by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . adapt contextually historicist styles through the aesthetic lens of contemporary Modernism to design affordable housing?

Summary: Irvington Terrace references California Mission architecture, the work of early Modernist architect Irving Gill, and traditional village-square site organization, and yet it focuses these influences into a contemporarily urban design. As affordable housing, it meets residents halfway with familiar contextual and historicist forms.

The low-income housing development of Irvington Terrace in Fremont, Calif., strikes a fine balance between progressive Modernist forms and a traditional village-square-like community. Designed by MVE and Partners, it forms a block-long perimeter of flat-roofed rental apartments, articulated with interlocking rectilinear volumes that define individual units. These fused and richly textured units avoid the monumental austerity of past failed experiments in Modernist affordable housing by providing street wall relief and variety, complete with street-enlivening stoops and porches. These rows of housing surround two town-square courtyards with adjacent public amenities.

MVE’s design acumen isn’t cut from whole cloth here. This balance of new world simplicity and fundamentally established village models in a West Coast context was explored by California proto-Modernist Irving Gill and exerted overt influence on this project, say the project’s designers.

Contemporary urbanity and traditional community
The 100 low-income rental units at Irvington Terrace (completed last November) were developed alongside market rate for-sale town houses in the Bay-area suburb of Fremont. Irvine, Calif.-based MVE compared notes with the townhouse architects on material choices, color schemes, and landscape architecture. Units range from one bedroom to three, and the entire 108,000-square-foot project sits on top of a partially underground parking garage.

The development’s site was a disused shopping center in a commercial zoning area, and the City of Fremont (which requires that 15 percent of all market-rate development be affordable housing, according to California Construction) and the complex’s nonprofit developers, BRIDGE Housing, wanted Irvington Terrace to add density and walkable livability to the newly mixed-use zoning area. At three stories tall, Irvington Terrace can fit 40 units to an acre.

Wood-framed and plastered in a variety of earth tones, each connected unit has its own entrance to maintain a single-family-unit feel. The development’s offset, interlocking, and set-back rectilinear volumes enhance its close neighborhood feel, hinting at diverse urban uses and functions through the playful intersection of masses, although the project essentially has only a single function. This play of forms creates a terracing effect of sorts, from front protruding volumes that reach down to the streetscape with stoops that provide neighborhood gathering places to set-back rectilinear volumes on top levels that subtly evoke the bell towers of one of the project’s aesthetic touchstones: California Mission architecture.

These front stoops help to obscure the subtle ground-level increase in elevation that is a result of the underground parking garage. By leading the eye directly from the front door down to the street, the stoops make the units appear as though they’re sitting on top of English basement apartments. Ernesto Vasquez, AIA, a vice president and partner at MVE, says he chose to hide the parking structure beneath the units to maintain the neighborhood’s sense of scale.

Curb appeal
The rental units all cluster around two landscaped courtyards, complete with trellises and pergolas, similar to traditional California Mission arcades. An inward-facing section contains public meeting spaces for residents, and across one of the courtyards the front-entrance and lobby section holds more public amenities, such as a laundry room and classroom space for job training sessions.

There is no utilitarian “backside” to Irvington Terrace, which Vasquez says enhances the neighborhood’s security and sense of community by (quoting urbanist and author Jane Jacobs) keeping “eyes on the street.”

Public housing projects rarely manage to make affordable materials like plaster truly shine, but Irvington Terrace’s cohesive balance of massing gives its plaster construction the appearance of the permanence of concrete or stone, and its flourishes of detail (like its landscaping and trellised walkways) seem more akin to upscale shopping centers than municipal public housing. “It’s not stamped as a project that looks and smells, shall we say, like a project or a state funded development,” Vasquez says. “It has good curb appeal.”

In abstract
Vasquez says that although referencing California Mission architecture was an important goal, adding lots of classical detailing wasn’t possible because of the project’s modest $31.8 million dollar budget. So, Vasquez and his team used abstract forms that hinted at eras of classical detailing to meet the project’s aesthetic goals. This approach is perhaps the most overt reference to the architecture of Irving Gill, the early California Modernist whose work played part in the early 20th century’s Progressive movement.

Gill is most known for designing housing projects, primarily in San Diego, for communities that rarely had access to quality housing: recent immigrants, African-Americans, and low-income people. His way of stripping down the details of ornament-laden California Mission style and rendering its essence in raw concrete is reminiscent in Irvington Terrace. Gill’s is a surprisingly explicit Modernist credo, considering that he was most productive from 1908-16, when the historicist California Mission Revival style was most en vogue, and he practiced across the nation before the influential European Modernists in exile made landfall and begin teaching at American universities.

A native of East Los Angeles, Vasquez says that with affordable housing, all design aspirations must be balanced with the risk of cultural dislocation of the residents, and Irvington Terrace seeks to even these scales. It has a traditional single-unit and community-oriented family scale with references to familiar aesthetic motifs, yet still appropriates a contemporarily urban mixed-use identity. “We need to think in terms of the occupant and the tenant, and the families that are going to live there,” he says. “How do they feel?”