Right now, New York's Museum of Modern Art is hosting Foreclosed, for which they've asked five architectural teams to come up with new ideas for suburbs ravaged by the housing crisis. Glassell Park-based Zago Architecture has tackled Rosena Ranch, a subdivision just outside Rialto, in San Bernardino County. According to MoMA's website on the project, "Rosena Ranch is a typical bedroom suburb, despite its distance from Los Angeles, and it is easily accessed from a highway interchange. It has been under planning and construction since 2004, but since the financial downturn of 2008, work has ground nearly to a standstill, leaving an unexpected juxtaposition: at one end of the site, which is only 10% built, nearly identical large-scale houses stand side by side; at the other end, acres of terraced, unbuilt lots with little vegetation but commanding views of the nearby San Bernardino Mountains run along broad curving roads."
ZA took a subtle approach, "creating a richer mix of uses, housing types, living situations, and landscapes than the serial repetition of an individual home with a driveway and patch of lawn would allow." The blurred look in the renderings is intentional misregistration ("a printing-process error that leads to blurred images") used metaphorically. The team also allowed a little more nature in via seasonal rivers and natural wildlife routes and made the roads narrower and "more circuitous." The firm's Andrew Zago explains the plans in a video over at MoMA, where you'll also find more renderings and photos of the existing Rosena Ranch situation.
· PROPERTY WITH PROPERTIES [MoMA]
· Zago Architecture [Official Site]
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