Under LA's new "Objective Design Standards" for historic districts, the building on the left would be prohibited, and the building on the right would be encouraged
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I imagine someone has written a long-form piece on the emergence of "articulate the massing" standards out of the New Urbanist movement in the early 2000's, but I'm not sure where that piece is.
In the case here, it's just being applied out of laziness
Why do we have state mandated safe articulationslop if we’re going to let shit like this go up anyway
Important to remember that a lot of this ugly patchwork Minecraftsman stuff is the result of good standards being drafted by people like and then handed to fuming spiteful modernists who maliciously “comply” with them to make the buildings even uglier out of spite.
The building on the right makes me want to go ahead and get it over with already.
No one is even designing buildings like the ones on the left for other reasons, such as lacking knowledge of craft, technique. Design moves on, the intent is to stop giant refrigerator or vending machin type blocks from being slathered with stucco and haunting the neighborhoods.
A little disingenuous because you know the building in the left is unbuildable in those materials today. Applying the standards to materials we actually see in construction makes the standards much more rational.
Design standards need to start with beauty + passive heating and cooling and go from there. The look of our environment effects everything we do and "energy savings" is pointless if the structure itself is purposely working against us.
The building on the right would be "encouraged" insofar as the City can't turn down a developer's proposal no matter how ugly because of builder's remedy.
