At the time of writing this post, it’s still 2015 – at least here in Toronto. But by the time you (subscribers) get this post in your inbox, it will be 2016. So happy new year! I am thrilled about getting this year started and I hope you feel the same way.
To kick things off, I thought I would share a great interactive post from Guardian Cities called, A history of cities in 50 buildings. It’s a look at our urban history through 50 important and pivotal buildings. Buildings such as Southdale Center, which was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall, and Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, which was a building that really set the stage for the modern skyscraper that we know today.
Not all of these buildings have left a positive legacy on our cities. I am sure that some of you would argue that the creation of the suburban shopping mall, with its corresponding “sea of parking”, was not a step forward for cities, but a step backwards. The architect behind Southdale Center, Victor Gruen, has even gone on record saying that he refuses “to pay alimony for those bastard developments.” He hated the shopping mall.
But like them or not, these buildings are part of our urban history, and I think it’s not only interesting but important to understand their impacts. If you want to see which important buildings were missed, at least according to Guardian readers, click here. I have to say that I was happy to see both Montréal and Toronto represented in the original list, as well as a few other buildings that I’ve written about here.
On that note, happy new year to you all, again, and many thanks for reading Architect This City. If you have any suggestions for content you would like to see on this blog in 2016, please leave it in the comment section below. This may be my personal blog, but my goal is to make it valuable for all of you. Hopefully I achieve that sometimes.
Brutalism is an architectural movement that most people, other than architecture nerds, hate. Derived from the French words for raw concrete – béton brut – Brutalist architecture is characterized by its use of exposed concrete and its imposing fortress-like qualities.
Most people find it too cold, sterile, and impersonal. But this 99% Invisible episode perfectly sums of where I think we sit with this era of building:
“Back in the 1960s, Victorian style buildings were considered hideous and impossible to repair. We were tearing batches of Victorians down to erect big concrete buildings. But some Victorians were saved—and today, some of them are considered treasures.
Concrete architecture now finds itself at an inflection point: too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic. And a small, but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts, and preservationists, would like us to just wait a bit and see.
Maybe, with a little time, we’ll come around to love these hulking concrete brutes.”
Concrete can be a wonderful building material all on its own. I mean, just look at the work of Tadao Ando.
But all concrete is not created equal. Here is a taxonomy of concrete textures that was also part of that same 99% Invisible episode:
I say all this because if we believe that Brutalist architecture has no value then we are likely to believe that it doesn’t need to be preserved. And that may very well be the case for some Brutalist architecture. But if history is any indication, some or much of it may also be considered beautiful one day.
Most cities have a rich history of demolishing (or almost demolishing) buildings and neighborhoods that today we would (or do) treasure. Which tells me that we’re not always very good at figuring out what has value or will have value in the future.
So maybe some of those brutes are worth a second look.
Coworking spaces are big business.
One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)
If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.
All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.
But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.
Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a Vornado Realty presentation. They are working with WeWork to deliver their new WeLive concept in Crystal City, Virginia.
It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:
The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future.
This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces.
The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).
That was a fun project to work on.