every apartment gets an atlantic view in carlo ratti’s zig-zag west palm beach tower 🌴 designboom.com/architecture/…

Vape shops. Betting shops. Dodgy businesses. If you look at your high street these days and think ‘who asked for this?’, you’re not alone. I’m doing something about it. We’re giving local people and councils more control over what opens, and tougher powers to crack down on businesses that aren’t good for our communities. For too long, Westminster has stood by while our high streets declined. That ends now.

Capitalism has a clear MO: find the optimised form, and replicate ad infinitum. It is as applicable to buildings as it is for phones, for cars, for cruise ships, for every mass market product. Not a value judgement, just an observation of the world system we live in!

Cederhusen, Stockholm. 245 apartments in 10-13 storey cedar-clad buildings, with a cross laminated timber structure. Designed by General Architecture. A thread 🧵

The march of anywhere nowhere architecture continues apace, this time infecting the new Australian city of Bradfield (10,000 homes). This despite all evidence pointing to the human need for beauty and a sense of place. This has neither. Architects are SOM and Hassell.

I spoke with the great @DKThomp about how Britain's economy got so broken, and what we can do to fix it. theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…

If we want to enable cheaper yet still high quality housing, we'd do well to allow a similar approach, giving developers certainty about what they can or can't build, while still giving freedom about how the building appears from the street.

So much of Copenhagen are uniform streets of 5-6 storey apartment buildings, but it was not by chance or mere preference. The city had strict building regulations mandating this form (The Building Acts of 1856 and 1889). They're much the same apart from the facade.