Those are darned good questions. I have a large and growing family, and the original house on our property was built as a standard tiny cookie-cutter California ranch back in the 50’s. We have a lot of land, so instead of adding to the main house, we’ve added outbuildings on the property. The office is a separate building, as is the guesthouse my eldest daughter lives in (actually an old manufactured home that I bought used and plopped down in the south 40.) The boys sleep in a rustic bunkhouse right next to the main house. There are also three sheds and a barn. It’s all just sprung up organically over the ten years we’ve lived here. Stylistically, it’s all over the place. I wish there had been more design, but mostly it was fast builds with what we could get to solve immediate needs.
It sounds odd, but it suits our needs perfectly. It probably wouldn’t work anywhere except southern California. Our biggest problem is plumbing. But it’s mostly boys, so we manage.
Utopian is typically more expensive because it’s not at hand. We are used to those designs you mention but it’s because they work in that locale based on years of trying and winnowing what didn’t work, like evolution. Edison came up with concrete houses but they failed for the same reasons that most utopian projects do, expense and a pain in the ass to ever modify to solve new issues.
I’ve always liked the design, but I don’t have to work in it so maybe there are issues inside I don’t fully grasp. One issue is that the city hall plaza is a very dead space, a big flat concrete desert that rarely gets used and isn’t very inviting.
Yes, I know other people who have done this. I was recently checking out the sheds in the Home Depot parking lot, and realized the largest one was big enough to live in, if you build a sleeping loft it’s actually a nice little space.
I’ve been meaning to read “How Buildings Learn”, didn’t realize there was BBC series based on the book.
Shit. All these years I thought it was Le Corbusier’s own design! In fact, I’m pretty sure that was what an art history professor told me. . . but then I did tend to sleep though art history classes.
One of the best I need something not technical classes I had was art appreciation which was per the teacher the same as his art history class but we don’t have to remember all the names and dates and such. I actually learned quite a bit by not being under the pressure of knowing everything. I learned enough that while there are things that I feel meh about as art I at least appreciate the work and creativity behind it even if it isn’t in my neat things zone.
The big red sphere on the left. How do you make your mulled wine, from a stovetop?
Well, I mean, you have to make it on a stovetop here, since the paint flakes off into the wine and is lead-based. Not to mention the seventy pound lid you need to move. And the fact that it takes hours to heat over an open flame…
Whenever I have occasion to pass near that particular mess, I can never shake the feeling that it’s exactly how you’d design the headquarters of an organization where having to shoot down a mob of protesters is a serious consideration.
Ground-level entrances/exits always shrouded in shadow, inscrutable windows too broken up by concrete baffles to even be a generic reflective surface, massive paved area bereft of anything except an excellent line of sight from the windows.
I don’t even despise brutalism in general; and this one still looks like it should be the headquarters of The Interior Ministry in some dystopian people’s republic.
Sure, in some cases. I think there are a lot of different types of “utopian” architecture though-- geodesic domes aren’t necessarily made from poured concrete or some weird modern plastic, plenty are made from wood. I think a lot of modern architecture is based on artistic ideas that look cool, but don’t necessarily work, but I also think what “works” depends on who is using it. For a lot of people a house that is one big open space with no divisions would not work, and yet that’s what a yurt is, and Mongolians have been living in them for centuries. Part of my query was wondering if we get used to certain designs, and thus feel out of place in alternate designs we’re not used to.
Well, it’s all in how we use spaces. Mongolians using yurts are less likely to spend a Sunday having friends over to watch a football game. So they don’t need a flat wall for the couch and one for the TV. We have found building boxes to be easier and thus, more fiscally efficient for construction. Again, it’s less that “the yurt is also a large open space” than it is “yes, but we use large open space entirely differently based on culture.”
Nor for the plumbing and air ducts. Electrical is easier to run through wooden studs after you’ve built the wall frame. And here in Canada, flat walls with wooden studs are a whole lot easier to insulate than a curved slab of cement.
India has an insane solution for toilets. They pour the concrete for the walls and then bring in the fixtures. Plumbing then takes place in a small room about three feet wide installed behind all the fixtures instead of in the walls. Their local construction techniques require an entire additional room where we put it into the wall. Concrete just isn’t always the answer.
