It's funny....
Cool stuff.
Most of the forward-thinking "urban planning" of the 1950's and early 1960's have turned into a bit of a bust.
The concept of flat roof, single-story modern houses - going back to Frank Lloyd Wright - is fine and dandy, except they leak. Even the most forward-thinking archetects didn't know from insulation(!) so all of those house are incredibly air-leaky. (There's a "Frank Lloyd Wrong" house here in Minneapolis -designed by one of his employees- that's visually to die for, but it has had to be constantly repaired and was partially rebuilt.)
Then there's the Robert Moses urban planning of scads of high rises for the poor - the Cabrini projects in Chicago are a good example. Rampant problems, crime, elevators that don't work, lousy sound proofing, etc. made them instant ghettos....and many of them have been torn down and replaced with quaint town houses!
Then there's Brazilia......drop-dead beautiful, but lifeless and totally obsolete.
So, it's fun and cool to view all of the most advanced urban planning concepts, but it turns out that much of their ideas have not really worked out in the real world.
It's a fascinating subject, to be sure, but I'm happy with my traditional Stucco 1924 2-story (complete with its back bump-out which brings it up to 2000 sq ft and its deck).
Most of the house are still standing
Oh yes...most of the Wright houses, as well as other modern houses ARE still standing.
But alot of them have structural problems.
This Old House did up a nice 1950's flat-roof modern house in Massachusetts a few years ago and almost everything was wrong the it.
It was fascinating to watch what they had to do to upgrade and repair it.
Many modern movement...
Many modern movement buildings have suffered problems (especially here in rainy England). However it must be remembered that the architects who built them were very often working far ahead of existing technology, materials and techniques, and the modern movement could not have progressed without the example of FLW's crumbing blocks and Lubetkin's leaking walls.
I would agree wholeheartedly with Paulanna
and designs of the fifties and sixties weren't so much a bust but rather as stated they (Modern architects) were far ahead of the times with their designs. It was, I should think, the construction methods that couldn't keep pace due to a combination of process and/or materials shortcomings.
This country (the US) seems to be horrendously behind the times now where modern architecture is concerned. Sure there is the odd developement where a new design paradigm has taken root, but for the most part we just seem to keep copying a few designs that are all a slight reinterpretation on designs from several hundered years ago, English Tudor, French Provincal, etc. It's almost as if frontier America is still in it's infancy. We just don't live that way anymore, yet every gated community is stuffed with Georgian manors and the like, yuck!, yuck!, yuck!
There are a few exceptions of course, a friend lives in an Eichler in Palo Alto and the surrounding area is home to better then 1700 of them. They built them (Eichler Homes) like crazy till they went out of business in the late 60's. She has lived there over 15 years and still finds it very livable today as it must have been in 1965.
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Don't blame the buildings too much, everything in context...inhabit those buildings with the employed and people with money and most of the problems won't exist. There are thousands of shoddily built apartment blocks and they aren't all slums.
Apartment blocks are difficult, I would happily live in one but the sound proofing is never good enough and the corridor design is usually miserable.
I would love to live in a housing co op for the design conscious, there could be furniture swapping parties, a gallery, a bar....
I don't know that I am necessarily
blaming the buildings, I think it is more a disappointment with the total lack of imagination relative to construction projects going forward from say 1945. The vast majority are still designs that were laid out 300 to 400 years ago. That doesn't strike me as progress but rather stagnation.
Apartment blocks are a whole other issue, and difficult not to come across as either prisons or hotels. Soundproofing is always an issue as is odor control and the ability or lack thereof in containing the smells of a neighbor cooking cabbage or fish or some other odiferous "masterpiece".
My point is that it seems that all of the cutting edge stuff is being done somwhere other than in the US. Australia, Argentina, the UK, Spain always have a high percentage of forward thinking residential architecture in any year end review of modern buildings built in the preceeding 12 months. Makes me a bit disappointed that there isn't more of that here. I do like elements of the example on the link above, though.
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I think a powerful central extraction fan servicing all kitchens would help, garbage + laundry chutes... all these novel ideas have been tried out but never in one building. Sven Markelius + Le corbs Unite to name two.
There were a few Italian architects working on these self contained mega-structures in the 70's . I'll try and find a link or two.
sameness
we keep seeing the same old stuff [home design] because money is clearly in the driver's seat.
it's always more efficient and economical to punch out cookies with a cutter; more cookies, more profit. and if the cookie eaters keep buying the cut-outs, it appears everyone's happy.
the constant quest for more money and wider margins is a social ill that is depleting our culture of things both beautiful and noble. once we've surrendered to the premise that "you can't argue with the bottom line," everything becomes a servant to the shekel. everything.
[my apologies in advance for such a downer post. i realize what relatively little i've written here is very broad-brushed; unfortunately my energy level at this late hour doesn't permit me to fill in an amount of detail that would serve well to temper the indictment. this is sort of my gut reaction to big_tv_guy's astute observation regarding our residential housing stagnation, which is quite possibly an overly generous term to depict the actual state of affairs.]
the bottom line: i love my country, but the dollar has become far too important in america, and we are experiencing the effects of the fallout.
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an extruded apartment block is fine, the designs aren't all terrible and novelty for the sake of it is no solution either. What the problem is just shoddy materials, thin walls and nasty fittings.
Even worse than this though is the macmansions and the SUV problem, I'm looking forward to the day when these houses and cars get vandalised as climate damagers and the canal developments start sinking...they were only told 20 years ago what was going to happen the fools. No doubt we'll all have to pay for dykes and levies to be built for them.
But to be positive, one thing I do like about these older fanciful projects is the optimism, aside from big civic projects like olympic facilities there seems to be an endless round of urban renewal projects, a town planner I know says that all they do is constantly try and patch up problems by moving bus stops and demanding public spaces be integarted into projects that no one ever uses. I did read an article on this Harry Siedler designed development(RIP) that seems quite good.
http://www.seidler.net.au/projects/013.html
To kdc
myth has it that Robin Hood or some such archer of yore split the arrow already in the bullseye. You sir have split Robin Hoods arrow and underneath all of those arrows is the dollar sign.
Perhaps it is not lack of imagination on the part of builders but rather the GDP, no not "Gross Domestic Product" but rather General Dumb Public clamoring for the same cookies. People do tend to be sheep oftentimes for fear of standing out in a neighborhood and/or because of restrictive zoning covenants. Perhaps it's true as someone once said "No one ever went broke over-estimating the lack of imagination within the general public"
I know my two posts here are also somewhat in the "downer" category, but man I look back over the literature of the 40's, 50's and 60's about utopian societies, dwellings, furnishings and transportation of the future, and all I can say is "Man, where's my Jetpack?"
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