Building lot

“ However, the low, even ground was elaborately divided into blocks, and the blocks, in their turn, into building lots, to be in readiness for the possible purchaser, who might appear at any moment. On the boundary line between the town and this suburban region was the little brick school-house; and beyond it lay the open ground which now, in the absence of any inhabitants, was still used as a wood yard for the distant smelter, whose constant fires easily devoured the vast piles of wood daily unloaded by the trains which ran down the spur of track leading to the yard. ”

“ The Assembly owns a hundred acres of land, which have been laid out into parks, drives, avenues, and building lots. About twenty-five acres have already been improved, and quite a number of lots have been sold to individuals upon which to build cottages. ”

“ By this time the village would have grown out toward your grounds, and perhaps doubled, may be quadrupled their value for building lots, some of which you could sell, and adding the amount to the savings of a couple of years, be able to build one or two more comfortable little houses on your own lots. ”

“ In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or stone, and on each side of it or in front of it a structure one fourth as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes, not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board fence, shutting in vacant lots, often the best lots on the street, which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from the building all round and beyond his property. ”

“ A further illustration of the economy of open planning, leads into an extremely complicated discussion of the technique of architectural planning, dealing with the relationship of land value to the percentage of site area covered by building. It may be stated, however, that when the building covers too high a percentage of area, it inevitably becomes more complicated and more wasteful of space ”

“ With long narrow blocks, as in New York, the development would be more irregular, the tendency being to alternate high and low buildings. Further variations occur where a skyscraper owns one or two lots in an adjoining tract in order to block the erection of another high building, as with the Park Row Realty Building, and the Broad Exchange Building, or the purchase of low buildings across narrow streets to insure light and air, as with some of the life insurance company buildings. ”

“ The time element in this definition eliminates such buildings as a factory in a residence district, or a saloon in a business location, which while yielding a large rent injures the surrounding property. There are cases in rapidly changing sections where the most suitable building is one some years in advance of the time, since the utility of the building yielding the highest present rent will in a few years disappear, necessitating its destruction or reconstruction. ”

“ In recent years the mill-owners have abandoned the old low, two-story type of building with its narrow windows and dingy aspect of gray stone, and erected in its stead these enormous structures—the only approach to the American sky-scraper I saw in England. They are magnificent mills, far superior to those you will see to-day in this country, clean, bright and—every one I saw—new. ”

“ This simple fact, that a building of glass and iron, covering eighteen acres, affording room for nine miles of tables, should have been completed in less than five months from the day when the contract was entered into, at a cost less than that of the humblest hovel, opens a new era in the science of building. ”

“ If the architect you engage makes any objections to the scheme, let me know what they are.
Taking the eight lots which you have purchased, each one hundred feet deep, let us devote say sixty feet to the back yards. This will admit of flowerbeds, and a little playground, a very important item with a mother of young children. These dimensions are the same as those of hundreds of South End lots and houses.
Then there will be left for the building of the eight homes an area of eight lots, each forty feet deep and twenty-three feet wide. ”

“ Outlay on Farm Buildings—It would not be very satisfactory, perhaps, to attempt to lay down any rule as to the proportion of capital per acre which it is necessary to invest in buildings on any particular class of farm. The class of building, the material used, local circumstances, as well as the extent of the farm and the value of the land, all tend to disturb calculation. ”

“ If we have not as much to offer in immediate return, we have, at least, a broad expanse of uncovered acres within the city, for the easy occupation of those who wish homes, either modest or splendid, or who shall wish such as the growth of the metropolis multiplies its population into the millions, crowds its roofs higher toward the stars, and makes a productive silver mine of each several house-lot. ”

“ Ten years from now, and this hillside for forty miles will be a succession of orange groves. Near the depot we shall have a limited number of business lots, while the balance of the land will be surveyed into large orange grove and villa tracts. It will be specified in each deed that no cheap buildings shall be erected. It is not a mere speculation, as there are already a dozen or more men who will begin elegant residences as soon as the land is surveyed.”
“Do you know, professor, who owns that point jutting into the lake? It is a fine building site.” ”

“ Irrespective of its value as a financial expedient, excess taking allows the municipality to secure the greatest physical benefit from an improvement. The widening or relocating of a built-up street is likely to involve a complete rearranging of lot lines, particularly in older cities where the lot line is irregular and the depth of lots varies greatly. ”

“ As a development of land ripe for building, with more yards of frontage to the main-road than at first sight geometry seems able to accommodate, it has been taking advantage of unrivalled opportunities for a quarter of a century, backed by advances on mortgage. ”

“ When buildings are erected on the outskirts of a city where the. conversion from agricultural land to building land is taking place, the character of the buildings will at first determine the value of the land. Such districts afford highly competitive sites, where the only difference between lots, barring topography, is in transportation facilities, so that building operators can control values in the new territory by their scale of development, as in South Brooklyn. ”

“ Residences erected in blocks are usually two or three rooms deep, covering 50 to 70 feet, so that with an allowance for light and air, 100 to 120 feet is also a desirable depth for residence lots. Where residence land is most valuable it is economized in the same way as with office buildings, the entire area being built on except for such light wells as are necessary or required by the building laws. In some of the best residence sections of smaller cities, lots of extra depth are found, permitting the dwellings to be set far back from the street, as with Euclid Avenue. ”

“ They have sold their valuable holdings at a low figure, have seen the buyer realize a tremendous profit, and have been obliged to purchase sites at a greatly increased figure when by retaining their holdings they would have had adequate land for their needs. Buildings have been planted in parks in the supposed interest of economy, and by filling up the site the building has been robbed of distinction and the people of needed open space. ”

“ To provide a maximum of 28 new housing with a minimum expenditure of labour, money, transport, and manufactured materials.
Broadly speaking, so far as rural housing is concerned, the solution must be sought through the use of natural materials already existing on the site, materials that can be worked straight into the fabric of the building, without any elaborate or costly conversion, and that by local labour.
“Pisé de Terre,” “Chalk Compost,” and “Cob” are three alternative forms of construction, one of which will usually fulfil the above conditions in any given situation. ”

“ The fine new Public Market occupying a whole square, about two and a half acres, deserves a visit. The building which cost $280,000 is of a pink and white volcanic stone locally called sillar, with a roof of corrugated iron arranged to give good ventilation. At the four corners are four buildings, one a hotel and restaurant, the other three for storage of surplus stocks of fish, meat, and vegetables. ”

“ The site should be large enough for the eventual group of buildings, the building should be easily capable of extension with the least cost, and the same forethought should govern the lay-out of the machinery. ”

“ Ground, in the country, being the cheapest item which the farmer can devote to building purposes, his object should be to spread over, rather than to go deeply into it, or climb high in the air above it. We repudiate cellar kitchens, or under-ground rooms for house work, altogether, as being little better than a nuisance—dark, damp, unhealthy, inconvenient, and expensive. The several rooms of a farm dwelling house should be compact in arrangement, and contiguous as may be to the principally-occupied apartments. Such arrangement is cheaper, more convenient, and labor-saving ”

“ At times one can get a cheaper house by pursuing this plan. Another plan of building is by the day. Usually this means to employ carpenters and a foreman, take bids on the material that the carpenters use, and to sublet the mason work, excavating, painting, plastering, tin-work, plumbing, etc. Sometimes the mason-work is also done by the day. ”

“ Another method of procedure is to draw a plan of the house that contains the rooms considered necessary, submit such plans to a lumber merchant and get quotations on costs of various types of material necessary to construct it. Such construction will usually require the services of a skilled carpenter and mason but permits of more latitude in most cases than is available under a set building arrangement. ”

“ Under the present circumstances of agriculture, however, no land will support that outlay on buildings. At the same time, improved buildings and increased building accommodation is on numerous farms urgently needed. The solution of the difficulty therefore seems to lie in a more economical arrangement of the buildings, and in the discovery of cheaper material and methods of construction. ”

“ Average repairs vary from one-half of 1% of the value of the building per annum in the case of the highest type of fireproof buildings, 1% for ordinary mercantile buildings, 2% for older property or that of cheaper construction, 3% to 4% for old tenements, and so on up in proportion to the age, character of construction, and lack of care of the buildings. ”

“ The first principle is that if the building is suited to the needs of the location and is equal to or superior in construction, arrangement and appearance to existing buildings, it tends to increase values, while if inferior and cheaper than existing buildings it tends to depress them. Such an effect of inferior buildings is by no means uniform, as there are locations in which the erection of any building, however poor, increases values. Good and bad store fronts. The store on street level with good windows yields about 25% more rent than the adjoining one. Madison Street, Toledo. ”

“ Limiting this tendency would be a natural increase in the height of buildings, on account of wide streets and greater light and air obtained on the smaller building plots remaining. Practically the proportion between public and private land has but little influence on the density of city population, although there is an economic mean in the proportion between land for communication and land for buildings, which varies according to the utilization of land and which makes itself felt when disregarded in either direction by loss of income. ”

“ Within the short period, therefore, of seven months, owing to the energy of the contractors and the active industry of the workmen employed by them, a building has been erected, entirely novel in its construction, covering a space of more than eighteen acres, measuring 1,851 feet in length, and 456 feet in extreme breadth, capable of containing 40,000 visitors, and affording a frontage for the exhibition of goods to the extent of more than ten miles. ”

“ Figure 4 shows a block-plan on a very small scale of the apartment-house, and a block-plan on the same scale of 40 “towers” adjoining each other, and having the same available space as the apartment-house. These plans show how much more land is required to give the same accommodations (minus the conveniences and luxuries of an apartment-house) in the “tower” system than in the “flat.”
The shaded portions in each block-plan represent the aggregate of available room in each case. This shows very strikingly what an enormous proportion of land and material is wasted in the “tower” system. ”

“ The mill buildings went up first, on a broad space of one hundred acres levelled off for them, and then the town began to grow. That was sixteen years ago, and it has kept on growing. Every year sees a lot of new houses, of various values, and one and all well built and comely. And in all grades they are better houses than a workman, or a mill boss either, can get anywhere else in America for the same money. ”

“ First, however, before building the mould for a residence, school, theatre, office building, or factory, 296 the engineer decides what strength his foundations must have. The foundation for a small residence is an easy matter, but when it comes to a big factory, or an office building of a dozen stories or so, the most careful work must be done beforehand. In the old days, when it was desired to sink the foundations of a building down to bedrock, they used steel or wooden piles, but these will rust or rot, and the modern way is to use concrete piles. ”