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.

Talk of bees usually conjures images of buzzing hives acting in concert, but most species around the world are actually lowners, hence this series of chic abodes for less social bees. Honey bees and bumblebees work together, and get most of the media buzz, while solitary bees work alone — not producing honey or wax, but still playing an important role as pollinators in the global food system.

“When we talk about bees, we usually imagine the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) when in reality, around 90 percent of the bee species are considered solitary,” explains Gabriel Calvillo of MaliArts, who designed these bee condos.

“The fact that solitary bees do not generate any ‘consumable product’ for humans has meant that they are not given much attention, but recent studies point to the fact that they are possibly the most efficient pollinators in nature.”

The ‘Refugio’ series contains three different structures, each designed around the preferences of different solitary bees. They feature pine and teak wood finishes, ceramic roofs and steel legs with integrated feeding and watering systems for maximum comfort.

Perhaps most importantly: nearby literature will explain to passing city dwellers what the structures are about, and the importance of bees to the world as we know it.

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.

Visitors to the new panoramic rooftop deck of the Tate Modern are being told not to take pictures … and not just of artwork on display inside the galleries: voyeuristic snapshots inside neighboring apartments are now off-limits as well.

The neighborhood Neo Bankside apartments have threatened to sue the institution over this addition, an extension to the Tate designed by Herzog & de Meuron that opened earlier this summer. The problem: people are shooting zoomed-in photographs from the viewing platform then posting them online, exposing living rooms and bedrooms behind floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall glass facades.

London politician Adele Morris calls it a “tricky situation” and notes that “residents were very distressed to suddenly discover they had no privacy at all in their homes. Nobody had anticipated that people would literally be hanging over the balcony and taking photographs of their rooms and then posting them on the internet.”

Architectural responsibility aside, solutions have been proposed to the situation. For the Tate, ideas like closing the deck or installing a screen of plants on it have been considered. On the Neo side, a film could be applied to the glass to deflect gawkers.

One resident described the experience as “terribly intrusive” and said “I bought this apartment because of the view but now I have to keep my blinds down whenever the platform is open, otherwise you get people waving at you.If I had known what it would be like, I would never have bought a flat here. Now I think I would struggle to sell it.”

Of course, there is arguably a ‘buyer beware’ component to this fiasco – living in an urban condo with extensive glass (particularly in a vertically-growing city like London) means making certain concessions to privacy. Those who live in glass houses may need to be aware of the risks they are taking – having a room with a view means that people can probably view you, too. Meanwhile, the Tate defends the design.

“The viewing level is an intrinsic part of the free public offer of the new building, providing a 360-degree experience that is virtually unique to London,” said representatives of the museum in a statement. Realistically, if someone can sue over viewers in this case and place, it also opens the door to lawsuits between basically any set of urban buildings.

“Since the very first plans were drawn up in 2006 we have been through an extensive consultation and planning process, and have maintained an ongoing dialogue with local residents. At no point during this process were any concerns raised regarding the viewing platform. There is signage encouraging the public and visitors to use it respectfully and responsibly” (Instagram images by refik, ellarog and karen_1605).

Spinning structures is not new territory, but shifting units around vertically as well as in horizontal circles is a fresh dimension of novelty with a likewise refreshed sense of purpose – to make housing truly fair for everyone, giving each person some time at (and views from) the top.

Every since the elevator shifted the top floors from being least to most desirable in cities, real estate prices have reflected the relative values of these spaces. With this alternative arrangement proposed by designer Shin Kuo, each unit would take turns being on top as well as facing each different direction.

A lot of engineering is required to make such a thing work, from detachable infrastructural connections to prescribed times and safety locks for rotation (please keep limbs inside your home!).

Part of what makes the solution so intriguing is that it conceives of architecture like a product of industrial design – something that can be fundamentally improved upon through rethinking even our most basic assumptions.

Still, at least one big question remains: given the upfront and ongoing costs of making this whole thing work, who will ultimately be able to live in such a structure, which presents itself with such an egalitarian purpose? It may simply be ahead of its time – if more modular modes of plug-and-play dwelling become the norm, such infrastructure may also come to be more commonplaces (and come down in cost).