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There are lots of copy-paste condo farms here in the Minnesota suburbs. You can easily wander into a neighborhood full of a few hundred physically identical dup
by beat 8y ago
There are lots of copy-paste condo farms here in the Minnesota suburbs. You can easily wander into a neighborhood full of a few hundred physically identical duplexes.
Ugly as sin, but they're cheap housing.
edit: I'll go farther than this. My own house is over 100 years old, in a "bungalow neighborhood" of Minneapolis. Most of the houses were built over a period of a few decades, with more or less the same design. There's a T structure, leading to three sections on the first floor. The entrance is a living/dining area separated by an arch, on the other side of the back wall is the kitchen, and on the other side of the interior side wall is a hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. They're all like this. And these were built by hand, with the most sophisticated factory parts being two-by-fours and hinges. They might have a porch, or an extension (my house has a back extension built in the 1950s), and the attic might be finished into a single room, or even expanded into multiple rooms with a large dormer. Many/most have been modified over the years. But the basic form? Consistent as a pup tent.
These things are the result of available technology. The bungalows are a product of factory-made nails, which made balloon frame construction viable. In the South, you'll find shotgun shacks, which are what happens when you build a bungalow but don't need or want a basement.
This is nothing new. My neighborhood might look varigaeted, but it's not.
- derefr 8y agoSure, but that's not quite what I was getting at. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The sort of copy-paste condos you see all in one place are still a single development project by a single property developer. They're all signed off on as one job-lot, and then the materials are allocated to build all of them, a pool of workers are hired and reused between all the projects (where they might be working on condo #14 one day, and then condo #26 the next), etc. Maybe some more are added a few years later, and maybe those are across town—but this is still the same ongoing "project", by the same architect, the same construction firm, under the umbrella of the same sign-off from the same urban planners and engineers. Whereas, what doesn't seem to exist, is a sort of approach to architecture that resembles software engineering. One where "a building blueprint" is like "a software library": a reusable thing, sold or shared between different companies, or maybe even open-sourced. A world where your first condo project, as a developer, might involve constructing a building to a blueprint that existed long before your company did, even a blueprint your rival firms are also using. In such a world, you'd expect the components that go into such "common blueprints" to become standardized. You'd see a separation-of-concerns where these components get prefabricated not by the development company's contractors (as part of a "house in a box" or "condo in a box", the way you see today) but as part of an ecosystem of parts that enable these separate development-companies working off the same plans to work more quickly/efficiently. You'd have the Apples of the construction world buying full kitchen-assemblies or pre-plumbed-and-electrified-and-insulated-walls or whatever from the Samsungs of the construction world.
- kasey_junk 8y agoThat is precisely what “modular” homes are. There is a stigma to owning them in lots of places though.
- yrb 8y agoWhat do you think bathtubs, showers, sinks, taps, doors and most fittings are? There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details. Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.
- baybal2 8y agoYou have just found out what Soviet 112th series apartments were.