Corviale, a one-kilometer residential complex in Rome
archdaily.com
archdaily.com
What I've never understood with these projects is, what's the supposed benefit of a single stupidly large building over a large number of reasonably sized ones? It doesn't feel like this would bring any meaningful economies of scale to the building process. It seems unlikely to actually use land more efficiently.
Like, is it really just some kind of an authoritarian fetish for giant projects, or was there at least some attempt at justifying it?
A more successful example is the former Munich Olympic Village (https://goo.gl/maps/1HTQWvGcRcoXAWvH6). It's composed of 3 streets which are completely built over, so the cars at ground level are hidden from view and the pedestrians are walking in a completely pedestrian area at level 2 (I think). The buildings are also very linear and all look the same, but all apartments have huge south-facing terraces with lots of greenery (including shrubs or even trees). Public transport connection is also very good with a subway station nearby. Today the apartments are very sought after - wish they had built more projects like this. But if you look at more recent projects, like the "Messestadt Riem" (https://goo.gl/maps/tVrahc4uDFkijGCC9), they are much more cramped and spread out over a larger surface, with squat buildings that look very interchangeable - not really better, I'm afraid.
Helsinki tries to do the same in an area called Merihaka. I don't like it. Feels "off". The lower (car+transit) level feels like the Morlocks in The Time Machine, or some other kind of sci-fi dystopia, and the upper level has weird entryways to the netherworld and no real grid of "streets" (or whatever) for locating buildings and also some trees (in big planters, one presumes) and how can you have healthy, respected trees that are more or less suspended in mid-air, disconnected from the Earth ?
In construction, you have to have the timing right for the whole building in one-go...
In land-ownership issue, you have to own the whole land / negotiate with/seize from with owners who own some of the land
Being charitable, the thinking at the time was somewhat mechanistic: that you could build utopic urban environments from first principles as massive campuses vs individual buildings.
Inevitable these projects underestimated the organic and evolutionary complexity of urban environments. No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood.
But on the other hand, these mega projects were a simple story to sell politically. Look, we're being bold and thinking big, we're going to actually address problems in housing supply vs kicking the can down the road, etc. Someone else saying they needed to think in terms of flexible zoning and a variety of tax incentives looks not nearly so compelling.
Today we look back on these projects differently, because the failure of "housing projects" in the US, UK, and elsewhere are a familiar meme almost, so people are much more skeptical about mega projects working out.
The lesser the regulatory burden, the more organic development you'd see, including a much larger proportion of smaller projects and smaller buildings. Large steel or steel + concrete structures are grossly inefficient in terms of construction costs per square footage, except where property values are incredibly high. (Wherever you see such structures in areas without extremely expensive property prices, you can be sure there are other factors at play--regulation, government funding, etc.) That's why 5-over-1 (wood framing over concrete) is so common where possible. Some people might complain that many 5-over-1 buildings have too large of a footprint, but that's also largely due to the same regulatory economics.
Anyhow, if communities simply made a laundry list of things they don't want--e.g. no more than 4 stories, ground footprint smaller than N square feet, etc--and then provided for approval by-right (i.e. if your project meets those restrictions, you're automatically approved), then most areas suffering from severe housing supply issues would be in a dramatically better situation than they are now, California especially.
But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results.
Just because a project was approved by right doesn't mean that NIMBYs won't file a lawsuit against you anyways to find some reason to get the project canned.
https://la.urbanize.city/post/forbidden-city-how-los-angeles...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-... (archive of same without paywall: https://archive.ph/mvLpO )
Also I very much doubt your characterization of properties in Germany. I'm sure there's a wide variety that broadly resembles what we see in all developed urban areas.
The US uses wood construction a lot because it's a cost effective local material. Fire safety standards in the US are generally quite high. Building with wood is not some sort of problematic thing as you imply.
Seriously, the weird chip on the shoulder some people get about the US is tiresome. Sure we have some stupid laws and bureaucracy like anywhere, but we're not aliens with pokadot skin or anything. I assure you people are pretty much the same everywhere.
Most of Europe allows single stairway buildings. Germany has half the fire death rate of the US. It’s the US (along with Canada) which is the outlier in multi family building design here. They could be so much better!
https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...
The annoyances I'm talking about aren't substantial criticisms, they're just stupid. "Oh no, the US makes buildings out of wood, how silly of them" is just people being both ignorant and shitty.
As an alternative, a 1.5 level (per apartment, a ramp, stair, or interior elevator) design where one side has 2 floors and the other just one, such that three floors are split among 2 floors of buildings. I'd still want enough acoustic insulation and isolation to enjoy silence, and an airflow design for the whole building that keeps all the exhausts and smells away from all residences.
https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...
Many of them don't look great but they pretty much did their job given the limited resources that a lot of cities had available.
If you look at modernist cities around the world, in India for example as well, cities that took inspiration from this kind of planning have generally good standards of living, costs, little homelessness and decent environmental footprints.
Those buildings would be illegal in most of the US. If similar quality and floor space per inhabitant was legal to build you could indeed solve housing problems in short order. No need to have the state do it. If flophouses/SROs were legal developers would build them.
If it will be a bloodbath for investors it's not a matter of not allowing it, people just won't invest and it won't happen anyway. Or the government will massively subsidise it and under-wright it to make it happen, and the public purse will carry the can. If it were financially viable on it's own, the private sector would most likely do it anyway, but if you're starting from the point of financial non-viability of your housing scheme as a starting assumption, blaming investors seems a bit silly.
I'm not surprised you don't understand what I mean when I speak of the value of housing if your first thought is Warren Buffet. The value of a house is the stability, safety and shelter it gives to the citizenry, it's allowing people who live in it to prosper and to build families.
This is also true about people who designed american urban sprawl.
It is sort of funny, not many people complain about skyscrapers but they are similarly excessive. Think of it as 200m taller than the Burj Khalifa, just sideways and fewer stars I bet.
We’re just a bunch of apes that like to mess with our environment, inventing a new type of environment is in our nature.
The only thing I could think of is surface area and, compared to "a large number of reasonably sized ones", this obviously would be more efficient.
I see them as skyscrappers in landscape mode.
These communities also didn't age too well, becoming associated with aging population, urban degradation and poor architecture.
And it’s not even a thing of the past. In its most recent incarnation, the German Greens have declared war on single family homes. The fashionable justification being their carbon footprint. Instead, they are for policies to house people in apartment blocks that are densely spaced within cities instead of suburbs. Often while mixing different demographics that would not normally like to live within the same neighbourhood. Suffice it to say that people continue to pursue the dream of owning houses on their own plot of land.
There is a place for everything, houses and large buildings.
Otherwise, I agree with the comment above, that such buildings seem impractical, and can be replaced with separate buildings, even higher, with open space in between them (and greens and parks and benches,...), eg: https://goo.gl/maps/TneCupaRNq3SgQYL7 (imagine this, but with undeground parking instead of cars parked on the steet).
To rely on wood and concrete to protect you is the death of self reliance
that doesn't sound true. How can you survive aa a homeless person in New York, Seattle or Boston? of course you need shelter provided for you, or you'll be dead in a single winter night.
If you live in a more rural region, feel free to have single-family houses. With an energy-efficient building style and rooftop-solar, that should be very environmently friendly. That is, if you don't waste too much energy commuting.
In and directly around cities, there is a huge scarcity of space for buildings and a shortage of homes. Having more dense units is both socially and environmentally friendly.
Or maybe that’s why they make it so huge. Only need to deal with all the permits once.
Another example is guided busways. Inferior to a road in every respect but that isn't enough to stop them.
I guess I shouldn't single out architects and urban planners - probably every field has projects that a back of the envelope calculation shows are obviously a terrible idea but they go ahead anyway. Solar roadways. Space based power.
The issue with architects doing it is that buildings stick around for a long time and people have to actually live in them, so I feel justified in reserving special resentment for modern architects.
Solar roadways for example are only a terrible idea, as long as sturdy solar panels remains expensive, and there is lots of other unused area to be covered much more cheaply. That might change one day, but yes, until then it is an idea from people who are too lazy to do the basic math.
Anyway, we’ve signed up for a bit of desertification already with climate change, right? So there will be somewhere to put the panels in a nice space efficient shape like a square.
Honestly I wonder every time it comes up whether the solar road was a straightforward grift or something more nefarious like an attempt to make environmentalists look ridiculous.
It is easy to forget, but the majority of people hate math and are not scientists. The idea of solar panels sounds and feels good, so it must be good.
And I strongly feel and identify as a environmentalist, but sadly I have to state, that many fellow environmentalists are acting ridiculous, or rather naive.
No, because land close to humans is limited and I would like at least some forest to remain forests.
If it would be really cheap to add solar panels as a bonus, even with no high efficency, this whole idea makes sense, otherwise not. So I wouldn't rule it out, if there would be a significant cheaper way, but I surely would not bet on that idea.
If anything, I would make the panels as a roof over the road and get sound protection for the people and snow protection for the road as well. Still quite expensive
You're dramatically overestimating the actual land coverage that would be needed to power the entire world with solar panels (assuming one abstracts away the problem of actually running power lines everywhere). A square 340 miles on a side would do it, from the back-of-the-envelope calculations I've seen.
The spaces here in germany, that are covered with solar panels, would have been adequate agriculture area, but is now ugly and in use. So if you could just use the road as the space, you could save that other land for other use. This is the idea behind it.
It's not that limited. Think how many roofs there are. Or car parks.
Also HVDC power transmission is a thing now. You don't even need to have your power source close to humans.
It has always been a thing, but it still means losses and expenses to build it. If you could have solar panels in the road, you could charge electric cars directly and efficently. But like I said, unlikely to happen.
It is just that they are too expensive to make much sense. With many potential new solar tech that is in the pipeline, that might change.
Another complete afterthought is the gigantic shadow these monsters do cast. In some cities they brought entire neighbourhoods into shadow during the day.
Such buildings are just sad and reflect the minds of their creators (and of those who rooted/root for them).
I hope a diff angle would show easier access.
Do you need 360 degree access?
Re 360 - no and yes. Someone will always do a full building walkaround. But I was thinking more of the interior corridor.
not that anyone in Rome would want you to put out a fire there, I'm sure they are all praying an earthquake will relieve them of this brutalist masterpiece
A few years ago, we visited (the fields of) Verdun and stayed in Briey. A medium size (~5000p) village in the middle between Metz and Verdun. While driving we overlooked the fields and saw this huge out of place futuristic building. That's how I learned of the "Unité d'habitation". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation
Take, for example, more than one "round houses" with around 200m diameter of one building.
https://yandex.ru/maps/org/krugly_dom_na_nezhinskoy/70861302...
Like a CPU that is surrounded by a troop of supporting chips.
I wonder which schools do kids of Corviale attend. Around it I can see all kind of stuff but only one school. Do they all fit?
Despite being a huge apartment complex, it seems very car-centric.
I will say that it might seem contradictory but really high density housing with adequate services (grocery,medical,school) is actually lower impact than huge sprawl. Sure the impact on that one kilometer is dramatic but in a suburban sprawl situation the land use for the same number of residences/units is going to be orders of magnitude higher. Even the transport links might use more land than the the land used. I’m thinking large city streets and freeways, that’s a lot of real estate.
This might be a fine application for immersive IT on the grandest scale. Provide the fully complete 24-hour sensory experience of actually living in, or next to, one of these monuments to oversized municipal egos before the first shovel touches the dirt. Use IT to determine if the benefits match the (simulated) lived reality…before the City has an ugly, dysfunctional 50+ year problem on its hands.
And have the members of the current Community themselves provide an evaluation of whether the project as simulated meets their wants and needs, and not just the needs and wants of the City Council, builders or architects. There would have been a lot fewer Brutalist buildings and high-rise urban renewal housing projects built, if such an accurate immersive simulation had been available in the 50s-60s.
Such a simulation is probably beyond the capabilities of this generation of IT professionals. It would be a very hard job to model the diversity of residents, situations, environments, future economic scenarios, etc. over the lifetime of the proposed large building. Validating the QoL of the simulated environment would be even harder. (Maybe start with known failures and see if the simulation predicts the observed issues.) But if the QoL impact of large projects can’t be properly assessed, maybe smaller, more human-scaled projects are the responsible approach. Sprawl or no.
Anyway looking Arab countries is like looking at everything that's wrong with modern world.
Imagine being so rich you can build any kind of city and you choose to build Dubais, Dohas and this line.
You could literally build fascinating Arabian-style fascinating cities that would make a Disney movie look bad...and they decide to create such non sense monsters like palm islands (not practical, doomed to be sunk by raising oceans moreover) or lines in the desert, pointless skyscrapers in places where there's no lack of horizontal space, this ain't Manhattan ffs.
... and, given the acid test of history, how terrible designs really were. Thus exacerbating the very thing they were trying to improve. *
*my subjective take
We are friends with two separate Italian families who struggled with Covid lockdowns.
The first family live in Florence and were stuck in a tiny apartment with two young girls and weren't even allowed to use their building's communal (but private) garden. Fresh air was to be found only on their balcony.
The second family live in central Milan, and on the announcement of the first lockdown, fled to an extended family member's house in the countryside, far from the city. The parents described it to the (young) kids as "the unexpected holiday". They ended up ordering toys and bicycles online once it turned out the lockdown wasn't just going to be a couple of weeks.
My primary concern about our overall response to Covid is that next time around - and there will definitely be a next time - there will be substantially more suspicion (and hence less compliance), and that doesn't end well.