Welcome Mats Out for New Courtyards
Courtyard housing, which served Southern California so well in its early development, is being rediscovered.
The hope is that courtyard housing will be an alternative to the overscaled, ticky-tacky shoebox-like apartments and condo projects that are defacing many neighborhoods these days.
The courtyard concept calls for the clustering of sensitively scaled attached houses, townhomes or apartments around a well landscaped common open space, lending the development a distinct and pleasant identity.
Design guidelines encouraging courtyard housing were adopted recently by West Hollywood in recognition of the fact that “it is as important to regulate the quality of spaces created by and between buildings as the buildings themselves,” said Mark Winogrond, the city’s director of community development.
He adds:
“While modern architects and developers have shown that it is indeed possible to design a courtyard that is dreary and inhuman, at its best a courtyard reflects people’s fondness for the California climate, for the outdoors, and fosters a sense of community while providing a sense of protection and oasis within a larger urban context,”
Last year, Pasadena approved an imaginative package of zoning ordinances that shift the focus of its multifamily residential plan reviews from “hardscaping” to accommodate the automobile to “softscaping” to enhance the ambience of the neighborhood.
“We want to emphasize the garden character that graces our streets and distinguishes our city,” said Pasadena landscape architect Phoebe Wall, one of the authors of a landmark study that was the basis for the ordinances.
Similar ordinances also were implemented by Santa Monica for its Ocean Park neighborhood, with the result that some distinctive new apartment complexes have been built there.
Particularly praised has been the bungalow-styled Ocean Park cooperative consisting of 43 units on five sites, designed by the firm of Appleton Mechur & Associates.
The encouragement of the courtyard concept through design guidelines also is being explored by a host of other cities, including Los Angeles.
Courtyards were first developed in Southern California nearly 100 years ago in the form of modest bungalows to provide inexpensive housing for the waves of newcomers settling here and others who vacationed here. With front porches and common areas encouraging mingling, the courts became, in effect, small, friendly neighborhoods in an increasingly anonymous city. Some still persevere.
But more common these days is the “ding bat” or “shoe box” multiunit structure, filling up a lot with a long, narrow building sitting awkwardly on a raised parking garage. What setbacks are required usually do not provide any usable open space, other than a place to store trash cans, nor do they tend to prevent the building from shading adjoining buildings and back yards
“‘Most of them are just out of scale and out of place, and not very neighborly,” comments Matthew Marchand of Highland Park, where in the last few years dozens of such complexes have risen. Marchand is a member of the Highland Park Revitalization Project that is urging the city to enact stricter urban design guidelines.
Why so many of the projects are objectionable is not as much an issue of density as it is of design, declare both opposing developer and community representatives, and the planners and architects in the middle.
It is obvious that Southern California needs more comfortable and convenient housing, nearer to jobs. But the housing must work for the neighborhoods it is to be located in, as well as for the people who will live in it.
“The problem is developers milking the sites for every last square buildable inch and ‘schlock’ architects who repeat plans regardless of the orientation of the site, the context, and area,” observed Deborah Murphy, who reviewed hundreds of such projects in the Los Angeles City Planning Department before recently being appointed an aide to Mayor Tom Bradley.
Architects have contended in defense of designs that a part of the problem is the city’s building and safety requirement of semi-subterranean parking.
“We would like to sink the parking lower, bring the buildings more into scale, but the parking requirements are, in a word, unreasonable,” says an architect. “The result is that instead of lawns and flowers, there are driveways and grills.”
“You feel you are walking past jails, not houses,” observed Sandy Brown, a Westwood activist who fought against the overdevelopment of North Westwood Village.
“There was density there, but it was set back behind trees, with the parking in garages in the rear. Now we have cell blocks.”
“Growth is happening. The challenge is to shape it to work for a neighborhood rather than against it,” said Johannes Van Tilburg, whose architecture firm specializes in the design of multiunit developments.
Van Tilburg’s design of the four-story, 60 unit Marabella Apartments at 600 S. Detroit St.--replacing two traditional low-rise fourplexes--drew strong protests by local residents, while his design of the Venice Renaissance, an 89-apartment complex on Main Street, has been widely praised.
Of course, changes encouraging the courtyard concept do not guarantee better, more neighborhood-friendly projects. Design guidelines generally tend to mandate mediocrity, not excellence, with such projects as in Ocean Park the exception, not the rule.
Still, there is the hope that the resurgence of the courtyard concept can make a difference.
