Apartments Were an Urban Innovation
Like just about everything else about modern cities, apartments were a big change from what cities were like before the 20th century. "The Evolution of the Apartment," a short article in The New York Times, traces the changes in the design of living space in buildings, and therefore buildings themselves, and eventually the entire cityscape.
"The city’s first apartment buildings, like the Dakota, the Gramercy and the Chelsea, were constructed in the 1870s. Unlike the city’s existing tenements — those greasy, cholera-ridden death traps described in books like Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives” — apartments offered amenities like telephones, electric lighting, commercial refrigerators, private dining rooms and ground-floor restaurants that could deliver food to your unit."
This was but the first of a set of transformations triggered by consumer interests, technology, economic change, and public policies:
"In 1901, New York State banned tenements, and toilets, natural light and ventilation were added to existing buildings to make them more sanitary. During the depression, our city’s luxury apartments were chopped up and sold off, while servant’s quarters were converted into bedrooms. And in 1935, the nation’s first public housing units went up on the Lower East Side."
Today a new set of urban imperatives are gradually reshaping living space, buildings, and city scapes: the need to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce water consumption; the consequential challenge of affordability and sufficient housing; and the need to renature cities. The next evolution is becoming visible: Buildings that produce more energy than they consume and capture stormwater onsite to be recycled. Increased density of housing in already built areas and Transit Oriented Development. Green infrastructure, inside and outside of buildings, and biophilic immersion.
