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October 9, 2018

Battle of the Bungehuis

This past July, Soho House Amsterdam opened up in the storied Bungehuis building. Not really news, other than the fact that FT just published this article talking about the building’s history and some of the project’s hurdles, which I of course found interesting.

Completed in 1934, the Bungehuis originally served as the offices for a prominent trading company. The architect was ADN van Gendt. When he died during the building’s construction, Willem Jacob Klok took over.

Also noteworthy about the building’s construction is that, according to Wikipedia, twenty houses had to be demolished in order for it to be constructed.

This underscores a point that I have made before on the blog. Cities are not static. Most of us probably look at the Bungehuis and consider it to be quite a handsome piece of architecture. Some of us may even go so far as to say that we don’t make buildings like they used to.

Soho House is on record saying that they were “not very budget-conscious” during the renovation because of the sense of responsibility that they felt around the building and its history.

May 22, 2014

New ideas need old buildings

In reading a recent Financial Times article called, Are creative people the key to city regeneration?, I was reminded of a famous line from the late urbanist Jane Jacobs: “New ideas need old buildings.” What she meant by that is the following:

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them…. for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

And what she was effectively getting at is that we live in a world obsessed with historical data and precedence. To use

Well, just like that, the unofficial end of summer. Labor Day weekend. But I agree with Shawn Micallef: “Defy the crowd and keep enjoying summer.” There are still weeks of it left.

But given that it is Labor Day weekend, here are two things to think about.

The first is a Financial Times article by Lawrence Summers where he argues that America needs unions more than ever and that, indeed, the central issue of American politics today is the “economic security of the middle class.”

Here is an excerpt that speaks to declining bargaining power on the part of labor:

“But I suspect the most important factor explaining what is happening is that the bargaining power of employers has increased and that of workers has decreased. Bargaining power depends on alternative options. Technology has given employers more scope for replacing Americans with foreign workers, or with technology, or by drawing on the gig economy. So their leverage to hold down wages has increased.”

It’s also worth mentioning that only about 6.4% of private sector workers in the U.S. are in a union today. This is a decline of almost two-thirds since the 1970s and is a good segue into the second thought of this post.

Two years ago Fred Wilson wrote a post on his blog (which he reblogged today) where he argued that “labor needs a mechanism to obtain market power as a counterbalance to the excesses of markets and capitalism.”

But, that this mechanism needs a refresh. He calls it Union 2.0.

“However, like all bureaucratic institutions, the “Union” mechanism appears anachronistic sitting here in the second decade of the 21st century. We are witnessing the sustained unwinding of 19th and 20th century institutions that were built at a time when transaction and communications costs were high and the overhead of bureaucracy and institutional inertia were costs that were unavoidable.”

This makes perfect sense to me.

At the same time, we can’t forget – and this is how Summers ends his article – that, today, “the most valuable companies are the Apples and the Amazons rather than the General Motors and the General Electrics.”

That tells me that what may have worked in the past will likely not work in the future.

Photo by Jonas Viljoen on Unsplash

Brandon Donnelly

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Battle of the Bungehuis

New ideas need old buildings

Thoughts on labor, and the end of summer