Wow, indeed.

Nice big bold letters, Apu.

I do wonder how this white will weather. I imagine in that Mediterranean(ish?) sun it will just look better and better. Would love to see pictures when the growth comes in more.

please remind me why a giant social housing complex with overtures of a sterilized human laboratory experiment is beautiful? Is this some sort of vision of the future or a warning?

as one who has spent almost half of his life in various versions of social housing complexes (base housing, dorms, large apartment complexes)

while i have a major soft spot for the large "soviet bloc" housing complexes...

i think the morphosis project in spain is pretty interesting. some pretty strong moves on a tight budget. i think the overall affect has a semblance of a community, especially when you look at the surroundings.

and yes, i hope it is a vision of the future.

aalto


corb


and because most people living in third world countries can't afford much else.

and because this sure as fuck isn't working.

the bottom image is a computer rendering. But if your saying its the same as the socialized housing complex shown above it's not. The single family homes are completely enclosed with a yard barrier between neighbors. Every family has a plot of land they own. Every house is customized. Every house has direct access to the public way not via communal space. I guess you are against the American Home archetype because its not aesthetically appealing? I concede the Morphosis project is architecturally appealing upon first glance. Im a sucker for pretty pictures. But remember Corb's Plan For Paris - An architectural revolution, but the built reality a disaster.






NYC







Holz do you have a family? Do you talk to your neighbors? Do you think that the market for single family homes is just 90% delusional people who just dont know that they really want to live in a concrete box? Please man. Look at the website and look at the panorama views of that complex and have the cajones to call a turd a turd. No matter how hard you polish it, its still a turd.

clamfan...
the scale is completely different...this isn't the projects..and if you can't see that i don't think holz can help you.

larson - its says its a project right on the dam front page of the website. High / low its still a project. I said that grand visions look cool but rarely ever function. I wasnt comparing scale either but since you cant read I cant help you.

clam, have you actually read anything about the Voison Plan, or just looked at the pictures?

The Corb cruciform blocks were supposed to be office buildings.

What if you made a shape, and then 25 years later, some other people made a building in the same shape, and then they cut the maintenance and security budgets for that building? Everybody'd be like: 'clamfan sucks!'

dam - then Id have to come up with some new bullshit like typology of porosity to suit the social ideals of this project type

clam,

the bottom picture is real - it's an aerial of the markham development outside of toronto.

i'm not against the "american home archetype"

i just think it's a farce. it's also one of the reasons we are in the mess we are.

i have a small family. (dinks w/ dogs)

we know all our neighbors, and most of the people in the neighborhood we live in.

it's different from the projects you'd find in the u.s. it's social housing - heavily subsidized, whereas in the states, it is funded once for construction and then forgotten.

the use of project in the link is as a scheme or proposal.

and here are some other social housing projectsfor your edumacation

"Morphosis
Madrid Social Housing
Madrid, Spain

In a suburban Madrid neighborhood of conventional, anonymous housing blocks, Morphosis devised a typology of porosity to suit the social ideals of this project type.

As an alternative to towering blocks of faceless units, this project explores a radically different social model that integrates landscape and village topologies.
By grafting properties commonly found in detached villas onto this low-income housing project the architects achieved a multi-family living complex with amenities such as loggias, green spaces, and domestically scaled massing that are not normally found in public housing in Spain.
The basic parti is an extruded “J”: a low-rise “village” building, flanked by a tall, slender bar to the North and a lower multi-level bar building to the South."


Hows this not a project? Its immoral from conception. ya it looks cool. But so what - it also looks horribly claustrophobic and maze like.


Heres a link to a normal looking industrial gate lets say. You may even say thats a great example of central European industrial architecture ( of which its not but lets just say)



link


Now do you see the dilemma?

clamfan..
is english your first language? i'm serious

it's obviously a project...but when i say 'the projects' i'm referring to a specific type of project and idea that is shown in the projects you provided photos of.

regardless of whether or not you choose to ignore it or not...there's a huge difference between a 15-20 story building and 20 of its closest neighbors and the madrid project...just in shear numbers of people...

what you're doing is taking an idea and comparing it to it's worst example..
the gate at buchenwald is still a gate... if the gate were removed it would still be a gate...it's only a 'bad' gate if you connect it to a prison camp as an idea.
i think your argument is specious...your criticizing the project typology without even trying to see if this example has any kind of merit.

first off, how is it immoral from conception? that statement is without merit or backing.

this thread was never about industrial architecture. and it certainly wasn't about the nazi's co-opting existing aesthetic ideals to mask the reality of a Konzentrationslager

if you want a discussion on industrial architecture, then start a new thread.

thom mayne and his disciples took a standard prototype, of which several constructs were soulless, and gave it life and a breath of fresh air. these housing constructs are an attempt to give those on the lower rungs of the social ladder a more humane place to live.

if you want a discussion about immoral, we can start w/ something along the lines of favela
[img[http://www.ivebeenthere.co.uk/places/brazil/sao-paulo/favela-morumbi-sao-paulo.jpg[/img]

the barrio


the slums of mumbai

Here's a link for you, clam.

favela

nice, 765. i still like the madrid social housing project. they are a f of a lot nicer to view as you are driving by than the traditional shit boxes. i like to look at buildings that inspire thought, and obviously this one has done so.

liberty bell;

it depends on how its done. if its the typical plaster and paint,, the heat and humidity could easily wear it down making the buildings look tattered pretty quickly. now, you might be thinking of white washed + lime mixture that gives, amongst others, many greek island houses a very pocketed textured whiteness. now thats a more interesting and textured, less virtual, sort of white. and even if it wears off it still looks more "charming".

having said that, too much white, ,though tempering the temperature inside the house, would overexpose the surroundings rendering it even less hospitable during mid-day. without more planting, this pretty place might be a bit too blinding during those hours of the day. glare everywhere i stare. i must say that i don't appreciate, as habitable spaces, the green carpet lawn, as shown in the first image.

i guess, in this case, what makes the design interesting intellectually, that is the abstraction of architectural and landscape materiality (white concrete, green grass) is also what makes it less comfortable.

for all its creative modernist mess (messy utopia), there are certainly post modern inflection. btw, what do these horizontal ladder like things spanning between the flying beams function as?

where are the trees?

are these chimneys? or wind catchers? or true morphosis expressionism (which i love)?

or remove the lawns altogether, replacing them with pools in the midst of which are statues of sexy naked men with small knobs and the occasional ugly statue with a huge knob and hairy legs, nympho-bisexual maidens, horny dryads...

yes...thats what i sense...a covert neo classicism lacking arousal. needs arousal.

aren't the ladder things the places where the green is supposed to grow? as lb suggests, we're not seeing it in the 'designed' condition yet. the plantings have to mature to soften it up.

I like how they converted a power plant into public housing. good example of adaptive reuse.

the argument about it being a project or not is funny....i mean it IS a low income housing project, and of a type that that people might call "the projects" in the USA. or council flats in UK...

i know, and have said before, that from personal experience corb's typology can work just fine. sir peter hall points out some amazingly beautiful examples for the upper middle class in europe, and i live in a lower middle class example in tokyo that is slightly ugly but functionally much higher quality than the places the rich people are buying into today (not kidding). so it just isn't correct to assume this won't work.

on other hand...Thom's new typology looks slightly scary to me, and i am sort of sad to admit that it looks pretty much how i expected it would after i first saw the plans a year or more ago... i really did hope that this was one of those projects that would be better in reality than on paper... right now am still not convinced.

kudos to thom for trying this out, but i think it really will need some time to see if it will work or not. say 10 years or so. my fingers are crossed.

it also looks like a modernism in an state of orthogonal psoriasis. modernist little chunks and sticks sticking out of the main blocks for no apparent integral reason, skin peeling off and hanging.

precluding the 'creative mess', does this qualify as a new typology? the arrangement seems to me like variations on courtyard housing. but i can't really tell, not enough information
courtyard city

those sticks provide large quantities of shade, thus keeping the courtyary cool and reducing energy loads.

is it just me or does this thing formally regurgitate old school richard mier type structuralism?

im not impressed honestly i think morphosis has done much more beautiful projects than this.

and also i thought clamfan was strictly a troll, but hes holding his own in this convo. though i disagree with him/her its nice to see a legit argument.

carry on...

A troll? WTF - now I remember why I avoid this board like the plague

judging by the endless possibility of other solutions providing more shade, i have my doubts as whether that was the determining factor in how they're formed. mind you, calling it a dermatologically aberrant modernism is not a criticism in itself. i also do not care that they provide some shade; for me, thats hardly whats defining about them. so really, i don't see why you even bother to register this obvious observation. you like the building, you're ready to defend it using the normal methods apropos what impresses itself upon you as criticism (which wasn't the case)....why so defensive? and why see it in such a conventional shading device way anyway?
someone upstairs called the design (and therefore these useless incomplete structures) expressionistic; that promises a more relevant raison d'être than 'energy loads'.

in a different situation, a hip living person such as yourself would argue that "green architecture" does not at all imply a certain look or style. now now...

the above is in reponse to holz's green sticks, btw

So I'm saying this project is pretty like Angelina Jolie, visually beautiful while also trying, with the best intentions, to spread love in a harsh world.

And noctilucent, you're saying this project is pretty like Sarah Palin, that is, outward appealing but hideously cruel on the inside?

(Sorry to raise politics again but when i think of pretty-looking-but-ugly-on-the-inside SP is the first gal that comes to mind.)

my x girlfriend is the first to come to mind

noctilucent, i referred to it as morphosis expressionism, and while I agree with what most of what you're saying, I need to say that I did'nt mean it as negative at all,, actually, what i like most about morphosis' work over their long practice is exactly that kind of boldness to formally, structurally, and ecologically express their buildings at multiples of scale,, and though their language at the smaller scale has changed drastically since Rotondi left, i still enjoy the glimpses of artistic willfulness

and, if it serves a direct purpose, something that we as users can appreciate or utilize, rather than inherently architectural, whether functional, or "green" (ukh), then thats for the better,,

i think its an interesting project that would age nicely over time, as for the meier reference, i think thats really judging it on the surface, merely through the images,, as even though its might look like it, it really gives a different vibe, especially as there is no ALUCOBOND (ukh!!!!!!)

on another note? SP? pretty?

liberty bell;

i have no idea what festers behind the women's prettiness, but my point was not that of an explicit vs an implicit.

if i wish to criticize the building solely from the standpoint of habitability then i'd say (knowing the sort of climate there) this much white = too much glare and heat reflected back into those little courtyards; this renders the courtyards less habitable.

it could also be a point to note the lack of spatial identification (which the inhabitants might bring into the project anyway) that could have been achieved by a nuanced variable materiality (architecture and landscape), especially of, and around, the courtyards.

however, this last point is also exactly that which, though detracting from the comfort factor, encourages the semblance of abstraction to come across. and this, for its intellectual purpose, a substantial part of me that doesn't ponder much on people understands.

let me be a bit idiotic here; for a nicer environment to live in : at some point, the northern sensibility (which typically knows how to deal with the cold better than that with the heat) should have released the design to the southern sensibility for design development. this other part of me sees no reason why this could not have been an even nicer place to live in.

the question is, therefore, would one at some point allow her design to be trivialized by sacrificing some sort of supreme seriousness and let it become more mundane, more habitable? there you go, that clichéd attack on self-referential modernism again.

nice post, noct.

i think its an interesting project that would age nicely over time

are you serious? white anything in an urban environment will not age nicely over time. this building does not seem to accommodate messiness in what i imagine could be a very messy environment. it always shocks me a bit when architects, especially good architects, miss something like that, or willfully choose to ignore it.

now that was a good solid critique that i could understand, noc. thanks. i think you're right. while i do hope that the various armatures for the growth of greenery will begin to address the issue of habitability in the court space, providing a little shade-cover and keeping the white walls from being so glarey, it is still a pretty tough and extreme landscape.

the tug-of-war between the architects' desired abstraction and the human desire for texture, color, and other life-reinforcing gestures is a difficult one, of course. reminds me of one of the projects in 'design like you give a damn' in which the mult-unit building (costa rica?) was not only inhabited but painted a variety of colors and had things attached - as if the architect left it unfinished and it was up to the residents to complete it.

also reminds me (strangely?) of east germany in 1989. i've always loved that two things that were mass-produced intentionally so that different was suppressed ended up being canvases for personal expression: the trabant, the east german car; and the identical monopoly-house-looking worker housing in towns like hellerau outside dresden.