This Space for Rent

Modern architecture on Belmont Street

This pretty building went up during the winter. It's quite nice for a modern building. Yes, it's very square, but the wooden sheathing gives the eyes something to look at instead of the flat blehness of concrete slabs or spray-on "stucco".

Whenever I see a modern building that's well-designed (like the Bauhaus school), I get an almost irresistable urge to toss down a couple of hundred thousand US$ and build myself a nice modernist building. But then I reconsider, because I've had to live in nice modernist buildings; those nice frameless windows? After a few years, they become leak magnets. Ditto for the flat roofs that so many modern building have; if you live in an area where there is a lot of rain or snow, it's a constant battle against nature to avoid leaks (when I was in school back in Wisconsin, almost every building I had classes in would have a crop of little plastic buckets materialize every spring to deal with the leaks).

And in the grand tradition of inappropriate design, a lot of these modern buildings with huge frameless windows and flat roofs are built in places where the summers are hot and the winters are cold and snowy. Energy-efficient? No, not even close. But they do look pretty.

Comments


[in passing]

The inspiration for those spare, geometric modernist buildings was largely spare geometric buildings in the dry lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Funny thing, how the forms have trouble in wetter climates.

Randolph Fritz Wed May 4 01:34:44 2005

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