LOW COST HOUSING: CLIFF MAY

The subject is Cliff May again. I thought I'd discuss May's efforts to create low-cost housing. We know May could build wonderful ranch houses when he had a decent budget and room to spread out. Now let's see what he could do with tract houses on small urban lots.

Here's (above) one of May's smallest living rooms. It looks large because a sliding glass door has been opened and the patio's been made to look like part of the living room. Both have the same floor color and similar furniture. To heighten the effect the board and baten outdoor fence is made to look like an indoor wall. A nifty idea, eh? Of course this open wall solution only works in the sunbelt where winters are mild.

By the way, that fire pit on the patio floor (above) is for real campfires. There's no fireplace. Maybe that would have cost too much.

Here's (above) a different Cliff May house and an even smaller living room. Here the kitchen, living room and dining room are all in one enclosure. Like I said, this is a small house!

The partition behind the couch is oddly high and intrusive. It dominates the room. I'm guessing it's there because May needed space for kitchen cupboards. He couldn't put them against the glass wall facing the yard because that would have violated his belief about the need to bring the outside in. I'll bet May regretted this decision.

One last comment: Maybe May went too far in his effort to cut costs. The upper wall above the fireplace, the area just under the roof, cries out for glass. Whatever the cost it would have been worth it.

In the color photograph above we don't see the wall opposite the sofa. I like to imagine that it looked like this one (the b&w photo above) from yet another May house: louvered wall panels that open up and out during the warm weather, and which can be easily lowered when it gets cold. In the "up" position walls like this can be made to look like extentions of the roof.

And how do you like the wide steps in the back yard? That's an interesting idea, too. It makes the yard seem larger. And are the lounges in the yard deliberately smaller than normal?

I absolutely love Cliff May's designs but I have to admit that he didn't really solve the low cost housing problem. That's okay, Frank Lloyd Wright couldn't solve it either. In fact, some 60+ years later we're still wrestling with it.

We do have one advantage that architects in May's time didn't have, and that's the availability of a wide variety of small, scaled-down furniture, like the kind in the IKEA promotion above. Maybe ours will be the generation that makes the low cost breakthrough.