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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

No, that's a separate thing: you're thinking of "one-plus-five" apartments, which came about because of fire code changes that allow for wood frames on top of concrete bases, and have a limited number of styling options available because wood and concrete have different thermal/rain expansion behavior.

Unfortunately, while they're bland, they're also much cheaper to build than previous apartment styles, and so they're an urgently-needed part of fixing the housing issues in dense cities. Lower housing costs take priority over aesthetic considerations.

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Interesting, although none of these buildings are wood-framed. They're all concrete with a wood panel decoration hung on the outside, or with different blocks painted different faded pastel colors.

Edit: I'm talking about stuff like this: http://lookfordesigns.com/modern-apartment-building-architec...

> Lower housing costs take priority over aesthetic considerations.

I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense, but in my (and many other people's) view, these buildings are simply unlivable and reduce the livability of the area they exist in. So, in a sense, they're a kind of "negative housing" in that the more of them exist, the less areas are acceptable for at least some people to exist in.

I try to be optimistic about the future, but the rate at which these buildings are going up makes it hard for me, because it means that I can't actually trust that a given area is a place I can remain in the long term. Now I have to have an escape plan anywhere I decide to be.

I acknowledge that my whining about this may be an "old man yelling at clouds" thing, but it does cause me real distress.

The remark was that you can't just put wood and concrete together in whatever way you'd wish, because they react differently to temperature, so only a limited number of designs are actually available.

The examples you linked to are definitely of the "it's a cheap design to build" variety, and it's the ones that pay that decide what gets built, not really the architects...

These buildings distress me as well. I always called them panel style before I learned of one-plus-five. I often imagine finding the developer, and looking at the building with them saying - look at what you left here! Bad dog!

There are plenty of high priced apartments and condos in my area that are built in the hideous way described. It's not a symptom of low cost housing and there are inexpensive options for decorating or building that reliably produce pleasing facades and living spaces.

This is not a new science, we've been coming up with inexpensive livable structures for thousands of years, if anything it's vastly cheaper to build them now since we have the benefit of modern construction technology and all of the decorative elements can be mass produced from common or synthetic materials.

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