Pancake architecture
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 that causes you to spend the next few hours hunched over a toilet, cursing the pancake gods for their cruelty.
So what is this pancake architecture that appears to leave me sick to the stomach after being force fed it? Some planning staff, like this staff planner assigned to one of our projects in the Tri Valley area recently, have seemingly heard of the architectural concept of reducing the scale of buildings. Scale is extremely important in architecture. If you've ever walked on a sidewalk positioned against a building that has a large blank wall three stories or more high, you may have felt uncomfortable there. The reason is that the building scale is too large at a human scale and the person interacting with the building will feel engulfed. Tall walls or buildings can make people uncomfortable and people don't like being in a space with such a jarring difference of scale. Often, tall buildings will have some kind of break along the first floor or two to "cradle" to people that may interact with it. It doesn't even have to be a full plane break; windows, material changes, and awnings can achieve this effect. Alleys between buildings with large blank walls, otherwise uncomfortable spaces, have been transformed into spectacular gathering spaces just by stringing lights across the buildings about 10 to 12 feet high.
The problem is that too many planning staff members take this concept and start applying it en masse without understanding the reasoning behind it. While scale is important, applying a breakdown of scale across the entirety of a four unit, two story townhouse is just overkill, especially when the townhouse is set back from the public sidewalk a good ten to twenty feet. Completely segregating the second floor with the first floor can make the building look like there was a first floor designed then someone just plopped another floor on top. It's important for some elements in a facade to tie the building together vertically as well as horizontally, for a harmonious design.
And this is what we did in our initial design for these townhomes along a street just off of downtown. We had several vertical elements to tie in the first and second floors. This gave some prominence to the major elements in the house such as the living room and the entry. It tied the two floors together while still achieving scale breaks, and anchored the buildings so it doesn't look like arbitrary streams flowing down the street.
The planning staff didn't see it that way, presumably because they heard that one architectural concept and were hell bent on applying it everywhere with complete disregard to any other architectural concept. To achieve approval by planning staff, they forced us to completely remove all vertical elements by forcing plane changes and running a horizontal element across the entire building...creating a stack of two pancakes. A stack of two pancakes that were never meant to be pancakes, forced in by non-chefs into a Frankenstein monstrosity that left me hunched over my drafting board, cursing the city planners.
Frustratingly, the city initially directed us to design rowhouses, which are townhomes with vertical breaks so it looks like books on a shelf. This made sense in our setting, as the breaks horizontally between the units signal to people that they are separate units. Then when the city started weighing in, they forcibly redesigned it so it looks more like books stacked on a coffee table, so our units appear broken within itself. This was completely counter to their initial direction, costing our client tens of thousands of dollars in architect's fees as well as months of delays. We did what we could to make it read as "un-pancaked" as possible with traditional dormers interrupting the horizontal monotony, but the first and second floors still looked divorced instead of being a cohesive building.
It was the same way in another project in the Tri Valley, with single family detached residences. These were large houses with substantial setbacks, so nobody would ever really interact with the houses, visually or experientially, such that it would make them uncomfortable with a two story element, not that a two story house is particularly out of scale in the first place. Nor did the staff planner's official reason make any sense, to reduce scale from the neighbors, given that the closest neighboring house was several hundred feet away and elevated above the proposed homes. Still we were forced to pancake the houses.
It's not that pancake architecture is inherently wrong. Some architects intentionally stack floors like pancakes, but that's typically predicated on a specific idea they were going for and it's usually not just to reduce scale. It almost never works when the architecture was supposed to be something else and some outside party decides to make pancakes out of it. To make things worse, these changes we were forced to make were not prescribed in any law, ordinance, or guideline. These are just the whimsical desires of staff and city board members, so the direction is arbitrary and directed after the initial design. Drastically changing the design at such a late stage of design is expensive and the developer racked up tens of thousands of dollars just by responding to capricious staff comments over the course of a few months and ending up with a worse design than previously achieved.
When we go to a breakfast joint, we expect our food to be designed and prepared by chefs. Although I'm sure overreaching politicians sometimes gets in the way of creativity, as they sometimes prescribe (or at least try to) the ingredients some chefs can and can't use or how they use it, but overall, people would think it's ridiculous for bureaucrats to take on the creative and artistic aspects of food preparation. There is no reason, as a society, to rely on city planners with no architectural background to dictate architecture over an architect who lives and breathes architecture. Even if the city planner does have such a background, which very few do, they have not worked as much on the project as the project architect. There is no reason for some city staff to take a T-bone steak dish and decide to force the restaurant to turn that dish into pancakes because he heard once awhile back that people like pancakes.
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 that causes you to spend the next few hours hunched over a toilet, cursing the pancake gods for their cruelty.
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| Geisel Hall, a library in UC San Diego. The pancaking in this building was done to evoke the imagery of a stack of books being held up by a pair of hands. Image courtesy of Belis@rio. |
The problem is that too many planning staff members take this concept and start applying it en masse without understanding the reasoning behind it. While scale is important, applying a breakdown of scale across the entirety of a four unit, two story townhouse is just overkill, especially when the townhouse is set back from the public sidewalk a good ten to twenty feet. Completely segregating the second floor with the first floor can make the building look like there was a first floor designed then someone just plopped another floor on top. It's important for some elements in a facade to tie the building together vertically as well as horizontally, for a harmonious design.
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| Diagrams of pancake facade versus a rowhouse facade. The pancake parti is typically utilized in larger buildings while the rowhouse parti is utilized often in residential houses in urban areas. The city staff, as well as us, wanted the rowhouse look, but decided to try their hands as architects and forced us into a pancake look. |
The planning staff didn't see it that way, presumably because they heard that one architectural concept and were hell bent on applying it everywhere with complete disregard to any other architectural concept. To achieve approval by planning staff, they forced us to completely remove all vertical elements by forcing plane changes and running a horizontal element across the entire building...creating a stack of two pancakes. A stack of two pancakes that were never meant to be pancakes, forced in by non-chefs into a Frankenstein monstrosity that left me hunched over my drafting board, cursing the city planners.
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| Rowhouses in the Nyhavn district of Copenhagen. |
It was the same way in another project in the Tri Valley, with single family detached residences. These were large houses with substantial setbacks, so nobody would ever really interact with the houses, visually or experientially, such that it would make them uncomfortable with a two story element, not that a two story house is particularly out of scale in the first place. Nor did the staff planner's official reason make any sense, to reduce scale from the neighbors, given that the closest neighboring house was several hundred feet away and elevated above the proposed homes. Still we were forced to pancake the houses.
It's not that pancake architecture is inherently wrong. Some architects intentionally stack floors like pancakes, but that's typically predicated on a specific idea they were going for and it's usually not just to reduce scale. It almost never works when the architecture was supposed to be something else and some outside party decides to make pancakes out of it. To make things worse, these changes we were forced to make were not prescribed in any law, ordinance, or guideline. These are just the whimsical desires of staff and city board members, so the direction is arbitrary and directed after the initial design. Drastically changing the design at such a late stage of design is expensive and the developer racked up tens of thousands of dollars just by responding to capricious staff comments over the course of a few months and ending up with a worse design than previously achieved.
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| Boston City Hall. The top few floors could be considered pancake architecture, but flairs out instead of in as the building goes up. This building is often considered one of the ugliest buildings in the world, but acclaimed by some architects for pushing the envelope. Nevertheless, this was done specifically to be brutalist, the opposite of what the city planners were looking for, and hardly what one would want for residential in a small town. Image courtesy of Daniel Schwen. |
When we go to a breakfast joint, we expect our food to be designed and prepared by chefs. Although I'm sure overreaching politicians sometimes gets in the way of creativity, as they sometimes prescribe (or at least try to) the ingredients some chefs can and can't use or how they use it, but overall, people would think it's ridiculous for bureaucrats to take on the creative and artistic aspects of food preparation. There is no reason, as a society, to rely on city planners with no architectural background to dictate architecture over an architect who lives and breathes architecture. Even if the city planner does have such a background, which very few do, they have not worked as much on the project as the project architect. There is no reason for some city staff to take a T-bone steak dish and decide to force the restaurant to turn that dish into pancakes because he heard once awhile back that people like pancakes.
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