3801 SE Morrison

Building Data:
Neighborhood: Sunnyside
Year Built: 1953
Typology: Courtyard/Hybrid Court
Units: 12
Stories: 2
Site Area: 15,000sf
Building Area: 9,742
FAR: 0.53:1
Density: 35 du/net acre
Zoning: R2.5 (1 Dwelling/2,500sf)
Is it Legal? NO

This is our first case study of a hybrid-court. The name refers to the fact that it’s configured as a combination of the traditional single story U-shaped courtyard, with a two story bar connecting the side wings. Some hybrid courts combine townhouse units with single level flats in the wings. This example, located in SE Portland’s Sunnyside neighborhood, is entirely flats. The two story bar resembles a pair of walk-up four-plexes placed side-by-side. Each group of four flats are served by a single front entry to a hallway with a stair leading to the upper units.

Traditional site design; stoop and green space

This courtyard building takes advantage of its corner site on a triple lot to provide below-grade parking all along the street facing side and below the fronts of the two wings on the front street side. The fact that it’s a triple width lot ensures that these garages, while less than ideal, still don’t really dominate the front of the project. The elevated courtyard creates semi private shared outdoor space for the units, and all apartments have windows on at least two sides.

Examining the site plan, one could see how this could be adapted to a double lot, by eliminating a chunk of the back bar and sliding the wings closer together, resulting in an 8 unit building, at the same net density, but on a smaller site.

 

22-30 NE Beech

Building Data:
Neighborhood: Boise
Year Built: 2015
Typology: Townhouse/Duplex
Units: 2
Stories: 2+
Site Area: 5,000sf
Building Area: 3,882
FAR: 0.53:1
Density: 17.5 du/net acre
Zoning: R2.5a (1 Dwelling/2,500sf)
Is it Legal? YES

The side-by-side duplex with garages below units is the modern day cousin of the twin-house duplex. Unlike its historical precedents, the modern twin house is dominated by parking and is not a rental but sold as a townhouse. This example was constructed three years ago adjacent to the Vancouver/Williams corridor. The land is zoned R2.5, or one dwelling per 2500 square feet of lot. In this zone, development typically takes the form of a builder purchasing and demolishing a low value house, partitioning the lot down the middle and erecting this type of duplex, with a shared common wall on the new lot line.

The market and the building industry’s preference for secure, off-street parking and the ease of selling a building, rather than holding it as a rental explains its difference from pre-war duplexes. The horizontally separated twin-house format makes fee simple partition and sale relatively easy (as opposed to condominiumization of a stacked duplex), and it also makes it easy for each unit to have its own garage with direct access.

Traditional site design; stoop and green space

Individually, there is nothing inherently bad with this building, but we believe the cumulative impact of redeveloping neighborhoods with these parking-forward structures is undesirable. The social and environmental benefits of front porches, stoops and small green spaces in front of dwellings have been well documented by the New Urbanist movement, and those factors lead the City of Portland to end the practice of “snout-house” building two decades ago.

Like our NE Mallory case study, this building represents a typology that is likely to proliferate if the proposed Residential Infill Project is not modified to address aspects of building design and typology.

 

1309 N Killingsworth St

Building Data:
Neighborhood: Overlook
Year Built: 1943
Typology: Courtyard Apartment
Units: 9
Stories: 1
Site Area: 10,000sf
Building Area: 5,327
FAR: 0.53:1
                                                                                         Density: 39.2 du/net acre
                                                                                         Zoning: CM2 (no max density, 45’ height)
                                                                                         Is it Legal? YES

Back doors of units along east wing

1309 N Killingworth represents the courtyard apartment typology in its simplest, most basic form. (As we will see, there are many variants on this typology) The building is a single-story, u-shaped bungalow courtyard with the open end facing the street. The individual apartments’ front doors face the courtyard and access the street via the shared space. All units are through-units, meaning they have at least two window-walls, front and back. End units have three. All units also have a front and a back door.

Courtyard and main entries

The courtyard is the dominant feature of this building type. It provides a shared semi-private open space that is set apart from the public realm of the sidewalk. This case study building is not set very high off the ground plane, and the landscaping is somewhat uninspired, but other examples can be found where the grade shift to the courtyard, and landscaping make a clearer transition between the street and create an enjoyable shared courtyard.

A feature that many residents enjoy is the fact that their units open directly into the open air, and not a shared hallway, making living here more like the experience of a house and less like a more anonymous apartment building. We will post more case studies exploring the many variants on the courtyard building and their advantages and disadvantages.

 

332 NE 22nd

Building Data:
Neighborhood: Kerns
Year Built: 1924
Typology: Plex / Two Story / House format
Units: 4
Stories: 2
Site Area: 5,000sf
Building Area: 3,600sf
FAR: 0.72:1
Zoning: R1
Is it Legal? YES

This lot’s zoning could in fact accommodate one more unit. R1 allows 1 unit per 1000sf of site area, and this is a fourplex on a 5000sf lot. The building even has a detached 2 car garage to the side (potential adu on top?).

Note the fact that the front of the building faces the long side of the corner lot. As we saw in the previous post, there are unique advantages to corner lots for small multifamily buildings. By taking advantage of a double length frontage, a building can maintain a proportional relationship with the street that is pretty comparable to that of a single family house on a standard mid block lot. An additional advantage to corners is the amount of curb frontage for on-street parking. There is easily enough room for 5-6 cars to park on around this building, whereas on a mid-block lot there would only be frontage for two. Corners can thus mitigate some of the burden on this scarce resource.

Coming in at slightly less than 900sf each, these are very generous apartments. They could conceivably house a small family consisting of a couple with one child in each unit. That’s not quite as far fetched as it might sound either; the first post-war suburban tract homes in Levittown were as small as 750sf!

 

Creston Lofts - 2860 SE Gladstone

Building 2 - Northwest

Building 1 – East (left) and Building 2 – Northwest (right)

Building 3 - South

Building Data:
Neighborhood: Creston Kennilworth
Year Built: 2014
Typology: Mixed Use Multi-Building / Walkup with townhome units
Units: 19 (+ commercial spaces)
Stories: 3
Site Area: 10,000sf
Lot Coverage: 69%
Building Area: 16,000sf (est.)
FAR: 1.6:1
Density: 82 du/net acre
Zoning: CN 1 (Neighborhood Commercial)

Three axonometric views above indicate the rather complex arrangement of this project. Blue indicates commercial tenants.

Projects like this give some hope for the future of our built environment. Creston Lofts is a three building mixed-use project in the Creston Kennilworth neighborhood of Southeast Portland, about half a mile north of Reed College. The building is a complex mix of unit types, including studio, 1 bed lofts, two bedroom units and live-work spaces. The project is anchored by the corner building, which features a restaurant on the ground floor. Facing the courtyard is a semi sunken unit with a loft. Steps lead up to a shared deck at the second level, which gives access to three studios and three generous one-bed units. This arrangement resembles dwelling types we’ve seen in Scandinavia on our travels.

The Eastern building is a stack of lofted spaces. Two live work units and one lofted one-bed are entered from the ground, and the upper level contains two-story two bed units. These units have their living spaces at the top, to maximize views.

The central courtyard is more than a means of access or a leftover negative space between buildings. It is the heart of the project, providing semi private communal open space. A large Japanese maple dominates the space, and given its size and maturity, appears to have been preserved from the site’s previous use as two homes.

Obviously, the building’s styling will have some fans and some detractors, but regardless of how one feels about the visual composition, one could hardly find a more carefully crafted, human scaled project, blending different kinds of living spaces with places for small businesses. The small scale of the buildings is eminently appropriate for the context; its buildings are slightly larger in scale than the homes to the south, as is appropriate on minor neighborhood business corridors. A frequent complaint about new development stems from the major scalar shift between existing fabric and the new addition. This project’s scale is only one order of magnitude larger than its neighbors, not several as is sometimes the case. We believe adding buildings like this are a much better way to add density in our established neighborhoods.

Trastevere, Rome

The multiple building masses and shared spaces blend the best features of contemporary Scandinavian housing design with the intimate scale of a medieval Roman neighborhood.

Given the exceptionally innovative design of this project, Plan Design Xplore reached out to the project’s creator, Architect/Developer Lloyd Russell of San Diego. To learn more, read our interview!

View of courtyard facing north

Photos from the website of Deform Inc. (design-build contractor)

Site Plan

 

4017 NE Rodney

Building Data:
Neighborhood: Boise
Year Built: 1911
Typology: Duplex-Stacked
Units: 2
Stories: 2
Site Area: 5,000sf
Building Area: 2,472sf
FAR: 0.5:1
Density: 17.5 du/net acre
Zoning: 1 (1du/5000sf of site area)
Is it Legal? YES

4017-4018 NE Rodney is an excellent example of the classic stacked duplex typology. While this one appears to have been constructed as a duplex, many of Portland’s stacked duplexes were the result of conversions. Many of these conversions occurred during WWII when the city was experiencing a severe housing shortage due to the influx of war industry workers. Note that unlike today, the newcomers were, by and large, blue collar workers.

This type of duplex has trade offs. The ground floor unit has more access to the yard than the top unit, but in many cases, a usable attic is available to the second floor. Sound transmission through the floor can be an issue. On the upside, the floor plans are pleasant and efficient, with much less space wasted on redundant circulation. We’d wager these units’ interiors are pretty similar to single story bungalows of the same era. Additionally, the shared yard and shared entry facilitate community.

Contemporary side-by-side duplex.

Very few of these seem to get built today. In fact, we have located only one contemporary stacked duplex thus far. Developers seem to favor side-by-side duplexes. These can be sold as single family attached houses, which are an easier deal for small unsophisticated builders who do not want to build and hold. They are also easier to park.  

Site Plan