Tag Archives: architecture

A new McMansion critic: Ice Cube

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I’ve seen this story in a few places but here is a summary of Ice Cube’s thoughts about McMansions:

Who observed “in a world full of McMansions, the Eameses made structure and nature one”?

It wasn’t architectural historian Thomas Hines or publisher extraordinaire Benedikt Taschen, but rapper Ice Cube…

Who knew? Reminiscent of critic Reyner Banham’s (who once wrote “I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original”) wacky yet endearing drive through the city’s crazy quilt of architecture in 1972, Ice Cube name checks everything from Baldessari’s scary ballerina clown to the Watts Towers while cruising westward toward the Eames House. He admires the husband and wife team for their resourcefulness and credits them for “doing mash-ups before mash-ups existed.”

“A lot of people think L.A. is just eyesore after eyesore, full of mini-malls, palm trees and billboards,” sais Ice Cube. “So what, they don’t know the L.A. I know.” And what he does know is absolutely worth a look.

Having been born in Los Angeles, perhaps Ice Cube is uniquely suited to point out the differences between McMansions and the Eames House. I would guess organizers of this large art exhibit are happy to have a celebrity promote what they are doing.

The Eames House foundation suggests it was built to fit its initial owners:

The Eames House, Case Study House #8, was one of roughly two dozen homes built as part of The Case Study House Program. Begun in the mid-1940s and continuing through the early 1960s, the program was spearheaded by John Entenza, the publisher of Arts and Architecture magazine.

In a challenge to the architectural community, the magazine announced that it would be the client for a series of homes designed to express man’s life in the modern world. These homes were to be built and furnished using materials and techniques derived from the experiences of the Second World War. Each home would be for a real or hypothetical client taking into consideration their particular housing needs.

Charles and Ray proposed that the home they designed would be for a married couple working in design and graphic arts, whose children were no longer living at home. They wanted a home that would make no demands for itself, and would serve as a background for, as Charles would say, “life in work” and with nature as a “shock absorber.”…

Charles and Ray moved into the House on Christmas Eve, 1949, and lived there for the rest of their lives.  The interior, its objects and its collections remain very much the way they were in Charles and Ray’s lifetimes.  The house they created offered them a space where work, play, life, and nature co-existed.

This sort of customization is unusual in many American suburban houses, not just McMansions which are often cited as exemplars of typical suburban single-family homes.

Would wealthy homeowners rather live in or next to a McMansion or modernist house?

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A short look at a Great Falls, Virginia modernist house got me thinking: would the typical wealthy homeowner rather live next to a McMansion or a modernist home? Here is how this house is described on Curbed (and there are lots of pictures as well):

A wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., Great Falls, Va. is better known for it’s sprawling McMansions than its modernist masterpieces, but this glassy new construction in the woods is adding to the town’s architectural street cred. Distinguished by stark white walls and huge expanses of glass, the sleek home was designed by architect David Jameson and won the 2011 Washington DC AIA Award of Excellence. Thanks to the broad swaths of glass, the modern house achieves a connection to nature that would evade one of NoVa’s typical Italianate McMansions. Worthy of special note is the courtyard, which utilizes a frameless glass railing.

So what makes this modernist house more attractive than a McMansion? Several reasons are given here:

1. It has “architectural street cred.” Namely, it was designed by a known architect and won an award.

2. It is better connected to nature than McMansions.

3. It is not an Italianate facsimile of which the articles suggests there are too many. This house is unique.

But I would be interested in knowing how many suburban residents would choose to live in or live near this modernist house versus choosing a McMansion. The modernist style is not common in the suburbs; unless this house is in a unique neighborhood or has a really big lot, it may stick out from surrounding houses. For the average suburbanite, do the looks of this structure really invoke feelings of home? Might this be of architectural interest but not somewhere people could imagine living?

Designer parking garages in Miami

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Parking garages tend not to have good reputations as they are often functional blocks of concrete that are measured by how many cars they can fit. But, Miami apparently has a number of “designer” garages including a proposed parking elevator for a new high-rise:

The $560 million Jetsonesque tower will rise in Sunny Isles Beach as part of a collaboration between Germany-based Porsche Design Group and a local developer, Gil Dezer. It likely will be the world’s first condominium complex with elevators that will take residents directly to their units while they are sitting in their cars…

Here is how it will work: After the resident pulls over and switches off the engine, a robotic arm that works much like an automatic plank will scoop up the car and put it into the elevator. Once at the desired floor, the same robotic arm will park the car, leaving the resident nearly in front of his front door. Voila, home!

The glass elevators will give residents and their guests unparalleled views of the city or of the ocean during their high-speed ride, expected to last 45 to 90 seconds…

The car elevators are the latest twist on Miami Beach’s burgeoning passion for designer parking garages. The highly acclaimed 1111 Lincoln Road designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron opened in 2009; also planned are garages by London architect Zaha Hadid, Mexico’s Enrique Norten and Miami’s own Arquitechonica.

Being able to live in a luxury condo that is greatly enhanced by parking right outside of your door sounds like a uniquely American prize. This is another reminder how American culture is dominated by the automobile.

At the same time, this could also be seen as an architectural or design issue: how can one successfully design parking garages so they are aesthetically pleasing? While these garages in Miami might be for more luxurious residences, there are other options. One option that seems to be growing in popularity is underground garages. While this is great in dense urban spaces where valuable land can’t be wasted on a separate parking structure, it can also be found in denser suburban developments where the goal is to allow condo or townhome owners to park directly below their units and to keep the garage out of sight. After all, large houses with prominent garages may be called “snout houses” in reference to the overarching emphasis on where the garage is going to be parked.

This reminds me of one of the parking decks in Naperville. The Van Buren structure features a stained glass window memorializing the “Cars of the Century.” Also, Wheaton has done a nice job of hiding their downtown garage behind more traditional looking structures.

Two fun structures: an “underground temple” in Japan and a proposed underground skyscraper

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Here are two interesting spaces, one underground proposal from Mexico City and a large piece of infrastructure in Japan.

1. A Mexican architect has drawn up plans for a building that is just the opposite of a skyscraper:

Suarez has imagined a massive building for those who prefer holes to heights and a novel solution around a law that bans structures higher than eight stories in the crowded, historic center of Mexico City.

Instead of a soaring tower, Suarez wants to dig an inverted pyramid nearly a thousand feet deep with enough apartments, stores and offices to hold 100,000 people.

Kind of sounds like an acropolis from Simcity. What would people do for natural light – would people be more willing to live far underground than high above a city?

2. A large piece of infrastructure under Tokyo is known as the “underground temple.” Its real job: help control floods.

The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, also known as the G-Cans Project or the “Underground Temple”, is an subterranean water infrastructure project built to protect the capital Tokyo against floodwaters during rain and typhoon seasons. It is believed to be one of the largest water collection facilities in the world. Building began in 1992 and the massive structure now consists of five concrete silos, a large water tanks and 59 pillars connected to a number of pumps that can pump up to 200 tons of water into the Edogawa River per second. It has also become a tourist attraction, as well as a location for movies, TV shows and commercials.

This kind of looks like the depiction of the large temple-like spaces of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. This also reminds me of the Deep Tunnel project under Chicago which is also for floodwater – it is the largest infrastructure around (one of the largest such projects in the country – see some earlier pictures here) but hardly any Chicago area resident knows that it even exists.

(Two quick thoughts: both of these spaces would be large and impressive. Second, is getting one’s architecture news from Yahoo good or bad?)

A shift from the size of the McMansion to the quality of the large house

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The Tennessean takes a look at a trend I have been hinting at for a while: people may willingly buy smaller homes but they also want an increase in quality.

After a slowdown caused by the recession, neighborhoods of million-dollar houses are being developed in Davidson County again. But please don’t call them McMansions.

Not long ago, homes in the million-dollar range were easy to spot because of their size, typically 6,000 square feet or more. Today, the average size has shrunk to between 3,500 and 5,000 square feet of space, according to developers.

That’s the size of many less expensive houses, but homes with seven-figure price tags have individual architectural designs and other features that won’t be found in a typical subdivision house, says Alan Looney, president of Castle Homes…

Buyers are interested in quality of construction, not quantity of square feet, says Eric Bentley, construction consultant for home builder Carbine & Associates.

Is this an improvement for those who decry the architecture or design of McMansions or the environmental impact of these larger houses? The improved quality of these large homes may just fit Bourdieu’s ideas that quality and aesthetics are more important to the educated classes rather than the size and functionality that those with money might go after. At the same time, this is taking place during an economic downturn and we don’t know the profiles of these buyers – are these people who had also had plenty of money before the recession and are only now buying houses because they desire quality and not size? Or is the downtown leading a whole bunch of people to reconsider their priorities when money is more scarce?

The lack of seating in cities and the response by New York City

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The New Yorker draws attention to the lack of seating in many urban settings and how New York City has responded:

A dimension that is truly important is the human backside. It is a dimension many architects ignore,” the urban sociologist William H. Whyte once observed. Planners and designers of urban space have often stinted on seating, leaving the rest of us to colonize ledges, lean against planters, perch on fire hydrants, set up camp chairs, and fold coats to dull the pain from pointy iron rails. Lately, though, New York has begun to recognize the needs of the temporarily sedentary. This is quietly becoming an excellent city for sitting…

In the latest initiative, the Department of Transportation has rolled out a new program of sidewalk seating by request. New Yorkers can go to the DOT website and suggest a location for a sleek, sculptural CityBench designed by Ignacio Ciocchini (who also authored the garbage cans and shop kiosks at Bryant Park). Each of the three side-by-side berths is made from a sheet of perforated steel, folded into a back and a seat, and separated from its neighbor by a low armrest. The benches look tough, cool, and modern, but the effect of installing 1,000 of them on sidewalks in all five boroughs will be to make the city a more relaxed, inviting place.

Some will no doubt resent the new proliferation of benches and chairs as yet another encumbrance. New Yorkers would prefer the rest of the world to think that we move at a constant lope, defying cars in intersections, and pushing past slow-moving tourists. The truth is, though, that some of us are also old or infirm or have only just learned to walk. It’s precisely because we spend so much time on our feet that we find ourselves sometimes schlepping groceries, dragging reluctant kids, nursing bum knees, and suffering in high heels. The old solution was to segregate weary shufflers in parks, leaving the asphalt to the hurried. But Whyte noted that in crowded public plazas, people don’t choose to sit out of the way of foot traffic, but rather plop down amid pedestrians who happily weave around them. The reason is that sitting down is a social act. Public seating is a crucial element of a vibrant metropolis, which is why the Department of Transportation is also now functioning as the Department of Staying Right Here.

Interesting. Compared to the sedentary suburban lifestyle which consists of a lot of sitting within houses and workplaces as well as numerous short car trips, the city life is much more on one’s feet.

Two thoughts about this:

1. This short piece doesn’t say much about how we got into this position. I suspect one reason is homelessness. Seats are places wheres the homeless can spend a lot of time during the day and sleep on at night. With the increasing criminalization of homelessness in many cities, either seats have been removed or they have been altered to not allow laying down. Cities may want seating but they want it for certain types of people to sit there.

2. I wonder if many cities haven’t provided as much seating to save money or to limit having to deal with problems (like homelessness) by simply leaving seating to private spaces. Of course, the problem with this is that most businesses would have you pay in order to have a seat. If public spaces are only for walking, standing, and milling around, they are less attractive and the wealthier can retreat to private settings to find seats.

Unusual 60,000 square foot house in northern Ohio

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Big houses tend to draw attention but particularly eccentric big houses. Here are some of the features of an unusual 60,000 square foot home in northern Ohio:

A wealthy inventor conceived of a home with whimsical, underground ‘streets’ built to scale and inspired by those he’d seen in Georgetown, Paris and Savannah. Above ground, it featured a private beach and marina sculpted into the shores of Lake Erie. And a helicopter pad…

“It takes four-and-a-half hours to show this property,” said Scott Street of Sotheby’s, the listing agent for the Waterwood Estate, which is now listed on the Vermilion real estate market for $19.5 million.

The property sits on 160 acres, boasts three-quarter miles of frontage on Lake Erie and contains a series of “pods” connected by glass corridors that were navigated by scooters and golf carts…

Jacobsen used his trademark “pod” style design to give the design more flexibility and allow it to evolve as Brown wanted other things added. The entire home is a series of 20 castle-like concrete buildings connected by glass corridors and each structure is topped with a slate pyramid.

Perhaps one could argue that any 60,000 square foot home is unusual but this has many intriguing traits.

Why build this property on Lake Erie?

Look for the new, important company to come out of a “low road building”

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While suburban office parks and city skyscrapers often gleam, one commentator suggests that important innovations tend to come from less attractive “low road building[s]”:

The startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Brand’s essay originally appeared in his book, How Buildings Learn, and has just been re-released as part of The Innovator’s Cookbook, a new Steven Johnson-edited tome of great essays about inventing stuff. It couldn’t come at a better time. The aesthetic of innovation now dominates the startup scene, but it’s like the skeleton of a long-dead invention beast. The point of a Low Road building isn’t that it looks any particular way but rather that you could do anything with and in them. “It has to do with freedom,” as Brand put it.

The argument here is that the particular design of a building, ordered, new, and stately versus bland, functional, and drab, leads to different creative outcomes. If this is the case, why then do successful companies move from their “low road building” to corporate complexes? This likely has to do with status signals – a successful company has to look to look the part such as having an impressive lobby to intimidate visitors and upscale offices for executives. But do the new buildings necessarily slow down innovation or is it more of a function of a growing bureaucratic structure?

I wonder if there is empirical evidence about where great companies get their start and how soon it is before they move to more traditional corporate offices.

Another take on this essay is to think about where these kinds of “low road buildings” tend to be located. In the suburbs, I would think they tend to be in rundown strip malls or in faceless industrial parks. In the city, they might be in old manufacturing facilities or more rundown neighborhoods. On the whole, people would probably not want to leave near such places. Such places could often be considered  “blight” and not the best use of the land. If something more attractive was to be proposed for such sites, many cities would jump at the opportunity. Does this mean we need to protect such spaces, particularly since they are often cheaper and could be used by start-ups who have limited capital?

“Home is where the hub is”

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A recent study looks at how being connected through the Internet and other gadgets at home changes what home is:

What the web has inspired, then, is a postmodern understanding of what “home” is: a de-physicalised, conceptual and psychological phenomenon that externalises its invisible meanings. And interaction designers recognise this: the web is another castle that the Englishman can live in, and he seeks to create virtual places that have as much effect on pride, self-esteem and identity as the bricks and mortar version where he sleeps…

I am constantly connected when I’m at home. It is my companion when watching a movie, it is my entertainment system when listening to the radio, it is my connection to the family and friends I speak with on VoIP. Sociologist Kat Jungnickel and anthropologist Genevieve Bell suggest that my over-networked experience isn’t unusual in Home is Where the Hub is? Wireless Infrastructures and the Nature of Domestic Culture in Australia: “Some read their emails and Google for news in front of the TV while others breastfeed while surfing the net. In the kitchen, they look for recipes or talk with friends via IM. In bed they write emails or shop on eBay.” The rooms once allocated for specific purposes have been co-opted by other (digital) tasks.

This isn’t always welcome. In one of Jungnickel and Bell’s case studies, a participant describes the conflicts that arise from home-multiplicity: “Sal tells of the congestion zone caused by the chameleonic characteristics of the kitchen table,” they write. “During the day it is her new computing space, and at night it is the social, cooking washing-up space for both of them.” Each online activity has imposed itself on our home-practice. We are experiencing a domestic transition as the web collaborates and competes with old “new” technologies such as the TV, the researchers argue. It “complicates” characteristics of the physical space.

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

In recent decades, commentators have suggested that Americans have retreated into their large homes and lost their connection to their communities. But this may be suggesting that while Americans may have withdrawn, they are still interested in being connected. However, this connection looks different than it has in the past. The connection now happens at the times of the individual’s own choosing, it is done at a distance, and it is unclear how much this translates into offline world action.

I don’t think we should be too surprised that the concept of home is changing. Our current understanding dates back roughly to the mid 1800s when homes were built with separate rooms to separate uses: sleep in one room, eat in another, cook in another, etc. Before that, homes were more multi-use as more people used their home for work as well as family life. It would be interesting to think about how the quick expansion of Internet connectedness might lead to new designs for homes or introduce interior spaces that enhance this connectedness. Already, we have more static gadgets that have been adapted, such as televisions including Internet apps, so why not dining rooms, bathrooms, and front porches plus back patios?

Tracing the McMansion Palladian window back to 16th-century Italy

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A common design feature of the American McMansion is the Palladian window, often over the front doorway and showing off the expansive, two-story foyer. One writer suggests Palladian design features can be found throughout the Pittsburgh region:

Want to see more? OK, let’s take a walk in any local area. Aspinwall or Avalon? Highland Park or Shadyside? You’ll wear yourself out counting Palladian features on houses and apartments, occasionally a grand facade in one place, sometimes just a simple Palladian window ornamenting the attic of a modest home in another.

And then, before you’re totally exhausted, take a drive through Upper St. Clair or Peters and take in all of the Palladian windows you will find on what seems like every fifth McMansion built in those towns in the past 30 years.

Continuing, the same writer gives us some insights into how Antonio Palladio’s designs became popular and part of the American architectural vocabulary:

Palladio designed about 45 villas and palazzos (country houses and town houses) for wealthy clients in and around his adopted home town of Vicenza and nearby Venice, which is about 40 miles away. He also designed significant public buildings in both towns, including major churches in Venice — the best known being the church of San Giorgio Maggiore — which is directly across the water from the Piazza San Marco and the subject of thousands of picture postcards over the years.

But, what really brought him fame is his published work “I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura” or “The Four Books of Architecture.” These books, when translated into English at the beginning of the 18th century, captivated English architects, who eagerly copied his works and his style. Palladianism coursed like a river through the architectural styles of the Georgian Period — the approximately 120-year reign of the Kings George I through IV. As the prevailing styles in England at the time of the flowering of the American colonies, they were copied here in public buildings, churches and houses.

Thomas Jefferson, as a gentleman architect, was infatuated, and based his designs for Monticello on Palladian ideals. He even proposed a near-copy of a famous Palladian villa as his unsuccessful bid for the design of a presidential mansion in Washington. (Today’s White House is a somewhat more Anglicized version of Palladianism.)

What makes the Palladian features of McMansions problematic for critics (an example here) is that it is not seen as being “authentic.” For example, the Palladian window might sit beneath a French gable roof. Thomas Jefferson may have popularized the style but he did so in a more “true” structure that incorporates a number of a Palladian elements rather than simply picking one part out and slapping it up on the facade because it looks nice.

Even though I have heard about Palladian features many times, I was unaware about its roots in 16th century Italy. Is there anywhere in the general American education (grade school through college) where more modern architectural features comes up? I know students learn about Greek columns and temples but what about more modern buildings, like the steel skeletons of skyscrapers, the balloon-framed house, roof styles, and more. Is this a deficit in general knowledge that encourages architectural pastiche like McMansions? Is this generally left to history and art classes? What if all college graduates had the knowledge of a basic architectural field guide that they then could mentally carry around for the rest of their lives?