Tag Archives: architecture

Teardown McMansion owner asks why people hate their home

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A teardown McMansion owner in McLean, Virginia wants to understand why people don’t like the home:

I don’t understand why people get so upset on this board. When we bought a new build a few years ago, we were very excited and actually liked the brick over the hardieplank.

We live in a teardown area in McLean with many original homes. We always keep our lawn nice and upkeep our landscaping.

Why do you dislike my house and maybe me or family?

[edited for original errors]

The responses come pretty quickly and include a number of arguments:

1. Building any newer home within a “historic” neighborhood (even if just from the post-World War II era) would be a problem for disrupting the existing character.

2. Specific design elements of teardowns are problematic, particularly certain kinds of siding.

3. Maintaining the lawn and exterior of the house might be necessary in many suburban neighborhoods bu it probably isn’t going to make up for the design of the house itself.

Despite the objections – which sound fairly permanent and independent of the people actually living in the home – the pace of teardowns has actually increased.

“Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings”

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It is fun to see the efforts of seven well-known architects as they highlight the better points of some buildings disliked by many. Some summary statements:

Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be. [Tour Montparnasse]

At a distance, the scale of the skyline exudes a sense of identity and strength for Albany, while at the pedestrian level the Plaza plays an important role in the community. I know that others find it too brutal or forbidding, but I think it’s beautiful in its monumentality and starkness. Monumentality always suggests supreme power, and that’s scary. I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile. [Empire State Plaza, Albany]

Monuments, if you trace their ancestry, can reveal disturbing things about the past. Nonetheless, they have enduring qualities which, viewed on their own merits, are perhaps an example to us. [Templehof Airport, Berlin]

It was the first building with an observation deck — that way of engaging with the city was actually pioneered by the tower. It had a restaurant that wasn’t particularly expensive. High rises today are about exploiting the skyline for private gain. But Londoners are capable of being nostalgic too: We have a power station that is now a modern art gallery. I wonder if the satellites and antennae shouldn’t be reinstated to communicate its purpose as an enduring symbol of the moment in the 1960s when technology propelled Britain onto the international stage. It’s a reminder. [BT Tower, London]

Who exactly gets to decide whether a building is loved or hated? Who are the real gatekeepers? This is actually an issue for many cultural objects in the modern world. There are always opinions from the experts, whether from architects themselves who can better understand the process to architecture critics who often write for influential media and can have their opinions heard by millions to the public who can now share their opinion via social media and other public forums. But, architecture is slightly different than say music or other media because it has a real permanence. If a major public building or skyscraper is viewed as ugly, it is not likely to be torn down or remade quickly. (The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis is a rare example where it was occupied for less than twenty years and its destruction was viewed by “the death of modernism.”) The seven buildings in this particular article are here to stay and, oddly enough, may just become targets for historic preservation in the future because they are important and old.

“The Psychology of Living in Skyscrapers”

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What are the effects of living in a very tall building?

Why should we even think that high-rise living has an effect on us? One does not, after all, see detailed psycho-architectural studies of ranch houses. The primary reason may be sheer novelty. “Given the age of our species, living more than a few stories up is a very recent phenomenon,” writes Robert Gifford in Architectural Science Review. “This tempts one to conclude that high rises are unnatural, and some would argue that what is unnatural must be, in some way, harmful.”…

So how to square this with a body of research that seems to conclude that most people find high-rise living less satisfactory than low-level living; that tall buildings seem to breed more crime than their lower-situated counterparts; that small children seem to develop (by reading and other measures) less quickly the higher up they live; that tall buildings might even invite suicide? Could an architectural form really do all that? Architecture is never more than a container for social relations. And so high-rise sociology is troubled by larger factors—who is living in the high-rise, and under what conditions? Pruitt-Igoe became synonymous with the problems of high-rise housing; it was considered the death knell of modernist social planning and modern architecture all at once. The backward, revisionist look has been more nuanced…

Much of the research about the problems of tall-building living is really research about, as the sociologist Gerda Wekerle put it, “the problems created by concentrating multi-problem families in housing stigmatized by the rest of society.” Other studies have looked at the populations of places like dormitories, which are themselves hardly representative. The high-rise form is endlessly skewed by social extremes. As Wekerle argues, “Pruitt-Igoe is no more representative than is the John Hancock Center of high-rise living.” And then there’s context. In places like Singapore or Hong Kong, tall-building living is not only the norm, it is considered socially prestigious. A friend who grew up on the 19th floor of an Upper East Side New York City apartment building (and who, interestingly, grew up to be an architecture critic) finds nothing odd, in retrospect, about his upbringing; most of his friends, after all, lived in similar circumstances, if not in the very same building. Why would you need a suburban lawn, he suggested, when Central Park was five minutes away? In terms of building height, he notes: “I don’t think it really had much effect one way or another, perhaps because so many of the neighboring buildings were of relatively equal height, so there wasn’t a sense of vertigiousness.” For the record, he seems to read very well…

One wonders what psychological effects there might be to this earthbound living in the sky. As the architecture critic Joseph Giovannini observed, “Living on the 60th floor is different. There are no earthly sounds, no close-up details outside, not even trees—just the long view and then the drop.” Astronauts on NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, asked to draw three-dimensional cubes, drew them with shorter vertical dimensions when in the zero-gravity of space. Might living in the sky also subtly influence one’s perspective of space, distance, and height? Studies have shown that children, at 25 months of age, can transmit information gleaned from aerial views to make ground-level wayfinding decisions; at 21 months, however, they cannot. Would children whose homes come equipped with aerial views have an edge? It is known, for example, that people with a fear of heights—or even those without when shown images of people falling—will overestimate actual heights.

Some interesting speculation yet the final paragraph ends with this summary: “For now, we must still rely largely on anecdote.”

A few other thoughts:

1. While these buildings may seem normal now, it is important to remember that they are relatively new in human history. For thousands of years, people barely got off the ground, let alone flew in airplanes or lodged or worked 600 feet up.

2. If an academic thought something was here, it doesn’t seem that difficult to design some experiments to see if there are differences.

3. If there were differences, how would architects, residents, and others adapt tall buildings?

4. There are a number of ways these buildings could have a psychological effect. You don’t have to live in them to be affected if your sunlight is blocked or you are consistently walking in concrete canyons in places like Manhattan. Even in the world’s biggest cities, there are still spaces relatively close that allow one to get away from skyscrapers and get back to a more normal sense of scale.

5. As a sociologist, I tend to agree that the differences in living in such buildings is probably due more to social interactions promoted by such buildings rather than the architecture or design itself.

“The Underappreciated Architecture of Waffle House”

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Waffle House recently announced plans for a fancier new building in New Orleans. One journalist suggests this undervalues the chain’s existing architecture:

Waffle House is not Chartres Cathedral, admittedly, but it has a certain architectural je ne sais quoi. The classic Waffle House is minimalist in design, with a lemon-yellow strip running around the top, above a wide band of windows and, often, a red or red-striped awning. The interior is outfitted with retro globe lights and red-and-chrome stools. Unlike most fast-food joints, Waffle House has an open kitchen, so you can watch the cooks as they scatter and smother your hash browns…

New Orleanians will be excited to get a Waffle House in Mid-City, and I would never begrudge them that. But this new design is all wrong for Waffle House as a brand, and falls short of its status as a Southern icon.

The company owes that status to an architect you’ve never heard of, Clifford A. Nahser. A World War II veteran and Georgia Tech graduate, Nahser was still a fledgling architect when Waffle House co-founder Joe Rogers Sr. approached him for help designing his prototype diner in Avondale Estates, near Atlanta. As the chain grew, Nahser went on to design hundreds more restaurants, drawing up the plans in his basement after his day job at Atlanta Public Schools…

What bothers me is not that Waffle House feels it’s time for a change (maybe it is) so much as the direction they’ve chosen. As the “loft” aesthetic has permeated American culture, we’re seeing watered-down faux-warehouse details in outposts of Chipotle and Starbucks, and that is the style we see here. It’s as generic as the classic Waffle House look is distinctive. Couldn’t the company have hired an architect known for his or her use of bold color to bring more of a pop sensibility?

There seem to be two main issues at play here:

1. How much should restaurant chains (and for that matter, retail chains as well) look alike or different? Waffle House has a very recognizable logo as well as a common design aesthetic. How much does this help the brand in terms of sales, nostalgia, recognition? Does a chain benefit from looking significantly different than other chains or should there be some similarity so people feel they can comfortably cross over?

2. How much do architectural movements – here, a more minimalistic and modernist design – get translated into fast food restaurants? I’ve argued before that Americans don’t particularly like modernist homes but perhaps this kind of modernist architecture is associated with a particular industry (fast food) that arose in the post-World War II era of prosperity and highways. The architecture and landscape of interstates and suburban sprawl is often criticized so how many people would defend the look of Waffle House?

14 times The Simpsons took on famous architecture

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Curbed put together a short list of times The Simpsons has lampooned architecture:

Frank Gehry crumples up a piece of paper, tosses it to the ground, and suddenly becomes inspired to build a similar-looking concert hall for Springfield, hometown of The Simpsons. Rem Koolhaas, with his eyes closed, teaches nine local children about “Lego architecture” using a model of OMA’s CCTV tower in Beijing. Since The Simpsons began airing in 1989, there have been countless references to landmarks and architects, new Dwell-reading neighbors and postmodern malls filled with identical Starbucks stores…

Dialogue from an episode aired in 2003:
Lisa: I’m impressed that you drew up blueprints, but these are for a go-cart track.
Homer: Did Frank Lloyd Wright have to deal with people like you?
Lisa: Actually, Frank Lloyd Wright endured a lot of harsh criticism.
Homer: Look. I have no idea who Frank Lloyd Wright is.
Lisa: You said his name two seconds ago.
Homer: I was just putting words together.

Some fun moments here. In fact, I suspect there is an interesting dissertation or book to be written about how The Simpsons presents spaces, from homes to Springfield (which really is a zany community) to broader geographic and social contexts. What if a two-dimensional animated show ended up offering one of the most astute mass market analyses of our spatial lives?

Trying to revive wood skyscrapers

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The idea of constructing high-rises out of wood and other sustainable materials may just be gathering steam:

This week, an ambitious proposal for the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper was unveiled in Vienna, Austria. The 275-foot, €60M timber building will be built next year, and follows in the low-carbon footsteps of recent timber structures in Canada, Australia, and England. The idea of fashioning tall towers from the earth’s natural materials, and not concrete or steel, first began gaining traction in 2013, when the Canadian architect Michael Green introduced the concept to the wider world via a TED talk that has now been viewed more than a million times. “I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with,” Green said in his talk. “It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent.”…

Unlike concrete and steel, synthetic materials that together represent eight percent of man’s greenhouse gas emissions, wood has the opposite effect: it takes in massive amounts of carbon dioxide, an obvious upside when cities are growing ever denser. “One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide,” Green explained in his TED talk…

At the time when Green gave his talk, the world was home to at least two existing timber structures that could have been considered towers: the Stadthaus residential building by Waugh Thistleton Architects in London, which has nine stories, and the Forté apartment complex in Melbourne, Australia, designed by Lend Lease developers with ten floors. Both buildings were made from panels of cross-laminated timber, which is a form of engineered wood that was originally developed as an alternative to stone and masonry. Unlike typical 2-by-4s, these panels made from many pieces of wood glued together are enormous, around eight feet wide and 64 feet long…It’s also fairly difficult to get cross-laminated timber to catch fire, which appears to be the main concern of supervisory bodies in cities where architects are attempting to use the material in their buildings. Vienna, which will soon have the tallest structure of this sort, has instructed its fire service to conduct special tests on the new building, which will already be required to install more sensitive sprinkler system than those required for other towers.

As the article notes, the main feature appears to be the reduction of carbon use compared to construction with cement and concrete. But, this might also draw the attention of architects less interested in the sustainability but intrigued by another medium with which to innovate. It could be fascinating to see the mix of mediums within a single skyline – imagine the glass skyscrapers of today next to wooden structures that have a entirely different feel.

Google and other tech companies continue HQ architecture race

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Google just unveiled its plans for a new HQ design:

Apple is building a massive spaceship-like ring around a private eden dotted with apricot trees. Facebook is working on a forest-topped hanger, reportedly with a single room big enough to house 3,400 workers. Now, we have our first glimpse of what Google’s envisioning for its own futuristic headquarters: A series of see-through, tent-like structures, draped in glass, whose interior workspaces can be reconfigured on a massive scale according to the company’s needs.

In a new video released this morning, Google showed off an ambitious proposal for a future North Bayshore campus in Mountain View. The concept was produced by the firms of Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, two of architecture’s fastest rising stars. Heatherwick Studio, based in the UK, was responsible for the torch at the London Olympics. The Bjarke Ingels Group, based in Denmark, is working on a trash-to-power plant in Copenhagen that will double as a ski slope.

The plan they came up with for Google is every bit as radical as one would expect. As Bjarke Ingels puts it, the structures proposed for the new campus would do away with rigid walls and roofs and instead “dissolve the building into a simple, super-transparent, ultra-light membrane.” Inside, giant layers could be stacked, Lincoln Log-style, into different work environments, using a fleet of small cranes and robots. Plant life is suffused throughout the campus, indoors and out.

It’s not an original idea but I was just struck by the juxtaposition of the tech companies more ethereal presence (online, information, brand status) versus their actual physical presence. The Internet may be revolutionary but how exactly do its architects and drivers translate it into physical form? Perhaps not surprisingly, into an open structure with lots of glass, light, life, and flexibility. Somewhere, however, there have to be tech companies operating in concrete Brutalist structures…

It will still be interesting to see how these buildings function. I’ve seen several articles lately about companies going to open floor formats (the anti-cubicle) even as workers don’t always like this lack of privacy. How much building flexibility is too much? Given Google’s plans, how will the architecture fit with the surrounding community of Mountain View? How many years is this expected to be used?

Building attractive staircases to encourage better health

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Staircases are necessary in many buildings but a new report suggests constructing them in attractive ways would help boost health:

And as ULI’s report argues, there’s more at stake than just aesthetics. A raft of research suggests that more appealing stairways may actually beckon more people to climb, in turn helping to reduce stroke risk, improving cardiovascular health and fighting obesity.

First, the obvious: More exercise, like the kind you get from taking the stairs instead of the elevator, is good for you. A 40-year study of nearly 17,000 (male) Harvard alumni, published in 1986, found that those who walked, took the stairs and played sports were likely to live longer than their more sedentary classmates. The researchers found that by age 80, one to two additional years of life were attributable to exercise. Take the stairs, enjoy a longer life.

And it appears designers and architects really can bait people into doing what’s good for them. A 2004 study saw a 9 percent increase in foot traffic when researchers added motivational signs, artwork, carpeting, new paint and music to a CDC building’s stairwells. A similar 2001 study published in the American Journal of Public Health tested two interventions in the University of Minnesota’s public health building and found that while shaming signs—“Take the stairs for your health”—didn’t motivate stair travel, adding artwork and music to them via a compact disc player (aww, 2001) increased stair traffic by nearly 5 percent. “Buildings should be designed with attractive stairwells that are accessible to the general population,” the researchers concluded.

There are more dramatic intervention options, too. ULI, guided by principles from the Center for Active Design, argues that developers should be thinking seriously about stairways even before the construction crew moves in. The groups recommend placing stairs closer to building entrances than elevators and making them more visible. (A 2007 analysis found stairways’ accessibility and visibility explained 53 percent of their use in 10 university buildings.) Using glass panels as walls instead of concrete and cinderblock also gently guides people toward stairways.

Stairs can be an exciting architectural feature as well as a health boon. In contrast, elevators in large buildings don’t present many benefits for health or architecture. The typical lobby of a modern high-rise includes a spacious room with ill-defined sections with banks of elevators somewhere to the side or back. Stairs, if done well, can present an interesting focal point and help define the space. However, I wonder if these findings primarily apply to low-rise buildings where the stairs could be used as the primary means of traveling between floors.

Designing homes in “Disaster Chic”

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Looking for a home that will help you survive the coming apocalypse? Look no further than printable homes, prefabricated small homes, and shipping containers.

You peer warily out of the single window in your zombie-proof steel box. The street seems deserted—except for a lone figure who is staring at you from a distance. Is it 2079, in the years after the Great Drought Plague!? No, it’s 2015 in Royal Oaks, Michigan, and that zombie is a curious local Fox reporter.

Royal Oaks is just the latest American town to get a house made from shipping containers, which offer something unique to consumers with a taste for apocalyptic adventures. While designers are developing smarter ways to build temporary housing and disaster shelters, developers and real estate agents are using the same technology to sell trendy and high-end homes. What results is a bizarre kind of hybrid style that pairs our worst fears with our biggest hopes for the future—utopia and dystopia overlap. Call it disaster chic…

Of course, it’s not surprising to see interesting ideas cross-pollinate—3D printing, containerization, and pop-up dwellings are all really cool concepts, and there’s no reason they should be shrouded in break-in-case-of-emergency glass. What’s interesting is how similar our ideas about crisis engineering and future chic really are. In the city of the future, everything is instant, whether for a good reason or a bad one. The cities of our dreams have a lot in common with those of our nightmares.

These homes don’t seem all that well equipped to help keep you safe. If anything, their primary feature in relation to disasters is that they can be quickly produced and moved. Those are important features in recovering from disasters but I imagine some might want more solid homes to survive the disaster in the first place.

But, it is interesting that such homes that do well at addressing disaster recovery might become more popular with a broader audience. Do such designs simply offer something different in a housing market where the typical home or housing unit isn’t really that exciting or different? Is this a way to offer ironic commentary about one’s home – homes in the United States are often intended to imply permanence but these structures hint at catastrophic change and adaptability? Or is this primarily driven by younger adults looking for cheaper housing options in cities that seem pretty determined to not provide much in the way of affordable housing?

Using Chicago skyscrapers as inspirations for spaceships

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“Jupiter Ascending” may not be very good but some of the spaceships are based on Chicago architecture:

When Hull came to Chicago, the Wachowskis began peppering him with reference photographs of Chicago buildings, facades, landmarks, ornamental detail and infrastructure. “Of all the directors I have worked with, they are by far the most architecture-minded,” he said. “They wanted a very decorative vision for the ships, almost Louis XIV-like in places, existing alongside this other aesthetic, far more gothic and less feminine.”

Indeed, the Wachowskis, who started a small construction company and worked as carpenters before becoming filmmakers, wanted the two warring ships at the center of “Jupiter Ascending” to somewhat reflect Chicago itself. “I like how the great curling femininity of the Frank Gehry (Pritzker Pavilion) is juxtaposed against the weight of those harsh, more severe buildings on Michigan Avenue,” Lana said. “I liked that tension in Chicago, that something as elegant as a big river can curl through so many grandiose statements. When we were looking at the design of the ships, we kept exploring this, placing almost baroque, exuberant levels of detail on one end, while on the other, contrasting a rigorous, rational logic.”…

“But also I really love the top of the Carbide & Carbon Building (on Michigan Avenue),” Lana said. So its lighthouse peak informs the back of Titus’ ship, while the front is, well, a play on the flying buttresses that shape the top of the Tribune Tower. “But I often wasn’t flamboyant enough for the Wachowskis,” Hull said. So the gold-green design along the facade of the Carbide building is mirrored on the outside of the ship. And inside: The ceiling of the ship’s loading dock is reminiscent of the dense mosaics in the Chicago Cultural Center ceilings; the long, vaulted chapel is vaguely similar to the reading room of the Newberry Library. “Which was a sanctuary for me as a kid,” Lana said, “where I went when I cut school.”

Balem, played by Eddie Redmayne, is the imperialist, the severe, ominous bully. His ship, therefore, is gothic, less curvaceous than Titus’ ride. The front end, its T-shaped bow, has some inspiration in the terra-cotta faces that watch from the facade of the old Tree Studios building on Ontario Street. And there are hints of the former Midway Gardens entertainment venue in Hyde Park, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (torn down in 1929). “His ship is more of a towering, hard-looking, Albert Speer-ish brutalism,” Hull said, “but it would be too on the nose for his designs to just reflect that, to not suggest Balem wouldn’t want some ornamental embellishment to his world.” So, his boardroom has touches of the latticework beneath the Loop “L” tracks.

An interesting source of inspiration for objects – spaceships – that we might typically think are otherwordly or something completely different. Additionally, buildings are pretty static, even if they are involved in dynamic social settings, while spaceships have incredible mobility. But, as noted in this earlier post about The Hunger Games, it is difficult to make something completely new. Human creativity rarely involves completely innovative ideas that have never been expressed before but rather often involves taking existing forms and objects and doing new things with the mix. So, in trying to imagine the future, why not draw some on the past while also adding potential changes?

This is also a reminder that Chicago architecture is influential. If we do get to an age of large spacecraft, would Chicago still be a major inspiration? Could we have competing fleets based on different global cities?