7 ms·

One more in the same theme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora What I've never understood with these projects is, what's t

• ignoramous 4y ago
  Bombay (a city in India) is pursuing at least 2 large scale cluster development projects for housing owing to its very high density. It remains to be seen how it pans out. Previously, such clusters have only been realised for economic zones / business districts.
• bombcar 4y ago
  If you’re a politician or other approver you want something big and bold to put your name on. Authorizing building a bunch of normal buildings is boring - anyone could do that!
  • pmontra 4y ago
    Nobody lost an election because they were inspired by Le Corbusier. But they should.
• nwatson 4y ago
  Also here, last photo https://www.google.com/amp/s/bernadetealves.com/2020/06/12/unb-esta-no-top-10-no-ranking-qs-world-university/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/bernadetealves.com/2020/06/12/u... , the 700-meter Minhocão (Big Worm) at UnB (Universidade Nacional de Brasília). I started EE program there in 1984 before deciding to move to the USA (student/teacher strikes were gonna lead to lost semesters). Going between classes was real inconvenient.
• IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah I can't see much point either. I think it's just one of those things architects and urban planners do sometimes because it's interesting and unusual, not because it's good. Another example is guided busways. Inferior to a road in every respect but that isn't enough to stop them. I guess I shouldn't single out architects and urban planners - probably every field has projects that a back of the envelope calculation shows are obviously a terrible idea but they go ahead anyway. Solar roadways. Space based power. The issue with architects doing it is that buildings stick around for a long time and people have to actually live in them, so I feel justified in reserving special resentment for modern architects.
  • hutzlibu 4y ago
    "probably every field has projects that a back of the envelope calculation shows are obviously a terrible idea but they go ahead anyway. Solar roadways" Solar roadways for example are only a terrible idea, as long as sturdy solar panels remains expensive, and there is lots of other unused area to be covered much more cheaply. That might change one day, but yes, until then it is an idea from people who are too lazy to do the basic math.
    • IshKebab 4y ago
      It won't change one day. If we exhaust all better locations for solar panels than roads then we will already have enough solar energy to power the world many times over. Almost anywhere is better than a road.
      • hutzlibu 4y ago
        "Almost anywhere is better than a road." No, because land close to humans is limited and I would like at least some forest to remain forests. If it would be really cheap to add solar panels as a bonus, even with no high efficency, this whole idea makes sense, otherwise not. So I wouldn't rule it out, if there would be a significant cheaper way, but I surely would not bet on that idea. If anything, I would make the panels as a roof over the road and get sound protection for the people and snow protection for the road as well. Still quite expensive
• wardedVibe 4y ago
  If you haven't read "Seeing like a State" I think you would find it quite interesting. There was a period where urban planners thought that they could, starting from first principles, design the perfect urban environment. It wasn't just authoritarians doing it, but those were the places most able to continue to execute on a vision and disregard the pushback.
• marci 4y ago
  What do you mean by efficiency of land usage? The only thing I could think of is surface area and, compared to "a large number of reasonably sized ones", this obviously would be more efficient. I see them as skyscrappers in landscape mode.
• retube 4y ago
  "The Line" has entered the chat
  • ronsor 4y ago
    "The Line" has been kicked for wasting billions of dollars.
• groestl 4y ago
  Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Hof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Hof
• codewiz 4y ago
  In Japan, clusters of identical buildings were constructed around the same period of Corviale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danchi These communities also didn't age too well, becoming associated with aging population, urban degradation and poor architecture.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    The renovated ones are pretty nice (and cheap!) to live in. At least assuming you can stand living in such a building in the first place.
• jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  This was one of the big failures of modernism and related architectural schools. Being charitable, the thinking at the time was somewhat mechanistic: that you could build utopic urban environments from first principles as massive campuses vs individual buildings. Inevitable these projects underestimated the organic and evolutionary complexity of urban environments. No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood. But on the other hand, these mega projects were a simple story to sell politically. Look, we're being bold and thinking big, we're going to actually address problems in housing supply vs kicking the can down the road, etc. Someone else saying they needed to think in terms of flexible zoning and a variety of tax incentives looks not nearly so compelling. Today we look back on these projects differently, because the failure of "housing projects" in the US, UK, and elsewhere are a familiar meme almost, so people are much more skeptical about mega projects working out.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    One interesting aspect of how many people view urban planning is that a lot of urbanists like to point to the like of Jane Jacobs who (correctly IMO) opposed a lot of centralized planning, especially with respect to roads. At the same time, she favored organic and community-oriented development which I suspect a lot of people today would consider NIMBY and would mostly be opposed to large-scale housing developments. She did live in the West Village after all.
    • wahern 4y ago
      Large-scale housing developments exist largely because of the regulatory burden. If you need to spend years, if not decades, shepherding a project through a bureaucracy, then you need that economy of scale in units of housing per unit of regulation to make a project financially viable. The lesser the regulatory burden, the more organic development you'd see, including a much larger proportion of smaller projects and smaller buildings. Large steel or steel + concrete structures are grossly inefficient in terms of construction costs per square footage, except where property values are incredibly high. (Wherever you see such structures in areas without extremely expensive property prices, you can be sure there are other factors at play--regulation, government funding, etc.) That's why 5-over-1 (wood framing over concrete) is so common where possible. Some people might complain that many 5-over-1 buildings have too large of a footprint, but that's also largely due to the same regulatory economics. Anyhow, if communities simply made a laundry list of things they don't want--e.g. no more than 4 stories, ground footprint smaller than N square feet, etc--and then provided for approval by-right (i.e. if your project meets those restrictions, you're automatically approved), then most areas suffering from severe housing supply issues would be in a dramatically better situation than they are now, California especially. But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results.
• forgotusername6 4y ago
  In less hospitable climates this kind of giant building has its place. No need to go outside in the freezing cold or scorching heat.
  • ksherlock 4y ago
    In Whittier Alaska, (pop: 275-300 or so), most folks live in the Begich Towers which was a former Army building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begich_Towers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begich_Towers
• rob74 4y ago
  Well, if you are going to try to build affordable housing quickly, such large projects are the way to go. At least in the sixties and seventies city planners in the "western world" tried to do it (with more or less success), today they're not even trying anymore. A more successful example is the former Munich Olympic Village (https://goo.gl/maps/1HTQWvGcRcoXAWvH6 https://goo.gl/maps/1HTQWvGcRcoXAWvH6). It's composed of 3 streets which are completely built over, so the cars at ground level are hidden from view and the pedestrians are walking in a completely pedestrian area at level 2 (I think). The buildings are also very linear and all look the same, but all apartments have huge south-facing terraces with lots of greenery (including shrubs or even trees). Public transport connection is also very good with a subway station nearby. Today the apartments are very sought after - wish they had built more projects like this. But if you look at more recent projects, like the "Messestadt Riem" (https://goo.gl/maps/tVrahc4uDFkijGCC9 https://goo.gl/maps/tVrahc4uDFkijGCC9), they are much more cramped and spread out over a larger surface, with squat buildings that look very interchangeable - not really better, I'm afraid.
  • euroderf 4y ago
    > cars at ground level are hidden from view and the pedestrians are walking in a completely pedestrian area at level 2 (I think) Helsinki tries to do the same in an area called Merihaka. I don't like it. Feels "off". The lower (car+transit) level feels like the Morlocks in The Time Machine, or some other kind of sci-fi dystopia, and the upper level has weird entryways to the netherworld and no real grid of "streets" (or whatever) for locating buildings and also some trees (in big planters, one presumes) and how can you have healthy, respected trees that are more or less suspended in mid-air, disconnected from the Earth ?
  • usrusr 4y ago
    Isn't that exactly was gp was asking about? Why shape a big project like one huge monolith, if you could also try to disguise the size? Munich Olympic Village is all about appearing human-scale despite its size, Corviale makes its hugeness the core of its identity.
  • More-nitors 4y ago
    hm I thought they were to impress people... show off "we can build this in one-go" / "we can compensate/take this big-land from the owners in one-go" In construction, you have to have the timing right for the whole building in one-go... In land-ownership issue, you have to own the whole land / negotiate with/seize from with owners who own some of the land
• hankman86 4y ago
  These buildings are basically an anti-individualism ideology, cast in concrete. Which is why far left and far right regimes alike like to erect such structures. And it’s not even a thing of the past. In its most recent incarnation, the German Greens have declared war on single family homes. The fashionable justification being their carbon footprint. Instead, they are for policies to house people in apartment blocks that are densely spaced within cities instead of suburbs. Often while mixing different demographics that would not normally like to live within the same neighbourhood. Suffice it to say that people continue to pursue the dream of owning houses on their own plot of land.
  • ohyoutravel 4y ago
    This sounds like a speech you rehearsed for a San Francisco HOA meeting to keep more housing out of your neighborhood to keep your property values up.
  • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    If you live in (or near) a city center, you'll live in a large apartment building. If you want a single family house, you move outside the city center. You cannot have an urban city environment, with restaurants, bars, stores and walkable streets if you only have single family buildings with yards there. There is a place for everything, houses and large buildings. Otherwise, I agree with the comment above, that such buildings seem impractical, and can be replaced with separate buildings, even higher, with open space in between them (and greens and parks and benches,...), eg: https://goo.gl/maps/TneCupaRNq3SgQYL7 https://goo.gl/maps/TneCupaRNq3SgQYL7 (imagine this, but with undeground parking instead of cars parked on the steet).
  • 8note 4y ago
    I agree insofar as it actually involves people being in constructed environments. Houses are an anti-individualism ideology in all their forms. The only individualistic people are the homeless, who heat themselves with their own body, and and cover themselves only with what they can bring with them on their person. To rely on wood and concrete to protect you is the death of self reliance
• vl 4y ago
  In reality this is not different from any densely urbanized suburb. It doesn't mater if this is one "long building" or several building that have small gaps between them. You want cheaper, dense housing, you are going to run into similar issues.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  I dunno, I like it. It would be normally impossible to do something like this. The forest or rules surrounding something this massive would normally make it a fools errant. Or maybe that’s why they make it so huge. Only need to deal with all the permits once.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  To appreciate it, you need to prefer housing people over aesthetics. But that's not for everyone.
• bee_rider 4y ago
  I guess the utilities wouldn’t have to deal with weather so much, so that is cool. It is sort of funny, not many people complain about skyscrapers but they are similarly excessive. Think of it as 200m taller than the Burj Khalifa, just sideways and fewer stars I bet. We’re just a bunch of apes that like to mess with our environment, inventing a new type of environment is in our nature.
• scotty79 4y ago
  Lower amount of outside walls = lower maintenance?