Colton Palms

The site is at the center of the City of Colton, “Hub of Industry,” a town on the edge of Los Angeles. A vacant parcel of land in the old downtown was selected by the city for redevelopment as affordable housing for seniors. Single family homes seemingly inspired by Irving Gill, or in other cases the Greene Brothers, dominate the area. Frank Benest, the city manager, expected the unexpected—a housing development which was both comfortable and innovative. To this end, the city, working with the not-for-profit developer Cooperative Services Inc., sponsored an international design competition.

As a basic design objective of the premiated solution, the fabric and scale of Colton is recalled by the pattern of objects that make up the hundred-unit project. The streets, sidewalks, and parks of the old town work-experience has tested the look and feel of the old town and finds no reason for a change.

The site plan starts as a nine square; each square is a three-story cluster of nine to twelve apartments, with the center square removed for a green. The fabric of the nine square is extended to the north and to the east, and carved away in places, making room for landmark “public” buildings—the meeting hall, library, crafts pavilion, and the entry buildings. The palm court is an extension of Fleming Park, just across the street. The Park is a WPA project laid out in the 1930s.

Colton Palms embodies many of the principles of New Urbanism that have been used to plan new “old comfortable” towns like Celebration, Florida. “Public” buildings have separate civic identities and have been places to punctuate the carefully scaled and detailed clusters of homes. Although using similar planning principles, Colton Palms avoids picturesque imagery. The visual cues are purposely vague and ambiguous, playing on a memory of some time or some place that most of the citizens of Colton left behind long ago. The seniors who live in Colton are more connected to the wide-eyed optimism of the postwar future than any imagined memory of the nineteenth-century small-town America.