Thinking inside the box

A friend of mine told me a few years ago how he plans to build a low-cost retirement house consisting of 5 shipping containers configured around a central courtyard with one of those Mexican outdoor fireplaces in the middle of it on a rural property somewhere in northern New South Wales. I was not entirely convinced, mainly because of the narrowness of the containers as anything else, but then he is a very capable person and very good at envisaging building projects and then making them happen, so quite probably he is onto something.

Certainly there does seem to be a logical sort of appeal to reusing some of the thousands of shipping containers lying about in retirement around the world. The Dutch seem to like the idea, having set the first ever series of Big Brother inside a shipping container and then constructed student housing in Amsterdam from recycled containers (you can read about it here and here).

Student housing is one thing, but would you want to live in a shipping container on a more permanent basis? How do you get cross-ventilation? What about the economics of heating or cooling? The Domain supplement in this week's Sunday Age had two articles about container housing. The first was about a new container called "Small is Smart" designed by Australian firm Fulton Salomon. They propose it be used for holiday homes, granny flats, student accommodation and retirement villages as well as social, worker and emergency housing. It includes an "edible" wall vegetable garden on the exterior, and I suppose you could also include some solar panels, a water tank and a grey water system to make it even more sustainable. It's small, with a Pullman style bed and only room for two chairs at the dining table and one small couch in the living area. Using the salvaged container reduces the carbon footprint of new construction and keeps costs very low. It certainly looks a bit more luxurious than the caravan and annex that my grandparents lived in for many years, but personally I think I'd need a little bit more space.

That bit more space is suggested in the "respod" designs of MG Architecture. I must say I quite like the 3 bedroom C-type design with the corrugated steel cladding. I think it looks great and functional too.

One of the immediate problems with container housing, mentioned in the second article in the Age, is that in Australia at least we are still a long way from accepting innovative approaches to housing solutions, probably because we just don't have the same level of housing shortages evident in more crowded urban areas of the world. In particular, using containers for social housing in Australia would almost certainly contribute to social stigma.

It's certainly an interesting idea though and one which we need to explore further if we want to become more sustainable in our residential building practices.

Some stuff I liked about San Francisco

As I have been sorting through my photos from the San Francisco trip and reliving the lovely experience, I thought I might do a post about five things I particularly liked about the city in terms of urban design. If you want to see some more of the photographs, you can look at my Photobucket site.

1. Fast, easy, cheap, reliable transit: I've already commented favourably on their excellent integrated transport systems, the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit ) and the Muni (Municipal Transit Authority) networks, so I'm including a picture of one of the Muni trams here. They call them "trains" in San Francisco but they are really light rail trams (I'll concede though that the BART trains are trains). Unfortunately when we were there it looked as though Muni services were going to have to be scaled back substantially as a result of substantial budget cuts. I really hope they don't stuff it up. The networks integrate and function as well as any I've seen in European systems (think U and S bahn services in German cities, for example), and pretty much cover the whole city and Bay Area. The Muni electric buses were also very convenient and reliable. I think they have a really great system. And with all those hills, the trams and buses come in very handy for the tourists.

2. Charming urban parks: I did a post about South Park, one of my favourite little places in San Francisco. Another stand out in the Mission District, which was an area that was colourful and full of life (also in places full of homeless people, as I noted all of the "flat" districts were, and this was one aspect of the city I found somewhat confronting) and its beloved Dolores Park, a beautiful and heavily used green space in one of the most densely populated areas of this very densely populated city (the second highest population density in the US behind Manhattan, and hardly any skyscrapers, which strongly demonstrates one of my main gripes as an aspiring urban planner: yes, we need to encourage higher densities in our cities, but high density does not have to mean high rise. San Francisco proves that, as do many European cities. I really that our approach to increasing densities in Australian cities is going to leave us with too many over-sized, ugly developments with not enough green spaces - but I am digressing here!) The point is, Dolores Park is a perfect example of a multi-function open space in a high density area that gets used from morning till night by sunbathers, families, students and idlers; on weekends there are fairs and shows, and at night it provides shelter for a lot of homeless people by the looks of it, so the park is getting a lot of use. At the other end of the scale, San Francisco's version of New York's Central Park, Golden Gate Park, is a huge green lung, surprisingly desolate and even a bit scary at the far end towards the ocean but full of life, people and cultural institutions and gardens at the end closest to the city. What a wonderful park to have in such a densely populated city.

Of course the city is dotted with plazas and parks, some more successful than others. I loved the residential squares in the posher parts of town, like Alamo Square and Alta Plaza.

3. Vibrant street life: Like Melbourne, San Francisco is a city of active, vibrant streets of vastly differing personalities. Some that I loved were Valencia Street in the Mission District, which reminded me a lot of Melbourne's Brunswick Street with its great bookstores and alternative shops on Valencia Street; the relaxed middle class vibe of 24th Street in the Noe Valley; the vibrant commercial buzz of Post and Geary Streets around Union Square; the multicultural Clement Street in the Richmond district with its mix of Asian and Russian shops and eateries; the upmarket sections of Polk and Fillmore Streets, the streets around the Hayes Valley and Duboce Park, the lively and colourful alleyways of Chinatown. Speaking of colour, I also loved the murals all over the city. The streets of San Francisco are a big part of its appeal.

4. Interesting traditional architecture: I'm not the first nor will I be the last to comment on the beauty and function of San Francisco's lovely Victorian houses with their narrow, pretty frontages, their bay windows, turrets and curves. It's an intoxicating, lovely style and updated variations of it are evident in most of the city's more recent housing architecture, some of which are not so lovely but almost all of which seem to include the bay window elements. In terms of commercial and civic buildings, the city again achieves with the classical beauty of City Hall, the grand emporium facades of Market Street and Union Square, and the elegant grand hotels and apartment houses of Nob Hill and Russian Hill.

5. Interesting contemporary architecture: When I stop to take a photo of a Safeway store, then you can rest assured it's not any bland old supermarket design. In Australia, we still subscribe to the windowless box idea for supermarket design, but I fell in love with this airy Safeway store in the Marina district. Admittedly, it was surrounded by a car park (a no-no in any urban design manual), but the building itself demonstrates that you can have a simple, quite beautiful design for something as everyday as a supermarket. The glazed frontage bathed the store in natural light, creating a much pleasanter and more energy efficient shopping environment. Of course, there are many other interesting examples of exciting contemporary architecture in this exciting and beautiful city, but for me, this interesting Safeway store, determined to be beautiful and to breath life into its purpose and to make it not just a shopping barn but a pleasant experience, encapsulates something of the city's humanistic, artistic spirit as expressed through its architecture. Which is not a bad accomplishment for a supermarket, really.

South Park: A Hidden Gem of San Francisco

During my trip to San Francisco earlier this year I made sure to visit a rather delightful, if slighlty anachronistic, little residential square called South Park located in the extensive SoMa (South of Market) urban regeneration district.

This lovely little park has a chequered history. It was laid out by a developer in the 1850s and patently modelled on European residential squares to provide an upmarket, enclosed neighbourhood of townhouses facing onto a compact little urban park. In the 1890s it became a public park. The 1906 earthquake destroyed the neighbourhood and, while the park itself survived, the area went steadily downmarket and seedy (as indeed much of the SoMA area remains today, at least in my observation; it's a very schizophrenic environment, with huge glass and steel devleopments side by side with homeless missions - but I am digressing). South Park started sprucing up in the 1970s and '80s, as artists and other bohemian types attracted by low rents and its quirky charm, moved in, but they were sadly pushed out by the 1990s "dot com boomers" who took over the neighbourhood - a pity as it would have made a lovely artists' colony. Despite the new money apparently the park itseld remained a popular homeless and/or drug dealing haunt at nighttime. With the dot com bust in the early 2000s this square is now assuming its next personality. It seems an environment in transition - the housing stock surrounding it is nothing special, but there are several little cafes and the park itself is a charming little green oasis in an area of this lovely city that is not exactly blessed with a huge number of green spaces.

The size is just right - large enough for mature trees that provide a leafy outlook for the houses and offices overlooking the square, room to stroll and sit and chat, a small playground and open areas for children to run about or for people to laze about in the sun.

It's a public park so anyone can enjoy it, if they can find it. It is such a narrow little park squeezed into the middle of a standard sized city block and with very ordinary looking street opening, so "stumbling" across it is a little like stumbling across a long forgotten, somehow more genteel urban environment cloistered away from the rest of the modern city - how lovely and restful.

It's certainly not the busiest square in San Francisco, nor the grandest nor even the most beautiful. But it is a real little gem and it is the sort of balanced urban environment that I think comes close to perfection.

The charm of the garden square

I am very much a fan of the square as an urban space - be it the grand civic/ceremonial piazza, or the lively church or market square that serves as a bustling meeting place, or, most especially, the charming garden or residential square - those lovely, quiet little pockets of greenery and solitude offering peaceful respite from the city.

Considered a British invention, the garden square is mostly associated with London, where there are more than 600 of them, although they were built throughout the British Isles with other notable examples in Dublin and Edinburgh. These squares were exclusive sorts of places, generally built for the upper middle classes who lived in elegant rows of townhouses overlooking the communal, and usually gated, central gardens; residents had a key to the gardens. Today, the squares are usually open to anyone to enjoy. Place des Vosges, where my picture for this post was taken, is a deservedly famous Parisian take on the residential square. There are also examples of garden squares in American cities such as Boston, Savannah and San Francisco, a city that I am currently visiting and where, this afternoon, I plan to find my way to two of its most noted examples of residential squares, South Park and Alamo Square.

In Australia, the concept of the residential square never really developed much traction, perhaps because of the preference for private backyards. St Vincent's Place in South Melbourne is one of the best examples of an English style residential square in Australia. Today the gardens in the centre of that square remain a beautiful and much loved green space in this very charming area of the city, and they are a lovely place to spend an afternoon with a book. Wellington Square in North Adelaide is another example, slighlty larger in scale, of an Australian residential square. I can't think of many other examples of genuine Australian residential squares.

I think it is time for the idea to make a comeback, especially as we move towards more higher density living and less private backyard space. The residential garden square is an elegant, environmentally and socially sustainable solution to how we can increase our residential densities but still retain some greenery and open space in our cities.