I wasn’t familiar with the Slow Home concept until this week, after I received a e-mail from a Slow Home devotee who found us during a search for condo floor plans. The idea, promoted by a couple of architects affiliated with the University of Calgary, starts with the notion that a majority of home designs are “standardized, homogenous, and wasteful,” kind of like your typical fast-food meal. A slow home, by contrast, “is simple to live in and light on the environment” and “has been designed to benefit the lives of the people who reside in it.”
For the past nine months, the two architects, John Brown and Matthew North, and their website’s readers have critiqued thousands of floor plans from nine North American cities using a Slow Home rubric. This week the project turned its focus to Chicago homes, and Brown and North have already posted several videos in which they compare, contrast, and critique floor plans at 235 Van Buren, Lincoln Park 2520, and Ontario Place. The reliance on two-dimensional floor plans alone is a huge limitation, to say the least — obviously they’ve never been to 235, given that they repeatedly call it a “proposed” development and completely misrepresent the nature of the partial-height walls separating its kitchens and bedrooms — and too much time is spent among readers redesigning floor plans that are very much fixed and unalterable at this point, but occasionally you’ll find some interesting observations about livability and the flow of a home.
In today’s video, the duo focuses on the sizes, layouts, and positions of bathrooms in 11 Chicago condos and apartments (the specific development’s aren’t named), and in general like what they see. Common problems they see in our city’s floor plans are poorly located baths (right off a kitchen, or far from major living spaces), baths that are way too big relative to the size of their units, and simply too many baths in the city’s smaller condos.
Ohmigod, this is great. Thanks for alerting me to them!
Joseph – we really appreciate your mention of the Slow Home site on YoChicago! We work a lot with floor plans because we believe that a floor plan is like an x-ray – they are extremely useful to reveal the design underlying the house, kind of in the same way that an x-ray can provide a doctor with additional information that a physical exam cannot. We believe that a floor plan analysis should supplement, but not replace an actual physical review of any property prior to purchase. Floor plans can help reveal the organizational structure, circulation efficiency, furniture placement and overall livability potential of a home. Of the nine North American cities we have surveyed to date, the apartment/ loft projects in Chicago are fairly well designed and we look forward to reviewing townhouses and single family houses here over the next two weeks!
It’s not quite fair to say that the discussion on SlowHome.ca misrepresented the “partial-height wall” at 235 Van Buren. Readers found this feature puzzling, but the pics clearly reveal what it is — a 7′ high wall of kitchen cabinetry that encloses a room that has no windows. The 3′ opening above the cabinetry acts as a clerestory set 25′ back from the window wall. This room will be very dimly lit and have no prospect. Local bylaw may allow the developer to call this a bedroom, but it’s not livable by typical residential standards. Pity the person who calls this room “home.”
The “partial height wall” is a poor solution to the problem of trying to create livable rooms out of very long, unlit spaces. To say that the plan is “very much fixed and unalterable” misses the point — it didn’t need to be this way. This is a teachable moment for planners, developers, and would-be buyers. It’s an opportunity to learn to do better .. or at least to see the problems before signing the purchase agreement.
Slow Home is helping to educate a more informed real estate consumer. Let “fast house” developers beware.
Steve:
The reactions in the video discussion (not the subsequent discussion in comments, where readers were able to further investigate and address partial-height walls) gave viewers the sense that people in the kitchen will be able to gaze into the adjacent bedroom with ease, which isn’t the case at all. It seemed odd to me that residential architects would be unfamiliar with the concept, given how often you see them in developments throughout Chicago (not only in adapted lofts but in new-construction projects like 235), but maybe they are something unique to our city.
I personally haven’t tried living in a bedroom with a partial-height wall, and I know that many readers have complained about them in the past. But the fact remains that thousands of people do live in homes with them, and most likely weighed their pros and cons of them alongside myriad other factors before buying.
Joseph,
I feel as though you haven’t spent enough time on the site on a weekly basis to really understand the nature of the Slow Home website. Websites do not always disclose the full information of a development, so it’s a lot different than actually living in that city. We are merely critiquing, not criticizing. I hope that you’ll contribute next week when we review townhomes in the Chicago area.
Why would residential architects in Canada (or for that matter any place else) be aware of local code vagaries? Steve makes a very good, nay, excellent point…