FORECLOSED: REHOUSING
THE AMERICAN DREAM

PROPERTY WITH PROPERTIES

Andrew Zago, Zago Architecture

Rialto has long been a nodal point in Southern California's "Inland Empire"—once a heartland of agribusiness and today one of the largest metropolitan regions in the country, part of the fabric of development that spreads between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Yet this site—Rosena Ranch, just outside Rialto's city limits—is the youngest of the five studied in Foreclosed. More

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. This unincorporated subdivision will become part of Rialto upon completion; an abandoned airport cuts it off from the depressed downtown and from the San Bernardino National Forest on the other side of the I-15 highway.

Rather than attempting to remake the failed subdivision fundamentally, the interdisciplinary team, led by Andrew Zago of Zago Architecture, set out to "relax the boundaries" of the suburb, 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. Using misregistration—a printing-process error that leads to blurred images—as a metaphor, the team developed a system of manipulating housing type and property divisions to produce unexpected diversity, including duplexes and even row houses, achieving the classic suburban goal of merging indoors and outdoors in novel ways. The proposal also adjusts the planning of the site overall, narrowing the roads and making them more circuitous. Seasonal rivers and wildlife are allowed to move through the site in natural channels, so that the suburb cohabits with the splendor of the adjacent mountains rather than setting itself apart from them as a pastoral place.

Zago Architecture: Team: Alysen Hiller, project manager. Maren Allen, Matthew Au, Sarah Blankenbaker, Tyler McMartin, Chris Skeens, Paul Stoelting, dale Strong. assistants: erin Besler, Yu Ping Hsieh, Dong Woo Kim, Yunlong Li, Ana Muñoz, Kai Reaver, Rae Solomon, Ben Warwas, Jingyan Zhang. Arut Team: Eugene de Souza, mechanical engineer. Said Gharbieh, civil/transportation engineer. Anthony Kirby, infrastructure engineer. Jamey Lyzun, mechanical engineer. Urban & Ecological Design Lab Team: James Axley, Jacob Dugopolski, Yoshiki Harada, Alisa May, Nikki Springer, Emily Stevenson, Timothy Terway. Special Consultant: Robert E. Somol, director, School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago. Photographer: Joshua White. Special Thanks: Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc), Dr. David and Sylvelin Bouwman, Neil Denari, Todd Gannon, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Nancy Grimm, Jeffrey Kipnis, and United States Artists.

David Bergman, economist
Metropolitan Research and Economics, and Faculty, Southern California Institute of Architecture

Laura Bouwman, architect
Zago Architecture, and Faculty, University of Michigan

Bruce Danziger, engineer
Arup

Alexander Felson, ecologist
Urban & Ecological Design Lab, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences