Architecture Ransom Notes

Continued from part 1 . More design inanities now from DRB Stuck with the Santa Barbara direction, we were going to make lemonade out of lemons. We decided to make some great Santa Barbara architecture, absurd as it was, and sprinkle in modern style architecture as well. No dice. We went into the design review board and were promptly shut down. The board liked the architecture independent of each other but thought the juxtaposition between them was too jarring, fixating on the gable roofs versus the flat roofs. It was a fair point. We wanted to say that we were forced into this position from the irrationality of the city and we were just trying to get  something  in there that we thought would be in the best interest of the public, but of course, that would just lead to more tension. We instead argued that the roof forms are not so much a focal point in four story architecture as they are in one to two story architecture and that as long as the vocabulary of the design i...

The fateful project In the East Bay, there lies a city that is perhaps the most crime riddled and has one of the most corrupt governments in the Bay Area. There are a few nice areas to be clear, but our project wasn't in one of those areas. In fact, while a senior housing building was going up next door to our project, one of the construction crews was held up at gun point. We did a site visit once, but opted not to stay long and our future site investigations were done on Google Maps. The civil engineer was reluctant to send a survey crew out to the area past a certain time due to crime concerns. But boy, did the site have potential. It was next to a freeway with a small creek running through it. There was a BART station nearby though it would be a bit of a hike. On top of all that, there was extensive history to the site. Around 1906, two Japanese families owned much of the parcel and grew flowers in some fields and greenhouses for a living. During this time, there was much...

Several years ago, we went to my wife's friend's wedding at Vallco Mall in Cupertino. To our surprise, the parking lot was empty and many of the doors were barred. We finally found an open entrance and walked in. The lights were half on and there were only several people wandering around during a time where nearby Valley Fair Mall was absolutely teeming with people. The sound of a heavy door closing shut somewhere in the mall echoed through the otherwise quiet halls. Only four businesses were open in this giant mall: A large Chinese restaurant where the wedding was held at, a movie theater, a Cold Stone, and a random eyeglasses store. It was downright eerie, like if you walk around Times Square in the late afternoon and you only see five or six people walking around. Did the zombie apocalypse just begin? No, it turns out Vallco was a victim of several anchor stores closing up, turning it into what's known as a ghost mall. Developers had purchased the nearly vacant mall in...

Everyone knows the difference between 2D and 3D. When watching The Simpsons, people can tell when they're seeing 2D Homer vs 3D Homer . Most people can also figure out 2D. People can pull up a map and reasonably figure out where they are in relation to nearby towns and geographic features. Likewise, most people can draw simple maps for others to follow. But when 3D enters the picture, for some reason, some people, even those that have power to deny building projects based on architectural drawings, have difficulty visualizing and presenting unbuilt space in three dimensions. In 3D perspectives, heights drop off with distance. Intuitively, we know this. When we see a building with a flat roof run into the distance, the roof line runs down as if shrinking, even though we know from experience that the roof line is flat. If captured on paper, the lines run down toward what's called "vanishing points" on the horizon. In architecture, we frequently draw building elevati...

Have you ever made goals that you eventually realize it would take several lifetimes to accomplish? Perhaps some New Year resolutions you followed stringently for about a month before the effort somehow fizzled away? You can maybe take comfort that the city of Concord had set a 22 year housing goal that would take 966 years to achieve, if the current housing trend continues. Unfortunately, when cities fail this spectacularly, it adversely affects tens of thousands to millions of people. The San Francisco Chronicle reports how many Bay Area cities are lagging far behind their targeted housing growth by 2040 and includes a link to a handy map by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The housing goals are set by a governmental agency called the Association of Bay Area Governments and the projections are based on housing growth between 2010 and 2017. Every single county is over-performing its job forecast, some by massive amounts, and every single county is under-performing its...

We've all heard it. We've probably all bought into it at least several times as well. Natural is good. Buy the all natural product. Naturally grown food is better. Don't clean with that, there are chemicals in it! Of course, some of those ideas may be right sometimes, but using that reason in itself is fallacious. The mentality is so pervasive there is a logical fallacy specifically termed appeal to nature . This fallacy also occasionally bleeds into building construction, primarily choosing planning commissions and design review boards as its preferred medium. I have, myself, fallen prey to this mentality when I was younger, just out of architecture school. I was really into architecture conveying the truth. I still believe in this as far as ideas like spatial transparency where using hierarchical methodologies, one can, from the exterior, tell what spaces within a building are served for which purposes. But where nature is concerned, I was aghast to learn that, at least...

Conventional wisdom says that less square footage in a house means a more affordable house. Building a 2,000 square foot house should sell for more than an 1,800 square foot house on the same lot. This convention is not necessarily true, but it doesn't stop planning commission members from utilizing this logic to force smaller square footage homes in effort to bring prices down. Not all square feet are created equal. For example, one square foot of house on a main level is substantially more valuable than one square foot of house on a basement level. Basements, even with window wells, are dark and cold spaces that tend to not be as pleasant to be in compared to above ground living which has much more opportunity for light. Two story houses achieve higher density, therefore can achieve lower costs per square foot compared to a single family home. Land in the Bay Area is expensive. A house that takes up more land will cost more for the house you get. At a planning commission ...

Official movie poster The movie Little Pink House was released last Friday (in Berkeley at least) in what should be one of the most important films this year. It is an excellent, gut-wrenching film about someone just like you or me, with a strong performance by lead actress Catherine Keener. It covers Susette Kelo and the Institute for Justice 's fight against eminent domain abuse by New London, a town in Connecticut. Eminent domain is a legal process whereupon a government may take private property, with just compensation, for public use. However, jurisdictions have abused this government power to seize private property for the benefit of other private parties. These typically includes taking the homes of those less well off and giving them to wealthy interests such as major developers or corporations. Even Constitutionally compliant seizures have resulted in abuse such as lowballing appraisals to the landowners. In California's controversial high speed rail projec...

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article  about artists fleeing San Francisco due to its high cost of living, as part of its Grass is Greener series. It chronicles several artists moving to other cities such as Seattle and Los Angeles to escape the high rents in San Francisco. Art is extremely important. Sure, some art, maybe even most art, is just eye-candy, to simply stimulate the visual senses, not that there's anything wrong with that. But the most profound art unlocks hidden insights into our own character, expresses the perspectives of the artist, provides commentary on society, or locks in historical context for future generations. Unfortunately, having a roof over one's head is more important than art, and the art scene is being pushed out by this simple truth. When the housing supply is restricted to the whims of city planners and no growth neighbors, land costs go up and things less important than this basic necessity start to get pushed out. Murals i...

In my previous post , I wrote about how city agents acting beyond what they should be doing create pancake architecture and how it creates aesthetically displeasing architecture. Now I will go into how a city can pigeonhole architects and developers into pancake architecture and how that increases the costs of construction for arbitrary reasons. So back to the Fremont Small Lot Design Guidelines we go! In DGL 2.2.3, the city prescribes setbacks from one house to another in one story and two story situations, with a helpful diagram on the side. It states that between houses, one story elements must be 10 feet apart, one story to two story elements must be 12 feet apart, and two story to two story elements must be 15 feet apart. In a situation where you're trying to maximize densities like, say, during a housing shortage, exercises are run to try to maximize square footages per acre of land you have to build on. This allows you to get to house sizes demanded by the market as e...

Pancakes are delicious. Who can hate a soft and fluffy stack of pancakes, browned on the edges, with a golden square of butter on top and maple syrup dripping off the sides? When I think of pancakes, I think back to the stack of delightful macadamia nut pancakes I had at  Boots and Kimo's in Oahu where we risked missing our flight out just to get a taste in. Not that missing a flight out of Hawaii is ever really a bad thing. Pancake architecture, however, leaves a different taste in my mouth. It's not a real phrase, as far as I know. I don't know that any architecture school out there teaches "pancake architecture". Some of my colleagues derogatorily refer to it as "wedding cake" architecture, but I prefer the term pancakes because weddings are always meant to be celebrated as a beautiful synthesis of two people. Pancakes are sometimes just pancakes, and when not executed well, which is more often than I'd like, you get a powdery undercooked goo t...

The East Bay Times published an article concerning the difficulty of building, using the North 40 project in Los Gatos as a prime example. It goes into some length about how the project has been held up for twenty years in a stalemate fight between the developer and the neighbors. It ultimately ended up in a lawsuit which the developer won, clearly having rights to build on their land. Although I disagree with state directed housing supply mandates (enforcing property rights is a much better approach), it is interesting to see some of the other statistics the article revealed concerning the woeful lack of housing cities have permitted: 97 percent of cities and counties failed to keep pace with housing needs The article also cites research that found it takes on average 17 months to attain approval for projects and that these delays can add 30% to the price of new homes. It's a rarity for me to see California projects go from initial architectural contract to construction d...

People living in single family houses like looking out of their backyard into open space. It's a feature I would love to have for my own house. When someone has had that amenity, like any other luxury, it's tough to let it go. The problem is that someone's right to a view ends where another's property rights begin. That someone likes their view out their backyard does not mean the person who owns the lot behind that person should not be able to build a house on their own property. We designed a small community outside a large gated community in the East Bay and held a few community meetings where we invited neighbors to discuss the development. This land was a horse ranch and was situated alongside the main road into the gated community. On the other side of the road was a row of backyards inside the gated community. The new houses would not have been close to the existing houses so the impact was not significant by any means in context with Bay Area housing. They wou...

Have you ever looked at a new house for sale and just knew the layout just didn't work for you? Maybe you've even wondered how anybody could like it. Perhaps your next thought was to wonder what the architect was thinking. Or what the developer was thinking. The answer is that often times, it wasn't what the architect or developer wanted to do in the first place. In housing, like anything else with a design element, fads sometimes come and go. Sunken living rooms were all the rage in the 1980s, but one would be hard pressed to find new houses with these features today. Although they provided for some added height, they were not perceived well, were costly, and people don't like negotiating the stairs. So for good reason, these fads went away. Diagrammatic plan showing a push-back garage on a 46'x100' lot. Some fads are difficult to shake, even when their time has gone. For instance, one can still find push-back garages on new small lot subdivisions. The...