Tag Archives: architecture

Architecture students also required to take sociology

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If pre-med students have to take a sociology course, why not architecture students?

FOA principal Jagbir Singh told TOI that the need for study of sociology was felt to inculcate sensitivity among students to better understand needs of the society.

“Students should not merely understand the needs of the client but also be sensitive towards the latter. The psychological aspect should also be covered while talking to the client,” said Singh.

The 50-mark paper is divided into two equal parts comprising session and main examination. The course will carry two credits. The objective is to familiarise students with basic concepts, theories and issues of sociology and its relevance to architecture. The course curriculum will have six modules covering the basic concepts and teaching students about the social aspects.

Architecture is more than just creating a beautiful space or a functional design. Real people use buildings and spaces so considering their beliefs and behaviors a bit more could lead to designs that work better for people’s lives.

It would be interesting to then see how architecture students use the sociological information in their architecture studies and in their careers. What exactly do they retain and put into practice? It would also be interesting to compare buildings and spaces constructed with explicitly sociological ideas versus those motivated by different ideas.

Renovating a McMansion: “Help! I want Country Understated Natural and it screams Mcmansion”

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One McMansion owner is looking for help in redesigning their home:

I did not build the house and I want it to be lodgy, understated country? It is Tony Soprano in its bones…If I changed the siding to the cedar color– would it be too monotone? I would like to use that grey cedar for the door. What can I do about the square panel details which have the red rosettes? I thought a trellis/lattice design there could work there but…not really. The hardware should be copper for the door handles and the light fixtures-any suggestions for the exact kind/type or go with vintage or gas lantern look-but which one and how large? Any suggestions overall, any advice…APPRECIATED!

The subsequent suggestions range from from changing the exterior color to a different kind of siding and roof to changing windows.

But, this brings up an interesting question: how much can and should homeowners remodel McMansions? Critics would argue that the homes shouldn’t have been built or purchased in the first place but plenty exist. The same critics may go on to note that renovation projects might be difficult and expensive with McMansions because of inferior build quality or a lack of design. However, it is likely that many McMansions would undergo significant changes over the decades. This is what happens to single-family homes – just look at some of the original Levittown homes and how they have been altered. There may be a huge potential market for firms to offer McMansion renovation services, to come in and spruce up the dated portions and/or overhaul the more garish features (two-story entryways, large great rooms, many gabled roof, etc.).

Can a former McMansion be converted into a non-McMansion with a reasonable amount of money and time?

Fight McMansions with Modernist homes

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You don’t need a tiny house to fight McMansions – Modernist homes can also fit the bill.

The reaction is much the same as the humdrum McMansions along Mr. Farrow’s Oakville street tick past the car window in a blur of beige.

Halfway down the long avenue, a first-time visitor to the Farrow Residence gasps at the sight of the sleek, low-slung Modernist abode.

Designed in 1962 and completed in September 1963, the Breuer-esque home hasn’t changed much since Mr. Farrow completed the last addition in 1973, when a summer porch and pool were added to the back. Before that, in 1970, when the couple’s two young boys were closing in on their teen years and needed more space, the original carport morphed into a bedroom wing, and a garage was tacked onto the other side. Not that you can tell: An architect rarely uses a heavy hand when rejigging his own vision and, in this case, it’s the same “old Dutch” bricks, same window configurations, same massing…

Peppered throughout the 3,000-square-foot home are Mr. Farrow’s intricate and amazing carved birds, a hobby that has kept the 1958 University of Toronto graduate “out of trouble” and “away from the television” (and perhaps out of wife Diane’s hair?) – when he wasn’t designing hundreds of hospitals, schools and churches.

There are numerous lines of attacks on McMansions but this one is a good example of solely criticizing the architecture. This Modernist home is not small (3,000 square feet) and not necessarily cheap (though the construction cost or the current value are not noted). Its key advantage over the McMansion is that is was carefully designed by an architect. Because of this, it is not like the “humdrum McMansions” and it has remained stylistically consistent even with additions and modifications over the years. Whether the architecture is enticing to many is not the issue – the article mentions one women who wondered why the home had no windows on the front – but rather than it is architecturally coherent.

That McMansions are dull and repetitive is a continuation of the long-running critique of suburbs that suggested similar houses (see the limited Levittown models) leads to boring people and neighborhoods. I haven’t seen any study that confirms this but rows of similar-looking houses can present quite a contrast to vibrant urban neighborhoods with a mix of buildings. Of course, you can also find repetitive urban neighborhoods like the new rows of apartments going up in Chinese cities or modernist housing projects built in the mid-1900s that didn’t turn out too well…

Plans for a temperature controlled, 48 million square foot indoors “city” in Dubai

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The building boom in Dubai continues with plans to build a massive indoor city:

united arab emirates’ vice president and prime minister, sheikh mohammed bin rashid has announced the world’s first temperature controlled city to be constructed in dubai. the vast 48 million square foot project, entitled ‘mall of the world’, will contain the planet’s largest shopping mall and an indoor theme park covered by a retractable glass dome that opens during winter months…

envisioned as an integrated pedestrian city, seven kilometer promenades connect the design, bringing together a wide variety of leisure, retail and hospitality options under one roof. a cultural district forms the hub of the site, with a dedicated theater quarter comprising a host of venues. the ‘celebration walk’ modeled on barcelona’s las ramblas will connect the district with the surrounding mall containing a range of conference, wedding and celebration halls.

The pictures are quite interesting. The scope of the project raises several questions:

1. At what point does an indoor space transition from being a mall to being a city? Others have proposed towns or cities within buildings (even immortalized in arcologies in SimCity). But, this development is clearly within Dubai and the comments from officials indicate it is closely tied to tourism. So, it doesn’t quite sound like a city unless you want to make it sound more impressive.

2. With the emphasis on tourism, just how authentic will this space really be? If this is just for tourists, that is a lot of space to maintain and make exciting. If it is more mixed-use and include residential units, then some genuine street life could develop. Put differently, is this a Dubai version of the Las Vegas strip or something different?

Regardless, if this all is completed, it would be a sight to behold.

Quick Review: Cubed

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The book Cubedtackles what has become a ubiquitous space in today’s America: the white-collar office. Here are some thoughts about the book:

1. While the book might appear at first glance to be about office spaces, it is largely about the development and evolution of white-collar workers in the United States. This shift from farming and manufacturing in the late 1800s to office and clerical work was a profound shift in American society that affected everything from women in the workplace to educational aspirations to what it means to be middle class to what urban downtowns look like. It isn’t just about cubicles or desk chairs; it is about a shift toward knowledge workers increasingly laboring for big corporate America. It may seem normal now, but it is a remarkable shift over roughly 100 years.

2. While this shouldn’t be surprising given the field of architecture and design, it is still remarkable how much of office design was about trendy ideas and theories than on-the-ground information about what makes offices work. Thus, a history of American offices includes Taylorism, Le Corbusier, and Peter Drucker. Have a new idea about the intersection of work spaces and human interaction? If it is popular enough, it is likely going to going to be translated into office designs. Unfortunately, some of this theorizing comes at the expense of workers who were guinea pigs.

3. The book does well to include plenty of sociology, particularly picking up after World War II as sociologists like C. Wright Mills noticed the big shifts in society. At the same time, it strikes me that there isn’t enough well-known sociology about office life and American businesses more broadly. This may change in the near future with more economic and organizational sociology but it seems like a missed opportunity in the past from a field that focused on other topics.

4. This is the sort of book that would benefit from more pictures and architectural plans. There are some scattered throughout the book but I could easily imagine a coffee table companion book with rich photos and designs of iconic office arrangements. It can be hard at times to visualize the major patterns.

All in all, the book is a nice overview of American offices in the last 100+ years. There are numerous places where this book could have ballooned to many more pages but it doesn’t feel like the author is painting with too broad of strokes. Indeed, if we want to understand America in 2014, perhaps we should look less to Washington, glittering skylines, and the entertainment industry but rather examine what millions of Americans experience regularly in their offices.

Normal people living in “America’s smartest homes”

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As part of Time‘s recent look at smart homes, they profiled a number of “regular people” in different types of smart homes:

At the start of her final semester, Spratley, a 29-year-old design student, spent 90 minutes every day driving between her apartment in the suburbs and her college classes in midtown Atlanta. “It was tiring,” she says, “and it made it really tough to meet people.” So she moved into a parking garage behind her school’s main building. Literally. Spratley, who graduated in May, was one of the first residents of SCADpad, a three-dorm compound built and styled by students, faculty and alumni of Savannah College of Art and Design to prove that underused public spaces–many U.S. parking structures operate well below capacity–can be repurposed into homes. Although the 135-sq.-ft. (12.5 sq m) space felt cramped at times during her weeklong stay (“I was like, Where’s the closet?!”), Spratley found plenty to love: the iPad-controlled lights could mimic a sunset, a nearby 3-D printer made free home accessories like coasters, and the compound fostered its own minicommunity. “I had friends over to watch The Fifth Element on the ceiling of the parking deck,” she says. “It was like living in a piece of the future.”…

After marrying her college sweetheart in 2007, Miller, then 22, happily took what her friends called the “normal next step”: putting down a payment on a 2,500-sq.-ft., four-bedroom house with her new husband. But when they divorced a year later, she says, “my financial torture began.” First, she failed to resolve a messy deed situation with her ex; then the economy collapsed, and the bank seized her home. At that point, Miller, an architect, had an idea: “What if I take the $11,000 I’d have to spend on a year’s rent and build a minihouse from scratch?” She wasn’t alone: more than 70 architectural firms now specialize in helping Americans ditch their large, pricey abodes to raise low-cost, low-energy tiny homes, and Miller found starter plans aplenty online. She bought a flatbed trailer ($500), rented a 0.125-acre lot ($200 a month) and within 18 months had built and moved into her dream home, all 200 sq. ft. of it. Now Miller’s monthly expenses are $400 instead of $1,200, and she’s dating her new landlord; the two had a daughter in March. Her next project is designing a 650-sq.-ft. abode for the whole family, including her Great Dane. “I’ve realized I don’t need a big house,” she says. “I never did.”…

When retired Marine Sergeant John Peck awoke from a medically induced coma in July 2010, two months after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan and losing all four of his limbs, his skin “was so hypersensitive that I would scream if someone touched me,” he says. But once his physical pain subsided, Peck, then 24, faced a much more daunting obstacle: adjusting to everyday life in a new body. The challenges at his Walter Reed housing complex were immediately clear. He couldn’t enter rooms with nonautomatic doors, because he didn’t have hands to grab them. He’d wanted to be a chef since he was 12, and now he couldn’t reach the food cabinets–let alone prepare meals. “It was incredibly frustrating,” he says. Today, however, Peck lives in a house built by the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation that was designed to serve his individual needs. Now 28, he has a bathroom with a bidet, so he can use it solo, and can adjust lighting, sound and even the height of his kitchen cabinets by tapping a tablet. To be sure, there are plenty of issues his home won’t solve. “I can’t put shampoo into my hair or put shorts on by myself,” he says. And unloading the dishwasher is nearly impossible, even when he’s wearing prosthetics. But Peck draws hope from a potential double-arm transplant–and his November wedding to fiancée Stacy Elwood. For now, he says, “my house makes the little things easier.”…

Like many other people living in America’s poorest neighborhoods, Giuria, a South Bronx native, grew up at risk for obesity. He ate junk food (it was cheap) and avoided playgrounds (the equipment was undermaintained and dangerous) and gyms (he was never taught the importance of exercise). By the time he was 27, he weighed almost 400 lb. (180 kg). “It was awful,” he says. “I sprained my ankles, I couldn’t buy clothes, and I didn’t sleep well.” His brother eventually took him to a nearby fitness center, where he learned to use the elliptical. (“It was so weird–I did it backward for a while.”) But to really get healthy, Giuria knew he needed a lifestyle makeover. That’s when he learned about Arbor House, a $37.7 million, 120,000-sq.-ft. (11,150 sq m) low-income housing project going up a few blocks from his then residence. The new site emphasized active design, an increasingly popular style of architecture that’s meant to encourage physical activity. (Think visible stairwells and bright, inviting indoor-outdoor gyms.) He immediately applied for residency and moved in last June. Now 30, Giuria has continued to lose weight–he’s almost down to 200 lb. (90 kg)–by running and playing alongside his wife and three kids (including Xzavier, right). “This will make it second nature to them to be healthy,” he says. “It won’t be foreign to them like it was for me.”

Some interesting options with several common themes:

1. Homes more customized to individual dwellers. Some of this can be accomplished with technology but design can also help. People living in the home get the benefits of using the space better as well as having the home reflect well on them.

2. Smaller spaces. This could be the case because people want less space (limiting consumption, more green) or they can afford less space (often in more urban areas).

3. Greener, more sustainable building starting with lowered utility costs to houses that encourage more activity and are built using different materials.

My big question for all of these options is whether they could be produced and lived-in on a mass scale.

Using ethnographic techniques to study how office space is used

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According to Cubed, architects and designers have had a lot of idealistic approaches to office design but companies have pursued more ethnographic approaches in recent decades:

In other words, interior designers are struggling, hard, to be relevant and so are architects. And so are space planners and so are product designers. Both Steelcase and Herman Miller have intensified their use of anthropological techniques – participant observer, video ethnography, object testing – to understand office workers’ behavior and to design around behavior rather than attempt to influence or change it. (p.308)

In other words, some have moved from top-down designs borrowing from trendy ideas about office behavior and design to actually studying the people at work in offices to see what might or might not work. What you likely gain are the small but important pieces of information that might be lost with other methods of data collection. Imagine the all-important serendipitous short conversation between two employees who pass in the hallway. Designers and others often think these are really important as they generate social connections and innovation. But, if you asked on workers on a survey about such short encounters, they may not recall them or think much of them at the time.

Lots of businesses could benefit from ethnographic approaches as they would get the viewpoint of the workers instead of the interpretations of management.

McMansions as “weapons of mass construction”

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One writer resents having to put up with McMansions, labeled in the headline “weapons of mass construction,” for the sake of the economy:

I hate being all in this thing together. Or let’s just say, I hate being all in this thing together with the home-construction industry. Right now, a McMansion the size of the Louvre is going up directly across the street from my house. Nine other monstrosities are also being deployed in what was once a beautiful, empty meadow. The field has been filled with backhoes and earth movers and building materials on and off for at least two years.

The projects, once begun, take forever to finish. The crew starts work on a house, then gets dispatched to finish another project in a different town, and then comes back. So it takes months to get the micro-chateaux built. It’s like watching someone set fire to your neighborhood, then douse it, then come back and start the fire again six weeks later. You’d rather they just ruined things once and for all and got it over with. If you’re going to sack Rome, sack it. Drilling, digging, dust and leveled trees have been our reality since 2011. It makes it very, very hard to root for the home builders.

I am constantly reading that young people are not buying houses at the pace needed to get the economy percolating. Well, maybe someone should tell the developers to stop building lurid, vile houses that no one can afford. Or to stop building lurid, vile, prefab, ticky-tacky houses even if people can afford them.

When the economy cratered in 2008 and my 401(k) got massacred, I wasn’t as upset as I should have been because it meant that the McMansions scheduled to be erected across the street wouldn’t get built until the recession was over. Four happy years ensued, without bogus cathedral windows and four-car garages and faux-Belgian cobblestones and Philistines for neighbors. This situation put me in the uncomfortable position of having to root against my own country. As long as the housing industry was flat on its back, life was good.

I really wish that the economy were not so dependent upon the health of home builders. I would love to root for these guys. I really would. But they build trash. They tear down adorable bungalows and build McMansions in Princeton, N.J. In Chicago, in Boston, in Los Angeles and even in little old Easton, Pa., they are bulldozing whatever stands in their way and throwing up their eyesores. Throwing up being the operative term.

What does he really think? I wonder if this is closely tied to what he suggests is a personal experience with nearby houses. It is one thing to dislike McMansions on the whole and argue they are bad for society – like Thomas Frank suggested a few months ago – but then not live by them. In fact, a lot of social problems are like this: we know there are bad things happening in our county, state, country, and around the world but it is different when they are removed and abstract. There is some of that argument here: such homes are ugly, he doesn’t want to have to rely on the housing industry so much, etc.

It is another thing if a new McMansion under construction greets you every morning when you walk out your front door. Or if construction projects take a really long time. Are these concerns the result of teardowns where a historic neighborhood is threatened?

Micro-housing that is too expensive to solve the problems of affordable and sustainable housing

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Micro-housing may lead to some cool design opportunities but it may not solve important problems: providing more affordable and sustainable housing.

Which is, of course, the problem with zeroHouse: Nobody needs micro-housing in places where plots of prairie, mountain, and sea (!) are available in plenty.

Now, the zeroHouse might not be designed for the urban dweller at all. Several of the home’s signature features seem as though they’re meant for another type of buyer altogether. The design specs note that the house is entirely secure, with tempered “Sentry-Glass” windows, Kevlar-reinforced doors, and fully mortised locking systems. (Shocking that a house that looks like a Transformer could double as a bunker!)

Given the design features, land-parcel requirements, and other aspects of the building’s design—it can go into an energy-conserving “hibernation” mode for extended period of times—zeroHouse sounds like it might be better suited for Cliven Bundy country than for downtown infill construction. But then, that Manhattan Micro-Loft isn’t a much better model for addressing the lack of affordable housing in major U.S. cities.

I don’t mean to pick on Specht Harpman Architects, a New York- and Austin-based firm that’s mostly in the business of designing interiors and elegant single-family homes. Tiny-house offenders are everywhere, from the pages of any shelter magazine to the real-estate section of the New York Times, where per-square-foot costs and land allotments are out of sync with what (say) most New Yorkers need from micro-housing.

From what I’ve seen, much of the interest in tiny houses is driven by two market segments: (1) architects, designers, and other creative types who relish a new puzzle (how do you fit a lot of desirable features into a smaller amount of space) and (2) “downshifters” (to borrow a term from sociologist Juliet Schor), people deliberately trying to limit their consumption by limiting their living space as well as how much stuff they can accumulate.

Of course, there are some interested in micro-housing for its ability to address affordable housing and sustainability issues but several things still hold the micro-housing market back: zoning issues, a lack of large-scale building of these units thus far which would make them appear more normal and more practical to build with economies of scale, and price points that may not be cheap enough for the affordable market.

Bad suburban architecture that can give you acne

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The BBC TV show Orphan Black features a character who makes occasional humorous observations about the suburbs. Here is one of Felix’s quotes about suburbia from Season One courtesy of a recap:

It’s nine o’clock and Sarah pulls up to Alison’s house as Fee moans in the seat beside her. “You know I would never have gotten in if you said we were going to Suburbia.” He freaks out as she stops the car. “Don’t stop! Someone might speak to us!” Heh. Sarah peers out the window at Alison’s house. Fee frantically checks his complexion in the visor mirror. “You know, my skin just breaks out every time I leave downtown.” He demands Sarah look at his newly developed acne. “Right there! Tiny little suburban stress zits emerging in direct proximity to bad architecture.”

Felix is the classic antithesis of a suburbanite: gay bohemian artist who lives in a loft in a seedy-looking building. He sees suburbia as a bland place of conformity, a place that stifles creativity. This is illustrated by Fee’s quote above: the architecture of single-family home squeezed next to single-family home leads to acne.

Humorous quote but this critique is nothing new in the annals of suburbia. Concerns about conformity and bad architecture truly blossomed after World War II and continue to this day. Canadian subdivisions may often just heighten these concerns: the homes are often even closer together due to an interest in containing sprawl. In fact, these concerns are often reinforced by television shows and other narratives that play up the stereotypes of uptight, stuck-in-the-rat-race suburbanites versus free and uninhibited urban dwellers. While the show Orphan Black may have an unusual storyline, it is perpetuating a common suburban trope.