Having clicked through to the article, I sort of feel like the two staircase thing is, while a very valid objection, a bit of a red herring.
The real reason this architect is against the two staircase standard is sort of buried if you don't know what to look for:
The Seattle-based architect Michael Eliason has a number of complaints about the way America makes its apartment buildings. [...] The designs rarely accommodate larger families
Mandating two stairways, Eliason says, produces smaller [...] apartments.
A ha. Eliason is against one bedroom apartments.
(This is me pulling on my very dusty architecture hat.)
The long corridors Eliason decries are basically necessary for studio, one-bedroom, and even two-bedroom apartments to be built affordably. A fact with which I have wrestled a lot, because the article is quite correct: they prevent cross ventilation*, which in turn is hugely consequential in our global warming reality.
Quite aside from our present problem with lack of affordable housing in the Boston area, and predating it back to the days of rent control, has been the issue of insufficient housing stock for single people and couples without children. We don't have remotely enough single occupancy housing here. Which is why so many people were (illegally!) sharing three-bedroom apartments in roommate situations back in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't that people liked having roommates, it was that the scarcity of studios and one bedrooms made their price high.
So maybe things are different elsewhere, but this guy's anti-studio apartment crusade rubs me the wrong way for a very different reason.
* As usually meant. There's an approach from traditional East African architecture (the name of which is eluding me right this moment) I have never heard of implemented in an American apartment building. It kills me that the building I live in could be retrofitted to do this, but if course it's not in the owner's financial interests. If someone would just give me this building, I could do so much to green it...
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Date: 2023-02-05 10:06 pm (UTC)The real reason this architect is against the two staircase standard is sort of buried if you don't know what to look for: A ha. Eliason is against one bedroom apartments.
(This is me pulling on my very dusty architecture hat.)
The long corridors Eliason decries are basically necessary for studio, one-bedroom, and even two-bedroom apartments to be built affordably. A fact with which I have wrestled a lot, because the article is quite correct: they prevent cross ventilation*, which in turn is hugely consequential in our global warming reality.
Quite aside from our present problem with lack of affordable housing in the Boston area, and predating it back to the days of rent control, has been the issue of insufficient housing stock for single people and couples without children. We don't have remotely enough single occupancy housing here. Which is why so many people were (illegally!) sharing three-bedroom apartments in roommate situations back in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't that people liked having roommates, it was that the scarcity of studios and one bedrooms made their price high.
So maybe things are different elsewhere, but this guy's anti-studio apartment crusade rubs me the wrong way for a very different reason.
* As usually meant. There's an approach from traditional East African architecture (the name of which is eluding me right this moment) I have never heard of implemented in an American apartment building. It kills me that the building I live in could be retrofitted to do this, but if course it's not in the owner's financial interests. If someone would just give me this building, I could do so much to green it...