Launched with great fanfare a generation ago, the American anti-modernist city design movement called New Urbanism has been hailed as a remedy for car-ridden suburban sprawl and denounced as so much nostalgia for the small town before the automobile.
The controversy continues, and I won’t try to address all the pros and cons here. But it’s worth noting that the preference of many New Urbanist architects for “neo-traditional” housing has produced at least one interesting side-effect in the world of architecture at large: the revival of attention to antique building types as possible sources for the homes of the future.
Take, for example, the Charleston Single, a beautiful and versatile housing type native to Charleston, S.C., and one that has fascinated Toronto architect David Sisam for years.
From the city’s beginnings in the 1680s until the end of the 19th century, Charleston builders put up Singles on downtown avenues. Skinny, usually one room thick and several rooms long, laid out perpendicular to the street, the Single turns its short end to the sidewalk. Its entrance faces the strip of garden that runs the length of the narrow lot. Broad verandahs (which Charlestonians call “piazzas”) shield the house from sultry afternoon sun and afford exterior circulation among the rooms of the structure.
An estimated 2,700 instances of this graceful building type, cast in styles ranging from Federal to Victorian Gothic, still stand in old neighbourhoods of the city.
Architectural historians can’t tell us exactly why the Single arose and flourished in Charleston and nowhere else on America’s Atlantic seaboard, but the hot climate and limited space for home building appear to have been important factors in its development. Charleston was originally fortified, and the long, narrow residential lots were laid out to accommodate high population density within the city walls.
Ordinary row houses, crowded on the street, would have allowed little of the air flow crucial in a sub-tropical place. Hence, the elegant Single solution, its bulk stretched along one side of the lot, and separated from the next Single down the street by the long garden.
For the past 10 years, Ontario has been urging increased density in built-up areas and the curbing of low-density sprawl in suburbia. Which set Mr. Sisam to thinking: Could the Charleston Single be a model for residential development in Toronto’s suburbs? Could it suggest (he told me) “new ways of living closer together?”
Bringing down his thoughts from the clouds, Mr. Sisam created a suburban tract-house scheme in which a housing prototype based on the Single could generate some 20 units per acre, as opposed to suburbia’s more usual six to eight. Each long, three-storey, 2,000-square-foot dwelling, one room deep, would open south over the garden and parking garage. Every room would have a view of the garden.
There are almost no corridors. The ground floor plan shows an entry mid-way along the garden side of the house. At this point, one enters the living room, which adjoins the kitchen and the dining room, all arranged in a sequence of the sort one might find in any narrow Toronto row house. A stairwell, located at the centre of the building, connects the ground floor to the upper levels. It opens directly into the bedrooms and, by way of a short passage, into the family room. If the idea of a free-standing family home one room wide seems a bit odd, the practicalities of living in it would probably not be forbidding at all.
The exterior of Mr. Sisam’s prototype is tailored to fit contemporary taste, although its pitched roof can be read as a polite nod to the usual roof lines of suburban housing. Similarly, its porch, which runs the length of the first level, recalls a Charleston “piazza.” Despite the house’s retrospective features, however, the architect has done something original simply by reimagining an elderly housing type for 21st century customers.
Not that anyone in Ontario will inhabit one of Mr. Sisam’s updated Charleston Singles very soon. The current regime of standard building codes and regulations, as well as the conservatism of suburban developers and consumers alike, discourage innovation of this kind. But the good news here is that residential architects are thinking beyond the limits of what’s orthodox and possible at the present moment, since, without such creative thought about the past and future, housing design will never budge past the ordinary.