Part and parcel to the image of Orange County in the popular imagination, the suburban tract home is a ubiquitous, popular, and oft-derided element of the Southern California architecture vernacular. The Freshly Squeezed: Survival on the Fringes Honorable Mention proposal crafts an extended timeline for this housing typology, revisiting its history and imagining its position in a speculative future marked by natural disasters and resource scarcity.

Freshly Squeezed: Survival on the Fringes, by Robert Alexander

For 60 years, the Orange County suburban tract house has been a model real estate product for living and consumption in Southern California. Thousands of homes were built following this model of development: large single family houses (2000 to 4000 square feet), built of wood frames with stucco and generally occupying the center 50 to 60 percent of their lots. These houses demonstrated efficiency in their construction and in their ability to sell quickly, but were usually designed with little to no regard for the environment that they were placed in. New technologies in grading and drainage in the 1960’s made it possible to adapt this housing model, which had been developed for flat lands, into one that could now be used in more fragile foothill and hillside zones.

These houses were built for a world that no longer exists.

In a very short time, natural forces such as drought, fire, and flooding have exposed the fragility of these housing developments frequently built on the edges of wilderness zones that burn as part of their natural cycle and are dependent upon some destruction through fire to regenerate.

This project extends a projected timeline from the founding of the county’s first city, Anaheim, in 1857, and looks forward 200 years. Using population projections and examples of events some natural, some political and some economic this project tells a story of one possible strategy for the continued occupation of existing housing developments in these marginal areas.

-

From the judges:

"Suburban development has much to do with our current dearth of resources so I appreciate the aim to transform it." – Allison Arieff, editorial director of SPUR

Check out the image gallery for Freshly Squeezed's complete presentation.

Click here to see the other winners in both the Pragmatic and Speculative categories!