North Street Housing Development : Muncie, Indiana : row housing

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Authors
Pease, Stephen W.
Advisor
Kingsley, Robert
Issue Date
1981
Keyword
Degree
Thesis (B. Arch.)
Department
College of Architecture and Planning
Other Identifiers
Abstract

The American dream of owning a house is tied to the American heritage of the importance of owning land. Over the years this ideal has manifested itself in ownership of small but substantial plots of land outside the city's downtown that were inevitably incorporated into the city. Enough land was used to define the owners territory while not so oversized as to be unmanagable beyond the owners mean's.The evolution of this ideal has been manifested in the creation and growth of the suburban tract developments. In todays society, this ideal is quickly becoming unmanagable when faced with the ever widening network of public services coupled with the diminishing availability of American resources as these developments continue to expand across the landscape. The need for relocating housing in the city centers is currently urgently needed.But the cost of urban land and the resources it requires to build and maintain urban housing makes the cost prohibitive for most individuals who wish to own and manage their own urban property. What is needed is a transformation of this American ideal into a new form which can be accomidated by the urban fabric and affordable to the home buying public.This project is an exploration into the urban housing building type, dealing with scale, circulation, space, and territory while addressing issues of introducing housing into the urban landscape. This project is by no means the solution, but an exercise in learning so the designer may be aquainted with the issues of housing. The perspective that this project is designed from is that the American ideal of owning your own home is still viable, only in other forms.The organization of this copy is to show the linear evolution of the design in separete sequences. The design process is by no means linear and cannot be separated into different sections without the loss of some understanding. Never the less, this book is in three basic parts, the research, the site evolution, and the unit evolution. The evolution occurs within each section and includes only the most salient advancments, deleting all side tracks to the design.