Manufactured Housing And The New Suburbanism

VRT has long been an advocate of reviving the courtyard centric house of the antique world. Site built designs for achieving this are fairly straightforward. The problem is a little different when using the more modular elements specific to manufactured housing. VRT has come up with a solution loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright's 'tadpole' Usonian house design. In Wright's design, an open plan living, dining, and kitchen constitute the 'head', while bedrooms and baths comprise the tail. Two such structures are stuck together at the 'head' to create a duplex house. A doublewide provides for the pair of living, dining, and kitchen 'heads' while two separate singlewides provide bedrooms and baths.

Each unit of the duplex consists of the full singlewide and half of the doublewide split along the short dimension. The duplex is in the form of a Z. Z duplexes are placed between parallel streets. In this way two private, spacious courtyards are created sitting in between each duplex. All in unit lots run around 8,600 sq ft or approximately 5 units per acre. The street to street dimension is around 220', width along street around 70'. Extra storage space is provided by putting up a couple walls alongside the manufactured homes. These walls are also used to mount awnings around the courtyard of the next door unit. The singlewide is 16' x 72', around 1,100 sq ft housing 5 bedrooms - one primary with its own bath, four over under bunk style bedrooms, two additional baths, additional closet space, and finally a built-in office area with windows on the street. The doublewide is 40' x 28', around 1,100 sq ft comprised of large format projection TV with wraparound couch seating, a long dining table for fourteen, and an L shaped kitchen with the cooking area tucked away behind a wall.

A carport has room for two cars and two more can fit in the driveway. Next to the carport is a raised terrace running along the street. The primary bedroom connects to the terrace by a short flight of stairs making it convenient to access for a morning coffee or evening cocktail. By staggering the houses on the opposite side of the street the raised terraces are afforded a high level of privacy while having a good view of the street. Note that at the end of the drawing set are two drawings showing the property boundary lines in red, the contours of which look a lot like the great state of Texas. Another drawing outlines the singlewide in light green and outlines the doublewide in light purple.

One goal of the design was to integrate each unit with its lot, to make good on the contemporary aesthetic of pleasant private indoor / outdoor living. Another goal was to integrate each unit with its neighbor, to create what Christopher Alexander terms 'positive' space in between buildings. By pursuing this sense of deep integration the hope is that manufactured housing 'transcends' its less than glamorous past and proves itself capable of appealing to and delighting mainstream homebuyers. Finally, two types of illustrations are presented, 'schematic' types intended to show form and function, and artistic types intended to give a sense of look and feel.