Archinect - News

Why are we seeing the same trends in apartment design over and over again?

2019-01-05T15:02:00-05:00

Due to an Amazon-fueled apartment construction boom over the last decade, Seattle has been an epicenter of [a] new school of structural simulacra. But Seattle is not alone. Nearly every city, from Charlotte to Minneapolis, has seen a proliferation of homogenous apartments as construction has increased again in the wake of the financial recession.

Developer Modern, Plonkitecture, Contemporary Contempt, Blandmarks...

These are just a few of the names offered for the ubiquitous apartment building design that has swept the nation in the last few decades. They differ marginally across the United States, for they all equally strive for the aesthetically unoffensive and the financially advantageous.

“Part of what people are responding to isn’t the building themselves, it’s that there are so many of them going up so quickly, all in the same places in the city,” argued Richard Mohler, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington.

According to this Curbed article, the culprits are cost-cutting, code-following and labor-reducing. As unfortunate as it is from a design standpoint, standardization is indeed a solution that developers have little question about. Geoff Palmer's apartment buildings have famously occupied the corners and edges of Downtown Los Angeles with mass-produced mediterranean affectations in ...

Federica Buzzi's critique on the Le Corbusier Modulor

2017-05-31T14:20:00-04:00

The Modulor Man is a healthy white male enhanced by mathematical proportional gimmicks ‘of nature’, such as golden ratio and Fibonacci series. He represents the normative and normalised body around which Le Corbusier conceived his designs. As a result, most modern architectural forms are all tellingly calibrated on a similar standard, the healthy white male body.

"Given the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s groundbreaking research regarding medicalisation in architecture and its extensive Le Corbusier collection," the author Federica Buzzi writes, "I think it is time to address the role of norm and standard in Le Corbusier’s work and its legacy."

Meet Ernst Neufert, father of building standards

2016-09-20T17:32:00-04:00

Almost every kitchen counter in the United States is 36 inches tall. And 25 inches deep. Eighteen inches above the counters are the cabinets, which are 16 inches deep. Where do these sizes and dimensions come from? Have they always been so exact?

"In 1938 Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer hired Neufert to, as Speer put it, “oversee the standardization of building parts, and the rationalization to building methods.” He got to lead his own team of designers and technicians. They were called The Neufert Department.

He created the Octametric Brick, a standard-sized masonry unit that would come to replace any other sized brick in Germany (the bricks were 12.5 centimeters wide, or one-eighth of a meter, hence its name). Adoption of the brick, as Neufert saw, would create a standardized, modular world that all construction would occur in—no more custom shapes or sizes within buildings, no more worrying that cabinets would be the same height as the stove.

With the Octametric Brick, buildings could still look different and be different sizes, but everything, when reduced to its smallest part, would have this as a base unit. This overarching uniformity, based around the dimensions of a single brick, would be called the Octametric Sy...

NCARB revises "Intern Architect" title for architects pursuing licensure

2014-09-04T21:25:00-04:00

The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) convened its new Future Title Task Force, which is comprised of interns and architects from across the country, to discuss the profession’s title debate. The task force is charged with discussing the terminology used for those who are candidates for licensure and those who are architects.

The word "intern" contains a minefield of professional connotations. The job-title is often associated with a position that is unpaid, undervalued, or disposable, flying in the face of employment laws and professional ethics. And in some ways, it's no different in the architecture industry: it's deplorably and repeatedly the case that unpaid internships play an integral role in professional practice. It seems strange then, that the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) uses the title "Intern Architect" as the official term for those educated enough to pursue licensure. Under this definition, the babe in the woods can have the same title as a seasoned vet.

This disconcerting overlap of meanings has led NCARB to reconsider the term used to describe practicing professionals seeking licensure. NCARB's newly formed Future Title Task Force met late last August to outline the issues of this sticky naming-debate, eventually to determine what architects, before and aft...

Creating a universal language for city data

2014-06-05T15:28:00-04:00

City policymakers will have objective standards to compare their services and performance with other cities around the world. And just as significant, the people of cities — civic, business organizations, ordinary citizens — will be able to access the same new global standards.

This is a big, global deal. The International Organization for Standardization, based in Geneva, has issued a list of standards dictating the precise kind of data cities should be collecting, to gauge performance and character. Previously, comparisons between supposedly identical data points in different cities was not guaranteed to be "apples to apples". For example, one city's definition of "unemployment" being more restrictive than another's, making rankings faulty and discrediting performance grades.

View the 46 indicators for cities to report on, that will place them in line with the new ISO standards.

Regarding comparisons between cities, rigorously investigating the exact definition of any data sounds like an obvious consideration, but with the earnest and speedy surge in city's data collection, "more" seems to have been the optimal word, and not "stricter". In 2008, when the Global Cities Indicators Facility at the University of Toronto compared ranking metrics for seven world...