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.
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[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.