|
I see that goons be postin' ugly buildings instead of actual architectural failures. Came here to fix this. Zagrepčanka tower in Zagreb, Croatia:  It was completed in 1976 and frankly, it doesn't look bad. The tower is clad in white marble tiles which give it a nice touch. Oh, except this:  Turns out the architect chose a lazy solution and instead of doing something sensible, like anchoring the stone panels, he simply decided to use tile glue and a lot of wishful thinking to hold them up. Each of those panels is something like an inch thick and easily weighs over 200 pounds. After roughly a decade, heavy stone panels started separating from the highrise, threatening to clobber whoever was unfortunate enough to be standing outside. The repair was deemed to be mega-expensive because they pretty much had to retile the whole highrise, and for the time being, the management erected a tunnel made out of scaffolding and thick wooden planks that leads you from a safe distance outside, right into the front lobby. As of TYOOL 2015, only the western side of the building is "repaired". You are well advised not to go anywhere near that thing if the wind blows or at any time, for that matter.
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2015 13:16
|
|
GAY 4 ORGANS 
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:01 |
|
|
GenericOverusedName posted:What is with dumb architects and marble paneling, seriously. You can't make 70s commie chic without a profound lack of common sense, it seems.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2015 14:35
|
|
|
 This is a 1980s hospital in Zagreb, Croatia. It looks weirdly plastic from the outside, but on the inside it looks like an airport terminal:  "Nauseatingly Green Plastic" is the pervasive theme inside the hospital. What's even better, the architect apparently loved the idea of port-a-potties so in the walk-in clinic waiting room, instead of real bathrooms you've got these weird green plastic kiosks you're supposed to take a poo poo in (GIS unfortunately came up with nothing on this one.) I've had a wisdom tooth pulled in that clinic back in '04, the doctors were good but the building was weird as gently caress. They've got a bazillion of those arrow-pointing signs everywhere, they didn't stop me from getting lost in the hospital. It was like getting lost at an airport. I bring you some lovable but nasty commieblocks for the working poor:  These shits are 1960's "sardine cans". Even though they were devised under the "Silver City" moniker, they ended up being called "Sardine Cans" because  Hot as gently caress in the summer, and cold in the winter: corrugated aluminum sheets insulated by a tiny little bit of spray-on asbestos and plywood, the whole thing left to rot over the past fifty years. Soundproofing in these buildings is virtually non-existent: a friend tells me she can hear her neighbor's Little White Dog scampering around the linoleum floors in the early morning. Every. Single. Morning. The idea of aluminum/plywood walls must have sounded really impressive in 1957 (so much that the architect actually bothered to patent the design) but time has not been kind to these buildings. To add an insult to an injury, since they could be put up quickly and easily, the city planners shat out clumps of these aluminum blocks in quite a few districts of Zagreb. All of them are now way past their design life. I've known several people who live there, and none were "all there" in the head. edit: despite the fact that aluminum cladding stops the government mind-controlling rays from getting inside. A SWEATY FATBEARD fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Sep 11, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2015 16:59
|
|
|
Here are some pics I snapped half an hour ago. Forgive the dusk. These apartment towers were completed in 1966 and were considered "luxurious" back in those innocent times: every floor contains four two-bedroom apartments, stacked sixteen stories high. These apartments were issued to the upper class - the working poor had to settle with "sardine can" apartments from my penultimate post. These towers also show how the architects in 1966 were overly confident in the longevity of the concrete - every apartment came with a kitchen balcony, which in reality was a small slab of reinforced concrete sticking out the side of the building. Unfortunately, the concrete is only around three inches thick (concrete is forever, man!) and half a century later, the concrete started cracking like crazy and balconies turned into wobbly death traps of spalling, substandard concrete. But hey, everything can be fixed with a lil' bit of redneck engineering:  Yeah, prop up the fucker with two metal bars. I'd still be afraid to step on that thing. Would you? Unfortunately, the only real solution to "concrete cancer" as it's called, is mega-expensive: punch away ALL the old concrete till you've got nothing but a bunch of rebar sticking out the building, and then cast a whole new concrete slab in place of the old one. This sort of repair is often done on concrete beam bridges. The hapless people living in that apartment obviously can't afford to have the balcony repaired, so instead they just propped it up with bars and hoped for the best. It'll hold, man! Oh, and I unexpectedly caught this gem of redneck engineering on the way home:  I think their intentions were to build a balcony but they gave up halfway through for reasons unknown, and these doors are now a great place to accidentally walk out from while drunk and tumble down onto the driveway. Who knows, maybe they realized that balconies are a bad idea to begin with. e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rZc9qm4ArU A SWEATY FATBEARD fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Sep 11, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2015 19:01
|
|
|
drat the Japanese system is retarded. In former Yugoslavia, the buildings were numbered this way: left-side houses get odd numbers, right-side buildings get even numbers. This way, if you've got, say, building number 157 on Lenin street, with a huge plot of unused land which later gets turned into a building plot, you'd use the following: 157 gets renamed to 157A (default), while new construction gets named 157B, 157C, 157D; ad infinitum. This is gloriously awesome when you're a pizza delivery guy and you have to find place X. The downside is that one side of the road rarely matches the other side in number: left side of the road could have houses numbered 231 or so while the right side has number 46
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2015 17:15
|
|
|
cloudchamber posted:Oh, I see. Since that guy mentioned Yugoslavia, I guess I'll post something from there. The exterior shots of Josef K's apartment in The Trial were shot outside of a beautiful 1950s housing estate in Zagreb called, at the time anyway, the Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades: That street is 15 minutes away from my house. A grocery store/multistory garage is now standing in the place where the camera is located in the video. The street changed its name at least four times: "Avenue of Science", then "Moscow street", then in early 60s it was settled as "Avenue of Proletarian Brigades." Today, it's called "Vukovar street." The buildings erected there are masterpieces of brutalism (as in, "fugly as all hell") and they were not made out of prefabricated concrete: load-bearing walls were built out of in-situ cast concrete, with standard brick masonry fillings for inside walls. This method of building soon gave way to standard plattenbau as in-situ casting was deemed slow, inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Also, the first grocery store in that street wasn't built until well into the 60s: there used to be a large chain of soup kitchens scattered around, and people were expected to dine out. The concept of soup kitchens was abandoned almost immediately, which meant that people had to haul their groceries from stores far, far away (good thing the public transport was/is reasonably good) edit: Zagreb wasn't carpet bombed during the WWII (thx RAF!) which meant that there was no massive rush to redevelop war-ruined housings: postwar period was spent slowly filling the empty plots between prewar houses. First large-scale projects came to pass in 1957. The downside to this was that lovely housings for the working poor was left to stand and decay. This stuff would've been demolished had the town been bombed, and replaced by something much, much better. There are some areas of the town which were slums by early 70s, but "tearing down old housing" was an unspeakable anathema for socialist-era city planners. Even today, it's not hard to find 19th century, abandoned and collapsing houses with windows boarded over: not even the Gypsies want to squat in them anymore. Look here to see Zagreb houses which should've been torn down 100 years ago: http://blog.dnevnik.hr/nepoznatizag...etnje-font.html A SWEATY FATBEARD fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Sep 14, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2015 06:43
|
|
|
red19fire posted:Cantilever stairs are cool as gently caress, but I wonder if they wear out over time and start to tilt. I've seen this phenomenon on 1920s-vintage stairs made out of sandstone. They were supported by iron I-beams on one side, so they were not exactly cantilever - but holy hell was it creepy walking up the stairs that were worn down a full inch near the railing side (where people tend to walk the most) and don't even get me started on wooden beam stairs from 1910s.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2015 23:16
|
|
|
flosofl posted:I've seen two level high rise apartments in both NY and Chicago. It's not a stretch to think there's a three floor apartment somewhere in the world. I imagine the cost of those would be downright prohibitive for 99.99% of the planet. There is a 1974 commieblock in Zagreb, Croatia that has that kind of apartments - floors 1 and 2 are apartment A, floors 3 and 4 are apartment B - the floors 5-16 are standard single-level apartments which just adds to the confusion, the loving thing is a concrete anthill. Just to prove that we haven't learned anything, there was a whole district of commieblocks with such apartments erected in 1981. Delivering a pizza to people in these things is a harrowing experience because you WILL get lost, and the pizza isn't getting any warmer.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2015 18:14
|
|
|
Boiled Water posted:Getting pizza in Zagreb sounds like a harrowing experience in itself. Yes. Imagine yourself being the delivery guy, circling around aimlessly in your beat-up Lada through a neighborhood of unmarked blocks, then climbing up several flights of stairs (elevator is too drat slow) and the stairwell leads to nowhere in particular. You're now trapped in a concrete tube and you just know you're gonna get chewed up when you finally make the delivery since the pizza is cold. gently caress I'm never working that job again.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2015 19:50
|
|
|
Jesus loving christ that thing is a cardboard shack  makes me fond of communism that gave us fugly but structurally sound all-concrete buildings 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2015 02:03
|
|
|
therattle posted:Yes. There's an amazing force called gravity that allows water to run down to your body to your foul bits. Yeah but what do you do when you have to wash your dog? Or heavens forbid, a cat? Fixed showehead seems just cumbersome to me - the great thing about the whole concept of 'a bathtub' is being able to easily wash stuff in it with a detachable showerhead on a rubber hose and not getting yourself wet / spilling water everywhere.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2015 17:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:01 |
|
|
A Winner is Jew posted:The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea (the pyramid that's literally falling apart) is probably more structurally sound than like 1/2 of the buildings that have been put up in China over the last 10-15 years. Oh, rinky-dink construction is very much present in NK too: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2631670/Scores-dead-North-Korea-flat-collapse.html Yeah, a brand new 23-storey tower block collapsed without any provocation whatsoever, and it was in Pyongyang where you'd expect the construction methods to be above-average when compared to buildings being put up in other towns. Heavens forbid that there's an earthquake in North Korea, the whole country would literally fall apart. I'm living in a 18-storey commietower completed in 1971. It's pretty sound structurally, the building has suffered through several earthquakes without any damage (and "block A" suffered a massive gas explosion caused by a DIY gas installation, the tenant was killed but the building was not damaged), but I'm going to be gentle to it and say that the workmanship was uhh "kinda shoddy". When casting the 15-th storey floor in my tower, the workers made a seriously poo poo job putting up the cast and when the concrete was poured, the whole thing sagged and soldified before anyone could notice the mistake... and the saggy ceilings were left in place afterwards. This was problematic because none of the doors and windows would fit, so the carpenters had to cut down the frames and make boggy fillings around the corners. When I had the AC installed in the apartment, we deliberately had to put the indoors unit at a few degrees angle because the whole thing stuck out like dogs balls. The funny thing is that my towers were of "above average" construction quality, estates put up for the working poor sport some seriously scary construction faults. edit: WebDog posted:If you want fire hazard there was an old building that went up recently that turned out to have had used seaweed as insulation. Yeah I used to live in a 1937-vintage building that used pressed seaweed as insulation. It was doped with tar and plaster and cut into square panels before being nailed to the brick walls. This was not good - but it was better than incredibly combustible styrofoam panels that were all the rage in the 70s and 80s. My tower block has double outside walls, prefabricated concrete on the outside, and aereated concrete panels on the inside. Many 60s apartment blocks actually have no insulation whatsoever - thus the archetypal "carpet on the walls" apartment in Eastern Europe - this was a DIY fix against heat loss and condensation on the walls. A SWEATY FATBEARD fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Jan 9, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 11:45
|
|