As this excerpt from Metropolis Magazine states, this is not surprising. But for me, this is sick, wrong, silly, and I find even more insulting than most subdivisions. It's no secret to most that I am enamoured with lofts and with the idea of adaptive re-use, so obviously I have some bias when it comes to something like this. But, geez....
(For images, either before reading the extended entry or during, you can see this link)
[begin quoted material -- written by Karrie Jacobs]
In reality, I am the uncool hunter. My talent is discovering the places where hipness goes to die. I drive around the country and stumble on phenomena that make me realize that something I once valued is about to be eaten alive by mindless commerce.
...
Several months ago, I found myself in Frederick, Colorado, one of those featureless expanses of dust that fills with tract houses simply because -- traffic permitting -- it's a 30-minute drive to Denver. There I came face to face with the demise of the loft as a meaningful cultural icon. Not that I was surprised. The commercialization of the loft, the abandoned warehouses and factories that afforded artists dirt-cheap square footage, perfect for the painting of epic canvases -- that happened a long time ago. Old industrial buildings became prime real estate. Then developers in cities without a large enough inventory of mills and plants ripe for conversion -- Houston for example -- began building "loft" complexes from scratch, complete with exposed ducts and heroic girders. But at least these industrially inspired buildings were true to the urban nature of more authentic lofts.
Three years ago I started seeing lofts as the contemporary answer to the ranch house. It seemed that the popularity of the ranch house in the 1950s and '60s suggested a nostalgia for a lost lifestyle, a longing for the atavistic cowboy. The loft is also about nostalgia: it is a monument to the disappearance of industry.
...
I got my answer last summer, when I wound up in Frederick, drawn there by an ad I saw in a glossy real estate advertising magazine called Homes and Land of Boulder County. The developer, Cornerstone Homes, had several pages promoting Ironworks Lofts, a community of "stand-alone" loft hoes, single family subdivision houses tricked out in industrial brick and steel with names like the Firehouse and the Cannery.
...
I told myself that these buildings are exactly as industrial as a more typical subdivision's "Tuscan Villas" are Italian.
[end quoted material]
There is nothing wrong with incorporating some of the 'features' of a loft: open plan and open space, high ceilings, big windows, even exposed structure vs the generic drywall box room. But to copy the aesthetic as an applique is, IMHO, quite on the side of wrong. Could these buildings have been built in the same materials and with the same interior spatial qualities and layout w/o being kitch? Yes. In fact, some of their exterior appearances needn't change too drastically, simply remove the press-on-architecture, and design with honesty and self-integrity rather than disneyland-interpretations of the real thing.
This isn't a very good example, but there's a house near where I live, on near Lawrence expressway, that one could call... industrial or farmish due to its materiality. It isn't a brick warehouse, but it isn't quite an Eichler either. Have a look here and here. It doesn't break any new ground on the house archetype, really, and certainly not 'loft-like living' inside. But it isn't trying to pretend it's some other kind of building either, nor that it had a (false) past.
Lofts as converted spaces are something cool, because of the adaptive reuse, of their (often) deep-urban locale, their re-vitalization properties, and the fact that true lofts origninally come as a blank slate for the inhabitants to inhabit by crafting an insertion. The 'new' loft developments turned lofts into a high-priced luxury place by simply adopting a few of the elements of lofts, but filling the space with pre-built and pre-arranged things. These not only are in a suburb (not urban = more sprawl), they seem to have rooms like any other tract house, and they're consuming new resources. Call a true conversion a loft, call 'new lofts' something else, maybe grand studio appartments, and call the last for what it is: subdivision home w/ hollywood smear.
Posted by kannik at April 15, 2004 10:51 AM in Architecture | TrackBack