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Photo by LYCS Architecture, Unsplash
If we weren’t all so “busy” with politics and pandering to mindlessly rich criminal psychopaths, we’d probably be paying more attention to new architecture. You know, the sort people live in?
Not the slums glamorized by idiots in music videos. Not two-dimensional sound stages with windows. Not the unoccupied mega-monstrosities so appropriately sited in deserts. Not the Easy Flip American corporate development type. Not the recycled traditional architecture which is now Auto CAD’s bread-and-butter templates.
I mean the new tech architecture which is basically inevitable and grudgingly finding its way into the market. It’s taken an incredible length of time to get out of the early 1900s but it’s finally happening.
The “visions of tomorrow” are usually pretty bland. It’s still pretty much The Jetsons vs The Flintstones. This is the sparkly neat almost IKEA-standard future we’re supposed to see, remember?
In practice, the world is full of a weird mix of truly lousy old architectural designs based on worse ideas of human life. If you check out some of these designs, you can see which caves and 1970s cocaine binges they came from.
The Industrial Revolution didn’t do human quality of life any favors. Cost ruled, as it does now. Amenity and quality of life were distant considerations at best. “High density” started then, and it’s as much of an atrocity now as it was then. Even being worth looking at wasn’t a thing. Brutalism, aka institutionalized boredom, is an example.
As for the quality of building, the whole idea of that was buried somewhere about then. There’s a huge dichotomy of quality in the market. Let’s just say “good architecture is wasted on the rich”. Good building is wasted on just about everything.
Nobody could be accused of learning from the past. Some older designs were very good quality indeed. Most in the mass market weren’t, and still aren’t. By the 1950s, the instant suburb had basically killed any theory of good residential design as good business.
The market IS to blame for this unsightly mess with its obsession with building The El Cheapo Ultra- Crud-esque Slums of Tomorrow. These ridiculous things were obsolete before they entered to comatose brains of the poor souls “designing” them. Materials may be good, bad, or inexcusable.
This is where sustainable architecture sneaks in. It’s a buzzword that even the most banal spruikers don’t quite know how to use. That’s largely because the expression relates to competence. “Sustainable” effectively means “unkillable”, like some occasional generations of past architecture. Tudor is a case in point, as are some of the actual Georgian buildings. They’re tough, structurally dependable, not death traps by design. Just keep a structural engineer handy because these great old places do need some TLC every century or so.
To be strictly fair, a lot of people in construction and architecture are patiently slogging away with good designs and better materials. Market inertia and a Smithsonian-worthy market image of suburbia are the only things creating a demand for these fossils.
New materials like hempcrete and more integrated systemic designs are slowly slinking into this unimaginative money-mad contraceptive of a sector. That’s mainly because these designs are a lot more productive and infinitely more cost-effective at all levels including for consumers.
Imagine a city as an ecosystem. Instead of a heat sink, it’s a water reservoir, passive energy producer, cheap and easy to maintain. Homes are spacious, and not cookie-cutter.
These homes aren’t pretentious overpriced cupboards. They’re designed to be upgraded. They’re multi-level with decent exterior living spaces. Tech systems are easy to install in dedicated spaces. They protect the environment instead of destroying it. You can fit more people into cubic space, ending urban sprawl.
You simply can’t have slums in this design ethos. You can’t have rotting infrastructure coast-to-coast. People could actually live like human beings.
Keep an eye on the new designs. They’re only just now getting out of the womb. Just think – For the first time in history, you can design the sort of place you want your kids to live in.
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