The corner store, the two-family semi-detached, the office above the shop: they were once all building blocks of the standard American neighborhood. Now, they are making a comeback, albeit in an altered form. A new breed of mixed-use mini-complexes, combining living, working, retail, and food and beverage, is emerging in gentrifying parts of the country. One developer who is spearheading this new hybrid is Philip Kafka. Based in Detroit, he has created several such mixed-use compound there, one of which, True North, marked with his signature: an updated version of the Quonset hut. Now he has expanded to Ft. Worth, Texas, where Marlon Blackwell, FAIA has used the formula to design PS1200, which houses a restaurant, coffee shop, retail, offices for a local magazine, a day spa, a photography studio, and eight lofts.
Magnolia Village, PS1200’s neighborhood, typifies the transformations in American neighborhoods near downtown cores. Around the corner, Type 3 apartment blocks are marching down the major arterial of West Rosedale. Parallel to that street, the small shops and workshops on West Magnolia are turning into coffee shops and clothing stores. In-between, small mixed-use buildings and office lofts are popping up between bungalows, some spiffed up, while others look unchanged for decades. In that landscape, Blackwell’s and Kafka’s buildings propose an order that looks towards preserving and elaborating the place’s texture, while going with the gentrification flow and giving that new economic injection a modernist appearance.
Blackwell’s and Kafka’s central invention, beyond using the Quonset hut, is breaking the development into parts, which goes a long way to bridging between the scale of the newer development and the fine grain of the surrounding residential, commercial, and light industrial structures. In Ft. Worth, Blackwell designed a row of eight three-story high units, each a separate Quonset hut, aligned along the back of the lot parallel to the street. In front, he placed a restaurant and a small retail container, split by a walkway. The complex presents itself as a commercial strip of the scale of the stores on West Magnolia, while the live/work volumes behind recall the larger scale on West Rosedale and the new mixed-use structures dotting the neighborhood.
The low buildings are clad in the same metal as the Quonset objects, but here in horizontal bands that evoke an abstracted and more emphatic version of the metal fronts sometimes used for diners and other structures during the 1930s through 1950s. The exceptions to all the metal are the front and back ends of the row of Quonset huts and three stucco volumes that house booths in the restaurant. These elements break down the building’s mass, leading to an all glass front facing the courtyard between the two commercial buildings and opening up to a small patio.
The metal bands are bold in their profiles, zipping around the volumes they contain in indented bands whose fastening Blackwell has expressed, without highlighting the presence of those screws. Against this horizontal underlining of the street, the Quonset huts emphasize their verticality, rising up around their bases to equally streamlined curves. There is no modulation, only the repetition of the arches over the eight separate units. Material, form, and scale all work together to make the building fit in without making it shy away from its newness.
The bases of each of the rear octet are modest and relatively low ceilinged, with few design flourishes. The tenants have modified them to suit their needs, whether as offices or, in one case, a restful place for spa treatments. It is the double-height spaces above these, which you reach through a set of external stairs, that fully use the Quonset hut’s spatial potential. While the front halves of their interiors are completely open and rise up to the structure’s full height, Blackwell has filled the other half with a plywood-fronted structure that recalls the figure of a human being standing in the space and reaching out towards the unit’s sides –an allusion the owner of one of the units made explicit by hanging a framed robe in that stance in the loft area above. This wood infill houses the kitchen, bathroom, and storage spaces below a small loft.
What is just as remarkable as the strength of the overall composition is the quality of the craftmanship on display. Kafka’s team of builders, used well by the architect, has created. The exterior is tight and precise, while on the Quonset huts’ interiors the white plaster rises up to the arch of the ceiling with virtually no modulation or variation. The sense of complete control over the forms gives PS1200 a sense of machined precision.
What makes the complex an evolution over the earlier versions Kafka developed in Detroit is the skill with which Blackwell has composed these pieces. The overall rhythm of the back units forms a visual base for the pavilions in front, which both affirm the street and open off of it to create an open space that develops from a small courtyard to an alley running along the front of the live/work units. Small details, like a corner window that pops out at angle as the metal bands continue their run around the corner of the restaurant block, punctuate the simple array.
This is, without a doubt, a piece of urban architecture that shows off both Blackwell’s skill and the cleverness of Kafka’s concept, which uses a cleaned-up version of an industrial material that is easy and fast to construct as a way to give living, working, and commercial activities a unified form with enough both historical reverberations and contemporaneity to make it fit into its neighborhood.
What should we think, however, about it as an act of gentrification? Certainly, such developments bring economic life to a district, support the city with increased taxes, and, at least in the case of PS1200, bring their own beauty to the place. They do so, however, by replacing what were affordable, if a bit run-down, places of living and business. Not only that, their presence makes the whole area more expensive.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
