From Seattle to New York City, Minneapolis to Dallas, boxy apartment and condo buildings sporting bland facades, metallic or colored cladding and a generally flat aesthetic seem to dominate new urban developments these days. Surprisingly similar in style from one place to the next, they have been dubbed works of “developer chic” or “fast-casual architecture” and branded blandmarks or LoMo (Low Modern), generally by those critical of their appearance. Some of their look is a byproduct of “value engineering,” a stripping away of decorative flourishes for the sake of saving a few dollars (the bane of many artistic architects) but there is more to the story.

As with virtually any architecture, costs do naturally play a role as well in shaping these structures — ornate brickwork may look beautiful, but even as a decorative facade layer the material adds loads of weight and a lot of expense to a cheaper wood-framed building.  As for the stylistic convergence more broadly, much of this traces to economic and other factors that are essentially the same across cities in America and otherwise: high demand for affordable housing that has to meet a similar set of safety and other code requirements.

In many cities, housing is in short supply and a lot of area is zoned for single-family residential, forcing developers to fit as much housing as they can into whatever plots are left available. Where they do get built, these structures face restrictions often derived from international building codes, calling for formulaic approaches (for instance: a concrete base floor with five wooden floors on top) resulting in a roughly similar size and shape. Facades with portions that are recessed or pushed out are common features, too, again usually the product of local ordinances and design review boards that demand physical variety from facades.

To some critics, these cookie-cutter creations represent an aesthetic crisis. To others, they seem like harbingers of gentrification. As any urbanist knows, though, a lack of affordable housing is a serious and pervasive problem neither caused nor solved by architects as such. Architecture critic Kate Wagner looks at the situation pragmatically, arguing that “affordable mid and high-rise towers are the most effective way to house the greatest number of people on the smallest parcel of land, something that’s desperately needed in places like San Francisco, where the value of land is so high.”

For those who would point to the much-discussed failures of 20th-century mass-housing attempts, she writes: “Modernist public housing was not the failure of architecture it was the failure of people—through racial prejudices, misguided and poorly thought out policies, ugly politics, and economic greed, people caused the public housing of the past to fail.” Additionally, a lot of lessons learned from that era are incorporated into even the most boring of boxy apartments, including mixed-use programs that activate areas and bring in more than just residents.

More broadly, there is a case to be made that what was once more of an art has become something of a science, whatever one’s opinion of the effects. Architects have always been in the business of balancing aesthetics and pragmatics, form and function, but increasingly their work is constrained by outside forces, including but not limited to client budgets, safety considerations and municipal rules.

Over the long term, the sometimes-shoddy construction materials and methods of this currently trending typology may be the seeds of its undoing. It’s possible these will be looked back on as a mistake. Maybe, though, the same thing will happen here that has with other approaches and styles over architectural history: people will come to appreciate the beauty and functionality in what currently seems mundane if not abhorrent. In the meantime, architects can only do so much — it’s up to cities and their citizens to accept reality or rethink entrenched paradigms and consider the merits of changing zoning limitations, restrictive codes and perhaps also the benchmarks by which we judge architecture to be good or bad.

Just looking at the photos of these interiors, where would you guess this unusual verdant living space is located? The English countryside, maybe, or a rural land project full of experimental buildings made of natural materials? An apartment building in one of the world’s most heavily populated cities probably wouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind, but that’s exactly where “Garden Room” is set, testifying to the transformative skills of India-based architectural studio The White Room.

Known for their propensity to experiment with organic forms and materials, even within urban settings, The White Room creates the feeling of a secret oasis in this unusual project. Sculptural in form, the space features lots of round windows, arches and hollows, with nary a straight line in sight.

Designed for “a flamboyant couple,” the “organically designed spaces seamlessly flow into each other, thinning the boundaries and bringing nature closer to the living,” explain architects Nitin Barchha and Disney Davis. “Thes paces take on a sculptural form with some wrapped in turquoise mosaic, some in mediterranean whites, while others in slate and green.”

The result feels more like a garden than an indoor living space, complete with stepping stones set into carpets of living grass. Plants are virtually everywhere you look, water cascades through multiple fountains and custom glass doors maintain views of the lush green spaces and allow natural light to penetrate the innermost rooms, like the bedroom and the incredible aqua-tiled bathroom.

“The White Room studio is built on the basic principles of exploring the bare beauty of materials. Here the focus has always been on exploring innovative ways of approaching fundamental problems of space, proportion, light and materials. The way in which a wall meets a floor, or how a door fits into a wall, flush or proud, are not mere details, they are as much architecture as the planning of a sequence of rooms in a gallery, or the composition of a facade.We consider architecture, of all the arts, as the one that most depends for its expressive power on rubbing up against the gritty constraints of every day life.”

Drivelines Studios is a low-rise residential apartment building in Johannesburg, SA, constructed from 140 re-purposed metal shipping containers.

Drivelines Studios is a residential building like few others… and that’s by design. The roughly triangular, seven-story low rise fits neatly into an odd-sized lot in Maboneng, an area of JoBurg enjoying a spurt of urban renewal. According to New York-based design studio LOT-EK, Drivelines Studios “responds to the post-apartheid generation’s desire to repopulate the city’s downtown through new models of urban living.” The model may be new but the materials are not: 140 recycled and re-purposed steel shipping containers form the building’s internal and external structure.

Selection Metalling

We’ve featured shipping container projects by LOT-EK before (here and here), but the 75,000 sq ft Drivelines Studios project is their largest such effort to date – it’s also South Africa’s largest residential shipping container project. Costs were managed quite creatively. For example, the upcycled metal container boxes were organized by color and their exterior surfaces were left unpainted, ultimately determining the building’s outward appearance.

Containment Strategy

During the course of construction, the containers were trimmed and assembled on-site with preordained combinations of containers forming distinct living and working spaces. One common theme is the large diagonal cut-out angled from the corner to the center of each container’s long side. This cutting style resulted in large windows offering grand views of Albertina Sisulu Road ( a major arterial thoroughfare) on one side and the building’s inner courtyard on the other. Once assembled and stacked together, the trimmed containers present a repeating and mirroring pattern on the building’s facades.

Inside the Box

“Embracing the triangular geometry of the site, the building is conceived as a billboard where two separate volumes of residential units are hinged at the narrow east end of the lot,” according to a spokesperson for LOT-EK, “framing the social space of the open interior courtyard. As in a billboard, the building’s outer facades are straight and flush with the lot line while the facades in the inner courtyard are articulated by the staircases, the elevator tower and the bridges connecting all levels, and by the open circulation paths activated by the units’ spillover onto their outdoor space.”

Ex-Cargo

Drivelines Studios is a seven-story tall low rise building. The ground level first floor features residential units at the rear, allowing a mix of small retail spaces opening onto Albertina Sisulu Road. Moving inward, a private landscaped courtyard offers residents a soothing urban green space highlighted by a swimming pool. All six levels above the ground floor feature residential units only. These open-plan studio apartments provide from 300 sq ft to 600 sq ft of living space, with each and every unit having an open “balcony” space facing the inner courtyard and the network of walkways.

Shipped Off the Old Block

“The building’s social intention and agenda is in line with the emerging urban community of its surrounding neighborhood,” states LOT-EK, “taking an active role in the revitalization, reactivation and re-imagining of the city’s downtown.” Some historical trivia: the building’s footprint was once occupied by an auto repair and service shop called “Drivelines”, from which the development derives its name.

Container Contentment

Not everyone is thrilled with the emergence of Drivelines Studios, however, as some see the project as fueling gentrification in Maboneng and the low-income Jeppestown neighborhood. Jonathan Liebmann, the founder of project developer Propertuity, takes such criticism in stride. “Four years after we started work in Maboneng, we decided to focus on delivering affordable residential accommodation in anticipation of market demand,” explains Liebmann. “In Maboneng, the average rental has been about the equivalent of $330 per month but we foresee this decreasing to around $230 over the next couple of years.” Time will tell, of course, but in the meantime we’ll just have to… contain ourselves. All images via Flickr member Jorge Andrés Calderón (Aireos) under a Creative Commons license.

A new housing project in Beirut uses flexible wall dividers in an unconventional way, allowing huge steel panels to slide into and out of the structure itself, animating the facade while partitioning space on demand.

Designed by Fouad Samara Architects, these duplex ‘Modulofts’ units in the capital of Lebanon were modeled after a combination of classic open urban lofts and cozy contemporary homes, hence the spatial flexibility.

Each unit has a pair of rooms overlooking a main living and dining area which can be opened up by day, the steel partitions serving as shades, and closed at night for privacy, or reconfigured for dinners and parties.

The adaptable interior can be configured in sixteen different ways, explain the architects, via a combination of four sliding walls that divide the bedrooms as well as separate living and dining, study and television spaces on the lower level.

Divisions aren’t exclusively binary, either — partitions can be slid out partway to create essentially infinite variations. Raw slate is designed to reference traditional Lebanese homes, and steel to conjure NYC loft aesthetics.

Stepping into a lockable bathroom stall, one expects a degree of privacy, but for those with shy bladders, this interior tiling strategy may prove problematic.

Designed by Gyva Grafika in Lithuania, the tyles tap into a well-known aesthetic of conventional mass-housing modules — graying buildings where individual differences emerge in the details of habitation rather than the architecture.

Closed shutters, broken glass, hanging clothes and bemused onlookers populate the walls of the stall, while decorative touches like houseplants and custom curtains add some flair and color to the otherwise brownish background.

The custom tiles wrap the space, starting a few feet up (around waist high) and continuing for five tile lengths to around eye level — together, they form a kind of inverted five-story facade, wrapping but facing inward.

The source is not just imaginary, either — these actual photos were taken in the same neighborhood as the project, so locals might even see themselves staring back at them.

The work conjures to mind projects by artists like Evol, whose miniature streetscapes bare a remarkable resemblance — little villages of mass-produced housing units set into unexpected contexts.