suburban, facade, community, neighborhoods, diversity, Westchester County, Ossining
Architecture | Urban, Community and Regional Planning
"The modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of facade as load bearing member, fetishizing transparency. However, this new preeminence of visuality was not applicable to the suburban home, with its predisposition toward the creation and control of privacy. What separate the suburban condition from the urban, in addition to the role of the single-family home as purchasable symbol representing an ideal, is the front yard. Instead of a simple A-B division across a singular surface, the yard creates a "deep" facade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration' sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and porches all serving to enhance our control of privacy...
"Borrowing this model, we can establish new comfort with our public body. Through the generation of an active communal spine, flowing between neighborhoods varying in class, race, and density, we can break down the isolation that is facilitated by both technological advancements like the car and the de-facto segregation of exclusionary zoning, building a community that is predicated on exchange with one another, built through a sharing of visual knowledge, and staged through spatial layering..."
Maldonado, Brandon, "Corporeal Meeting Place" (2012). Architecture Senior Theses. 58.