It should come as no surprise to the American consumer that things are planned out to exact money from us. That lovely fountain in the mall is not there to make you happy and relaxed, it is there to make you spend money. Here is a glossary of terms used by commercial developers.
ACTIVE WATER FEATURE: Any man-made body of moving water out of which you are not supposed to drink. A waterfall. A fountain.
AMENITY PACKAGE: Frills. E.g., trees. An Amenity Package is that collection of all nonessential and not readily justifiable elements in a development which, it is hoped, if sold creatively enough, can be transformed from an obvious drag on earnings into an inducement for a tenant to pay more rent than he might do otherwise. E.g., day-care centers, jogging trails, subsidized restaurants, a concierge, picnic tables.
BEAUTY CONTEST: An attempt to inject Quality of Life into a development in which government zoning officials offer a developer higher densities—and thereby profits—than would otherwise be politically palatable in exchange for such concessions as, and see also, Amenity Packages, Quality Statements, and Active Water Features.
BLUE WATER: The stuff you put into the fountain of your mall to offset the unsightliness of the pennies that people throw in, as well as the grout that washes off. It is this fluid you then discover kids will stick a straw into and drink, as you watch, horrified, having utterly no idea of its level of toxicity. See Situation
BRICK-SNIFFERS: Renovators and gentrifiers. Also called White Painters, those young couples who, when they rehabilitate an old place, sandblast all the plaster off, right back to the brick, frequently causing structural damage in the process. They then ritualistically stick their noses right up against this brick and inhale deeply, immediately after which they paint everything white except the wood that they varnish.
CAMPUSLIKE SETTING: What every office development is invariably said to have.
CLASS A SPACE: Premiere office Space, appropriate for a corporate headquarters. How much of this there is in a Development is the key means of determining its market quality. Since it always comes measured precisely in square feet, it would be nice if there were a uniform definition of what it is. Like the Supreme Court and pornography, the definition is—we know it when we see it. Generally, it means the newest buildings, charging the highest rents, but that in turn is determined by and influenced by intangibles. See Amenity Package, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Parking Garage, One Hundred Percent Corner, Great Big Oak Trees Right up Against the windows, and Quality of Life.
CORPORATE CAMPUS: A bucolic setting on which are located the office buildings of a number of different corporations. A Corporate Campus location is equivalent to, in residential terms, a "farmette"—more land than is logical to mow but not enough to plow.
CORPORATE ESTATE: A vast sylvan location for a single corporate headquarters. The possible number of Corporate Estates in any Development is thought to be identical with the number of available hilltops. The ultimate Corporate Estate is the Two Wind-Sock Model. Two wind socks indicate that the Estate is so large that helicopter pilots fear the weather on one side of headquarters is significantly different from the weather on the other side.
DELICATE DETAIL: An expensive architectural flourish meant to distinguish a development from its competition. The structural element that skateboarders invariably discover makes a great ramp.
EXECUTIVE HOUSING: Housing of a high enough quality that a corporation's top officials would consider it desirable. Proximity of it is thought to be essential to the growth of a commercial development, inasmuch as fancy executives will not put up with long commutes. In context, it does not simply mean an expensive house. It means an expensive house with easy access to clubs, health facilities, shopping, excellent schools, and, frequently, horses.
FAR: Short for Floor-to-Area Ratio. Pronounced eff-eh-are. The fundamental unit of density, from which all calculations spring—parking, hence profitability, hence human behavior, hence civilization. It is the ratio of the amount of building to the amount of land. If you've got 100,000 square feet of office space on 100,000 square feet of land, you've got an FAR of 1.0—a one-to-one relationship. Interestingly, from the point of view of predicting how functional a commercial development will be, particularly in terms of transportation, it does not make much difference whether this 100,000 square feet of office space is configured as a ten-story building, each story ten thousand square feet, surrounded by ninety thousand feet of open land; or a two-story building, each story fifty thousand square feet, surrounded by fifty thousand square feet of open space., or a one-story building utterly covering the available land. The amount of building is still 100,000 square feet, the FAR is still 1.0, and that ratio works magically to predict automotive use and traffic crunch, without regard to what the development looks like.
FLOORPLATE: The shape and size of any given floor of a building. The floorplate that touches the ground is called the footprint, after the shape it leaves on the land. An ideal Floorplate size in a commercial development is thought to be roughly half a football field—on the order of twenty thousand square feet. see "The Laws."
GREAT BIG OAK TREES RIGHT UP AGAINST THE WINDOWS: Currently the most ambitious and fashionable stunt in the repertoire of the developers of Class A Office Space, it is the creation of Softscape by the locating of extremely large buildings right in the middle of a forest, without disturbing the trees. No small trick. It involves cutting the hole for the foundation without knocking over the surrounding tall vegetation, stabilizing the hole until the roots heal, and then building the building, again without knocking over the trees. This frequently involves great big equipment to lift everything in that building up and over the six- or seven-story height of the vegetation. But the biggest hassle is the endless threats required to convince the cracker equipment operators—who view trees as weeds—not to "accidentally" knock over a beech with their backswing. Great Big Oak Trees Right Up Against the Windows is the successor stunt to the hitherto most fashionable similar effort, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Parking Garage.
GROUND COVER: An automobile dealership, or a ministorage facility, or any other easily bulldozed land-intensive use in a development that provides an income stream and keeps the whole place from blowing away while its owners figure out what they want to do with the land, really.
HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON PARKING GARAGE: This Is Structured Parking, the Hardscape ugliness of which has been struggled with, through the planting of Softscape hanging vines cascading over every edge, in an attempt to make it look like a terraced garden. When built-in irrigation is included all the way around each level, inside the planters, it is thought to be a prime component of Class A Office Space, particularly in quasi-tropical environments epitomized by the Perimeter Center-Georgia 400 Edge City north of downtown Atlanta. Similar efforts are being made on the outside of the actual office buildings, and inside their atria. The ultimate Class A Hanging Gardens Parking Garage is one in which the entire top deck is also covered with dirt and then planted and even decorated with fountains and sculpture, so that denizens of high office suites looking down have a view of gardens, not of parked cars.
HARDSCAPE: A landscape consisting of man-made building materials such as asphalt, precast concrete, and the like, that developers feel customers perceive as forbidding. Hardscape especially refers to objects that are machinelike or machine-made. See Softscape.
KIT OF PARTS: A limited number of design elements repeated endlessly throughout a development in the hope that such recapitulation will give the project an identity.
LANDSCAPE UPGRADE: Bushes. Especially when offered as an option at additional cost in a development that otherwise would not have any.
LUMINAIRES: Lights. Especially those thought to be complementary to, and See also, Signage.
MEMORY POINT: An element of a development meant to be re-garded as So Spectacular as to Stick in the client's mind long after he or she has gotten home that night. Lavish use of real gold in the bathroom, for example. Or marble. See Ooh-Ahs.
NONCOMPETING LOW-DENSITY USE: A church. As seen, positively, by the owner of an adjacent mall.
OOH-AH: An unusual Amenity inserted into a development specifically to elicit an animated reaction from a client. No Tract Mansion is thought to be salable for over $800,000, for example, unless it includes a bidet as an Ooh-Ah. This, although bidets serve in America as nothing but cat waterers. Commercial Ooh-Ahs include built-in hair dryers in the men's rooms.
PASSIVE WATER FEATURE: Any man-made body of still water in which you are not supposed to swim. E.g., a reflecting pool.
PLOP ART: Abstract sculptures placed about a development for reasons that are an utter mystery. See also Quality Statement.
PRODUCT: Everything in a development that was put there by the hand of man. Whether it be a parking lot, a curbing, a planting of flowers, or a high-rise, somebody views it as Product, and can go into astounding detail about whether it is good or bad, cheap or expensive.
PROGRAMMED SPACE: A place where a spontaneous expression of Community is thought to be so unlikely that a consultant has to be paid to hire a street musician to play. Similarly, a place where people have to be paid to march in a Fourth of July parade.
QUALITY OF LIFE: That attribute which a development is said to be sensitive to when attention is being drawn to intangibles that do not directly contribute to the bottom line. See Amenities
QUALITY STATEMENT: Very large, heavy, expensive, neutral sculpture. Ideally, brushed steel or aluminum. Totally plain geometry a plus. Moving parts, and/or integration into an Active Water Feature, daring. Located at the entrance of an office park or complex, a Quality Statement is supposed to suggest absolutely nothing to the viewer except somewhat understated wealth, to which, it is hoped, a customer's aspirations will be stimulated sufficient unto the rental of office space. Also used to induce government officials to grant higher zoning than otherwise probable. See also Beauty Contest and Plop Art.
SIGNAGE: Signs. Especially those which are products of the expenditure of vastly more money on design review than would seem plausible, given the appearance and function of the result, which is to announce "No Left Turn" and the like. Etymology: The guardians of urban esthetics have for decades decried the proliferation of shopping center beacons that makes each nonlimited-access highway resemble the Las Vegas Strip. Thus, developers of large tracks of land who aspire to the label "megadeveloper" indicate their seriousness of purpose, attention to detail, and desire for social acceptance by hiring designers to create signs of a style that are not merely informative, but are distinct to the development. Hence, Signage—probably a contraction of "signs" and "signature." Note: Signage, being an expression of high taste, never radiates light from within, in the fashion of a Gulf or Holiday Inn sign. Its highest expression was once thought to be in the form of sand-blasted, hence three-dimensional, wood. But etched glass and engraved stone have begun to make a strong showing. See Kit of Parts.
SITUATION: A problem of unimaginable, much less soluble, proportions.
SOFTSCAPE: Plants. Trees. The work of nature, as opposed to the work of man. See Hardscape
STREET FURNITURE: Everything exposed to the weather put there by the hand of man, not counting roads, buildings, and plants. This "everything else" is far more considerable than most people recognize, because it is usually so plain or so ugly—and thus ignored as a feature of the landscape—as to render it virtually invisible. It includes newspaper vending boxes, stoplights, no-parking signs, and those circular iron grills sometimes put around the bases of trees when they are embedded in a sidewalk. Not to mention, of course, furniture. Like benches.
STREETSCAPE: A road on which sufficient design review has been expended such that the Street Furniture, Signage, and Luminaires all match and/or are festooned with flags.
VALUE ENGINEERING: The process of designing structures so that they can be built as cheaply as possible, usually by systematically eliminating such frivolities as esthetics.
THE LAWS
THE FARTHEST DISTANCE AN AMERICAN WILL WILLINGLY WALK BEFORE GETTING INTO A CAR: Six hundred feet. The length of two football fields
FIRST COROLLARY TO THE SIX-HUNDRED-FOOT LAW: In a mall, thou shalt never let a shopper see how far it is to the next anchor store. Thou shalt break her line of sight. If you make her aware of how much walking she is really doing inside a mall, she will leave the building and take her car to the far end rather than walk. And once you've let her out of the building and into her car, there is a significant chance that she will say forget the whole thing and go home.
SECOND COROLLARY TO THE SIX-HUNDRED-FOOT LAW: The most remote parking space in any development is rarely more than three hundred feet from its building's entrance.
THIRD COROLLARY TO THE SIX-HUNDRED-FOOT LAW: In either a downtown or a commercial development, if you do everything you can to make casual use of the automobile inconvenient at the same time that you make walking pleasant and attractive, you maybe, just maybe, can up the distance an American will willingly walk to fifteen-hundred feet. A quarter of a mile. And this at the substantial risk of everybody saying forget it and choosing not to patronize your highly contrived environment at all.
THE FIRST MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR STRUCTURE USUALLY BUILT IN NEW DEVELOPMENT: A mall.
HOW MANY CUSTOMERS MUST LIVE WITHIN A FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE OF A MALL FOR IT TO BE SUCCESSFUL: A quarter of a million.
HOW BIG A MALL MUST BE BEFORE ITS DEVELOPER IS VIEWED BY HIS PEERS AS HAVING HAIR ON HIS CHEST: One million square feet (twenty-five acres under roof) and/or three levels.
HOW MANY STORIES UP OR DOWN AN AMERICAN WILL USE THE STAIRS: One. Frequently zero.
FIRST COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: In a three-level mall, the main entrance should be at the second level, from which it will only be one story up or down to get to the other levels. Otherwise, people may never go to the farthest level.
SECOND COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: In a three-story town house, the garage entrance, and hence the kitchen, where one unloads the groceries from the car, should be at the second level, for the same reason as in the First Corollary.
THIRD COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: In an office environment, even if a building is only two stories tall, it must have an elevator.
FOURTH COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: Multiple-family housing—apartments and condominiums—that are three stories or taller must have an elevator.
FIFTH COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: Since elevators and escalators demand rigid and heavy support structures, buildings that require them are more easily built of concrete and steel than Sticks and Bricks, thereby substantially increasing the cost, and increasing the likelihood that the structure will be viewed as Hardscape.
SIXTH COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: The world moves, in residential construction, at three stories. Residential structures either have to be less than three stories above the main entrance, in order for you to build them without elevators, or they have to be high-rise. Once you start building a residential structure of concrete and steel to accommodate an elevator, your costs kick into so much higher an orbit that you have to build vastly more dwelling units per acre in order to make any money.
HOW MUCH TOTAL SPACE IS REQUIRED TO PARK THE CAR OF THE OFFICE WORKER: Four hundred square feet.
HOW MUCH SPACE A HUMAN TAKES UP, RELATIVE TO HOW MUCH SPACE HIS CAR TAKES UP: Five-eighths.
THE PRIME LOCATION CONSIDERATION WHEN A COMPANY MOVES: The commute of the chief executive officer must always become shorter.
THE PLATONIC IDEAL OF THE SIZE OF AN OFFICE BUILDING'S FLOOR-PLATE: Twenty thousand square feet. ("We decided the way the Law happened was, in 1978, there were six brokers drinking in Clyde's, all from Coldwell Banker," reported Jim Todd, a developer who is active in the Urban Land Institute. "And they all decided that from that point on, twenty thousand square feet would be the size of the office floor and it's always been. And when those six guys get together and change it, it'll change, but in the meantime it's the Law.")
Actually twenty thousand square feet—about half a football field—is the golden mean because an office building is usually a hundred feet wide in order to yield the maximum number of windows and, hence, offices with windows that command high rent, at the lowest total building cost per square foot. The building tends to be two hundred feet long because a hundred feet in any direction is thought to be the maximum distance that can be served by one costly "core." A core is that vertical tunnel in the middle of the building containing all elevator shafts, bathrooms, air conditioning, utility connections, and the like.
Actually, the typical floorplate range is from eighteen thousand to twenty-five thousand square feet. Smaller floorplates carve up better for multitenant use, notes David Shulman of Salomon Brothers. But the largest practical floorplate is thought to be thirty thousand square feet, because that holds the maximum number of employees a manager can effectively walk around and deal with personally in one day.
Although it does increase building costs, it is frequently thought valuable to integrate as many twists and turns and sharp angles as possible into the edge of a floorplate. If the number of corners is increased, the number of corner offices is maximized far beyond the traditional four per floor.
THE FUNCTION OF GLASS ELEVATORS: To make women feel safe. Not to offer a view out.
THE MOST RATIONAL EXPLANATION OF WHY THE FIRST THING A DEVELOPER USUALLY DOES IS BULLDOZE EVERYTHING FLAT: A parking surface may not undulate more than 6 percent, by law. If a car is parked sideways on a grade steeper than that, its door will be very difficult to open on the uphill side, or close on the downhill side. Also, the surface will offer unacceptable liabilities when covered with ice.
THE MOST PROBABLE EXPLANATION OF WHY THE FIRST THING A DEVELOPER USUALLY DOES IS BULLDOZE EVERYTHING FLAT: Because architects use T-squares. Therefore, when designing a building, the first thing an architect usually draws is a horizontal base line, which in turn gets incorporated into the final building by the work of a bulldozer.
JAKE PAGE'S LAW OF SEVERED CONTINUITY: "You name a place for what is no longer there as a result of your actions. So one has Foxcrest Farms, for example, where no fox will ever again hunt and no plow ever make a furrow worth the name."
THE KEITH SEVERIN COROLLARY: All subdivisions are named after whatever species are first driven out by the construction. E.g., Quail Trail Estates.
No comments:
Post a Comment