A tiny, twisting staircase led up one floor to another tiny room and bathroom, and the staircase led up again to a bedroom. Instead of conveying claustrophobia, the house exuded a comfortable, almost nautical sensation of functional smallness. The style was known as a “trinity house,” Emily explained, a uniquely Philadelphia invention. My interest piqued, I turned to the web and library for more information on these unique structures. My search eventually led to one of the city’s most famous residents, Benjamin Franklin, and offered a window into the city’s early history. Many trinity houses turned up for sale or rent on Craigslist, often along with photos of their interiors. A discussion forum operated by a local blog describes residents moving beds in through second story windows, and the unique quirks of living in such small homes.

Few websites could describe their origins, number, or typical form. One real estate website described the type as some of the city’s oldest houses, generally over 100 years old, cozy, and located off shared courtyards. A Frommer’s webpage describing the architecture one might encounter during a walking tour provides just one short sentence, contrasting them with their larger neighbors, “The less wealthy lived in ‘trinity’ houses — one room on each of three floors, named for faith, hope, and charity.” However, other sources contradicted the name’s origin. The introduction to a collection of stories about the 19th century working class neighborhood Flatiron reports residents of the Catholic section called their 14-foot-wide homes “Father, Son and Holy Ghost houses” for their three-room makeup.(1)

Early examples of the buildings dating from the 18th century have been preserved in a National Historic Landmark called Elfreth’s Alley. A nonprofit educational organization sponsors tours of the alley and boast it’s the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood in America. While the official website doesn’t use the term, another unofficial website describes the architecture as Georgian and “trinity.”

A 1986 Philadelphia Magazine article by Stephen Fried points out the homes are precisely what city founder William Penn hoped to avoid when he founded a city he envisioned would be a “greene Country Towne” filled with homes set amid gardens. The article describes the homes usual form, reporting they are “much in demand” among the well-to-do, and that sometimes several are combined to form “quadities” or “quantities.” For an example of the form, the author suggests Elfreth’s Alley, or the 1900 block of Waverly Street. The author also describes a typical layout: a kitchen in the basement, and the homes often had two front entrances, one leading up to the living room and another providing access to the basement.(2)

An essay on housing for the poor provides additional insight into the origin and early history of the homes. The author describes how property speculators built long rows of identical row homes, and even how the city took possession of small alleyways and subdivided them. The process of what he calls back-alley dwellings is described:

The back-alley dwellings represented a particularly difficult problem. They took several forms. Owners of houses fronting on main streets might simply add on buildings in the rear to the end of the lot, creating a dark, unpaved, unsewered alley. A more famous Philadelphia rear-dwelling was the band-box, or “father, son, holy ghost” house. These houses rarely fronted the streets, but instead were built in the back yards and formed little courts, which were often invisible from the street. Of three, or less frequently two, stories, they contained only one room per floor, with an unenclosed stairway leading from one floor to another. They could be suitable for one small family, but they were unfit for the poor who often crowded into them. These real courts multiplied as the city’s original large lots were subdivided. They were probably built both for speculation and for servants’ quarters. Of great significance is the fact that they were rear dwellings, often obscured from the view of passers-by.(3)

This description is accompanied in the text by a diagram from W. E. B. DuBois’s text The Philadelphia Negro. However, a simple aerial photograph of the trinities above can illustrate the ingenuity of Philadelphia’s alley developers:

Sutherland describes how these houses afford home ownership to the city’s ethnic communities and avoid the problems of high-density tenements like in New York. However, the overcrowding and substandard sanitation caused high rates of typhoid and tuberculosis. His analysis of tenant owners reveals they generally did not hold extensive properties, and often lived in the building itself or nearby.

Sam Bass Warner’s classic account of Philadelphia’s growth suggests one of the city’s most famous residents was responsible for several trinity homes.

To accommodate as many families in so little space some of the blocks for the ward had been cut by alleys so that little houses might be crowded onto the back lots of the houses facing the main streets. Strawberry Alley and Elbow Lane cut through the first block, Petty’s alley divided the third block, and Benjamin Franklin had begun the alley process with his house lot off Market Street in the second block of the ward. He had built a row of three houses on Market Street, thereby turning his home yard into an interior lot. … In the early nineteenth century Franklin’s home parcel became Franklin Court, an alley lot which opened up the interior of the block.(4)

Warner reports the tremendous density and low sanitation caused periodic epidemics of yellow fever, typhoid, small pox, and dysentery. He finds the 1774 census reported 1,401 people and 337 dwellings in the city’s middle ward, composed in turn of five developed block of “slightly less than five acres of land.” Erring on the generous side to assume the ward was composed of 25 acres of developed land would yield the density of 13.5 dwelling units per acre (more than 55 people per acre), considered a high density today, let alone in an era without modern sanitation. He reports that street railways opened up “cast tracts of cheap suburban land and thereby destroyed the market for new alley construction.” Noting many of the old alleys remained standing for years “giving discomfort to Philadelphia’s poor for many generations.”

It is no small irony that the extremely dense urban fabric that constituted an urban problem in the 18th century is precisely the antidote to 21st century ones: sprawl, housing un-affordability, and auto dependence. Now may be the right time to learn from Philadelphia’s trinities, to study their dimensions and construction, as we seek to learn how to build more humane, resource-efficient urban homes and neighborhoods.

> See also my post on “An Architectural Aesthetic of Efficiency,” about how the “forced austerity” of the third world can result in a fundamental re-evaluation of residential architecture

(1) Gerard, Shields. Flatiron. Hilliard & Harris Publishers: 2006.
(2) Fried, Stephen. Philadelphia Magazine. April 1986. “The Trinity House – Last Thing Founding Father Thought He’d Be Remembered For.”
(3) Sutherland, John F. “Housing for the Poor in the City of Homes: Philadelphia at the Turn of the Century.” Chapter 9 in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1940. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds. Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1998.

This year 96 teams from 34 universities entered the competition. Our team selected the number 1856, the year of the founding of the University of Maryland. The team was composed of Dorien Couch (real estate), myself (planning), Nandor Mitrocsak (architecture), Eric Raasch (real estate), and Elizabeth Vetne (architecture). Our entry, mounted on seven 11 by 17 sheets, looked like this:

We also had to work up a full financial proforma on the project to prove it was financially viable:

Although developed at the turn of the century as a residential neighborhood, today very few people call Cedars home. The neighborhood is home to an eclectic combination of light industrial uses, a community college, a few residences, a city park, and even a honky-tonk. I had the opportunity to drive through the neighborhood during a subsequent trip to Dallas, and here’s a few views of what it looks like.

We conducted research into demographics, infrastructure, and the natural context of the site. In these diagrams, the entire site is designated in lime green. Downtown is just to the north of the site, and contains many high rise office buildings and new housing. (See this Google Map for more context.)

Although separated from downtown Dallas by a sunken freeway known as “the canyon,” the site has excellent access to downtown, features a station on the city’s rapidly expanding light rail system, and features a unique eclectic character. Calling our plan Transistasis (the property of a system to reform its functions to maintain a meaningful existence), we organized our proposal around the themes of reconnecting, rethinking, and renewing the neighborhood. We proposed extending the M-Line historic streetcar from the city’s main arts district north of downtown (where the art museum and symphony are located), and develop Cedars into an alternative arts district as a counterpoint to this formal arts activity. We allowed artist studios by-right, and allowed a density bonus for the creation of new arts venues along Lamar Street. Instead of adopting an unrealistic decking plan, we focused on creating an activity spine extending from city hall into the Cedars neighborhood, and along Lamar Street from the convention center into the neighborhood. Our development, outlined in purple on this map, proposed mixed-use urban development near the DART station.

Our plan proposed three major anchors for the neighborhood. We proposed creating a new amphitheater in the Old City Park, providing a venue featuring a dramatic Dallas skyline. The visitors will spill out onto Cedars streets, investigating artist studios and galleries, and passing through our development on Belleview street on the way to the light rail station and parking. The second anchor, a magnet arts middle school, would be just a short ride from the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, now under construction in the arts district north of downtown. The third anchor, a restaurant and craft brewpub would serve as a hub of activity at the Cedars DART Station. The Belleview Redevelopment plan also includes a new supermarket, housing, and retail space.

Although we were not a finalist, the judge’s comments we received back were generally favorable. The finalists’ plans, and the plan created by the competition winner, a University of Pennsylvania team, are available on the competition website.

Nonetheless, we are proud of our plan. In the course of our research, we found that the tree for which the neighborhood is named, the Eastern Red Cedar, is known as a pioneer species often found on damaged land. Early in Cedars’ history it was home to pioneering forms of urban life — Belleview Place, Dallas’ first apartment building, was constructed in 1890 at the corner of Sullivan and Browder streets. Redevelopment of the neighborhood (whether according to our plan or another) could return the pioneering Red Cedar and pioneering new forms of sustainable living to Cedar’s streets, a good thing for the city of Dallas.

> ULI Hines Urban Design Competition
> Dallas Morning News: “Dallas’ Cedars area is focus of urban renewal contest for students,” “Cedars – Buzzing with Activity“

Architectural sustainability, or the green building movement, is dominated by concern with buildings energy efficiency and use of sustainable materials. Left largely undiscussed is the question of the cultural values that shape our homes. American homes have increased in size, cost, and complexity, even while the building’s energy efficiency and materials have improved. Geoff Manaugh often points out the possibility that after technical fixes to fossil fuel energy have been perfected, we will still live in precisely the same way as before – with automobiles, large homes, and consumption. The most visible counter-trend, small homes movement, has had a limited cultural impact as its absurd minimalism contrasts so greatly against excessive cultural norms. It’s often pointed out we simply don’t have enough raw materials for billions of the world’s poor to live at the same standards as exist in the developed world. What’s lacking is a concerted effort to cultivate aesthetic and cultural models for more resource-efficient living.

Other professions involved in the planning and design of cities have dedicated considerable effort to realizing models for less resource intensive environments. New Urbanism proposes neighborhood-scale pattern for more efficient development. Together with Smart Growth, some think it is the nucleus to a new “sustainable urbanism.” The field of landscape architecture has sought to align aesthetics with ecology (PDF), and great strides have been made in seeking to design parks and landscapes that are both beautiful and beneficial to natural ecosystems. The architectural profession needs to engage in a similar effort.

Oddly the place best situated to cultivate a cultural ethic of creative and efficient homes are the nations where wealthy and deeply impoverished live side-by-side. Here the resources of professionals can be deployed within the limits of the forced austerity of poverty.

Vaughan Burns, a South African architect I met with last summer while studying abroad, has made it his life’s work to make humane low cost housing. In the country, government efforts to provide housing to the poor had pushed the architectural profession to the limits of economy. Every centimeter of cement or piping, every hinge, every ounce of paint makes a difference in cost when you’re building 2.3 million homes. Although Vaughan lamented how this tendency can result in inhumanely minimal structures (the model to the right is a new version, enlarged from the previously standard 380 square feet), he has taken it as a creative challenge to formulate a philosophy that maximizes the benefit for residents. Vaughn said he’d been commissioned by middle income and even wealthy clients to build homes much larger, but in the same style as low-cost government housing. The owners almost certainly could afford a conventional home, but found the simplicity, economy, and beauty of the “low cost mindset” more appealing.

In his view architecture had just four basic elements: floors, doors, roofs, and windows. These structural categories doubled for metaphors of four rules of design that have guided his designs.

The first, the “floor,” is client participation. Vaughan argues for participation both because it is important to creating good design and also because of its transformative impact on the clients.

The second, the “door,” represents multi-functionality of design. Buildings should maximize the use of every space, surface, and room. An architect specializing in alternative building techniques has observed “many standard homes built today feel hollow and empty until they are filled with possessions.” He observed his designs include window seats, window shelves, and creative flooring making the homes “quite pleasing even before you move in.” An efficient home could convince the occupant to choose a smaller space, and even “need” fewer belongings to live.

Third, the “roof,” is the principle of expandability and sub-divisibility to provide maximum future use of the structure. This may mean making halls wide enough to contain a narrow bed should it need to be converted to a bedroom, using easily recyclable materials, or allowing outdoor access to a bathroom to allow it to be shared among several small homes.

Fourth, the “window,” stands for the value of embracing symbolism. Fake traditional touches can be cheap but provide a sense of community or identity. Murals can transform a plain surface into something beautiful, powerful, and meaningful, all at the cost of the artist’s time and the paint involved. Rather than abolish symbolism as inauthentic or unnecessary ornament, Vaughn argues we must recognize the imaginary thing can be just as good as the real thing. After all, in his view through architecture we transform real things — raw materials and labor — into the unreal — comfort, shelter, and space for living. Perhaps someday, like in Le Guin’s fictional future, economy itself will profoundly affect our aesthetics as one of the desired unreal products of architecture.