"Now That's What I Call (Fast Casual) Architecture."

Wait, do you mean the Break Wind Lofts at Duggins Flats wasn't an original and innovative design?

My faith in Flaherty and Collins is crushed -- crushed, I tell you.

Facebook photo credit to Dank Lloyd Wright -- thanks, Clint.

By the way, whatever happened with the Break Wind Subway Station?

August 10, 2016: "Big Dig secret revealed as Mayor Jeff Gahan presents ... the Break Wind Subway Station."

In the absence of the local chain newspaper, we turn to Loueyville media for excerpts from this breaking story.

 ... David Duggins, the city's Millennial Enfluffment Director (MED), told Busyness First that all due credit for the innovative Break Wind Subway Station goes to Mayor Jeff Gahan.

"Obviously, we have no subway in New Albany," said Duggins.

"I mean, an actual subway is your basic pie in the sky mass transit crappola, but the genius of Jeff Gahan is that he instinctively understands what millennials crave, which is the appearance of luxury without anyone's brains getting hurt trying to figure out how those validation machines work."

According to Duggins, the functionality of the Break Wind Subway Station is that it won't be connected to anything, but will serve as a mere symbol of the unattainable for those high-rolling hipsters expected to inhabit the highest-priced apartments in town.

"It's like our city-wide sharrows project," said Duggins. "We paint symbols on the street and declare victory. The intended users have such short attention spans that they never realize none of it leads anywhere or means anything."

"The Break Wind Subway Station serves the same purpose. It's an imaginary quality of life bonus, and it makes me proud to serve a mayor with vision of this magnitude."

Concluded Duggins, "Besides, shit like this is way easy to TIF."

There'll now be a city-wide contest to create a design for the imaginary Break Wind Subway Station signage. The contest will be restricted to whichever graphic artists are hanging out at Quills when Duggins stops in for his latte.

A few of the entries are pictured here ...

 ... along with the winning entry.

Spongebuild Squareparts: "I think accountants are designing these buildings.”

It is a recurring question.

Why do all new apartment buildings look the same? by Patrick Sisson (Curbed)

The bland, boxy apartment boom is a design issue, and a housing policy problem

A wave of sameness has washed over new residential architecture. U.S. cities are filled with apartment buildings sporting boxy designs and somewhat bland facades, often made with colored panels and flat windows.

Due to an Amazon-fueled apartment construction boom over the last decade, Seattle has been an epicenter of this new school of structural simulacra. But Seattle is not alone. Nearly every city, from Charlotte to Minneapolis, has seen a proliferation of homogenous apartments as construction has increased again in the wake of the financial recession.

This is hilarious.

A Twitter query seeking to name this ubiquitous style was a goldmine. Some suggestions seemed inspired by the uniformity of design in computer programs and games: Simcityism, SketchUp contemporary, Minecraftsman, or Revittecture. Some took potshots at the way these buildings looked value-engineered to maximize profit: Developer modern, McUrbanism, or fast-casual architecture. Then there are the aesthetic judgement calls: contemporary contempt, blandmarks, LoMo (low modern), and Spongebuild Squareparts.

Getting down to the particle board of the matter:

Good architecture should always respond to the local context. In the case of these buildings, the local economic context just happens to be the same in just about every major U.S. city.

“Critics don’t understand what we’re working with, the parameters and the financial constraints,” says Black. “It’s like any other business: If you’re selling autos or selling widgets, there are certain costs, and a certain profit you need to make to do business in the future.”

The building pictured on that meme isn't fast-casual, penny-pinching, developer-driven architecture at all.

Above, I've refashioned a meme about "fast-casual architecture." Before linking you to an explanation of the visual, below is the actual meme. Recently it went viral.

What makes the meme relevant to New Albany? Our fast-casual Break Wind Lofts at Duggins Flats, that's what. Can an interim executive director of public housing afford one of those units?

Ironically, the structure pictured in the viral meme isn't faux luxury housing at all. Rather, it's low-income housing for seniors in a neighborhood of Seattle.

Here's the rest of the story.

The Story Behind the Housing Meme That Swept the Internet, by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

How a popular meme about neoliberal capitalism and fast-casual architecture owned itself.

The Providence Gamelin House opened its doors in Seattle in 2005. It was built to offer safe, affordable housing for low-income seniors in Seattle’s Rainier Vista neighborhood. To occupy any of the facility’s 77 units, residents must be ages 62 and older and earn below 50 percent of the area median income for King County in Washington. Most of them earn far below it: The average annual income for Gamelin House residents is $11,000.

For more than a decade this permanent supportive housing facility has served low-income residents of south Seattle. It’s their home. But the Providence Gamelin House only came into its own at the end of 2017, when an architectural rendering of the project was compelled into service as a meme. Specifically, as a housing meme, which is its own bucket for signifiers of our slide into late capitalism.

The meme surfaced wherever memes surface and spread however memes spread—idk. Eventually it found its way to the desk of Timothy Zaricznyj, director of housing for Providence Supportive Housing, the person who now oversees this alleged gentrification nightmare. (In fact, he manages 16 affordable-housing developments in Washington, Oregon, and California.) Zaricznyj was not exactly tickled. “They chose the wrong project, if they want to slam developers,” he says ...

 ... The fact that this meme depicts modest affordable housing—not penny-pinching, developer-driven Fast-Casual architecture—even inspired a meta-meme backlash ...

 ... The original meme is a vague critique of “architecture by bean-counters” (of which Seattle does not lack for examples) and developers’ thirst for transitional neighborhoods. The Gamelin House was the work of Michael Fancher, an architect who designed affordable housing across the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and ‘90s. But don’t blame Fancher: Affordable housing is subject to severe restrictions and even worse funding shortfalls.