Works Partnership Architecture's tract home redux in Ridgefield

Prototype A, Ridgefield, Washington (photo by Chris Hodney)

A tract-home subdivision 25 miles from downtown Portland in Ridgefield, Washington is not usually the place to find award winning architects plying their trade. But that's precisely why Works Partnership Architecture accepted an offer from Ryan Zygar and Tamarack Homes to try and build a contemporary home within the strictures of affordability and speed necessary to the client and the home building industry.

As profiled in Residential Architect magazine by  Meghan Drueding, the completed spec home, totaling 1,904 square feet and now for sale for $327,000, took 70 days from start to finish, including design time. Known as Prototype A, it features an upside-down floor plan with the primary living spaces and a master suite placed above a ground floor garage and two additional bedrooms. Designers and principals Bill Neburka and Carrie Schilling also chose to pull apart the two halves second floor to create a private courtyard. This gives rooms extra opportunities for natural light and cross-ventilation.

Looking at the house from the street front, it doesn't provide a lot of glass and transparency to integrate the private sphere with the neighborhood outside. The garage is front and center, which is never the best choice from an urbanistic perspective. But this is arguably a reflection not of Works' design decisions so much as the environment in which the house is being built, and what the market expects in terms of two-car garages over front porches. I'm not saying this house should be some new-urbanist cliche in which smiling families wave across their porch swings to one another, but it is unfortunate that subdivisions always seem to favor car storage so prominently at the expense of porches or other integrations with the public realm.

At the same time, the design also does something clever. It combines the traditional form of a pitched roof with the above-the-ground outdoor space delivered by flat-roofed designs. This way the house, while modern, fits in well with the McMansions or more modest traditional looking tract homes in this realm even as it stands out from them.

Still, the fact that Works and the builder made this striking design happen within market confines is impressive. "Zygar wanted to challenge himself and his staff to build a different kind of house for the same cost, in the same amount of time, and using the same materials and techniques as a standard production home," Drueding writes.

Of the architects, she adds, "Used to creating custom homes, they found they had to adjust their drawings to dovetail with typical production building methods. 'It was a great education for us, understanding how these houses get built,' Neburka says. Adds Schilling, 'It’s fast, inexpensive, and efficient.'"

Prototype A, Ridgefield, Washington (photo by Shawn St. Peter)

If the home sells in an acceptable amount of time and for an amount close to the asking price, perhaps it may convince other builders to construct houses using Prototype A's blueprint. After all, most home builders don't necessarily have anything against modern design so much as they believe the market wants traditionally styled homes. However, every trend is cyclical, and history has shown there are times when contemporary design can register on a broad scale.

In early and especially mid-20th century, ranch houses became popular for their blend of old and new forms, and many contemporary subdivisions by builders such as Joseph Eichler in California and Robert Rummer here in Portland saw dozens of contemporary houses snatched up by middle class families. What's more, the functional quality of modern homes became a way of life, eschewing the warren of small rooms common to Victorian houses in favor of greater openness. Today even if a suburban house has a traditional looking exterior, its great room is decidedly of today.

Prototype A, Ridgefield, Washington (photos by Chris Hodney)

Creating a popular contemporary home plan that is replicated by other builders doesn't require just a good design, but a business partner willing to make it happen and the interest of the public. As has been the case with the trend of prefab homes as celebrated in Dwell magazine and elsewhere, the good design and the first prototype are just the first of several steps necessary to achieve the large scale of home after home being built.

Hopefully Prototype A, if its design is as compelling as it looks in these photos, will prove its success over time by being more than a prototype.

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Comments

[Nixzusehen]

I really like internal courtyard idea, but the front is an insult to the streetscape and the neighbors.

[Calvin Ross Carl]

The front does seem a little peculiar, but I appreciate the idea of essentially turning the house backwards and focusing all of the house's attention on the courtyard. Either way, I am excited to see an architect and developer prove that an intriguing home can be created the same way a typical suburban tract home is made.

On another note, such a shame that $327k is considered an affordable home. I would definitely call myself middle class, and would still struggle with affording that home.

[stephen]

I don't know if I would call the front insulting to the neighbors. There is an honesty about the inward focus of the home. Unfortunately, these "tract" home developments are still very focused on the automobile. I appreciate that it is not another hodgepodge of styles and like the modern approach. The raised courtyard is nice and is another indicator of the inward nature of the home.
So, I dig this design, but it may be just the lesser of two evils. Until we really are able to persuade the market that we need to be focusing on community design then developers will keeps building tract homes.

[Ryan Zygar]

i am happy to say. prototype is now a home. sold "close to asking" faster then the current average days on market. before our two other houses.

if you build cool stuff it will sell. go out there and make new things and think about it. we owe it to our selves.

this was a lot of fun and huge challenge and i appreciate all involved immensely.

[Jim Heuer]

It's exciting to see cutting edge architecture make some inroads into the world of mass production housing development. Today's housing tracts tend to embody the worst of faux traditional styling with the worst of mass produced materials and cookie-cutter, AutoCad-induced monotony of design.

Still, as you point out, it wasn't always such. But while you point to the ranch style era as the 20th Century's most notable period when vernacular housing adopted elements of cutting edge design, the key breakthroughs represented by the Ranch Style home actually arrived in the architecturally exciting era of the Craftsman Style 30 years previously.

In the first 15 years of the 20th Century, middle class Americans were searching for a new residential architecture that accommodated the enormous technology-driven lifestyle changes that were sweeping the country. The automobile, telephone, electric streetcar, electric appliances, and a host of other devices were transforming the way the middle class lived and worked... and the Victorian style houses of a previous generation were hopeless inadequate for the new age.

The pages of the "shelter" magazines of the day like The Craftsman and Ladies Home Journal were filled with articles by leading architects advocating for one or another concept of modern design. From this era sprang the elimination of the formal entry hall, the introduction of the "open plan" of interiors where living room, dining room, and sometimes kitchens flowed from one to the other with minimal barriers, and an emphasis on merging indoor and outdoor spaces.

These concepts were embraced eagerly by buyers who snapped up "ultra-modern" bungalows by the thousands all across Portland's east side as developers quickly embraced this "modern architecture" and adapted it for cost-conscious buyers.

Today, as we are surrounded by tens of thousands of Craftsman Style bungalows in Portland, their shear ubiquity blinds us to how revolutionary the embrace of modern architecture in that era really was. Some writers of the day railed against the vulgarity and cheapness of these new home styles and their rejection of "proper" Victorian and Colonial residential designs. More traditionally minded architects lamented the public's distraction by contemporary styles. Regardless of these critics, Portland's new home builders went from constructing 80% of their homes in Colonial and late Victorian Styles in 1904 to nearly 80% in Craftsman Styles and other versions of "Progressive Architecture" by 1910... a phenomenally rapid shift in adoption of a brand new architectural idiom.

Would that such an adventurous embrace of modern design might appear among modern home buyers. Perhaps it will if our society can somehow recapture that boundless faith in "progress" and "the modern" that encouraged those thousands of early 20th Century Portland home buyers to overthrow the dead hand of "traditional architecture".