Fwd: Why buildings should be dumb boxes | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Sharon Villines (sharonsharonvillines.com) | |
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2018 11:32:24 -0700 (PDT) |
On Aug 25, 2018, at 1:57 PM, Philip Dowds <rphilipdowds [at] me.com> wrote: > > One of many things I was told, as a first year architecture student, was that > “Corners are expensive.” I was not told, however, that corners are bad > because they cost money. Rather, the point was resources are finite, and > need to be deployed wisely. But many cohousers are working with architects and contractors have not told communities that they can make their projects less expensive by reducing the number of corners. While the central point is that "resources are finite, and need to be deployed wisely”, people need to know what things cost in order deploy wisely. I am certainly not an architect, but I’ve worked on a fair number of planning committees for various types of buildings and never been told that corners are expensive. A larger point is that they are high maintenance. The more complex joins and bracings can lead to cracks and leaks. That means costs incurred as long as the building stands. Several years after we moved in and I was on the facilities team, I realized that we would have saved ourselves a lot of grief if we had had the manager of a multi-residence building look at the plans and tell us what was high maintenance. To clean some of our windows and hanging lights we have to use a very tall ladder (rickety and dangerous) or rent a cherry-picker which is both scary and expensive. > We can make our gardens easy and inexpensive to maintain by paving them over. > But is that what we want, really? I pointed out a building to my 7 year old granddaughter that was very large with white marble siding and only 3-4 tiny windows. I thought it looked monumental, clean and crisp, and by association I could feel the surface of unpolished marble. She looked for a minute, well 10 seconds at least, and said, “If was that building, I would paint myself purple.” One point of the TreeHugger article was how can we make the dumb box more aesthetically pleasing while avoiding unnecessary costs, both current and future. Proportions, color, surface, texture? Sharon ---- Sharon Villines Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC http://www.takomavillage.org
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Why buildings should be dumb boxes Sharon Villines, August 25 2018
- Re: Why buildings should be dumb boxes Philip Dowds, August 25 2018
- Fwd: Why buildings should be dumb boxes Sharon Villines, August 25 2018
- Re: Fwd: Why buildings should be dumb boxes Philip Dowds, August 26 2018
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