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Honoring the Ordinary
By Robert Shurell
Usually I like to focus on a building that has social, cultural, historical or architectural significance. These buildings stand out in the neighborhood and they make a change for the better. I like to write about places that give senior citizens and low-income persons a chance to live in dignity. These are the places that people write articles about; the mayor comes to the grand opening and the community celebrates them.
But what about the building next door? Which one? Oh, the grayish-brown one, with no trim, aluminum windows and stucco walls. The completely ordinary building. Oh, that one? I didn’t even notice it.
What are the defining characteristics of the ordinary apartment building? To narrow it down a bit, how about the ordinary Richmond District apartment building? To start with, it is probably three-stories tall. Most likely, also, it will have a garage door on the ground floor, adjacent to a regular entrance. Bay windows are a must-have design element, because cantilevering the building out over the sidewalk is a way to grab additional square footage. (You will find a set of bay windows on nearly every façade in the Richmond.) Many of these buildings have cement plaster (also called stucco) on their exterior walls. This material is inexpensive and durable, just right for the ordinary house.
The exterior may have special features that make it ever so slightly different from its neighbor. The garage door-entry door arrangement described above has any number of manifestations it can take with minimal modification to the original idea. My Richmond apartment, for example, has a gate next to the garage door, and a recessed front door that allows you to access the mailboxes and utility meters without entering the building. This arrangement works when the building has three or more apartments, because an internal, shared stairway is necessary. When the building has only two units, the doors can be placed at the top of an exterior stairway, so one resident may access his unit from the landing, while another goes through her front door to an internal stair leading to the top-floor apartment.
What I like about these Richmond apartment buildings is that they are so predictable. I like their ordinary nondescriptness. As you walk along the streets, these buildings surround you. Similar to commercials on television, these apartment buildings stream past your vision, each marginally different from the next, catching your attention only if they offer something you happen to be looking for: a front porch with morning sun, or bigger than normal windows. Any slightly personalized aspect of a building can pique sentiments in a potential user. Each of us carries our own ideas of what is desirable in a home, or what is a salable feature. Between the limelight projects of our opening paragraph, these nondescript structures are the buildings that actually do most of the work. These are the roofs that San Francisco sleeps beneath every night. These are our everyday homes.
The apartment I live in with my family is about as ordinary as it gets. Built in 1987, it is a light-brown stucco building with black narrow-framed aluminum windows and virtually no trim. What makes it distinct in the block is the use of stucco reveals on the ground-floor level to create a running bond pattern that resembles stone construction; it is a solid base for the upper stories. Three-stories tall, the upper two floors have bay windows. Inside are three apartments. The building owner lives in a full-floor flat on the third story, her son lives in the front flat on the second floor, and my family lives in the back flat on the
second floor. The ground floor has a three-car garage, trash and recycling area, laundry area, and storage.
Why do I like this type of place? I would certainly rather own my home than rent, and I think the apartment (especially the bathroom) is too small. There is a mouse that has broken in and, to our dismay, raided the pantry over several nights. Still, I like the place.
Perhaps because many of my favorite architects are modernists, I am predisposed to the idea of unite d’habitation that Le Corbusier stumped so mightily for, wherein each person, regardless of personality, is expected to enjoy life in rows upon rows of identical shoebox “machines for living.” That, in general, is where housing is today, and where it has always been. A house is a house; they all have the same type of things inside. Some are more spacious or have different finishes. The masters of modern architecture took care to anticipate the manner in which a person would use their home, and program it especially for them. We are adaptable, though, and each of us uses what we have as well as we can.
The idea of adaptability extends beyond the capacity of humans adapting to where they live, but of a building adapting to the person living within it. In this symbiotic relationship, each party pushes and pulls and negotiates and compromises with the other to adapt to the needs of the user, and the needs of the building. When this is successful, when both the user and the building have adapted enough, the relationship should be enjoyable, and should continue to change as values change. Maybe that is why I like my average apartment so much. It doesn’t come at me with any attitude. It’s just a regular old apartment that lets me do what I want, as long as I stay within the walls.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Robert Shurell is a licensed architect with Stantec Architecture, a firm specializing in architecture that serves the needs of our communities in the fields of education, healthcare, transportation, and civic and cultural facilities. Feel free to contact him with questions or comments at robert.shurell@stantec.com. Copyright © 2008 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.