H H Richardson And The Suburban Subdivision

H H Richardson is best known for his Romanesque revival style, where the massive, bulky elements of medieval Romanesque architecture were abstracted and refined for both his domestic and commercial buildings. However the hulking decorative facades are not the only elements of Romanesque which captivated Richardson. He also drew on the courtyard which defined the cloistered Romanesque monasteries - no better example being his Glessner House on the southside of Chicago built in 1887. Richardson coordinated his Glessner design with the owner of the neighboring lot so that the wall of the house adjacent to the Glessner courtyard would be windowless. This was a marvelous architectural innovation for the suburban subdivision, one which the contemporary subdivision would do well to incorporate.

Now without going into the reasons the trend in the suburban subdivision is toward larger homes on smaller lots. The 'setback' schemes of the typical municipality are out of place given this trend. As a workaround developers have resorted to the condominium in order to minimize unused space. VRT proposes a duplex workaround with the duplex turned sideways to the street. With the duplex one set of setbacks is eliminated.

Putting it all together the problem becomes designing a house where the back wall of the house serves as the front courtyard wall of the neighboring house - and the houses share an internal party wall side to side - a description hopefully clarified in the drawings below.

The house shown in the drawing is similar in plan to Wright's Robie House - where the dining room is on one side and the living room on the other - with stairs somewhere in the middle. For comparison see here. The difference is that below the living and dining room in this house are the bedrooms while in Robie they are above and to the side. As for the courtyard design in Richardson's Glessner House see here and here for full details. Note in the Glessner plan one enters the house through an archway and immediately turns sideways to march along a narrow corridor between an outer and inner wall. The result is that neither the dining room nor the living room have any street side windows, the only windows being those facing the courtyard - a design artifice incorporated in the house shown above.

As shown above, the house footprint - excluding the optional guest house / storage - is around 25' x 97' or not quite 5,000 sq ft. The lot is around 70' x 125', slightly more than 1/5 acre. Finally the dirt excavated for the bedroom level and the pool could be evenly spread around the development or used to elevate the courtyards a few feet above street level.