The single family detached suburban house has come to define the American Dream for millions of people. Yet, the recent foreclosure crisis has left this dream in tatters for many. While these houses embody much of what of what is wrong with the suburbs (excessive size, homogenous styles, inefficient use of land, environmental destruction, low density), they have come to provide an affordable and high quality of living for millions of Americans. Instead of discounting these houses completely, they offer the unique potential to rethink such vulnerable communities by increasing their flexibility, adaptability, and resilience.
My proposal is to reassemble these houses, many of which are currently sitting empty, into high density stacked clusters. Each house would maintain a ‘yard’ and would be shifted and moved together. Around each of these houses would be a three-dimensional slack space, where additions and transformations would be encouraged. Houses would become more versatile, supporting multiple units, community uses, and commercial spaces. The reassembling of these houses would facilitate a mending of social connections, an opening up of land for higher and better uses, and a fundamentally different relationship between inhabitants and their physical space. The suburban and urban now straddle the same space, creating a tension, while acknowledging, embracing, and giving form to communities that are inherently unfinished, continually growing, changing, and adapting.
So the banks will give up these foreclosed homes, and a contractor will use a giant expensive crane to slowly reassemble houses as if they are Lego blocks? Realisticly speaking putting a house on a crane is expensive work, requiring many more hours than it takes to build a house. Every window and door will be racked and useless with twice the labor and for what?
After taking away the most desirable aspect of living in the scenic countryside, what is so great about living in a cluster of residences where half the windows and doors are now facing the neighbors?
Even if you centralized a square mile of McMansions, the traffic congestion just gets worse as everyone tries to leave the complex to get just as far to work.