"Cheap stick framing has led to a proliferation of blocky, forgettable mid-rises—and more than a few construction fires."

In a moment we'll learn why America’s new apartment buildings all look the same.

First, an aside.

One of our most indelible travel experiences in recent years came in 2016 when we visited Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Only 30 years ago Estonia was a bedraggled Soviet republic, and once freed to pursue its own post-communist destiny the country has caught up to the times by thinking and acting ahead of the curve.

Today Estonia is a juxtaposition of history and modernity, no more so than in Tallinn, where citizens ride public transportation for free and vote on-line, and also can enjoy dinner atop a glass & steel skyscraper then walk a few blocks to the 14th-century old town for a nightcap.

We spent much of our time in the historic city center, marveling at structures still hale and hearty at age 700, then arrived back home to find construction underway atop the concrete foundations at the Breakwater amid mounds of pre-fab stick/toothpick/matchstick framing.

I'd known for a very long time that construction techniques in America differ from those glimpsed in Europe, fundamentally in the dichotomy of wood versus concrete, masonry and steel. In Tallinn there are numerous example of Soviet-built prefab apartment blocks, but instead of wooden "sticks," the standardized sections were made of concrete.

This time the visual evidence was right down the street from our house, deployed for a project obviously intended to last only a few decades -- or around the time the city's TIF subsidy bonds finally get paid off.

All the while I just kept thinking about those venerable buildings in Tallinn. I've heard good things about the living experience in Breakwater, and here in Anchor City that ship has sailed.

It is as it was intended. Must it be this way? I don't know.

Breakwater fire revisited: Exactly what are the potential dangers of "Toothpick Construction" techniques?

Breakwater, Break Wind: "We got to move these refrigerators, we gotta move these color TV's," or else we'll miss the thrill of public housing demolitions.

Fact-checking Deaf Gahan: He hasn't spent one penny of his own money to welcome another business to New Albany. Taxpayer-financed subsidies? Those are another matter entirely.

Awed throngs gather their headgear as the Toothpick Colossus of Duggins rises again, right there, across from the fire station.

This piece explains it all.

Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same, by Justin Fox (Bloomberg)

Cheap stick framing has led to a proliferation of blocky, forgettable mid-rises—and more than a few construction fires.

These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks.

They really are everywhere, I discovered on a cross-country drive last fall, and they’re going up fast. In 2017, 187,000 new housing units were completed in buildings of 50 units or more in the U.S., the most since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1972. By my informal massaging of the data, well over half of those were in blocky mid-rises.

These structures’ proliferation is one of the most dramatic changes to the country’s built environment in decades. Yet when I started asking around about them, they didn’t seem to have a name. I encountered someone calling them “stumpies” in a website comment, but that sadly hasn’t caught on. It was only after a developer described the style to me as five-over-one—five stories of apartments over a ground-floor “podium” of parking and/or retail—that I was able to find some online discussion of the phenomenon.

The number of floors and the presence of a podium varies; the key unifying element, it turns out, is under the skin. They’re almost always made of softwood two-by-fours, or “stick,” in construction parlance, that have been nailed together in frames like those in suburban tract houses.

The method traces to 1830s Chicago, a boomtown with vast forests nearby ...

Handbags, toothpicks, gladrags, matchsticks and the re-erection of Break Wind.

How deep do you think those bunkers really are? Do they connect to City Hall's? What about One Southern Indiana?

DOOMSDAY PREP FOR THE SUPER-RICH, by Evan Osnos (New Yorker)

Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”

Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focused on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort ...

For some, it’s just “brogrammer” entertainment, a kind of real-world sci-fi, with gear; for others, like Huffman, it’s been a concern for years. “Ever since I saw the movie ‘Deep Impact,’ ” he said. The film, released in 1998, depicts a comet striking the Atlantic, and a race to escape the tsunami. “Everybody’s trying to get out, and they’re stuck in traffic. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed” ...

At least Flaherty & Collins had insurance.

Awed throngs gather their headgear as the Toothpick Colossus of Duggins rises again, right there, across from the fire station.

Income inequality can wait ... this is "luxury" paradise.

Awed throngs gather their headgear as the Toothpick Colossus of Duggins rises again, right there, across from the fire station.

Photo credit.

Who knew? Toothpick construction groupies are like the "cheeseheads" cheering the Green Bay Packers. It's a fetish of sorts -- you know, like tumescent TIF bonds to an economic development director's piece of mind.

Now to the feature:

Well, so much for the world's largest shuffleboard table.

Income inequality can wait ... this is "luxury" paradise.

For those who are completely baffled by the free association ...

Breakwater fire revisited: Exactly what are the potential dangers of "Toothpick Construction" techniques?

Breakwater fire revisited: Exactly what are the potential dangers of "Toothpick Construction" techniques?

And we criticized Soviet designs?

As most readers know, The Breakwater is New Albany's ballyhooed "luxury" apartment complex, a titled possession of the Flaherty & Collins behemoth in Indianapolis, but also municipally subsidized -- to be frank, to an obscene extent.

One of the two buildings at The Breakwater caught fire on February 24, and New Albany firefighters spent most of the next day fighting the blaze. Fortunately the building was unoccupied (there were minor firefighter injuries), but because it hadn't yet been finished, the sprinkler system was not activated.

According to a subsequent investigation, contractor error was responsible. The rubble since has been cleared, the insurance companies are haggling, and reconstruction will resume.

You can read the official conclusion of the Breakwater fire investigation in a previous post. Included are complete story links.

Fast forwarding a month, articles published just this week at Fire Engineering and The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina) are hard-hitting, indeed.

In the first, we learn that in the aftermath of a catastrophic fire of similar circumstances in Raleigh, questions about building methods and materials are being raised.

In Raleigh building fire, a warning about construction standards, by the editorial board (The News & Observer)

As growth in Raleigh booms, buildings rise quickly. Perhaps, too quickly.

The spectacular fire that consumed a 241-unit apartment building under construction near downtown Raleigh last Thursday night has raised questions about the type and quality of building methods and materials being used in new buildings.

The fire that reduced The Metropolitan, an unfinished, five-story building at the corner of West Jones and Harrington Street, was apparently fueled by the extensive use of wood in the upper floors. Wood allows for faster and less expensive construction than using concrete and steel, but it’s vulnerable to fire, especially when the building is unfinished and sprinklers have not yet been installed ...

I highly recommend reading in its entirety this piece by Jack J. Murphy about large lightweight toothpick construction buildings. He's a fire service veteran, and appends his essay with voluminous references. Why aren't we listening?

Note: In the first paragraph of Murphy's article, it is my view that he intended to use the word "reservations" rather than "justifications." As we have observed so many times before, spell check doesn't help when the wrong word is spelled correctly.

Toothpick Construction: Enough Is Enough, by Jack J. Murphy (Fire Engineering)
03/21/2017

The fire service has ample justifications about large lightweight toothpick construction buildings (LLW/TPC) long before the recent Raleigh (NC) five-alarm ‘Toothpick Construction’ fire.

So why is the construction industry and insurance companies not paying heed when it comes to better fire protection features? This can be effected either via the code development process or the industry stepping up and creating ‘best practices’ for an enhanced balance of fire protection systems, namely a full building suppression system and more robust passive fire protection for draft-stopping and fire walls (masonry) that extend through the roof within these residential complexes.

Over the years, the fire service has advocated a balance of fire protection that has fallen on deaf ears. A new fire service tactic to consider before a municipal council hearing and/or state legislation is how LLW/TPC building complex fires (whether these structures are under construction or occupied) are overwhelming local fire department response. For many communities, a fire response must go way beyond the municipality border lines to get a sustainable fighting force to help prevent such an enormous fire from becoming a much larger community conflagration.

In the February 2017, a LLW/TPC building under construction fire occurred in Maplewood, New Jersey. This fire quickly spread to the exposure building of similar construction; this building was approximately a few weeks away from being occupied. This building did, however, have masonry fire walls, although they are not yet required by code; they played a key role in saving the structure ...

As an aside, in Kansas yet another fire broke out prior to the activation of sprinklers and destroyed an apartment building.

Official says welder sparked massive Kansas apartment fire (AP, via Fire Engineering)

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — A fire that leveled a multi-million dollar apartment building under construction and spread to about two dozen homes in suburban Kansas City started when a welder accidentally ignited wooden building materials, fire officials said.

More than 100 firefighters battled the blaze at the CityPlace development in Overland Park on Monday and three were treated for minor injuries. The fire destroyed the four-story apartment building, heavily burned a second and rained burning debris onto a nearby neighborhood, damaging at least 22 other homes.

Overland Park Fire Chief Bryan Dehner said the building where the fire started was "most vulnerable" when the fire happened because it was so early in the construction process that it lacked fire deterrents such as a sprinkler system.

This makes three fires in three different places in a month's span of time, all quite similar. Are any local news outlets planning on following up on these themes and how they pertain to our area?

I'm looking at you, Susan Duncan.