The reason prewar patterns aren't coming back

[M II A II R II K]

So long as seas of asphalt aren't created, that's all that matters.

[new.slang]

Originally Posted by niwell

Prime example of above: https://goo.gl/maps/zLYszyv1RdP2

Scale is pretty good, but anything positive ends there. It replaced a 1 storey non-historic retail building.

that corner archway kills it.
and looking across the street...t.o needs to give up its penchant for stuccoing everything.

[C.]

What kind of architectural elements could have been used instead to improve this building without making it too costly? Me thinks they got the upper floors right, but blew it when they came to the base, the most important part. For one, the dark reflective windows preventing people from looking in the street-level retail. What else?

[JonathanGRR]

Originally Posted by memph

It would be interesting to see fine grained multi-family development taking place in rust belt cities (and many other non-elite cities) that have a lot of vacant lots near downtown that could become desirable to build on in the next few decades as the more intact/desirable areas become saturated.

Like this?

http://detroit.curbed.com/2016/9/7/1...t-neighborhood

[memph]

Originally Posted by CIA

In my city, zoning use to require a minimum of 1:1 ratio for parking spaces to units. As a result, 40 percent of the space in garages were perpetually empty. The city lowered the requirement and eventually started allowing buildings with zero parking near transit stops. The result? Folks that did not want or own a car ended up occupying the buildings without parking. These developments were also cheaper to construct as there is a high hidden cost of providing "free" parking. Other developers responded by only providing as much parking as the market demanded, sometimes 1 for every 3 or 4 units.

Parking is an issue where the market can take care of itself. The concern is people will park on side streets if off street parking is not provided, but that point is made moot in a dense urban area with mass transit availability because people have alternatives and can live car free.

Dense development similar to the prewar patterns can be highly profitable for developers, the problem is current zoning in many places doesn't allow it. Change the zoning, and it may very well flourish in some areas. Even Houston which can be cumbersome as a whole has a few great neighborhoods that are relatively new that are walkable and relatively dense. I'm thinking of areas around Galleria. With Uber I was able to get around and do everything I needed to do without a rental.

And now that your city has so many buildings with too much parking, the people that really want to have a car can just live in those buildings while new buildings can be built with parking amounts below the average demand for the neighbourhood.

[memph]

Originally Posted by new.slang

that corner archway kills it.
and looking across the street...t.o needs to give up its penchant for stuccoing everything.

The palette choice for the cladding looks sooo much like what you'd see on a suburban grocery store.

And yeah, the archways are messed up. The arch is way too shallow. They look enough like an arch that your mind thinks of them that way, but they also really don't look like they can support the weight above them which is what arches were traditionally supposed to do so the result is incongruent. There should be a gradual and continuous curve going from the top of the arch to the "columns" that the arch sits on.

Arches should look like this
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.64936...7i13312!8i6656

Or if you want to do a "fake arch" with a shallow arc at the top to maximize the size of the window, then don't draw so much attention to the "arch" side of it with different coloured bricks and keystones, and making them so big (2 stories tall and half as narrow just screams "arch!") and front and centre, rather make them a more subdued part of the facade ex:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.64875...7i13312!8i6656

That's my take on it at least.

[memph]

Plus wtf is up with the parts of the building that look like architect make a 1ft error when they made their drawings
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.65470...7i13312!8i6656
Why does the 3rd floor window below the step-back extend 1 ft past the end of the 4th/5th floor portion of the building?

And this looks super awkward too, one half of the building is 1ft taller than the other half?
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.65439...7i13312!8i6656

This is pretty basic stuff, you don't need to hire an starchitect to avoid these kinds of mistakes and you don't need to spend millions on ornate stone masonry to achieve a significantly better result either. Sometimes developers mess up, and they either learn from their mistakes or go out of business.

I would say that in a city that has a relatively strong culture of small scale development, this kind of failure is relatively uncommon and most new buildings will not look that cheap and out of proportion.

I do think cultivating a culture of small scale development will help. Many of the current builders were previously sprawl developers and are new to building infill, some might be new to building anything, period. I think as developers get more experienced and competition increases, the quality will improve. Even though it is small scale, there are still things that developers can do to benefit from economies of scale.

First of all, many cities have standard lot sizes, so once you've done your first development, you can recycle your designs, maybe tweak them a little, and do another very similar development on a second property elsewhere in the city. You can even scale it up and build many similar properties throughout the city. In a city with hundreds of thousands of buildings, if there's a few dozen that are identical, that's not going to result in a cookie cutter look because you're still going to have to pass thousands of different looking buildings before finding a clone. I'm sure that this kind of stuff was taking place in the past. You could even build many identical/similar buildings concurrently.

You could also do something along the lines of an "online architecture catalogue". Aspiring architects could upload designs to a website, developers could browse designs on the website, and then purchase designs they like.

I think the biggest advantage big developers have in terms of economies of scale is pushing their development through the regulatory process, and parking requirements (how do you fit a parking structure on a 3000 sf lot?).

[ardecila]

You're conflating two different issues. The architecture of a building has nothing to do with "prewar patterns of development". Most aspects of traditional cities and building form arise organically from market forces, without any involvement from architects.

Go to a place like Mexico City, especially on the outskirts... you'll see a pretty fine-grained urban form, but all the buildings are just featureless CMU boxes, maybe with brightly colored windowframes or shutters. If the owner has a little money, maybe he stuccoes the building. Fine questions of architectural detailing are totally irrelevant.