by Klaus van den Berg
Avondale Estates presents a rare and harmonious juxtaposition of two different kinds of historic architecture. The historic core, already on the National Register of Historic Places, speaks to the city’s founding in the early twentieth century under the influence of European architecture and town planning. The newer residential areas showcase many architectural styles from the mid-twentieth century, notably the ranch houses and bungalows that are one of the United States’ signature contributions to world architecture. To be sure, there are financial incentives to develop and maintain historic neighborhoods, such as tax credits and increased property values.
However, the most important rewards lie elsewhere. By establishing a second historic district, Avondale Estates can preserve the connectedness, neighborhood identity, and harmonious integration of architecture and landscape that make our city special—all of which are threatened by the on-going fragmentation that is taking place in urban and suburban areas all over the US, including in the Atlanta Metro.
Together, the existing historic district of Avondale Estates and the aspiring mid-century district connect two major phases of US political and cultural history that inscribed an evolving philosophy of landscape and community into the expanding American suburb. In areas where modern and traditional homes stand side by side, such historical contrasts form a dynamic trajectory that makes a neighborhood special. The long-term value of preserving this cultural, historical, and aesthetic richness transcends the increase in property values of individual homes that is often viewed as the primary reason to establish a historical district. Historic districts create a narrative for the legacy community, offering plot points, marking transitions, and identifying turning points in the urban landscape.
As for any historic district, the city will have to develop dynamic design guidelines and adopt ordinances that maintain existing resources and facilitate future development. It is crucial both to recognize the historical, aesthetic, and financial value of the past and to build on the values of a neighborhood to accommodate evolving future needs. By nature, design guidelines for Avondale Estates’ mid-century areas must be different in kind from those in the existing historic district. Because mid-century architecture represents a new, innovative approach to building in the United States, its preservation must be understood and approached from a different perspective. The focus should be on protecting the integrity and coherence of neighborhoods built with a careful integration of architecture into the landscape in mind, with homes that emphasize interaction between inside and outside and celebrate a variety of building materials.
In the current historic district, a proscriptive approach aimed at preserving and conserving existing housing stock prevails. Dynamic design guidelines for the proposed mid-century district in Avondale Estates should, by contrast, strive to preserve modernism as innovative practice. The design principles should center on the question of how properties and public spaces contribute to the story and character of the city as it evolves over time. Effective guidelines must also articulate how architecturally innovative future houses can be built with the existing neighborhood in mind. After all, thoughtful alterations to a mid-century house or a new house that takes a fresh approach to a proven architectural style may contribute as much to the beauty and quality of our mid-century neighborhoods as a house that is preserved in its original state. By maintaining and developing the innovative principles of mid-century modern architecture, dynamic design guidelines can enable Avondale Estates to integrate its twentieth-century past with current and future standards for sustainability and aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods that promote high quality of life.
In the case of Avondale Estates’ mid-century architecture, preservation goals do not call for a strict, detailed, narrowly proscriptive code. A description from the report on The Ranch House in Georgia may help focus attention on what is special and worthy of imaginative preservation in our neighborhoods: mid-century houses “have integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association; and possess significance in American social history, architecture, community planning” (http://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Environment/CulturalResources/Pubs/Ranch_House_Evalution_Guidelines_2010.pdf). Mid-century houses form a bond with nature that is highlighted through changes in elevation, rooms with multiple outdoor views, and multiple access points to the house, all of which encourage an appreciation of healthy and sustainable living. The iconic roof lines characteristic for homes in the proposed district not only integrate the houses themselves into the landscape in intriguing ways; by creating flat planes, they become part of the dialogue between nature and the built environment that shapes the beautiful neighborhoods of Avondale Estates. These features can and should be reimagined for the twenty-first century in ways that marry new and old. Similarly, the typical mid-century feature of large windows and sliding glass doors remains attractive, and using glass to allow light into homes while working with new energy technologies will allow creative expansion within the mid-century style.
Much preservation is dominated by binary thinking— either buildings are historically significant and must be preserved in detail, or they are not important and may be razed. A different paradigm is required for our mid-century neighborhoods. Preserving the modern means developing dynamic guidelines that embody a more sophisticated view of history, change, and growth to maintain our city’s diverse, character-defining architecture in the future. In this case, successful preservation means curating a historic district by embracing an active and form-based vision that maintains the narrative of the community, preserve the resources that need detailed preservation, and encourage architectural innovation in the spirit of existing neighborhood styles. Maintaining a historic district thus becomes a kind of neighborhood poetics, in which pristine examples of mid-century homes coexist with harmonious variations and evolving visions of modern living to create unique neighborhoods that maintain economic, aesthetic, and historic value.
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