Tag Archives: design

How a developer of big homes differentiates his homes from McMansions

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Few builders are aiming to have their new big homes labeled McMansions. Here is how one developer describes how his new homes differ from McMansions:

According to brothers Taylor and Milton Chamberlin, the goal for the Georgian style homes is for them to be an alternative to “McMansions.”

“We really take our time to design the homes to fit in the neighborhood. We’re not builders that come in and put this huge McMansion in a small neighborhood where it doesn’t fit. That’s not what we do,” said Taylor. “All of this is really thought through and it’s really livable, usable space. It’s not those McMansions where you walk in and wonder, ‘What do you do in this room?’”

The base model runs around $1.4 million and features four bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms, with the possibility of another bedroom and bathroom on an additional level. Costs will vary based on the different lot sizes and individual add-ons the purchasers want in their homes…

Another goal is to foster a 1950s sense of community among the owners of the nine properties, in which everybody knows and interacts with their neighbors. The homes will only be accessible via a private road and there will be a small fence around the subdivision…

The brothers noted The Barrett Companies’ effort toward green building and energy efficiency. From better insulation and caulking to installing appropriate outlets in the detached garages for plugging in an electric car, the Chamberlins believe small touches make their properties stand out.

These are big new homes that at first glance might fit several traits of McMansions. But, here is the argument the developer uses to say their homes are not McMansions:

1. The homes will fit the neighborhood. Critics argue McMansions, particularly teardowns, can disrupt the character of existing neighborhoods.

2. The home is not just about space; it is about well-designed and usable space. One argument about McMansions is that they provide lots of square footage but this is often contained in cavernous rooms or in poor layouts that are difficult to utilize in day-to-day life.

3. They are hoping to promote a community atmosphere in their small development. I wonder if this is primarily a function of size; the fenced-in neighborhood with a private road will only contain nine homes.

4. These homes will be greener than normal big homes. McMansions are often said to about excessive consumption and part of sprawl.

5. There will be a consistent design scheme with Georgian architecture and detached garages on the private road away from the streets surrounding the neighborhood. McMansions are criticized for mixing architectural styles.

In the end, I wonder if a majority of buyers and critics would think these reasons are enough to separate these homes from McMansions. These are still big homes in the midst of suburban neighborhoods. They may be more consistent and be less mass-produced but are they different enough?

“Exporting the McMansion” to China

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A principal in an American architecture firm discusses the McMansions his company has designed in China:

Market researchers in China say that these buyers prefer styles (derived from) the old houses in France and England. The people feel that the styles of the English and French are more “wealthy looking” than Spanish or Mediterranean styles. Think of “Downton Abbey” or Fontainebleau. Those are perceived as the homes of royalty. Homes in Spain or Italy, they perceive those homes as more casual…

The villa houses we’re building are generally 3,500 square feet to 7,000 square feet, and that excludes the basement, which isn’t usually included in the salable square footage…Some of these homes are being purchased by investors and some of them will be second homes. Lagoon Manor, for example, is a 600-unit development we’re doing that’s in the northeast part of Beijing, though from the heart of the city it’s about an hour-and-a-half drive because of the traffic…

The homes are of concrete construction. Even the roof pitches are concrete panels — there’s almost no wood in the construction.

The interiors are built to a European construction model. You buy the shell and finish the interior yourself. The outsides of the homes are completely finished, but you open the front door and it’s a light bulb.

This discussion suggests there are some similarities between American and Chinese McMansions. They are purchased by people who want to show wealth and the architecture is intended to connect the style of the new home to established “high-class” styles. The homes are quite large and expensive. However, they are constructed differently: it is more of a concrete shell that the buyer can then customize in pieces (IKEA is mentioned). While the discussion doesn’t mention this, I assume these homes are less common in China than the United States and so are still more unusual.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see what remains the same and what changes and why when the American McMansion becomes another global export.

Zappos CEO says office space should be designed like cities

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Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh argues office space would work better if it were organized like cities:

Tony Hsieh talks about his Internet juggernaut Zappos in the same way that urban planners talk about cities. In fact, the language is uncanny. He believes the best ideas – and the best form of productivity – come from “collisions,” from employees caroming ideas off one another in the serendipity of constant casual contact.

This is only achievable through density, with desks pushed close together in the office, or – in the case of Hsieh’s ambitious plans to leverage the new Zappos headquarters to remake downtown Las Vegas – with company employees and community members colliding into each other on the street. For the kind of “collisionable” density he’s looking for in downtown Vegas around his company, he figures the neglected area (not to be confused with the Vegas Strip) needs at least 100 residents per acre…

The typical office has about 200 or 300 square feet of space per employee. When Zappos moves into its new headquarters in the former Las Vegas City Hall in about six months, Hsieh is aiming for something closer to 100 square feet per employee. He’s also planning to decommission a skywalk into the building to force people to enter through (and collide with) the street.

In the context of offices, this kind of density bucks conventional wisdom. Most companies think employees will perform best, or at least be happiest, if as many of them as possible can have their own spacious corner office (with closable door!). This thinking has even influenced the architecture of office towers.

“That’s analogous to people wanting to live in the suburbs and live in a big house,” Hsieh says. “And what they don’t realize is that they end up trading two hours of commute time for more time with friends or relaxing or whatever.”

Interesting comparisons: corner offices are like suburbs. While Hsieh cites research, how come other companies haven’t figured this out yet? I also wonder if this is more about corporate cultures established in more traditional firms versus newer startups or high-tech firms. This reminds of a video I show in my Introduction to Sociology class to illustrate the differences between more bureaucratic structures and more flat, disc-shaped structures. In the clip from Nightline, the design firm IDEO is shown working through designing a new shopping cart. The atmosphere is both less hierarchical in terms of authority and space; people seem to be closer together and common collaborative space is important.

This conversation also lines up with talk on college campuses about interdisciplinary research and collaborative activity. Just how much can redesigned offices and common spaces contribute to this? Are we missing something major by building office buildings more like suburbs than cities?

Architect Jeanne Gang opposed to sprawl

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An interview with Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, designer of Aqua in the Loop, reveals her dislike for sprawl, and, along the way, the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright:

“Urbanization is the huge issue of our time,” she says. “We can’t survive if we can’t solve the problems of population growth, loss of clean air and water and loss of biodiversity.”

Gang and her firm, Studio Gang Architects, are pioneers in ecological urbanism, a field of design that considers rising populations and dwindling resources. Cities are key laboratories, and Gang says they must become denser and more nature-friendly.

She hasn’t hesitated to take on global icon Frank Lloyd Wright with her anti-sprawl approach. Chicago’s — and America’s — most famous architect spent decades promoting single homes on suburban lots where residents would savor nature far from downtowns and connect with society in cars.

“I want to turn Wright’s legacy upside down,” Gang says with no hint of doubt. “The way to be ecological is not by spreading out. It’s by clustering together. It’s by having a better relationship with nature in the city than you can have in a far-out suburb.”…

Taking on Wright is not an easy task. While he may have designed a number of single-family homes, he also designed a mile-high tower. Particularly in Chicago, Wright is someone revered for his ability to design in a Midwestern sort of way, drawing upon prairie influences and helping Chicago grow up. But, I’m sure Gang could find many people who agree that sprawl uses too many resources. Additionally, if new designs like that of Aqua can be more ecologically friendly, attract residents and business, and give cities iconic buildings, city leaders are likely to see this as a big win.

The “extreme architecture” of “a drone-proof city”

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With the recent talk about drone use, here is an interesting thought exercise: how to best build a city that limits the reach of drones?

Kohn’s envisioned drone-proof community, which he calls “Shura City,” is a thought experiment, a provocation (shura, Arabic for consultation, is a word associated with group decision-making in the Islamic world). It’s a self-contained environment with elaborate architectural devices designed to thwart robotic predators overhead. Minarets, along with the wind-catching cooling towers called badgirs, would obstruct the flight path of the drones. A latticed roof, extending over the entire community, would create shade patterns to make visual target identification difficult. A fully climate-controlled environment would confuse heat-seeking detection systems. He has not included any anti-aircraft weapons in this scenario…

Kohn writes in his proposal that he envisions Shura City as a brick-and-mortar response to a 21st-century conundrum, a world in which war is ill-defined and combatants on both sides live in an extrajudicial limbo…

Kohn says that he thinks it is a duty for his generation to challenge the newly mechanized means of warfare that have become routine over the last 10 years. “If people are going to create new and exciting ways to kill people, I think there’s no harm in pushing the envelope of peace technology,” he says. Imagining Shura City is part of Kohn’s personal response to that challenge, a way to hack the machines of modern war.

“There is a deliberate impudence to the City,” he wrote to me. “Drones rely on data mining of individuals and tracking of individuals, kind of like Facebook. The City hides the individual in the embrace of the community, using human traits drones cannot understand as protection. The City subverts the aggressor.”

Peace architecture vs. war architecture. Cities with the ability to hide people vs. the ability of drones to find people. There are some interesting contrasts here. Many urban sociologists like to promote public spaces where people of all backgrounds and circumstances can share physical settings (see the example of The Cosmopolitan Canopy by Elijah Anderson). But what happens if the public spaces that perhaps mark democratic society are places citizens are afraid of being spotted from above? Can cities more closed to above still be open in the sense that we think of them?

While this particular example may be far-fetched, it wouldn’t surprise me if some cities around the cities attempt to limit the effectiveness of drones.

Celebrating “a cathedral for commuters”

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Grand Central Terminal is 100 years old and NPR provides part of its story:

Seven is one of the 750,000 people who walk through Grand Central every day. To put it into perspective, that’s more people than the entire population of the state of Alaska — a handy fact you can learn from Daniel Brucker, an enthusiastic New Yorker who’s managed Grand Central Tours for the past 25 years…

Fortunately, the Vanderbilt family, who owned the New York Central Railroad, had the money. And what they built was a 49-acre rail complex with more tracks and platforms than any other in the world. The buildings on Park Avenue, to the north, are built over it. And it’s an almost unfathomably busy place — during the morning rush hour, a Metro-North commuter train arrives every 58 seconds.

“It’s like a cathedral that’s built for the people,” Brucker says. “We’re not going through somebody else’s mansion, through somebody else’s monument. It’s ours. It’s meant for the everyday commuter, and it’s a celebration of it.”…

“It is the largest interior … public space in New York,” Monasterio says. The windows on the east and the west side, those windows used to open, they used to draw air from the east side, through the terminal, over and out the west side.”

Having been there a few times myself, it is a remarkable building. Public spaces that are so crowded, functional, and well-designed are rare.

It would be interesting to hear more about how Grand Central fits into the fabric of New York City. On one hand, it seems like quintessential New York: classical exterior, busy space, busy yet functional. At the same time, it doesn’t exactly fit with Midtown Manhattan and the modern skyline. It is a relic of the past, a building that had to be saved through the first federal conservancy act from the 1960s.

The winner of NYC’s micro-apartment contest

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With more cities interested in micro-apartments, the announcement of a winner of the New York City micro-apartment contest may be influential:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winner of the city’s adAPT micro-apartment competition yesterday, a contest to design a 250- to 370-square-foot living space that launched last July. The winner, chosen from 33 applicants, is a collaborative effort between Monadnock Construction, the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and nARCHITECTS called My Mirco NY, which will have its design implemented in a 55-unit building scheduled for completion in 2015…

Like many others, the winning design incorporates high ceilings and dual-use furniture to make the space seem larger. Although the press release called the winning proposal “fresh”, “striking”, and “innovative”, the long, narrow floor plan is similar to comparable projects like San Francisco’s SmartSpace, with fold-up furniture, micro kitchen, floor-to-ceiling storage, and loft space.

The mayor’s office had to waive some zoning regulations to make My Mirco NY legal, but it did not release any information about the competition’s runners-up or what their designs were like…

nARCHITECTS designed the building around prefabricating the units and stacking them on a foundation, then adding a brick facade. It will be the first multi-unit prefab building in Manhattan.

It will be interesting to see how people living in the units as well as people in the neighborhood respond. It is one thing to win a design competition, another to put it into practice and achieve the desired results.

It is also worth noting that the city had to bend some zoning rules. If communities are serious about micro-apartments and other similar smaller housing units, they have to find room in zoning regulations. This could be a more difficult task as zoning changes can draw the attention of neighbors and others in addition to stirring up political discussions involving elected officials, city employees, and builders and architects.

Can you design an attractive “third place” library if it has no books?

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A journalist asks an interesting question about libraries: can it be an attractive space if it has no books?

Whether the public library has a digital-only collection, a hard-copy collection, or a combination of both, it is first and foremost a place for ideas. Sure, the spare, clean lines of an Apple store brilliantly focus attention on the excellence of Mac products available for sale, but a public library needs to foster community, inspire idea cross-pollination, and help us draw connections between our past and our future. A public library needs to be a place of comfort  –  a place where its community can come to explore thoughts, feelings and ideas.

Modern library designers are headed in the right direction when they reference sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s “third places.” A third place is an informal public space that’s neither work nor home where people can interact casually and exchange ideas. Third places are the oil that lubricates civic engagement, and Oldenburg believes they need to be physical, not digital. Physical third places bring people with different mind-sets and politics together, but virtual meeting places attract like-minded people, Oldenburg told JWT Intelligence in 2011.

In B.C., the West Vancouver Memorial Library, renovated some half a dozen years ago, did it right. The library is warm, friendly, modern and welcoming with many little nooks to foster human-scaled interaction.  The new Surrey City Centre Library, which opened just over a year ago, did it wrong. Its design might be architecturally stunning, but its large white expanses feel cold and uninviting. Perhaps this will improve when the library gets busier.

San Antonio’s $1.5 million library will have tablets, e-readers and computers, but no physical books. Word is the 5,000 square-foot library will have 100 e-readers to loan out,  plus 50 onsite computer stations, 25 laptops and 25 tablets. Borrowers will be able to check out e-readers for two weeks or simply load books onto their own devices, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The argument here seems to be that libraries are sterile places without physical books. While the San Antonio library branch referenced here seems to be more progressive in terms of technology, a trend I assume many libraries are trying to follow, it still does have e-readers. What exactly is it about books that makes a space less sterile, particularly if the writer above also suggests the best part of the library in British Columbia is that it has “many little nooks to foster human-scaled interaction”? Can’t a technologically advanced library have a lot of little nooks? Perhaps books give off a sense of stateliness or learning.

I wonder if the opposite argument could be made: having lots of books might foster less social interaction and therefore make a library a less inviting place. Do people necessarily go to find books to read and have social interaction? Some people do indeed go to bookstores for conversations about books (and other media like magazines) but libraries have not traditionally been places for social interaction in the same sense as bookstores or coffee shops.

Building beautiful cities

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Architecture critic Edwin Heathcote suggests the beauty in cities is to be found in its ordinary moments.

My first thought is that standards of what is beautiful in cities changes quite a bit over time. Architecture changes. Material conditions change. Culture changes. Buildings go through cycles of acceptance and what might be charming or notable in one city is not so revered elsewhere.

My second thought is that this may be an exercise in gatekeeping: who exactly gets to declare cities or designs as beautiful? Architecture critics, of course, get to do this.

My third thought is that Heathcote may just be right. Much of the attention cities receive tends to come down to particular neighborhoods, like the business core or trendy locations, or particular buildings (like the tallest and/or newest skyscrapers). For example, visitors in Chicago tend to get to see the “greatest hits” including Michigan Avenue, the Loop, the museums, Millennium Park, and other glitzy and well-maintained places meant to project an image. The problem is that most of Chicago doesn’t look like this and the majority of residents are operating in other parts of the city.

Trade in a McMansion…for a mid-century pre-fab modern home?

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One blogger suggests she would rather have a mid-20th century prefab modern home than the new McMansions going up around her:

I’ve never been a fan of “McMansion” houses. They have spread across this country like a plague and have taken away from the unique architectural style of certain regional areas. For example, where I live in New England, we’ve always been known for capes, ranches, split levels and the colonial style of older homes. McMansions have no business being here. And yet, every time I see a parcel of land become available around here and a new home going up, it’s always a McMansion. Always. No offense to anyone who lives in one, but I fail to comprehend their appeal–they’re unnecessarily huge, expensive, lack any uniqueness and stick out like sore thumbs. And yet this behemoth has been nothing but successful since it first sprouted up in the 80s.

Now that my rant is done, I’d like to turn your attention to the humble mid-century modern home. Ahhhh…aren’t these great to look at? National Homes was at one time one of the country’s largest providers of pre-fab homes. It was founded in 1940 and by 1963, had built 250,000 homes across the U.S. I think these houses are beeeeeooootiful. What I wouldn’t give to find a little ranch with a carport and white fence for the right price in my area like the one in the ad above. And the designs were customizable and affordable. If only they’d make a comeback…

The complaints about McMansions are not unusual. Compared to the McMansion, the modern home is smaller, has a carport (which is less ostentatious than the multi-car garages many McMansions have), has only one story, and has a nostalgic appeal. However, I’m not sure the modern pre-fab home would be considered beautiful. Is it built with more quality or design that today’s McMansions? How many other Americans would also choose modern homes over McMansions?

If someone really wanted to go retro and avoid the McMansion, why not go back further to homes that didn’t require mass production or pre-fab pieces? This would require going back to pre-World War II era and finding homes that were constructed by smaller builders in more traditional styles.