Juno RA-0 Residential Complex
Written by: Coupe
What's 250 meters tall, covered in ads from top to bottom and present in every sprawl from Neo-Tokyo to Seattle? The Juno residentials! Originating from our little Raleigh, these big ol' monoliths have been contendors for the most economic high-density housing since the 40s, on account of their prefabricated construction-components, modular innards and having a whole 82% of its outer surface covered in a proprietary one-way optical screen, giving the building unrivalled room for paid advertisement space. Pretty whiz, huh chummer?Chummer obviously wasn't paying attention when Renraku had it playing ads for a new 'edutainment' product line for a whole month. Gonna have those moeblob homonculi burned into my head 'till I die...Okay, so it's not that whiz and you're wondering why the Juno has an article on here. The first reason is that these days, there's at least one of these sort of buildings in any big city, and nearly half a dozen of 'em in bigger sprawls, so having some background details on something you're gonna check out sooner or later is handy. Second and most important is that Raleigh holds the original prototype of the Juno Residential, the RA-0. It's fallen far from what little grace it had, what with having its top floors taken over by a heavily-armed cartel and trickling crime all the way down to the point that Lone Star only go there when there's no choice, but for that very same reason you're gonna be seeing a lot of things happen here that might end up on your shadowrunning to-do list. So download the floorplan <LINK> and take some notes!
Just a heads-up if you actually plan on living there for a while: The rent's cheap because of the ad-space, but what you're saving in bills, you're paying in 'protection' fees to one gang or another to not have your shit stolen. Other than that, it's a good place to dissapear, for better or worse...
Purpose / Function
The Juno RA-0 was built as a testing-bed for housing low-income workers as economically possible, by way of emphasizing extreme spacial-efficiency and maximizing advertising space to provide an additional income alongside paying tennants. It also served as a prototype for architectural/construction designs for the skyscraper projects in the Concrete Forest, particularly in designing interiors with modular wall setups allowing for conjoining and seperating of rooms for various residential and commercial needs.
Surprisingly, you see more open spaces in the residential parts than in any other part of the building. The 45th and 46th floors in particular have some kind of ancom co-op living arrangement going on, private space doesn't seem to matter to 'em, so you've got these huge-but-cozy common rooms. They've even let me sit down and eat with them these past couple of months. Good folk, really.
The Hamilton co-op? They moved to the 50th floor a year back, omae. 45 and 46 have been property of Tannhäuser Gate cultists since.
Oh.
Alterations
Not much has changed on the outside since its construction in the 40s, owing to the low-maintenence design of its ad-screens, but the inside is a whole other story: Rooms can and will switch between residential, commercial or public use in a matter of days, owing to their modular designs, and turf-wars between the smaller gangs on the lower levels keep these changes happening on the regular as everyone tries to keep clear of the violent hot-spots.
The only setup that's been consistent for longer than a decade besides essential/maintenence stuff is Amir's kebab shop on the 2nd floor. Dude's stayed where he is despite being right in the thick of hotly contested ganger turf, serving questionable meat products since '51. Probably gonna die of old age there, the trooper...
Architecture
The RA-0 is smaller than its mass-produced siblings at only 259 meters and 72 floors tall, but packs in a whole lot more on the inside owing to the costlier but more spacially-efficient construction materials used on the inside. The structure is held up primarily by a trio of high-strength 'solid-core superstructures' that span the whole length of the building, strong enough to minimize the needed load-bearing walls and pillars throughout the interior-spaces. The art-deco interior design takes advantage of this by using 'hot-swappable' walls that can be changed or even removed completely to allow for free and (relatively) easy rearrangement of interior spaces for whatever's needed at the time.
Between the regular moving of walls, inconsistent maintenence and occasional gang-shootings leading to a shortage of the fancy decorative facades on the modular walling, only the top third of the Juno's interior is recognizably art-deco, with the rest of the complex looking like a love-letter to utilitarian brutalist architecture. Some residents do their best to mitigate the bleakness by painting the walls and throwing up their own decorations, but unless you're in one of the more community-oriented floors or live up in Pack territory, it's only a matter of time before they're stolen or defaced.
I swear, half the shootups in that place start because some punk steal a neon sign only to get a back full of flechettes from someone's angry troll grandma...The exterior of the building is coated almost entirely with a layer of one-way video-screening materials, which in theory turn the entirety of the outside surface into advertisement-space while residents can still look out at the city from the outside. There's even some space between the screens and the windows underneath, so residents can still crack open a window and let some stagnant air into their apartments.
History
The Juno RA-0 prototype was commissioned by Anita E. Bartolo, a dwarf magician and one of the billionaire names behind the Forester Group, as a prototype for new materials and construction-methods to be used in the Forestville renovation projects, to see if they would work on a smaller scale before attempting to implement them on the larger skyscrapers they had in mind, while at the same time giving the group a hit of publicity by way of providing low-income housing of 'more than acceptable' quality for Raleigh.
Unfortunately for Bartolo, the whole thing turned into a shaggy-dog story when the building was 90% finished, owing to creative and economic differences favoring a different construction concept to be used instead. This led to Bartolo falling out with the Forester Group and eventually leaving of her own volition, but retaining the full rights for most of the proprietary designs and tech used in the Juno RA-0 thanks to some deft legal shenanigans.
'Deft legal shenanigans' meaning she had someone threaten a few families until she got her way. No philanthropist, this one.Once the prototype was finished, Bartolo was left with a somewhat expensive but extremely space-efficient, ad-revenue generating building with too much potential to simply move on from. Instead, she tweaked the design a little to cut construction costs as much as possible and make more use of prefabricated components, and presented the next iteration as the 'next generation in cost-efficient, prefabricated housing' to multiple city-planners, architectural engineers and the such. And to her surprise, she actually got some agreements to construct more Juno residencial complexes in other cities and sprawls. And the rest was history... or not. Juno complexes were popping up in many cities throughout the CAS and UCAS, earning Bartolo money hand over fist, but in 2056, right before celebrating the 25th constructed Juno residence in Seattle, Mrs. Bartolo and her wife simply dissapeared dropped off the radar completely, just as most of the Forester Group had done at that same time. Their dissapearance was investigated briefly, but as of writing this article up there's still no clue as to what happened. Most of the Juno residences ended up in the hands of their city, private landlords or megacorporations that commissioned them, but for a few years the original RA-0 prototype was subject to numerous consecutive legal battles over who would come to own it. The building passed through multiple hands over the following years, and ultimately ended up in the hands of a smaller housing corp that happened to own partial rights to the land it was built on. Attempts were made to renovate and breath some life back into the building, but didn't get far once the cost-to-benefits ratios weren't considered favorable. These days, the RA-0 has mostly been left to its own devices after the surrounding area became one of Raleigh's 'bad neighborhoods'. The topmost levels of the building ended up taken over by a tusk cartel calling themselves the Pack, who more or less became the de-facto owners of those parts, while the rest of the building became turf for various bottom-feeder gangers, and any sense of security came from having a semi-auto shotty slung on your back.
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