"San Francisco building lifted 10 feet in preparation of rising sea levels"

From Dezeen:

A historic waterfront building in San Francisco that weighs 2,075 tons, the equivalent of 20 space shuttles, will be hoisted up over three metres above ground to protect it from flooding caused by climate change.

Building 12, which was completed in 1941 for America's shipbuilding effort during the second world war, is being lifted up in advance of a renovation by architecture firm Perkins and Will...

OK, so they are going to pop it on stilts and have a suspended walkway to the nearest piece of high ground for access?

Once raised Perkins and Will will extend the building from 118,890 square feet (11,045 square metres) to 230,000 square feet (21,367 square metres), adding a new basement, second level and mezzanine.

In other words, the site owner couldn't get planning permission to demolish a historic building, but the council allowed him to lift it up and build another two storeys beneath it, thus preserving the 'iconic' roof-line (I think it looks ghastly, but it does have historic significance).

I'd keep very quiet if I were him

From The Sun:

AN ARCHITECT could be forced to tear down a £4.65million building where he lives with his family because of a planning row with the local council.

... the 47-year-old is locked in a battle with Islington Council who claim it is out of keeping with the neighbourhood and it is not the same as the original plans submitted in 2012 – which, for example, indicated a brick-faced building.

Mr Taha insisted the switch to stone was subsequently approved by planning officers and they had simply lost, and therefore not uploaded, the most recent designs.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, admitting that he didn't get the right planning permissions (or some proof that his submitted application had been approved) is not very good advertising for an architect.

Decisions, decisions...

The first picture is our house as it actually looks.

The fourth picture is the nicest house on our road, which serves as our template.

I'd love to do a loft conversion, and I'm sure that a mansard roof is far more practical and sensible (second picture), but the rest of my family reckon that having a gable roof with round windows upstairs (third picture), which is a style peculiar to the street we live on, looks much nicer.




And here are our templates. Nobody really likes the three narrow windows upstairs in the fourth picture. Somebody up the road copied it (fifth picture) and made the second floor windows further apart but still not lined up with (and too large relative to) the windows on the first floor. Gloss over the disaster-zone of the built in garage. Hence why I thought you can't go far wrong if the windows all just line up vertically:

I boil my water in the Sydney Opera House

BBC or Daily Mash?

"Elevators travelling distances of more than 500m [1,640 ft] were not feasible as the weight of the [steel] ropes themselves become so large that more ropes were needed to carry the ropes themselves."

Answer here.

Unfortunately, my house is the one in the "before" picture, not the "after".

In reply to Dinero's question about the upper storey, I envisage a mansard-cum-gambrel roof/window arrangement with vertical side walls to maximise internal space, a bit like this, but the top bit will be at a flatter angle as our house is twice as deep as it is wide:

Listed Buildings

From the BBC

A yellow-roofed warehouse in Swindon that featured in a James Bond film has been given Grade II*-listed status.

The Spectrum building, Renault's former distribution centre, was designed by Lord Norman Foster and opened in 1982.

Featuring yellow steel "umbrella masts", the futuristic single-storey glass-walled building was also used as a backdrop in A View To A Kill in 1984.

Roger Bowdler, from English Heritage, said it was "one of the very finest examples of a hi-tech building".

Famous for his steel and glass designs, Lord Foster created the Gherkin and Millennium Bridge in London, rebuilt Berlin's Reichstag and also Hong Kong Airport.

...

The building saw the last of the car manufacturer's workers move out when Renault closed its operations there in 2001.

Since then, the 25,000 sq m building has housed a car seat manufacturer, a soft indoor play centre and a firm that produces DVDs.

... and a car dealership. Since 2001. Get the message?

One of the things about buildings is that they're often very hard to repurpose. Look at the Olympics - we're burning £100m+ on converting it from an athletics stadium to a football stadium. Sometimes, you can take a building and make it work for something else (like the EMI CD production building in Swindon that is now a car dealership), but it's often quite difficult. Which is why you need people to be able to either take large chunks out of them, or just knock them down and build something new in their place.

And one of the problems with buildings that could be classified as "modern wank" is that they're not only self-indulgent by the people creating and commissioning them, they're also not very practical. Even the early users often find them a bit crap, but repurposing them and maintaining them is even worse because of irregular use of materials and shapes. Once you list them, this is only going to get worse.

So, give it a decade, this will be probably be like so many listed buildings - empty, with the owners praying for a fire to destroy it so they can put something useful in its place.

"Cow attacks? Pah! Now the buildings are fighting back as well!"

Says the SumoKing, who refers us to this story at BuzzFeed:

The skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street - commonly known as “the Walkie-Talkie” - has damaged several vehicles parked close to it by melting them with the sun’s rays.

The post is complete with pictures of passing pedestrians theatrically screwing their eyes shut and holding their hands skywards to shield them from the blaze.

UPDATE: MacHeath point out that this has happened before, which makes the architect seem even more of an idiot.

Real life Weasley house aka The Burrow

I can't find a decent image of the actual Weasley house from the film because it only existed as CGI anyway, and appeared to shape-shift between films, popping up next to a forest in one film and then in the middle of a flat plain a couple of films later, but here's a real life version from The Daily Mail:

Weird.

Pinched from yesterday's Daily Mail.
Those are detached houses, not blocks of flats.

"This is not like blowing up the Taj Mahal or destroying the Acropolis"

From The Daily Mail:

The 11th-century minaret of a little known mosque that towered over Aleppo's old quarter was destroyed yesterday as fighting raged in the ancient Syrian city.

President Bashar Assad's government and the rebels trying to overthrow him accused each other of being to blame for the destruction to the Umayyad Mosque, inexplicably classified as a UNESCO world heritage site and the only structure of note in Aleppo's walled Old City.

"This is not like blowing up the Taj Mahal or destroying the Acropolis in Athens. This was just one pretty indifferent mosque among thousands," said Helga Seeden, a professor of archaeology at the American University of Beirut. "This is not a disaster like the recent earthquakes in Iran or China or that building collapsing in Dhaka. In terms of heritage, this is pretty much par for the course in Syria. I'm ever so slightly peeved but I think I'll get over it.

"Oh, I just did."

Fun Online Polls: Garage conversions and "the bloated welfare state"

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What do you see more often?

An integral garage converted into an extra room - 88%
A spare room converted into an integral garage - 12%

This ties in with my general observation of the world around me; I'd like to add that for every downstairs-room-converted-to-a-garage which I've seen, I've seen about ten integral-garages-converted-into-an-extra-room, if we could factor that in, the ratio between the two might be much, much higher.

Thanks to everybody who took part as usual.
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Dave Scotland left this highly inappropriate comment: "If we build more homes the nig nogs will come and fill them in no time."

Even if that were factually correct, that's not much of an argument, is it? You might as well say "There is no point improving our education system, as a load of foreigners will just come over here and send their kids to our schools", or "If we improved the NHS, then..." or "If we got crime down, then...".

If we take this Home-Owner-Ism to its logical conclusion, the government would be perfectly justified in allowing the country to go to wrack and ruin as a kind of poison pill defence against immigrants. Enforcing some kind of sensible immigration system is just one of many things which the government ought to be doing.
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I've been busy this weekend updating the workings on page 2 of the Citizen's Income Trust's pamphlet. Unsurprisingly, replacing the entire welfare and pensions system and various income tax/NIC reliefs like the personal allowance/primary threshold with a universal Citizen's Income/Citizen's Pension (set at current Income Support/Pensions Credit Minimum Guarantee rates) is as affordable now as it ever was, and that's before we factor in Laffer Effects.*

But one thing that is surprising is how much is spent on working age welfare. I've included just about everything you can think of: Income Support, JSA, ESA, Incapacity Benefit, Child & Working Tax Credits, Child Benefit, SMP, SSP, student grants and loan write-offs, other bits and pieces**. Remember that a large chunk of these (a third?) are paid to working families.

Can you guess what percentage of UK GDP they add up to?

Guess here or use the widget in the sidebar.

* Let's assume the revenue maximising income tax rate is 50%, in that case the benefit withdrawal rate which minimises the cash cost of welfare (or maximises the amount of welfare clawed back through means testing) must also be 50%. Current overall withdrawal rates for most household types are about 80% on anything up to a median sort of income.

** But not severe disability benefits or Housing & Council Tax Benefit.

Town Planning: Terraced houses (2)

Following the comments on the earlier post, allow me to summarise thusly:

Assuming
- plots are 9 yds wide and 36 yards deep
- the house has internal area 120 sq yds
- the garage is 3 yds wide and 8 yds deep
- you can choose between a semi-detached on the left or a terraced house on the right, which is the better layout?

I am pretty sure that the cost of building the semi-detached and separate garage is higher (in terms of foundations, bricks and roofing materials), but let's ignore that. What it boils down to is: a semi-detached with three rooms downstairs and up (of which one on each floor is usually too small) or a terraced house with two rooms downstairs and four rooms up (all OK in size)?

To my mind, the terraced layout is better: to keep everybody happy, I have pencilled in an integral garage downstairs with doors at the front and back so that people can carry mucky stuff from the garden to the front (most people will promptly convert this to an extra downstairs room, of course). And what you lose in the wasted strip of driveway at the side, you gain in a much bigger back garden (198 sq yds instead of 153); you could in fact make the terraced plot five yards shorter (lose the bit above the dotted line) and the garden is still 'better' as it is 'squarer'.
And terraced housing is almost infinitely scaleable. Here's a screenshot from Google Maps of some three-bed terraced houses in Leyton (without integral garages), including the roads in front and behind, that works out at 30 homes per acre (or "350 habitable rooms per hectare", to use the modern jargon):

Georgian Sudoku

My 7000th Blog Post

I'll celebrate by going a bit off piste and pointing out that I recently noticed how clever Georgian facade design/layout is. As long as you stick the basic rules on window lay-out, you can use any common building materials, build anything between two and seven storeys, use it for town or countryside, seaside or inland, urban or rural, posh or basic; you can build flats, terraced, semi-detached or detached, residential or commercial.

You can apply it to just about anything and it seems to fit in anywhere and between anything. It's actually surprisingly simple and very easy to copy.

1. Basic town centre buildings in Dublin, four storeys plus basement, red brick.


2. Residential in Edinburgh, two storeys plus attic (and possibly basement), mini-balconies, sandstone. The attic windows are pretty gross actually, see 4 below.


3. 19th century McMansion somewhere in Atlanta, two storeys plus attic, London bricks and fancy porch:


4. Re the attic windows; at some stage, people decided to pretend that their houses didn't have a roof, so the parapet at the front was so high as to obscure it entirely. The 'bog standard' type of window is set back and unobstrusive as per below, three storeys plus attic, London:
Even better is, the windows are evenly spaced left to right (as in examples 1 and 2) and the attic windows are the same width as the main windows and line up with them, as in the three attic windows in example 3. I'm not really a fan of the parapet walls because it makes it bloody hard to clean the gutters and blocks the view from the attic windows, if any.

5. No post about Georgian architecture is complete without a picture of The Circus in Bath, three storeys (possibly plus attic or basement?), mini-balconies, fancy parapet, sandstone Bath stone, which is soft limestone:


6. 32 Smith Square, London. Seven storey office block (probably plus attic and basement), red bricks, part rendered, built in the 1950s:

"Skyscrapers linked with impending financial crashes"

From the BBC:

There is an "unhealthy correlation" between the building of skyscrapers and subsequent financial crashes, according to Barclays Capital. Examples include the Empire State building, built as the Great Depression was underway, and the current world's tallest, the Burj Khalifa, built just before Dubai almost went bust.

China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, the bank said. India also has 14 skyscrapers under construction.

"Often the world's tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction," Barclays Capital analysts said. The bank noted that the world's first skyscraper, the Equitable Life building in New York, was completed in 1873 and coincided with a five-year recession. It was demolished in 1912...

That all seems perfectly plausible to me.

By and large, the height and density of buildings are primarily an indicator of relative land values in towns and cities. So you get the highest and densest buildings in the town centre* and then it gets lower and sparser as you move out into the suburbs.

The other thing which sky scrapers indicate is over-inflated egos, and credit bubbles inflate people's egos in the same way as they inflate the selling price of land.

So it's clear why credit bubbles mean more skyscrapers being built; credit bubbles always burst; hey presto, there's your correlation between skyscrapers and recessions.

Or the theory might be complete bunk, who knows?
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* UPDATE, prompted by JT's comment, I refer you to Jason Barr's empirical research looking at the economics of skyscrapers in Manhattan:

One also notices that within the skyline there are distinct “waves” of building heights, with height rising toward the "center". These waves reflect the endogenous relationship between strategic height, land values and agglomeration economies. Corporations need to be near each other to lower their business costs and increase demand, yet they also desire to stand out in the skyline.

Being close is valuable, which is reflected in property values in the center; large land costs, in turn, drives developers to build even higher if they are to get a return on their investment, as well as have their buildings stand out.

He explains that on the one hand, builders want to build as high as possible, to maximise rental income, fair enough. By and large, rental values decline slightly with height (longer lift journeys etc) and construction costs rise disproportionately with height. So there is a cut-off height above which it makes no sense building, but hubris (esp. during a credit boom) makes people want to add a dozen floors too many, and credit booms also lead builders to underestimate the cost of capital tied up in those extra floors.

He can thus identify the "too tall" buildings, and lists the top fifteen "too tall" buildings on page 27. As you'd expect, their construction dates match peaks of the eighteen-year credit cycles, two in 1908-13; seven in 1926 - 1933; then a bit of a gap for WW2 which threw the cycles out of kilter (or dampened the one which would have happened in the late 1940s); two in 1960 - 61; three in 1972 - 77; and an odd one out in 1987.