A rash of identical homes weakens the city's individuality
Seattle has the townhouse pox. A rash of trite, stale and clumsy faux-Craftsman eightplexes is ripping through the city's neighborhoods, bleeding vitality and visual interest out of the streetscapes.
Some at least offer the virtue of low price -- or relatively "low" in the pathology of Seattle's real estate market -- but we're trading short-term affordability for long-haul blight.
Architects and neighborhood advocates are worrying aloud. "People are going to get turned off to density by equating it to all these bad examples," says John DeForest, who founded the Northwest chapter of the Congress of Residential Architects. "There's an urgent need to put more good alternatives out there."
Former city councilman and architect Peter Steinbrueck goes straight to the projects' typical worst feature, the driveway or "auto court" that bisects the eightplexes to provide access to garages and, frequently, main entrances as well. "Who wants to look into these narrow, dark, paved-over spaces?" Steinbrueck asks. "They're like tenements, and it doesn't even matter whether they dress them up with this faux-Craftsman crap."
The auto courts are decidedly dreary and barren, but the problems don't end there...
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Comment by Mr_Grant on June 14, 2008 at 12:53pm
ReplyDeleteWell of course the "auto courts" are dreary and barren -- they're called auto courts! As in Thou Shalt Not Block the Big Iron Things. Of course residents aren't going to set out outdoor furniture or planting boxes. Of course there will be no children playing.