The Progressive Architecture Of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr

5. Group Cottages

54 Group Cottages 0 NE MANIFESTATION of the progressive movements was a reformist effort led by architects and planners to improve living conditions for the working and middle classes. This effort took shape most prominently in England as the Garden City Movement, which promoted the creation of new self-sufficient towns that would realize the amenities of urban life in semirural and healthful surroundings. Garden City housing was intended to be a vast improvement on the crowded conditions and architectural monotony of typical urban housing. The remedy called for houses and broken housing rows that would be varied in architectural composition and set back behind gardens or courts. Special emphasis was laid on plantings and the provision of pleasant views and sunlight. In the hands of English architects such as Parker and Unwin and M. H. Baillie Scott, these buildings generally adopted the vernacular cottage idiom of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Directly influenced by William Morris, the Arts and Crafts designers emphasized traditional building materials and techniques and functional simplicity in plans and massing, time-honored characteristics of the vernacular buildings of the English countryside.1 The Garden City and the Arts and Crafts Movements together produced a turn-of-the-century revival of English domestic architecture and were influentia ! on the European continent and, to a lessor extent, in the United States as well. The architectural ideas appealed to certain American architects to whom other progressive modes may have seemed inordinately foreign and exotic. The planning ideas were belatedly employed in the so-called garden suburbs of the 1920s and 1930S, including Pittsburgh's own widely acclaimed Chatham Village.2 Years earlier, however, between 1907 and 1914, Scheibler was applying Garden City planning principles to multifamily housing in Pittsburgh. As the English sought to translate terrace housing into the Garden City context, Scheibler pursued the suburbanization of the American row house. Scheibler's term for his projects-group cottages-even has an English ring to it. Unlike some of his English colleagues , Scheibler left no clear evidence of social activism , but he must have shared some of their concerns . His group cottages demonstrated a willingness to address the need for multifamily housing and to seek worthy solutions. Scheibler must have advocated the concept to clients such as Robinson and Bruckman. Many of the group cottages proved to be successful speculative ventures for their clients, while they also supplied decent affordable housing at a time when many Pittsburgh-area residents were notoriously ill-housed.3 Scheibler's group cottages are comprised of row Fig. 47· Titus de Babula, row houses, 1905. Shown with alterations. houses that are arranged in small groups and either aligned in a linear sequence or organized around a central court. Projects such as Hamilton Cottages and the Singer Place row houses take maximum advantage of their natural siting, and even the simplest groups have porches or sun porches and are set back behind front yards. Open green spaces are variously defined by walls, piers, and plantings. Surprisingly, however, with few exceptions, the cottages themselves stand in considerable contrast to the vernacular cottage idiom of the Garden City architects. Specific sources for this work, if any, are not readily apparent. Titus de Babula's design for a group of flat-roofed poured-concrete row houses (fig. 47) for Pittsburgh's Frank Avenue in 1905, although rather clumsy, is extraordinary in its reductionist qualities.4 Scheibler could have known of these houses and might have received from them some of the inspiration and vocabulary for his group housing. In any event, Scheibler's immediate response to the group housing program was reductionist forms and flat roofs. Between 1907 and 1909 Scheibler produced three types of row houses. All had planer brick walls, minimal detailing, and flat roofs. Five groups of the first and simplest houses (fig. 48) were built on Inglenook Place, in Pittsburgh's Homewood neighborhood.1 The single plane of the facades and the continuous Group Cottages 55 post-and-lintel construction of the porches emphasize the unity of each group, and indeed of the street as a whole, while shoulder-height stucco walls demarcate the porches of individual units. The only exterior decoration is a checkerboard motif incised into the butt ends of timbers at the eaves of the porch roofs. Houses of the second row house type (fig. 49) were added to the original Inglenook Place development , and others were...