Archinect - News

Revenge of the Suburbs?

2020-06-22T12:46:00-04:00

American homes are extravagant, having swelled from about 1,500 square feet on average in 1973 to more than 2,400 in 2018. After the pandemic, memory of the novel utility of all that space could justify even more of it. Some companies have already declared their intention to let workers telecommute forever, and real-estate analysts anticipate more companies eliminating or curtailing expensive commercial leases to save money.

The new article from The Atlantic expands on the premise, "Suburbia was never as bad as anyone said it was. Now it’s looking even better."
The incoming changes to built environment due to COVID-19 pandemic, might well be viewed as going back to suburban communities and escape from the density of packed urban environments, the author argues.

As many companies want to keep "working from home" policies extended, city folks might benefit from lesser traffic and lower property values and rents, as this reporter observes.

"Sue The Suburbs" group puts apartment-denying Los Altos, California on notice

2019-08-15T09:00:00-04:00

The four-person California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, or CaRLA, has one reason for being — to sue cities that reject housing projects without a valid reason. The litigious nonprofit with YIMBY roots struck again last month, suing Los Altos after the city rejected a developer’s bid to streamline a project of 15 apartments plus ground-floor office space.

CaRLA continues its aggressive efforts to get San Francisco Bay Area cities to stop denying by-right housing developments.

“Something, by hook or by crook, has to make these cities actually build housing,” Sonja Trauss, co-executive director of CaRLA, told The Mercury News.

Amazon HQ2 — what else can it offer to NYC?

2018-12-28T16:23:00-05:00

For years, suburbia has offered these companies acres of disposable, cheap, anonymous office parks: mostly one- or two-story concrete structures surrounded by loads of surface parking. These sites minimized costs, maximized security and allowed companies to scale up, contract or split into different units quickly — at the same time they promoted sprawl and traffic jams and transformed once-quaint bedroom communities south of San Francisco into phenomenally expensive places to live.

Even though Amazon's search for its new headquarters' locations has ended all the talks and negotiations about the company's potential impact on the cities it will settle in — New York and Crystal City, Virginia—have only begun.

In ways, the choice comes as no surprise as tech platforms have been attracted to America's wealthy coastal cities, with their established cultures, universities and transit systems, for years. The intensifying expansion of the tech industry amidst urban landscape raises many questions about corporations' powers and rights in a city.

Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times notes that companies like Amazon, through their multi-billion biding process, should offer to satisfy more than just the city's growing need for new jobs. The author suggests options: "As for housing, the city’s regulatory and zoning policies are more responsible for driving up costs than tech companies. But, in an ideal world, Amazon would reverse what it did in Seattle and commit resources ...

A Texas McMansion Hell bracket approaches, check out the 8 contenders

2018-07-03T17:38:00-04:00

I’ve been poisoning my brain the last couple of weeks narrowing down 2000 prospective McMansions to 16. Please give me a round of applause for this immense personal sacrifice. Instead of ranking them myself like I usually do, I will be doing a bracket at the end of the next post where you can vote for the Most Terrible in Texas! (After all, everything’s bigger in Texas!)

McMansion Hell, a bi-weekly blog delighting in architectural education through ridicule, now brings us a Texas bracket. The top 8 worst McMansions of Texas suburbia have been chosen and properly mocked. Now it's your turn to choose which belongs at the innermost circle of hell.

Here are a few of the contenders:

Montgomery County (House 3) (AKA Cascading Nope)

Denton County (House 5) (AKA Mt Nub)

Collin County (House 7) (AKA The Triple Can)

Check out the full lineup at McMansion Hell and get ready to cast your vote!

Want to learn more about McMansion Hell? Check our our conversation with McMansion Hell's author Kate Wagner, from a previous episode of Archinect Sessions...

Domestic Frontiers series: Mass Market Alternatives

2018-01-19T11:52:00-05:00

The first in a series of shows spotlighting research by Pratt Undergraduate Architecture Faculty on the future of Domestic Architecture in 21st Century. This exhibition, featuring the work of John Szot is entitled MASS MARKET ALTERNATIVES.

"Industrialization has had a profound effect on the American suburb. Only American audacity could have concocted and executed the formula for mass-produced homes that dominates the suburban real estate market in the United States. And only in America could such a formula become an economic and political juggernaut, making places where matters of personal taste are amplified into cultural bulwarks."

"'Mass Market Alternatives' seeks to exploit the economic leverage and aesthetic principles of mass-market suburban housing in order to diversify its potential customer base and challenge the reputation of the suburbs as enclaves of conservatism and political conformity."

The exhibition opens on January 22 and runs until February 9. A gallery talk will tak...

Rachel Whiteread brings American Suburbia to London

2018-01-16T13:06:00-05:00

A major new public art work by Rachel Whiteread modelled on a suburban US house will be unveiled next week at the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, south London. The wall sculpture, titled US Embassy (Flat pack house; 2013-1015), will greet embassy visitors as they enter into the lobby through the consular court. The work was commissioned by Art in Embassies, a US governmental body.

Artist Rachel Whiteread's name has become synonymous with the production of architectural interventions, invention and material playfulness through her large-scale artist sculptures, specifically her casts of the interiors of buildings. Her newest addition, installed in the US Embassy titled, US Embassy (Flat pack house; 2013-1015) in London is no exception.

The large-scale sculpture will be on display at the US Embassy in London and consists of a collection of concrete interior casts of a traditional American suburban home, interiors of a traditional mid-century suburban home from America. Each nuance, crack, crevice and plethora of formal elements are frozen in time within the casts and subsequently hung vertically on embassy walls.

2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial Spotlight: T+E+A+M reimagines the contemporary ruin

2017-09-15T17:26:00-04:00

By now, it’s a relatively familiar narrative: over the course of the last few decades, there's been a mass return to urban centers from their outskirts, resulting in a field of abandoned strip malls and big box stores. What to do with these contemporary “ruins,” however, remains an open question.

In their installation for this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Ann Arbor-based studio T+E+A+M has imagined a strategy of “redistribution,” in which the physical elements of one such big box store are “taken apart, moved around, piled up, and mixed with new construction to create alternative uses.” It’s the type of bricolage, informal building logic one often finds internationally but rarely within the United States. Brought here, it’s a refreshing change from the type of totalizing, imposed visions often associated with architectural proposals for abandoned suburban sites.

Image by author.

A mise en scène model, replete with faux vegetation and miniature benches, Ghostbox plays off...

Zillow backs off McMansion Hell

2017-06-30T12:46:00-04:00

McMansion Hell, which besides satire, also regularly features educational posts on the history and significance of vernacular architecture in the US, was threatened with a lawsuit this week for using photos obtained from Zillow for parody.

Image courtesy of McMansionHell.com

After Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing Wagner against Zillow, released its letter asserting that the company "cannot leverage its agreements with third parties to assert some kind of 'super copyright' that overrides fair use" Zillow announced that they will not pursue legal action against Wagner. The blogger agreed to stop using photos sourced from the website but will not delete any of the already posted images, as originally requested.

Mass Market Alternatives at Pinkcomma Gallery

2017-03-07T20:33:00-05:00

Starting Wednesday, March 8, the Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston will be showing a collection of drawings, models, and videos documenting a collection of algorithmically-generated suburban homes by John Szot.

conceptual statement:

Industrialization has had a profound effect on the American suburb. Only American audacity could have concocted and executed the formula for mass-produced homes that dominates the suburban real estate market in the United States. And only in America could such a formula become an economic and political juggernaut, making places where matters of personal taste are amplified into cultural bulwarks.
“Mass Market Alternatives” seeks to exploit the economic leverage and aesthetic principles of mass-market suburban housing in order to diversify its potential customer base and challenge the reputation of the suburbs as enclaves of conservatism and political conformity.

about the architect:

John Szot is an award-winning architect living in New York, and his work related to...

Can Cleveland combat climate change with compact communities?

2016-10-18T12:54:00-04:00

Although Cleveland often serves more as a punchline than a solution (the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 due to pollution), a climate change conference convened by the United Nations and currently being held in Quito, Ecuador sees new potential in the city. As StreetsBlog reports, if Cleveland can transform its current suburbia into denser neighborhoods, the metropolis could serve as a model for numerous water and climate-challenged cities in how to adapt to the demands of an increasingly populated globe. As a paper entitled "Where to put the next billion people" states:

"Cleveland could play a significant role in the fight against climate change by developing a strategy for more compact communities and with a more open and encouraging immigration policy, the report concludes.

The influx of immigrants should probably be planned better.

Cleveland’s outer suburbs and nearby rural towns hold the key. If the suburbs can figure out strategies to retrofit themselves as dense, walkable com...

A guide for New Yorkers exploring the "Suburban Jungle"

2016-03-25T12:55:00-04:00

Some New York City real estate agents have teamed up with their counterparts outside the five boroughs for organized seminars and “immersive tours” of the suburbs. The city agents get a cut of the commission if their clients decide to buy a house in the suburbs. The services, which reside somewhere between shrink session and sales pitch, intend to address the concerns of families unsure about leaving the city and guide them to suburbia, step by step.

Related news from the 'burbs on Archinect:

The strength of Chinese suburbia

2016-01-22T17:38:00-05:00

As of the 2010 census, the vast majority of Shanghai’s population lived in suburban areas. Between 2000 and 2010, suburban areas grew by 50 percent or more, compared to the city’s central districts, which grew slower or in some cases even shrank [...] The villagers who join the urban economy, then, don’t go downtown, but to the settlements that dot the fringes of the city. The industries that really help China to grow are here, too

More related news:

Part of the supercharged suburban sprawl near Dallas

2015-12-28T02:06:00-05:00

This year, Chinese families represented for the first time the largest group of overseas home buyers in the United States. Big spenders on new homes are helping prop up local economies in the Midwest...The interest from Chinese buyers is reshaping demographics in Texas.

As Part II of a series of articles exploring how China's financial heft and economic clout influence the world, Dionne Searcy and Keith Bradsher illuminate how Chinese real-estate investors are driving prices and development not just for "luxury condos in Manhattan and McMansions in Silicon Valley" but "mini-mansions" in Plano or Corinth.

Can dead "big-box" stores live a second life?

2015-11-16T12:49:00-05:00

In suburbs, cities and rural areas, [big-box stores] can present a reuse and rehab conundrum, particularly as retailers become more sophisticated about controlling leases and redevelopment. [...] With the big-box model, stores are rarely remodeled. [...] A kind of “retail cannibalism” emerges, where companies compete for market share with ever-shinier facades that leave aging stores behind as the asphalt fades.

More on the fading development of big-box stores:

Welcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbia

2015-10-23T16:27:00-04:00

What if a suburban downtown became a place where pedestrians ruled and cars were actively discouraged? As it turns out, what looks like normal urban gentrification actually marks the success of one of the most revolutionary suburbs in America. And its approach to development is fast becoming a model across the region—a model even embraced by [Evanston's] urban neighbor to the south, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The boring domestic origins of 1980s hardcore music

2015-08-26T17:45:00-04:00

Hardcore Architecture is a project by Chicago artist Marc Fischer exploring the relationship between domestic spaces, urban and suburban neighborhoods, and underground hardcore and punk bands of the 1980s. [...] The results of his media archaelogy are a funny, ironic and intriguing snapshot of American vernacular architecture in the 1980s. It's also a fascinating alternative vision of the places where underground culture has been created and nurtured

"Hardcore Architecture" (which we also posted on back in May) is now available as a limited-edition booklet, featuring 68 Google Street View snapshots of homes that housed punk and hardcore bands in 1980s. Besides their shared genre-base, these homes all have one thing in common: they are pretty boring. Or to be more charitable, perfect examples of "American vernacular architecture in the 1980s".

In this MinnPost piece, Chicago-based artist and creator of "Hardcore Architecture" Marc Fischer spills some details behind the homes. Here's some select bits from his interview:

"...there are definitely sorts of trends in the building styles. If you’re looking at a gigantic, long brick building in Syracuse, New York, in all likelihood it’s student housing for Syracuse University if it’s not a house. And certainly the homes in Chicago that I found all look pretty normal variations on Chicago types of homes – like brick two-flat buildings. Or in New York, of course, it’s predictably either rea...

In the midst of historic drought, Barclay's plans a residential development in New Mexico's desert

2015-05-21T13:02:00-04:00

[Barclay's] plan, to fabricate a “master-planned community” for nearly 100,000 people on what is today a field of sand dunes, is called Santolina. If fully populated, the development would be about the size of New Mexico’s current second-largest city, Las Cruces, and bigger than Santa Fe [...] Columbia University’s Earth Institute points to 2050 as a time when the drought will begin to worsen dramatically, right around when Santolina planners predict the development could approach full capacity

Have an idea for how to address the drought with design? Submit your ideas to the Dry Futures competition!

Let them eat McMansions! The 1 percent, income inequality, and new-fashioned American excess

2014-04-16T13:35:00-04:00

Today we call those changes “inequality,” and inequality is, obviously, the point of the McMansion. The suburban ideal of the 1950s, according to “The Organization Man,” was supposed to be “classlessness,” but the opposite ideal is the brick-to-the-head message of the dominant suburban form of today.

Can Phoenix un-suburbanize?

2014-01-20T13:01:00-05:00

There’s a movement afoot to bring new money into urban areas all over the country, and surprisingly, Phoenix, is part of that movement. The city has long been famous for its suburban sprawl. But now, plans are moving ahead to link high-rise downtown with a neighboring Latino barrio that wealthy developers have mostly ignored for the better part of 100 years. Not a shovel of dirt has moved, though neighbors already have expectations and fears.

Why Apple's Suburban Spaceship Could Lose the War for Tech Talent

2013-12-23T13:04:00-05:00

Increasingly, young tech talent wants to live and work in cities. As a result, the hottest tech companies, from Google to Twitter to Uber, are setting up shop in San Francisco, a long drive north of Silicon Valley, the traditional stronghold of the computer game. In the cutthroat world of tech recruiting, catering to the demands of the talent is everything, and even Apple isn’t immune to the first rule of real estate: location, location, location.

Forget Golf Courses: Subdivisions Draw Residents With Farms

2013-12-17T13:55:00-05:00

When you picture a housing development in the suburbs, you might imagine golf courses, swimming pools, rows of identical houses. But now, there's a new model springing up across the country that taps into the local food movement: Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity. It's called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA.

Editor's Picks #328

2013-08-14T13:58:00-04:00

In the latest edition of the Working out of the Box series Archinect interviewed Brooklyn-based designer & artist Doug Johnston. His current profession is creating "objects by stitching rope together" and he explains "I guess sometime early on, I realized that my design work wouldn't be limited to buildings or objects, but would extend to the ‘design’ or planning of a functioning business and studio practice. This guided my choice to work in smaller offices so that I could have more exposure to the nuts and bolts of generating income managing workflow and cashflow, etc...Being able to apply design thinking to the business structure itself has been really exciting and helpful".

Thayer-D liked what he saw "Really beautiful stuff. It makes me think it would be incredibly useful to have architecture students actually build things besides models during school. If only to get a tactile understanding of what their drawings might be and what goes into realizing them".

News
Over ...

Building a better big box

2013-04-03T16:41:00-04:00

D’Hooghe, a Belgian-born architect and director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, cares deeply about urban form and the large-scale issues cities face in achieving more efficient energy use, better transportation and less congestion. One of his main concerns is better integrating suburbs with the larger metropolitan areas in which they exist.

Creating Hipsturbia

2013-02-16T18:36:00-05:00

As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.

Broad Minded City Documentary Film looking for a venue

2012-11-29T14:59:00-05:00

Broad Minded City is a Documentary about Urban Planning, Design and Architecture focusing on the current issues facing cities in development, issues like sustainability, culture identity, infrastructure, transportation and preservation. It's a multidisciplinary approach loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright's urban model "Broadacre City" to show the difference between Broadacre City and Urban Sprawl as we know it today.

Right now, we are looking to share a 10-15 min short film of Broad Minded City to the public in a venue. The initial screening will mostly happen in the Los Angeles area, but not against screening on other cities interested in this subject matter. The hope is to make the documentary into a full-feature film (90 mins. or longer).

If anyone is interested in screening in their gallery space or movie venue, please contact or you have different suggestions on a idea venue. The documentary is not only for the architect, developer, planner & designer, but to the broader audience who have an interest or a belief that cities and the urban environment should have better planning, transparency & design, that the design of buildings and spaces should be an everyday experience.

Suburban Kansas Dream: Museum of Suburbia

2012-10-11T23:23:00-04:00

Museum officials in Johnson County, Kan., propose spending $34 million to create the National Museum of Suburbia, a faux suburb where visitors could wander through a model ranch-style home, wonder at an exhibit of lawn furniture and topple pins on a re-created bowling lane.

Reality Check: Developers React to MoMA’s Show, “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”

2012-03-27T00:44:00-04:00

Though the panelists agreed that the foreclosure crisis will lead to major changes in suburban development, they all thought new patterns are less likely to be brought about by a revised American dream than by economic and demographic factors. And all said it would be very difficult to change zoning laws to permit denser new development patterns, especially in existing “inner-ring” suburbs.

On Archinect: The CRIT: Thoughts on MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream

The Roots of Sprawl: Why We Don't Live Where We Work

2012-03-20T11:54:00-04:00

Los Angeles was one of the first large cities in the U.S. to adopt a kind of modern zoning to keep the industrial away from the residential. If the city would have more mixed use, with people living closer to retail and workplaces, Los Angeles would feel like another city, with less of its land area dedicated to low density, single family residential neighborhoods, and more streets with shops and businesses on the ground floor and homes above.

"The Laws That Shaped L.A." is a weekly series on LA-based radio station KCET, spotlighting regulations that have played a significant role in the development of contemporary Los Angeles. These laws - as nominated and explained each week by a locally-based expert - may be civil or criminal, and they may have been put into practice by city, county, state, federal or even international authority.

Can US communities learn from this European suburban retrofit?

2012-02-22T15:15:59-05:00

In 2008, the substantially updated town center of Plessis-Robinson, a suburb of Paris, was named “the best urban neighborhood built in the last 25 years” by the European Architecture Foundation. A composite of six connected districts ranging in size from 5.6 to 59 acres, the revitalization comprises public buildings, retail, market-rate and subsidized affordable housing, parks, schools, gardens, sports facilities, and a hospital. Construction was begun in 1990 and took a decade to complete.

Sympathy for the Suburbs

2012-02-21T12:20:00-05:00

Foreclosed, a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, shows ways of radically rethinking suburbia, homeownership and housing. But are such drastic measures what the suburbs really need?

Also, see on Archinect: The CRIT: Thoughts on MoMA's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream