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While the Gartz houses bear typical gable roofs, those of this working-class San Diego court are Mission Revival style.
Photo Courtesy of Doug Keister
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The California bungalow could well be the most beloved house form in Southern California today. Created and built between 1900 and the 1920s, it is also the most modern of 20th-century production houses, the product of architects trained in traditional design and practicing in the Midwest in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis.
Bungalows were designed a hundred years ago as active contributors to the character of some of America's greatest neighborhoods, and they still offer a plethora of valuable lessons. If urbanism is concerned primarily with the design of the spaces between buildings, then the street and the court are two principal aspects of a bungalow-based urbanism worth noting and admiring.
The streets in neighborhoods dominated by bungalows exhibit a number of extraordinary urbanistic characteristics. Typical front setbacks at 20´ to 30´ are very ample. Streets are relatively narrow.
The streetscape is highly articulate, typically of alternating canopy- shaped and column-shaped trees. The combined front yards of houses give the impression of a huge shared park overlooked by porches. (Cars are parked in backyard garages accessible through
side-yard driveways or alleys.) The repetition and variety of front porches and the
continuity and color of materials (principally shingles and siding) gives a vivid
impression of both individual houses and a rich fabric of continuous building. This is a rare moment of harmonious design in an ensemble of production-made, common, 20th-century buildings in America.
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Bungalow interiors aren't all
geometric moulding and Mission furniture, as shown by the Mediterranean flourishes inside the Andalusia near West Hollywood.
Douglas Keister from Red Tile Style due out Fall 2002
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As densities tended to increase within Southern California neighborhoods in the second decade of the 20th century, attached housing types—first duplexes and quadruplexes, then courtyard housing, popularly known as courts—were designed in bungalow form. At the turn of the 20th century, the court was a new housing type. Bungalows were arranged in a two-part pattern: one pair facing the street and more pairs situated sideways lining a courtyard—as many as would fit the depth of a lot. The two bungalows at the head of a court were designed as typical porch-dominated front-facing houses—no more and no less so than any other single-family house adjacent to them. The space between the bungalows, slightly wider than typical side-yard setbacks, became the entrance to the court. Cars were typically parked behind the court or to the side, entered from a side-yard pathway or alley. On rare occasions, and on sloping sites, cars were parked in underground garages. The consequence of the court design was a seamless incorporation of density into a neighborhood. The construction of a court next to a single-family house represented a density four to six times that of its neighbor, an increase that was unobstructive and virtually invisible.
On the interior of the lot, the space between each bungalow pair was large enough to define, through repetition, a central courtyard. Symbolically and functionally, this was a common garden that represented and enabled the simple social rituals of mutual dependence typical of community. The narrow spaces beside each pair became private gardens.
The design of single bungalows, duplex and quadruplex bungalows, bungalow courts, and their streets was so simple to repeat that they are now commonly found in city after city throughout Southern California. Their beauty can be measured both by their continuing popularity after over four generations of owners and by their inclusion in list after list of culturally significant buildings and neighborhoods. Isn't it time we start using more of the potent, common-sense architectural and urbanist lessons that bungalows are silently imparting to us every day?
Stefanos Polyzoides is a principal at Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists in Pasadena, California spolyzoides@mparchitect.com.
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