Modern Apartment Design

Guy Marriage, Guy Marriage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura residencial

Modern Apartment Design provides guidelines to the design of modern apartment buildings as well as a summation of current cutting-edge practice in engineered timber construction.

The book covers a brief history of apartment buildings around the world, with a broad outline of different types of apartment blocks. It has a strong focus on the design and actual construction of apartment buildings, especially those utilising mass timber, such as cross-laminated timber and laminated veneer lumber. It also features six Case Study chapters from industry-leading practitioners in the area, enabling best practice in architecture and engineering of these new apartment building types to be more widely understood and propagated worldwide.

The fully illustrated, full-colour case studies span the globe and include: Clearwater Quay in Christchurch, New Zealand (Pacific Environments NZ); Wynyard Central East 2 in Auckland, New Zealand (Architectus); Dalton Works in London, UK (Waugh Thistleton Architects); Mjøstårnet, Brumunddal, Norway (Voll Arkitekter); Brock Commons Tallwood House student housing in Vancouver, Canada (Acton Ostry Architects); and Regensbergstrasse apartments in Zurich, Switzerland (Dreicon). The book will be of great interest to architects and architecture students.

01 Chapter One Introduction

Guy Marriage

DOI: 10.4324/9781003123873-1

Introduction

In 2020, our planet has well over 7 billion humans living on it and that number is projected to rise to up to 13 billion by 2050. Where will all those extra people live? While humans traditionally lived rural lives, more recently we have lived in suburban flat lands: wasteful in terms of land use and illogical in terms of transportation to and from places of work. This then is the crux of the matter: if we continue to grow, do we continue to build outwards into the suburban wastelands that surround our horizontal cities; or do we concentrate, build upwards, and live in urban apartment clusters? Is our experience with Covid-19 going to change the way we build and live? After all, it is certainly having a difference in the way that we work.

There are many factors that go into housing decisions – prime amongst them is not only the price of land, but also the availability of amenities, the cost of electricity or other sources of energy, the seismic condition of the land, the quality of the subsoil, the external cladding and weather-proofing of the building, the closeness to schooling, work and entertainment. Social and cultural amenities are more commonly available in cities than in suburbia and humankind desires to be with other humans: we are an intensely social species.

Indeed, with the population of Homo sapiens heading to a minimum of 10 billion by 2050, then at the very least, accommodation for an additional 3 billion people needs to be created over the next 30 years. There is some debate about whether the human population will continue to rise (Andregg, 2012; Liotta and Miskel, 2012), or perhaps level off (Livi-Bacci, 2017), or possibly even drop like a stone (Bricker and Ibbitson, 2019), but regardless, in the next 30 years, we will have to build housing like never before (Pagett and Smit, 2013). It is clear that for the continued existence of our prolific species, we must stop building on arable land, spreading out over green fields with a sea of low-level housing. The obvious consequence is that the future of our housing is likely to be more vertical and denser than in the past: the future of humankind is undoubtedly urban.

Urbanisation

Cities will continue to intensify regardless of health scares, with existing low-rise buildings increasingly replaced by medium-density or high-rise buildings. That’s inevitable. Countries that once prided themselves for being rural idylls are increasingly admitting that actually, people like to live near other people and that in fact, urban life is growing at a considerable rate. Aotearoa New Zealand, once thought of by many as a green and peaceful land full of sheep, forests and mountains with a scattering of humans (and perhaps some hobbits), is now one of the more urbanised nations on planet Earth. In 2020, over 87% of the NZ population, now live in cities, although nowadays there’s a lot fewer sheep. China, for centuries, consisting primarily as a nation of agricultural workers living in small rural villages, is urbanising rapidly as well, with over 50% of the greater Chinese population now living in cities. Over half a billion Chinese people are now urbanites, mostly living in concrete tower blocks. All over the world, cities are being built at great speed (often with not a lot of sophistication), to house their inhabitants as quickly as possible. Cities are the termite-mounds of human civilisation: a visual manifestation of the way we like to live (Wilson, 2020).

There’s one big barrier to this argument however, and that is that, unlike termites, the way we are building now is not sustainable. Creating multi-storey communities from buildings made from concrete is neither a sensible nor responsible use of our increasingly scarce planetary resources. Sharp-edged construction-quality sand for use in both concrete and glass is running out (Torres et al., 2017). Concrete is an extremely energy-intensive product to create and use due to the immense amounts of CO₂ produced when cement is made. Concrete is largely a one-way street as a material: most demolition concrete goes straight to landfill. Steel is also extremely energy intensive to create, although it is excellent at recyclability. It is arguable that there is one material that we should be using more of in the future and that we can readily grow more of: big slabs of timber. Chapter 7, in particular, examines the relative benefits of timber over concrete and steel (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Multi-storey mass timber residential building.

Source: Hayes, after Acton Ostry.

This book therefore is of two things: both a general guide to the creation of good spaces for living in tall buildings, and also a pathway to constructing these tall apartment buildings out of engineered timber. Principles for apartment living are the same the world over despite many varied climates and socio-ethnic groups: people simply want a good, safe, quiet, well-designed, warm, dry space in which to live. The creation of a community of souls in an active urban environment, living high above the ground next to people they may not know and may never meet is a skilled task and needs careful attention.

Modern construction systems are similar around the globe: no matter what the building is made from, gravity has the same effect on a structure wherever you live, while lateral forces like earthquakes, high winds and hurricanes do their best to rip it all apart. The book attempts to give an insight into the design aspects peculiar to high-rise living as well as a head-start on the detailing characteristics needed to cope with tall apartments, especially those made from modern engineered solutions like mass timber.

That’s all assuming, of course, that the world will want to live in multi-storey apartment buildings in this post-Covid future. Some are predicting a push to return to the havens of suburbia, commuting into the city each day in single-occupant vehicles, much as we have for most of the last century (Wainwright, 2020). Many others widely presume that with the forced adaption of ‘working from home’ that we may never return to the cities at all. Are cities doomed? Are apartment buildings doomed? I certainly hope not.

Cities and disease

This coronavirus may be novel, but the effects are not new. Despite our inclination to live in cities, humans have always been susceptible to health risks when put in crowded conditions. Sanitation is the most important factor: without fresh water sources for drinking and bathing, and without adequate drainage systems for voiding sewerage, many cities have had waves of disease reduce their populations considerably.

The most destructive disease to hit cities in the last two millennia was the bubonic plague, causing death rates as high as 30% in some countries, arriving in waves between the 12th and 17th centuries. The plague (or black death) wiped out much popular inclination for urban living, as it spread rapidly via the vector of fleas living on rats, who enjoy living in cities as much as we do. People left the cities in droves and headed for the countryside – unfortunately taking the plague with them (Defoe, 1722). What is apparent in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is just how similar are people’s reactions to spreading disease are, even today. Lockdown is not new. Self-confinement has many years of precedents, as has the effort to escape from confinement. Mask-wearing was also used to survive back then, particularly by the plague doctors. Vaccination dates from Jenner’s cowpox investigations in 1796. Obsessive hand-washing is a relatively new one though.

Cholera epidemics (caused by sewerage contaminating supplies of drinking water) affected many cities around the world until 1854 when Doctor John Snow deduced the problem by tracing the source of contaminated drinking water to the Broad Street water pump in London’s Soho and solved it by the simple act of removing the pump handle (Hempel, 2006). New York similarly suffered from waves of disease for many decades until a good fresh water source was well sourced (Glaeser, 2011).

More recently the 1918 influenza epidemic caused millions of deaths – more deaths than in the First World War that immediately preceded it. The 1918 flu was not caused or spread by cities, but like any highly contagious disease it took advantage of the close proximity of people, spreading rapidly in the troop ships that were returning soldiers back home.

Our current preoccupation with disease is the Covid-19 virus, which has caused considerable death and disruption around the world. Unlike previous waves of corona viruses like SARS, this had a more immediate and wide-spread effect. Our modern inclination for extensive tourism, mass gatherings and prolific air travel spread this air-borne disease immediately around the globe. On the other hand, our modern means of communication provided answers to this issue as well: immediate worldwide lockdown advice that was taken up by most world leaders. Not all populations believed the advice or followed it, but at the stage of writing, the first wave of combating the virus was largely over. The worst of pandemics was overcome in certain places around the world, essentially, by the simplest of simple measures: stay at home, wear a mask, and wash your hands. But by the time the second wave peaked in December 2020, many people had tired of waiting and refused to stay at home. Predictably, death rates soared again until the Covid vaccines were administered.

While cities such as New York and London have had massive death tolls, many other cities worldwide have not. Clearly, the mere fact of being in a city does not cause disease: Hong Kong, for instance, has a density far higher than that of New York, but has had a Covid-19 disease rate and death rate that is miniscule by comparison, powered by citizen vigilance and awareness of just how fragile the human condition truly is. The key appears to be preparedness to act: cities and countries that entered lockdown earlier rather than later have far lower death rates. Staying home, self-isolating, washing your hands and disinfecting door handles have entered into our modus operandi for continued good health, but many people could not stomach even those simple measures, preferring to gather en masse and party. Whether this can be blamed on the inherent human want to communicate with others, or cultural differences in our willingness to follow rules, or whether it is just a matter of stubborn nature and stupidity, the simple request to stay at home, which can save lives almost instantly, was ignored by many (Gelfand, 2020).

Diseases and apartment buildings

As the figures coming out of Hong Kong and Taiwan show, the mere act of living in an apartment building does not necessarily equate with the spread of disease. The exact vectors for transmission within a city are uncertain, but while close proximity is an issue, apartment living has solid, impermeable walls that keep residents perfectly safe. Hong Kong, despite having one of the highest densities of any city on the planet, had an impeccably low Covid-19 transmission rate throughout the first lockdown. This is due to the tightly organised population locking themselves down, and insisting on mask-wearing protocols along with mandatory hand-washing. Isolation is the key to success, and in this aspect, living in apartment buildings is as safe as living in suburban homes. As a primarily air-borne disease, Covid’s means of transmission is more by breathing than by touching, but regardless, regular disinfecting of frequently-touched surfaces like door handles and elevator buttons is all part of the story.

Works cited

• Andregg, Michael. 2012. Seven Billion and Counting: The Crisis in Global Population Growth. Minneapolis, MN: ...