This is impossible to predict, of course.  Some folks already preserve gas pumps and motor oil signs the way New Englanders preserved their whale-ornamented weather vanes.  Will we have nostalgia for, say, the defunct cruise ship industry someday?  Golf courses?  Or might we tear down our (analogic) medieval walls, like Vienna did?  What is today's equivalent of the fur trading outpost?

Sam Maloof House

Some years ago (2004, I think) I took some photos of the Sam Maloof house.  Maloof, who died in 2009, was one of the great wood furniture makers, specializing in rocking chairs.  It was an honor to meet him.  He designed and built this house in Rancho Cucamonga, California, over a period of decades.

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