Prefabrication experiments - 428 - ML(urban blocks) - Modernist principles and the Yerba Buena Lofts

 

The urban block comprised of different apartment types and shapes organized in a coherent aggregation influences social diversity within collective housing projects. Arranging differentiated relations also presents opportunities to enrich an edifice's appearance by particularizing façades that celebrate or camouflage the tensions between typological organization and their external affirmation. Modern prototypes like Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation mezzanine unit or Mies Van de Rohe’s Lafayette Parks interlocking flats, and even Alvar Aalto’s Hansaviertal Apartments provide iconic examples of intertwining spaces to create dynamic housing patterns. While the three prototypes were not factory produced, their repetitive grids and composing spatial elements feigned an industrialized posture which played into modernism’s serial production narrative. 

 

Contemporary architects still combine and relate these ideas and disciplinary subplots to showcase innovative urban housing strategies. The Yerba Buena Loft units designed by Stanley Saitowitz and Natoma architects in San Fransicso  (2002) employ a mezzanine loft typical flat section along with a thick façade holding loggias or winter garden balconies to shape a crenellated streetscape pattern of masses and voids within a concrete superstructure, betraying their modernist roots. The apartment building’s section bridges front and back streets with double height commercial spaces establishing a pedestrian scale and a central portion of the deep section containing a four-story parking structure. Above this fourth floor, the building is divided into 2 parts: deeper mezzanine units on the south and half depth mezzanine units on the north. Both north and south units use the same principles to organize flexible loft units. The double height loggia spaces relating to Folsom Street side are directly linked to a corresponding interior space where a spiral stair leads to a bedroom open to the lower level. The mezzanine unit sections, and exterior loggias are repeated throughout the block. 

 

Flexibility principles are evident in the ordering of served and service spaces: Wet rooms, kitchens and baths, are concentrated on corridor and demising walls freeing adjacent spaces to varied organizations. The rigorous grid-based concrete structure presents an industrial discourse conveying a dynamic interplay between skin, structure, and interior planning. 

 

Yerba Buena Lofts