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.

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.

4,500 3D-printed ceramic tiles cover the facade of the ‘Cabin of Curiosities’ in Oakland, an experimental structure showing off how beautiful additive manufacturing can be. The facade consists of two different types of tiles by independent 3D printing studio Emerging Objects: the ‘Planter Tile’ and the ‘Seed Stitch Tile.’ Consisting of sawdust, Portland cement, corn-based bio-plastics and chardonnay grape skins, the tiles create a tactile living surface full of succulents ideal for the Northern California climate.

The ‘Seed Stitch’ tiles mimic the knitting technique for which they’re named, intentionally printed at high speeds to encourage the sort of non-uniformity you’d find in handmade objects – an interesting twist, considering the fact that precision is typically one of the most prized aspects of 3D printing technology. No two ‘Seed Stitch’ tiles are exactly the same.

Inside, the firm has lined the walls and ceiling with translucent ‘Chroma Curl Wall’ tiles with custom relief textures. Additional 3D-printed objects created by Emerging Objects, like lamps and furniture, are scattered throughout the room. ‘Cabin of Curiosities’ is presented as a potential component of a solution to the Bay Area’s severe housing shortage.

Emerging Objects, which was founded by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, professors at the University of California Berkeley and San Jose University, hopes to showcase the versatility of 3D-printed objects.

“These are not just investigations into testing materials for longevity or for structure, but also a study of aesthetics. We see the future as being elegant, optimistic, and beautiful.”

Space and privacy are increasingly valuable commodities in cities, and many people on tight budgets find themselves in living situations that feel more than a little cramped. The average student in a city like New York or San Francisco can’t afford to live alone, and many more have difficulty accessing shared housing with just a handful of roommates. In Bangkok, students facing financial difficulties have been offered a ‘space scholarship,’ but the catch is they’ll be living with 6 other people in a tiny apartment. How can designers make such tight quarters more tolerable?

Fabrica, a research center based in Italy, came up with a few solutions as part of a corporate social responsibility initiative by Thai property developer AP Public Company Ltd. Making use of existing condo units in Bangkok, the firm did some heavy research on what makes co-living work before setting out to design the spaces.

Some are ultra-compact, consisting of just a single undivided room, yet manage to be comfortable for multiple inhabitants through built-in furniture that makes use of the vertical space. Others have a couple separate bedrooms, but pack three to four people into each one. Fabrica’s extensive use of smooth, pale wood surfaces, simple lines and cohesive color schemes goes a long way toward making each apartment feel spacious and uncluttered despite the number of people living there. The same materials and color schemes are carried throughout the interiors, including the kitchens and living rooms.

No matter how you spin it, 7 people is an awful big number for one compact condo. But take a second to consider what most college dorm rooms look like, and whether you’d prefer their cheap bunks and hot plates to a well-designed space full of useful space-saving features.

Architecture enthusiasts might love the cold, harsh lines of Brutalist buildings, but for the people who actually live in the iconic London tower blocks and other modernist complexes for low-income residents, they can be – well – brutal. News that the tower blocks of Thamesmead in the city’s southeast quadrant are due for a pricey facelift drew a backlash from many Brutalist admirers, but it’s important to face the fact that these estates are far from the utopias they were promoted to be back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

For many of us, the stark, institutional qualities of Brutalist architecture are part of the appeal. It’s where it gets its name, after all. But the same endless planes of uninterrupted concrete, stilted proportions and labyrinthine layouts that make for a visually interesting museum, monument or even a luxury residence for a well-to-do enthusiast don’t necessarily translate well to low-income apartments. In these environments – as exploited in the recent film High-Rise starring Tom Hiddleston – the gloom of the architecture itself can become oppressive, especially when it’s not properly cared-for.

In a recent editorial at The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet notes that the dream of modern “concrete utopias” for working-class people broke down quickly once people were actually living in complexes like the Alexandra Road Estate, the Barbican, Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower.

“The lifts broke down, the stairwells were awash in urine, there was poor lighting and scant green or communal space. A visitor to the Holly Street estate in east London, quoted by Dominic Sandbrook in State of Emergency, wrote of ‘dark passages, blind alleys, gloomy staircases,’ corridors that were a ‘thieve’s highway’ and people who would ‘stick to the lit areas and walk hurriedly.’ No kind of paradise, in other words, and hardly embodying the social progressivism claimed by postwar city planners.”

But even beyond these issues, which could arguably be ascribed to just about any poorly managed low-income housing, are the sci-fi aesthetics when rendered all too real by daily life within. French photographer Laurent Kronental spent four years capturing the ‘grand ensembles’ housing projects in Paris, which are largely occupied by elderly residents, finding a fascinating juxtaposition of that crumbling modernist utopia and its marginalized occupants (top five images). “There is an unsettling paradox of life and void,” he says.

Could a middle ground be found with better planning, or converting some of the structures to new uses? It seems possible, but so far developers have been brutal (sorry) in flushing out existing residents to transform structures like Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower to posh residences for higher-income buyers. Both are set to become luxury housing developments, thereby eliminating the egalitarian intentions of their creators, rather than making them more livable for a broader swath of the population.