Metropolis - January Sample 2008

AMERICA
real estate
housing
sustainability
Karrie Jacobs

BUILDING SKIN

In the current boom-and-bust climate,
houses have become financial abstractions.
From the Betsy Ross
House to Your House

CORE

Philadelphia, a city of tiny row houses, might be just the place to
build a new version of the American dream: green and affordable.

SLEEPING LOFT

INDOOR/OUTDOOR LIVING

Above: An axonometric diagram of the main elements of the 100K House, designed by Interface Studio Architects. Below: Floor plans of the structure. Bottom right: The proposed site for the house. Philadelphia has an estimated 25,000 vacant lots within the city limits.

Sleeping loft

Open to below

SECOND FLOOR

Early one morning a couple of months ago, I sat alone in a radio studio in Manhattan taping a discussion for the BBC about the housing bust. The other participants were economists, one in a studio in New Haven, the other in Washington, D.C. The moderator was somewhere in London. My role was to inject a note of humanity into a conversation focused largely on the global economic impact of bundling so many dodgy mortgages into formerly solid investment vehicles. Later, out on the street, I pondered the weirdness of that discussion. Eventually, I realized that we were talking about housing and the effect of the housing slump on the economy, but we weren’t talking about houses.

This suddenly struck me as precisely the problem. In the current boom-and-bust climate, houses—the actual places where people live—

have become financial abstractions, like shares of stock. It’s as if we live simultaneously in two worlds: one in which housing exists to keep an economy driven by consumption from crumbling, and one in which houses exist to keep people warm, safe, dry, and secure.

But if housing is the problem, then houses are the solution. And it was houses—actual structures with floors, walls,

and ceilings—that were the subject of a more recent conventional discussion I had in person, over coffee. This time I was in

Philadelphia, a city of 1. 5 million that has lost 26 percent of its population since the 1960s, where there are some 40,000 abandoned properties. That figure, according to architect Brian Phillips, includes about 25,000 vacant lots.

Phillips’s firm, Interface Studio Architects, is located in a building that originally belonged to a plumbing-fixture manufacturer. The surrounding neighborhood, South Kensington, is just north of the Northern Liberties, an area that in recent years has emerged as Philly’s version of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. Founded three years ago by Phillips—a 36- year-old Penn graduate who has paid his dues at the large firm Wallace, Roberts & Todd—Interface is typical of many young firms around the country: Modernist in style and idealistic in spirit. “We were really interested from the get-go in Philadelphia’s changing continued on page 53