Regional identity
*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.
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View original on lemmy.world*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.
155 replies
Architectural degeneration.
Fachwerksbau (Alsace) is just fetish harness for houses, change my mind.
I don't want to
Having seen other German words, I'm going to just blindly guess that the word etymology is this:
Fachwerksbau
Fuckworks Bau
Sex worker Bough
Sex Dungeon Beams
Yep, fetish harness house.
I just love modern monochromatic architecture. Inject glass walls, metal accents, and white concrete into my veins.
and no trees! yuck.
There could be trees, why does it have to be no trees
This is dictated by cost and the desire to insulate. It's possible to build well insulated buildings that look traditional, but it's going to cost more and it's not going to improve the quality of living inside the house.
Flat rectangular insulation panels with plaster on top placed on large flat surfaces -vs- irregularly shaped insulation with a cavity and a bespoke brick façade. Just the bricks alone, so without the labour, is going to cost about the same as the finished plaster. In the long term brick and a sloped roof should require less frequent renovations, but I doubt that it would ever offset the higher initial cost.
You can stick a fancy facade on basically any wall construction to make it look like an old-half timbered style, or brick, or stone, etc.
But trying to actually build an old brick/stone/plaster and timber monstrosity today wouldn't be smart. Insulation, moisture control, energy efficiency, and even creature comforts like wifi signal penetration are all miles better with newer construction methods.
I agree the architecture is boring, but again, it doesn't have to look this way. However, I think most people would rather have the soulless gray box than have uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter.
Exactly, the vernacular of the past was based on the materials that were available and practical at the time, for the demands of the time. Whatever came out was just the practical way to build under these conditions, not necessarily a choice.
In that sense, the rectangular box IS the vernacular of our time. Practical materials that fulfill the needs people have to present-day homes. Straight walls, insulation, energy efficiency. Of course you can plaster on a fake facade but it's a choice, not a consequence.
In Australia, you can get the soulless grey box with shit insulation and mold problems, so it's twice as good! /s
You mean soulful mold?
Yep, I've lived in old buildings most of my life (very german predilection for the "Altbau" I guess) and I'm not sure whether people are aware how much energy it costs.
I love 3.5m ceilings and 2.5m high windows, I love thick walls made from solid stone, that's how I grew up, in a rented place in a wonderful turn-of the century building. ... it's not even expensive to rent compared to where I live now. But heating alone costs enough that it could pay for a single room somewhere else. And given that the walls are thick, but not insulated, you have to make sure you heat it, make sure you don't put things too close to the wall, otherwise you might have to battle moisture and moldy walls. In fact, if the windows insulate too well it might even be a drawback because the moisture can't escape, and you have to air the rooms (the very german habit of "Stoßlüften") frequently to not get mold.
The rectengular zero-energy buildings of today, you probably don't need to heat much. Friends of mine used to live in a building like that. Well insulated, three-pane windows, all that. They barely had to turn the heat on in the middle of winter. Body heat, residual heat from cooking and what not, it's practically enough to keep the place warm.
Yeah, I'm looking into insulating my 100+ year old house, and it might mean the stones on the base need to be flattened and covered up. The windows and some of the doors are now plastic, since the previous ones (that were already not the original) were water damaged, which somehow involved the indoor doors too.
Covering up can't be avoided unless you want to insulate on the inside. And insulating on the inside is a real pita to do right, so covering up it will be :) It's a shame to lose the old stone + brick look, but energy wise we must.
Flattening the outside might not be necessary if you've got local contractors who can do carpentry + flexible insulation solutions. See the first option for an example: https://www.eurabo.be/nl/updates/buitenmuren-isoleren-langs-buiten In Dutch because I don't know the terminology to find something like this in English.
I live in the Philadelphia area and a lot of the row houses here dating to a century or more ago have absolutely beautiful brickwork, incredibly creative and interesting stuff, often on houses that these days barely sell for $100K. It would be completely impossible to duplicate this kind of thing today even with a construction budget of millions. The craftsmen who can do that kind of work are nonexistent now -- today you're lucky to find somebody who can lay bricks in a straight line.
Unless you build the house to last 200 years, with occasional maintenance. No drywall monstrosity will survive that long.
Is that good though? In Japan they build houses with the expectation that they’re only going to last one generation and then will be rebuilt, and the result is that housing is actually affordable because there isn’t nearly as much speculative investing in housing driving up house prices.
That's a great point. Alternative is that once you build enough housing (admittedly that would take some doing to redo everything, best bet is slow replacement) you wouldn't really need that large industry to begin with. You just have houses everywhere that are good and you build a few here or there to replace accidental damage or the slow turnover of old ones.
Idk if that's possible. Humans never did it before.
I'd think it was always quite expensive to build like that, and what we see today is what survived. A lot of (european) vernacular architecture is just ... not that.
In fact I'd think the "old" houses in the comic, would need constant maintenance. Paint the wooden windows, make sure they don't distort, a new roof every 20-30 years. The places you see in a deserted italian, french or spanish village might have been uninhabited for a few decades, and are basically ruins.
It's true. But also could be less true. With our modern tech, we could build like they did back then, but much better. If we built for longevity. But we won't.
I am a unique and special snowflake.
Curious that Provence needed neither chimneys nor garages.
What's that about?
If it got more people into houses I wouldn't give a shit, but sadly, its shitty in both ways
There are a lot of high density housing being built in my city after some planning rule changes to enable it.
It's unpopular to say the least.
I'm just happy that it means more people get to live in a house.
As long as the house has at least 1 window each on opposing sides, and at least 2 metres of spacing between the next plot margin, I'd give it a pass.
I'm writing this from an area where I won't find such a place even if I were to pay 1/3 of my salary as rent.
Fuck the NiMBYs
the nimbys wouldn't object to high density housing anywhere nearly as much if there were guarantees that the poor wouldn't move in.
"Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet, but your cat's are gonna love it."
You can blame this guy: Adolf Loos, at least in part.
Major influence behind Modernism. He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.
"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects" is the core theme of his essay "Ornamentation and Crime" .
Basically,
ornamentation causes buildings and useful objects to go out of style.
Things that go out of style require materials and manpower to update.
It is the moral imperative of the designer to make useful things, things that need to be redone are less useful and are wasteful.
Therefore it is the moral imperative of the designer to remove all ornamentation from design.
He saw ornamentation as "degenerate" and equated ornamentlessnes with moral and intellectual development. He also made it a race thing. He used the example of people from Papua New Guinea having tattoos. Paraphrasing: "these primitive savages ornament themselves with tattoos, we enlightened europeans don't. We smart, they dumb. Therefore ornament = dumb bad, no ornament = good smart. See?"
He was a major inspiration behind the modernist movement. It helped that unadorned buildings are cheaper and easier to construct - especially with the advent of cheap glass and steel construction. So you end up with this sort of soulless architecture that gives no sense of time or place - that tells you nothing about its purpose or the people who built/use it.
The popularisation of the idea that ornament is inherently bad genuinely did far more damage to the visual environment of the UK than the Luftwaffe managed with years of strategic bombing in my view.
At least all the things I see on the buildings in the top picture seem to have a utilitarian purpose.
Of course, how well they fulfilled their purpose would have depended upon the availability of materials and manufacturing processes at the time.
"I think that thing is ugly, so I'm gonna make something even uglier!"
We can pretend he's the main influence, whilst ignoring the fact that most people prefer square even walls for aesthetic, functional, and - most of all - cost purposes.
I do agree we could do better w.r.t to colour, and millenial grey needs to go. But don't knock the rectangle. Rectangle is good. Rectangle is steady. You can plan on rectangle.
I now feel the need to create a coordinate system where a 120 degree angle is orthogonal, so people will say the same for hexagons.
And then pixels on the monitors will be arranged in a hexagonal formation.
It would be fun to watch.
But IDK if that will work out. Perhaps create another space.
Oof, I'd hate to live in a hexagon house with hexagon rooms. Can you just imagine what the corridoors would be like?
Either you accept that the corridors are constantly bending in and out, or you shove a rectangle through there for normalcy and disrupt all the other rooms
There's nothing in the construction world that I hate more than the fake gray wood interlocking vinyl floor planks that are in every house now. I guess they're supposed to be the color of wood on old barns or fences, but I've never seen real wood of that color on a floor anywhere. I bought my house a couple of years ago and it had that type of fake flooring in the living room. I deliberately left it uncovered during the renovations, assuming that it would be trashed which would force me to replace it with something I actually like -- no such luck, that stuff is actually pretty indestructable, unfortunately.
But consider this:
Hexagons - bestagons
Rectangle looks like shit and is monotone
No like really, I can see it making sense for older times where it was harder to build shit but cmon we are in 2026...
Rectangles were fucking hard for a very long time. Which is why vernacular building strategies came about (why there’s so much variation in architecture older than the Industrial Revolution).
This entire thread reads like it’s filled with opinions from people who have never put anything together.
I was talking more about the overall shape of the building rather than doors, windows etc etc and also not pre-industrial revolution ages.
I lived in a souther italian commune for a while and i still go there in vacation, the houses are very old and most shapes are cubic or rectangles except for windows and doors because it was just easier to build that way (the houses are also not big so it's a factor to keep in mind) while bigger structures do use more arches and many shapes
I think an aspect of the problem is the modern high expectations of functionality for things like climate control and ingress protection against pests and water. It's much easier to not make a mistake on those if you aren't adding any "frills". Balancing those needs with ornamentation and cost is such a difficult juggling act, most people just don't.
It's also a question of cost. You can probably take the layout off the modern house and have the facade look like the housing of old. But building houses is expensive so costs need to be cut where it can, thus very minimalist facades. If you live in your own house would you pay 50k or 100k just to have your house look a certain way from the outside? I know I wouldn't. I could barely afford the house.
Rectangle good, sure. But rectangle that gives no sense of time or place sad, I think.
I really like some architecture inspired by modernism. Huge FLW fan - fallingwater is my favorite building. But the good modernist or modernist-derived buildings incorporate and emphasize their surroundings and give a sense of time and place by incorporating traditional stylistic elements, local materials, etc.
Also, no pretending needed - this guy was a major progenitor of the style. The style can be a very good fit for the needs of people who commission buildings to be built, and it can look cool in its own right, but regardless of any of that Loos was a pioneering force in the Modernist movement
Unpopular opinion: I never saw the appeal of Frank Lloyd Wright, honestly. I don't know how anybody can look at Falling Water and not see a bunch of cardboard boxes somebody left at the creek.
Holy shit this is a bad take.
Yeah, that's unpopular alright. How do I look at it without seeing cardboard boxes? With my functional eyes
I don't have a strong opinion about this, but I find it funny that even your unflattering critique acknowledges that it does convey a sense of time and place.
Tell me you’ve never read Buckminster Fuller without telling me
Hmm, tricky but I'll try.
*Mimes: Five words*:
LMFAO
Like… everything he wrote?
Relevant YouTube video: how did the world get so ugly?
I know it was fairly cheap ornamentation, but the damage his philosophy did to buildings in Germany is profound. They straight up tore the ornamentation off a lot of buildings.
Man, I really don't care for this Adolf character...
Just Adolf things
Ayn Rand also writes about this in The Fountainhead
Somebody mentions Ayn Rand in a neutral/positive light and gets only upvotes.
What's going on here.
Positive? We established here these boxes are ugly and uninspired.
Goddamn she found a way to be as wrong as possible about every single topic.
I read The Fountainhead in college and thought it was great. Then I recovered from the flu and thought "what the hell was that shit?"
People sure are opinionated about architecture... I mean I think both are nice. Although the modern designs do tend to all look the same, which isn't ideal
My beef with modern home architecture (the stuff in the US, mainly) is not that it's different or modern, but that it's so fucking fake in its fundamental elements. Vinyl siding stamped to look like old-fashioned wood siding but obviously isn't because of the vertical seams and the bumps; double-paned vinyl windows with glazing dividers emulating old-fashioned casement windows that don't even look three-dimensional; shutters that obviously can't close; panel doors made from one block of essentially cardboard etc. etc.
I don't really have any strong opinions on architecture, but I'll still get mad in this instance taking it as a proxy for the French state's efforts to wipe out regional culture throughout its history. You have tons of regional languages, with their own rich cultures and histories, and France has systematically done its best to beat them out of existence. Bréton, Gascon, Picard, Occitane and Corsican, amongst many others, are all considered to be either definitely or severely endangered, according to their wikipedia articles. Even those whose wiki page doesn't mention this, like Alsatian, still generally mention the speakers tending to be predominantly older adults, with fewer and fewer young people learning the language. I've seen stuff about there being positive results with revitalization efforts and bilingual schooling for some of them, but it gets me bummed out and angry to think it might be too little, too late, and all in the name of some misguided nation building policies.
i mean are we not allowed to be opinionated on architecture all of a sudden? in a city environment, its what ends up defining the form of 80-90% of that environment. I feel likr thats actually one of the areas that make a ton of sense for the general public to be very opinionated about.
also, sarcastically commrnting on the amount of opinions people have on architecture, then literally following that up with an opinion on architecture... ironic.
No, I literally want it to be illegal for you to have opinions on architecture and mandatory by law for you to hear mine.
based and dictatorpilled. Big man me with your will to power daddy
It's kind of lame and boring if they look the same. There's a ton of different modern styles that aren't just black and white.
Like look up Nordic Modern, where there is often wood mixed in heavily.
A lot of modern styles just mean tons of natural light, open concepts, indoor/outdoor integration. It's not inherently bad or boring. It's probably more that luxury homes are being built cheap and fast with dentist office modern style that seems copy and paste, without caring about what makes it nice.
I think what people hate is the fake appearance of modernism where it's made to look new and expensive, and not what makes modern homes modern.
Funny enough 1921 is when all the houses from the second half of the comic started.
Not fair to equate bland housing with modernism.
Tell me this building is bland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Assembly
That's just (old and) ugly brutalism from the soviet fucking union.
I actually enjoy all three styles. Though out of the three, I’d prefer to actually live in the smallest bland box.
It looks like it hasn't been used since the fall of the soviet union and I'm only half sure it's not intentional.
Blander than any of the Corbusier buildings you’re responding to, tbh
That's horrific
The reflecting pool is so funny... What's there to reflect? The legislative assembly for my province is more breathtaking
it's not bland, but can someone powerwash that thing?
And lose all the brutalist charm? Might as well wash the sauce off your spaghetti before eating it.
Wait... other people DON'T do that?
Modern boxy homes would be pretty great if their roofs are also designed to be used as a patio area with awnings or solar panels. It just seems like a waste otherwise.
rooftop gardens would be goated
But that would lower the benefit for the constructor of about $600 for a measly 50 years of pleasure.
A wonderful thing is the regional differences in door casing styles.
Every house everywhere have doors and all of them have trims (door casing), but they're not the same.
In a lot of old houses/apartments, these are rarely changed. They suck to change because you'll probably want the same for all the doors in the house or it looks weird. So if you want to change/repair just one, you'd want the same profile again and that's not available, because every single carpenter had their own design back in the pre-1950s where stuff like this wasn't mass produced, but made by the carpenter. So you either don't change it or you get the same again. The design caries over either way.
In old large cities like Copenhagen where they obviously had several carpenters, you can tell to this day which neighborhood you're in by looking at the door trims if you know how they look.
These days the new ones are all just flat. No profile. Sure, it makes it easier to maintain, but its a real loss in my opinion.
*Cries in french* Around my hometown I have 4 styles of different houses depending of the microregion they are in. All in a 40 km radius. There is even a continum with hybrids as we move from a place to another.
... That's for older house of course. They are still here, terribly laking heat isolation and in desperate need of renovation, but still here but for every new family that move in the village of for every second brother that stays as an adult, there is a cookie cutter home terribly laking in hot weather resistance that will be desperate for renovation in just 15 years.
On est voisins ?
I think the creative processor for our simulation is failing. This explains a lot of the wacky things that are happening.
It's just low poly style, easier to render
You’re joking, but a big part of this style of housing’s popularity is that it’s very fast for architects to draw them in CAD programs.
Yes it's cheap and that's what it looks like.
Less work to design too. Whoever is working on the simulation might be on strike. Or got layed off…
This is the "light" version. The worst are when they don't even have street facing windows, only concrete and garage doors facing the street and all around the house nothing but concrete/tiles, no greenery. These houses make me so sad while walking around a neighboorhood :(
the grey and black rocks garden!
Ʌ921 is crazy
Back then, the builders built homes.
These days builders build houses.
What is the leading character of the older year? Capital 1?
common in France, in handwriting the down-tick part is often bigger than the vertical part.
Is it only if it’s the first number? I was confused why both 1s weren’t written like that, and was wondering if it was a weird way to write a 0 or something (idk if those would be accurate mid-medieval homes, probably not)
That’s funny, my French eye didn’t even notice the difference between the 1s before reading your comment!
Not at all. In France it's very common to have roughly the same proportions for the upstroke and downstroke. Both the first and second 1s are perfectly valid and legible and variations come with handwriting. However the downstroke should roughly end at least at the same level as the upstroke's start.
See this quickly made example, 147 written in French style (above) and English style (below) in my shitty phone handwriting.
As you can see, 1 takes a single stroke and 7 two so we can't mix them.
You also see people tracing the 4 as a zigzag shape, in one lazy stroke. I tend to do that, but I don’t know if it’s a specifically French thing.
Fun fact about the 7: even in France, you don’t cross them when doing chord notation (in classical music at least), because a crossed number means it’s a diminished intervall. That’s not a problem because the digit 1 isn’t used when numbering chords.
Never seen that in my whole life, it must be a mistake.
There are things you haven't seen.
People don't use materials they pick up in the immediate vicinity anymore, with stone being of different colors in different regions and different materials being locally available, forcing the use of different construction techniques. They use manufactured materials that all came out of the same factory and brought over by truck.
Yeah I was gonna say, I appreciate how the building in the Auvergne picture is black, because it's accurate to the volcanic stone there.
The cathedral in Clermont Ferrand is pretty bad ass
Carcinization of architecture. All structures evolve to box.
These white boxes are everywhere, as one of my daughters call it, they lack personality as one of a normal house and don't look practical or especially luxurious beyond looking like an office building.
I like it. But I also will never own one, so wtv I guess.
They are building those in my (mainly 1940s) neighborhood and yeah I hate them. Half the bottom floor is a garage, no front porch, front door recessed so unfriendly and people just drive into the garage, close the door and enter the house without ever stepping outside. And so very ugly and builders ask 1.5 million for them. They buy one lot then build two mc mansions on them. I get splitting the lot but we don't need those monstrous buildings.
I also mourn the loss of community but honestly moving to a living situation without a front door was such a huuuuuuge quality of life upgrade. The relentless greedy advertisers were so entitled.
Looks like in the past people wanted to be Hobbits and now they want to be Robots! I like them both, I think there is more diversity in modern styles than is really depicted here, even if I understand the sentiment.
I'll say this much, when it comes time to replace the roof, Style A is gonna punch you in the nuts a whole lot harder than Style B.
In many European countries there are regulations that your house architecture has to match the overall appearance of the locality. Maybe France doesn't have that or lags behind or it is badly enforced?
So you can be creative but have to match the colors and materials and roof style of the neighborhood. That can be annoying too but I can see how such bland architecture everywhere would be much worse. I always wanted to build a container home castle but it would never be approved.
As someone who lives in the south of France...they do. Houses like the ones in the second half of the comic are quite rare. No idea what they're crying about. Even in apartment buildings they have regulations and they all have the same color sun screens on their balconies and stuff. For example:
It's up to each city/town to set constraints and regulations for constructions and most places outside historical cities don't bother.
Yeah. It's really very local democracy where people can get involved in if such modernist crap bothers them.
The white box and brushed metal styles are not because someone decide to make everything look sterile. It's because most people don't want to completely rebuild their houses/apartments every 10 years. It's extremely wasteful and expensive to do it.
Found the post modernist.
A post modernist would never argue for neutral styles for efficiency…
Is affordable housing post modernist? Then yes, I guess I'm a post modernist.
That same stucco sterile box style is everywhere. It’s like a generic rich people tract house that you get from a vending machine. Just add water and they pop up, all the same, brick paved driveways, generic minimalist interiors, nobody actually lives there. It’s as empty and uncreative as the people who hired someone else to design it for them.
Why do you need big heavily fortified steepled roofs when snowfall is shrinking and you're not worried about roof collapse?
Why are you using heavy lumber, stone, and plaster to build a frame when steel is cheaper and hardy plank more reliable?
Why do you need a chimney?
The mass production of modern Box homes is a mistake, the older homes need to be mass produced
The curves and stone aren't really something you can easily mass produce.
Where I live, having a flat roof is absolute madness. The snow load would collapse it during the first big snowstorm.
My town is the top frame. The industry that was here previously crashed big time in the early 1900s. There were no jobs, so no one wanted to live here. The old city never got redeveloped. So the official buildings and even the high school are from another time. Same with the houses. Now it’s part of the charm and what brings people to visit.
Same in Canada, all those "modern houses" are the same, a box with small wide rectangle windows, it's horrible.
well things like HSR do interconnect a country and so unifies and therefore interconnect a culture.
now multiply this x100 with air travel and the internet.
I think it's less about the railway and more about standardisation of materials/building codes
Actually it’s more about building the houses as cheap as possible, because although French houses are generally much sturdier and better insulated than North American homes, building codes are not really well controlled here. They don’t even do plumbing and electrical inspections in new builds.
Are there zoning laws related to building footprints vs lot size, or maximum building square footage? In the US, many of these utilitarian box structures are designed to take advantage of the maximum allowable building size on a specific lot (This varies greatly by state and city)
That’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer, as my experience is strictly from working in the trades here. One thing to note is that the mayor’s office has a huge say in all that, and as someone mentioned above, there are often regulations on things like roof colour, so that houses in a given neighborhood all have matching roof tiles. I have friends that built a house nearby that the mayor hated because it wasn’t conformist enough for his tastes (they had incorporated lots of wood, resultant in a house with a more North American-style trim), but he’s totally fine with bland-ass white squares with red roofs, lol.
In my experience they're mostly painted yellow rather than white, but yup this is pretty accurate.
If the design's boring and copy-pasted everywhere, how could people grow attached to their houses? Furthermore, if people had to go to apartments, like for unwieldy prices for years now, they would be desensitized on the part of losing the house.
oh no, current trend is different to four previous trends? whatever shall we do
Media literacy moment
the artist is worried about current architectural stylings being samey, yes? and contrasting it with older styles, yes? and those older styles are not only from different areas, but different eras, yes? and people have been complaining about this since the tudor era, yes? stop me if i'm missing a step.
Stop!! The step you're missing is that the point isn't about when those different styles first emerged, but the fact that there were regional differences in style, as you correctly identified but missed the point of. It is irrelevant whether the differing styles emerged simultaneously or not: what matters is that they differed by region. The current style does not differ by region. This is the point the artist is upset about. Its nothing to do with the trend being different visually, its about the trend being homogenous across all regions, which is different than before, yes?
but it's not. the "alsacian" style is what basically every house in every hanseatic german city looked like at the time, all around the baltic sea. the black roof shingles and blue paint of bretagne were both imported from england and scotland at a time when scotland exported shingles to all of western europe.
take it from someone who lives in a place where houses are traditionally painted red based on the popularity of building with brick at a point in history, these are all anchored in time rather than place. it's clout-chasing and keeping up appearances all the way down.
Your heroic & unwavering commitment to missing the point is admirable, even inspiring. Never change.
i addressed the thing in the reply, did i not? what's left after that, other than the "things are worse now"/"RETVRN" shit?
While I'd marvel at the architectural diversity, all our houses are bungalows. It's simply most efficient, one floor is more than enough. Boxes rule! And if you throw a pizza on the roof it'll just stay :-)
Bungalows eat up way too much land. Build up, not out.
Why the heck should I care for that? Instead of more houses, maybe procreate less? Also my places have enough of free land around them, I'm not eating anything up.
Why you should care? If everyone was as selfish as you, there wouldn’t be land for nature, parks, or agriculture.
We don’t need more houses, we need more density, so less houses and more condos.
Free land means what in this context?
Nonsense. What we need is less population not even more unhumane stapler-boxes where noone would live if they had the choice. I did my part and didn't procreate, even though we would have more than enough dough to rationalize such a decision. So, you probably have kids so you added to the problem. More housing won't solve our problems. BTW, here, in germany, situation is not that bad because a few people build bungalows instead of skyscrapers. It's even very rare to find if you don't wanna build.
And yeah I'm selfish in that regard, I can't stand people, so I don't want them around me, if avoidable. And still be in a city not some fucking rural desert.
Please, don't tell me you'd prefer a human shoebox if you could do otherwise. For the sake of other people.
PS: "free land" means larger properties, no neighbors, tiny houses.
Double storey terrace without lawn is much more space efficient if you don't want to have someone living upstair, country that allowed HOA nazi would be benefit from it.
I'm not a murican, why would I care for the HOA 😁 Always this defaultism... And space-efficient for whom? We don't need a castle, we're just 2 ppl. A few rooms plus a cellar are totally fine.
HOAs exist in a lot of countries. I also had one for my apartment in the Netherlands.
And do the Dutch call it HOA or would they have said its dutch name?
When they're speaking English they call it HOA, because that's the translation.
Space efficient for literally everyone. Having a detached house with lawn makes everything so far away. It's called urban sprawl.
Inb4 why should I care for that, if you care about efficiency then you should probably care about that.
If I'd care for that efficiency, I'd propose for gargantuan skyscrapers next to each other. Each apt. 1 square room, 20 per floor.
Efficiency for wifey+me. And considering how immensely fast bungalows sell, not just for us.
Then it's not efficiency.
It's not efficient if it's efficient for me? But only when it's efficient for ALL people? So, good food isn't good unless everyone loves it?
[...] simply most efficient [...]
In what context? For what and for whom?
I think regional building materials are probably either forgotten and/or in most of the places not (easily) accessible anymore, also traditional craftmanship got displaced.
As I expressed a personal opinion, it's obviously for me and my wife. For 2 ppl it's efficient. Why 2 stories? A cellar is fine for a pool, but we also could do without it..
Here you would find traditional craftsmen though. You just have to pay more, where I also failed to see the benefit. But yes, not easily accessible for sure. Which is sad.