Suburban Alternatives

Suburban Alternatives – Low-rise, high-density.
Low-rise, high-density: in the United States, since the 1972 exhibition Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives at the MoMA, the expression refers to the ensembles of grouped housing units that maintain characteristics of the individual home, but whose density facilitates collective services and amenities and thereby reduces the consumption of land. The compactness of the building footprint limits energy consumption and promotes sharing, all while offering a living environment in close proximity to nature. These hybrid projects also generate a variety of housing typologies and forms of agglomeration. They propose an urbanism linked to the American ethos and open up more sustainable, more ecological alternatives, suited to current times. As forms of resistance to the dominant architectural model of the single-family home, these proposals for low-rise high-density housing have accompanied suburban development in the United States from the 1920s until today. They bear witness to architects’ critical view of purely horizontal modes of developing land. In this way, certain projects by Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Al Beadle, and Gregory Ain made early contributions to the search for an alternative, less individualistic modernity. Following a study trip of three months, Florian Camani and Mathilde Luguet deliver their observations through an atlas of fifty projects from across the United States: a set of rich and inventive tools, contextualized by essays from French and American researchers specialized in suburban areas and coordinated by Marc-Antoine Durand. Suburban Alternatives is both a contribution to the debate on housing density in the United States and a general, open reflection on the future of suburban living.
This research is the 2017 winner of the Delano Aldrich Emerson Fellowship. The publication was supported by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Académie d’Architecture and the Ressources research laboratory research laboratory of the École nationale d’architecture de Clermont-Ferrand.
With texts by Jean Taricat, Kenneth Frampton, Richard Plunz, Brian Phillips Deb Katz, Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin.