Читать книгу Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass - Anthony Poon - Страница 6

Our greatest responsibility is not to be pencils of the past.

ROBERT STERN

Is it possible to design and build affordable, “green,” and exceptional single-family housing in an age of cookie-cutter housing and bottom-line developers? It turns out the answer is yes. With creativity, luck, and an exciting vision, “production housing,” also known as tract housing, can be cool, modern, and luxurious, even for the masses.

Ever since humankind transitioned from a nomadic life to clustered settlements, families have yearned for free-standing solid structures composed of local materials. Most often shelters went up alongside similar structures for reasons of cost and availability of building blocks, be they mud, clay, brick, thatch, or wood. With time and resources, the same yearning stretched toward the creation of unique family homes, a way to stand out and signal prosperity. As the centuries cycled through population growth and economic swings, we found our way back to the need for mass-produced homes that could go up quickly and efficiently. We have seen this in several waves in the United States over the past seventy years alone.

We are all familiar with the post–World War II housing boom. William Levitt & Sons built new towns for returning GIs and their families seemingly overnight on rich farmland and in pine forests east of New York City and along the East Coast. These communities consisted of houses that were identical save for the paint color. In short order, Americans burst their way south and west. Single-family homes went up in quick succession from Florida to California, on marsh and desert as well as farmland. That this second wave was almost too big for the banks to handle, and that these were the homes purchased and lost in the recent mortgage bubble, doesn’t change the ever-present demand for affordable single-family homes, each with the moat of a lawn. Trees optional.

While we have all seen firsthand or in photos and movies the seeming sameness of row upon row of identical homes in America’s blossoming suburbs, buyers still had the option to choose from a menu of interior variations, entry features, and other simple ways to put a personal stamp on their home. The same is true of prefab homes that we see off the highway, or in halves on the highway trailered behind a semitruck.

This type of tract housing is based on the concept of prototypes. An architect would design four prototypical designs for a community of a hundred homes. These prototypes would have variations and upgrades, such as a swimming pool, an extra bedroom, a sound system, a security system, or fancier cabinetry. The prototypes would come in a few exterior colors and landscape choices. Along with other facade options like an arch, a trellis, or a porch, the completed community would not look like a tract of the same four homes repeated monotonously; rather, you could get three to four dozen different-looking homes. Sort of.

For Poon Design, this industry of production housing was a new kind of client, a different kind of business, and an entirely distinctive kind of architecture. The architectural team at Poon Design was vastly experienced with custom homes from the West Coast to the East Coast as well as in the south of France. These projects contrasted in every way with the premise of production homes.

We were limited as experts in speculative homes where the buyer was only a hypothetical idea. In our usual projects, a client hired us and we designed a single, special custom home. In addition, the custom homes we designed were larger, were more complex, and had a bigger budget than was typically seen in the production housing industry. As an example, a production home might sell for $400,000 to $800,000, on average, in the areas where we were to work. The custom homes that we designed sold for $2 million to $100 million. Production homes are affordable, average-sized homes, often for a first-time or retired buyer, or perhaps for someone purchasing a weekend home.

When developer Andrew Adler, CEO of Alta Verde Group of Beverly Hills, approached us with a vision for modern production housing, we found the challenge presented by this new client fascinating and the philosophical goals worthwhile. Poon Design was interested in honing our exclusive design talents to provide sensational visionary homes for the mainstream U.S. home buyer. We wanted to find ways to distill and translate good design for an industry of prototypes, repetition, mass production, fast construction schedules, and economical budgets. After decades of designing expensive homes for the wealthy, we strongly believed in creating an approach that would offer creative concepts and great design to everyone.

For a client paying us to construct a custom home, a budget of $1,000 per square foot would be considered typical, though extravagant for many. It is not difficult to execute a nice estate with such a generous budget. When a developer suggests that his production homes are to be constructed for one-tenth that amount—$100 per square foot—our most creative skills must come into play. How do we achieve results similar to a custom residence for a fraction of the amount?

Though we had the advantage of saving money in construction due to building in volume with production housing, we still needed a host of creative and strategic ideas. Building a dozen homes at one time, as compared to a single home, would no doubt offer discounts in construction labor and materials, but a volume discount alone would not create the enormous savings that our developer client needed.

A house is a home, and everyone should have a chance to own one, if that is their desire. Even the predictable traditional developers endeavored to artificially mirror local tastes, from clay tile roofs in the Southwest to gabled windows reminiscent of a perceived New England tradition. We were eager to meet the challenge.

We boldly believed that the next possible wave of a housing movement should be based around the idea that the essential qualities of upscale modern residences could be delivered to the mainstream marketplace at affordable prices.

In truth, for me, it all simply started at a party.

One evening after work in early 2008, Poon Design was hosting an informal office party for friends and colleagues to show off our expanded office space and new graphic design studio. We left our doors open to easily greet visitors.

A new neighbor had just moved into the adjacent office suite. As he was leaving his office, he heard our music, saw food, drinks, and a group of people enjoying themselves, and wandered in to introduce himself.

Andrew Adler looked around our studio, examined the giant glossy prints of our projects, studied our conference room with a presentation from earlier in the day and work areas littered with remnants of the week’s creative process, and talked to a few architects in the room.

Adler found me and said, “We could do great projects together, and we should talk.”

Adler and his newly formed residential development company, Alta Verde Group, had exciting ideas. He had previously developed successful urban infill condominiums and apartments in Texas, garnishing a myriad of accolades for breaking boundaries in housing design and urban development. He had just relocated to build and sell residential homes in Southern California after the real estate crash of 2007.

The country’s economy was slipping fast into a recession, and distressed land was available at reasonable prices to purchase and develop. In some cases, such land was already destined for detailed communities, with roads, sewer, and electrical lines already in place to service surveyed plats awaiting beautiful new homes. The business model was for a developer to build the homes at his or her risk, with the intention to sell them at a profit. In most cases, this common speculative plan was successful, but in an economic downturn, many developers’ plans went unrealized. The land remained vacant, and cleared land was selling at bargain prices.

Alta Verde was looking to buy this land and construct homes, but with an all-new, innovative approach. Adler envisioned cutting-edge design, unique but affordable materials, and yes, environmentally conscious structures. He imagined clean lines, uninterrupted glass walls, and dramatic interior spaces—all on a budget. Adler saw in the work on our walls a sympathetic creative partner in Poon Design. In our custom-built residences, he could see our desire to do things differently—to accommodate while engaging an artistic process.

We knew that with so much cool, advanced, and affordable design in every device from cars to laptops, the new generation of home buyers would expect the same in their homes, but at reasonable prices, especially in California.

For the Alta Verde project, we banned the words “prefab” or “tract home” from our lexicon; those words simply would not fly with our client.

Our vision was to bring the essential elements of good design—proportion, light, scale, space, authenticity, and flexibility—and apply advances in smart technology, sustainability, and new materials. We wanted to be at the forefront of a new chapter in California modern design. Adler and I were in agreement as to what would be allowed and what would be eliminated from the design dialogue. No Mediterranean-Spanish-inspired stucco boxes for us. No overly thick faux-adobe walls, with small windows that limit a connection to the California landscape. No inefficient, costly, and heavy clay tile roofs, and no wedding-cake-style decor of plaster that lacks authentic beauty or inherent visual detail.

We also believed that a key aspect of great residential architecture was no longer about the one-off experimental custom homes that show up on the covers of magazines. We believed, and still do, that today’s home design should not focus on creating a singular architectural jewel for one family to enjoy; the higher value and impact of good architecture can happen on a community scale.

That was all well and good. We were ready to dive in. But the real challenge to our concept? Cost per square foot. Large budgets make marble and grand staircases de rigueur; Adler challenged us to adjust our creativity to what he called “democratizing good design.”

This concept is not new. Michael Graves famously adapted his original high-end Postmodern tea kettle into an accessible and stylish item for Target. Graves had first designed his famous colorful kettle years previously for Alessi, an Italian kitchen-utensil distributor that represented some of the most well-known architects and designers of the time, such as Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck, and Zaha Hadid. Many of Alessi’s products are so celebrated that they are exhibited in the permanent collections of museums around the globe, including MoMA in New York City.

The tea kettle Graves designed for Alessi was priced at several hundred dollars for the cooking-obsessed collectors of exquisite design. The Target kettle was nearly exactly the same in concept, aesthetic, and details. The delightful vision of Graves’s design, originally available only to the wealthy, became accessible to the average shopper at Target, who, though shopping on a budget, still sought original, smart design.

Andrew Adler had the same thought about homes. The only hurdle now was financing.

For Adler and his Alta Verde Group to present the idea of a new class of homes and find investors, they needed developed architectural ideas, graphics, and presentations to show off in the pitch. With the real estate capital market having a hangover from the recent crash, locating leverage for construction was going to be a challenge, and even more so for modern homes in a conventional marketplace. Alta Verde had to create their capital program in stages and was not yet prepared to hire us as their full-time architecture company to design these homes in detail. But I felt this opportunity for exploration would reap great rewards, both in exposure and in personal merit.

With some risk, we agreed to provide one year of free design service in exchange for securing the future contracts to execute the projects. We would create a repertoire of architectural designs to entice investors. If Alta Verde was successful in finding the appropriate project funds, Poon Design would land a full plate of exciting new work. The bet on the vision and the players was made.

From 2009 to 2010, Poon Design planned groundbreaking homes that were starkly modern, open and sleek, and also welcoming and timeless; the last two adjectives are typically used to describe a successful house design.

Month after month after month, toiling late at night in eight-hour nonstop design sessions totaling hundreds, even thousands, of hours, Adler and I dedicated ourselves to a journey toward the unattainable ideals of creative perfection. Complementing my architectural skills, Adler brought his own design talents, an intuitive understanding of art and aesthetics, and his insights into emerging demographics. It was a remarkable and stimulating collaboration.

An upcoming chapter speaks to my training in classical music; with these homes, we composed structures in a relationship akin to a musical partnership. My design studio became an open workplace where Adler and I, alongside the architects at Poon Design, improvised and pioneered new ideas for a stale housing industry. Back and forth we drew, revealing our belief that shelter is more than a roof over one’s head. Rather, it is also a form of art. We explored ideas of sculpture and composition, massing and scale.

We also investigated new ideas in infrastructure for lighting, mechanical, and plumbing systems as well as solar power. Our homes had expansive walls of glass and tall sliding doors for bright, airy interior spaces to connect to the outdoors. The public aspects of the homes—living room, dining room, and kitchen—were combined into one large, flexible, loft-like space with high ceilings and a sense of grandeur and luxury. We researched new materials, green ideas, landscape concepts, and construction methods that would be inventive to the market, fast to construct, and within a developer’s budget. As for speed, a custom home can take years to build, whereas our type of production home was to take less than half a year.

Again, the homes had to be built for a fraction of the cost of a custom home. We had to delve even deeper into the challenge of balancing quality with style by revisiting every building spec of a home. Instead of having multiple ceiling heights, as is common in a custom home, we limited our designs to two: eleven feet for the public spaces and nine feet for the private spaces (bedrooms and bathrooms). We also designed extremely efficient floor plans with no wasteful vestibules, niches, and hallways.

Not only did such straightforward, though not always obvious, approaches simplify the construction of the home and thereby save tremendous amounts of money, but the ideas delivered powerful, dramatic spaces of architecture. The design was not about crown moldings, vaulted ceilings, and arches; rather, the homes represented elemental aspects of architecture: light, proportion, scale, and space.

To save even more on costs, we found materials and finishes that were affordable but delivered the same sense of quality as is found in a luxury estate, such as porcelain floor tile in lieu of marble, textured precast concrete veneer in place of exterior limestone, or prefabricated cabinets of Italian high-finish laminates instead of custom wood or lacquered cabinets. We even created a new front-entry door concept, filling a fiberglass-shell door with concrete so as to affordably provide quality, security, and acoustic insulation. These ideas, alongside dozens more, delivered a high-end modern home at a budget previously considered impossible. We even planned to use prefabricated elements such as roof trusses that would be high in quality but save a tremendous amount of time and money.

In the first year of our design work, research, and development, we were designing without a physical site in mind since the developer had not yet purchased any properties. We planned in the abstract without a particular climate, orientation toward a particular view, specific topography, or solar direction. We were creating designs so potent in their simplicity that they were adaptable to any terrain, city, and general locale.

At the end of this first year, and after many presentations to potential investors, Alta Verde successfully landed a large capital commitment from an international investor and also obtained construction financing from two California lenders who embraced the Adler/Poon vision.

Things were about to move very quickly. Alta Verde’s first deal was in Palm Springs at a development called Escena. In 2010 and 2011, Poon Design developed four home prototypes for 130 lots on 21 acres. All four of our prototypes were three-bedroom homes, between 2,200 and 2,600 square feet, fitting on an average lot size of just 7,200 square feet.

We utilized many of the ideas from our first year of research, which we then adapted and enhanced for this desert climate. These ideas included extended roof overhangs for passive cooling and protection from the heat, drought-tolerant native landscaping, and the use of regional building materials. The green home scheme provided the base design with a reflective, energy-efficient cool roof, electric-car charger setups, LED lighting, and a 2- to 6-kW rooftop solar array.

The media following the project coined it “Modern for the Masses,” certainly a clever and appropriate moniker at the time. Danny Yee, our creative partner and graphic artist, dubbed the new kind of projects “This Century Modern,” a nod to the ever-popular Midcentury Modern that signaled the first phase of a different building style in California and around the world. Danny’s phrase acknowledged moving forward today and on toward the future.

At the time of this writing, nearly two hundred homes have been built and sold in just three years, and several new phases of presold home construction have begun. As intended, we delivered exclusive modern design to the general home-buying market at incredible value.

We transformed the production industry, raising it to a caliber previously witnessed only in custom, multimillion-dollar homes. With our design success, we discovered a whole new demographic that sought our modern architecture. The buyers loved the Alta Verde homes, the media loved them, and a dozen national design award committees did as well, honoring all of us with “best in class” industry accolades for design excellence from organizations such as the National Association of Home Builders. Our design partnership with Andrew Adler and his belief in us had paid off.

A closing note on any innovative yet affordable residential architecture.

A colleague of mine revisited the Levittown homes of the 1940s for a piece published in the New York Times on the fiftieth anniversary of the once-groundbreaking mass-production tract homes. Regardless of some architectural embellishments added on by homeowners over the decades, he reported that he could still see the basic shape of every home, repeated house after house. This bothered him at first, but only briefly. It occurred to him that he was looking for the original design, and therefore he saw it and was pleased. But does this bother me?

Five-foot saplings were now fifty feet tall. That’s fine. But my colleague saw changes to the original designs: new coats of paint with a garage added here, a sun porch there, even some roofs raised to allow second floors.

In some cases, I feel that homes are as alive as the inhabitants. The architecture molds and gets broken in like a pair of jeans, to reflect the evolution of one’s lifestyle. But on the other hand, I have witnessed, unfortunately too many times, the devastation of beautiful Midcentury homes by thoughtless remodels and additions in the seventies and eighties—just as one example.

Are my homes at Escena intended to be works of art, or do I now let them go into the untrained hands of the purchasers of my homes? What happens at a restaurant when a diner customer asks the Michelin-rated chef to substitute A-1 for his classic béarnaise sauce?

My ego, matched by the developer’s, would like to see our Escena home designs remain pure. The homeowners, supporting the concept that they have purchased a work of art, have expressed little interest in adding their own brushstrokes of color to what are essentially pieces of modern art and sculpture.

To ensure our philosophy, we even added clauses to the sales contracts and community guidelines that prohibit architectural alterations. Sure, the landscape will change and grow, but certainly no second stories, added trellises and entry features, or guest-bedroom additions are allowed at our community.

Unlike many other residential developers who allow homeowners to choose from many options of paint colors, kitchen countertops, bathroom tiles, and so on, with Alta Verde Group, we decided that we produced the best compositions of residential design. If the home buyers do not like the model they see, they should consider looking at another one. If that doesn’t work out, perhaps they should visit a competing developer’s community. Our confidence has proven acceptable, as Alta Verde outsells all other developers in the region combined. Month after month.

No, I have not created Fallingwater or the Palace of Versailles, where such iconic designs are worth preserving forever. We have merely offered the newest ideas to an industry of production homes starving for fresh designs. But I do believe that in many cases, and perhaps in mine, that the original vision of an architect should be respected. The rest is up to history.