What to you are the drawbacks to a city with too many mixed-use buildings
Description
CLASS NOTES: Mixed use has a critical role in the history of city development, but unconsciously so. Mixed use means exactly how it sounds—multiple programs within a single building boundary. For much of the history of human settlements, mixed use was an automatic condition. It makes sense; people lived above where they worked, and this might well have been where they shopped and spent time socializing too. Mixing was convenient—it meant one did not have to travel far for daily duties (there were no cars) and it fairly assured a certain density and compactness of cities. The ethos of modernist city planning that arose around the time of the Industrial Revolution had an influential hand in dismantling this tendency to mix though. In 19th century England, the city had become a foul and disease-ridden place, overcome by the pollution of industry. In response, architects postulated that the future of cities would be better off separating people from industry. Along with this fact of separation of dwelling from industry, came dwelling isolated largely from commerce as well. Zoning pushed uses apart, from an ideology of returning man to a clean and unpolluted experience of nature. Despite its organic origins, designing mixed-use buildings presents a specific set of challenges to the architect at the pragmatic level. Different kinds of users require different sizes of circulation. The hours of access into a building may differ, often giving rise to the need for multiple front doors. Acceptable noise levels too may differ dramatically between programs. Not to mention plumbing and amounts of daylight. In a building of only apartments, or only offices for example, repetition of room types and circulation space make the experience of the building easy to control. But in mixed-use buildings, each separate program requires a specific architectural solution. A major design challenge arise in the need to unify the forms of diverse needs in a single piece of architecture.
