Tag Archives: architecture

Looking for the future of housing at the Solar Decathlon in Madried

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Check out three designs from an international housing competition in Madrid: a “Heliomet SunBloc” house, the Bee House, and a house made out of recycled wood and mushroom spores:

London Metropolitan University’s “Heliomet SunBloc” European Solar Decathlon house combines novel construction methods with unusual materials. The house is designed so that it can be placed on the rooftops of existing buildings or other disused areas, answering a difficult question about future suburban growth. Allied with a PV-T (PhotoVoltaic-Thermal) array, the design would help supply electricity and hot water not only to its own structure, but to the host building as well.

The primary material consists of relatively low-cost and lightweight EPS foam that allows unique interior and exterior designs to be created. …

The Bee House … makes extensive use of living walls and green roofs planted with bee-friendly vegetation. This built-in beekeeping system, completed by a backyard hive, serves to pollinate the home’s surrounding garden areas, which keep the homestead stocked with homegrown veggies as well as honey. The Bee House includes a work area and boutique shop where honey and beeswax-based soaps and candles can be sold to the public, perfect for the urban farmer with an entrepreneurial bent…

To say that this house is aspirational is putting (it) lightly, as the structure can’t currently be built as designed — largely because it’s constructed around a wall system based on recycled wood that has been colonized by mushroom spores. The myco-treatment, so to speak, creates a fire- and mold-resistant, highly insulating building block ideal for green building. Oh, and it produces two edible mushroom crops in the process. (Call it the 100 Mile House meets the 100 Mile Diet.)

We are probably a long ways from seeing any of these three designs in practice. However, they do hint at some possible trends:

1. Greener houses. I think the question is how far builders and buyers are willing to go. Far enough to save a little money? Enough to significantly increase the price/value of the home?

2. Trying to utilize and connect to nature. Many single-family houses are sort of sealed off from nature even if they are in more suburban, idyllic settings. This could include everything from an uptick in gardens and compost piles, using green roofs, providing more rooms that don’t feel so sealed off from the outside, or just harnessing nature for energy purposes (solar plus geothermal and other options).

3. Looking for ways to build homes in denser settings. One assumption made by a number of thinkers is that future homes and suburbs will be more dense due to rising energy costs (particularly an increasing cost in driving due to higher gas prices and possibly higher gas taxes to keep up with better fuel efficiency) and young adults and retiring adults who want walkable communities as well as places that offer mixed-uses and more of a neighborhood feel.

Modernist homes doomed by being too small?

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Here is an interesting suggestion regarding modernist homes like those found in New Canaan, Connecticut: the homes were just too small to compete with McMansions.

Among the houses that Philip Johnson designed in New Canaan, Conn., the suburban enclave that became a laboratory for postwar Modernist design, the Robert C. Wiley house, completed in 1953, remains one of his most elegant. It is a strikingly simple composition of two rectangular boxes: one, a glass and wood pavilion with a single, 15-foot-tall living, dining and kitchen space, is cantilevered over the other, a stone and concrete base that contains, among other things, four small bedrooms, bathrooms and a sitting room. The 3,000-square-foot house typifies Modernism’s insistence on efficient use of space, but by the advent of the McMansion era, despite its architectural pedigree, it merely seemed quaintly, and unsalably, tiny.

The house had been on the market for some time when an enlightened buyer — Frank Gallipoli, the president of Freepoint Commodities, an energy trading firm — bought it in 1994. “I wasn’t looking for a Philip Johnson house,” he recalled, but given the price of land in New Canaan, the building, along with the six acres on which it sits, offered good value. “It had the utility of a house,” Gallipoli said, “but I was getting an art object.” And art is a subject close to Gallipoli’s heart: he owns an extensive collection that includes works by contemporary British artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Jenny Saville and Marc Quinn. Many of these pieces are too big to show in a domestic setting, so Gallipoli began to think about converting a barn on the property (it also served as a garage) into a private gallery. About 10 years ago, he asked Johnson himself to come up with a design, but the architect’s idea for a series of domed structures was never built. Ultimately, Gallipoli commissioned Roger Ferris, of the Connecticut firm Roger Ferris + Partners, to design the barn, along with a pool house, a new garage and a substantial restoration of the existing house. (Ferris also did some work on Gallipoli’s Manhattan house and designed a “surf shack” for him in the Hamptons, which includes a pink Corian aboveground lap pool.)

I know the point of piece is to discuss the intriguing rebuild of this home but I find the suggestion at the end of the first paragraph fascinating. The tone of the piece is that people should recognize the beauty of the home and it took an “enlightened” buyer with a true interest in art to see it for what it could be. But, alas, Americans got bogged down with buying humongous homes like McMansions and lost interest in homes with “architectural pedigree.”

I’ve suggested this before: if given a choice, I don’t think most Americans would select a modernist home. I’m not sure square footage is the only reason for this. Critics and architects may not like these choices but it also doesn’t necessarily mean Americans only go for the largest space, the best bang for the buck, the kitschiest house, or the most impressive space. Perhaps many Americans imply aren’t trained to know what critically praised architecture looks like or to appreciate it. Indeed, where is this training supposed to take place and when should it occur? (I don’t think it happens much in the curriculum from kindergarten through college.) Or perhaps it has to do with how Americans view social class and the suspicion Americans tend to have toward educated opinions and movements. Additionally, hiring an architect to design a home requires money that is likely out the reach of many Americans.

Would most Americans choose the glass house or the McMansion?

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The Wall Street Journal has a photo gallery of a glass house in Napa that was built by a homeowner who didn’t want to replicate nearby McMansions:

Robert Lieff, 75, an attorney and founder of the law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, purchased this 21.5 acre property in California’s Napa Valley for $805,000 in 1998, according to the Napa County recorder’s office. Mr. Lieff, who purchased the land with his then-wife, Carole, was looking to build something with more character than the usual stock. ‘I just saw so many houses around there that were like ‘McMansions’ — I had no interest in that,’ he said. He opted instead for this corrugated steel and glass home, which over the years has won plaudits for its design.

The house does indeed have a lot of character and has a kind of modern beauty to it. The pictures are quite interesting as the home features a lot of straight lines, open spaces, and beautiful views of wine country.

Yet, as I’ve wondered before, how many Americans would choose this house over a McMansion? Granted, there might be some price differences; even most McMansions are not built on 22-acres of land. But even if the prices, square footage, and land were equal, would this modern house appeal to most Americans? Critics and architects tend to like such homes, and they want to preserve modern homes built in recent decades (such as these homes in New Canaan, Connecticut) and promote new ones. But mass-market homes tend not to look like these modern homes and suburban tract homes have been roundly bashed since Levittown.

Perhaps we could trace this back to Bourdieu’s ideas about social class. Here is how this might be argued: modernist homes appeal to those with the education and class training to like them. In contrast, those of the middle- and lower-classes like other features of houses such as their functionality, space, or the middle-class nature of the neighborhood (safe, good schools, etc.). Perhaps it is tied to what the home at the base of the American Dream is supposed to look like: a cozy place for kids with a comfortable yard but not too unusual. (However, some of the McMansions are quite unusual, though not perhaps in the good sense.) We might see these boundaries pushed in coming years: there are more people interested in providing affordable housing with a modernist twist such as semi trailers remodeled into housing units.

Question at the beginning of urban planning: “beautiful people or beautiful cities”?

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Here is part of an overview of the “birth of urban planning” and how the field began with a “focus on place at the expense of people”:

Before then, there were three types of people thinking about how a city should look and function — architects, public health officials, and social workers. Each group approached the question of city building very differently.

The architects were focused on the city as a built environment, implementing ideas like L’Enfant’s grand vision for Washington, D.C., and the New York City grid (set out by the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811). The public health professionals, on the other hand, were consumed with infrastructure. They knew there was a connection between certain diseases and social conditions, even if they didn’t know precisely what it was. Planning how a water system would work, or where waste should go, or how to get garbage out of a city, was the most effective way to stop diseases from spreading (see, for example, John Snow, who figured out in the 1850s that a single water pump on Broad Street in London had infected hundreds of people with cholera). And lastly the social workers wanted to use the city to improve the lives of the people living there. They wanted cleaner tenements, spaces for immigrant children to play, and more light and fresh air for residents.

These thinkers were brought together by the pressure cooker that was the Industrial Revolution. “At that moment, we began to look for technological ways to expand the city,” says Elliott Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “All of a sudden here’s a pressure to comprehensively plan. You can’t just put a privy wherever you want.”…

At that conference, and in the years that followed, any one of these early urban planning strains could have taken over as the intellectual giant in the field. Though the social workers and the public health officials continued to play a role, urban planning’s intellectual history ended up grounded in architecture.

That outcome is thanks in a large part to the creation of the country’s first urban planning school, at Harvard. The University founded a school of landscape architecture in 1898. It was, effectively, a vanity project, slavishly devoted to Frederick Law Olmstead (in fact, it was started by Olmstead’s son). At the same time, It was a place to start. Soon after, they began offering classes in city planning, a first for higher education in America.

This could be an intriguing intellectual “what if”: what if urban planning had initially followed a public health or social work path? How might our cities be different and how would that have changed our culture?

This reminds me of the roots of sociology. Like urban planning, sociology became a more formal academic discipline around the turn of the 20th century. While some people had been practicing sociology and urban planning, it took time for this to become institutionalized and formalized. Similarly, American sociology had its roots in a few influential departments, particularly Chicago, which shaped the early years of the field. Indeed, I suspect a number of the social sciences were formalized in this period as the cultural turn toward science and rationality combined with expanding college campuses.

Discussing height limits of skyscrapers

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Is there a limit to the height of buildings?

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a group interested in and focused on the phenomenon of skyscrapers, recently asked a group of leading skyscraper architects and designers about some of the limitations of tall buildings. They wondered, “What do you think is the single biggest limiting factor that would prevent humanity creating a mile-high tower or higher?” The responses are compiled in this video, and tend to focus on the pragmatic technicalities of dealing with funding and the real estate market or the lack of natural light in wide-based buildings.

“The predominant problem is in the elevator and transportation system,” says Adrian Smith, the architect behind the current tallest building in the world and the one that will soon outrank it, the kilometer-tall Kingdom Tower in Jeddah…

One idea for a new system would be buildings with hollowed bases. Think of the Eiffel Tower, says Tim Johnson. He’s chairman at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and a partner at the architecture firm NBBJ, and he says any really, really tall building would have to be like a supersized version of the Parisian icon, otherwise the lower floors required to support the gradually narrowing structure would be way too big to even fill up.

For a Middle East-based client he’s not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. “One of the client’s requirements was to push human ingenuity,” he says. Consider them pushed.

So perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t so crazy with his idea of a mile high building.

I would raise other questions:

1. Who has the funds/resources they want to devote to building such an edifice? Presumably someone might want to make a name for themselves.

2. Would anyone want to work or live at such a height? If not, what do you do with the building besides show off your accomplishment and perhaps hide television and other technological equipment?

3. Would it be “worth it” in the long run?

McMansions come to Levittown

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Levittowns are well known for its mass-produced homes but plenty of change has come to these homes and communities in recent decades. There are now even McMansions:

Take a ride down any Levittown street, and you will see the changes. I suppose, after 60 years, some change is to be expected. Apparently, even a complete tear down and re-build. That’s what happened over in Levittown’s Kenwood section.

This super-sized,’McMansion’, juxtaposed next to an asbestos-sided Jubilee, is the talk of Kentucky Lane. To my knowledge, there was no camera crew or shouts of ‘move that bus!” for this renovation. This prominent 3-story home is a sore thumb on a quiet street of  neatly lined Levitt built 2-story specials. It’s a monster of a house, complete with 5- bedrooms and 4-bathrooms. And? It is for sale. The asking price? Over 600-grand.

In.

Levittown.

Who will buy this house?

I posed this question to local realtor, Jen Mandell-Sommerer, of RE/MAX Advantage. She shared, “It’s not going to help the sales in Kenwood, nor do I think it is going to really hurt the sales in Levittown. The home just does not fit the area. I feel if a buyer has $650,000 they are not going to look in the Levittown area, especially in Bristol Township for that price range. Our houses are selling just in the $200,000 range.”

The listing for the house, which is down to $495,000, is here. Looks like a possibility for a McMansion: 3265 square feet, some odd architecture in the front, and a teardown that dwarfs original (yet altered) Levittown homes. The red sports car in the front driveway (both uncovered and covered) is an interesting touch, there is an interesting walk-through shower, and an extra-wide (leather?) chair next to a jacuzzi tub.

Gallery of the “10 Ugliest McMansions in New Jersey”

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New Jersey is well-known for its McMansions and was this was mentioned frequently in my study of all of the uses of the term McMansion in the New York Times between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2009. So I was intrigued to see a gallery of some of the ugliest New Jersey McMansions with this description at the beginning:

McMansions are one of America’s most notorious products. They have made it possible for people to live in large, cookie-cutter homes, which can be “customized” from a list of builder options. They have developed a reputation, however, as opportunities for perfect architectural disasters.

We have selected 10 of the most disproportionate, inharmonious, ostentatious, and just plain ugly McMansions to entertain you with (and show you what not to do if you are thinking of building a home). As an added bonus, we’ve also pointed out which famous architect would roll over in his grave if he saw it.

My favorite here is #7. Some common elements to these houses: their fronts are meant to impress; the designs often mimic notable architectural styles; there are a lot of big windows and pillars; and there are many gables. There is some consistency in this disparate architecture.

One quibble with this gallery: most of these homes are over 10,000 square feet and the homes are all very expensive. This is far beyond McMansion territory as homes this large are rarely mass produced. Imagine some of these mansions watered down a bit to save on costs and then mass produced in the New Jersey suburbs.

Redesigning the playground to free children and adults

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Here is an interesting example of architecture and design at work: putting together a playground in New York City that will free children and adults rather than burden them.

In Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” the playground forms a fertile backdrop for her pop-sociological observations about child-rearing, French vs. American style. The upper-middle-class Manhattan moms (she can tell by the price of their handbags) follow their kids around the gated toddler playground narrating their activities. The French moms sit on the edge of the sandbox and chat with other adults. The Brooklyn dads follow their children down the slide. The French moms sit on a bench and chat with other adults. Her theory, a bestselling one, is that French parenting consists of more non, more équilibre, and thus more time for adults to be adults.

It never occurs to her that maybe it is the playgrounds that encourage parents to act this way. Most New York playgrounds are designed for the protection of children: padded surfaces, equipment labelled by age appropriateness, and a ban on unaccompanied adults. Frankly, it is hard to see why an adult without a child would want to enter. There’s often little seating, minimal shade, and no place to set down a coffee except in a stroller cup holder. As for those parents who don’t want to helicopter, the perimeter benches can be far from where children play, sight lines blocked by the bulky climbing structures. Standard New York playgrounds are made for a single activity—child’s play—not family socializing or even adult enjoyment.

The planners of New York City’s Governors Island, an ice-cream-cone-shaped piece of land a half mile from the end of Manhattan, see play somewhat differently, and are designing their first thirty acres of park and public space accordingly. “People spend several hours here” on the weekends, says Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island. Free ferries from Manhattan and Brooklyn bring visitors in for extended afternoons. “You wander through the island, you have an idea or you may not, the kids run around. There aren’t precedents for that kind of place. It’s different than a beach or an urban park, or even a state park, where you go to barbecue.” She adds, “Early on we said we didn’t want to have playgrounds, but we didn’t say what that meant.”…

“If you create a park-like environment and people feel really free, adults hang out and participate like children do,” Geuze says. Contrast the concept for Liggett Terrace with the experience at Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park, an access point for the ferry to Governors Island. To date, Pier 6 consists of four landscaped, gated playgrounds, one with swings, one with water, one with sand, and one for climbing. There’s a separate beach-volleyball court, and a separate park building with food. If you aren’t pushing your kid on the swing, narrating every to and fro, the only place to sit is the springy rubber ground.

It would be interesting to hear more about how this new kind of park would change people’s behaviors. The article seems to suggest that certain park designs necessarily lead to certain behaviors; is this always the case? Does it require a critical mass of people

This reminds me of some arguments about parks from earlier days. Take Central Park in New York City as an example. Olmstead and Vaux designed the park to be more natural and take advantage of the natural topography and features. This was contrasted with more formal European parks which often had carefully cultivated gardens and water features. Central Park became beloved even as it is still fairly unusual in big cities as it can be difficult to find that much land and leave it relatively unencumbered.

 

Argument for historic preservation district for less than 20 year old McMansions

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I wondered when this day might come: a local government official in Australia is suggesting a set of McMansions less than twenty years go should be protected by a historic preservation district.

Hornsby councillor Bruce Mills is leading a push to have Cannan Close, Cherrybrook, gazetted as a heritage conservation area.

While the cul-de-sac was only developed in the 1990s, Mr Mills said it was already architecturally significant, and brushed aside claims that it was too new to be listed.

“I don’t think anyone turns into Cannan Close who doesn’t let out an involuntary ‘wow’,” Mr Mills said. “The houses are consistent in their look, feel, style and materials, the width of the blocks, even the trees and gardens.

“I know that the Cannan Close dwellings are only 20 or so years old, but what will our grandchildren be debating if we say it’s not old enough

“Under these new planning laws, nothing will survive until it’s 70 years old because nothing is protected.”

The logic here doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable: buildings that are not protected can be altered and/or destroyed. Yet, I imagine people might have two major objections:

1. Historic buildings should be a little more historic than less than 20 years old. This is actually an interesting question: at what point does a community have enough perspective to be able to declare something worth protecting or not? Buildings are not simply protected because they are old; it is often because they exemplify a particular style (even Brutalist structures can be considered for protection) or the community has found them to be worthwhile structures.

2. Some will argue that McMansions should never be historically protected, even if they were much older. One critique of McMansions factors in here: such homes are often not considered to be paragons of architectural style and because they are mass produced, will not age well. Put another way, these homes are not architecturally worth saving.

All together, discussions about historic preservation districts often stir up a lot of discussion as it can pit community interests versus the rights of homeowners. It will be interesting to see if these Australian McMansions do get protected.

Rise of “the doggie equivalents of McMansions”?

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The New York Times recently had a story about luxurious dog houses. A short blurb about the story in the New Yorker called them “the doggie equivalents of McMansions.” Here is a little bit from the NYT description of the world of luxurious dog houses:

Take, for instance, the Palladian-style mini-mansion that Glenna and Ed Hall bought at a charity auction three years ago for about $300. With Jeffersonian columns that match the ones on their home in Roanoke, Va., the two-foot-tall doghouse makes a perfect accent for the garden. No one seems to mind that the garden is off-limits to Maggie May, their 28-pound whippet-borzoi mix — least of all Maggie May…

As Michelle Pollak, an interior designer who creates custom doghouses under the name La Petite Maison, observed: “Half our clients say, ‘Hey, we’d like a replica of our home for the dog,’ and half say, ‘This is the dream house we’ve always envisioned but couldn’t afford in real life’ — like a French palace for the French poodle.”…

DOGHOUSE design tends to be popular with architects and home builders, who sometimes refer to it as “barkitecture” and donate their creations to charity auctions that raise money for animal shelters. Designers say they love doghouses because they’re small and fun and allow lots of room for creativity…

THERE are many designer doghouses, but perhaps the only one with a cult following was, not surprisingly, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The doghouse was created in the 1950s at the request of Jim Berger, a 12-year-old who wrote to the architect to say that his black Labrador, Eddie, needed a home.

This raises a set of questions:

1. Should McMansion doghouses come in for the same sort of criticism McMansions receive?

2. Are people who live in McMansions themselves more likely to build their dog a McMansion doghouse?

3. Are there critics of “barkitecture” in the architecture community?