Why new apartment buildings look the same

The ViA Apartment building in Salt Lake City is typical of apartment building construction across the US.

Readers of the Salt Lake Tribune are fortunate that the paper runs articles on architecture and design, written by local architect David Ross Scheer as increasingly, it is rare for a newspaper to have an architecture critic on staff.

The most current article is about why new construction apartment buildings look the same ("Why do all the new apartment buildings look the same (and do they have to)?").  From the article:

You can hardly help noticing the boom in apartment construction in and around downtown Salt Lake City. If you look a little closer, you’ll see that they are very much alike, like the same doll dressed up in different outfits.

The buildings I’m referring to are five to seven stories tall and have a boxy shape. The ground floor is a parking garage, sometimes combined with shops. Four or five stories of apartments or condos sit on top of this concrete “podium,” so they’re often called podium buildings. They cover a large area compared to older apartment buildings, often taking up a considerable portion of a block face.

These buildings are prevalent because they maximize developers’ profits by balancing leasable floor area (more is better) with construction cost (less is better). The residential floors are built of light wood framing because this is much less expensive than concrete or steel. The building code restricts this construction type to four stories, five if special lumber is used. For structural stability, wood framing requires large areas of flat, uninterrupted walls from the foundation to the roof. This gives podium buildings their boxy shape.

Fire code regulations require that buildings over a certain height be constructed with a concrete frame, which is double the cost of wood framing.

New developments in wood construction.  However, new developments in timber construction allow for buildings taller than 5-6 stories in ways that meet fire codes ("Canadian cities take wooden skyscrapers to new heights," Guardian), although building codes are still catching up ("Would you live in a wooden skyscraper?, AAAS/Science).

And thus far, I'd say that while these techniques allow for taller buildings, but that doesn't mean that they incorporate more aesthetic pleasing design.

Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia.

Buildings often "should" be taller.  For urban design reasons it's often better to build taller than 5-6 stories in certain places to better anchor districts, for placemaking reasons, to create "centers," providing more housing units, etc.

But it costs more, and developers don't want to spend the money.

To be fair, prevalent attitudes about what is "tall" or "dense" also make it harder for developers to get approvals to build taller. 

 From the article:

The design of these buildings is also having a major impact on the visual character of our city. Cities are visually defined by the architecture of their periods of expansion. In terms of residential neighborhoods, think of the brownstones in New York, or San Francisco’s Victorian “painted ladies.” Salt Lake City is now undergoing a boom in housing construction that will permanently transform it. Large areas of our city will be characterized by the design of podium buildings.

Is it marketing?  Besides construction, the reason the buildings all look the same is partly marketing as developers are convinced that the contemporary look of today's prevalent design style is preferred by the largest number of potential tenants.

17th Street NW, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC.

Cost shaping design choices?  But it's also cost.
Constructing buildings the way they were built decades ago, mostly of brick, is much more costly.

And only in large cities where land is especially pricey does it make economic sense to build underground parking.  Most of the grand historic apartment buildings were constructed at a time when building codes didn't require parking.

In cities where land is less expensive than the largest cities, if at grade parking isn't possible, typically these apartment buildings use at least one floor for parking, which makes it more difficult to enhance design.  From the article:

Many podium buildings are street killers. Their ground floor parking garages come right up to the street edge of the property, creating a dead, blank wall (and no, windows into parking garages don’t help).

Their long street frontage worsens the problem. City planners have tried to avoid this by forcing some developers to provide commercial space along the street, with mixed results. Simply building commercial space doesn’t guarantee there is demand for it. In some cases, mandated commercial space has remained vacant or underused.

Are more design requirements needed?  While the author of the piece recognizes the problems of sameness, he doesn't suggest additional design requirements, but "voluntary approaches" including changing how parking is provided and using materials like brick and stone instead of siding.

I don't think voluntary approaches will work.  Most developers don't develop for the long term, and extra costs only pay off in the long run, not immediately.

Subsidies?  I hate the idea of subsidies for better design and materials, but it might have to come to that.  In the past, I've suggested that "community benefits" received in return for density bonuses could include design improvements that ordinarily wouldn't be justifiable by "net present value" accounting and immediate positive marginal returns.

The architectural history of apartment buildings in Salt Lake City.  Salt Lake City has plenty of pre-1950 apartment buildings demonstrating that much better design is possible .

It is unfortunate that the article didn't reference some of these exemplary examples.

Nor did it mention a couple of great architectural history resources on the city's apartment buildings. 

Utah Historic Architecture, 1847 to 1940 has an excellent section on apartment buildings.  Unfortunately, it's out of print, but to its credit the Utah State Department of History has a downloadable copy available on the Internet.

And there is a newly published book, Historic Apartment Buildings of Salt Lake City, self-published by local architectural historian Lisa Michele Church, full of examples demonstrating the city's rich architectural history when it comes to the apartment building type.

Over the development of the book, Ms. Church did walking tours and presentations, which are available online:

-- walking tour based on the book
-- presentation

One such building is The Landing, an art deco building at 500 South and 1300 East, a couple blocks from the University of Utah campus.