Architecture Ransom Notes

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...