America, the Bland (New York Times)
 

All of these 4 - 7 floor buildings popping up in towns and cities across the country largely do look the same but we desperately need new housing and we need more walkable communities, which this type of housing is helping with. They are also better than vacant lots or surface parking, which in a lot of locations is what existed previously.


America, the Bland
Across the country, new developments are starting to look the same, raising fears that cities are losing their unique charm. But in the current housing crisis, does that matter?

Jan. 20, 2023
New York Times


"Charles Mudede was at the Post Pike Bar in Seattle in November, nursing a glass of white wine and having a heated discussion about a topic he felt strongly about: the state of new development in the city.

Last year, residential construction in Seattle hit a record high with over 13,000 units built, according to data from Seattle in Progress, an organization that tracks construction. Mr. Mudede, 53, who has lived in the city for 30 years, was expressing his distaste for some of those “architectural abominations.”

“What’s that new building?” he asked the bartender. “It’s an apartment building, but they put some bright blue, splashy thing on its facade..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/r...hitecture.html

To me this just seems natural. It's the same reason that cities that experienced a lot of development in the same eras of the past look similar.

I would rather have these six-story developments that all look the same that contribute to walkable neighborhoods and good urbanism than single-family detached home Rancho Generico sprawl that existed for most of the second half of the twentieth century.

Totally. One could pen this same article about housing needs and the subsequent developments that looked exactly the same in any decade.

Yes— the article mentions brownstones were once reviled by some.

Here is a good critique of these buildings.

https://twitter.com/holz_bau/status/1616479722711678978

The point about land use code is true...it's all about land use code. And economics.

I generally like these buildings BTW. But they could be better.

First, development capacity is too limited in Seattle, with both FAR and height limits. We get flat roofs and no upper adornment because any vertical capacity has to be used for rentable spaces.

It would be nice to include smaller buildings, but those cost more per square foot. If you can find 200' of frontage, damn right you'll build one building.

The City requires varied facades, including modulated depths and multiple aesthetic treatments, so that's what we get.

The vast majority have double-loaded corridors, so all but end units get only one side with windows. That results in mostly all one-bedrooms and studios. It would be really bad to reduce capacity by requiring skinnier buildings, and those one-beds make financial sense to build, but perhaps we could upzone or increase incentives to encourage bigger units.

We're already topping out what woodframe can do. Fire code says you can put habitable floors to 75' above the street (the floor literally, which works out to about 85' including the interiors), and we allow six levels of woodframe up to that height, so we're getting a lot of eight-story woodframes with concrete for the bottom levels. Parking is already in low (or zero) ratios and mostly below-grade.

The good news is you can get really high densities with the current way.

That said, the State will likely upzone to fourplexes and maybe sixplexes this year, and Seattle might follow next year if the State doesn't. Plus we'll do other broad upzones next year. So maybe family units in eight-story buildings won't be as crucial.

I did a thread a few years ago on a similar topic about all apartments these days looking similar.

He's not wrong, but is it really a big deal? Anytime you've got mass quantities of housing being built for mass quantities of people you're bound to get a lot of cookie-cutter looking stuff, with aesthetics taking a back seat. For example:

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2939...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9279...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6244...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9530...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5966...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6949...7i16384!8i8192

Over time, a lot of this stuff gets renovated (often multiple times), and some of the buildings get torn down and replaced, so over time more variability will emerge in the streetscape.

Exactly. The same historic blocks that are revered for their charm today were really just mass produced replicas in their time. Even their intricate cornices were often times mass produced off site and just attached on site.

Much of the banal architecture coming out of the ground today will serve as placeholders for future development and others will stand the test of time.

I'm not worried about it. Not every building can be a masterpiece and quite frankly, there aren't even enough good architects to design the sorts of buildings this article wants us to have.

I'm trying to find an architect to do a renovation of a SFH and it's damn near impossible to find anyone above mediocre who isn't absolutely slammed.

Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same

Cheap stick framing has led to a proliferation of blocky, forgettable mid-rises—and more than a few construction fires.

By Justin Fox

February 13, 2019 at 5:00 AM CST

These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks.

They really are everywhere, I discovered on a cross-country drive last fall, and they’re going up fast. In 2017, 187,000 new housing units were completed in buildings of 50 units or more in the U.S., the most since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1972. By my informal massaging of the data, well over half of those were in blocky mid-rises.

These structures’ proliferation is one of the most dramatic changes to the country’s built environment in decades. Yet when I started asking around about them, they didn’t seem to have a name. I encountered someone calling them “stumpies” in a website comment, but that sadly hasn’t caught on. It was only after a developer described the style to me as five-over-one—five stories of apartments over a ground-floor “podium” of parking and/or retail—that I was able to find some online discussion of the phenomenon.


Rest: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...uverify%20wall

Architectural styles will change as the decades go by. It could also be a general trend of value engineering. Somehow someway, to have housing that is affordable to the masses or to generally keep units in a range that can be affordable for certain markets, some measures have to be taken. We kind of have to be realistic though, not everything is going to be an architectural trophy.

If anything, America needs to be more bland to be able to house the masses and have affordable units. Lack of housing hurts folks (or affordable for that matter).

Fair points about trends over the decades and some of these buildings do look nice on the outside but my issue after being in these buildings is how cheaply they are made and how some are poorly designed fire hazards. Part of that is the municipalities' fault for signing off on this junk (at least here) but much of this is not going to age well and will not stand the test of time. Sure, raze and start over is an option but most companies will try to patch the hell out of things until they no longer can.

Agreed and where has it been? All of these new "luxury" buildings that most people can't afford.

I would also rather have these buildings than the bland 2-3 floor walk-up apartment developments that have a lot of surface parking that seemed to proliferate from the 1980s - 2000s and that contribute to additional sprawl.

I agree. I don't see the problem with the style as long as it is done in a way that supports vibrancy at the street level.

That video says the first of those type of apartments was built in LA in 1996, but I am nearly certain they were already building some of them in Seattle in the early 1990's.

Could very well be. Those Chedder videos are mostly click bait so its no surprise they missed some journalistic nuance.

There are certainly positives to 5 over 1 style buildings, and they’re better from an urban perspective than a lot of previous styles. But I’m surprised there isn’t consensus that they tend to look like shit. Never been a fan of the large footprint which doesn’t lend itself to a particularly pleasant urban experience.

Fire concerns are considerably overstated, but the risk is high during the construction phase. Once everything is sealed up and fire suppression systems are in place it’s no more dangerous than other styles. What I would be concerned about is noise - the style of construction doesn’t really lend itself to sound dampening.

Oddly enough we don’t see many in Canada outside of a suburban context. It’s not really a style common in central cities (I suspect land values and zoning come into play).

my main problem with medium rise buildings: too much stucco. It is almost always done badly here in Canada.

The checkerboard and ombre pattern metal panels used to save money over masonry will also almost certainly age horribly - both physically and as an aesthetic trend.