Architect’s Statement:
Charles M. Goodman

The Hollin Hills project of 225 acres, which will contain in all some 350 homes, has been designed to create a community of contemporary homes in a park setting which retains the natural character of a beautifully wooded and hilly tract of land. It is designed to combine house and land in a setting which offers enough variety and livability to keep the family at home for recreation, rather than out on the highway in a motor car.

Road Layout:

The road layout of the project is planned to provide:

1. Gradients easily navigated under the most unfavorable weather conditions.

2. Home sites which take advantage of the many superb vistas by their organization in terms of orientation and topography so as to permit outdoor living in a maximum of individual privacy.

3. Erosion-proof storm water drainage which will prevent ugly gashes in the earth gutters, and eliminate the possibility of local floods.

4. Economical utility distribution, thus decreasing the cost of land development and consequently the over-all price of the homes.

5. Road organization which will channel through traffic onto strategically distributed roads curved to take advantage of the contours and to slow traffic to speeds safe for pedestrians -- particularly children.

6. Dead-end roads, or "cul-de-sacs" wherever possible to create safe areas for children, and quiet park-like house environments almost rural in character.

Park Areas:

The distribution of dedicated park areas throughout the community is designed to provide pedestrian walkways from individual home sites to the future shopping center and various other areas of the community without requiring that the individual walk on the roads any more than necessary. The parks are also planned to act as part of the storm water drainage system, providing natural controls for channeling storm water away from the home sites. From the point of view of the individual home-owner, the parks have been distributed so that the largest possible number of lots in the community will look over a park area, providing privacy and rural seclusion equal to that found heretofore mainly in large estates.

Individual Sites:

The land subdivision in general has been designed to bring out the best qualities of each individual site, rather than to obtain the maximum number of lots per acre. Hollin Hills is a community of homes which have been fitted to the land. We do not believe that we can improve on nature, and are therefore not changing its face any more than we have to,The object, rather, is to integrate the requirements of twentieth century living with the natural beauties of the variegated site, in order to achieve a setting of unaffected repose.

For example, we do not plan to install formal cement curbs, gutters and sidewalks. We are not eliminating these features primarily because of the reduction in the cost of the homes which results from these economies, but mainly because only in this way can the community escape the formal aridity and conventionalism of the average tightly- built suburb. Hollin Hills is not a community designed to look like every other community; it is planned to be itself -- as unspoiled, as natural and as beautiful as Nature itself originally made it. We even regret the necessity of installing paved roads, not alone because it is a conspicuous expenditure for which the consumer has to pay, but also because of its hard, city-like character. reflecting great heat in the summer and creating ice hazards in the winter. However, both state and federal regulative agencies in the building field think that is is improper for people to live on a street that is not paved; consequently the roads will be suitably covered with macadam or gravel and asphalt to make a semi-permanent surface.

Trees and Shrubbery:

One of the most important aspects of the development of Hollin Hills is in the treatment of existing trees and shrubbery on each site. A recent issue of the builders' trade magazine, "The Practical Builder", contains an article by a high-pressure subdivider, entitled "Eleven Ways to Lose Your Shirt in Developing Land". The third way the author quotes is as follows: "Be sure the land is beautifully wooded with trees too big to uproot and worthless for saw logs and standing on ground where you expect to do some grading." This is exactly what we in Hollin Hills are doing! We have proved to our own satisfaction that the most valuable assets on a building lot, the oaks, elms, maples, dogwood and other threes [sic] which give the country its charm, can be preserved without damage, that grading can be done around most of them, rather than over their uprooted sites, and that building operations can go forward effectively in the midst of trees.

In furtherance of this program of preserving the natural beauties of the home sites in Hollin Hills, a basic minimum of landscaping and planting is undertaken. The largest part of each lot is left entirely untouched, except for the removal of dead wood and underbrush, and grass and shrubbery planting is limited to covering the area around the house itself which was disturbed by the building operation. Consequently each home owner has an opportunity to make what he will out of the assets in trees and flowering shrubs which cover the sites.

The Homes:

The homes in Hollin Hills bring custom design and planning to families of moderate income at a price they can afford to pay. Such design has never heretofore been obtainable in this $12,000 - $14,800 price range. Hollin Hills' low costs and consequent reasonable prices are achieved through the ideal medium, a builder-architect team both members of which are possessed of complete understanding of the type of home product desired by the discriminatlng consumer, and both of whom are in solid agreement as to the types of economies which can be made without in any way affecting the value of the house.

These homes provide a quality, a plan, and an amount of space seldom heretofore available to the medium price market. These elements have been gained through a careful analysis of the parts of a house and the simplification of these parts into large, repetitive structural elements which can be economically fabricated on the site, at a minimum of cost and with a maximum of strength and durability. All interior dividing walls are non-bearing, and can be changed without affecting the structural shell. Glass has been used to achieve a character of airiness in the interiors which make one want to remain in them. The feeling of being hedged in by a cocoon-like closeness, common to the typical conventional house, is conspicuous by its absence in the Hollin Hills homes.

These houses are planned with the inescapable fact in mind that space, which everyone craves, costs money, and that therefore the minimum total space needed for the average family's way of life within an attainable budget should be carefully distributed to provide the maximum usable area. The ruling idea in the Hollin Hills plan is that space should receive the broadest possible use by the entire family in a 24-hour time cycle, and that none should be wasted or under-utilized.

The spaces that receive the broadest use in any home are, without question, the living, dining and kitchen areas. The major indoor activities of the entire families are concentrated here. The theory that children other than infants in cribs will voluntarily remain in rooms provided for them has proven to have no validity, even among groups with incomes high enough to enable them to maintain extensive establishments with special nurseries and rumpus rooms for the growing children.

Thus the bedrooms have the single major space use of privacy for sleep. Consequently a space allocation for limited financial budgets should restrict the bed room areas to the minimum required for beds, clothes storage, dressing and circulation. The maximum possible increment of space should be allocated to the living, dining and kitchen areas; and the living area should be so designed that indoors and outdoors will blend together in a kind of free interchangeability which will widen the scope of attractiveness of the home as a whole.

The power of those areas to draw the family into them and keep it there happily and at ease is what makes the difference between a viable home and just another house that the family stays in because it has no place to go.

Hollin Hills homes attempt to achieve just this kind of multiple spatial magnetism: open, airy, visually unrestricted space that allows the human eye the freedom and variety of focus necessary to restfulness for the human mechanism at all ages and in all stages of health.

If these homes in Hollin Hills have succeeded in exploring only the outer periphery of this broad area of development for living on a more human scale, indoors and out, it will have made a measurable step in the direction of better shelter and more stable family life in the American community of the Twentieth Century,