Tag Archives: design

“Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings”

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It is fun to see the efforts of seven well-known architects as they highlight the better points of some buildings disliked by many. Some summary statements:

Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be. [Tour Montparnasse]

At a distance, the scale of the skyline exudes a sense of identity and strength for Albany, while at the pedestrian level the Plaza plays an important role in the community. I know that others find it too brutal or forbidding, but I think it’s beautiful in its monumentality and starkness. Monumentality always suggests supreme power, and that’s scary. I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile. [Empire State Plaza, Albany]

Monuments, if you trace their ancestry, can reveal disturbing things about the past. Nonetheless, they have enduring qualities which, viewed on their own merits, are perhaps an example to us. [Templehof Airport, Berlin]

It was the first building with an observation deck — that way of engaging with the city was actually pioneered by the tower. It had a restaurant that wasn’t particularly expensive. High rises today are about exploiting the skyline for private gain. But Londoners are capable of being nostalgic too: We have a power station that is now a modern art gallery. I wonder if the satellites and antennae shouldn’t be reinstated to communicate its purpose as an enduring symbol of the moment in the 1960s when technology propelled Britain onto the international stage. It’s a reminder. [BT Tower, London]

Who exactly gets to decide whether a building is loved or hated? Who are the real gatekeepers? This is actually an issue for many cultural objects in the modern world. There are always opinions from the experts, whether from architects themselves who can better understand the process to architecture critics who often write for influential media and can have their opinions heard by millions to the public who can now share their opinion via social media and other public forums. But, architecture is slightly different than say music or other media because it has a real permanence. If a major public building or skyscraper is viewed as ugly, it is not likely to be torn down or remade quickly. (The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis is a rare example where it was occupied for less than twenty years and its destruction was viewed by “the death of modernism.”) The seven buildings in this particular article are here to stay and, oddly enough, may just become targets for historic preservation in the future because they are important and old.

Do architects want to work at the architectural arm of Toll Brothers?

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The large single-family homes of Toll Brothers (often called McMansions) are designed by architects who work at Toll Architecture:

Toll Architecture is a national award winning Architecture and Engineering firm that includes land planning and graphic design groups.  We are a subsidiary of Toll Brothers, Inc., a Fortune 1000 company.  Our current projects range from luxury large single family homes and recreational facilities in golf course communities to urban luxury high rise condominiums.

In the rise of McMansions in the 1990s and early 2000s, Toll Brothers came to illustrate the oversized homes that many critiqued. According to those critics, one of the major downsides of McMansions is their poor architectural design or layout, whether due to a mishmash of styles or poor proportions or overly large spaces.

Yet, someone has to design these houses. Perhaps this would be analogous to responses psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists would receive from their academic guild if they openly admitted to working for the military. Yes, academics often need to search far and wide for jobs but working for the military may be a bridge too far. Would the same hold true for architects working for a major luxury home builder who privileges profits over aesthetics?

“The Psychology of Living in Skyscrapers”

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What are the effects of living in a very tall building?

Why should we even think that high-rise living has an effect on us? One does not, after all, see detailed psycho-architectural studies of ranch houses. The primary reason may be sheer novelty. “Given the age of our species, living more than a few stories up is a very recent phenomenon,” writes Robert Gifford in Architectural Science Review. “This tempts one to conclude that high rises are unnatural, and some would argue that what is unnatural must be, in some way, harmful.”…

So how to square this with a body of research that seems to conclude that most people find high-rise living less satisfactory than low-level living; that tall buildings seem to breed more crime than their lower-situated counterparts; that small children seem to develop (by reading and other measures) less quickly the higher up they live; that tall buildings might even invite suicide? Could an architectural form really do all that? Architecture is never more than a container for social relations. And so high-rise sociology is troubled by larger factors—who is living in the high-rise, and under what conditions? Pruitt-Igoe became synonymous with the problems of high-rise housing; it was considered the death knell of modernist social planning and modern architecture all at once. The backward, revisionist look has been more nuanced…

Much of the research about the problems of tall-building living is really research about, as the sociologist Gerda Wekerle put it, “the problems created by concentrating multi-problem families in housing stigmatized by the rest of society.” Other studies have looked at the populations of places like dormitories, which are themselves hardly representative. The high-rise form is endlessly skewed by social extremes. As Wekerle argues, “Pruitt-Igoe is no more representative than is the John Hancock Center of high-rise living.” And then there’s context. In places like Singapore or Hong Kong, tall-building living is not only the norm, it is considered socially prestigious. A friend who grew up on the 19th floor of an Upper East Side New York City apartment building (and who, interestingly, grew up to be an architecture critic) finds nothing odd, in retrospect, about his upbringing; most of his friends, after all, lived in similar circumstances, if not in the very same building. Why would you need a suburban lawn, he suggested, when Central Park was five minutes away? In terms of building height, he notes: “I don’t think it really had much effect one way or another, perhaps because so many of the neighboring buildings were of relatively equal height, so there wasn’t a sense of vertigiousness.” For the record, he seems to read very well…

One wonders what psychological effects there might be to this earthbound living in the sky. As the architecture critic Joseph Giovannini observed, “Living on the 60th floor is different. There are no earthly sounds, no close-up details outside, not even trees—just the long view and then the drop.” Astronauts on NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, asked to draw three-dimensional cubes, drew them with shorter vertical dimensions when in the zero-gravity of space. Might living in the sky also subtly influence one’s perspective of space, distance, and height? Studies have shown that children, at 25 months of age, can transmit information gleaned from aerial views to make ground-level wayfinding decisions; at 21 months, however, they cannot. Would children whose homes come equipped with aerial views have an edge? It is known, for example, that people with a fear of heights—or even those without when shown images of people falling—will overestimate actual heights.

Some interesting speculation yet the final paragraph ends with this summary: “For now, we must still rely largely on anecdote.”

A few other thoughts:

1. While these buildings may seem normal now, it is important to remember that they are relatively new in human history. For thousands of years, people barely got off the ground, let alone flew in airplanes or lodged or worked 600 feet up.

2. If an academic thought something was here, it doesn’t seem that difficult to design some experiments to see if there are differences.

3. If there were differences, how would architects, residents, and others adapt tall buildings?

4. There are a number of ways these buildings could have a psychological effect. You don’t have to live in them to be affected if your sunlight is blocked or you are consistently walking in concrete canyons in places like Manhattan. Even in the world’s biggest cities, there are still spaces relatively close that allow one to get away from skyscrapers and get back to a more normal sense of scale.

5. As a sociologist, I tend to agree that the differences in living in such buildings is probably due more to social interactions promoted by such buildings rather than the architecture or design itself.

“The Underappreciated Architecture of Waffle House”

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Waffle House recently announced plans for a fancier new building in New Orleans. One journalist suggests this undervalues the chain’s existing architecture:

Waffle House is not Chartres Cathedral, admittedly, but it has a certain architectural je ne sais quoi. The classic Waffle House is minimalist in design, with a lemon-yellow strip running around the top, above a wide band of windows and, often, a red or red-striped awning. The interior is outfitted with retro globe lights and red-and-chrome stools. Unlike most fast-food joints, Waffle House has an open kitchen, so you can watch the cooks as they scatter and smother your hash browns…

New Orleanians will be excited to get a Waffle House in Mid-City, and I would never begrudge them that. But this new design is all wrong for Waffle House as a brand, and falls short of its status as a Southern icon.

The company owes that status to an architect you’ve never heard of, Clifford A. Nahser. A World War II veteran and Georgia Tech graduate, Nahser was still a fledgling architect when Waffle House co-founder Joe Rogers Sr. approached him for help designing his prototype diner in Avondale Estates, near Atlanta. As the chain grew, Nahser went on to design hundreds more restaurants, drawing up the plans in his basement after his day job at Atlanta Public Schools…

What bothers me is not that Waffle House feels it’s time for a change (maybe it is) so much as the direction they’ve chosen. As the “loft” aesthetic has permeated American culture, we’re seeing watered-down faux-warehouse details in outposts of Chipotle and Starbucks, and that is the style we see here. It’s as generic as the classic Waffle House look is distinctive. Couldn’t the company have hired an architect known for his or her use of bold color to bring more of a pop sensibility?

There seem to be two main issues at play here:

1. How much should restaurant chains (and for that matter, retail chains as well) look alike or different? Waffle House has a very recognizable logo as well as a common design aesthetic. How much does this help the brand in terms of sales, nostalgia, recognition? Does a chain benefit from looking significantly different than other chains or should there be some similarity so people feel they can comfortably cross over?

2. How much do architectural movements – here, a more minimalistic and modernist design – get translated into fast food restaurants? I’ve argued before that Americans don’t particularly like modernist homes but perhaps this kind of modernist architecture is associated with a particular industry (fast food) that arose in the post-World War II era of prosperity and highways. The architecture and landscape of interstates and suburban sprawl is often criticized so how many people would defend the look of Waffle House?

Experimental no parking signs in LA replace text with graphics

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Instead of relying on text to delineate times of no parking, a new design has emerged in Los Angeles:

LA's new proposed parking sign design, inspired by the work of Nikki

Nearly two years later, LA is rolling out a pilot program of signs that may do exactly that. Over the next six months, the city will install 100 new signs around downtown to test a design that condenses a hodgepodge of regulations into one easy-to-read grid.

You might recognize the design. The original concept is the work of Nikki Sylianteng, a Brooklyn designer whose day planner layout blew up on the Internet last year. Her design made the rounds on blogs, garnering attention from commiserating drivers and, evidently, city officials. She’s now working with transportation officials in Vancouver to create new parking signs. She’s also heard from officials in Columbus, Ohio, and some cities overseas. And she heard from Los Angeles councilman Paul Krekorian…

Husting thought Sylianteng’s design was a good concept to run with (Sylianteng wasn’t paid for the project). It smartly transformed a handful of text-heavy restrictions into a color-coded blocks of time that tell you exactly what you need to know: Can I park here? Green means yes, red means no. Subtle diagonal striping helps those who are color blind differentiate between the colors. It was strikingly simple. “I didn’t even consider it would get to this level of the city,” Sylianteng says. “I figured if it ever did someone would say, ‘This is such a naive idea and these are all the reasons why this can’t happen.’”…

As a technological backstop of sorts, the city has been attaching Bluetooth beacons to every new sign erected with the hope developers eventually create an app that makes parking signs irrelevant. Husting calls this “phase two” of LA’s parking overhaul. Imagine pulling up to a parking spot and having your phone simply say “yes” or “no.” Or better yet, having your car tell you. “What we ultimately hope to do—and I know this is still far out in the future—is we want to be able to go ahead and connect with your vehicle,”Husting says. Until then, signs based on Sylianteng’s design would be a big improvement.

It is interesting to think about why certain kinds of road signs do or don’t change much over time. Some become so recognizable that to change them might create all sorts of difficulty. (Imagine redoing the basic stop sign or traffic light.) But, many others could be up for reinterpretation. Here, the shift is away from text to visuals – does this only work now because the visual reigns supreme in American society?

As the final paragraph above suggests, perhaps this is just the last gasp of the parking sign until autonomous vehicles simply communicate with the parking indicators and refuse to let you park in certain places.

Architects on how they save money when building their own homes

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Here are three money-saving tips architects use when constructing their own homes:

1. Prioritize—Duh.

“We worked really hard to get to the essence of what was important to us,” Jeff Stern, from Portland-based firm In Situ Architecture, tells WSJ, “rather than starting the process wanting it all and having to compromise.” For Stern, splurging on super energy-efficient triple-glazed windows meant incorporating a mix of budget-friendly solutions like concrete floors, fir cabinetry, and plastic laminate countertops.

Thomas Gluck of NYC-based firm Gluck + Architecture gave the exterior of his Tower House a tinted-glass treatment usually only used for commercial projects. “Even though the glass itself is inexpensive, the technique of applying the tint can be costly,” WSJ’s Nancy Keates writes. Still, this was a calculated risk that’s central to the design of the home; the dark glass exterior allows the structure to blend in with its woodsy surroundings. Inside the home, he kept the design and finishings simple…

2. Find off-price steals—it’s like bargain-hunting at T.J.Maxx but for building supplies.

According to David Wagner of Minneapolis-based firm Sala Architects, considerable savings can come from purchasing materials that are discounted for negligible imperfections. For example, the white-oak flooring he used for an 1,000-square-foot addition to his house was a few grades lower than what most clients demand, but he knew that “the flaws were just some ‘character knots’ in the wood.”

3. Think ahead—anticipate how design decisions will affect labor cost.

For his ultra-modern T-shaped home, architect Marc Manack from Silo AR+D in Fayetteville, Arkansas “made the infrastructure as easy as possible for contractors” by grouping utility hookups and connections together in an easily-accessible location. And because Manack did not plan for any “ornate millwork” or “high-end finishes” in his design, he was also able to reduce labor costs by hiring rough-in carpenters instead of more expensive, highly-skilled carpenters.

This helps get at two questions I’ve had about architects, builders, designers, and others that help people build and design homes:

1. Do they give their clients all the options like the cheaper ones they might use themselves? Or, do they look at the money available and present fewer options at each design decision point? Presumably, some clients only want the nicer/perfect items or labor but others might not. I suppose this might be something to negotiate or know in the beginning. Plus, we probably have different expectations: a builder, especially one who constructs large numbers of housing might have lower levels of quality compared to an architect.

2. Do the professional’s tastes actually align with what they design or recommend for clients? On one hand, authenticity is a big deal in the creative arts. On the other hand, the professional needs to have some flexibility in designing things that aren’t exactly what they would choose themselves. Again, this might be clear in the hiring and design process in the beginning.

Innovative design in response to social needs and social conditions

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The creativity in innovative design doesn’t come emerge from a vacuum: one academic explains how it is related to social forces.

“The ADA totally changed transport, architecture and every area where accessibility is important,” he says. “Design also develops out of a sense of social needs.”…

At a time when Jony Ive’s creations for Apple are as much status symbol as a technological advance, Margolin believes that the discipline’s potential lies in solving big problems and the creation of culture, not just the newest products…

He sees system design and a systemic perspective as key to innovation. Numerous modern inventions, such as Peapod and mobile banking, are built upon pre-existing infrastructure and only work well when they encompass different behaviors and user cases. Failures that ignore these perspectives are apparent every day…

Margolin also believes that innovation on a disruptive scale often requires a concept that creates a community of people around a common cause, such as the American mobilization of industry during WWII, the growth of research laboratories of mid-century American industry or the Silicon Valley of Steve Jobs’ era, inspired in part by the innovations of Xerox’s PARC research division.

This is related to one thing I try to impart in my Culture, Media, and Society course: despite our images of lone geniuses developing great novels, music, art, technology, etc., objects come out of a social process. This is the argument of a number of sociological works on cultural production and includes famous ideas like Becker’s idea of “art worlds.” You can also this in case studies of certain objects that once were not very popular but became popular through a series of events, such as the Mona Lisa whose stature was heightened by theft. Of course, social forces can also limit creativity whether we are talking about Babylonian culture in the first century BC where they were more interested in preservation of their past or in current copyright law that places restrictions on using created works.

14 times The Simpsons took on famous architecture

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Curbed put together a short list of times The Simpsons has lampooned architecture:

Frank Gehry crumples up a piece of paper, tosses it to the ground, and suddenly becomes inspired to build a similar-looking concert hall for Springfield, hometown of The Simpsons. Rem Koolhaas, with his eyes closed, teaches nine local children about “Lego architecture” using a model of OMA’s CCTV tower in Beijing. Since The Simpsons began airing in 1989, there have been countless references to landmarks and architects, new Dwell-reading neighbors and postmodern malls filled with identical Starbucks stores…

Dialogue from an episode aired in 2003:
Lisa: I’m impressed that you drew up blueprints, but these are for a go-cart track.
Homer: Did Frank Lloyd Wright have to deal with people like you?
Lisa: Actually, Frank Lloyd Wright endured a lot of harsh criticism.
Homer: Look. I have no idea who Frank Lloyd Wright is.
Lisa: You said his name two seconds ago.
Homer: I was just putting words together.

Some fun moments here. In fact, I suspect there is an interesting dissertation or book to be written about how The Simpsons presents spaces, from homes to Springfield (which really is a zany community) to broader geographic and social contexts. What if a two-dimensional animated show ended up offering one of the most astute mass market analyses of our spatial lives?

Trying to revive wood skyscrapers

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The idea of constructing high-rises out of wood and other sustainable materials may just be gathering steam:

This week, an ambitious proposal for the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper was unveiled in Vienna, Austria. The 275-foot, €60M timber building will be built next year, and follows in the low-carbon footsteps of recent timber structures in Canada, Australia, and England. The idea of fashioning tall towers from the earth’s natural materials, and not concrete or steel, first began gaining traction in 2013, when the Canadian architect Michael Green introduced the concept to the wider world via a TED talk that has now been viewed more than a million times. “I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with,” Green said in his talk. “It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent.”…

Unlike concrete and steel, synthetic materials that together represent eight percent of man’s greenhouse gas emissions, wood has the opposite effect: it takes in massive amounts of carbon dioxide, an obvious upside when cities are growing ever denser. “One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide,” Green explained in his TED talk…

At the time when Green gave his talk, the world was home to at least two existing timber structures that could have been considered towers: the Stadthaus residential building by Waugh Thistleton Architects in London, which has nine stories, and the Forté apartment complex in Melbourne, Australia, designed by Lend Lease developers with ten floors. Both buildings were made from panels of cross-laminated timber, which is a form of engineered wood that was originally developed as an alternative to stone and masonry. Unlike typical 2-by-4s, these panels made from many pieces of wood glued together are enormous, around eight feet wide and 64 feet long…It’s also fairly difficult to get cross-laminated timber to catch fire, which appears to be the main concern of supervisory bodies in cities where architects are attempting to use the material in their buildings. Vienna, which will soon have the tallest structure of this sort, has instructed its fire service to conduct special tests on the new building, which will already be required to install more sensitive sprinkler system than those required for other towers.

As the article notes, the main feature appears to be the reduction of carbon use compared to construction with cement and concrete. But, this might also draw the attention of architects less interested in the sustainability but intrigued by another medium with which to innovate. It could be fascinating to see the mix of mediums within a single skyline – imagine the glass skyscrapers of today next to wooden structures that have a entirely different feel.

Google and other tech companies continue HQ architecture race

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Google just unveiled its plans for a new HQ design:

Apple is building a massive spaceship-like ring around a private eden dotted with apricot trees. Facebook is working on a forest-topped hanger, reportedly with a single room big enough to house 3,400 workers. Now, we have our first glimpse of what Google’s envisioning for its own futuristic headquarters: A series of see-through, tent-like structures, draped in glass, whose interior workspaces can be reconfigured on a massive scale according to the company’s needs.

In a new video released this morning, Google showed off an ambitious proposal for a future North Bayshore campus in Mountain View. The concept was produced by the firms of Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, two of architecture’s fastest rising stars. Heatherwick Studio, based in the UK, was responsible for the torch at the London Olympics. The Bjarke Ingels Group, based in Denmark, is working on a trash-to-power plant in Copenhagen that will double as a ski slope.

The plan they came up with for Google is every bit as radical as one would expect. As Bjarke Ingels puts it, the structures proposed for the new campus would do away with rigid walls and roofs and instead “dissolve the building into a simple, super-transparent, ultra-light membrane.” Inside, giant layers could be stacked, Lincoln Log-style, into different work environments, using a fleet of small cranes and robots. Plant life is suffused throughout the campus, indoors and out.

It’s not an original idea but I was just struck by the juxtaposition of the tech companies more ethereal presence (online, information, brand status) versus their actual physical presence. The Internet may be revolutionary but how exactly do its architects and drivers translate it into physical form? Perhaps not surprisingly, into an open structure with lots of glass, light, life, and flexibility. Somewhere, however, there have to be tech companies operating in concrete Brutalist structures…

It will still be interesting to see how these buildings function. I’ve seen several articles lately about companies going to open floor formats (the anti-cubicle) even as workers don’t always like this lack of privacy. How much building flexibility is too much? Given Google’s plans, how will the architecture fit with the surrounding community of Mountain View? How many years is this expected to be used?