This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It's also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a "conventional" apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It's pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it's no surprise that it's also a single-stair building.

The architect is OHLAB. For more information, here's their website.

In the second half of the 19th century, the way Londoners had historically lived, started to change:

In the 1870s, a striking change was occurring in the residential habits of London’s elite. After centuries of living close to the ground in houses, Charles Dickens Jr. (son of the famous writer) observed that wealthy residents were starting “to avail themselves of the continental experience … and to adopt the foreign fashion of living in flats.”

The resulting housing typology was something known as the mansion block. And as the name suggests, one of the principal design ideas was that these blocks should, ideally, look like a single giant mansion. In other words, the individual homes were to be obfuscated:

The mansion block was a grand building that borrowed elements of the English terraced house (as a row house is known in British English), particularly the elite “palace fronted” terraced houses designed by Scottish architect Robert Adam and his brothers a century earlier, which concealed individual houses behind a grand facade to resemble a single palatial structure.

It is a design approach that makes sense. I mean, I can see wealthy people wanting to appear as if they're living in a palatial mansion. That said, it is an approach to multi-family housing that feels somewhat foreign today. Most people don't look up at tall buildings and wonder if it's one person's home.

And we don't aim for that.

Presumably this is, at least partially, because scales grew, builders were looking for economies of scale, and because modernism told us that mansion-looking structures were outdated. Whatever the reasons, multi-family buildings today are not generally conceived of as sub-divided mansions.

What's maybe ironic about this shift, though, is that we went from elaborate and varied facade designs intended to communicate single structures, to modern and repetitive facade designs that, somehow, better communicate the individual homes.

I suppose we got used to the "foreign fashion of living in flats".

Image: Josh Kramer for Bloomberg CityLab

At the end of 2020, I wrote about a cross-laminated timber apartment building that Joanne and Fred Wilson were building in Brooklyn at 383 Greene Street.

Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.

On her blog, Joanne describes the project as being a "labor of love", and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called Frame 122).

This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).

If you'd like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here's a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog: