It seems as if the ground, the common ground between houses, is the medium through which people are able to make contact with one another and with themselves. Living on the ground, the yards around houses join those of the neighbors, and, in the best arrangements, they also adjoin neighborhood byways. Under these conditions it is easy and natural to meet with people. Children playing in the yard, the flowers in the garden, or just the weather outside provide endless topics for conversations. This kind of contact is impossible to maintain in high-rise apartments.
2. Private gardens. In the Park Hill survey (J. F. Demors, “Park Hill Survey,” O.A.P.y February 1966, p. 235), about one-third of the high-rise residents interviewed said they missed the chance to putter around in their garden.
The need for a small garden, or some kind of private outdoor space, is fundamental. It is equivalent, at the family scale, to the biological need that a society has to be integrated with its country-
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side—city country fingers (3). In all traditional architec tures, wherever building is essentially in the hands of the people, there is some expression of this need. The miniature gardens of Japan, outdoor workshops, roof gardens, courtyards, backyard rose gardens, communal cooking pits, herb gardens—there are thousands of examples. But in modern apartment structures this kind of space is simply not available.
3. Identity of each unit. During the course of a seminar held at the Center for Environmental Structure, Kenneth Radding made the following experiment. He asked people to draw their dream apartment, from the outside, and stuck the drawing on a small piece of cardboard. He then asked them to place the cardboard on a grid representing the facade of a huge apartment house, and asked them to move their “homes” around, until they liked the position they were in. Without fail, people wanted their apartments to be on the edge, of the building, or set off from other units by blank walls. No one wanted his own apartment to be lost in a grid of apartments.
In another survey we visited a nineteen-story apartment building in San Francisco. The building contained 190 apartments each with a balcony. The management had set very rigid restrictions on the use of these balconies—no political posters, no painting, no clothes drying, no mobiles, no barbecues, no tapestries. But even when confined by such restrictions, over half of the residents were still able, in some way, to personalize their balconies with plants in pots, carpets, and furniture. In short, in the face of the most extreme regimentation people try to give their apartments a unique face.
What building form is compatible with these three basic requirements? First of all, to maintain a strong and direct connection to the ground, the building must be no higher than four stories—four-story limit (21). Also, and perhaps more important, we believe that each “house” must be within a few steps of a rather wide and gradual stair that rises directly from the ground. If the stair is open, somewhat rambling, and very gradual, it will be continuous with the street and the life of the street. Furthermore, if we take this need seriously, the stair must be connected at the ground to a piece of land, owned in common
21 2 39 HOUSING HILL
by the residents—this land organized to form a semi-private green.
Concerning the private gardens. They need sunlight and privacy—two requirements hard to satisfy in ordinary balcony arrangements. The terraces must be south-facing, large, and intimately connected to the houses, and solid enough for earth, and bushes, and small trees. This suggests a kind of housing hilly with a gradual slope toward the south and a garage for parking below the “hill.”
And for identity—the only genuine solution to the problem of identity is to let each family gradually build and rebuild its own home on a terraced superstructure. If the floors of this structure are capable of supporting a house and some earth, each unit is free to take its own character and develop its own tiny garden.
Although these requirements bring to mind a form similar to Safdie’s Habitat, it is important to realize that Habitat fails to solve two of the three problem discussed here. It has private gardens; but it fails to solve the problem of connection to the ground—the units are strongly separated from the casual life of the street;—and the mass-produced dwellings are anonymous, far from unique.
The following sketch for an apartment building—originally made for the Swedish community of Marsta, near Stockholm— includes all the essential features of a housing hill.
 |
| Afartment building for Marsta, near Stockholm. Therefore: |
To build more than 30 dwellings per net acre, or to
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build housing three or four stories high, build a hill of houses. Build them to form stepped terraces, sloping toward the south, served by a great central open stair which also faces south and leads toward a common garden . . .
| parking underneath |  | stepped terraces |
| central common stairs | ||
Let people lay out their own houses individually, upon the terraces, just as if they were land—your own home (79). Since each terrace overlaps the one below it, each house has its garden on the house below—roof gardens ( i 18). Leave the central stair open to the air, but give it a roof, in wet or snowy climates— perhaps a glass roof—open stairs (158) j and place the common land right at the bottom of the stair with playgrounds, flowers, and vegetables for everyone—common land (67), connected PLAY (68) , VEGETABLE GARDEN ( I 77) . . . .
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40 OLD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE**
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summary of the language
fix the position of individual buildings on the site, within the complex, one by one, according to the nature of the site, the trees, the sun: this is one of the most important moments in the language j
104. SITE REPAIR
105. SOUTH FACING OUTDOORS
106. POSITIVE OUTDOOR SPACE
107. WINGS OF LIGHT
108. CONNECTED BUILDINGS
109. LONG THIN HOUSE
within the buildings’ wings, lay out the entrances, the gardens, courtyards, roofs, and terraces: shape both the volume of the buildings and the volume of the space between the buildings at the same time—remembering that indoor space and outdoor space, yin and yang, must always get their shape together j
110. MAIN ENTRANCE
111. HALF-HIDDEN GARDEN I 12. ENTRANCE TRANSITION I 13. CAR CONNECTION
I 14. HIERARCHY OF OPEN SPACE I 15. COURTYARDS WHICH LIVE I 16. CASCADE OF ROOFS I 17. SHELTERING ROOF I I 8. ROOF GARDEN
XXVI
. . . when neighborhoods are properly formed they give the people there a cross section of ages and stages of development—identifiable NEIGHBORHOOD (14), LIFE CYCLE (26), HOUSEHOLD MIX (35)) however, the old people are so often forgotten and left alone in modern society, that it is necessary to formulate a special pattern which underlines their needs.