The corner store affords a rare opportunity for the inquiring designer. Rather than add yet another misshapen creature to the mutant petting zoo that comprises much of the well intentioned new housing in the city (not just the Make It Right houses), architects might do well to apply their ingenuity to maturing the adolescent awkwardness of the corner store, which can afford — indeed benefit from — unique and unexpected forms.
Read the whole article at Design Observer
I was a bit bemused by this. Buildings on street intersections that have doors in the corner? Do you really not have them outside of New Orleans?
ReplyDeleteThey're fairly commonplace here. The victorians in particular favoured that approach. And it makes sense. They built long parallel streets of similar houses, the end ones were the stores and the slightly bigger houses, the doctor's house, the foreman or overseer's house..
Corner doors make sense when they open directly into a room.
Going to the original post in your link, I found language I could not translate. Shotgun? I know what it is when it's a thing that goes bang, but as a building? Nope.
Okay, I've remedied that, now I know what a shotgun house is. Long and narrow, with doors at the ends and interconnected rooms. Cheap to build, humble in desing, any ornate tendency saved for the street frontage only.
ReplyDeleteLike a trailer without wheels.
There is a building around the corner from my house that has a corner door. I think it's the only one in town that does. It used to be a grocery store many years ago.
ReplyDeleteShotgun shacks are fairly common in the southern U.S. They are long narrow houses with no hallways. I've heard that they are so named because one can fire a shot from one end of the house that will exit cleanly out the other end.
Sorry for the redundancy. I wrote my answer to your first comment before I read the second one.
ReplyDelete