Against Open Floorplans?

Some people live in a pod, some people don't; all of us need appropriate housing

I came across this thought-provoking piece, “The Apartment Problem,” from Eric Erins, and I wanted to share and bounce off of it. It raises a question that’s a little less discussed in housing circles: not the aesthetics of new construction, really, but the design of the floorplans and how people inhabit/live in them in an everyday sense.

He first says that he supports new housing and is not using his critiques as a roundabout way to be a NIMBY. But he does have critiques:

And yet…I really think a lot of the new apartments that are being built kind of suck.

I understand this probably seems like a minor thing to be on about. However as I sit in my own apartment, built in 1924, I think it’s important to acknowledge, what we build today can have long term consequences for how we live over the long term. Having lived in a few of these older apartments, and having visited a number of high-rise ‘luxury’ apartments in trendier neighborhoods, with all of the bells and whistles and amenities I find my preferences for these older ‘less desirable’ apartments solidified. They often lack central air conditioning, they don’t have in unit laundry, no co-working lounge, etc.. What they lack in some (overrated in my opinion) physical comforts they more than make up for in the way one lives in them day to day. I know I might be losing some of you here, so to expand on what I mean we’re going to need to look at some floor plans….

There are some YIMBYs who just don’t want to hear any critique of modern buildings, but most, I think, would be open to this discussion of floorplans and design. Some do talk about this, and it’s definitely an area of discussion, just less than other more basic questions.

This long bit on the sort of everyday way a floorplan is used/inhabited is excellent, and it’s kind of wonky (apartment floorplans, yawn) and also extremely relatable and relevant. A lot of policy stuff is like that, you know. The point Erins makes here—that a bad floorplan can turn people into friction and irritation—strikes me as a microcosm of the insight that by twinning people to cars and/or traffic, suburbia turns people into an annoyance.

Here’s Erins:

The fact that everything is off ‘the big room’ means you aren’t really getting away from anyone. If you want to sit in one of the bedrooms and read, take a nap, meditate, whatever, but somebody is watching a movie or doing something involved in the kitchen you aren’t escaping that noise. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have a baby or small child in an apartment like this. Getting a kid down for the night isn’t always the easiest task. Assuming you’ve won that battle for the night and your kid is down that ‘one room’ may practically be off limits for the night if your kid is a light sleeper. No settling in with your current binge watch on the couch, the TV is more than likely right next to your kids bedroom door, and given the likelihood that the developer did not spring for a solid core door you’re probably going to risk waking them right back up. Not that this is solely applicable to children. Watching TV loudly while your partner is sleeping because they have to be up early is equally as rude. Maybe this is a problem of being considerate of who you live with, but honestly I think this is just as much a design problem as anything else. A well designed layout should make living with people easier, not a constant exercise in consideration.

He compares this modern open floorplan—entering from the public hallway directly into the main room, and with all of the bedrooms/bathrooms entering directly into the main room as well—with an old floorplan from the 1920s:

You’ll notice it has a Foyer, creating a neutral space between the Living Room, the Dining Room, and the Bedroom ‘Wing’. Is a Foyer a waste of space? To a developer trying to squeeze as many apartments into a floor-plate as possible I’m sure it is. To me? I’m going to say no, and frankly I’m not even going to bother defending it. It’s nice to not walk directly into a room. To have a landing zone, a place to hang up my coat, or my guests coats. A place to welcome people in, and a place to have a long winded midwestern goodbye.

In other words, there is a sense in which the modern apartment exposes people. It’s not so much about raw square footage as it is about layout and the use of space. And in cities, where you’re always around people, it might become even more important to be able to simply get away a bit, to completely turn off that part of your brain that’s on the lookout for threats, disruptions, interruptions. Maybe most people don’t even think about this at the level of conscious thought, but I think most people probably feel it.

I guess there’s an even bigger and more fundamental question here, which is, how many human needs must be diluted or given up in order to accommodate more people? Maybe none must be. Or maybe they do, and we need to weigh the fundamental goodness of people against our own psychological needs as individual people. But it’s clear that design is crucial. Interesting stuff.

Later on in the piece, Erins notes the difficulty of having people over in an open-floorplan home. Some part of me—the conservative, the traditionalist, the kid who remembers big holiday gatherings in a big single-family house—really feels this:

New build apartments simply do not have ceremonial spaces. Where would one have a Thanksgiving dinner with extended family in a modern combined kitchen LR/DR apartment? I’m not saying it isn’t done, and I by no means want to imply events held in rooms like that are any less meaningful. However I do think one setting is frankly more aspirational than the other, and that modern apartment design by and large doesn’t have the physical room for some of these more formal social scripts is something worth noting.

And he goes on:

The ‘abundance’ crowd promises us cheap housing if we simply build our way out of our shortage. However looking at the broader American public, and families especially I’m not sure that modern apartments are nearly nice enough to entice them into cities. If you want to appeal to them apartments need to actually compete with houses on something other than proximity to amenities. Home matters, to Americans especially. Modern apartment design probably reads as austerity to most suburbanites (and even many urbanites who want families) and for good reason.

The idea of modern apartments lacking “ceremonial” spaces is important. You can kind of see how and why some folks imagine and/or discern a line from urbanism to anti-family sentiment/low fertility/attacking America/whatever. There’s something about not having those little spaces that feels like an attack on a way of being human. There’s an abstraction to it, a lack of understanding of what makes home.

As with Erins, I wouldn’t take any of my thoughts here to mean we shouldn’t build new homes unless they’re perfect. And, of course, for some people these new homes probably are perfect. It’s very easy to mistake your own preferences for truths about the world or for analysis of public policy.

But this piece really made me think, and I’m curious what you think of all this.

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Related Reading:

New Construction Blues, Northern Virginia Edition

Talk Notes: Traffic and Crowding

I’ve Seen This House Before

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