by Klaus van den Berg
One of the greatest attractions of Avondale Estates is its unique residential area. From the city’s origin in 1926, holistic integration of homes, gardens, landscape and high design standards have prevailed, making it a special place whose character needs to be maintained for future generations. Over time, the city has tried to keep the founder’s vision alive by adhering to town planning ideals and preserving a well-planned environment that includes shared space created not only by parks, the lake, and our tree-lined streets and sidewalks, but also by identity-shaping architecture that promotes and visually integrates public and private green space.
Heeding the past, managing the present, and designing the future keeps a place unique. As part of the ongoing process of rewriting the city’s zoning code, the firm Lord Aeck Sargent (LAS) has been charged with assessing and rewriting the design guidelines for the Avondale Estates Historic District. This endeavor will primarily affect those homes, fifty years and older at the time of application, that formed the basis for Avondale Estates’ inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. But it will also need to address the many mid-century homes that have been added to the historic district since the 1950s. Today these form a second historic layer in the historic district and contribute to its variety and architectural value. Design guidelines for preserving and adapting these homes for the future will ensure that the original historic district remains unique even as other parts of the residential district echo many of its features in ways that contribute to the distinctiveness of the residential area as a whole.
As citizens move about the core of the city’s residential neighborhoods, they also experience at least two historically distinct ways that town planning has been articulated around the vision of a landscaped community. The older houses in the historic district tend to take a picturesque approach that features more traditional living quarters on the inside and well-designed, landscaped gardens; by contrast, the mid-century homes follow architectural models popularized by Cliff May, Joseph Eichler, and Frank Lloyd Wright that weave landscape features into the design of more modernist houses. The lines of these homes integrate into the city’s curving and hilly landscape or, as in Wright’s homes, use interweaving fields to accent and integrate these natural features into floor plans. In contrast to the picturesque garden city ideal that predominates in the historic district, the adaptable architectural form of the ranch house lends the mid-century district as a whole a very different aesthetic, but one that shares the commitment to the landscape as defining feature.
Both districts feature surprising juxtapositions of the two main approaches to neighborhood planning. While Dutch Colonials, Georgian homes, narrower front lots, and sidewalks predominate and define the character of the historic district, the architecture from the 1950s onward interspersed along these streets makes the district appear more dynamic and less frozen in time. Similarly, while a variety of ranch and contemporary homes with wide front yards and broad, car-oriented streets define the character of Majestic Acres, these are interspersed with traditional homes, including ones that echo the Tudor style in the historic district or otherwise visually emphasize their relationship to the original core of the city. Avondale’s residential district is known for its architecturally rich, aesthetically diverse character, and it is the lived experience of these historical layers that can be so pleasurably appreciated in the environment and landscape of the neighborhoods, especially from the pedestrian point of view.
When Avondale Estates applied to become a city on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s, only homes fifty years and older at that time were eligible to be listed among the city’s significant architectural contributions. Accordingly, the design guidelines for protecting the uniqueness of the city’s residential core were developed with homes dating from the time of the city’s founding in the 1920s and 1930s in mind. However, today the many mid-century homes located in the historic district as well as in newer neighborhoods are well over the age of eligibility as historic resources. From the perspective of 2020, it is clear that the variety of houses built from the late 1940s to the late 1970s contribute greatly to the architectural richness of our city, yet we currently have no guidelines for preserving their contribution to Avondale Estate’s residential neighborhoods. The current process of rewriting the architectural guidelines for the Avondale Estates Historic District is also an opportunity to think about how to protect the character of the residential areas in which the mid-century homes dominate and to articulate expectations for future construction that maintain the city’s special architectural richness.
In the case of mid-century architecture, heeding the past means something different than in the case of traditional houses. Since these architectural paradigms “think about” the landscape in different ways, design guidelines for home owners should recognize both kinds of architectural contributions to the distinctiveness of the city’s residential area. At this point, as we add guidelines for the mid-century resources in the existing historic district, based on this work, we can also begin drafting guidelines for the aspiring second historic district. Getting these guidelines right will assure that Avondale Estates can manage the present to protect the character-defining qualities of the mid-century homes in all our residential areas—a task that must extend to the way the individual homes are integrated in their geographical settings and how they contribute to larger areas of rhythmic organization formed by streets. These guidelines will thus also help to integrate new construction into the neighborhood What needs to be preserved is neighborhood identity, which is a function of the lived experience of its organization and values as a whole—not just of the individual houses.
Let’s return to the question of how to maintain the uniqueness of our residential area and how we may manage and develop it in the future. While the Historic District will get updated guidelines, it is unclear how the city will maintain the character of the mid-century area. In some areas without historic protections, citizens can already get a taste for what happens when there are no guidelines in place and new homes are constructed with architectural aesthetics unrelated to those of the other historic layers of the city. Houses built without reference to Avondale’s rich legacy of architectural and town planning will endanger the unique quality of the residential district.
As a first step in the ongoing work to designate a second historical district, in the context of the current zoning rewrite, the city should take the opportunity to establish a Neighborhood Conservation Overlay District (NCOD) for the mid-century district and follow the procedure recommended in the Calfee Zoning Audit of outlining general fundamental characteristics of the qualities we want to preserve. Doing so would make it possible to establish a city review process aimed at maintaining what make the residential neighborhoods of Avondale Estates so unique and architecturally rich: the holistic integration of homes, gardens, and landscape.
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