Midway Gardens Square

Frank Lloyd Wright a little more than a century ago, created the wondrous Midway Gardens on the site of the former San Souci amusement park in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. Midway Gardens consisted of a large open air square ringed by 3 story buildings situated on just 10 acres. Following out this same geometry on slightly more

land, I've drawn up a residential re-imagining of Midway, one intended for the suburbs. Each unit in the development is around 9,000 sq ft with garage space for approximately 6 cars: I think in order to get America fully on board with the townhouse it has to be made as car centric as possible - maybe even more car centric - than the house. Just beyond the garage is a games and recreation area for the kids, and beyond that is a fenced, private garden area with pool and spa. This fenced garden area connects to the large interior garden square which has seating areas here and there and a fountain at the center.

DESIGN CONCEPT

My 'palette' for the buildings is Wright's own choice of concrete, stone, and glass used in his Fallingwater house outside Pittsburgh. In an interview with Hugh Downs, Wright explained the great virtues of concrete reinforced with steel, how it could be used to span great spaces, and how those spaces could be protected with glass. I've tried to follow this same idea so that for instance on the ground floor from driveway back to the pool its all open space divided only by glass. If feasible I think it would look great to have an all glass garage door so that the ground floor space gets good lighting end to end.

The living area on the first floor is also an open plan where a near cinema size projection screen is the focal point. Ottomans make it possible to take in a movie in a state of horizontal repose, all the rage now at the movie theaters and why not ? The dining room connects to a terrace fitted with alfresco furniture and looking out over the square.

Stairways, storage, and mechanicals are housed in the narrow stone structure along with an office area perched at the top. Each unit has four regular bedrooms each with its own bath, and the master suite. In order to give each bedroom lighting they open onto a winter garden illuminated from above. If an elevator is desired I've set aside space for the pneumatic type with access to all four levels.

INTENDED MARKET

The suburban development SFR is largely an invention of Victorian England. Architects such as William Norman Shaw, drawing on England's Gothic past, masterfully combined elements such as the all stone first story topped with the wattle and daub upper stories to fashion an architectural style now known as Tudor Revival. Shaw's marvelous Grim's Dyke, built for WS Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan, functioned as a template for the first homes of the American suburbs which began to appear with the maturing of the Industrial Revolution no better example being Lewellyn Park just outside Newark NJ, once a major industrial hub. Every American suburb is based on this template. Such developments do indeed look grand and one cannot help feeling suitably impressed in passing such stately homes. However it must be stressed that an architecture which creates a striking picture from the street may not translate into an interior which evokes the feeling of the sublime, that special spatial sense Wright imbued in his homes, what critic Jay Appleton termed the quality of 'prospect and refuge'.

At the other end of the spectrum is the urban residential tower. Such buildings are certainly engineering marvels and to a lesser extent the dwellings within are architectural marvels. Yet one is always keenly aware of the constraints of life in the tower - low ceilings, smallish living rooms, the hassle of parking, minimal storage, and separation from the ground and the garden - unless of course multimillions are spent - and even then money mitigates only so much.

It is VRT's contention that both the luxury single family home and the luxury urban tower condominium are susceptible to critique. The SFR to a great extent was popularized as an architecture through which the middle class were encouraged to believe they could emulate, could approximate the sort of life lived by the upper class. On the other hand, the residential tower derives from the commercial tower, a structure promoted by the steel industry in its bid to sell the excesses produced above and beyond the needs of the the railroad industry. And so at the risk of sounding effete, one can point out that neither the SFR nor the residential tower emerge from purely architectural considerations.

The townhouse around square, when modified to incorporate the car-centric reality of modern life, can be a worthy competitor of the SFR and the condo tower. It affords a density on a more human scale, and in a garden setting of a more congenial nature. Where the SFR isolates and the condo tower concentrates, the townhouse around square modulates, allows for spacious private living on the one hand and charming sociability on the other. And by way of comparison for those who have had the chance to experience Wright's Little House living room on display in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, the living room design in this townhouse is of the same proportions, the same length, width, and height, hopefully to good effect such that the occupant may forget all about the fact that he is in a townhouse not a detached home.