I'm interested in the views of the GW community on this. Most people in my heritage conservation district/neighbourhood prefer this type of infill:

over modern architecture, and I can understand why. The picture above is my previous house, we sold it four years ago. It was built in 1989. When I first went to see it I was interested primarily because it fit in perfectly with the two 19th century houses on either side of it, but didn't come with the expensive baggage of a century home.

But architectural purists (as I understand it) do not like this type of infill, as it confuses the public: what house is original to the period of the neighbourhood, what is infill? We live in a "heritage conservation district", and the by-laws suggest that infill houses should not attempt to replicate the original styles of the homes. Rather sympathetic modern interpretations, with pleasing and welcoming street scapes, are preferred by the professionals it seems, if not by neighbours.

Regarding the examples provided in the house idea book, I agree that the first couple of houses (see link and photos below) seem too large (way too tall) in comparison to the other houses. Also, I'm not crazy about the recessed entries - it doesn't seem neighbourhood friendly. But at least there are no giant double garages dominating (blighting) the landspace in the front yard (although that second house needs some serious help with landscaping).

What do you think of the examples and comments in the Houzz ideabook?

I'm assuming here that infill will happen, for better or for worse. I would prefer that the lovely side rose garden remain forever (that is what my house above used to be), but we live very close to downtown and I support infill over ever expanding suburbs.

But I would find a faux-historic house built to such a scale "wrong", too.

There is a movement against recreating a faux history here, I think, but the historic commission and neighborhood districts would still require that the house play well with the neighbors.

I wouldn't want to tear down a lovely 19th century home in decent condition and replace it with a modern home - but I have no problem with a properly scaled but thoroughly modern home in the neighbouring empty lot.

Perhaps this knee jerk reaction is because people haven't been exposed to enough 'good' modern architecture? Unfortunately most of the 'modern' houses in my neighbourhood are awful.

Youve shown two bad examples. Im not sure ive seen a good example that is right in scale, "fits", yet modern and not a slavish repro. Anyone?

Some elements should mimic the surrounding homes. Maybe the roofline (every other house has a pitched roof, so design a modern house with a pitched roof). Or the exterior - do something that will look good in stucco if the rest of the houses are Spanish Revivals all clad in stucco.

I can understand the people who love Modern architecture feeling picked on because nobody gets it, but I have to wonder if they would drive by a street full of Victorian homes (painted ladies) & see one very simple Spanish Revival house with terracotta tile roof & stucco walls in the midst of it and think, "Wow, that looks odd."

Of course, I live in a neighborhood built in the 1960's so it's a mix of split-level, tri-level, colonial, gambrel, and cape cod style homes. We "bungalow-ified" our house when we added a front porch & haven't been thrown out of the neighborhood yet ;)

I live in a city that has a particular section of town with original homes similar in style to the first picture here by Sochi. That area has traditionally been working families, but due to its location close to downtown, it is starting to become more gentrified. There have been very well done infill homes that are done in the linear, minimalist style, but have been done....shall I say....artistically and expensively. They have Perfect scale to the existing homes, and good landscape and hardscape. It looks really good in my opinion. It makes the neighborhood seem trendy and desirable, these are lots on very steep hills so not the easiest to build. These infill homes say :I want to be here.

In another area of town, where homes were built between WWI/WWII, there were some infills done in the 1970s. These are the most butt-ugly things you can imagine. Ranches or split levels in a neighborhood with 4 squares and bungalows just looks terrible. They also seem to be cheap looking. In fact, most have ended up as rentals, because they offer no charm to buyers.

So....is the first scenario just better done....or just newer? Will it also seem undesirable in 40 years? Time will tell....

Why on earth is the term infill elitist or dismissive? Is there another term that refers to the same thing?

Agree that the two from Houzz aren't good examples. I have seen modern in the past that work well, but don'thave pics. I like good design and architecture of any style, including modern or Victoran, or whatever. I agree that there are fewer example of good modern generally. Maybe this style it is more difficult to master?

The scale issue is a big one, with modern or contemporary infill. Everyone seems to want a huge McMansion with multiple garages (or at least the developers think they do). These huge homes just don't fit in existing older neughbourhoods, whatever the style.

Engineerchick, I expect I would like your neighbourhood, I appreciate variety. I don't think I've seen any contemporary interpretations of classic styles that I like at all (we have a lot of that in my city), but I totally agree with that infill should at least acknowledge it's surroundings.

There is a new modern house not too far from my neighbourhood that I love. While I love the building itself, the landscaping makes a huge difference in the appeal of the entire property. I will try to take a picture of it.

Like many of you, my frustration is more with the lot line to lot line scale with no graceful placement rather than any concern with the actual exterior style.

I do not have a problem with the term 'infill' at all. I think it simply describes the situation without any kind of judgment attached. Don't see it as either elitist or dismissive and am not really clear on how it is interpreted to be so.

Urban economists, city planners, developers, and architects use it to mean adding density (sensitively, one hopes) to handle growth without creating sprawl. It goes hand in hand with sensitive urban redevelopment, and adaptive reuse of existing building stock.

Well-conceived infill development saves neighborhoods and protects the architectural and historic character of cities. The key words are "sensitive" and "well-conceived."

If we had the political will to create the same kinds of binding master plans and enforceable zoning for our public sectors that people who can afford it accept within their gated communities, our public life would be the better for it.

You won't see the level of rudeness and affrontery illustrated by those two houses in Landingworthinghamshireton Estates. One brick, two brick, lawsuit, checkmate.

The second photo posted by the OP is not infill housing - a SF dwelling was torn down (or it was a major reno) and another SF dwelling was built in its place. No increase in density UNLESS at the same time they constructed a duplex or added a studio sized structure in the backyard (think coach house). Either of these two situations would have increased the density and that would be in-fill housing.

So this discussion seems to have two tangents to it - infill housing and an inconsideration of a neighbourhood sensibilities when rebuilding a home.

Infill housing which causes an increase in the density of a neighbourhood results in a lot of NIMBYism. Even though it is necessary people don't want it in their neighbourhood - they know it's necessary but put it somewhere else.

Where I live real estate is extremely expensive and there has been an ongoing attempt to add infill housing in the central urban area of the city and people are trying it. However the requirements and by-laws for building infill housing are extremely stringent.

But "the requirements and by-laws for building infill housing are extremely stringent" is only true if your locality makes it true.

The rules, the restrictions, the kinds and strength of zoning, the loopholes, and the enforcement vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It's very local, it's usually very political, and unless it involves a legally binding easement of some kind that is attached to the deed, it is always susceptible to change, for good or for ill.

The hardest thing to do in any kind of building regulation is to be subjective and still get the job done. You can specify set-backs from the lot lines, height, square footage, lot coverage, and even building materials - anything that is measurable. But finding a way to dictate style - essentially to say "you can't make something that looks horrible" - is very much more difficult. It usually has to be done by an architectural committee, which is almost always appointed by the governing body of the locality - the city council, which is elected, or the planning commission, which is also often appointed by the elected officials. In any case, politics are involved.

Which is why, in America, where we value individual rights so highly and subject any government action to such scrutiny (as we should), the irony is that it is almost impossible to dictate style or taste except in a private development, where agreement with covenants is a legally binding requirement for building and for any improvements.

Here is a modern house in an existing older neighbourhood that I really like, but more importantly, I think they got it right. I like it on an aesthetic level, but I also think it fits well within the neighbourhood. Landscaping plays an important part here. As Blfenton and bronwynsmom point out, this isn't infill - they tore down the existing house and replaced it with another single family home.

Anyway, here it a picture I took this afternoon from my bike:

Another picture of it before the landscaping was done, in the top left corner of this picture. I found this pic on the web, ignore the other pics if you can:

Here is the house immediately next door to the modern one:

Most of the houses in this small pocket were built after WWI, with many cool 1920s and 1930s deco type homes, some MCM homes, some '80s stuff like the neighbouring house. Mostly nice homes, slightly larger than average perhaps, but not huge.

My case for this house - it appears to be exactly the same height and overall mass as the neighbouring house. The house is appropriately set back from the street. There is ample landscaping - this house faces a large park and a river, the flowers and other plantings appropriately bridge the space between the park, road and house. Ample parking for four cars, a car port instead of the dreaded garage. You can't really tell, but the car port has a green roof on it, which is awesome. They use brick, concrete and wood here, all appropriate materials I think, used in other houses in the neighbourhood. The front door is recessed and concealed, which I don't love, but I'm sure it works well with the lane and the car port.

Now this was a pretty big lot for an urban neighbourhood, so it is easier. It is far more challenging I expect to do an equally satisfactory job in a narrow infill lot. But surely it must be possible.

I will try to find more good examples tomorrow.

It was felt that the replacement should reflect that something happened on the site, rather than simply duplicating the facades on the street. The cornice and window positions on the top floor actually more closely duplicate those of most of the row than on the house to its left, and to some extent, the house that blew up, while the lower stories indicate the part of the house that blew out into the street.

I could not find a picture online of the original house, pre-explosion. Whether you find the replacement acceptable or not, the general means by which it follows the neighborhood pattern met commission approval.

You say that the bylaws on infill are stringent in your area. Does your city actively enforce the bylaws? We have regulations and bylaws too, but too often developers lobby the city and are allowed variances that thwart the intent of heritage conservation districts. Our city just introduced new infill guidelines (after consultation with heritage districts like mine). The guidelines are good (the developers hate them), but it is still to be seen if they will be rigorously implemented. I hope so.

Great example Pal, thanks for sharing. Fascinating architectual interpretation of the event that occurred.

Lazydaisynot, I'm sorry about your former house. Infill should not (need not?) be at the expense of sensitivity to the existing homes. Towering new buildings amongst small houses is almost never acceptable, however laudable the goal of urban densification.

My great grandmother's former home is the only house left on the block - it is surrounded by high rise condos. But it is literally right downtown and the old neighbourhood is long gone. It is inevitable (and appropriate?) in some areas I guess.

Sochi,

I know infill is neutral, but I think it is a term that doesn't sound appealing. Like something squeezed in, and somehow lesser than or secondary to "first fill". If you were marketing something, would you lead with "Lovely infill home on quiet street close to ..." LOL

But I am biased, because in my old town that is exactly what infill was. The town was built in the early 1900s, and most of the housing stock dates from then, though styles range from Victorian to Tudor to Georgian to Mediterranean and Craftsman.

In that town, infill was viewed as undesirable because it was always smaller than and had less historic character and charm then the properties their lots were carved from. It was added at a time when the large old houses were seen as just old, and out of date, and when their size and operating costs made them white elephants (eg 70s).

PS I will try to look for images, but I think Londoners do a good job at infill. Mostly buy keeping the scale the same and using a lot of glass

This building was a later 19th c. remodeling of an earlier 19th c. building:

It aged imperfectly, and housed a bunch of very small apartments:

And one night, its overtaxed electrical system gave up, which left this for a year or so...

And it was eventually replaced with this. The extra height was allowed because it matches that of the buildings on several nearby corners. The veneer brick is cheap and awful looking up close, but other than that I think the building works well for the site.

Palimpsest, I see the point of referencing the explosion by thrusting that angle out toward the street, and it's an interesting idea. I'm less sure that interrupting the consistency of the combined facades of those attached houses is aesthetically appealing, but it's still clearly done with respect as well. And looking at the one that blew up, you can see that the original arched recessed doorway wasn't like the others in the first place.

My old neighborhood in Palo Alto has been inundated with frighteningly scaled newer houses scattered amongst the cute older bungalows; sometimes using empty lots, but more often purchasing then using two older lots at once (which is the exact opposite of infill, apparently?).

These houses, much like the modern ones in Sochi's OP, appear almost commercial in scale compared to the original housing stock in the area. We refer to this one as the Midtown Holiday Inn:

In my view, the developer should have to make the case for why the change is important enough to justify a variance. Instead, where we are, the citizens have to make the case for why it should NOT be allowed. If, in fact, the notification of the hearings is made at more than a whisper, and is scheduled for a time when people who have jobs can actually get there.

This one I think did a pretty good job. This was originally a simple, single family brick home. They created a double and put a modern looking facade on it:

Here is an out of focus (sorry) photo of the houses to the right of the double above:

The height, set back and mass are acceptable. There is some pleasant landscaping, the driveway doesn't take up too large a percentage of the front yard. The materials are similar to other nearby houses. My only qualm is that the windows create such a privacy issue that they must constantly be covered with window treatments. They are also much larger than the windows on the other houses nearby.

Here is one on the same street I have a huge problem with:

They are putting three of these on that oversized single lot. They are WAY taller than all the other homes. All you see walking by on the sidewalk is the garage and the endless stairs up to the front door. No soft landscaping at all. I think it is awful, despite the admittedly pleasing interiors. These homes simply do not fit in here, yet they sell for well over $1M.

The terrace like structure had to be cut back to the lot line rending it a walkway to get into the commercial ventures on the ground level with steps at either end and the middle. Very inhospitable. And as a result nothing of any customer-based venture (it was supposed to be all restaurants, I suppose) lasts. It has some offices and a daycare I think.

Had he not built so blatantly in violation they may have worked out a better solution with steps encroaching in areas where passage was possible --this is grandfathered all over, anyway--but I think they played hardball because it was blatant --and it was in violation of the Disabilities Act.

I think he is bankrupt.I feel bad about that, but he should have not been quite so greedy with that extra square footage.

The first house is clearly different from its neighbors but I think it suits the street well. The photo next to it is the type of situation they were dealing with in the neighborhood at the time. Some historic houses just weren't worth salvaging.

This house was for sale a while back and I showed the interiors. The neighborhood was quite dangerous at the time (at night) so the front has smallish windows, while the back is largely glass. It seems a better alternative to using large windows on the front and then putting bars over them, something else that was done at that time.

Between the early 60s and the 1970s--as we got closer to the Bicentennial, I suppose, there was more of a tendency to build something that looked "federal". These houses follow the shape of the neighboring houses exactly, and yet they are really all wrong, because they are too different to be the same, and too similar for it to be okay that they are different. The windows are too small on most floors, too big on the top floor and much too uniform in size and rigid in their placement. Not a successful infil, imo, even though they technically follow the neighborhood parameters.

There are some older parts of the city where an old house will be torn down and through rezoning a back/front duplex will be built usually in a style that resembles the rest of the neighbourhood.

In some parts of the city and in the district where I live, developers will buy up 4 or 5 older homes, apply for rezoning and build townhouses (rowhouses). They can't build condos because of height restrictions.

Some areas of the city are subjected to the type of image that circuspeanut posted (not spanish hacienda style but some type of Mcmansion) Our real estate is very expensive and most of the value is tied up in the lot. Many of the lots are 50'-66' x 125' and worth $1000,000-$2000,000, with an 1800 sq.ft 1940's bungalow on them. People buy the homes, tear them down and build 4000 sq.ft. SF homes (no infill) on them and then flip them for $2500,000-$3000,000.

Because of the value of the real estate, homeowners watch what their neighbours and what developers are doing very carefully. Homeowners are very protective of their investment, sight lines are protected, light lines are protected, heights and mass are all regulated. Do some developers try to get around it. oh yea, they try.

We just did a whole house reno and wanted to add some extra square footage. We were able to add a maximum of 200 sq.ft. and that is only because the roof line for that square footage was in place when the home was built and because our house was grandfathered through some of the by-laws. We would have been even more restricted had we torn the house down and rebuilt. It's because of our neighbours sight lines.

I would much prefer seeing traditionally styled, new homes built in a traditional, historic neighborhood than some concrete monster. Yuck.

The only aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods, imo, with extreme variations in architecture generally have very large, wood lots.

Everything about the house is awful and I can't believe that our seller, who apparently declined to appear at the SUP meeting, didn't have to disclose it to us. In fact, they started building after we went under contract (we lived out of state) and NO ONE mentioned it to us. Not even our agent. Imagine our surprise when we arrived to find a towering monster beside our 1920's charmer. And an immediate request for $2k worth of tree work.

(man, did that make me sound bitter?) I really should post some pictures. When they have the casement window open in their kitchen I can touch it by reach over my front fence.

The idea that infill should authentically show that it is new is a dope cloud-fueled delusion among aging architects and urban planners. In the real world, the number of residential architects and clients with the competence to produce a modernist building that actually fits its surroundings approaches zero in most locations. If a neighborhood is already mixed, the inappropriateness of a new building is diluted somewhat. But in a cohesive neighborhood of a certain age, most of the edifices I see actually built (as opposed to theoretically speculated about) completely wreck the fabric of the neighborhood. The only practical solution is to require slavish mimicry of the surrounding neighborhood. Architects who care about "phoniness" are welcome to cry into their hookas. No one who lives in these neighborhoods actually cares about it--they're just relieved that their neighbor's new house doesn't look like a large urology practice.

Marcolo - you're exactly right about the people in my neighbourhood - everyone wants infill like the first house I posted in the OP. I suggested that we just put the year built on the newer infill - 1989 - make it obvious that it is new.

There are a number of really unsuccessful facsimiles here. There is usually something blatantly wrong with either the proportion or the execution. (See "federal" houses above) That is why I think there should be enough difference to mark it stylistically, even if the overall form is historic.

This type of slavish copy has been accomplished, very successfully. But...in a couple years time by one of the neighborhood billionaires. Infills are now rare in this neighborhood, but are occasionally necessary.

I agree that there should be a strict adherence to guidelines regulating form and appearance, but I think I would rather walk by something like this (and you do walk by these, without being jolted, a lot of them are unobtrusive)

...than a near-miss facsimile.

One old humble Mansard had been gutted and rebuilt as two attached single families. The workmanship was quite poor, and the rear (new) dwelling was atrocious. However, once the signage goes away and the landscaping is finished, you will barely notice this building on the street. You'll continue to notice the neighborhood but not this individual structure.

By contrast, there was an old funeral home that started out as a large English colonial house and ended up being mostly (but oddly, not entirely) demolished and replaced with a modern multifamily abomination. It stands at a bend on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge on the next corner from a lovely but humble brick Romanesque church. Now the perspective down the street no longer focuses on the church, which this multistory structure now obscures. Instead you see this new edifice taking center stage with its bizarre amalgam of brick and cement and metal and glass and random lines. When it was going up I expressed my dismay to a couple of realtors as well as an architect I know, who all smugly and knowingly assured me how "hot" the building's architect was and how desirable the building would be. Never sold a single unit, it went into bankruptcy and it's half finished. Parts of the finished spaces have been rented out. Architects now live in a world as incestuous and closed as Versailles and are no longer capable of listening to anyone outside it, with predictable results.

I see Cambridge as the epicenter of this kind of disaster, since it suffers so many architectural assaults perpetrated by Harvard. You may have seen an article in the NY Times a couple of years ago in which a new, bizarrely cantilevered grad school dorm was deemed a public embarrassment. It is. But so is all of the Harvard-perpetrated infill in this city today. Further down Mass. Ave., a neighborhood of big old Victorians interspersed with '20s brick apartment buildings and fronted by low single-story retail space is now home to a new '70s retro Brady Bunch dorm. Further down, a new administration building seems inspired by Fascist architecture. It's not-too-affectionately known as the Reichschancellery.

When a profession has a 99.99% failure rate, it's time to shut it down.

I also think there is little love lost between much of the smug Harvard educated subset and the rest of the country.

My father was happy when I got rejected by Harvard for grad school, he was afraid that I would go there.(They were actually #14 of my applications, I thought 13 might be unlucky)

When we did tours of local firms to see the different kind of design offices a number of them said they would much rather hire students from our type of program (which I considered 13th grade, in a way) because we had a practical education. One illustrated with this story:

"We had two interns, an architect from one of the Ivy's and one from an art-tech school, and we gave them the same project, to get together some lighting for a place we were doing.

"In a couple of hours the art tech student came back with two piles from our resource room and said--this pile is basic lighting that I know will light the space functionally just by laying it out properly. This pile has more interesting lighting but I would need to figure out the room cavity and stuff like that, and I am a little slow at that.

"The architecture student had several doodles on paper showing rectangles with lightbulbs drawn inside, because he was conceptualizing.

As for Harvard, I took Organic Chem at a State school with a Harvard student, and no one wanted to be her lab partner because she broke a lot of equipment, blew up one experiment, and threw awat the desired product and kept the waste product in at least one other. She also had one of the lowest test averages in the class.

But my illustrations may make your point as well, Marcolo, because the "different" infill buildings I show are all between 40 and 50 years old and I think there was still some common sense at that time.

Next time I go into Harvard Square, I'll have to look for your examples (off-hand, I can't think what they might be).

Brady Bunch Dorm (it's much cheesier and uglier IRL)

Funeral home abomination. Behind the tall part you can see the church spire that once used to end that vista on Mass Ave.

The still mostly-empty building. You may be able to see that they literally sawed off the bottom of the old facade and kept it, broken bricks and all. Has no relation to the tinfoil wrapped building, not even by contrast.

The new Chancellery. Surprisingly designed by Robert Stern, a big advocate of "traditional." In trying to modernize traditional, he ended up with something indistinguishable from Albert Speer's works. Again, much worse IRL--I'll try to find more pictures.

That new grad student building. No picture can fully capture its hideousness.

In the misery likes company department, I'm somewhat heartened to learn that it isn't only in my humble little town where all (okay, most of) the architects appear to have been dropped on their heads in infancy.

I'd still love to be an architect though.

That sawed off building + silver building makes no sense whatsoever.

Not only is it overscaled for its site (not so much in height, but it takes up an entire city block on the Mass Ave side), but this is a bustling street with retail at virtually every door, then you get to this.

This is the least ugly of the buildings I posted. It's more funny, as in I literally burst out laughing first time I saw it. It doesn't recall an American Art Deco building. It just needs a balcony where the Fuehrer can address his people.

pal, I know what you mean about '30s and '40s public buildings sharing some similarities with the Stern. This not only feels different, but clearly acts as if it is facing some grand Platz rather than a pedestrian urban street.

I think the difference between those and the deco buildings I am going to post below is that these were meant to convey a sense of solidity in unstable times. These were WPA buildings, a couple post offices and the train station.

The big different with the main post office depot and the train station is that these were not placed in human-scale sites, but were really meant for long views. The post office annex is the only one on a pedestrian street, and it has some really nice reliefs at street level, and it is a business district. They are not on a street like yours at all.

(I am not a fan of the RAM Stern building that was recently completed here, either.

Annex:

It's a very weird feeling to walk past the Stern building. I would never say all of Mass Ave is pretty--it's not--but it is extremely pedestrian in scale. The businesses are mostly very small storefronts in 1910s-1920s single-story plazas, so there's a new thing to look at every 15 feet or so. The street is busy and a PITA to cross but even more of a PITA to park on or near, so you're meant to approach everything as a walker. Then you get to the Chancellery. Not only does it loom at you, but contrasted to what you just walked by, it feels like it takes forever to pass and get away from it--you walk and walk, and it's still there. Past that building, retail fades away for a couple blocks until Harvard Square starts it up again, but you're still walking by mostly older and much more human scaled buildings, as well as a small park across the street. Sore thumb.