Tag Archives: architecture

Arguing over whether spires and antennas at top of skyscrapers count for a building’s height

Posted on by

There is an ongoing argument, including this opinion piece from a “Chicago partisan,” about what at the top of a skyscraper should count toward the building’s official height. The latest round of argument involves the new World Trade Center building:

So far, nothing is official: the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the international organization of skyscraper engineers, designers and builders that certifies a building’s height, will weigh in only when One World Trade Center is completed. At an expected, historically symbolic 1,776 feet, the New York tower seems to have a solid claim.

But Chicagoans who live in the shadow of the 1,451-foot tall Willis Tower, which has held the title of nation’s tallest for some 40 years, should cry foul — because deciding just how tall a building is turns out to be more complicated than it might seem…

The council has three categories for measuring the heights of tall buildings: height to “architectural top,” “highest occupied floor” and “height to tip.” This may seem like splitting hairs, but the differences can be considerable.

The meanings of “height to tip” and “highest occupied floor” are self-evident. But “architectural top,” the category the council uses to officially crown the tallest building, is less clear; it includes “spires,” but not “antennas, signage, flag poles or other functional-technical equipment.” This wording deliberately makes the short, pointy tops of the Petronas Towers count, but leaves out the much taller antennas that crown the Willis Tower.

The way this argument is going, it seems like city partisans want to change the definition of building heights in a way that best advantages their tallest structure. Why? This is more about status and prestige than anything else. The city with the official tallest building can claim something about themselves. Certain cities, like Chicago and New York, are known for their skylines and have historically dominated this international race.

I’m not sure why exactly this matters for certain cities. On the one hand, these tallest buildings can dominate a skyline. Being at the top of the record books can bring some attention, though it is unclear what exactly it leads to. On the other hand, the square footage of residential or commercial space that one building can add doesn’t make or break a business district (unless, perhaps, it is the only really tall building). Also, the tallest building can be built nearly anywhere, whether in New York, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, or Dubai. Does the tallest building really signal architectural or engineering competence? Doesn’t it tell us something that not every major or global city is chasing this record?

In other words, this might be a record that only a few cities and boosters really care about.

Architezer’s list of the top 10 US buildings

Posted on by

In response to a recent PBS show titled “10 Buildings that Changed America,” Architizer puts out its own top 10. They admit that their list is a little different:

Sure, the criteria governing our choices are more architecturally inclined — you won’t find the White House or even the Empire State Building here — and our tastes, unabashedly modern, but it’s undeniable how each of the buildings listed here have significantly contributed and even altered our built environment.

So these aren’t really the same lists – it seems like PBS was going for the most important socially and culturally through all of America’s history while Architizer is reflecting more modern architectural interests. The list features Wright, le Corbusier, and van der Rohe (x2). The geographic distribution is interesting as well: 2 in New York City, 1 in Boston, 1 in LA, 1 in Seattle, and then the rest are scattered throughout the country. Interestingly, at least for people in Chicago where there are frequently claims that modern architecture really took off in the city, no building from Chicago is on the list.

I would be fascinated to see how many Americans know about the 10 buildings on the list. Maybe they could identify two or three, with perhaps Fallingwater and the UN Building being the most well-known?

McMansion owners want “a front and rear entrance, a dining room, and a recreation room”

Posted on by

According to this description of McMansions, they offer suburban homeowners the basics:

When Sandy and Chris Ross were in Portland, Ore., they lived in a house built for those who buy large suburban dwellings.

“Our house was a McMansion, designed for most people who want a front and rear entrance, a dining room, and a recreation room,” says Chris Ross, a software engineer.

But the Rosses are not most people.

When they moved to Bryn Mawr, they wanted a house built to accommodate their family’s special needs, limited finances, and environmental awareness.

The main contrast developed here is between a McMansion and a custom-built home designed by an architect. McMansions provide the basics of a suburban home: a front and back door, some basic rooms, and plenty of space for living. In contrast, the home designed by an architect allowed the couple to have a kitchen that met their needs, a house that highlighted a notable Japanese maple in the front yard, and a good insulation and design that helps keep utility costs low.

Perhaps the bigger issue here is that most suburban homes are not built by architects nor are they really customized for their buyers. The article seems to suggest the custom home is desirable but a majority of homebuyers choose not to go this route. This particular story does not say how much this custom home cost. Additionally, a custom design might take longer and many homeowners may not feel equipped to help put together or desire a more customized home. Yet, a custom-designed home could allow more homeowners to really say their home reflects them.

Different features of homes through the decades

Posted on by

The design of single-family homes has changed quite a bit through the decades. Here is an overview, featuring this description of what homes built 1980s have featured:

More than 80 percent of homes listed for sale today in Austin, Raleigh, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas were built since 1980. In fact, more than one third of the homes listed today in Austin, Raleigh, Houston, and Dallas were built after 2010: these markets had a relatively mild housing downturn during the crash and demand for new construction has remained strong. In contrast, few homes in Las Vegas or Phoenix  have been built since 2010, but more than a third of their listings were built in the boom-and-bust 2000s decade.

Which features are distinctly modern? Homes built in the 1980s offer cathedral ceiling skylights, sunken living rooms, and mirrored closets. The 1990s gave us palladium/palladian windows (a large arched window flanked by smaller rectangular windows), island cooktops, and pot shelves (no, silly, that’s a kitchen feature). Next came the decade of water and audio: infinity edge pools, snail showers, and pre-wired surround sound are often mentioned in listings from the 2000s. Finally, phrases emphasizing artisanship and nature popped in the 2010s, like hand-textured walls, handscraped hardwood floors, and natural light exposure.

Recently, too, homes have gotten bigger, especially since the 1990s: homes built in the current decade are 80 percent bigger than the typical 1940s home. On top of all that, “new” is hard to resist, especially compared with the wear-and-tear that older homes have. As a sales agent in a new Las Vegas development said to me during the boom, “Why buy a used house when you can buy a new house?”

All those extra square feet, island cooktops, and hand-textured walls come at a price. The median listing price of homes built in the 2010s is more than twice that of homes built in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1940s. That means buying a piece of history will set you back a lot less than a big, modern house will.

Sounds about right except for the missing stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. It would then be interesting to these features and design changes with how perceptions of homes have changed. Take the significant change in square footage from the 1950s to the roughly 2,500 square feet for average new homes today – do homeowners feel like this size larger size is right? Or, take the updated and fancier kitchens: more Americans are eating out and consuming processed foods yet the emphasis on having gleaming kitchens has increased.

This also is a reminder of the population shift to the Sunbelt in recent decades.

Housing facades hide subway infrastructure

Posted on by

Not all the necessary equipment for subways fits underground. Here are a few examples of how cities use facades to hide the subway:

On a street in Brooklyn that takes you towards the river, where the cobblestones begin paving the road, there is a townhouse that deserves a second look. Despite its impeccable brickwork, number 58 Joralemon Street is not like the other houses. Behind its blacked out windows, no one is at home; no one has been at home for more than 100 years. In fact, number 58 is not a home at all, but a secret subway exit and ventilation point disguised as a Greek Revival brownstone.

If you think about it, this could happen a lot in cities and not too many people would know. It is a clever way to not let necessary infrastructure mar what otherwise are pleasant streets.

It reminds me of seeing Hollywood sets where the exterior looks like a city or neighborhood but then you walk inside and there is nothing there. Here is an example of the interior of a city street scene on a Hollywood lot:

HollywoodFacadeInterior

This could be an interesting premise for a science fiction story: the city looks real but there is nothing behind the facades…

Designing a “disaster-proof home”

Posted on by

There may be plenty of homebuyers who would like the assurance a “disaster-proof home” could provide:

Charles Roig, a longtime architect and owner of the company, and his twin brother, Daniel, a structural engineer, started working on the idea for disaster-proof homes 14 years ago. After more than 250 pages of structural calculations, they came up with a wood truss design and a patented wind-force resistance system that Charles Roig says can withstand winds of more than 200 mph that are associated with a category EF5 tornado…

“Every time I saw something on television and saw tornado destruction, it just ripped my guts out,” Roig said. “I couldn’t stop this.”

Gibbons likens the job of marketing disaster-proof houses to the early days of selling environmentally friendly homes because consumers have to buy into the concept before they’re willing to pay more for the features. She thinks collectors will be among the first to gravitate toward such a house.

Roig estimates one of his houses would cost 15 to 25 percent more than a conventionally built home. Most of the designs are single-story homes and contemporary in design.

We’ll see how popular these might become. Even in places where tornadoes are more common, they are rare events and the odds of one hitting a particular house are even smaller. But, a one-time occurrence may be enough to convince plenty of people that this is worthwhile.

See the R-Evolution Living website. Here is what they claim about their homes:

  • Tornado-proof, Hurricane-proof, Earthquake-proof
  • Secure against small blasts from inside or out AND Fire-proof possible
  • Able to resist the effects of Sink-Holes
  • Safe, affordable, attractive and GREEN
  • Made from renewable indigenous resources
  • Luxurious and upgradable
  • Backed by Insurance companies
  • Protecting you even while you sleep

With the heavy rains in the Chicago area in the last week, can they also promise to be flood-proof? And here is how the structure works, according to the FAQs page:

How does this structure work, exactly?
The main premise of a R-Evolution Living(TM) VPU, is a principal we refer to as an “Adjacency Structural Matrix” or ASM. ASM is a series of components that rely on the adjacent components in order to gain additional strength. So, instead of a wall required to be 16 feet thick in order to resist the immense force of an EF5 tornado’s 235 mile-per-hour wind, a series of patented components called “ribs” transfer the force to the adjacent members. The floors and ceilings, therefore, now accept the resistance to the force against the wall. Similarly, the exterior walls are now 11’-6” tall “beams” resisting the forces at the roof and at the end walls. This entire system is then linked together so that the unit acts as a living, single, extremely strong component.

Sounds interesting. It may just come down to the price differential…

Looking for new houses that don’t give off a McMansion vibe

Posted on by

A discussion of some new homes in Mt. Airy, Pennsylvania involves which homes do and do not give off a “McMansion vibe“:

“What’s THAT?” she said suddenly. “That’s just not okay.”

She was looking at two identical McMansions near the intersection of Lincoln Drive and Wayne Avenue, tall houses too big for their lots with boring beige stucco and stone that lacked the tell-tale Wissahickon schist sparkle.

I had a similar reaction to a house on the corner of Bryan and Durham, in a close-knit neighborhood known for the quality and variety of its Halloween decorations. It’s a neighborhood where kids play in the streets and everybody lives in almost identical row houses and twins with deep porches and sparkling stone walls. The new house looks like something from a soul-crushing suburban development, and the owners haven’t bothered to plant anything in the huge sunny side yard. The most notable feature of the house is a No Parking sign on the front of it.

So I was relieved when I looked at the listing for a new house being built on one of my favorite streets in Mt. Airy–St. Georges Road. It’s one of two planned homes by Blake Development.

From the looks of the plans, the house suffers a little from a common East Coast malady, multiple siding disorder, where the vertical exterior surfaces have a little too much variety. They’re stone, no they’re stucco, no they’re wood-like planks made out of concrete. But overall the house holds true to the character of the neighborhood. I’m encouraged by the interior shots of the developer’s other projects. The rounded door under the stairs is very Mt. Airy, and the kitchens
are good quality but not overly fancy. They’ve also won a bunch of awards for historic restoration.

It seems that the primary trait of what distinguishes between a McMansion vibe or not is whether the new home fits architecturally with other homes in the neighborhood. So, the definition of a McMansion could then differ quite a bit from place to place depending on whether the new home is near 1950s ranches, early 19th century Cape Cods, or other styles.

This could also lead to an interesting question: should new homes always fit in with existing homes? More broadly, should all new buildings fit in with nearby buildings? What happens when architectural styles change? I suspect the answer in practice is that it depends; not all homes or buildings are perceived as worth preserving and it often requires dedicated groups of residents or local actors to defend existing styles.

By the way, what neighborhood wants to be known primarily for “the quality and variety of its Halloween decorations”?

Photographing some of the densest housing on earth in Hong Kong

Posted on by

Check out a few photos of the dense high rises in Hong Kong:

As one of the most densely populated regions in the world, Hong Kong boasts not only the number one spot on Forbes’ list of escalating real estate markets, but also some of the most packed housing towers on Earth (at least one of which includes an honest-to-goodness 16.4-square-foot apartment). Captivated by these tightly crammed stacked cities, of sorts, German-born photographer Michael Wolf created tapestry-like shots of the residential buildings, cropping context to make the scope of each photo seem all the more mind-bending. In Hong Kong, architecture is “driven by function, not form and one tower block can only be distinguished from the next by the bold colour schemes of its façade,” he says, which means each piece in his Architecture of Density series, published earlier this year in a book by the same name, is pattern-driven and geometric; it’s so reminiscent of computer code that the human element nearly disappears altogether.

It would be interesting to see how people react to these pictures and these building designs. The headline to the story suggests these buildings are “sterile” but I could imagine other reactions: there is an order (and perhaps even some symmetry) to these structures; these buildings are stark and devoid of character; perhaps the buildings have to be this way to squeeze in so many people. Of course, these buildings don’t have to look this way; ornamentation doesn’t necessarily limit density. But, these buildings are the product of a particular era, context, and purpose.

Here is some more from the London School of Economics on Hong Kong’s density and the architecture and planning that has gone into it:

The urban area of Hong Kong has the highest population and employment density in the world. Measured at block level, some areas may have population densities of more than 400,000 people per square kilometre. As of 2011, there are seven million people for its 1,068 square kilometres (412 square miles) of land. However, more than 75 per cent of this land comprises no-built-up areas. The high concentration of people in just a few square kilometres is due partly to the fact that new town development did not take place until well into the 1970s and therefore most of the population (which had experienced a post-war boom in the 1950s) had to be accommodated in the main urban area along the waterfront of the Victoria Harbour on Hong Kong Island. The high price of land in Hong Kong also contributes to its high-density development…

Over the past few years, Hong Kong has developed the following planning, design and management measures to continue improving its high-rise living environments:

External environment of buildings
1) Better planning and design so that buildings are positioned further apart and have more open space;
2) Improved transport management by prioritising the development of mass transit and focusing on pedestrian movement in order to keep traffic congestion in check;
3) Creation of space by fully utilising the already-existing areas within buildings, such as roof tops and podiums, and transforming them into community and recreational spaces;
4) A trend towards large-scale property developments, which allows a greater consolidation of space in order to provide community facilities and ease of movement between locales;
5) The use of new building technology and materials to break the monotony of a district, while outdoor escalators facilitate the movement of pedestrians; and
6) Public education campaigns to encourage people to contribute to maintaining a clean environment.

All of this makes for quite a sight, even compared to the density of Manhattan.

The new Ace Hardware home is badly proportioned

Posted on by

Ace Hardware has a new set of television commercials where they argue going to their neighborhood stores is like visiting your neighbor. However, there is one big problem (beyond the fact that many people don’t know their neighbors): the house is badly proportioned. Take a look:

AceHardwareHouse

The bottom portion of the house doesn’t look too bad: a porch, front door, and a two car garage. But, then look above. My best guess is that the Ace sign displaced the actual window which then got squeezed in between the roof line and the garage. Overall, it doesn’t look good. The neighbors would not be happy if the house next door looked like this.

Despite the odd looking house, I like the sales pitch. I was at Home Depot to get five items related to gardening this weekend. Due to the size of the store and my infrequent visits (perhaps once a month or so), I had to ask where three of the five items were because they were very difficult to locate otherwise.

“4 Reasons to Own a Smaller Home” and not a McMansion

Posted on by

One writer gives four reasons for eschewing a McMansion and instead purchasing a smaller home:

1. Your mortgage will be smaller.
The most obvious advantage of living in a small home is the cost. Some wee homes are priced in the five-figure category, which could translate into a mortgage less expensive than your car insurance payment. Or, if it’s a real cheapie, you could pay cash for your new small home and kiss your mortgage good-bye forever.

2. Your taxes will be cheaper.
There are many factors that influence taxes, including house square footage and lot size. A smaller house usually means a smaller tax bill. Make sure you research your chosen town and state before settling on a home. We suggest plugging the address into Propertyshark.com before even picking up the phone to call the listing agent.

3. You will reduce your carbon footprint and save money on utilities.
Living simply means consuming less resources and creating as low an impact as possible upon the environment. That’s tough to do when you live in a sprawling 3,000 square foot manse with central air conditioning in a planned neighborhood with no trees or wild land for miles around. Furthermore, it takes a lot of heating oil to keep a big house warm, particularly if you live in cold climes. A strategically-placed pellet stove, on the other hand, could heat an entire 800-square-foot cottage. A smaller house also means a smaller electric bill.

4. Your house will be unique.
When your living space is small, you must get creative with how you use it. Gone are the days of devoting entire rooms to storage. Every nook and cranny of your home is essential, so it’s up to you to figure out how to make it work. This is a good thing. It forces you to carefully consider purchases and evaluate the necessity of the belongings that you do have. Additionally, it turns your house into something that is uniquely yours and adds character to your home. After all, isn’t that what turning a house into a home is all about?

This is a decent comprehensive list of complaints people have about McMansions: the first three reasons cover the financial aspects, the third also discusses the green or sustainability issue, and the fourth gets at the mass-produced nature or the poor quality of McMansions. Perhaps the only thing left to add is the negative neighborhood or community life that McMansions supposedly contribute to?

What would the flip side of this be – 4 reasons to purchase a McMansion? Here is a start. 1. You get a bigger house. 2. You get a bigger house for less money compared to a custom-designed house or one put together by an architect. 3. At least the front of the house will look impressive and large. 4. It is likely to be a newer house with fewer problems.