no-ranch: future potentials in historical significance (the ranch house in the city)

N O - R A N C HFuture Potentials in Historical Significance: The Ranch House in the City

Antonio Pacheco, 2015

New Orleans

Dixieland Ranch Future Potentials

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Antonio Pacheco, 2014All Rights Reserved

This is an independently-published academic work produced exclusively by the author and meant for informational purposes only; it is not for sale. All attempts have been made to properly cite and acknowledge referenced images and texts; omissions shall be rectified as they are discovered. If omissions are discovered,

please contact the author at [email protected]

THIS IS A DRAFT

Nouveau Ranch

Author: Antonio Pacheco Critic: Rebecca Fitzgerald

N O - R A N C HFuture Potentials in Historical Significance: The Ranch House in New OrleansFuture Potentials in Historical Significance: The Ranch House in the City

Antonio Pacheco, 2015


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Whereas typical vernacular architectures are by and large defined architecturally by their varied approaches to mitigating the sweltering or stifling discomforts of any region’s climate, the architectural qualities of the ranch house are defined mainly by a life predicated upon the occupation of air conditioned space. The availability and affordability of technological advancements like forced air and the automobile defined the architectural and social vocabulary of the post-war building industry. This vocabulary is one that largely excludes considerations of climate mitigation, while simultaneously requiring a more generous organization of land, resources, and energy in order to operate successfully. Whereas Victorian townhouses ventilate via the confluence of high ceilings and elaborate organizations of windows and transoms and are sited on compact, narrow plots of land in the city, ranch houses reach for a different set of climatic and organizational requirements rooted in petrochemicals and the suburban field. The ranch house was developed for a time where active ventilation and generous land use were the norm and this is reflected in the scale of their organization, layout, and siting. These factors, of course, played a pivotal role in the manufacture and dissemination of the post-war ideal of the “American Dream.” Ranch houses, however, are haphazard and awkward in their proportioning and arrangement, and while a general appreciation for the high-minded, affluent aspects of “Mid-Century Modern” architecture is in full-swing, in depth analysis of the architectural significance of the ranch house as infill development in urban, working class environments is lacking. Our interest here, however, has little to do with the automobile and air conditioning but rather, looks to the deeper and more existential aspects of the ranch house: if the postwar notion of “normal” (economically, socially, sartorially, etc) was considered ideal, what does it mean to be “normal” architecturally? An idealized notion of normality lies at the heart of the postwar attitude and came to define the architecture of that era. This ideal normalcy can also be found at the root of Modernism in architecture. If we take Modernism in architecture to be defined by a philosophical preference for progress through uniformity, there is perhaps fertile ground from which to observe a brand of architecture that was utilized to signal the attainment of a shared and seemingly monolithic ideal, the aforementioned “American Dream.” This monolithic ideal was on display everywhere that ranch houses exist and is a vital component of both the process of modernisation in America as well as Modernism, in general. The confluence of tax policies, lending practices, social attitudes and the end of a global war generated a unified spasm of new development across the land. This spasm bore one manifestation in the city and another in the open

Dixieland Ranch

Future Potentials in Historic Significance for Structures of the

Recent Past


Ranch: the spirit that creates ranch houses, that favors their method of existence over that of prior eras; a generic, ‘everyman’s’ manifestation of Modernism in architecture and culture defined by the ubiquity of ‘new money’ in the post-war American landscape ...

Nouveau Ranch

fields. The city was ripped apart, carved into constituent components, lobotomized and segregated by highways, zoning, and tower blocks that effectively broke the 19th century version of the American city. The surburbs provided a catch basin for the exodus from this lobotomized city while formalizing these divisive tendencies across a post-agricultural expanse. The city’s large swaths of demolition and redevelopment were mirrored across the countryside by the erection of new sub-divisions, each organized along ideological, political, and economic lines aiming to keep children safe, poor people of color out, or showcase the wealth of a newly minted class of literally landed gentry. This process has come to definite the mantra of the “American Dream” in built form. American folklore conveys that this dream -the promise that upward social mobility is afforded to those who work hard and that the attainment of these two things is synonymous with freedom- is within reach regardless of social class or birthright, and in being so, sets up an cultural ideal whereby architecture is used to codify and Americanize Modernism’s notion of “progress through uniformity.” Our discussion here deals with this ephemeral ideal: the dream of having the freedom to attain. Labeling something a “discussion on the ranch house” is misleading because given our prior definitions, key markers of any discrete architecture type include the way in which those structures relate to the land they sit on and to other buildings, generally speaking. So, this discussion is one that should also concern the development of suburban areas in general, including, shopping malls, highways, and the vacated city centers left behind in their wake. There are plenty of other scholars who are engaging with these topics more effectively than we can, so we choose to focus more directly on the amorphous intersection between architecture and desire and to do so through direct and measured observation of the ranch house type. The other issue with a “discussion on the ranch house” is that though defined by and representative of a monolithic mythology, the ranch house always expresses differentiated preferences, trends, and conditions. Many different kinds of ranch houses exist and many of those types exist in many different places. Ranch houses are defined by the tension expressed in this duality and that, ultimately, is what makes their contemporary condition require analysis.

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Ranch: genericism, ubiquity, uncompromising uniformity, and a generous use of land, water, and energy.

Nouveau Ranch

Nouveau Ranch

The ranch house is a special type, generally speaking, because it represents a continuation and exaggeration of the initial dissemination of east coast architectural types across the wider American country resulting from the late-19th century’s “railroad era,” effects of which lasted until the end of World War II. This era saw the wholesale dissemination of East Coast vernacular styles across the country, where these imported influences collided directly with traditional modes of inhabitation. Ranch houses were inserted into and managed to overtake the trajectory of this discourse after World War II, becoming a generic and ubiquitous system of inhabitation for most Americans. This replacement system of inhabitation was superimposed on the existing fabric of every region, not slowly and naturally like during the railroad era, but all at once, as a by-product of public and social policy and their attendant propaganda machines. The halcyon era following World War II resulted in the bountiful collection of far-flung suburban enclaves smattered with post-war homes and their descendants that we occupy into today. Not only that, but ranch houses found their way into the city, as well, and are present as constituent components of urban renewal, slum clearance, and restrictive covenants that defined that era’s approach to urbanism while simultaneously being expressive of the overall cultural preference for the symbolism imbued in ranch house aesthetics regardless of actual locale. Today, the condition of the American inner city is directly related to the values embedded within the ranch house and in the technocratic and propagandistic instruments that elevated Ranch to its elysian status. In fact, even traditionally urban neighborhoods are likely to have some aspect of ranch house derivative lurking in their midsts and most Americans, whether they grew up in the suburbs or not, have an intimate relationship with the ranch house. Typical preservationists, clinging to the mythos of the 19th century city, use regulation and tax incentivization to stifle or blot out these tendencies, but they should be celebrated. Across rural America, use of the post war architectural vocabulary of stick construction, lowly-pitched roofs, and slabs-on-grade went hand-in-hand with modernization efforts and later, with the proliferation of “big-box” hardware stores, so that we find many aspects of Ranch sprinkled all over America, from dense working class neighborhoods along the East Coast to just off of Main Street in small towns. From its inception, however, ranch house development has been deeply influenced by localized building cultures, labor systems, and political definitions. These aspects have particularized Ranch and made real the regional and cultural eccentricities of the American psyche. And because, in recent eras, these architectures themselves have been ridiculed for the qualities that initially made them distinctive- genericism, ubiquity, uncompromising uniformity, and generous use of land, water, and energy- they have become somewhat mitigated in their numbers and maligned in their reputation. In this way, ranch houses represent a very specific type of architecture that, though present across a wide landscape, is actually of a relatively finite and localized existence. The methods through which the ranch house was disseminated, reproduced, and consumed across the American landscape, though described as monolithic, has been was anything but. Each municipality, every town, neighborhood and block, every parcel of land, is subject to local ordinance, culture, and patrimony. These ‘on-the-ground’ phenomena, when coupled with the variety of building traditions already present in each location at the onset of the post-war boom, have actually produced a great deal of variety within the ranch house type. It is this variety within monotony that defines the spirit behind ranch houses.


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An idealized Ranch structure exhibiting textbook aspects of ‘Warehouse Classicism,’ as observed in New Orleans.

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Crescent City Case Study

While the predominant discourse surrounding Modernism is one that emphasizes its inability to allow difference, it is possible to see Modernism’s contribution as one of injecting a certain level of sameness everywhere, though in a highly localized way. That is, Modernism supports the insertion of specific types in varied locales: slab buildings in France, panel buildings in Germany, stick frame buildings in Chicago and New York, and tract housing in Los Angeles and Detroit or whatever the case may be, but these introduced types each take on a life of their own specific to each respective place, over time. The insertion of a specific and generic building vocabulary into a traditional society results in the spontaneous creation of new types. Societies, over time, take ownership over new vocabularies and materials and utilize them to express a hybridized set of beliefs combining existing, traditional values, with the new possibilities presented by the opportunity for ubiquitous, generic consumption by the masses across time. The result is a plurality of new approaches rooted in tradition but ultimately facilitated by the complexities inherent in this new level and manifestation of consumption. According to this supposition, if we were to take the city of New Orleans as a case study in the ability of a place to take hold of Modernism and Ranch and subvert each movement’s native tendencies- sameness, ubiquity, and bigness - towards its own ends, we would come to see that despite that city’s immense catalogue of Victorian structures, the ranch house has had a much larger hand in shaping the future of the built environment than is currently recognized. The ranch house physically represents Modernism’s impact on New Orleans and as a discrete layer of historical development and consumption, further becomes that era’s contribution to the vernacular canon deployed throughout that city and its environs. As one can trace creole cottages to original colonisation, plantation homes to the slave era, the double shotgun to Victorian times, and the bungalow to the Craftsman period, so too can the ranch house come to symbolize New Orleans’ post-war condition. New Orleans’ collection of ranch houses has an unironic proclivity toward sameness. Their proportioning and organization are so jarring in comparison to the tout ensemble of an otherwise Victorian city that they are remarkably easy to forget, beyond consideration. The lowly, squat, oblong brick boxes pale in comparison to the slender shotguns and landed mansions. But amid this unrequited pomp, there exists a world of Ranch-treasure. These homes share a variety of common characteristics that comprise a unified and legitimate type and style across these lands. Blocks in New Orleans, generally speaking, measure 300’ by 300’, are organized according to a key-lot configuration and are usually subdivided into 15-, 20-, 30-, and 60-foot frontages and are either 100- or 150- feet deep. Here, street frontage is a valuable marker of wealth and status and simultaneously creates a singular, monolithic facade meant to interact with the milieu, relegating other


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While the predominant discourse surrounding Modernism is one that emphasizes its inability to allow difference, it is possible to see Modernism’s contribution as one of injecting a certain level of sameness everywhere, though in a highly localized way. That is, Modernism supports the insertion of specific types in varied locales: slab buildings in France, panel buildings in Germany, stick frame buildings in Chicago and New York, and tract housing in Los Angeles and Detroit or whatever the case may be, but these introduced types each take on a life of their own specific to each respective place, over time. The insertion of a specific and generic building vocabulary into a traditional society results in the spontaneous creation of new types. Societies, over time, take ownership over new vocabularies and materials and utilize them to express a hybridized set of beliefs combining existing, traditional values, with the new possibilities presented by the opportunity for ubiquitous, generic consumption by the masses across time. The result is a plurality of new approaches rooted in tradition but ultimately facilitated by the complexities inherent in this new level and manifestation of consumption. According to this supposition, if we were to take the city of New Orleans as a case study in the ability of a place to take hold of Modernism and Ranch and subvert each movement’s native tendencies- sameness, ubiquity, and bigness - towards its own ends, we would come to see that despite that city’s immense catalogue of Victorian structures, the ranch house has had a much larger hand in shaping the future of the built environment than is currently recognized. The ranch house physically represents Modernism’s impact on New Orleans and as a discrete layer of historical development and consumption, further becomes that era’s contribution to the vernacular canon deployed throughout that city and its environs. As one can trace creole cottages to original colonisation, plantation homes to the slave era, the double shotgun to Victorian times, and the bungalow to the Craftsman period, so too can the ranch house come to symbolize New Orleans’ post-war condition. New Orleans’ collection of ranch houses has an unironic proclivity toward sameness. Their proportioning and organization are so jarring in comparison to the tout ensemble of an otherwise Victorian city that they are remarkably easy to forget, beyond consideration. The lowly, squat, oblong brick boxes pale in comparison to the slender shotguns and landed mansions. But amid this unrequited pomp, there exists a world of Ranch-treasure. These homes share a variety of common characteristics that comprise a unified and legitimate type and style across these lands. Blocks in New Orleans, generally speaking, measure 300’ by 300’, are organized according to a key-lot configuration and are usually subdivided into 15-, 20-, 30-,

Artifice of the Duplex: the condition wherein a building deploys aspirational means of ornamentation and formal sleights of hand in order to imply a status, lineage, or affectation that clouds that building’s more humble nature.

Warehouse Classicism: The ready-made deployment of the aspirational means of ornamentation inherent to Duplex Artifice; The resulting ubiquitous tendencies in the built environment resulting from the widespread dissemination of mass-produced architectural components.

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and 60-foot frontages and are either 100- or 150- feet deep. Here, street frontage is a valuable marker of wealth and status and simultaneously creates a singular, monolithic facade meant to interact with the milieu, relegating other facades and the organization of grounds as after thoughts. Suburban-style development, on the other hand, deploys a variety of block sizes and configurations and in fact uses the concentration of these disparate block morphologies to signify changes in zoning and use: straight streets are for fast driving, curvy ones for slow. In a residential setting, pinwheel lot division within blocks allows for each individual block to showcase a handful of detached homes and for each individual lot to have a dynamic and engaging interaction with automobile occupants. New Orleans’ adaptation of the ranch house rests on the synthesis between the urban key lot and the suburban pinwheel design. The synthesis, however, as stated previously, is resolutely unimpressive. The Ranch type is so incongruous to the urban condition that all attempts are made to hybridize typical urban forms like the double shotgun, creole cottage, and bungalow with the ranch house to make the postwar American vernacular more amenable to the city’s urban grid. New Orleans is a city with a history of owner-occupied multi-family structures, structures that were packed tightly together and decorated with Victorian sensibilities and though less prestigious than single family homes, were still held in high esteem due to their affordability and superficial beauty. Whereas the apartment in New York City or the row house in Baltimore might be considered the de facto working class housing type in those respective cities, in New Orleans, it is the double that reigns supreme. Moreover, the city’s inherently dense but strictly stratified condition meant that people mixed frequently in the streets and that the space between people and things was relatively close. So, any effort aimed at rectifying the ranch house to the city had to address the ubiquity of the double and its associated Victorian architecture. So, in New Orleans, we find a great number of duplex ranch houses, as well as the comparatively rambling single-family homes. Out of this condition comes the prevailing ideological trope employed by ranch houses here: artifice. It is through deception that the ranch house is adapted to New Orleans, a condition referred to here as the Artifice of the Duplex. The Artifice of the Duplex supposes that the architecture of the American Dream has both a symbolic existence as well as an architectonic one, that it is a forthright stylistic condition with shared traits, proportions, and strategies. The formal aspects of this idealized expression have their roots in the trade catalogs and pattern books of the 18th and 19th century construction industries and in the rapid urban expansion inherent in the American condition during this time. For as long as Americans have been colonizing their continent, they have employed an eclectic and distinctly American classicism to convey a sense of permanence and progress simultaneously. So, if we consider the ranch house type as one aspect of modernism’s contribution to the American city, we can consider the appliqué of this American classicism as its second half. The post-war boom experienced in New Orleans encapsulated economic aspiration and civil rights along with the national themes of home ownership and corporate business resulting in a culturally loaded significance embodied within the ranch house. The ranch house was a literal and stylistic break from the baggage-loaded city of the past. In being such, the motifs rendered were those of a “streamlined” and “clean” Modernism, an evocation of the same technological forces that were draining and paving over vast swaths of swamp in the city, containerizing the port, and adapting the area’s economic core to a then-booming resource-extraction industry. But, one crucial aspect of the evocation of Modernism is that outside of a few exemplary exercises in regional modernism, this evocation was anything but absolute. Common ranch houses in New Orleans are nearly always built of brick and though air-conditioned, often contain functional (as well as non-functional front porches), an extremely prevalent vernacular feature aimed at mitigating the hot, humid climate of the region. These porches are more or less carved out of the typical mass of the ranch house (as opposed to vernacular porches, which are essentially slight, tacked on spaces projecting from the main building envelope. Furthermore, they are typically ornamented with either cast iron motifs directly borrowed from the Victorian era cast iron grilles that adorn vernacular buildings in the city’s colonial-era French Quarter neighborhood, or with neoclassical columns reminiscent of traditional Uptown (American Sector) tendencies. And it is these forms of ornamentation that perhaps make New Orleans ranch houses an excellent case study, because why go through the process of reaching for modernity only to then paste over that modernity in classical motifs? Artifice of the Duplex is at work: what better way to symbolize a sense of timelessness in new construction than through material and symbolic applique? So combined in the ranch house, we see the emergence of a new prototypical architectural type coupled with the application of a new iteration of American classicism resulting in new general condition marked by variegated sameness. This variegated sameness is synonymous with the American Dream generations aspire to and has come to define America’s architectural moment from then on. Artifice of the duplex also supposes that shared values in this new architecture are most forcefully disseminated and evoked through the aforementioned aspirational means of ornamentation and formal sleights of hand that are only possible given the result from the widespread dissemination of the mass-produced architectural components that give


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An idealized Ranch structure exhibiting textbook aspects of ‘Warehouse Classicism,’ as observed in New Orleans.

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A Guide to Warehouse Classicism


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A Guide to Warehouse Classicism

Typical Window Configurations:

Basic Variants

Nouveau Ranch


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Ranch: genericism, ubiquity, uncompromising uniformity, and a generous use of land, water, and energy.

Crescent City Case Study

Holy Cross- A Case Study Neighborhood

The research contained within this document combines academic research, on-the-ground observation, and thoughtful conjecture in order to posit an order that attempts to describe the ranch house as it exists in New Orleans today. This research was conducted over a six month period of inquiry under the tutelage of Director John Stubbs and Beth Jacob while the author was a graduate student at Tulane University’s School of Architecture. Initially developed under the guise of a studio assignment, this work utilizes research conducted in class as a basis for a case study looking into the New Orleans ranch house. The studio in question was aimed at conducting historical research over a variety of aspects of New Orleans’ Holy Cross neighborhood. The documented tendencies presented here are informed from this research and independent research conducted in the Summer and Fall of 2014 The research presented here owes a great debt to the work of Thomas Hubka at the Center for Vernacular Studies and to his book, “Houses with No Names,” which was used as conceptual guide for this project. Generally speaking, the Holy Cross neighborhood is a 19th century working class enclave that though at one time contiguous with the rest of New Orleans, had its connection severed by the construction of the city’s industrial canal in 1918. The neighborhood is bounded on its other sides by the Mississippi River, the still-active Louisiana National Guard compound at Jackson Barracks, and the remaining Lower Ninth Ward. Urbanization here coalesced around the streetcar lines that crossed into the Lower Ninth Ward from the city on Dauphine Street. A small commercial strip and the now-deconsecrated St. Maurice church complex are located at what once was the terminus of the line. Holy Cross marks the furthest downriver boundary of the city and so, was slower to urbanize, generally speaking, and managed to maintain a rural and utilitarian character for longer than many other parts of the city. Further, blocks in the neighborhood average a length of 335’ on each side instead of the 300’ per side that is common in the rest of the city, so structures were typically located on slightly larger lots than typical. Chain of Title research conducted at the Notarial Archives in the Land Records Division of the Office of the Clerk of Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans as well as utility records fromt the Louisiana Division/City Archives section at New Orleans Public Library suggest that areas closer to the Mississippi River were more industrial in function, housing warehouses and shipping facilities as well as small truck farms and other types of undeveloped lots. Beginning with a post-war manufacturing slowdown and culminating with the containerization of the Port of New Orleans, the Holy Cross neighborhood experienced a dramatic loss in economic vitality. Simultaneously, with large structures formerly dedicated to the shipping industry now rendered obsolete, large expanses of prime land opened up for development. These plots of land: large, contiguous, and affordable, were in the perfect position to be subdivided and built upon in the post-war tendency of suburban ranch house. But, again, the structures we find here are not quite the ramblers of nearly (and wholly suburban) Jefferson Parish, but something very clearly hewn from the New Orleans stock of house types. Generally speaking, Holy Cross contains variations on a ranch theme, with ranch proportions (10’ floor heights, lowly-pitched roofs and windows differentiated according to internal use) seemingly cross-bred with existing functional types, namely the creole cottage and associated slaves quarters, as well as the shotgun single and shotgun double. The resulting hybrids represent an effort at adopting a new stylistic phenomena to highly localized regulatory and typological milieu. Research conducted over the course of this period of study yielded the development of four distinct New Orleans-specific ranch types, referred to here as ‘Dixieland Ranch.’ Dixieland Ranch, as discussed here, pertains to the types found only in the Holy Cross neighborhood, types that perhaps speak to larger trends waiting to be found across the city.


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Generally speaking, the four types discerned here are as follows:

Cottage Variant-Single Family Structure

The Cottage Variant is a single family structure that loosely references the ubiquitous creole cottage type synonymous with the oldest quarters of the city, namely the Vieux Carre, Treme, and Fauborg Marigny neighborhoods. Itself an adaptation of the double parlor house, creole cottages typically feature a cluster of open and flexible rooms grouped on either side of two central fireplaces. These structures typically front the street with two pairs of floor-to-ceiling double doors, typically covered with either board-and-batten or louvered shutters. Creole Cottages also feature a small roof projection that covers the first five feet of the sidewalk, this projection, known as an abat-vent contains several circular air vents used to facilitate passive cooling in the structure through the fluctuation of a mass of insulated air located in the roof and attic space of each structure. The Cottage Variant of the ranch house keeps the creole cottage’s pinewheel plan but, instead of four open rooms, contains a central circulation space (a type of stubby hallway), around which bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, living room and dining room revolve. These roughly 1000 square foot structures typically measure 25’x40’ and sit on 3500 square foot lots (30’x115’). Cottage Variants, like two other of the four ranch types discussed here, has two main entry points, one from the driveway ( located off of the kitchen, in the “rear” of the house, and one along a the longitudinal axis of the house, at the center of what is treated as a primary facade.

903 St. Maurice

New Orleans Ranch Types


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Cottage Variant-Single Family Structure

These roughly 1000 square foot structures typically measure

25’x40’ and sit on 3500 square foot lots (30’x115’).


The Cottage Variant of the ranch house keeps the creole cottage’s pinewheel plan but, instead of four open rooms, contains a central circulation space (a type of stubby hallway), around which bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, living room and dining room

revolve.

Cottage Variants, like two other of the four ranch types discussed here, has two main entry points,

one from the driveway ( located off of the kitchen, in the “rear” of the house, and one along a the

longitudinal axis of the house, at the center of what is treated as a primary facade.


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Standard Double- Multiple Family Structure

The Standard Double variant is a multi-family structure that directly references the single-family nature of the Cottage Variant in an attempt to mask its true multi-family nature. These doubles usually exist as a pair of mirrored room-on-room configurations, similar to the Shotgun Single and Shotgun Double types found around the city’s working class, Victorian neighborhoods like Bywater, Central City, and Mid City, with a marked increase in the privacy associated with a room, the deeper into the unit one progresses. Each unit has two access points, one from a principal street (opening onto a living room) and one from a shared driveway (opening onto the kitchen). These 1800 square foot structures (900 square feet per unit) typically measure 30’x60’ (15’x60’ per unit) and sit on 7200 square foot (60’x117’) lots.

903 St. Maurice

no-ranch: future potentials in historical significance (the ranch house in the city)

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