"... without worrying too much about design. 'That’s propaganda!' he protests. 'It says that poorer people should live in lower-quality environments: "Don’t waste your time on innovation." But it’s the other way around! I would love all my colleagues to concentrate on this kind of housing because it needs the same kind of passion as an iconic skyscraper.'"
I’m sure the poor will be proud, as they huddle in their cars for a few more years, that if they ever do get a real home, it will have interesting architectural details.
“ The success of a low-income housing complex depends on its social warmth. Selfhelp maintains a small team of social workers on-site, mostly to help residents navigate the welfare bureaucracy but also just to be there if they want to chat.”
Nice feature! Paid help showing you how to collect more welfare money!
I've always had the impression that architects, much like advertising execs, are more interested in furthering their own artistic notions (and winning awards) than producing results beneficial to the client or consumer.
oh good. another brutalist Soviet architecture style, with a cover of plastic windows. why do they make buildings so damn ugly. looks like DEI meets mental masturbation, and viola! here poor people, something you don't need, won't understand the 'vision', but here it is.
Re- the embedded video. This is all too on the nose for progressives, liberals, democrats or whatever they call themselves today. The folks in North Carolina are not the right kind of people so they get the fuzzy end of the lolipop. How is it the left can't just see AMERICANS instead of their protected groups vs everyone else.
Wow I've never seen this RTM guy before, but what an indictment of the "mainstream" (it's anything BUT that now) Media, who utterly failed to report honestly on this. In a mirror image of Katrina, where the media reported rumors as fact and hyped every sob story all the time to damage Bush, they literally covered up the suffering of North Carolinians, and dutifully labeled citizen reporting of facts as misinformation because that's what Biden's FEMA wanted them to say.
A few years ago there was a show on HGTV called Trading Spaces. People would redecorate their neighbors house with the "help" of an interior designer. One of the designers, Heidi, would inevitably ruin the house in such a way that it would take major and costly work to repair after she left because the designs were hideous. I remember one time she glued newsprint to the dry wall in a kitchen. The only way to fix that would be to replace the dry wall. She was interviewed one time and asked about her designs on the show and she was quite upfront up about it. She said that she did what she wanted on the show because she didn't have to worry about input. When she was working for actual clients she had to please them.
That was my thought too. If you have custom-made windows, and something breaks, it costs a LOT of money to replace them. The same thing happens here in Madison at the Civic Center when one of the custom light bulbs burns out (as lightbulbs do) -- because they're not off-the-shelf replaceable....$$$$$. Of course, the building won a couple architecture prizes, because architects giving awards don't care about cost.
Yes those groups but also the organizations they've captured. Where were the NFL "moments of silence" for NC? Where were the celebrity solicitations for donations? The amount of sympathy and help requested for California's fires dwarfs the minimal to zero coverage the hurricane Helene victims got. This is the worst journalistic malpractice I've ever seen because of the huge scale of desperate human suffering not ignored but covered up by the criminally corrupt media and every organization run by woke progressives. Every. Single. One.
Mainstream media blackout on North Carolina to protect Biden. Listening to the un-challenged FEMA propaganda that came out over the previous few months was infuriating. Proof that "journalism today is about covering important stories, with a pillow, until they stop moving" if the news is adverse for Democrats
this all just shows HOW Important the Dept of Education is! currently these poor poor folks are SO IGNORANT, that they'd Rather live in a boring place today, than stay in their cars for 2 more years.. and Then be able to live in a place with Character! Poor folks are SO STUPID, that They DON'T Understand what we are doing for them!
Apparently the commentariat so far is more interested in architecture than a 14-minute video. I understand. Time is precious.
PLEASE WATCH THE FIRST 3 MINUTES. Then see if you can turn it off or turn away.
I rarely click on the links here myself, but felt moved by title screen on the embedded video, intrigued that Althouse would present such a pro-Trump visual without comment. My plan was to listen while checking a catalog project. I had to stop and watch. I hope you do too.
I recently linked to this: 40 Bad Ideas- John Cochrane where pretty much everything the people (highly) paid to propose as a 'solution' is nothing but waste, expense and impossibility. Rent control and 'let government rain money' on the problem, the perpetual solutions...
The video is worth watching. Great points made throughout. In 48 hours, Trump moved people left homeless after Hurricane Helene into furnished apartments. Biden's FEMA not only never did this, but was moving people out of hotels days before Trump's inauguration as a snowstorm was hitting the region. Just watch the short coverage of one family at the 5:50 mark, and then remember Biden didn't help this family, but Biden did make sure his family received pardons.
New homes being built today take up about 2,600 square feet. That is a lot of particle board and luxury vinyl and cheap siding. That is a big, poorly constructed house. If you want a house that big, you better have DIY skills. Unfortunately, these skills, like handwriting, seem to be disappearing. Heck, young Americans can't even name the "things" in a toolbox and what they might do. And they pay people to do the most routine things. Hang a flat screen TV, change a flapper on a toilet, clean a sensor on your furnace, change a lightbulb, etc. I mean you're going to go bankrupt if that's your attitude. And all the random strangers in your home? Seriously, what the hell? My neighbors have a constant parade of handymen in and out of their homes.
Planned low cost and public housing projects learned a lot from Cabrini-Green and mostly avoid those problems now. They usually mix them into other neighborhoods (to avoid gang takeovers), and dress them up enough to look decent.
The biggest issue is what to do with "temporary" buildings 20, 40, or 50 years later. See WW2 housing. Pull a trailer here, build a quonset hut there, drop a no-building-code shack/tiny house anywhere it fits. They continue, continue, and continue and rarely receive adequate maintenance...as temporary...
Absolutely infuriating. Government spending on everything is out of control, and has been for a long time, but there are a few things that I think all Americans can agree on as spending priorities, and one of them is immediate (short-term) disaster relief. That this sort of relief was delayed for solely political purposes (apparently for political spite) is unforgivable.
Heartbreaking, infuriating video. Grim's Hall has reported several times on the ineffectual response of FEMA in North Carolina, and on ordinary citizens picking up the slack to the extent they could. It is hard to see how a change of administration could change the intransigence of mid-level (unfireable) FEMA bureaucrats, but it's good to hear that they are making progress. As for the priorities of architects, I'm with Wilbur. Helmut Jahn's State of Illinois Building in Chicago is a constant reminder that he, at least, valued his own aggrandizement over the needs of the people who have to occupy that building.
Yeah, massive multiunit buildings only work if the residents already have middle class values, or if they own their units in a coop/condo arrangement. A better solution is the Chicago bungalow: a small house, on a small plot, in a city. Combines the best features of city and suburbs. So many of these are gatting bought by - you guessed it - immigrants!
I have proposed this before: 21st century homestead act. Give poor inner city people houses, scattered all over the country. Gives them pride of ownership, and spreads their social costs all over. Callit reparations!. Of course, their politicians will not want to disperse their voting base. Maybe they will, though, if they can look forward to gentrified urban areas getting occupied by white middle class D voters, who will raise the tax take the politicians can feast on. Win-win!
The housing shortage impacts the working poor and low middle class the greatest amount. Restrictions on infrastructure ends up causing multiple problems. Where's Howard Roark when you need him?
There are different levels of subsidized housing. Authorities are probably going to keep the most deprived and dangerous out of the fancy postmodernist buildings. Also, not all of the units may be public housing, so only starrecipients for starchitect buildings.
Can you really tell how these buildings will look to people 40 or 50 years from now? This one looks like it has a good chance of being appreciated. It doesn't look as much like it's about to fall down as some other 21st century starchitect buildings. People are also more forgiving of buildings with airy and light-filled atria/atriums than of the usual slabs and piles.
Freder: "And they are going to get to work, how, where?"
Valid question. My first answer is they're not getting work right now, in the inner city. So if they are still jobless, but in a lower cost-of-living area, with a house they own, and not ghettoized with people that have no habits conducive to getting and keeping jobs, it's still an improvement. The dole will cost less and will be spread all over the country, social workers will have smaller caseloads, etc.
My second answer is that there may indeed be jobs in the new destination. This was sort of the idea behind the Haitian insertion in Ohio, right? Why not do the same with our own citizens? I would not recommend the scale of the Ohio op - my idea is just a few homesteaders in each town.
Finally, I am proud of you for being concerned about jobs for Americans! Keep it up! Seriously.
And then there's this ... A few months ago, when a man died in his apartment and wasn’t found for several days, his fate rattled other residents, including a woman who approached the little group that Gross was leading to demand (in Spanish) that management find a way to make the building less isolating. “This place shouldn’t feel like a prison,” she said.
The headline asks, "Does it scale?" Maybe ask first, "Does it work?"
I owned 5 acres in the Colorado Rockies. I had a nice view, but most of the land around me was deserted. I paid very little for the land.
We had an HOA. Almost everywhere in Colorado the land has "Covenants" that place restrictions on what you can build. In my case, the big one from the HOA was that the house had to be at least 800 square feet.
That was not the deal breaker, but it was still a problem. The deal breaker was that it cost at least 30K dollars to break ground on that 800 square foot house. I was 30 miles from the county seat, and 30 minutes drive to buy a coke. The building was governed by IBC, international building codes. I would link to that, the Necronomicon/OED hybrid of building codes, but they block me because my neighbors are brown. Anyway, every step had to approved, permitted, and inspected. You dig a hole for a concrete pier? Inspector had to come check the hole. Every little thing required a trip to the county seat, approval from the building department, fee, and the inspection. It was crazy. I sold it and paid cash for a house in SC. SC, btw, is one of the worst states in the South for many reasons, but fortunately we have a large rural black population. That helps stop a lot of gentry liberals from moving in, buying or building a nice house, then crushing supply with regulation in order to drive up real estate values.
P.S. I was told that a bottle of Jack Daniels in one of the holes would ease the process a lot.
All the homeless could be given shelter in a short period of time by simply building tented barrack like structures. the military have much expertise in this field. And yes, I believe that the homeless also need to be legally compelled to occupy these taxpayer funded benefits until they can stand up on their own. The voluntary method of rehab is a failure. Homelessness is becoming normalized as to being present on our streets and in our parks, and that needs to be changed.
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56 comments:
How are irregular shaped broken windows replaced?
I’m sure the poor will be proud, as they huddle in their cars for a few more years, that if they ever do get a real home, it will have interesting architectural details.
“ The success of a low-income housing complex depends on its social warmth. Selfhelp maintains a small team of social workers on-site, mostly to help residents navigate the welfare bureaucracy but also just to be there if they want to chat.”
Nice feature! Paid help showing you how to collect more welfare money!
I've always had the impression that architects, much like advertising execs, are more interested in furthering their own artistic notions (and winning awards) than producing results beneficial to the client or consumer.
Another Cabrini-Green in the works.
oh good. another brutalist Soviet architecture style, with a cover of plastic windows. why do they make buildings so damn ugly. looks like DEI meets mental masturbation, and viola! here poor people, something you don't need, won't understand the 'vision', but here it is.
Slowly and at great expense.
Function always follows form for any designer high on their own farts.
Didn’t say much about the apartment interiors themselves, except that a body was removed from one days after death.
Luxury beliefs are never far from the architectural studio. Pragmatism is so unimaginative.
Re- the embedded video. This is all too on the nose for progressives, liberals, democrats or whatever they call themselves today. The folks in North Carolina are not the right kind of people so they get the fuzzy end of the lolipop. How is it the left can't just see AMERICANS instead of their protected groups vs everyone else.
Every architect has read and studied A Pattern Language. Shame on him for promoting a building that violates its tenets (and his tenants!).
Wow I've never seen this RTM guy before, but what an indictment of the "mainstream" (it's anything BUT that now) Media, who utterly failed to report honestly on this. In a mirror image of Katrina, where the media reported rumors as fact and hyped every sob story all the time to damage Bush, they literally covered up the suffering of North Carolinians, and dutifully labeled citizen reporting of facts as misinformation because that's what Biden's FEMA wanted them to say.
A few years ago there was a show on HGTV called Trading Spaces. People would redecorate their neighbors house with the "help" of an interior designer. One of the designers, Heidi, would inevitably ruin the house in such a way that it would take major and costly work to repair after she left because the designs were hideous. I remember one time she glued newsprint to the dry wall in a kitchen. The only way to fix that would be to replace the dry wall. She was interviewed one time and asked about her designs on the show and she was quite upfront up about it. She said that she did what she wanted on the show because she didn't have to worry about input. When she was working for actual clients she had to please them.
That was my thought too. If you have custom-made windows, and something breaks, it costs a LOT of money to replace them. The same thing happens here in Madison at the Civic Center when one of the custom light bulbs burns out (as lightbulbs do) -- because they're not off-the-shelf replaceable....$$$$$. Of course, the building won a couple architecture prizes, because architects giving awards don't care about cost.
Architects come running when there is a fresh supply of lab rats to experiment on.
Yes those groups but also the organizations they've captured. Where were the NFL "moments of silence" for NC? Where were the celebrity solicitations for donations? The amount of sympathy and help requested for California's fires dwarfs the minimal to zero coverage the hurricane Helene victims got. This is the worst journalistic malpractice I've ever seen because of the huge scale of desperate human suffering not ignored but covered up by the criminally corrupt media and every organization run by woke progressives. Every. Single. One.
Mainstream media blackout on North Carolina to protect Biden. Listening to the un-challenged FEMA propaganda that came out over the previous few months was infuriating. Proof that "journalism today is about covering important stories, with a pillow, until they stop moving" if the news is adverse for Democrats
Now do journalists.
Beat me to it. They might want to lock in demo bids and permits right now.
Didnt we learn anything about projects like cabrini green
this all just shows HOW Important the Dept of Education is!
currently these poor poor folks are SO IGNORANT, that they'd Rather live in a boring place today,
than stay in their cars for 2 more years.. and Then be able to live in a place with Character!
Poor folks are SO STUPID, that They DON'T Understand what we are doing for them!
Apparently the commentariat so far is more interested in architecture than a 14-minute video. I understand. Time is precious.
PLEASE WATCH THE FIRST 3 MINUTES. Then see if you can turn it off or turn away.
I rarely click on the links here myself, but felt moved by title screen on the embedded video, intrigued that Althouse would present such a pro-Trump visual without comment. My plan was to listen while checking a catalog project. I had to stop and watch. I hope you do too.
Consultations with architects are properly ended with first use of the word, "whimsical".
I recently linked to this: 40 Bad Ideas- John Cochrane where pretty much everything the people (highly) paid to propose as a 'solution' is nothing but waste, expense and impossibility. Rent control and 'let government rain money' on the problem, the perpetual solutions...
...adding the input from creative types who have never seen the inside of an economics building is a recipe for a quicker, more expensive disaster...
Channel your inner pessimist and imagine what that's gonna look like after 10 years of DGAF/poor anger management.
Actually, some creative graffiti might improve it.
It was pretty captivating and infuriating at the same time.
The video is worth watching. Great points made throughout. In 48 hours, Trump moved people left homeless after Hurricane Helene into furnished apartments. Biden's FEMA not only never did this, but was moving people out of hotels days before Trump's inauguration as a snowstorm was hitting the region. Just watch the short coverage of one family at the 5:50 mark, and then remember Biden didn't help this family, but Biden did make sure his family received pardons.
New homes being built today take up about 2,600 square feet. That is a lot of particle board and luxury vinyl and cheap siding. That is a big, poorly constructed house. If you want a house that big, you better have DIY skills. Unfortunately, these skills, like handwriting, seem to be disappearing. Heck, young Americans can't even name the "things" in a toolbox and what they might do. And they pay people to do the most routine things. Hang a flat screen TV, change a flapper on a toilet, clean a sensor on your furnace, change a lightbulb, etc. I mean you're going to go bankrupt if that's your attitude. And all the random strangers in your home? Seriously, what the hell? My neighbors have a constant parade of handymen in and out of their homes.
hehe
Planned low cost and public housing projects learned a lot from Cabrini-Green and mostly avoid those problems now. They usually mix them into other neighborhoods (to avoid gang takeovers), and dress them up enough to look decent.
The biggest issue is what to do with "temporary" buildings 20, 40, or 50 years later. See WW2 housing. Pull a trailer here, build a quonset hut there, drop a no-building-code shack/tiny house anywhere it fits. They continue, continue, and continue and rarely receive adequate maintenance...as temporary...
Absolutely infuriating. Government spending on everything is out of control, and has been for a long time, but there are a few things that I think all Americans can agree on as spending priorities, and one of them is immediate (short-term) disaster relief. That this sort of relief was delayed for solely political purposes (apparently for political spite) is unforgivable.
Gotta hand it to them they did get creative in indulging their spite.
Heartbreaking, infuriating video. Grim's Hall has reported several times on the ineffectual response of FEMA in North Carolina, and on ordinary citizens picking up the slack to the extent they could. It is hard to see how a change of administration could change the intransigence of mid-level (unfireable) FEMA bureaucrats, but it's good to hear that they are making progress. As for the priorities of architects, I'm with Wilbur. Helmut Jahn's State of Illinois Building in Chicago is a constant reminder that he, at least, valued his own aggrandizement over the needs of the people who have to occupy that building.
Yeah, massive multiunit buildings only work if the residents already have middle class values, or if they own their units in a coop/condo arrangement.
A better solution is the Chicago bungalow: a small house, on a small plot, in a city. Combines the best features of city and suburbs. So many of these are gatting bought by - you guessed it - immigrants!
I have proposed this before: 21st century homestead act. Give poor inner city people houses, scattered all over the country. Gives them pride of ownership, and spreads their social costs all over. Callit reparations!. Of course, their politicians will not want to disperse their voting base. Maybe they will, though, if they can look forward to gentrified urban areas getting occupied by white middle class D voters, who will raise the tax take the politicians can feast on. Win-win!
JSM
In two years it will be a shithole.
Well. All Chicago public housing for that matter. The good news? You're no longer taking your life in your hands getting to Midway Airport.
The news media lost interest in the Helene damage pretty quickly. But the question is really, was it a geologic event.
And architects, weak engineers and poor artists, should be heavily managed and not allowed to impose on people.
Here is a geologist youtuber investigating one of the debris flows up to where it broke loose.
https://youtu.be/oBuJxHR4ycY
Give poor inner city people houses, scattered all over the country.
And they are going to get to work, how, where?
The housing shortage impacts the working poor and low middle class the greatest amount. Restrictions on infrastructure ends up causing multiple problems. Where's Howard Roark when you need him?
There are different levels of subsidized housing. Authorities are probably going to keep the most deprived and dangerous out of the fancy postmodernist buildings. Also, not all of the units may be public housing, so only starrecipients for starchitect buildings.
Can you really tell how these buildings will look to people 40 or 50 years from now? This one looks like it has a good chance of being appreciated. It doesn't look as much like it's about to fall down as some other 21st century starchitect buildings. People are also more forgiving of buildings with airy and light-filled atria/atriums than of the usual slabs and piles.
Just wait until the graffiti bums, excuse me, artists, get ahold of that!!!!
Freder: "And they are going to get to work, how, where?"
Valid question. My first answer is they're not getting work right now, in the inner city. So if they are still jobless, but in a lower cost-of-living area, with a house they own, and not ghettoized with people that have no habits conducive to getting and keeping jobs, it's still an improvement. The dole will cost less and will be spread all over the country, social workers will have smaller caseloads, etc.
My second answer is that there may indeed be jobs in the new destination. This was sort of the idea behind the Haitian insertion in Ohio, right? Why not do the same with our own citizens? I would not recommend the scale of the Ohio op - my idea is just a few homesteaders in each town.
Finally, I am proud of you for being concerned about jobs for Americans! Keep it up! Seriously.
JSM
No other comment on JM's idea that that, FF? What about the idea of ownership? Does it matter? Can you say something constructive?
JM, I appreciate your positive response to FF.
No mention of cost.
And then there's this ...
A few months ago, when a man died in his apartment and wasn’t found for several days, his fate rattled other residents, including a woman who approached the little group that Gross was leading to demand (in Spanish) that management find a way to make the building less isolating. “This place shouldn’t feel like a prison,” she said.
The headline asks, "Does it scale?" Maybe ask first, "Does it work?"
Preemptive pardons for all those who only pretended to be architects, like George Costanza.
I owned 5 acres in the Colorado Rockies. I had a nice view, but most of the land around me was deserted. I paid very little for the land.
We had an HOA. Almost everywhere in Colorado the land has "Covenants" that place restrictions on what you can build. In my case, the big one from the HOA was that the house had to be at least 800 square feet.
That was not the deal breaker, but it was still a problem. The deal breaker was that it cost at least 30K dollars to break ground on that 800 square foot house. I was 30 miles from the county seat, and 30 minutes drive to buy a coke. The building was governed by IBC, international building codes. I would link to that, the Necronomicon/OED hybrid of building codes, but they block me because my neighbors are brown. Anyway, every step had to approved, permitted, and inspected. You dig a hole for a concrete pier? Inspector had to come check the hole. Every little thing required a trip to the county seat, approval from the building department, fee, and the inspection. It was crazy. I sold it and paid cash for a house in SC. SC, btw, is one of the worst states in the South for many reasons, but fortunately we have a large rural black population. That helps stop a lot of gentry liberals from moving in, buying or building a nice house, then crushing supply with regulation in order to drive up real estate values.
P.S. I was told that a bottle of Jack Daniels in one of the holes would ease the process a lot.
JM's idea is unworkable. And he didn't mention anything about how he is going to pay for his scheme.
Trapezoid windows are unusual but not unheard of.
Where's Howard Roark when you need him?
I watched it. I cried. I was angry.
The Atrium looks like someone made a mistake in their Metric to English conversions.
"100% of apartments reserved for low-income older adults (age 62+)"
All the homeless could be given shelter in a short period of time by simply building tented barrack like structures. the military have much expertise in this field. And yes, I believe that the homeless also need to be legally compelled to occupy these taxpayer funded benefits until they can stand up on their own. The voluntary method of rehab is a failure. Homelessness is becoming normalized as to being present on our streets and in our parks, and that needs to be changed.
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