Tag Archives: design

In the movie Her, futuristic Los Angeles looks like Shanghai

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In recently watching the movie Her, I was intrigued to see the futuristic Los Angeles. What exactly does it look like? Shanghai, as the film was filmed in LA and there. Here is what I noticed in the film:

1. There are a number of portrayals of Los Angeles. For example, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is featured in several scenes. One time the main character walks past the Hall and another scene takes places on an outside terrace with a lotus flower fountain on an upper level of the hall. Here is what the fountain looks like:

WaltDisneyConcertHallFountain

See an exterior shot of the building in an earlier post. This building fits well with a futuristic image with its metal panel exterior and unusual lines.

2. There are a number of shots of a city skyline, particularly from the main character’s apartment. However, this view usually has a lot more tall buildings than Los Angeles actually has. While Los Angeles has a downtown as well as an outcropping of taller buildings by Beverly Hills, there were clearly too many to be LA. At the same time, there were also shots featuring the One Wilshire building. So the film plays loose with the skyline shots but they are often Shanghai.

3. There are a number of scenes in public spaces, particularly nice plazas and walkways that connect large buildings. I haven’t explored all of LA but I know these are limited in the downtown so there seemed to be too many.

4. There is a scene early in the movie featuring a subway/train map in the background and while the base map is of Los Angeles, it clearly has too many mass transit routes to match today’s LA.

5. Others images of mass transit don’t look like LA including a bullet train and elevated mass transit lines.

6. Some of the shots from apartments or the tops of buildings show more boulevards than streets or highways.

7. Some of the outdoor scenes have street signs that look more Asian in design as well as more Asian pedestrians (though LA has a large Asian population).

Los Angeles was once viewed as the future of American cities: sprawling, encompassing a broad range of terrains from beaches to hills, and glamorous locations. However, American filmmakers may now be looking to rapidly growing Chinese cities for what the future holds.

Questioning the open kitchen

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Lots of newer homes have kitchens open to great rooms or other gathering spaces. However, there are a few people questioning the trend:

J. Bryan Lowder, an assistant editor at Slate, recently slammed the open concept in a widely read article called “Close Your Open-Concept Kitchen.” He called the trend a “baneful scourge” that has spread through American homes like “black mold through a flooded basement.”

Lowder’s point, and one echoed through the anti-open-kitchen movement, is that we have walls and doors for a reason. While open-kitchen lovers champion the ease of multitasking cooking and entertainment and appreciate how the cook can keep an eye on the kids (or an eye on a favorite TV show), the haters reply that open kitchens do neither effectively. Instead, the detractors say, open kitchens leave guests with an eyeful of kitchen mess, distract cooks, and leave Mom and Dad with no place to hide from their noisy brood.

And apparently defenders of the open kitchen are quite vocal:

Roxanne, who blogs at Just Me With … under her first name only (and chose not to reveal her last name in this article for fear of backlash from open-kitchen devotees), ranted against the concept on her blog. For Roxanne, the open kitchen destroys coveted privacy.

Who knew this topic was so controversial. And how did we move from older homes with kitchens at the back of the house to the open kitchen of today?

Design psychologist Toby Israel, author of “Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places,” said open kitchens have gained such momentum because the kitchen is often the heart of family existence and a central gathering point.

All interesting. But, another issue with this article: the headline suggests there is a backlash against this design but presents limited evidence of this. Sure, it quotes a few people who don’t like the open kitchen. And there is a citation of an odd statistic that just over 75% of home remodelers are knocking down walls. All of this indicates more of a discussion about open kitchens, rather than a big trend.

This is a common tactic today from journalists and others online: suggest there may be a trend, present limited evidence, and then leave it to readers to sort out at the end whether a big trend really exists. There are several ways around this. First, present more data. A few articles that start heated online discussions do not tell us much. In this case, tell us what builders are actually doing or what homes people are buying. Second, wait it out a bit. Having more time tends to reveal whether there is really a trend or just a minor blip. While this doesn’t help meet regular deadlines, it does mean that we can be more certain that there is a discernible pattern.

Argument: you can’t hide the size of McMansions, regardless of the design

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A local debate over McMansions draws this claim about whether the size of the homes can be overlooked:

However, I do feel that we need to bring the elephant in the room out into the open so everyone can appreciate it properly. If you strip away all of the polite planning jargon about massing, square footage, curb cuts, along with most everything else gets said in those circles, and then boil it all down to its core essence, the view becomes much clearer. What we are talking about here are some very large and quite ostentatiously designed houses.

I call it Adele Chang’s Dilemma. How do you build McMansions that don’t look like McMansions? You can’t. No matter what the design style, or where you place the garage, or how you reconfigure the roof, or bedeck the place with curlicues and cornices, or shuffle the massing, or even bring in a small gaggle of winged gargoyles and lawn gnomes, the result is still going to be one heck of a big barn.

In other words, some will argue that McMansions are just too big, even if are designed well or maybe even fit local architectural traditions. Underneath those design elements will always be too many square feet. And why is this square footage so important?

We are talking about a clash between two differing cultures here. On the one hand you have the traditional version of Sierra Madre. A place where people are comfortable with what they have today and don’t view house size as a measure of their personal or spiritual worth.

The culture Adele Chang and her CETT bosses cater to, on the other hand, is a nouveau riche arriviste’ sort crowd who somehow believe that building a vanity castle on the side of an open hillside will be recognized by all of those living below as a sign of an innate personal superiority. It is a form of unchecked clodhopper consumerism that most people living here today do not respect or care to live beside.

The size matters because it (1) suggests something vain about the owner and (2) is resented by others because it is a blatant status symbol. A big new home in a community that does not want it is tied to an owner who is seen as a jerk.

Starbucks looking to have more stores that match local design

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Starbucks is a global brand but the company is looking to have more stores that line up with local style after moving designers out of Seattle:

As the designers became more familiar with their surroundings, they began to incorporate the communities’ stories into the designs. There are thoughtful touches like furniture made from reclaimed basketball court wood at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. And a brass-instrument chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the new Canal Street location in New Orleans. But even more interesting than that was the cultural observations the designers were able to make.

With more people on the ground, they began noticing things that might make a difference in not just the aesthetics, but how a particular customer might want to experience the shop. In metropolitan U.S. cities, for example, people tend to come in pairs or alone. They’ll saddle up to a long community table next to a stranger without giving it a second thought. In more urban settings, people will just sit right next to each other, alone but collectively together,” he explains.

While in places like China or Mexico City, the Starbucks experience is much more group-oriented. “People are in bigger groups, so you have think differently about the seating there.” he says. “They won’t crowd together in a banquet like they would in New York City.” This drove the designers to place more individual stools in the shops, so people could drag them around, creating impromptu group seating areas. The design in the Kerry Center location in Beijing, feels like a lounge, with a “coffee workshop” on the second level meant to teach a predominantly tea-focused culture about coffee…

Much of the mass customization comes in the form of colors and materials. For example, in Miami and Los Angeles, the design team is more likely to use a lighter palette of colors to reflect the abundance of sunlight. Southern cities need furniture that is cool to sit on, and beachy locations need durable furniture to account for the sand that gets tracked in. “We were looking at how the floor had worn over 10 years because people were walking in with sand on their feet,” Sleeth says about a store in Miami.

And for local design for all those Starbucks on the similar stroads of suburban America? The examples in the article are primarily from urban neighborhoods that have definable aesthetics.

Starbucks has long claimed to desire to be a “third place” between home and work. How much does local design help the company meet such goals? Do customers feel more at home (and happier and spend more money) in such stores?

Finally, does this sort of local design help people forget the fact that Starbucks is a major multinational corporation? Does it relieve guilt about patronizing Starbucks compared to a local establishment?

Can a McMansion successfully coexist with nature?

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A description of a large Coral Gables, Florida house suggests McMansions and nature can successfully mix:

Since the major asset of living in coastal Miami is nature, we’ve never understood the draw of a McMansion that fights its setting. Unfortunately, the city’s got street after street of homes incongruously designed, then slapped on lots stripped of fauna.

Not this beauty, though! Set on two lakefront acres in Coral Gables filled with sabal palms, live oaks, palmettos and ferns, the home is built with floor-to-ceiling windows that fill it with light and allow the outside to fill in as the most glorious decor, giving each room a loft-like, secluded feel.

While not everyone can afford — or even wants — a massive 12,231-square foot, $8.9 million home, the principle applies on scale: more nature is better!

There are two perspectives to this mixing and I don’t think they agree:

1. A home can be enhanced by its interaction with nature. This is linked to several factors: the size of the lot (just how much nature is around the home), the landscaping around the house (which is more like sculpted nature), and how the architecture and design of the home allows for more views or spaces for interaction with nature.

2. Critics of McMansions would suggest they are antithetical to nature and conservation. Big homes require lots of resources to construct and maintain. Additionally, they tend to be associated with suburban sprawl and lots of driving. A big home might be nicely married to nature but it is still an excessive use of resources.

This posting does seem to be making the point that many McMansions try to adopt natural elements but fail. Like my first point, a well-done connection to nature might be able to gloss over other problems with McMansions. However, I think there are still some out there who would argue that McMansions can never really promote nature.

It may be a really ugly house but is there such a thing as a 1956 McMansion?

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I’ve seen pictures of this large Indianapolis house before but here the suggestion is that it may be the ugliest house in America. It is quite unconventional, but I’m more interested in another suggestion: that this is a 1956 McMansion.

Designers with delicate sensibilities, look away. This may be the most hideous McMansion in America. Built in 1956, this is “almost-famous pimp-turned-construction mini-magnate” Jerry A. Hostetler’s Indianapolis Hearst Castle. Minus the architectural prowess. Plus more balconies.

Although the term McMansion didn’t really emerge until the late 1990s, it is sometimes applied to past eras. I usually think this doesn’t work that well because it involves applying modern standards to past styles. In the 1950s, I think this house would have simply been considered a mansion because of its size. The average new house size in the 1950s was roughly 1,000 feet so a home like this would have been quite large. Additionally, the home was built by a successful businessman, someone who would have the means to construct what he wanted, and was not built for the mass market.

The more unusual homes of the 1950s might have been some of the new modern glass and steel homes that some architects built. The mass produced, large, poor quality McMansions of the late 20th century didn’t really exist yet as mass market housing still tended to be quite small.

The important new styles in American homes in the last few decades: shed, split-level, millennium mansions

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The recently updated A Field Guide to American Houses includes descriptions of three new home styles from recent decades:

Q: Is it harder to put new homes into defined categories? In other words, how do you determine what is a defined style and what isn’t?

A: When I first started the revision, I was almost overwhelmed by what seemed to be the fractured nature of new home design and wondered how I would ever figure out what I believed the defined categories were…

Q: We think of Italianate, Queen Anne or Craftsman, for example, as being classic, etched-in-stone styles. Do you think one day we’ll think in the same way of split-level, shed or millennium mansions, three of your new categories?

A: Yes, I do. Shed was a favorite style of architects in the ’60s and ’70s. It was taught in prominent architecture schools such as MIT and Yale and won a number of architecture awards, … and even appeared in house-pattern books for builders. Millennium mansions, on the other hand, dominated builders’ subdivisions in the 1990s and 2000s much in the way that ranch houses dominated builders’ subdivisions of the 1950s and ’60s.

Split-level was a brand new house shape, rather than style, and was most often used in the ranch, styled ranch or contemporary styles. It can be compared to American four-square, also a house shape, popular from about 1900 to 1920 that could be found in several different styles.

Whether critics like these new home styles or not, there were a lot of each of these three styles built. American homes aren’t quickly demolished so these homes are here to stay. This could lead to a few options:

1. A number of these homes could be significantly altered as homeowners add on, change the exterior and interior, redecorate, change the yards, and live full lives with lots of memories in these homes. I’m reminded of the homes of the Levittowns: while critics said they were “little boxes,” after several decades they had been altered quite a bit and the streetscapes included a variety of homes to look at. See the historical work Expanding the American Dream by Barbara Kelly.

2. Down the road, such styles will be revered and will eventually lead to preservation efforts. “We need to save that gaudy McMansion from the mid-1990s” – someone in 2030 might say.

3. Down the road, critics will still blast McMansions and these other new styles as unimaginative and wasteful. But, there may still be plenty of these homes.

4. Some new design will render these trends irrelevant or passe. McAlester looks forward in this interview to green homes but these homes doesn’t necessarily have to have a similar architectural design.

Japanese homes seek to optimize space – includes ninja approach

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Here is a look at how some Japanese homes maximize their limited space:

Take for example, Tatsumi Terado and his wife Hanae who lives in a house with no interior walls, hardly any barriers and some ladders to get around. The young couple call their house the Ninja — because they need to be as nimble as one to go from one room to another…

Radical design is featuring more and more in Japan’s residential landscape and is a hit among the country’s young generation. It is as if the compact spaces the Japanese have to live in are pushing the architects, and their clients, to think out of the box and let their whimsical ideas take off…

“Houses depreciate in value over 15 years after being built,” says Tokyo-based architect Alastair Townsend, “and on average they are demolished after 25 or 30 years, so the owner of a house doesn’t need to consider what a future buyer might want.

“It gives them a lot of creative license to design a home that’s an expression of their own eccentricities or lifestyle.”

In addition to the limited amount of space, another factor appears important: houses aren’t expected to last that long. While McMansions are often criticized for a lack of quality construction and design, few people would suggest most would be demolished 25-30 years later. Think of some of the small and relatively bland houses built after World War II in places like Levittown that are still standing and have been tweaked quite a bit. Put these two combinations together, less space and less need to last long, and home designs could be more unique and customized.

It is hard to imagine circumstances under which Americans would have such short-lived homes. We have expectations that homes should last, should be places where memories can be made and sustained over decades. Builders construct edifices and neighborhoods that are meant to at least look permanent – thus the aping of older architectural traditions. Plus, there might be environmental concerns: you would have to design a house differently from the beginning for it to be disposed of not much later.

New skinny, tall, and super expensive residential towers in NYC

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Here is a look at a new set of skinny, tall, and expensive condo buildings under construction in New York City:

One such apartment tower under construction, 432 Park Avenue, will have a top floor higher than the Empire State Building’s observation deck. Another will have a top floor higher than any in One World Trade Center, which is officially (by virtue of its spire) the nation’s tallest building.

The 432 Park penthouse has sold for $95 million; two duplex apartments at One57, now nearing completion, also are under contract, each for more than $90 million. Even a studio apartment on a lower floor at 432 Park (designed for staff — a maid or butler) costs $1.59 million…

But what’s most striking about these towers is their shape. The boxy old World Trade Center twin towers had a ratio of base width to height of 1-to-7 (209 feet-to-1,368 feet); an apartment house about to begin construction next to the Steinway piano showroom on 57th Street will be a feathery 1-to-23.

That kind of skinniness, also found in skyscrapers in Hong Kong and Dubai, is shifting the focus of high-rise construction. Twenty years ago, only five of the world’s 100 tallest buildings were at least partly residential, compared with 31 today. They include the Princess Tower in Dubai, at 1,358 feet the world’s tallest apartment house.

These towers are shaped by their clientele: a transnational nouveau riche looking for a second (or third or fourth) home. Having made fortunes in nations less regulated economically and less stable politically than the USA, these buyers want a safe investment as much as, or more than, shelter. And they don’t want to pay New York resident income taxes.

Three things I would like to know more about:

1. It would be fascinating to see who lives in these buildings – though buildings like these tend to guard that information. Is this the in form of conspicuous (sort of) consumption: the pricey and incredibly exclusive real-estate holding in the global city? Collect the full set!

2. It would also be interesting to hear more about the construction. A later part of the article mentions “super strong concrete” and new dampers but this is a sizable change from thicker skyscrapers of the past.

3. How do these buildings change the New York City skyline? Does their thinness present a different kind of image?

One new Miami building will “Be Home to Nearly 2 Percent of the World’s Billionaires”

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There are wealthy buildings and then there are ultra-wealthy buildings like this new condo tower in Miami:

Twenty-two billionaires—just shy of two percent of the world’s total—have purchased units in a condominium tower being built in Sunny Isles Beach, a small city in Miami-Dade County. The 60-story Porsche Design Tower features the normal super-rich perks, including units as large as 17,000 square feet, and swimming pool- and kitchen-equipped balconies as large as 1,600 square feet.

But the real draw is hinted at in the name: The Porsche Design Tower features three car elevators that will take residents and their rides directly to their units, where they can park their car in a glass garage adjoined to their residences (two-car garages for the “cheaper” units, four-car garages for the pricier ones). This feature allows car-obsessives to stare at their super expensive cars from their high-rise living rooms.

The tower, which broke ground in April 2013 and secured a massive construction loan in October, is the brainchild of car enthusiast and condo magnate Gil Dezer and Germany’s Porsche Design Group. As of mid-October, Dezer had sold almost 100 of the tower’s 132 units, the prices for which range from $4.2 million to $32 million. He reportedly spent part of November selling the remaining units at a gathering for Bugatti owners. There will be 284 robotic parking spaces in all. This is automated parking taken to the next level.

I know most of the buyers would rather not reveal that they live in this building but doesn’t this lift the profile of a new building?

The car elevator is pretty cool but I would also be interested in seeing how exactly this building interacts with the surrounding area. If you have this many wealthy residents, you don’t want normal people walking up or being anywhere near. Indeed, how could you construct entry and exit points so that people can’t simply wait for the wealthy to drive in and out? Leaving the transportation to cars leads to possible problems – and flying helicopters off the top of the building would help.

I can only imagine what the security will be here…