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To be honest, today my entire goal is to survive. 😂 I am on day 5 of single-parenting while Jonathan is on a work trip.. which means I am at home with an active toddler and a 6 month old with a mission to never sleep. 🤪 So please, have fun and enjoyment for me! I can live vicariously through someone else. ❤️
I would never give any company or government body my dna. Not by choice. You will never know who they will sell it to or give it to. What companies and governments say they do and what they actually do are not the same. (Not paranoid just not very trusting)
Those DNA testing companies sell your data to 3rd parties (insurance companies, advertisers etc). They also have had data breaches. There is also and ethical concern your decision to put your DNA info out there gives companies info on your brothers, sisters, kids, parents, cousins etc.
So, I’m an architect in Germany. I worked in couple housing projects that are “dumb boxes” let me tell you, there is a lot of thought go into these. For housing, people dont want weird shapes that is hard to furnish. And also as you said, it is cost effective and still they have a charachter. It is also more enjoyable living in these buildings, as they are very well isolated for heat and mold (which is a big issue in old buildings here) also you pay less money to heat your home. I believe these kinds of buildings are ideal for housing, but when it comes to public buildings like libraries I think we should think outside of the box. These are not just building that “form follows function” these are landmarks and stuff that stay in peoples minds. I aggree with all the critism and we as construction industry should do better to prevent these undesirable outcomes. We have the tools for it but as most industries, architecture is also run by dinosours who are resistant to change from the traditional methods. In general I aggree with you and thank you for this video 😊
Good point. I was going to say the same thing about the library. Every city needs landmarks that draw attention and act as a tourist attraction. It would ever make sense to build every building like that, but I think it's allowable, even better, to have a few buildings that are a bit out of the ordinary.
That really is a very important factor - I go with Ritter Sport on that one "Quadratisch, praktisch, gut". I want 90 Degree corners and straight angles in my rooms, thank you ;) (Also, I recently viewed a place that was nice and modern and very well lit due to a lot of floor-deep windows... unfortunately, the living room had those windows on THREE sides, so you almost had no place to put ANY furniture in that room against a wall at all or it looked very weird.
Fine, make landmarks look good, but the specific Freiburg case is an example of what not to do. The oversight that the shell would turn into a dangerous hazard for example should not have become an oversight and is a glaring failure in simple due diligence by the designers involved, and the designers responsible should be renowned for their failures.
@@-----REDACTED-----It's astonishing how often problems with reflections happen. If I recall correctly, there's one architect who designed two buildings that at times focused sunlight on the space before the building (at least one of those was parking) and made it extremely hot (enough to melt plastic). I can perhaps see how that mistake happened the first time, but how can anyone explain the second time? The guy *knew* about the possible problem.
Whenever I see a really odd structure built to impress - so Frank Gehry for example, I think of what will happen after 40 years of expanding and contracting - so how ir will be maintained. The value of stone and concrete in historic structures is partly in how well they age.
A lot of people are quite fed up with those sterile modernistic boxes, also in Europe. I can recommend "the aesthetic city" channel for a different perspective than the modernistic monoculture that is predominant under architects. But like with the historic examples that you showed, you can have a box shaped building with the colour, details and ornaments, that make it lively and liveable.
Yes, don't mind the shape as long as it is beautiful. Although with this approach I will say the buildings must look real. I lack the vocabulary to describe it, but for example, when you go to Las Vegas or the Cheescake Factory. You can tell all the buildings are fake and artificial which also makes me want to vomit. It can't be a piece of cardboard with some paint on it. It has to look like a well crafted, beautiful, and real. If they can achieve this to the point that it is indistinguishable to the discerning eye, then by all means, bring on the boxes
Disagree with the speaker here. Stark, flat roofs are ruining Stuttgart - more and more buildings built without the traditional pitched roofs. Developers love flat roofs because they are cheaper to build, yet a building with a flat roof is not only ugly, it is unhealthy - no circulation of air above the accommodation. Streets of buildings with pitched roofs have a more human feel than streets of buildings with flat roofs. They are easier to be around . . .
I agree with everything you said. I just wish buildings had more colours, or at least distinguishing elements of colour such as window frames, doors, balconies etc. Or a bit more use of tiles/mosaics on the fascades.
people do not like those colorful houses. We had a street where they changed the rental houses to colors in the violet scale. They did not look bad, but it took not long and they were white again. They are now still called the Milka houses , because the color scheme looked like the color scheme from Milka chocolates. And we have a house in the city called the blue house - it was blue about 30years ago and it's now white/gray. But it is still known by the locals at the blue house. Colors are okay if they look natural like red bricks, green ivy on the walls, but screaming colors are seen as problematic.
@@seanthiar Agree that generally houses should be in muted colours and/or colours that reflect natural building materials such as brick and stone, rather than random primary colours just for the sake of it.
"Big dumb boxes" are all fine, especially if they are newly built to modern energy-saving norms. If they just weren't so damn boring to look at, most of the time. The small frills you find on old housing, the fact that even when they had been built to match each other's style, is what makes old buildings / quarters "humane". And this is something modern housing dearly misses. I'd take some 19th century or older building that was cored and modernized internally any time over the house I live in right now.
i'm with you on this. big dumb boxes might be, from a technical point of view, great. But they sorely lack in soul nourishing design. And i think there can be a compromise that has the best of both worlds. And i think if we look at those 100+ year old buildings, that are similar to those big dumb boxes, but more stimulating, we already see how to accomplish that. But we have to reject the brutalist design and all those metal and glass facades for that.
That's why landscaping around them and creating good common areas is so important, I pass through several dumb box neighbourhoods every day and none of them are ugly neighbourhoods, they're surrounded by greenery, playgrounds and ponds. I've even seen GDR era dumb boxes that manage to look good by maximising greenspace between buildings and adding murals to strategic areas which also helps deter graffiti.
There is ways to make them cuter! E.g. my home town upgraded some of the smaller ones and put in wooden lattice shutters, some neat sliding shutters and more green stuff on them and they look good! They can absolutely be redeemed and even fancy façade elements made from moulds wouldn't cost a lot.
Right? I feel like the "big dumb boxes" are the McDonalds Hamburger of architecture. Upsides: Pretty cheap materials, very simple assembly, makes you feel alright (especially if it's the only thing you've been exposed to, yet), fulfill the basic requirements for humans to exist. Downsides: You can't tell if you're in a box neighbourhood / eating a McD Hamburger in Munich, Paris, Moscow, New York, Tokyo or any semi-rural town that still has their own McD for some reason, unless you look at outside factors like air humidity or temperature. In the form I currently see modern buildings, they're so incredibly bland and same-y. For me as a German, the only way box-neighbourhoods could be even more boring, would be if we adopted a grid layout for the streets.
Some more info about the University library: the designers originally used a specific glass but the state decided to cut costs and just use normal glass and that's where all the problems started. The sun reflecting from the glass was getting so hot, it actually started melting plastic parts of cars parked in front of the building. It was insane.
Dump boxes create a canvas for aesthetics. They need not be dull or monotonous, since it is the surface rather than the inside structure people see. Like in the early 1900' we shoul keep decorations separated from the functional parts to get both better and cheaper.
Yes you can paint (or render) them different colours, window frames etc. Also orientation and height differences so that you break up lines between buildings.
you can even use an outer "shell" and those can although benefit the energy balance of a construction, replacing some panels with solar cells or use an air gap between outer and inner layer. Boxes can be to an extend be build much sturdier then other constructions, regarding to earthquakes or other enviromental hazards or cheaper using prefabricated parts.
But the 1900s with "Jugendstil" was a time when functional parts of the architecture were also used as beautiful decorations. It was not just a plain box and some artwork glued to the surface to make it pretty.
As a student from Freiburg, I truly appreciate someone presenting the insanity that is our university library to the world. It is one of the biggest running jokes among students here that the building is just terrible and how everything about it including it's design and construction is dysfunctional in some way or another.
It was already a running joke from the start (Enough to inspire Extra3 and I considered it nice of them back then that they did not go further.).🤐 I studied in Freiburg back when it was reopened and would be lying if I said I liked it. At least it was open 24/7 back then😎
It wasn't even mentioned that the top floor is permanently closed because it lacks a second fire escape route, reducing the space available to students even further.
@@gargoyle7863 Dunno if it changed since I finished my bachelor, but back then it was always terribly crowded. Almost no chance to load laptops without causing the staff to complain about too long cables. I also used to bring Ohropax... Just the notorious things.
@@Never_again_against_anyone My times at the bib are over as well but I agree it's crowded. I think they underestimated the demand. So yes, maybe they should have build a boring box for maximum space.
I live in a box. The original inspiration behind was the Bauhaus. “Form follows function.” A simple and timeless design. The first box building in Germany was built in Dessau in 1925. Simplicity was behind its design and the American version, the Mid Century Modern, was based on the same principle. Modernism is about architecture and the things contained within it, not calling attention to themselves.
Unfortunately, though not entirely due to its own fault, the Bauhaus motto often led to beauty being relegated, if not outright ignored. Methinks that beauty is a function necessary for humanity.
@@harryhirsch3637 Yes, many of the original work was. But even some of the original work had abandoned beauty. Even more so by its followers. As it so often happens to those intending to revolutionize, the proverbial baby gets thrown with the bath water.
@@ebahapo Buildings are also areas, where you stay or not. If you are dehumanized in a building or row, but you have to serve it's proposed idea, you are not a free man anymore unlike you really choose that. Bauhaus is nothing more than what you see in 2:10. That being said, it's a shame and crime to use it on a wide scale. Other designs are less penetrant.
These buildings are also very normal in Denmark. They are so well insulated that in winter, even with the heating on, you often get ice on the windows in the mornings before the sun hits them.
Getting iced windows inside means your windows aren’t insulating that much. The humidity contained within the warm air (breathing/cooking/showering/…) is condensing at the window and freezing at its surface. Kinda bad (from the insulation perspective).
We also have ice on the outside of windows (when I don't put the outside blindes down which I usually do). Whats weird is that the facade also has ice or condensate water on it, and in the morning sun it sublimates and steams of the wall on the east. Looks really unusual to me 😅
Those dumb boxes have a long and proud history in Germany. My grandmother and later my uncle as well as my father used to live in the Westhausen settlement in Frankfurt/Main. One could say that Westhausen is an early prototype of those unpretentious settlements consisting of simple square and dumb boxes. That apartment was handed on from one family member to another because as a mere mortal you would otherwise haven't had a chance to rent a place in such an attractive neighborhood. As it turned out, people feel at home and love to live there. In the 1920s when the neighborhood was built, many of the design principles you are presenting here were revolutionary new developments (others, like the emphasis on mixed income neighborhoods are even older). Still it seems the original builders got a lot if it right, since after all much of the original installations are still functional and appropriate today.
I've been able to see a new quarter grow in my home town over the last couple of years. It's made up of 'big dumb boxes,' but they all are built a little differently. Some a little wider, some a little more narrow, some a floor taller or shorter (I think there's nothing over six floors there, either), and they have different shades of browns, whites, and earthy reds. They all look nice, they form a nice new area to live in, having green spaces in-between them, and I know that they were easy enough to build as well. They don't even look that much like boxes to me, they just look nice. That's a lot of living space on an area which used to hold a fair ground (used only twice or so a year) and a large market hall that is now outside the town by the Autobahn access where it's much easier to deliver and pick up the fruits, vegetables, and flowers traded there.
In Stewart Brand’s book, “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built” he wrote about the need for buildings to built in such a way as to allow flexibility for future use. A building can be built for one purpose and be used for something completely different decades later. Occupants may have planned for one thing, but through living in the structure may discover the need to make adaptations. Box shape buildings are inherently more adaptable for changing needs.
Great video, as per usual. You really have taken TH-cam vlogging to another level. So well researched, and so well represented. Always look forward to these vids.
This why I am happy to live in Amsterdam, where even the new build 'boxes' at least don't look like boring central European white boxes. Facades are generally done in a relatively varied way and have some sort of refinement detail. Always brick, because that works best with our weather and building heritage. And also looks better than stark plaster. I don't see what some pastel colours on the boring boxes would have cost that much more. I'm not advocating for richly decorating the boxes (though secretly that would be my wish), but big white boxes from your example are a literal horror scenario for where I live. It is very noticable that German new buildings usually look very stark compared to Dutch buildings. And no thats not always because they would be more efficient, it's also a matter of taste of what is good architecture.
@@aileenmarzanna wdym by that? most of our housing are apartments and row houses, single family housing is prety rare for the low to upper class family, you'll find that most new suburbs built here are multi-family houses.
The white colours might seem boring but actually it makes sense. In Freiburg at least because it's in the warmest and sunniest region of Germany. An insulating plaster not only keeps the warmth in winter but also helps keeping a flat cool during hot days.
Brighter colours help to lessen the Heat Island Effect that plague most cities. So in that sense, white facades do make sense. Yet I really like to see more creativity in architecture. Maybe in interesting shading or greenery.
One of the reasons I'm so glad for homeoffice is that my office is in one of those glass designs. After over a decade, they never got the internal climate right and I had health issues for a long time due to that. My homeoffice is in a recent-built "big dumb box", and I pity everyone who has to spend most of their day in a terrarium like the one holding my office, where teh only actual walls surround the staircases and bathrooms.
At the core "dumb boxes" heed the maxim "form follows function". You can still got your individual touch by applying color, small ornaments or even piling a slightly bigger box onto a slightly smaller box, like you can see in many medieval cities. And boxes consisting of two or more semi-detached houses are more efficient and even in many cases more aesthetically pleasing than rows of detached houses showing each the exactly same playful details.
I really think architecture went wrong somewhere over the last hundred years. Whenever I see a "new" building (be it from 1960 or from yesterday) I think "did we forget how to make simple but nice and pleasant looking buildings?". I really hate the kind of dystopian concrete blocks that our cities in Finland are unfortunately full of. Somehow I feel like we adopted the "commie blocks" without ever being communist ourselves. But whenever they try to build something new and "modern" instead, it always just ends up looking too complicated and weird. There's nothing wrong with the shape of a box. We do like the walls to be at a 90 degree angle in our homes after all. What makes the old cities in central Europe so beautiful in my opinion is that they actually put some effort on the facade. Make the colors nice, put up some decorations maybe, and then no one will even notice the building is actually in the shape of a box. It's really important for our mental health that the places around us look nice, so please don't just ignore that in the name of efficiency. But making facades look pretty is probably much cheaper than making the buildings some kind of weird innovative shape that just ends up looking weird anyway.
As architect Louis Sullivan said, "Form follows function". There is a reason why the majority of single family homes are boxy with a gabled roof. Those Swiss chalets are not built to look idyllic, they are built to handle the snow loadI look at some of the commercial buildings that Helmut Jahn built here in Chicago, and they were replete with problems of heating and air-con-ditioning, sound control, leaks, and in the case of the new air terminal at O'Hare airport, a glass roof where the reflection off it blinded the air traffic controllers in the control tower!
The members of the "form follows function" cult always forget that "joy of use" and living in an aesthetic city that makes your eyes happy are also part of the FUNCTION! We built wonderfull buildings during historism or belle epoche but after that it was so much brutalism and boring blocks. There are youtube videos online why we dont build beautifull anymore. Its such a shame that my city demolished the most beautiful train stations to replace them with brutalism because all architectural students get taught "form follow function" without this IMPORTANT part of the function!
(I wrote my thesis about Joy of Use and Emotional Design because i was so fed up being indoctrinated by Form Follows Function maniacs that all forgot that making the user happy was a function. )
@@SonjaHamburg Imo too many confuse "Form follows function" with "Building efficiently". I know I am not an architect, just some rando from the internet, but even for me, the difference between "Function dictates form" and efficient building is rather clear. If we took the first sentence literally, we all should live in ball-shaped houses, because spherical shapes maximize surface-to-volume ratio. But from an efficiency viewpoint, that's just the most idiotic thing you can do, because circles just don't scale well when placed next to each other (the old "stacking tin-cans vs boxes" problem). Not to speak of the structural problems it would bring with it. But to get back to your initial comment: aesthetically pleasant buildings don't clash with efficient building in my opinion. Take dumb boxes for example: On the inside, they are usually more spacious, "sun-flooded" and friendly than most older buildings I know from personal experience, while being better at keeping the temperature at the level you want. They have larger windows, better isolation and the way the rooms are shaped is more to our "modern" standards. The thing that many people seem to dislike is the facade. And while I personally like that style of architecture with lots of glass and blocky aesthetic, I get why people perceive it as boring and "cold". But there are SO MANY examples of how to make it better. Easiest is of course to just paint them. But you can use greenery on the facade, which also helps cleaning air and cooling down the surroundings. Or add some fancy ornaments onto the main wall, add some wooden elements to break up the surface, organize a street-art competition and the winner can decorate one of the walls with their art etc. So many possibilities! Architects and Builders just have to use them.
@@SonjaHamburg you can go for pretty&unusable if you want to. Maintenance cost will easily double without any benefit beyond looking good from the outside. You know, I TEND to look at MY house from the inside 99% of the time, if I'm outside I look at my GARDEN 99% of the time. Going for "looks" is usually nothing more than make-believe, like most modern Haute Couture is utter crap that can't be worn beyond the catwalk. Architects should be forced to live in their concoctions for a couple of years - they wouldn't be doing them anymore. Learned that from an architect with a Civil Engineering degree.
So often these days form follows function seems to have been replaced with from over function I've walked into some buildings and end up boggled at how poorly the interior planned out and how they increase work loads and reduce productivity because staff rooms toilets are all poorly located even the entry and exit points.
In my "dumb box", build in the 60s with moderate slap-on isolation, the averaage energy use for heating is 1/5 of a single family home. Now, there are several 1-room apartment (german counting) in here as well as family apartments, so if you only count families it might be down to 1/3. But that is still a huge difference (And also a reason why I was a bit confused about the costs people were throwing around last winter. What I pay in a whole year is what they claimed they had to pay more per month.)
I have been binging your videos past weeks and this one is for sure my favourite so far. The beloved downtowns of European cities are essentially mid rise boxes with decorations. This partly goes for the grocery store video too. I grew in a walkable mid rise dominated neighborhood mainly built in 50's to 70's. The funniest comparison to America where everything is built around convenience is that for some reason this illegal mid rise mix use suburb miraclously had space for anything one could desire in daily basis and everything was withing 15 min travel, without a car, as an elementary school student. Even as a high school student I could go weeks without leaving the two connected neighborhoods. Our family had a car but we really never used it on daily activities because walking two blocks is faster than driving. Not just bikes often uses the frace, built for human scale. These mid century suburbs have undergone a boom of popularity in Helsinki and prices have spiked. Originally when built, middle class viewed these as the developments for the poor and the reputation was terrible. Now many have found the convenience and beauty of this perfect compromise of downtown accessibility and open space of American style suburbia. Apart from some public buildings, it's all boxes with varying amount of decorations. Affordable, convenient and cute.
Ah wow thank you so much for the kind compliment. The "missing middle" is a big issue in the states and something that could greatly benefit their cities.
As shown in this video, the “big dumb box” isn’t really dumb, and need not be unattractive. There is also room for more complex structures; it is a matter of balance. We can have modern equivalents of gothic cathedrals and historical row houses.
Having a fair share of "dumb boxes" around my neighborhood I agree that they can be quite beautiful with their simplicity and efficiency. The only think I somewhat worry about is the style of the buildings themself. If all of them are near identical in the same modern minimalist, all white style they might look decent today, but in 50 years they might look as outdated and soulless as many brutalist concrete boxes do today. You've shown how older houses in other styles can also be these efficient boxes at their core, so creating a bit of variety in facade materials, color or roof shape might be worthwhile.
I think part of the problem here is that the box design is being equated with spartanic exterior design. You can build a box and then still decorate it on the outside. It's not like we expect our box shaped living rooms to just stay bare walls, either. The box is just the foundational structural element. Decorations are extra.
bongi6811: Stark, square buildings with flat roofs are ruining Stuttgart. Developers love flat roofs because they are cheaper to build, yet a building with a flat roof is not only ugly, it is unhealthy - no circulation of air above the accommodation. Streets of buildings with pitched roofs have a more human feel than streets of buildings with flat roofs. They are easier to be around . . .
To your last question: what would I suggest to increase both quality of life and climate saving? I would suggest a big choice of shops for everyday necessities within walking distance. I live in an absolutely boring neighbourhood, but I can reach about 100 shops on foot within ten minutes. That is quality of life. A neighbourhood without shops is a dead neighbourhood and CO2 production by use of cars is inevitable.
Much of the newer suburbs in Gdańsk, where I'm from, are also those "dumb boxes" - which I also believe are great. First, this city is originally built on a narrow coastal plain between a tall glacial moraine and the Bay of Gdańsk, which means a lot of sandy soil and the need for intensive water management in the hills. After some particularly damaging flash floods in the summer of 2001, most of the new development in these hills has been 4-5 story boxes to make space for retention basins and leave large areas of the city forested opposed to single family homes and paving the foothills fully in concrete. Personally, I think some of the developments like in Jasień, the next neighbourhood over, are really interesting with a commuter rail station in the middle, and a neighbourhood of "dumb boxes" surrounding one of the retention basins where they have small retail and cafes and services on the ground floor, parking underground to pedestrianise the entire neighbourhood, and a second pedestrian layer on the first floor. It's incredibly simple, but so well thought out. One other aspect of building to 4-5 stories in regions with a climate like ours, is that the tops of the buildings are below the tree canopies, not only allowing for a very "human" scale, but when one is living in a very forested city like where I live, allowing the actual ecosystem to protect the building from the elements and save on heating costs in winter, while keeping the temperature down during summer heat waves, although the latter is less of an issue in Gdańsk than it is in Freiburg which gets intense heat in summer.
Beautiful place to live. Very central. Close to France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Short run to the Bodensee. Bohemia (Czechia) and Hungary not far away. Idyllic. I hope you and your family have a great life there. Your vlogs are exemplary and show the way for other TH-camrs. Well-researched, impassionate, factual and informative.
I get so pulled in to the topics of your videos that I forget to thank you for putting together such well presented videos. It must take an enormous amount of time and energy... getting the video snippets, developing a script, narrating and then editing it all. We are so lucky that we have people like you who will take the time and effort to thoughtfully present and discuss these issues that effect all of us.
Some of the newer skyscrapers try so hard to look distinctive, but they end up looking weird, and their styles won't age well. The interiors have odd-shaped rooms that waste space. They are expensive to maintain, expensive to heat and cool, and I suspect that some may eventually be demolished prematurely and replaced by buildings that are more efficient.
I'm a landlord and we love these dumb boxes, too. Simple to maintain, efficient, making it cheaper to build and run, lowering rent and generally nice to live in.
I'm not against boxes, but I don't like flat roofs. They might be nice in a warm dry climate, but not in northern Europe. I witnessed the problems several times over the years (thank god only in my surrounding). My school had water leaks and needed some rebuild. The students home I lived in had leaks and I made some bucks by getting the gravel from the roof down so that the roofers could go on their search. And the home of a friend in a terrace style blockbuilding also had leaks on the roof. With a tiled roof you only need to change some tiles if something happens. Of course the room usage is worse but you can have the isolation in a well workable dry surrounding and not burried under gravel and foils where the rain may stand.
It's important not to forget that architecture is first and formost about designing spaces for people to live and work in, not gigantic pieces of art to look at. thanks for the vid, loved it.
I just wished for those boxes to be a little prettier and that not every architect designs exactly the same house. There are parts in Bremen and Hamburg that are very hard to distinguish.
This is really unfortunate, because there is no need to do it that way. I know a smaller city (a bit over 30000 inhabitants) that did also such kind of development in a better way. They wanted to avoid creating a ghetto for the poor, therefore they planned ahead. The first thing was that they split it into different parts where not every part was developed by the same company. In addition they also demanded that living space for all kind of different types of income was created. Therefore neighboring buildings look similar because they are based on the same "building blocks" but each a bit different. They have different heights, some have a bit more green around then others and so on. In addition there are not 20 of the same type along a street, but maybe 2 or 3 and then a different type of these blocks starts. Some have edges, some have rounded balcony, there are different colors (not bright ones, but more subtile) and so on. Due to this the city block looks a lot more "organic" and not like a bee hive. Of course this is slightly less efficient, but I think its worth it.
To all those who claim that these boxes are 'ugly' - NO competently-maintained living space, whether one storey or many, actually _need_ be ugly, at least in the developed world. The consideration and the wise use of _plants_ - from large trees to tiny ferns, flowers to fruit, both inside and outside a building, before, during and after the lifetime of the building, can, should and will eliminate all calls of 'ugly!' in respect of most residential buildings, and certainly up to at least four or five storeys in height. Of course this presupposes the cooperation of builders, landowners, landlords, building managers, local authorities, city ordnances and the like, and may well require legislation to protect existing plantlife. And just because an apartment or home is 'small' (whatever that means, wherever you are) and/or 'boxy', does not mean that you cannot easily make it into your own individual living space, as beautiful as you like.
In the Netherlands, houses were built in the shape of a ball. The idea was to reduce the surface area. But the glaziers had great difficulty getting the arched windows sealed. The round interior is anything but practical. No further houses were built in this form afterwards.
As a British architectural photographer, I enjoyed the video and learnt a lot (particularly the cost/efficiency stuff), but I'm left a little bit confused about what is unique about the German "big dumb box". Are you referring specifically to a 5-6 story building with 4 sides and a roof? If so, those exist all over the world, including Paris as you mentioned, London and also in the US in the form of 5 over 1s. Are you just saying the US should build more mid-rise buildings? Or are you saying they should make buildings with simpler shapes? The biggest beef I have with some of the examples you showed is that the facades are so bare. I love minimalism, but when you have too much of it, it becomes monotonous. The historic centre of Freiburg looks to be full of "big dumb boxes", but they are all slightly different, with different detailing and decoration, and that's what makes it interesting to look at vs the modern development you showed. In the UK, the most desirable architectural styles are Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian. Fundamentally, the structures of these buildings are often very simple, but it's the detailing that makes them delightful. I think we need to get more of that back into architecture.
My biggest problem with these buildings is that they most often come in boring, sterile whites and greys. Add some colours to it. And some greenery, like a rooftop garden or something for insects and birds and it would be much better
HI, as a Building Regulations officer for last 50 years, (Building code official) in the UK I really enjoyed this big dumb box article a lot of good common sense. May I point out that it is only 2 years ago that the English National Government woke up to the facts on solar reflections and overheating of apartments and new dwellings, and published Overheating Requirements in out mandatory building regulations Check out Part O (oscar) "Approved Document" for our new code on this topic. Shame it took a melted car in a London street and apartments with 35-40 degrees C to wake them up. John Bone, C.Build.E MCABE
Before moving to the US we lived in Freiburg Vauban. In my opinion this is one of the best examples of modern neighborhoods. All buildings have to have a high energy efficiency standard but the buildings are not the boring white cold rectangular boxes that you see in many other newly developed neighborhoods. Instead you see a variety of individual colorful houses. Despite being one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in town it is one of the most sought-after one and the quality of live is awesome. Anyone who is interested in modern, energy-efficient, urban development that serves the people who live there I can highly recommend a (guided) tour through the neighborhood Freiburg-Vauban.
I am a big fan of dumb boxes with triangles (roofs) on top. I find them prettier, and they make more sense in places with lots of precipitation. Flat roofs and rain/snow only go well together for a while. You always ebentually develop issues with a flat roof, while slanted roofs just „shrug off“ the rain falling on them.
One of the entrepreneurs in building box houses was a famous czech entrepreneur by the name of Tomáš Baťa nciknamed The king of shoes. In the city of Zlín where his shoe factory was he built entire neighbourhoods of (for that time) modern and affordable houses that stand to this day.
When looking at New York - most people think of Manhattan but there are 5 boroughs with Staten Island being very suburban as is much of Queens. Also many of the skyscrapers were built for business/non-residential purposes. So it’s not that surprising when you mention density comparison with Paris.
13 years ago we were looking for our family home. Being a chartered HVAC engineer I thought I‘d know what to go for. No chance, my wife simply wouldn‘t even consider visiting one of the boxes on sale, absolutely no chance. At the same time most of our female friends loved the new build boxes 2 storey or 6 stories. All I would be asking for would be a roof with less maintenance - not flat. One thing is colour, we now live in a row of small houses build in the 30‘s. We don‘t share cm of property (as is nowadays normal) nor are their any regulations on colour for the neighbourhood. Although all build the same, none of them got the same colour as it’s neighbours by now. It’s very colourful and often people walking by would stop, take a look and simply enjoy 😉
Your wife has good instincts. Stark, square buildings with flat roofs are ruining Stuttgart. Developers love flat roofs because they are cheaper to build, yet a building with a flat roof is not only ugly, it is unhealthy - no circulation of air above the accommodation. Streets of buildings with pitched roofs have a more human feel than isolated clumps of buildings with flat roofs. They are easier to be around . . .
5:08 they may be more walkable, but you cant tell me that doesnt look ugly as shit. I feel like just painting a few of thoser buildings different colours and adding some ornamentation would go a long way in making the street scape more visually appealing, something which, from what I understand, is exremly important when it comes to how an area is percied and csan impact mental health in the area as well.
Brilliant architectural+environmental presentation. Loved it. I used to live in Switzerland (dumb box. Cofortable, well-insulated). Now I live in a British terrace. Quirky but it is hard work keeping mould away and warmth in. I am also for the dumb box: fater all, I live inside, and I can make the inside original. As long as the outside has a nice colour and it is clean and in good repair, with greenery not too far, as well as shops/schools/doctors, I am very happy. Switzerland (as well as Germany, Slovakia etc) have got it right!!
Oh so much to say, but im sure you are right about the size of the house. My knowledge about that is that good. But ill say this, they need stop building the "eco friendly" houses cause are are most of the time the complete opposite. An example, across the steet where i live they did a total renovation of an apartment building, tore out everything to the bare bone of the buliding and were going to make everything eco friendly. Well now a couple of years later a lot of the poeple that moved in to the new appartments have now moved out, they are falling appart cause these eco friendly materials dont last. A wile ago an architect and engineer here in Sweden said if we want to make buildings that last we need to build them from stone like they did hundred of years ago, there is a reason those buildings still stand today and many actually wants to live in them.
Finland uses lots of dumb boxes. Very pleased with this video. I do have a new priority: handicapped accessibility. Not for 70 year old me (yet) but for my 18 year old granddaughter! The newest dumb boxes are really not quite practical even though the technical measurements say "sufficient"
I really like pretty whimsical architecture and dislike uniformity, so I totally get the hate people have of "dumb boxes". But I also think that beauty can be achieved by other means, like interior design, pretty gardens, public parks or art projects that are interwoven into the neighborhood. Which simultaneously also means that lots of people are included into designing and personalizing their neighborhood, not just a tiny elite team of architects. The plainness of dumb boxes can be a feature not a flaw.
I am a building material scientist and really want to thank you for pointing out the huge amount of embodied energy in glass facades. Everybody is talking about how bad concrete is in this manner, but especially architects seem to forget, that a replacement with glass is even worse. In my opinion huge windows make a flat less livable than more conservative designs with smaller windows. You have less wall space, it has to be cleaned, in the summer the room heats up more and you need artificial cooling, Edge constructions are more prone to failures and are heat-bridges,... I am also not a big fan of lame dumb concrete boxes, but they are much better than glass boxes with a fancy geometry.
Agreed. However, our windows (big, but not overly large, admittedly) help heat our house in winter, while the shade provided by the roof protects from the summer sun, or else the sunscreens do for the short time they may be needed.
@@CaroAbebe While writing the comment, I was thinking about pure glass facades, corners made of glass or huge window areas. And I agree, if your windows have a good insulation value, they may help heating the rooms on sunny days.
Great blog Retired British structural engineer. Interesting post. Dumb boxes often used but I have some bêtes noirs when it comes to medium rise social housing. These are often dumb boxes with load bearing masonry walls and precast concrete. Cantilever balconies. Balconies with posts at the outside corners are easier and faster to construct. Failure to stack the flats. Large multi bedroom flats at ground floor requiring transfer structure to support the upper floors with steel columns threaded into partition walls.. Level thresholds obtained by dropping the insulated structural ground floor well below external ground level. This puts the underground drainage lower which increases excavation and inspection chamber sizes. I personally consider having the wall plate of a timber framed building below ground level is asking for problems.
Thanks for showing St. Louis, MO. It never gets any praise or good attention. Before urban renewal it was a true gem in America but has become chopped up and disconnected to the max. My Grandma grew up around the area where Pruit Igoe was built and hearing her stories about city life in the 1930s to the 1950s made me question why we ever built suburbia and ran away from city life so quickly.
It has always been so interesting to me because when I hear other researchers in my field of study talk about urban decline they usually point out what occurred in Detroit - but what happened to St. Louis was on another level.
The boxes can look a bit sterile and unwelcoming, but with greenery, green spaces, pedestrian lounging areas (benches, gathering places, public barbecue places etc.) this can be alleviated a lot. Münster has a model district with a lot of walkable areas connecting low-story boxes that form a very pleasant neighborhood. The Vauban neighborhood in Freiburg is another example of this concept done right and expanded upon well. And don't forget awesome roof-terraces and gardens that you can potentially put on the flat roofs. The most important thing is that we build way more of these multi-story buildings of 2-4 floors (higher becomes too intimidating and dominating and oppressive) instead of detached single family houses in towns and cities. These dumb boxes also work really well with renewable energy integration. All in all a boatload of positives for society, cities, livability, sustainability.
All of these dumb boxes make everything look the same, take away a part of the identity of a region, ... why do people like to travel? To see the same buildings in every place? No. People travel to France, Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. to see the cities with their special style and flair. In China - even though they try to put special features in every single compound, in the end everything looks the same, and you can't distinguish a picture from a random neighborhood from Beijing with that of Wuhan for example. The same is if you take a picture from Moscow and try it with a random picture from any former Soviet city. But you would definitely be able to say oh, that is a French town, oh that is a Swiss town, oh that is a town from Italy. etc. We should start thinking again on making things special and beautiful instead of just "useful" and "cheap". The world would actually benefit!
Big fan of dumb boxes here. I feel it ultimately boils down to community spirit. Make housing practical, and make public spaces nice (trees, greenery). Add the occasional eye-catcher (what used to be cathedrals vel sim). I don't really mind a fancy university library, the Freiburg one just went wrong.
I'm a function over form kind of guy. I find beauty in added function, durability and cost savings. I live in a "cookie cutter house", and I love it for its simplicity.
5 1/2 years ago my wife and I moved into a new dumb box in Kohlscheid ( a small suburb of Aachen). It is absolutely fantastic. The building has two stairwells, each with 4 one bedroom, 6 two bedroom, and 4 three bedroom apartments over five floors. There are storage rooms for each apartment in the basement, as well as a garbage collection room, heating, and an underground garage. We have a 3 bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. There is an elevator from the basement to the 5th floor. Everything in really ideal for us as we're retired, and mobility will someday be an issue. With a large pantry in the apartment, we have our washer and dryer here, and like most Germans we can dry our laundry on our balcony if the weather permits. Our energy costs in the box are substantially lower than in our previous home. I love the German construction methods. Seldom does one see wood frame construction. The insulation between apartments is superb. We never hear our neighbours unless someone is moving in or out and you hear drilling. We're 300 meters from a very nice supermarket and bakery, and bus service into the city. Doctors offices, pharmacies, other shopping are all easily accessible,.
Recently re-habbed a big box (literally a cube with zero modulation) in a downtown instead of building in a green-field on the edge of town. Everything you say in this video is true, and so little understood by most people. Your video does a great job describing the benefits of this green building, with great depth-of-understanding. Great examples. Great contrast with less successful designs. GO ASHTON!
Interesting as always, Ashton! My late father was an architect, studied as such in the 1940's and thus steeped in "functionalist style", which was much about doing away with heave ornaments and making for better living conditions for "the masses". He would probably endorsed this episode of yours. The idea of this as an architect stile was somewhat derailed by the industrialized building techniques of the 1960's. But building boxes doesn't necessarily equal lack of style. Another thing which you hinted at is that the size is important for the environment to be livable. Personally I don't understand the present vogue about building 30 - 50 floor buildings. It is not what we used to do in Europe. No matter what country you study, traditional housing has been about 3 - 4 story buildings. My father used to compare Denmark and Sweden in the 1960's, when we had a big building boom in Sweden. In the inner cities then, if one house in a blocks condemned, a big construction company bought the whole block and tore it down, building a new, much too large to be esthetically, box instead. That made for city centers mordor less all looking the same. In Denmark however, they still were poorer than in sweden (it's quite the reverse these days). In the same situation therefore, they tore down the condemned house and squeezed a dew one in where the old one had been standing. Thus the new house automatically didn't differ too much in dimensions from the old one. And the over all environment looked pretty much the same as before.
Love your passion for your housing videos. Lots of information/facts in this video. So glad you have taken the scientific route for your videos.. you've come a long way from when you were "the Blackforest Family" and had just started your channel.
Thanks for a great insight into all of these factors!! We recently bought our first apartment and the outside is so ugly but we were floored by how little energy is needed, both during the super hot summer and the colder months. We have to use heat eventually but the temperatures had to drop considerably for us to start using our floor heating. And in summer, all our American friends were like "how do Europeans live without AC?!" and we really did well all summer, even though temperatures did go up a lot last summer. I also love that you included the community aspects and the decrease of segregation. It's not going to disappear completely but even a decrease is extremely valuable to community building and reduction of harmful effects of differences in starting positions. I'm not naive enough (anymore) to expect them to completely disappear but any improvement is a step in the right direction.
Was nutzt mir die schönste und futuristischte Architektur , wenn ich die Bau und Betriebskosten nicht zahlen kann ? Dann doch lieber eine Box. Übrigens nichts neues. Die Bauhaus Architekten und Wohndesigner der 1920er Jahre in Deutschland bauten auch schon so. Einfach , praktisch und günstig und trotzdem sehr modern . Die waren ihrer zeit weit vorraus.
Freiburg was never really on my radar. The only thing I knew was that the classic horror film "Suspiria" was filmed there. But it seems like a really cool place. Freiburg has a university, a university clinic, the Europa Park is close, there are at least 2 large water parks nearby, the beautiful Black Forest, Switzerland, Lake Constance and France are just a stone's throw away and Freiburg is also progressive in renewable energy. I think I should move there.
With your rather sober analysis you really put a dent in the aspirations of future architects. The term "form follows function" exists for a reason. For sustainable future housing of a growing world population achitectional escapades don't provide any more solutions than ultimately just pleasing the egos of the builders-owners or the architects. The dumb boxes may not be the solution that most pleases the eye but they're certainly suitet to provide affordable housing and the possibilty of creating living communities. As always, a profoundly researched and very well argued video. Perhaps it should even be made a standard reminder of developing departments in city councils to keep them level headed. Have a nice week.
I like the different people living in the new development Alte Güterbahn Viertel in Freiburg, student housing, retirement home, social housing, commercial rent apartments. I hope there are also homes/apartments you can buy, shops and work studios, for dentists, doctors, sculptors, painters, furniture craftsmen or just a little cafe or döner shop. I also saw a playground and some greenery and trees. This all makes/builds a vibrant community even if it’s new.
The apartment I live in is almost a big, dumb box. It's exactly six storeys tall and contains eight apartments. The highest storey has a roof-top terrace and is pretty small, the other apartments have loggia-style balconies. Due to its location at a five-road intersection, it's staircase-shaped. But the building is very well insulated, the apartments get a lot of natural light, it's lovely. Literally the only downside is that the footprint of it is quite big, which for the folks living in it mostly means we all dread it when the Kehrwoche arrives or it's winter, meaning there's about an hour or more of labor necessary to keep the sidewalks clean and accesible xD Also, after having gotten into urbanism (as an amateur), I have realized that if I ever have the luxury of building my own home, it'll definitely be a pretty simple bungalow with a flat, greened roof (and solar panels), to make it an efficient little box to live in.
What a fantastically educational video. People like you are so badly needed to give advice to 'Dumb Governments' and ' Dumb Local Authorities' to let them see the bigger picture in their planning decisions.
Big dumb boxes without any architectural flourishes or differentiating colors are the bane of the existence of boxes. The boxes themselves are done somewhat differently in Europe with more retail on the bottom and less scale so that they don’t seem so overwhelmingly dominant. Those details like color and architectural flourishes add to the visual interest and personality of a building and are worth the money.
They may be called dumb boxes, but I think the library is more of an example of a dumb box. Cleaning the glass every 6-8 weeks will also cost a fortune. New developments need to think of energy efficiency as the most important factor of a building. Maintenance, reusability and durability of the used materials must be second and comfortable living and working in a building should be third. The architecture of the exterior should be forth and last. A BREEAM performance score of a building takes care of the first three. It isn’t a mandatory performance, but it should be. Currently it is a voluntary standard, but it is increasingly becoming an asset in real estate and housing development, in Europe that is. The US and Middle East hardly know what BREEAM is and where it stands for and don’t/won’t design their (iconic) buildings accordingly. I saw a housing development video of 2023 in the US and they put poorly double glazing in uninsolated aluminium window frames. We used that double glazing in the eighties, we are currently at HR+++ or triple glazing and we always have insulated aluminium window frames. No sufficient insolation of the outer walls or roof. You don’t see double gap sealing of window frames, flimsy hinges and locks a burglar would laugh at, no solar panels (and it was in Arizona). We wouldn’t get a house insurance with those hinges and locks. Separation walls that only separates physically, every sound goes through it, probably no building code for this. Houses so close together without fire protection they’re a fire hazard for the whole neighborhood. No mandatory smoke alarms or CO alarm. The US is so backwards in (energy) efficient construction. Their building codes are laughable. Americans really build dumb boxes, more cardboard boxes with a nice facade. There is whole territory to gain here in the US.
Thanks! I always learn something from your videos. I like a big dumb box, but have seen other parts of Germany where they are painted bright colors. Makes the area so cheerful. Who needs all that fancy design when you can have a functional building in a bright sunshine yellow or baby blue?!!
Only issue with dumb boxes is if they are placed in a rain heavy area. Slap a sloped roof on them and they are good to go. Or the neighborhood is really fancy old buildings.
I'm in the process of buying an apartment from a company that focuses on building condominiums. They say that white cubes ("dumb boxes") are most versatile because they are so neutral. There's certainly some expressive architecture, but the vast majority of apartments built is not among it. With a practical floor plan that most can agree on, the same apartment can be furnished for singles, couples or families and the rooms can also change their purpose to some extent, for example when children grow up and move out and don't need their rooms any more. The exception are the bathroom, toilet and kitchen, which all require some installations that are decided upon from the beginning. Then by the placement of freshwater and wastewater connections and electric outlets it's pretty clear where your sink, dishwasher, stove and fridge goes even if the apartment isn't sold with a pre-installed kitchen. The rest is flexible and can be adjusted, probably better than a more "styled" apartment would.
As a 67 yo engineer, I'm totally with you on the importance of smart architecture. You didn't discuss balance, but I'm guessing you'd acknowledge that we humans also have a creative side that responds strongly to artistic design. Not that each and every building needs to be artistic... but, a sprinkling of whimsical buildings here and there can go a long way towards scratching that artistic itch. In many European cities you have the wonderful contrast of the new, old, and really old, so that's where I think the box design makes lots of sense... don't aesthetically compete with the old... dumb down much of the new to accentuate the old. And, "suburban" neighborhoods can be more about the outdoor and communal spaces. Keep the housing simple. For the last 10 years I've been thinking that our current trend towards open concept inside our homes is creating the feeling of kitchens, dining tabes and couches all stuffed in gymnasiums... I just see inside noise pollution... where do you go to read book or quietly watch a TV program. I'd like to see movable internal walls that would allow us to reconfigure the space for different needs... a box design would be just fine, and then go crazy with movable wall configurations for that artistic itch.
Dumb boxes in my country brings to mind the hastily and cheaply built apartment buildings from 70s and 80s, we sometimes call those "the suicide boxes" because of uninspiring and depressing environment and appearance. Personally I prefer older architecture, it's just more appealing and inspiring to eye while being functional and seem to hold time better than boxes from that time period. Maybe there is a way to make them more appealing and resilient at the same time.
building quality in the 70s was so bad. I once was explained that that was a time when due to new building materials it was possible to build cheap for the first time. So there was a building rush of cheap constructions. Unfortunately nobody considered the quality and longevity. In Vienna buildings from that area are already being torn down, which is a shame after so little time....
@@llleiea True. Additionally there was the energy crisis, so the idea was to build everything more energy efficient, which meant trying to insulate everything and build houses like bottles. Some new innovations that didn't go well at all. Maybe some of them would have fared better if the overall architecture (on small houses and rowhouses) wasn't so keen on low profile boxes with foundation as low to the ground as possible and without anything stopping water/moisture from the ground entering the lowest wooden structures... Now we have new energy crisis in a bit different form and I'm afraid that we will see some more new innovations that don't survive the test of time.
It's not just the box, the factor for good places are living spaces liked defined by Strong Town (see Jason Slaughter, Not Just Bikes) making it possible to have have walkable cities, not dominated by the car. The Netherlands are often mentioned but a town like Gijon in Spain has partial elements of this concept. The buildings in downtown are 10 stories high but the the life in the evenings is bustling, because the plane at street level has always a cafe, shop or restaurant.
Just because a lot people think that the box looks dumb, doesn't mean you can't make it a nice neighborhood. Lots of green and things+layout around the boxes can make up for the appearant dumbness.
I really hate it when public buildings have these architecture competitions for them and it's supposed to be this groundbreaking design. It does nothing for the people paying for it and it takes money away from other important things. Just build it into a dumb box, everyone will be happy because they get to use it because construction will actually be finished on time and it won't be closed for construction constantly because it was designed for form, not function.
I'd like to make a video about this because it is a difference from large-scale construction projects in Germany to the States. Government buildings, libraries, and even social housing are typically done through a jurored, open design competition. But the flip side of that coin is what happens in the US. Many government buildings are done via RFPs or "request for proposal". While this "technically" means they are open for bids, they are usually written so that either one specific contractor always gets the bid or they prioritize the cheapest possible solution (and then subsequently go over budget).
@@TypeAshtonoh, I'm afraid you won't be able to find too many differences between the US and Germany in that regard. What you describe sounds very familiar.
@@TypeAshton I'd love to watch that video! Although I get the appeal of design competitions coming from a US-American viewpoint, I am frankly disillusioned by their reality. In my opinion, the competition environment favors flashy, often impractical architecture, for the following reason: Although aspects like sustainability and cost play a major role during the judging itself, dumb boxes are seldom featured among the entries, so jurors can't even pick the option that *would* be best. For architects, these competitions are an opportunity to show what they can do and to present themselves to more people to ultimately get more work, even if they didn't win the competition. So of course, they're not going to show up with a dumb box for an entry, even if it would be best for the purpose, because the people who decide whether or not to task an architect with designing a building care more about the looks than about the practicality. So all the public buildings we ever get are suboptimal and instead flashy. Also, many politicians like to commemorate themselves by having a large and flashy public building built, but this rarely ever works. The costs explode, the building has to be fixed right after construction and all that politician will be remembered for is wasting taxpayer's money with an eternal construction site. Because of this, new, flashy buildings are favored in financing, while many necessary, but less flashy measures don't make the cut. I am similarly disillusioned with the reality of the competitions for who gets to actually build the roof and so on. It's about time to mention that I am a technician in my town's theatre. The building is publicly owned, and my employer, the publicly owned city marketing company, rents it to use it as a theatre. Because we don't have a facility manager, my colleagues and I have to take care of the building in many aspects even though we're theater technicians. Because of this, I know a lot about the problems this now 50 year old brutalist building is plagued by right after a major renovation and many of them could have been avoided if they didn't just hire the cheapest contractor. Although I know that this is supposed to prevent corruption by forcing that the cheapest contractor gets the bid, I've only seen it lead to inferior build quality, leading to things like water damage with high costs down the line. So yeah, a great system in theory, but not so great in practice.
I live in Freiburg too, and I agree with many things of your video. But I have a problem with the flat roofs, because they leak very often and require a lot of polysterol insulation which is bad for the environment and bad for fire protection. Insulation made from wood, is far better in both categories, but you can use wooden insulation only on angeld roofs.
Thank you for the many very well-researched videos. You can tell that a lot of work goes into it. The videos are great just as they are. If anything, may I suggest using a deesser for the voice over?
Great video! So far, not a big fan of those dumb big boxes popping up everywhere, but you opened my eyes as to why they're actually not that bad - thanks for that 🙃
The most amazing thing about these tiny boxes is ... that someone called them big! It's so refreshing to see human scale in low-cost construction (okay, not exactly low-cost but certainly not luxury). A typical new construction in my city is at least 30 floors, often 40+.
A thought provoking video again. Thank you I would love to see more art incorporated into the facades like it was in buildings before the mid 20th century. The art could reflect the taste and fashion of the time. As you pointed out, the budget saved on building a "dumb box" could then be used to make the view from the outside morre interesting.
I‘d like to chip in my two cents on the Freiburg University Library. Taking the data from the University’s presentation (available online) things don’t look as bad as they first seemed after watching the video. According to the University’s website the overall amount of ‘usable space’ (Nutzfläche) is the same as the old building’s while the surface area of the new building (the building’s shell) is about 60% of the old one’s. The new building also features a number of sustainability perks like core temperated slabs, high efficiency glazing, a heat recovery scheme and ground water cooling - all of which were still pretty innovative 15 years ago and supposedly leaves the building with an energy consumption of only a third of that of the old building. Of course the website doesn’t talk about the amount of grey energy that went into the construction nor does it explain why the old building had to be torn down completely instead of following a remodeling concept. So, all in all I’d dare to conclude that the building shouldn’t be counted as a complete failure. That being said, I do agree to the point you made about the many advantages simple ‘dumb boxes’ provide as excellent building blocks for a modern city - as long as this goes together with a meaningful concept for the design of the urban space.
With more than 40 years experience in construction it‘s still fun to listen to architects and their ideas and discussions… We hear them… while we build buildings… and mostly the stuff we build is good although they planned it… and of course those „dumb boxes“ are the logical consequence for sustainable construction… as much as architects aren‘t… At least here in Austria…
I really enjoyed this video, especially as it showcased the advantageous building physics (area/volume ratio) and embodied energy of these “boxes.” Another advantage: their flat roofs can support gardens. Paradoxically, green roofs can extend the lifetime of the roof materials. I believe productive gardens on roofs and landscapes will be a major trend in coming years, and will do a lot to improve the appeal and street experience around these sites.
We have a green roof on our house! There is a science to it for sure. We have a special gardener that comes once a year to pull weeds and replace any bare areas with specially approved plants to extend the life of the roof.
Dear Ashton, what a great documentary you put together! I have no knowledge about the building industry, but I just disliked the uniform buildings. Your well put together content here has really changed my perception and opinion about those big white dumb boxes. Well done! 👏👏👏
In physics we have the concept of the spherical cow: when figuring something out you start with the absolute most basic thing possible, and only add what is necessary. Whittling down from flourish to a box is turning that around. I think the reason it works so well in physics is that every addition adds more to the equation to solve, and who wants to do unnecessary math? In architecture, extras translate into money, so...humans are gonna human.
Rainwater management is another thing to consider. When we concrete over areas, those places can not naturally drain, which shifts the burden elsewhere. When there is heavy rain, the water falling onto buildings has to go somewhere, and ultimately that usually means rivers, creating the potential for floods. There are strategies to avoid excessive runoff, but they depend on the right building densities to ensure there is sufficient space to provide natural soakage.
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Hi ! what are you doing on diwali?
To be honest, today my entire goal is to survive. 😂 I am on day 5 of single-parenting while Jonathan is on a work trip.. which means I am at home with an active toddler and a 6 month old with a mission to never sleep. 🤪
So please, have fun and enjoyment for me! I can live vicariously through someone else. ❤️
I would never give any company or government body my dna. Not by choice. You will never know who they will sell it to or give it to. What companies and governments say they do and what they actually do are not the same. (Not paranoid just not very trusting)
Those DNA testing companies sell your data to 3rd parties (insurance companies, advertisers etc). They also have had data breaches. There is also and ethical concern your decision to put your DNA info out there gives companies info on your brothers, sisters, kids, parents, cousins etc.
@@gesus6613 so true
So, I’m an architect in Germany. I worked in couple housing projects that are “dumb boxes” let me tell you, there is a lot of thought go into these. For housing, people dont want weird shapes that is hard to furnish. And also as you said, it is cost effective and still they have a charachter. It is also more enjoyable living in these buildings, as they are very well isolated for heat and mold (which is a big issue in old buildings here) also you pay less money to heat your home. I believe these kinds of buildings are ideal for housing, but when it comes to public buildings like libraries I think we should think outside of the box. These are not just building that “form follows function” these are landmarks and stuff that stay in peoples minds. I aggree with all the critism and we as construction industry should do better to prevent these undesirable outcomes. We have the tools for it but as most industries, architecture is also run by dinosours who are resistant to change from the traditional methods. In general I aggree with you and thank you for this video 😊
Good point. I was going to say the same thing about the library. Every city needs landmarks that draw attention and act as a tourist attraction. It would ever make sense to build every building like that, but I think it's allowable, even better, to have a few buildings that are a bit out of the ordinary.
That really is a very important factor - I go with Ritter Sport on that one "Quadratisch, praktisch, gut". I want 90 Degree corners and straight angles in my rooms, thank you ;)
(Also, I recently viewed a place that was nice and modern and very well lit due to a lot of floor-deep windows... unfortunately, the living room had those windows on THREE sides, so you almost had no place to put ANY furniture in that room against a wall at all or it looked very weird.
Fine, make landmarks look good, but the specific Freiburg case is an example of what not to do.
The oversight that the shell would turn into a dangerous hazard for example should not have become an oversight and is a glaring failure in simple due diligence by the designers involved, and the designers responsible should be renowned for their failures.
@@-----REDACTED-----It's astonishing how often problems with reflections happen. If I recall correctly, there's one architect who designed two buildings that at times focused sunlight on the space before the building (at least one of those was parking) and made it extremely hot (enough to melt plastic). I can perhaps see how that mistake happened the first time, but how can anyone explain the second time? The guy *knew* about the possible problem.
Whenever I see a really odd structure built to impress - so Frank Gehry for example, I think of what will happen after 40 years of expanding and contracting - so how ir will be maintained. The value of stone and concrete in historic structures is partly in how well they age.
A lot of people are quite fed up with those sterile modernistic boxes, also in Europe. I can recommend "the aesthetic city" channel for a different perspective than the modernistic monoculture that is predominant under architects. But like with the historic examples that you showed, you can have a box shaped building with the colour, details and ornaments, that make it lively and liveable.
love you for mentioning this.
Yes, don't mind the shape as long as it is beautiful. Although with this approach I will say the buildings must look real. I lack the vocabulary to describe it, but for example, when you go to Las Vegas or the Cheescake Factory. You can tell all the buildings are fake and artificial which also makes me want to vomit. It can't be a piece of cardboard with some paint on it. It has to look like a well crafted, beautiful, and real. If they can achieve this to the point that it is indistinguishable to the discerning eye, then by all means, bring on the boxes
Disagree with the speaker here. Stark, flat roofs are ruining Stuttgart - more and more buildings built without the traditional pitched roofs. Developers love flat roofs because they are cheaper to build, yet a building with a flat roof is not only ugly, it is unhealthy - no circulation of air above the accommodation. Streets of buildings with pitched roofs have a more human feel than streets of buildings with flat roofs. They are easier to be around . . .
thanks for the recommendation
There the "Berliner Dach" comes in handy, flat but pitched. @@jamesneilsongrahamloveinth1301
I agree with everything you said. I just wish buildings had more colours, or at least distinguishing elements of colour such as window frames, doors, balconies etc. Or a bit more use of tiles/mosaics on the fascades.
For Germans, those houses are already TOO colourful. But that's just Germans, they don't like noise, even visual.
When it comes to tiles and such, be careful what you wish for th-cam.com/video/sp3tK8Vqv9w/w-d-xo.html
My town renovated theirs and they installed exactly that. They look cute now.
people do not like those colorful houses. We had a street where they changed the rental houses to colors in the violet scale. They did not look bad, but it took not long and they were white again. They are now still called the Milka houses , because the color scheme looked like the color scheme from Milka chocolates. And we have a house in the city called the blue house - it was blue about 30years ago and it's now white/gray. But it is still known by the locals at the blue house. Colors are okay if they look natural like red bricks, green ivy on the walls, but screaming colors are seen as problematic.
@@seanthiar Agree that generally houses should be in muted colours and/or colours that reflect natural building materials such as brick and stone, rather than random primary colours just for the sake of it.
"Big dumb boxes" are all fine, especially if they are newly built to modern energy-saving norms. If they just weren't so damn boring to look at, most of the time. The small frills you find on old housing, the fact that even when they had been built to match each other's style, is what makes old buildings / quarters "humane". And this is something modern housing dearly misses.
I'd take some 19th century or older building that was cored and modernized internally any time over the house I live in right now.
So how about this compromize: a big dumb box with an old-style street-side facade.
i'm with you on this. big dumb boxes might be, from a technical point of view, great. But they sorely lack in soul nourishing design. And i think there can be a compromise that has the best of both worlds. And i think if we look at those 100+ year old buildings, that are similar to those big dumb boxes, but more stimulating, we already see how to accomplish that. But we have to reject the brutalist design and all those metal and glass facades for that.
That's why landscaping around them and creating good common areas is so important, I pass through several dumb box neighbourhoods every day and none of them are ugly neighbourhoods, they're surrounded by greenery, playgrounds and ponds. I've even seen GDR era dumb boxes that manage to look good by maximising greenspace between buildings and adding murals to strategic areas which also helps deter graffiti.
There is ways to make them cuter! E.g. my home town upgraded some of the smaller ones and put in wooden lattice shutters, some neat sliding shutters and more green stuff on them and they look good! They can absolutely be redeemed and even fancy façade elements made from moulds wouldn't cost a lot.
Right? I feel like the "big dumb boxes" are the McDonalds Hamburger of architecture. Upsides: Pretty cheap materials, very simple assembly, makes you feel alright (especially if it's the only thing you've been exposed to, yet), fulfill the basic requirements for humans to exist. Downsides: You can't tell if you're in a box neighbourhood / eating a McD Hamburger in Munich, Paris, Moscow, New York, Tokyo or any semi-rural town that still has their own McD for some reason, unless you look at outside factors like air humidity or temperature. In the form I currently see modern buildings, they're so incredibly bland and same-y. For me as a German, the only way box-neighbourhoods could be even more boring, would be if we adopted a grid layout for the streets.
Some more info about the University library: the designers originally used a specific glass but the state decided to cut costs and just use normal glass and that's where all the problems started. The sun reflecting from the glass was getting so hot, it actually started melting plastic parts of cars parked in front of the building. It was insane.
Dump boxes create a canvas for aesthetics. They need not be dull or monotonous, since it is the surface rather than the inside structure people see. Like in the early 1900' we shoul keep decorations separated from the functional parts to get both better and cheaper.
Yes you can paint (or render) them different colours, window frames etc.
Also orientation and height differences so that you break up lines between buildings.
i absolutely agree, green facades and beautiful colours go a long way to make boxes look much nicer.
you can even use an outer "shell" and those can although benefit the energy balance of a construction, replacing some panels with solar cells or use an air gap between outer and inner layer. Boxes can be to an extend be build much sturdier then other constructions, regarding to earthquakes or other enviromental hazards or cheaper using prefabricated parts.
But decoration is still taboo among architects.
But the 1900s with "Jugendstil" was a time when functional parts of the architecture were also used as beautiful decorations. It was not just a plain box and some artwork glued to the surface to make it pretty.
As a student from Freiburg, I truly appreciate someone presenting the insanity that is our university library to the world. It is one of the biggest running jokes among students here that the building is just terrible and how everything about it including it's design and construction is dysfunctional in some way or another.
It was already a running joke from the start (Enough to inspire Extra3 and I considered it nice of them back then that they did not go further.).🤐
I studied in Freiburg back when it was reopened and would be lying if I said I liked it.
At least it was open 24/7 back then😎
It wasn't even mentioned that the top floor is permanently closed because it lacks a second fire escape route, reducing the space available to students even further.
It's not terrible. The stairways in the silent section is to loud, but the big non-silent part is win for students. I like it's look and shape.
@@gargoyle7863 Dunno if it changed since I finished my bachelor, but back then it was always terribly crowded. Almost no chance to load laptops without causing the staff to complain about too long cables.
I also used to bring Ohropax...
Just the notorious things.
@@Never_again_against_anyone My times at the bib are over as well but I agree it's crowded. I think they underestimated the demand. So yes, maybe they should have build a boring box for maximum space.
I live in a box. The original inspiration behind was the Bauhaus. “Form follows function.” A simple and timeless design. The first box building in Germany was built in Dessau in 1925. Simplicity was behind its design and the American version, the Mid Century Modern, was based on the same principle. Modernism is about architecture and the things contained within it, not calling attention to themselves.
Unfortunately, though not entirely due to its own fault, the Bauhaus motto often led to beauty being relegated, if not outright ignored. Methinks that beauty is a function necessary for humanity.
@@ebahapo You're right about beauty being necessary to humans but the better Bauhaus designs are absoluely beautiful!
@@harryhirsch3637 Yes, many of the original work was. But even some of the original work had abandoned beauty. Even more so by its followers. As it so often happens to those intending to revolutionize, the proverbial baby gets thrown with the bath water.
But the first what was lost: Form follows function. 🤥
@@ebahapo Buildings are also areas, where you stay or not. If you are dehumanized in a building or row, but you have to serve it's proposed idea, you are not a free man anymore unlike you really choose that. Bauhaus is nothing more than what you see in 2:10. That being said, it's a shame and crime to use it on a wide scale. Other designs are less penetrant.
These buildings are also very normal in Denmark. They are so well insulated that in winter, even with the heating on, you often get ice on the windows in the mornings before the sun hits them.
Getting iced windows inside means your windows aren’t insulating that much. The humidity contained within the warm air (breathing/cooking/showering/…) is condensing at the window and freezing at its surface. Kinda bad (from the insulation perspective).
@@agn855i thinked he meant iced on the outside pretty sure
@@GlumandaHD yeah, I meant on the outside 😅
@@agn855 We also get ice cream- on the outside, which is an excellent sign ;-)
We also have ice on the outside of windows (when I don't put the outside blindes down which I usually do).
Whats weird is that the facade also has ice or condensate water on it, and in the morning sun it sublimates and steams of the wall on the east. Looks really unusual to me 😅
Here in Portugal we love "the beauty of simplicity".
Those dumb boxes have a long and proud history in Germany. My grandmother and later my uncle as well as my father used to live in the Westhausen settlement in Frankfurt/Main. One could say that Westhausen is an early prototype of those unpretentious settlements consisting of simple square and dumb boxes.
That apartment was handed on from one family member to another because as a mere mortal you would otherwise haven't had a chance to rent a place in such an attractive neighborhood. As it turned out, people feel at home and love to live there.
In the 1920s when the neighborhood was built, many of the design principles you are presenting here were revolutionary new developments (others, like the emphasis on mixed income neighborhoods are even older). Still it seems the original builders got a lot if it right, since after all much of the original installations are still functional and appropriate today.
I've been able to see a new quarter grow in my home town over the last couple of years. It's made up of 'big dumb boxes,' but they all are built a little differently. Some a little wider, some a little more narrow, some a floor taller or shorter (I think there's nothing over six floors there, either), and they have different shades of browns, whites, and earthy reds. They all look nice, they form a nice new area to live in, having green spaces in-between them, and I know that they were easy enough to build as well. They don't even look that much like boxes to me, they just look nice. That's a lot of living space on an area which used to hold a fair ground (used only twice or so a year) and a large market hall that is now outside the town by the Autobahn access where it's much easier to deliver and pick up the fruits, vegetables, and flowers traded there.
In Stewart Brand’s book, “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built” he wrote about the need for buildings to built in such a way as to allow flexibility for future use. A building can be built for one purpose and be used for something completely different decades later. Occupants may have planned for one thing, but through living in the structure may discover the need to make adaptations.
Box shape buildings are inherently more adaptable for changing needs.
Great video, as per usual. You really have taken TH-cam vlogging to another level. So well researched, and so well represented. Always look forward to these vids.
This why I am happy to live in Amsterdam, where even the new build 'boxes' at least don't look like boring central European white boxes. Facades are generally done in a relatively varied way and have some sort of refinement detail. Always brick, because that works best with our weather and building heritage. And also looks better than stark plaster. I don't see what some pastel colours on the boring boxes would have cost that much more. I'm not advocating for richly decorating the boxes (though secretly that would be my wish), but big white boxes from your example are a literal horror scenario for where I live. It is very noticable that German new buildings usually look very stark compared to Dutch buildings. And no thats not always because they would be more efficient, it's also a matter of taste of what is good architecture.
The Dutch also lead Europe in building single family homes in suburbs. It's perhaps the most "American" country in the EU.
@@aileenmarzannaWhaaat?
@@aileenmarzanna wdym by that? most of our housing are apartments and row houses, single family housing is prety rare for the low to upper class family, you'll find that most new suburbs built here are multi-family houses.
The white colours might seem boring but actually it makes sense. In Freiburg at least because it's in the warmest and sunniest region of Germany. An insulating plaster not only keeps the warmth in winter but also helps keeping a flat cool during hot days.
Brighter colours help to lessen the Heat Island Effect that plague most cities. So in that sense, white facades do make sense. Yet I really like to see more creativity in architecture. Maybe in interesting shading or greenery.
One of the reasons I'm so glad for homeoffice is that my office is in one of those glass designs. After over a decade, they never got the internal climate right and I had health issues for a long time due to that. My homeoffice is in a recent-built "big dumb box", and I pity everyone who has to spend most of their day in a terrarium like the one holding my office, where teh only actual walls surround the staircases and bathrooms.
At the core "dumb boxes" heed the maxim "form follows function". You can still got your individual touch by applying color, small ornaments or even piling a slightly bigger box onto a slightly smaller box, like you can see in many medieval cities. And boxes consisting of two or more semi-detached houses are more efficient and even in many cases more aesthetically pleasing than rows of detached houses showing each the exactly same playful details.
I really think architecture went wrong somewhere over the last hundred years. Whenever I see a "new" building (be it from 1960 or from yesterday) I think "did we forget how to make simple but nice and pleasant looking buildings?". I really hate the kind of dystopian concrete blocks that our cities in Finland are unfortunately full of. Somehow I feel like we adopted the "commie blocks" without ever being communist ourselves. But whenever they try to build something new and "modern" instead, it always just ends up looking too complicated and weird. There's nothing wrong with the shape of a box. We do like the walls to be at a 90 degree angle in our homes after all. What makes the old cities in central Europe so beautiful in my opinion is that they actually put some effort on the facade. Make the colors nice, put up some decorations maybe, and then no one will even notice the building is actually in the shape of a box. It's really important for our mental health that the places around us look nice, so please don't just ignore that in the name of efficiency. But making facades look pretty is probably much cheaper than making the buildings some kind of weird innovative shape that just ends up looking weird anyway.
As architect Louis Sullivan said, "Form follows function". There is a reason why the majority of single family homes are boxy with a gabled roof. Those Swiss chalets are not built to look idyllic, they are built to handle the snow loadI look at some of the commercial buildings that Helmut Jahn built here in Chicago, and they were replete with problems of heating and air-con-ditioning, sound control, leaks, and in the case of the new air terminal at O'Hare airport, a glass roof where the reflection off it blinded the air traffic controllers in the control tower!
The members of the "form follows function" cult always forget that "joy of use" and living in an aesthetic city that makes your eyes happy are also part of the FUNCTION! We built wonderfull buildings during historism or belle epoche but after that it was so much brutalism and boring blocks. There are youtube videos online why we dont build beautifull anymore. Its such a shame that my city demolished the most beautiful train stations to replace them with brutalism because all architectural students get taught "form follow function" without this IMPORTANT part of the function!
(I wrote my thesis about Joy of Use and Emotional Design because i was so fed up being indoctrinated by Form Follows Function maniacs that all forgot that making the user happy was a function. )
@@SonjaHamburg Imo too many confuse "Form follows function" with "Building efficiently". I know I am not an architect, just some rando from the internet, but even for me, the difference between "Function dictates form" and efficient building is rather clear. If we took the first sentence literally, we all should live in ball-shaped houses, because spherical shapes maximize surface-to-volume ratio. But from an efficiency viewpoint, that's just the most idiotic thing you can do, because circles just don't scale well when placed next to each other (the old "stacking tin-cans vs boxes" problem). Not to speak of the structural problems it would bring with it.
But to get back to your initial comment: aesthetically pleasant buildings don't clash with efficient building in my opinion. Take dumb boxes for example: On the inside, they are usually more spacious, "sun-flooded" and friendly than most older buildings I know from personal experience, while being better at keeping the temperature at the level you want. They have larger windows, better isolation and the way the rooms are shaped is more to our "modern" standards.
The thing that many people seem to dislike is the facade. And while I personally like that style of architecture with lots of glass and blocky aesthetic, I get why people perceive it as boring and "cold". But there are SO MANY examples of how to make it better. Easiest is of course to just paint them. But you can use greenery on the facade, which also helps cleaning air and cooling down the surroundings. Or add some fancy ornaments onto the main wall, add some wooden elements to break up the surface, organize a street-art competition and the winner can decorate one of the walls with their art etc. So many possibilities! Architects and Builders just have to use them.
@@SonjaHamburg you can go for pretty&unusable if you want to. Maintenance cost will easily double without any benefit beyond looking good from the outside. You know, I TEND to look at MY house from the inside 99% of the time, if I'm outside I look at my GARDEN 99% of the time. Going for "looks" is usually nothing more than make-believe, like most modern Haute Couture is utter crap that can't be worn beyond the catwalk. Architects should be forced to live in their concoctions for a couple of years - they wouldn't be doing them anymore. Learned that from an architect with a Civil Engineering degree.
So often these days form follows function seems to have been replaced with from over function I've walked into some buildings and end up boggled at how poorly the interior planned out and how they increase work loads and reduce productivity because staff rooms toilets are all poorly located even the entry and exit points.
In my "dumb box", build in the 60s with moderate slap-on isolation, the averaage energy use for heating is 1/5 of a single family home.
Now, there are several 1-room apartment (german counting) in here as well as family apartments, so if you only count families it might be down to 1/3. But that is still a huge difference (And also a reason why I was a bit confused about the costs people were throwing around last winter. What I pay in a whole year is what they claimed they had to pay more per month.)
I have been binging your videos past weeks and this one is for sure my favourite so far. The beloved downtowns of European cities are essentially mid rise boxes with decorations.
This partly goes for the grocery store video too. I grew in a walkable mid rise dominated neighborhood mainly built in 50's to 70's. The funniest comparison to America where everything is built around convenience is that for some reason this illegal mid rise mix use suburb miraclously had space for anything one could desire in daily basis and everything was withing 15 min travel, without a car, as an elementary school student. Even as a high school student I could go weeks without leaving the two connected neighborhoods. Our family had a car but we really never used it on daily activities because walking two blocks is faster than driving. Not just bikes often uses the frace, built for human scale.
These mid century suburbs have undergone a boom of popularity in Helsinki and prices have spiked. Originally when built, middle class viewed these as the developments for the poor and the reputation was terrible. Now many have found the convenience and beauty of this perfect compromise of downtown accessibility and open space of American style suburbia. Apart from some public buildings, it's all boxes with varying amount of decorations. Affordable, convenient and cute.
Ah wow thank you so much for the kind compliment. The "missing middle" is a big issue in the states and something that could greatly benefit their cities.
As shown in this video, the “big dumb box” isn’t really dumb, and need not be unattractive. There is also room for more complex structures; it is a matter of balance. We can have modern equivalents of gothic cathedrals and historical row houses.
Having a fair share of "dumb boxes" around my neighborhood I agree that they can be quite beautiful with their simplicity and efficiency. The only think I somewhat worry about is the style of the buildings themself. If all of them are near identical in the same modern minimalist, all white style they might look decent today, but in 50 years they might look as outdated and soulless as many brutalist concrete boxes do today. You've shown how older houses in other styles can also be these efficient boxes at their core, so creating a bit of variety in facade materials, color or roof shape might be worthwhile.
I think part of the problem here is that the box design is being equated with spartanic exterior design. You can build a box and then still decorate it on the outside. It's not like we expect our box shaped living rooms to just stay bare walls, either.
The box is just the foundational structural element. Decorations are extra.
bongi6811: Stark, square buildings with flat roofs are ruining Stuttgart. Developers love flat roofs because they are cheaper to build, yet a building with a flat roof is not only ugly, it is unhealthy - no circulation of air above the accommodation. Streets of buildings with pitched roofs have a more human feel than streets of buildings with flat roofs. They are easier to be around . . .
To your last question: what would I suggest to increase both quality of life and climate saving? I would suggest a big choice of shops for everyday necessities within walking distance. I live in an absolutely boring neighbourhood, but I can reach about 100 shops on foot within ten minutes. That is quality of life. A neighbourhood without shops is a dead neighbourhood and CO2 production by use of cars is inevitable.
Much of the newer suburbs in Gdańsk, where I'm from, are also those "dumb boxes" - which I also believe are great. First, this city is originally built on a narrow coastal plain between a tall glacial moraine and the Bay of Gdańsk, which means a lot of sandy soil and the need for intensive water management in the hills. After some particularly damaging flash floods in the summer of 2001, most of the new development in these hills has been 4-5 story boxes to make space for retention basins and leave large areas of the city forested opposed to single family homes and paving the foothills fully in concrete.
Personally, I think some of the developments like in Jasień, the next neighbourhood over, are really interesting with a commuter rail station in the middle, and a neighbourhood of "dumb boxes" surrounding one of the retention basins where they have small retail and cafes and services on the ground floor, parking underground to pedestrianise the entire neighbourhood, and a second pedestrian layer on the first floor. It's incredibly simple, but so well thought out.
One other aspect of building to 4-5 stories in regions with a climate like ours, is that the tops of the buildings are below the tree canopies, not only allowing for a very "human" scale, but when one is living in a very forested city like where I live, allowing the actual ecosystem to protect the building from the elements and save on heating costs in winter, while keeping the temperature down during summer heat waves, although the latter is less of an issue in Gdańsk than it is in Freiburg which gets intense heat in summer.
Beautiful place to live. Very central. Close to France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Short run to the Bodensee. Bohemia (Czechia) and Hungary not far away. Idyllic. I hope you and your family have a great life there. Your vlogs are exemplary and show the way for other TH-camrs. Well-researched, impassionate, factual and informative.
I get so pulled in to the topics of your videos that I forget to thank you for putting together such well presented videos. It must take an enormous amount of time and energy... getting the video snippets, developing a script, narrating and then editing it all. We are so lucky that we have people like you who will take the time and effort to thoughtfully present and discuss these issues that effect all of us.
Some of the newer skyscrapers try so hard to look distinctive, but they end up looking weird, and their styles won't age well. The interiors have odd-shaped rooms that waste space. They are expensive to maintain, expensive to heat and cool, and I suspect that some may eventually be demolished prematurely and replaced by buildings that are more efficient.
I'm a landlord and we love these dumb boxes, too. Simple to maintain, efficient, making it cheaper to build and run, lowering rent and generally nice to live in.
I've never liked those "dumb boxes". Thanks for giving me a new perspective!
I'm not against boxes, but I don't like flat roofs. They might be nice in a warm dry climate, but not in northern Europe.
I witnessed the problems several times over the years (thank god only in my surrounding). My school had water leaks and needed some rebuild. The students home I lived in had leaks and I made some bucks by getting the gravel from the roof down so that the roofers could go on their search. And the home of a friend in a terrace style blockbuilding also had leaks on the roof.
With a tiled roof you only need to change some tiles if something happens. Of course the room usage is worse but you can have the isolation in a well workable dry surrounding and not burried under gravel and foils where the rain may stand.
It's important not to forget that architecture is first and formost about designing spaces for people to live and work in, not gigantic pieces of art to look at.
thanks for the vid, loved it.
I just wished for those boxes to be a little prettier and that not every architect designs exactly the same house.
There are parts in Bremen and Hamburg that are very hard to distinguish.
This is really unfortunate, because there is no need to do it that way. I know a smaller city (a bit over 30000 inhabitants) that did also such kind of development in a better way. They wanted to avoid creating a ghetto for the poor, therefore they planned ahead. The first thing was that they split it into different parts where not every part was developed by the same company. In addition they also demanded that living space for all kind of different types of income was created. Therefore neighboring buildings look similar because they are based on the same "building blocks" but each a bit different. They have different heights, some have a bit more green around then others and so on. In addition there are not 20 of the same type along a street, but maybe 2 or 3 and then a different type of these blocks starts. Some have edges, some have rounded balcony, there are different colors (not bright ones, but more subtile) and so on. Due to this the city block looks a lot more "organic" and not like a bee hive.
Of course this is slightly less efficient, but I think its worth it.
Building lower-cost properties it´s so so importante in a world with very concerning housing problems. Thank you!!
To all those who claim that these boxes are 'ugly' - NO competently-maintained living space, whether one storey or many, actually _need_ be ugly, at least in the developed world. The consideration and the wise use of _plants_ - from large trees to tiny ferns, flowers to fruit, both inside and outside a building, before, during and after the lifetime of the building, can, should and will eliminate all calls of 'ugly!' in respect of most residential buildings, and certainly up to at least four or five storeys in height. Of course this presupposes the cooperation of builders, landowners, landlords, building managers, local authorities, city ordnances and the like, and may well require legislation to protect existing plantlife. And just because an apartment or home is 'small' (whatever that means, wherever you are) and/or 'boxy', does not mean that you cannot easily make it into your own individual living space, as beautiful as you like.
In the Netherlands, houses were built in the shape of a ball. The idea was to reduce the surface area. But the glaziers had great difficulty getting the arched windows sealed. The round interior is anything but practical. No further houses were built in this form afterwards.
As a British architectural photographer, I enjoyed the video and learnt a lot (particularly the cost/efficiency stuff), but I'm left a little bit confused about what is unique about the German "big dumb box". Are you referring specifically to a 5-6 story building with 4 sides and a roof? If so, those exist all over the world, including Paris as you mentioned, London and also in the US in the form of 5 over 1s. Are you just saying the US should build more mid-rise buildings? Or are you saying they should make buildings with simpler shapes? The biggest beef I have with some of the examples you showed is that the facades are so bare. I love minimalism, but when you have too much of it, it becomes monotonous. The historic centre of Freiburg looks to be full of "big dumb boxes", but they are all slightly different, with different detailing and decoration, and that's what makes it interesting to look at vs the modern development you showed. In the UK, the most desirable architectural styles are Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian. Fundamentally, the structures of these buildings are often very simple, but it's the detailing that makes them delightful. I think we need to get more of that back into architecture.
My biggest problem with these buildings is that they most often come in boring, sterile whites and greys. Add some colours to it. And some greenery, like a rooftop garden or something for insects and birds and it would be much better
HI, as a Building Regulations officer for last 50 years, (Building code official) in the UK I really enjoyed this big dumb box article a lot of good common sense.
May I point out that it is only 2 years ago that the English National Government woke up to the facts on solar reflections and overheating of apartments and new dwellings, and published Overheating Requirements in out mandatory building regulations Check out Part O (oscar) "Approved Document" for our new code on this topic.
Shame it took a melted car in a London street and apartments with 35-40 degrees C to wake them up.
John Bone, C.Build.E MCABE
Before moving to the US we lived in Freiburg Vauban. In my opinion this is one of the best examples of modern neighborhoods. All buildings have to have a high energy efficiency standard but the buildings are not the boring white cold rectangular boxes that you see in many other newly developed neighborhoods. Instead you see a variety of individual colorful houses. Despite being one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in town it is one of the most sought-after one and the quality of live is awesome. Anyone who is interested in modern, energy-efficient, urban development that serves the people who live there I can highly recommend a (guided) tour through the neighborhood Freiburg-Vauban.
I am a big fan of dumb boxes with triangles (roofs) on top. I find them prettier, and they make more sense in places with lots of precipitation. Flat roofs and rain/snow only go well together for a while. You always ebentually develop issues with a flat roof, while slanted roofs just „shrug off“ the rain falling on them.
One of the entrepreneurs in building box houses was a famous czech entrepreneur by the name of Tomáš Baťa nciknamed The king of shoes.
In the city of Zlín where his shoe factory was he built entire neighbourhoods of (for that time) modern and affordable houses that stand to this day.
When looking at New York - most people think of Manhattan but there are 5 boroughs with Staten Island being very suburban as is much of Queens. Also many of the skyscrapers were built for business/non-residential purposes. So it’s not that surprising when you mention density comparison with Paris.
13 years ago we were looking for our family home. Being a chartered HVAC engineer I thought I‘d know what to go for. No chance, my wife simply wouldn‘t even consider visiting one of the boxes on sale, absolutely no chance. At the same time most of our female friends loved the new build boxes 2 storey or 6 stories. All I would be asking for would be a roof with less maintenance - not flat.
One thing is colour, we now live in a row of small houses build in the 30‘s. We don‘t share cm of property (as is nowadays normal) nor are their any regulations on colour for the neighbourhood. Although all build the same, none of them got the same colour as it’s neighbours by now. It’s very colourful and often people walking by would stop, take a look and simply enjoy 😉
Your wife has good instincts. Stark, square buildings with flat roofs are ruining Stuttgart. Developers love flat roofs because they are cheaper to build, yet a building with a flat roof is not only ugly, it is unhealthy - no circulation of air above the accommodation. Streets of buildings with pitched roofs have a more human feel than isolated clumps of buildings with flat roofs. They are easier to be around . . .
5:08 they may be more walkable, but you cant tell me that doesnt look ugly as shit. I feel like just painting a few of thoser buildings different colours and adding some ornamentation would go a long way in making the street scape more visually appealing, something which, from what I understand, is exremly important when it comes to how an area is percied and csan impact mental health in the area as well.
Brilliant architectural+environmental presentation. Loved it. I used to live in Switzerland (dumb box. Cofortable, well-insulated). Now I live in a British terrace. Quirky but it is hard work keeping mould away and warmth in. I am also for the dumb box: fater all, I live inside, and I can make the inside original. As long as the outside has a nice colour and it is clean and in good repair, with greenery not too far, as well as shops/schools/doctors, I am very happy. Switzerland (as well as Germany, Slovakia etc) have got it right!!
My wife's dad actually build a round house... to minimize surface area. I miss him now that he is gone. He would have loved your video!
Oh so much to say, but im sure you are right about the size of the house. My knowledge about that is that good.
But ill say this, they need stop building the "eco friendly" houses cause are are most of the time the complete opposite. An example, across the steet where i live they did a total renovation of an apartment building, tore out everything to the bare bone of the buliding and were going to make everything eco friendly. Well now a couple of years later a lot of the poeple that moved in to the new appartments have now moved out, they are falling appart cause these eco friendly materials dont last. A wile ago an architect and engineer here in Sweden said if we want to make buildings that last we need to build them from stone like they did hundred of years ago, there is a reason those buildings still stand today and many actually wants to live in them.
Finland uses lots of dumb boxes. Very pleased with this video. I do have a new priority: handicapped accessibility. Not for 70 year old me (yet) but for my 18 year old granddaughter! The newest dumb boxes are really not quite practical even though the technical measurements say "sufficient"
I really like pretty whimsical architecture and dislike uniformity, so I totally get the hate people have of "dumb boxes". But I also think that beauty can be achieved by other means, like interior design, pretty gardens, public parks or art projects that are interwoven into the neighborhood. Which simultaneously also means that lots of people are included into designing and personalizing their neighborhood, not just a tiny elite team of architects. The plainness of dumb boxes can be a feature not a flaw.
I am a building material scientist and really want to thank you for pointing out the huge amount of embodied energy in glass facades. Everybody is talking about how bad concrete is in this manner, but especially architects seem to forget, that a replacement with glass is even worse. In my opinion huge windows make a flat less livable than more conservative designs with smaller windows. You have less wall space, it has to be cleaned, in the summer the room heats up more and you need artificial cooling, Edge constructions are more prone to failures and are heat-bridges,...
I am also not a big fan of lame dumb concrete boxes, but they are much better than glass boxes with a fancy geometry.
Agreed. However, our windows (big, but not overly large, admittedly) help heat our house in winter, while the shade provided by the roof protects from the summer sun, or else the sunscreens do for the short time they may be needed.
@@CaroAbebe While writing the comment, I was thinking about pure glass facades, corners made of glass or huge window areas.
And I agree, if your windows have a good insulation value, they may help heating the rooms on sunny days.
Great blog
Retired British structural engineer. Interesting post. Dumb boxes often used but I have some bêtes noirs when it comes to medium rise social housing. These are often dumb boxes with load bearing masonry walls and precast concrete.
Cantilever balconies. Balconies with posts at the outside corners are easier and faster to construct.
Failure to stack the flats. Large multi bedroom flats at ground floor requiring transfer structure to support the upper floors with steel columns threaded into partition walls..
Level thresholds obtained by dropping the insulated structural ground floor well below external ground level. This puts the underground drainage lower which increases excavation and inspection chamber sizes.
I personally consider having the wall plate of a timber framed building below ground level is asking for problems.
Thanks for showing St. Louis, MO. It never gets any praise or good attention. Before urban renewal it was a true gem in America but has become chopped up and disconnected to the max. My Grandma grew up around the area where Pruit Igoe was built and hearing her stories about city life in the 1930s to the 1950s made me question why we ever built suburbia and ran away from city life so quickly.
It has always been so interesting to me because when I hear other researchers in my field of study talk about urban decline they usually point out what occurred in Detroit - but what happened to St. Louis was on another level.
The boxes can look a bit sterile and unwelcoming, but with greenery, green spaces, pedestrian lounging areas (benches, gathering places, public barbecue places etc.) this can be alleviated a lot. Münster has a model district with a lot of walkable areas connecting low-story boxes that form a very pleasant neighborhood. The Vauban neighborhood in Freiburg is another example of this concept done right and expanded upon well. And don't forget awesome roof-terraces and gardens that you can potentially put on the flat roofs.
The most important thing is that we build way more of these multi-story buildings of 2-4 floors (higher becomes too intimidating and dominating and oppressive) instead of detached single family houses in towns and cities. These dumb boxes also work really well with renewable energy integration. All in all a boatload of positives for society, cities, livability, sustainability.
All of these dumb boxes make everything look the same, take away a part of the identity of a region, ... why do people like to travel? To see the same buildings in every place? No. People travel to France, Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. to see the cities with their special style and flair. In China - even though they try to put special features in every single compound, in the end everything looks the same, and you can't distinguish a picture from a random neighborhood from Beijing with that of Wuhan for example. The same is if you take a picture from Moscow and try it with a random picture from any former Soviet city. But you would definitely be able to say oh, that is a French town, oh that is a Swiss town, oh that is a town from Italy. etc. We should start thinking again on making things special and beautiful instead of just "useful" and "cheap". The world would actually benefit!
Big fan of dumb boxes here. I feel it ultimately boils down to community spirit. Make housing practical, and make public spaces nice (trees, greenery). Add the occasional eye-catcher (what used to be cathedrals vel sim). I don't really mind a fancy university library, the Freiburg one just went wrong.
I'm a function over form kind of guy. I find beauty in added function, durability and cost savings. I live in a "cookie cutter house", and I love it for its simplicity.
Many thanks for your profound research and entertaining explanations.
My pleasure!
5 1/2 years ago my wife and I moved into a new dumb box in Kohlscheid ( a small suburb of Aachen). It is absolutely fantastic. The building has two stairwells, each with 4 one bedroom, 6 two bedroom, and 4 three bedroom apartments over five floors. There are storage rooms for each apartment in the basement, as well as a garbage collection room, heating, and an underground garage. We have a 3 bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. There is an elevator from the basement to the 5th floor. Everything in really ideal for us as we're retired, and mobility will someday be an issue. With a large pantry in the apartment, we have our washer and dryer here, and like most Germans we can dry our laundry on our balcony if the weather permits. Our energy costs in the box are substantially lower than in our previous home.
I love the German construction methods. Seldom does one see wood frame construction. The insulation between apartments is superb. We never hear our neighbours unless someone is moving in or out and you hear drilling. We're 300 meters from a very nice supermarket and bakery, and bus service into the city. Doctors offices, pharmacies, other shopping are all easily accessible,.
Recently re-habbed a big box (literally a cube with zero modulation) in a downtown instead of building in a green-field on the edge of town. Everything you say in this video is true, and so little understood by most people. Your video does a great job describing the benefits of this green building, with great depth-of-understanding. Great examples. Great contrast with less successful designs. GO ASHTON!
Interesting as always, Ashton! My late father was an architect, studied as such in the 1940's and thus steeped in "functionalist style", which was much about doing away with heave ornaments and making for better living conditions for "the masses". He would probably endorsed this episode of yours. The idea of this as an architect stile was somewhat derailed by the industrialized building techniques of the 1960's. But building boxes doesn't necessarily equal lack of style.
Another thing which you hinted at is that the size is important for the environment to be livable. Personally I don't understand the present vogue about building 30 - 50 floor buildings. It is not what we used to do in Europe. No matter what country you study, traditional housing has been about 3 - 4 story buildings.
My father used to compare Denmark and Sweden in the 1960's, when we had a big building boom in Sweden. In the inner cities then, if one house in a blocks condemned, a big construction company bought the whole block and tore it down, building a new, much too large to be esthetically, box instead. That made for city centers mordor less all looking the same.
In Denmark however, they still were poorer than in sweden (it's quite the reverse these days). In the same situation therefore, they tore down the condemned house and squeezed a dew one in where the old one had been standing. Thus the new house automatically didn't differ too much in dimensions from the old one. And the over all environment looked pretty much the same as before.
Thanks for your insights. Good to hear from your field of expertise!
Love your passion for your housing videos. Lots of information/facts in this video.
So glad you have taken the scientific route for your videos.. you've come a long way from when you were "the Blackforest Family" and had just started your channel.
Thanks for a great insight into all of these factors!! We recently bought our first apartment and the outside is so ugly but we were floored by how little energy is needed, both during the super hot summer and the colder months. We have to use heat eventually but the temperatures had to drop considerably for us to start using our floor heating. And in summer, all our American friends were like "how do Europeans live without AC?!" and we really did well all summer, even though temperatures did go up a lot last summer.
I also love that you included the community aspects and the decrease of segregation. It's not going to disappear completely but even a decrease is extremely valuable to community building and reduction of harmful effects of differences in starting positions. I'm not naive enough (anymore) to expect them to completely disappear but any improvement is a step in the right direction.
A sloping roof can save on cost in the future, especially in areas were snow sits on the roof for periods of time.
Was nutzt mir die schönste und futuristischte Architektur , wenn ich die Bau und Betriebskosten nicht zahlen kann ? Dann doch lieber eine Box. Übrigens nichts neues. Die Bauhaus Architekten und Wohndesigner der 1920er Jahre in Deutschland bauten auch schon so. Einfach , praktisch und günstig und trotzdem sehr modern . Die waren ihrer zeit weit vorraus.
Freiburg was never really on my radar. The only thing I knew was that the classic horror film "Suspiria" was filmed there. But it seems like a really cool place. Freiburg has a university, a university clinic, the Europa Park is close, there are at least 2 large water parks nearby, the beautiful Black Forest, Switzerland, Lake Constance and France are just a stone's throw away and Freiburg is also progressive in renewable energy. I think I should move there.
It's a great place to live. A very vibrant, fun city.
If you can afford it... Even when I studied there for two semesters in 1980/81, renting a place to stay was far more expensive than in Hamburg.
I live in California and we are desperately trying to build more housing fast. This is a great video that I learned a lot from. Thank you!
With your rather sober analysis you really put a dent in the aspirations of future architects. The term "form follows function" exists for a reason. For sustainable future housing of a growing world population achitectional escapades don't provide any more solutions than ultimately just pleasing the egos of the builders-owners or the architects.
The dumb boxes may not be the solution that most pleases the eye but they're certainly suitet to provide affordable housing and the possibilty of creating living communities.
As always, a profoundly researched and very well argued video. Perhaps it should even be made a standard reminder of developing departments in city councils to keep them level headed.
Have a nice week.
I like the different people living in the new development Alte Güterbahn Viertel in Freiburg, student housing, retirement home, social housing, commercial rent apartments. I hope there are also homes/apartments you can buy, shops and work studios, for dentists, doctors, sculptors, painters, furniture craftsmen or just a little cafe or döner shop. I also saw a playground and some greenery and trees. This all makes/builds a vibrant community even if it’s new.
The apartment I live in is almost a big, dumb box. It's exactly six storeys tall and contains eight apartments. The highest storey has a roof-top terrace and is pretty small, the other apartments have loggia-style balconies. Due to its location at a five-road intersection, it's staircase-shaped. But the building is very well insulated, the apartments get a lot of natural light, it's lovely.
Literally the only downside is that the footprint of it is quite big, which for the folks living in it mostly means we all dread it when the Kehrwoche arrives or it's winter, meaning there's about an hour or more of labor necessary to keep the sidewalks clean and accesible xD
Also, after having gotten into urbanism (as an amateur), I have realized that if I ever have the luxury of building my own home, it'll definitely be a pretty simple bungalow with a flat, greened roof (and solar panels), to make it an efficient little box to live in.
What a fantastically educational video. People like you are so badly needed to give advice to 'Dumb Governments' and ' Dumb Local Authorities' to let them see the bigger picture in their planning decisions.
Big dumb boxes without any architectural flourishes or differentiating colors are the bane of the existence of boxes. The boxes themselves are done somewhat differently in Europe with more retail on the bottom and less scale so that they don’t seem so overwhelmingly dominant. Those details like color and architectural flourishes add to the visual interest and personality of a building and are worth the money.
They may be called dumb boxes, but I think the library is more of an example of a dumb box. Cleaning the glass every 6-8 weeks will also cost a fortune. New developments need to think of energy efficiency as the most important factor of a building. Maintenance, reusability and durability of the used materials must be second and comfortable living and working in a building should be third. The architecture of the exterior should be forth and last. A BREEAM performance score of a building takes care of the first three. It isn’t a mandatory performance, but it should be. Currently it is a voluntary standard, but it is increasingly becoming an asset in real estate and housing development, in Europe that is. The US and Middle East hardly know what BREEAM is and where it stands for and don’t/won’t design their (iconic) buildings accordingly. I saw a housing development video of 2023 in the US and they put poorly double glazing in uninsolated aluminium window frames. We used that double glazing in the eighties, we are currently at HR+++ or triple glazing and we always have insulated aluminium window frames. No sufficient insolation of the outer walls or roof. You don’t see double gap sealing of window frames, flimsy hinges and locks a burglar would laugh at, no solar panels (and it was in Arizona). We wouldn’t get a house insurance with those hinges and locks. Separation walls that only separates physically, every sound goes through it, probably no building code for this. Houses so close together without fire protection they’re a fire hazard for the whole neighborhood. No mandatory smoke alarms or CO alarm. The US is so backwards in (energy) efficient construction. Their building codes are laughable. Americans really build dumb boxes, more cardboard boxes with a nice facade. There is whole territory to gain here in the US.
Thanks! I always learn something from your videos. I like a big dumb box, but have seen other parts of Germany where they are painted bright colors. Makes the area so cheerful. Who needs all that fancy design when you can have a functional building in a bright sunshine yellow or baby blue?!!
Only issue with dumb boxes is if they are placed in a rain heavy area. Slap a sloped roof on them and they are good to go.
Or the neighborhood is really fancy old buildings.
I'm in the process of buying an apartment from a company that focuses on building condominiums. They say that white cubes ("dumb boxes") are most versatile because they are so neutral. There's certainly some expressive architecture, but the vast majority of apartments built is not among it. With a practical floor plan that most can agree on, the same apartment can be furnished for singles, couples or families and the rooms can also change their purpose to some extent, for example when children grow up and move out and don't need their rooms any more.
The exception are the bathroom, toilet and kitchen, which all require some installations that are decided upon from the beginning. Then by the placement of freshwater and wastewater connections and electric outlets it's pretty clear where your sink, dishwasher, stove and fridge goes even if the apartment isn't sold with a pre-installed kitchen. The rest is flexible and can be adjusted, probably better than a more "styled" apartment would.
As a 67 yo engineer, I'm totally with you on the importance of smart architecture. You didn't discuss balance, but I'm guessing you'd acknowledge that we humans also have a creative side that responds strongly to artistic design. Not that each and every building needs to be artistic... but, a sprinkling of whimsical buildings here and there can go a long way towards scratching that artistic itch. In many European cities you have the wonderful contrast of the new, old, and really old, so that's where I think the box design makes lots of sense... don't aesthetically compete with the old... dumb down much of the new to accentuate the old. And, "suburban" neighborhoods can be more about the outdoor and communal spaces. Keep the housing simple. For the last 10 years I've been thinking that our current trend towards open concept inside our homes is creating the feeling of kitchens, dining tabes and couches all stuffed in gymnasiums... I just see inside noise pollution... where do you go to read book or quietly watch a TV program. I'd like to see movable internal walls that would allow us to reconfigure the space for different needs... a box design would be just fine, and then go crazy with movable wall configurations for that artistic itch.
Dumb boxes in my country brings to mind the hastily and cheaply built apartment buildings from 70s and 80s, we sometimes call those "the suicide boxes" because of uninspiring and depressing environment and appearance. Personally I prefer older architecture, it's just more appealing and inspiring to eye while being functional and seem to hold time better than boxes from that time period. Maybe there is a way to make them more appealing and resilient at the same time.
building quality in the 70s was so bad. I once was explained that that was a time when due to new building materials it was possible to build cheap for the first time. So there was a building rush of cheap constructions. Unfortunately nobody considered the quality and longevity. In Vienna buildings from that area are already being torn down, which is a shame after so little time....
@@llleiea True. Additionally there was the energy crisis, so the idea was to build everything more energy efficient, which meant trying to insulate everything and build houses like bottles. Some new innovations that didn't go well at all. Maybe some of them would have fared better if the overall architecture (on small houses and rowhouses) wasn't so keen on low profile boxes with foundation as low to the ground as possible and without anything stopping water/moisture from the ground entering the lowest wooden structures... Now we have new energy crisis in a bit different form and I'm afraid that we will see some more new innovations that don't survive the test of time.
It's not just the box, the factor for good places are living spaces liked defined by Strong Town (see Jason Slaughter, Not Just Bikes) making it possible to have have walkable cities, not dominated by the car. The Netherlands are often mentioned but a town like Gijon in Spain has partial elements of this concept. The buildings in downtown are 10 stories high but the the life in the evenings is bustling, because the plane at street level has always a cafe, shop or restaurant.
I've taken this style for granted growing up in Europe, but now I know the origins of it. Thanks.
Just because a lot people think that the box looks dumb, doesn't mean you can't make it a nice neighborhood. Lots of green and things+layout around the boxes can make up for the appearant dumbness.
I really hate it when public buildings have these architecture competitions for them and it's supposed to be this groundbreaking design. It does nothing for the people paying for it and it takes money away from other important things. Just build it into a dumb box, everyone will be happy because they get to use it because construction will actually be finished on time and it won't be closed for construction constantly because it was designed for form, not function.
I'd like to make a video about this because it is a difference from large-scale construction projects in Germany to the States. Government buildings, libraries, and even social housing are typically done through a jurored, open design competition. But the flip side of that coin is what happens in the US. Many government buildings are done via RFPs or "request for proposal". While this "technically" means they are open for bids, they are usually written so that either one specific contractor always gets the bid or they prioritize the cheapest possible solution (and then subsequently go over budget).
@@TypeAshtonoh, I'm afraid you won't be able to find too many differences between the US and Germany in that regard. What you describe sounds very familiar.
@@TypeAshton I'd love to watch that video!
Although I get the appeal of design competitions coming from a US-American viewpoint, I am frankly disillusioned by their reality.
In my opinion, the competition environment favors flashy, often impractical architecture, for the following reason:
Although aspects like sustainability and cost play a major role during the judging itself, dumb boxes are seldom featured among the entries, so jurors can't even pick the option that *would* be best. For architects, these competitions are an opportunity to show what they can do and to present themselves to more people to ultimately get more work, even if they didn't win the competition. So of course, they're not going to show up with a dumb box for an entry, even if it would be best for the purpose, because the people who decide whether or not to task an architect with designing a building care more about the looks than about the practicality. So all the public buildings we ever get are suboptimal and instead flashy.
Also, many politicians like to commemorate themselves by having a large and flashy public building built, but this rarely ever works. The costs explode, the building has to be fixed right after construction and all that politician will be remembered for is wasting taxpayer's money with an eternal construction site. Because of this, new, flashy buildings are favored in financing, while many necessary, but less flashy measures don't make the cut.
I am similarly disillusioned with the reality of the competitions for who gets to actually build the roof and so on.
It's about time to mention that I am a technician in my town's theatre. The building is publicly owned, and my employer, the publicly owned city marketing company, rents it to use it as a theatre. Because we don't have a facility manager, my colleagues and I have to take care of the building in many aspects even though we're theater technicians.
Because of this, I know a lot about the problems this now 50 year old brutalist building is plagued by right after a major renovation and many of them could have been avoided if they didn't just hire the cheapest contractor. Although I know that this is supposed to prevent corruption by forcing that the cheapest contractor gets the bid, I've only seen it lead to inferior build quality, leading to things like water damage with high costs down the line.
So yeah, a great system in theory, but not so great in practice.
I live in Freiburg too, and I agree with many things of your video. But I have a problem with the flat roofs, because they leak very often and require a lot of polysterol insulation which is bad for the environment and bad for fire protection. Insulation made from wood, is far better in both categories, but you can use wooden insulation only on angeld roofs.
Thank you for the many very well-researched videos. You can tell that a lot of work goes into it. The videos are great just as they are. If anything, may I suggest using a deesser for the voice over?
Great video! So far, not a big fan of those dumb big boxes popping up everywhere, but you opened my eyes as to why they're actually not that bad - thanks for that 🙃
As she said they have been in our cities all this time.
The most amazing thing about these tiny boxes is ... that someone called them big!
It's so refreshing to see human scale in low-cost construction (okay, not exactly low-cost but certainly not luxury). A typical new construction in my city is at least 30 floors, often 40+.
A thought provoking video again. Thank you
I would love to see more art incorporated into the facades like it was in buildings before the mid 20th century.
The art could reflect the taste and fashion of the time. As you pointed out, the budget saved on building a "dumb box" could then be used to make the view from the outside morre interesting.
Gut das ihr da seid ❤❤❤❤❤
I‘d like to chip in my two cents on the Freiburg University Library. Taking the data from the University’s presentation (available online) things don’t look as bad as they first seemed after watching the video. According to the University’s website the overall amount of ‘usable space’ (Nutzfläche) is the same as the old building’s while the surface area of the new building (the building’s shell) is about 60% of the old one’s. The new building also features a number of sustainability perks like core temperated slabs, high efficiency glazing, a heat recovery scheme and ground water cooling - all of which were still pretty innovative 15 years ago and supposedly leaves the building with an energy consumption of only a third of that of the old building.
Of course the website doesn’t talk about the amount of grey energy that went into the construction nor does it explain why the old building had to be torn down completely instead of following a remodeling concept.
So, all in all I’d dare to conclude that the building shouldn’t be counted as a complete failure.
That being said, I do agree to the point you made about the many advantages simple ‘dumb boxes’ provide as excellent building blocks for a modern city - as long as this goes together with a meaningful concept for the design of the urban space.
This video sounded exactly like my Facility Management Module in my University.
You aren't even allowed to build mid-rise buildings like those in most places in the US. Zoning laws in most places just don't allow for it.
GO BLACK FOREST FAMILY!!! Schön euch hier zu haben!!😊😊😊
With more than 40 years experience in construction it‘s still fun to listen to architects and their ideas and discussions…
We hear them… while we build buildings… and mostly the stuff we build is good although they planned it… and of course those „dumb boxes“ are the logical consequence for sustainable construction… as much as architects aren‘t…
At least here in Austria…
I really enjoyed this video, especially as it showcased the advantageous building physics (area/volume ratio) and embodied energy of these “boxes.” Another advantage: their flat roofs can support gardens. Paradoxically, green roofs can extend the lifetime of the roof materials. I believe productive gardens on roofs and landscapes will be a major trend in coming years, and will do a lot to improve the appeal and street experience around these sites.
We have a green roof on our house! There is a science to it for sure. We have a special gardener that comes once a year to pull weeds and replace any bare areas with specially approved plants to extend the life of the roof.
Dear Ashton, what a great documentary you put together! I have no knowledge about the building industry, but I just disliked the uniform buildings. Your well put together content here has really changed my perception and opinion about those big white dumb boxes. Well done! 👏👏👏
Really glad you enjoyed the video!
In physics we have the concept of the spherical cow: when figuring something out you start with the absolute most basic thing possible, and only add what is necessary. Whittling down from flourish to a box is turning that around. I think the reason it works so well in physics is that every addition adds more to the equation to solve, and who wants to do unnecessary math? In architecture, extras translate into money, so...humans are gonna human.
Fed up with every building in every town around the world looking exactly the same, I want to live in my town, not someone else's.
Rainwater management is another thing to consider. When we concrete over areas, those places can not naturally drain, which shifts the burden elsewhere. When there is heavy rain, the water falling onto buildings has to go somewhere, and ultimately that usually means rivers, creating the potential for floods. There are strategies to avoid excessive runoff, but they depend on the right building densities to ensure there is sufficient space to provide natural soakage.