Transportation II. The pedestrian environment B. Common yard; porch and fence

Frontage is the general term for what happens in the space between private buildings and public streets. The frontage includes all building and landscape elements forming the pedestrian experience. As explained in the previous installment of the Technical Page, there are at least eight frontage patterns that recur frequently and with considerable repetition of characteristics. Towards the rural end of the Transect continuum, two ubiquitous traditional neighborhood frontages are the Common Yard pattern and the Porch and Fence pattern. The first frontage, Common Yard, is named for its most obvious, largest feature: a swath of unfenced continuous vegetation, often dominated by grass, between the road or street and an array of houses usually set well back from it. The second, the Porch and Fence pattern, overlays those two kinds of semipermeable architectural barriers on the front yard space, with houses pulled closer to the street; essentially, porch and fence compensate for the privacy lost in diminished distance. It is important to understand two things that the Common Yard is not. There should be no confusion of Common Yard, which is a neighborhood pattern always including more than one dwelling, with genuinely rural Farmstead, in which there is usually one principal dwelling and the land is divided up by an arsenal of different fencing types. Nor is the Common Yard to be confused with Conventional Suburban Design (CSD) and its addiction to individual lawns and front-loaded driveways as spaces for the display of consumption. focus on shared landscape The second distinction requires further explanation. Because CSD is fundamentally concerned with the imagery of material abundance, its lots usually present their wider side to the street, allowing space for a similarly wide house and a wide driveway. In the true Common Yard pattern, the lots fit their narrow ends to the road and the houses face an uninterrupted park or meadow landscape. It is the shared landscape that is the real concern, not the display of houses and cars. In the best examples of Common Yard, automobile access is from the rear, so that there are not even driveways dividing the enfronting greensward. Riverside, Illinois, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1869, is an early example; many of its large, picturesque blocks were originally planned with narrow lots served by rear lanes. While the Common Yard pattern evolved for quieter, less trafficked locations, the deep lots and vegetated setbacks can serve as a good buffer on higher-speed thoroughfares, whether more rural or closer in to a city center. The Porch and Fence frontage is less rural in function and feeling. In this pattern, the houses are set back from the street at a more or less uniform distance to balance the dual desires of having some front area for planting but still maintaining good contact with the sidewalk. A front porch, at a conversational distance from the sidewalk, encroaches into the setback space between façade and public right-of-way. The porch must be genuinely furnishable, which means its depth should be no less than eight feet. At the sidewalk line, a fence, usually well below pedestrian eye level, demarcates the front dooryard but allows it to be viewed. Porch and fence are in effect dual frames for the picture of life offered, from the point of view of both the passersby and the occupants of the house. They protect and present what they contain, providing a simultaneous measure of prospect and refuge. The Porch and Fence pattern works well at a surprising variety of densities. It is seen in older neighborhoods with grand houses, in modest bungalow developments, and on rowhouse streets both large and small. Differing construction and planting materials and details, in combination with the almost infinite variations afforded by adjustments of yard and porch levels, make this a flexible and powerful frontage pattern. u