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They’ve got to find a way to make it not look dystopian and a place you’d like to be. A huge “nakedly” concrete structure doesn’t have much appeal. Some designs
by ianai 6y ago
They’ve got to find a way to make it not look dystopian and a place you’d like to be. A huge “nakedly” concrete structure doesn’t have much appeal. Some designs I’ve seen look like they have no guard rails, for instance. Maybe it’d look better if it looked more developed. Or if it went a fully integrated direction like a traditional high rise.
- asimilator 6y agoSome people like the brutalist aesthetic.
- keiferski 6y agoAdd some neon signs and play electronic music in the background, and you’ll it’ll become a #Cyberpunk hotspot on Instagram.
- ianai 6y agoDo they like it in 20 years after the concrete is all chipped and looks set to fall apart?
- ghaff 6y agoBrutalism largely outlived its welcome for a number of reasons. But one of them is that it literally does not age well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wongarsu 6y agoI like brutalism as an aesthetic, but there are so many brutalst buildings that make me want to clean the facade with a pressure washer. Unless the architect designs around the predictable weathering patterns, a brutalist building really needs constant upkeep to keep looking good, just like some other contemporary styles.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoArchitecture students who don't have kids in the main
- henriquez 6y agoIt is dystopian, though. “Shove all the poor people in tiny boxes, then stack the boxes on top of each other.” That’ll fix ‘em. Maybe in our plague-ridden new world order the idea of dense urban areas is just flawed. City living is great for the wealthy and indentured servitude for pretty much everyone else.
- curryst 6y agoThey really aren't that small. A single wide is 500-1200 sqft, which is fairly competitive with apartments in major cities. A double wide is 1000-2000 sqft, which is competitive with most homes. High rises are basically just bespoke stacks of trailers; the units are just planned by an architect and custom-created, rather than being pre-fabricated and stacked. I would probably live in a trailer if they were priced cheaper than other options and not in a terrible area. The latter is usually what kills it, as most cities have zoning laws that relegate mobile home parks to areas far from any kind of development. Another complication is that in hot areas (the dense urban areas), most of your rent is going towards location, not to recoup the cost of building the thing. I have no doubt that in SF's financial district, they can probably recoup the costs of the building in a small number of years. I wouldn't be surprised if the land they're built on is worth more than the building on top of it. It doesn't make any sense to put up a building that's 10% cheaper, but ugly, when it only makes the whole project 0.1% cheaper.
- ghaff 6y ago>It doesn't make any sense to put up a building that's 10% cheaper, but ugly, when it only makes the whole project 0.1% cheaper. That's the problem with most of the cheap/tiny/etc. housing schemes. By the time you account for whatever combination of land cost, overhead of common areas/access, utility infrastructure, maintenance, etc., you now have housing that is often substandard in some way that isn't actually much cheaper (and is going to be harder to rent/sell/re-sell).
- throwaway316943 6y agoIf you ask me, we’re trying to modularize and standardize the wrong things. Housing will always benefit from being customized to the people inhabiting it. Shared spaces and utilities benefit more from generalization since they are used by a variety of people for a variety of purposes. We should figure out the essence of infrastructure and community spaces and then mass produce those as easy to assemble units so you could build a community hub wherever one is needed.