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A context-based, form-language for mixed-use, main street buildings
How to design buildings with human scale and proportion (and Modernism’s ongoing inability to get it right).A housing crisis and subsequent apartment building boom has overtaken many America cities in the post Great Recession twenty-teens. Similar transformations have not been experienced in American Cities since the decades following the two World Wars. With rising homeless rates, and spiking real...Read more -
From McMansion to McMain Street
Like the McMansion, the McMain Street attempts to mimic the complex roof massing of many buildings in a single building. Here are ideas on better ways to preserve or create Main Street character.Drive through any middle-class suburban neighborhood built in the last 25 years and you will encounter the “McMansion,” the aspirational mega-house with its overly complex roof form, dumbed-down architectural details and grandiose double-height foyer. The term McMansion is embedded in the American...Read more -
The emperor's new buildings
A book review of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl.For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs' withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le...Read more -
Three fundamental errors in architectural thinking and how to fix them
Identifying mistakes in designers' basic assumptions is a first step to a healthier, more sustainable built environment.This article was previously published in Common\Edge . Editor's note: Research by Ann Sussman, Justin Hollander, and Hanna Carr was presented at CNU 26 in Savannah, Georgia, on use of brain and cognitive science to better inform designers about how people perceive and experience their surroundings...Read more