Based purely on a visual guess, I would actually think that a number of those might be early modular construction? Prefab, panelized, I'm not up on the terminology, nor am I not particularly familiar with its history in the US and if any of those buildings are, but they look an awful lot like "Large Panel System" buildings built of precast concrete elements. I'm not an architect, but the joins seem characteristic. Plattenbau in German, these are what a lot of the British and european public housing towers were built out of.Ive wondered this too. Why were we able to build this
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in the 50’s to 80’s no problem, but nowadays we just can not do it. We were able to even build public housing high rises decades ago, cabrini green the most infamous public housing projects were huge residential towers, but these days once its a high rise it automatically only pencils out if its entirely for millionaires. Its pretty crazy.
China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and lots of other asian countries still build concrete apartment towers exactly like these today just in grey instead of red in enormous quantities to fit the working class into. Its what the majority of the housing stock and high rise stock is.. cheap concrete towers and lots of them. Even in the same hemisphere as us you have Brazil, Argentina, Chile… in the middle east you have Egypt. For some reason we just cant make the math work for the middle class here when sooo many other places can.
To my understanding, they fell out of fashion basically simultaneously globally for a number of reasons, safety being at least one, since they're not particularly structurally redundant. As far as I'm aware, after the 80s folks everywhere just kinda decided that this system of construction was obsolete, and nor were they particularly well built when new - Ronan Point in the UK is a fairly well known contemporary example, but concerns persist to the present day. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74elw4enl7o
Even if they were cast in place... that era of concrete construction just wasn't done very well. 2000 Commonweath notably collapsed on topping out in 1971, The recent condemning of Riverview in Cambridge, etc.
I think theres been a resurgence in interest in modular construction in the 6-18 story range - see the Clarendon Hill Redevelopment - while that systems is wood, I wouldn't be surprised if there are also other newer, more modern and safe modular concrete systems that bring the cost back into line to build more buildings along those same forms, plus Mass Timber. I know MAPC was awarded money to bring a prefab builder in-state, so hopefully that helps things along.
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