14 ms·

Future generations will laugh in horror and derision at the folly of facadism

223 points by sndean 8y ago

tlb 8y ago
One reason old buildings seem generally better than new buildings is survivorship bias. We only see the exceptional old buildings that were worth preserving. The franken-buildings in the article won't survive many generations to be laughed at. In general, the prediction "future generations will laugh at X" rarely comes to pass. Better laugh while you can.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I share a similar conviction, if you look at pictures taken of 'old' neighborhoods it is possible to see this in action. A bunch of buildings that no longer exist because, well they weren't worth saving. That said, I had thought they would be talking about the trend I'm seeing to create offset walls in buildings to make them more "interesting" and then painting the different offsets in different colors. I suspect this will be called out as "early 21st century buildings." And like the faux adobe of the 80's will hopefully fade away into something more interesting.
  - ynniv 8y ago
    That was my assumption as well. I imagine a worker being chastised for gluing "bricks" to the wall over a window in the wrong orientation, not because the wall will fail, but because they won't look right. https://images1.apartments.com/i2/kxqVDahEc7Jmxp6e5JSwEuPIJRCVoJSjTV7VJyq0bd4/117/walton-westside-atlanta-ga-building-photo.jpg https://images1.apartments.com/i2/kxqVDahEc7Jmxp6e5JSwEuPIJR...
- cfmcdonald 8y ago
  True, they usually cry rather than laughing. There are plenty of examples of exceptional old building that were worth preserving being destroyed in favor of what are generally agreed to be ugly monstrosities. Penn Station is the premiere example, of course.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    An interesting thought is that many of the Victorian masterpieces were considered ugly in their time. But then again, it's hard to see anyone coming around to the goofy buildings in this article.
    - cfmcdonald 8y ago
      I'd be interested to see evidence of that. It seems to me that there is a clear downward trend in building aesthetics, i.e. that it's not just a case of "no one likes new things until they are old." To stay on the subject of train stations, I don't think anyone has built a building as beautiful as, say, Saint Pancras in London or Gare de Lyon in Paris in many decades.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        I listened to the Teaching Company series of lectures about Victorian Britain, which doesn't lend itself to finding an easy citation for you.
      - jonhendry18 8y ago
        I kind of suspect that there's some kind of (tax?) benefit to retaining part of the old building, and these architects are doing the absolute minimum to qualify for it without really honoring what was probably the intent of the policy.
        kd5bjo 8y ago
        In many stateside jurisdictions, remodeling a building makes you exempt from many zoning requirements that were instated after the original building was constructed. To qualify as a remodel rather than new construction, you can keep as little as a single wall of the previous structure.
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    Cincinnati public library https://cdn.citybeat.com/files/base/scomm/cb/image/2016/06/640w/aclead_insideoldmainlibrary1874.jpg https://cdn.citybeat.com/files/base/scomm/cb/image/2016/06/6...
- coldtea 8y ago
  >One reason old buildings seem generally better than new buildings is survivorship bias. We only see the exceptional old buildings that were worth preserving. These franken-buildings won't survive many generations to be laughed at. I don't think so. That might be true if we were speaking of random events (where the chances of a building being ugly or nice are more or less fixed, but we only get see the beautiful surviving old buildings). But architecture is also defined by "schools" and has periods where public buildings follow this or that general trend -- and not all trends of all ages are equal. Some ages just have shitty design sense. There are countries where you can see buildings from 100 and 200 and 500 even years ago, not just the exceptional ones, but rows and rows of them (e.g. the whole historical center of several European cities left mostly intact). And they still come across better than very expensive buildings by famous architects done in the same premium areas. It's not just statistics, it's also the architectural norms that defined certain eras. An average art deco building will look better to most people's sensitivities than the most expensive (or praised by critics) brutalist or modernist architecture. For a long time in the 20th century we had architecture design schools that produced monstrosities only critics ever cared about. One very easy example is the ugly-ass buildings in Soviet St. Peterburg compared to the marvels built even a few decades or years before communism. Not because of lack of funds (some where expensive and were built to be enormous) but because the ideology called for ugly ass utilitarian and boxy designs. Similarly, most celebrated Le Corbusier buildings are ugly ass affairs. The average modern architect would rather be caught dead than design a beautiful house, with ornamentation and colors and the like -- it's about minimal or "designy" to appeal to other architects and modern critics.
  - 781 8y ago
    There was a great article about this recently which basically says that modern architecture schools drills into you that any sort of ornamentation is a sin. It also made another interesting point: modern buildings have no context, if you see just a picture of one, it's impossible to say if it's from London, Madrid or Shanghai. And a great quote: > There’s an easy test for whether a building is beautiful or not. Ask yourself: if this building could speak, would it sound like the Rubaiyat or the works of Shakespeare, or would it make a noise like “Blorp”? For nearly 100 years, we have been stuck in the Age of Blorp. It is time to learn to speak again. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
- advisedwang 8y ago
  Sure, but in the mean time this trend is taking some of those buildings that are worth preserving and turning them into ones that aren't.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I think there is more than that. First, architecture followed the same trend as modern art where taste and beauty have given way to being original and conceptual. This results in very mediocre constructions. Paris attracts millions of tourists who come to admire its palaces and tasteful haussmanian style. No such enthusiasm for the modern buildings of Frankfurt. Not to mention the concrete-made brutalist horrors and other modern architectural “creations”. Second, apart from the said brutalist bunkers, all modern constructions are designed for a very limited life (even infrastructures like bridges). I was visiting the Pantheon in Rome last week, a 2000 years old building which interior made of marble and stone looks almost new (after many renovations I am sure). What will be left of our glass and steel buildings? They are merely more durable than a mongol tent. The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really.
  - dsnuh 8y ago
    >The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really. Not sure why you think that A) Facebook would last, and B) that we will have the ability to retrieve and display "ancient" file formats even if those selfies survive on disk?
    - cm2187 8y ago
      Actually if you think about it, books have survived through centuries better than physical constructions. There has been occasional losses, libraries burning or being sacked. But we have an incredible amount of antique texts even when the physical location of some of the cities they mention has been lost to time. I assume it will be the same with today’s knowledge. It will be cheaper to preserve the storage of our digital life than to preserve the physical monuments we value the most.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        That seems like a half-cocked assumption, because a discovery of a hard drive that's hundreds or thousands of years old is not going to reveal anything to anyone, unlike finding an old scroll will. At the very least, no if a civilization far into the future is able to read those, it will have maintained substantial continuity with today's world and will probably have a bunch of the buildings you imagine becoming ruins.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  I'm with the author. This sucks. Architects had been preserving parts of buildings by incorporating them into the new since the bronze age. You can see it all over ancient cities. It was organic. That has been adopted as a formal (well.. semi-formal) ruleset that basically reads: "slice off the front of the building and stick it on the new one." Someone from the council comes to check you for preservation compliance, supposedly. Job done. Urban beauty preserved. Meanwhile, it's not like they're sculpting Viennas or Oxfords. Urban planning is a jumble of chaos. I'm OK with getting creative with city planning, but either go for cheap, or beautiful, or practical. This is none of those. It's silly.
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    There are some buildings done like this where the windows don't even really meet up with the windows in the old facade. I assume when you look through them you see the inner surface of the old facade.
- cc439 8y ago
  >"In general, the prediction "future generations will laugh at X" rarely comes to pass. Better laugh while you can." Really? I'd say mocking the styles/beliefs/misconceptions of previous generations is the topic of at least 20% of all snarky comments on the internet. It's not like it's hard to find widesread mockery and condemnation of even "high" art forms either. Even the architecturally illiterate can deride Brutalist architecture on merit despite not knowing the name of the style.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Survivorship bias might apply to construction quality but I doubt it applies to architectural aesthetic appeal. Just look at New York City, or Philadelphia, or Rochester, NY, or any city with old housing stock. It so happens that everything was made out of brick, so none of those buildings are going anywhere anytime soon, except for the ones that were torn down to build condos, or the ones that caught on fire, were left to rot by slumlords, etc. It just so happens that the majority of those old buildings are (or were) handsome and tastefully designed. Nobody in the USA is tearing down perfectly good buildings solely because they are ugly or because their style is outdated.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  This is often said, but I don’t think that it tells the story. Large government and commercial buildings tend to stick around. I live in an old city by US standards and many 100-200 year old buildings are present, and a few as old as 400 years are as well. Even midrange residential construction from >100 years ago is in active use. Many buildings see the wrecking ball, but old buildings survive neglect. Very few postwar buildings can survive more can a few months of abandonment. They’re fundamentally junk, designed to last through their depreciation cycle and depend on building systems to stay around.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    There's also a style element: ornaments will be ornaments, no matter how old or new, while minimalism will just emphasize shiny when new and mucky when not. Sustainable architectural styling could be helped a lot if there was some software for approximating how a building would look after a decade or two of minimal maintenance.
wrs 8y ago
This is happening all over the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. I don’t know if it’s worse to knock down an interesting building and replace it with a giant soulless cookie-cutter apartment building, or to leave the façade of the original stuck to the outside like a cruel joke...
- mulmen 8y ago
  I like the trend in Seattle personally. We are in a major building boom right now and if everything was entirely new construction it would be jarring in the future. The facadism in SLU particularly prevents the entire neighborhood from being cooike cutter glass boxes and gives some visual variety that maintains the (idealized) historical style of the city. Go look at Bellevue and Redmond, the cities were obviously built in a series of booms that had very little variety. It's all very stale and boring.
781 8y ago
In Bucharest there is this building: https://i.imgur.com/f6PFnAN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/f6PFnAN.jpg It's the office of the romanian architects guild.
- artursapek 8y ago
  That looks like a humorous photoshop.
- meddlepal 8y ago
  I like it.
newman8r 8y ago
I had no idea this was even a thing, but all the examples look pretty tacky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facadism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facadism
antishatter 8y ago
Surely there are examples that aren't comical? It must be like every other category of anything 90% is shit and 10% is pretty good.
oldcynic 8y ago
I've never understood the point of this. Why keep the often beautiful Edwardian or Victorian facade if what you construct behind it doesn't respect anything of the original you went to such lengths to keep? Bolt a standard office or apartment complex to the back and pay so little regard that the floors don't even line up with the old frontage or match in any major respect. Just build a cheap office block and be done. At least that's honest. Then again I suppose that would reveal the Emperor's New Clothes. Modern architecture simply can't do public buildings, balance, aesthetics or anything that isn't either a standard curtain wall box or a £15bn signature tower block. We didn't learn from all the Victorian buildings pulled down in the sixties that many now regret losing.
- afterburner 8y ago
  > Why... ? Just build a cheap office block and be done. Because those are ugly and boring.
  - oldcynic 8y ago
    So is the result of just about every facade preservation. Some fine examples here: https://inspiringcity.com/2016/02/14/facadism-the-laziest-and-most-unsatisfying-form-of-preservation-is-causing-irreparable-damage-to-spitalfields-and-to-london/ https://inspiringcity.com/2016/02/14/facadism-the-laziest-an...
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    That's not a good argument for ugly and agitating.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jseliger 8y ago
  I've never understood the point of this Because the point is about economics, not aesthetics or utility. There are many homeowner NIMBYs in the United States, who work hard to protect the value of their houses by limiting the growth of the housing supply: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8109437/how-nimbyism-is-holding-back-silicon-valley-and-the-american-economy https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8109437/how-nimbyism-is-holdin.... One commonly-cited specious argument is regarding "neighborhood character" and the supposed ugliness or sterility of modern buildings. So facadism is a way of addressing that argument. The argument itself is somewhat bogus. So we get a bogus solution to a bogus argument. The logical thing to do is let landowners build what they want to on their land: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-.... If an owner wants to build a bunch of new housing or offices, great.
madrox 8y ago
Aesthetically, people love old buildings. However, people also love modern building code that keeps us safe in things like earthquakes. Also, preservation laws are wild [1]. If you own an old building, you usually have to agree to the preservation laws that came with it. They usually state you can't mess much with the exterior, but go nuts on in the inside. In face of all these barriers, facadism is the loophole. https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/ https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/
- onion2k 8y ago
  These buildings are in London. There aren't any earthquakes.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    Earthquakes can occur anywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraplate_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraplate_earthquake. I don't know what kinds of regulations London has around earthquake safety, presumably it is laxer than in Japan, but they are still important. There are other safety reasons to prefer new buildings too. Fire safety, perhaps? Particularly topical in London at the moment!
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      > There are other safety reasons to prefer new buildings too. Fire safety, perhaps? Particularly topical in London at the moment! Ironically in the case of Grenfell it was the new additions (the cladding) that allowed the whole building to burn when the original design would have kept the fire contained.
      - pas 8y ago
        A bit more info for those wondering: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/17/hackitt-review-grenfell-style-cladding-building-regulations https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/17/hackitt-revi... "[...] council building inspectors approved the use of cut-price combustible cladding and insulation on the 24-storey block after 16 inspections."
ranko 8y ago
This reminds me of the Potempkin Village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
pwaivers 8y ago
> "Future generations will laugh in horror and derision..." Is there anything in the past that we laugh at in horror and derision? Future generations will probably understand why we did it, or just tear it down. There is not much reason to mock the architects.
- rpowers 8y ago
  I laugh at the 70s deco look with pink refrigerators, green counter tops, and shag carpet.
  - soared 8y ago
    That is coming back into style and I kind of like it! (I can't track it down, but someone released a phone recently that was black and white with one pastel colored button)
- jhpriestley 8y ago
  Marie Antoinette's fake rustic village is still held up for scorn I think.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  All those concrete buildings on college campuses seem like a good example.
- ben_w 8y ago
  I grew up with this misapprehension (thanks to seeing it aged 6 or so) that Monty Python & The Holy Grail was a historical documentary. If that wasn’t laughing in horror and derision at witch hunts, I don’t know what is. Limited just to architecture, I seem to recall quite a few derisory laughs at school about how toilets used to be designed, too.
  - pwaivers 8y ago
    Very good point about the Monty Python and the Holy Grail! That is a great counter-example. I still think this title is hyperbolic, though it grabs readers' attention.
ryandrake 8y ago
This kind of tasteless fakery is all over cookie cutter USA suburbia—basically anything builtbafter 2000 or so is totally phony. Faux brick siding in front (look around the sides and back and you’ll see the cheap aluminum siding). Huge, ridiculous arches that don’t structurally support anything. 20 gables on one roof. Tons of Windows in front, with nothing (or oddly placed/sized ones) on the sides and back. Non functional shutters and chimneys. Over optimizing for curb appeal and house flipping.
- soared 8y ago
  That is a separate issue from what the article is describing. The article is about keeping the facade of a building and putting non-match, new buildings within the old walls. Cookie cutter houses don't start with anything - they are just poor design from the start.
- Casseres 8y ago
  You might enjoy reading McMansion Hell [0]. [0] http://mcmansionhell.com http://mcmansionhell.com
  - rurban 8y ago
    Or the modernist manifest of all manifests "Ornament und Verbrechen", Adolf Loos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime Fulltext (english) at https://web.archive.org/web/20141108111449/http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20141108111449/http://www2.gwu.e...
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  The fucking gables, man. Also five window shapes randomly distributed over one side of the house.
ageitgey 8y ago
One funny note is that a similar thing happens all the time in Southern California for a totally different reason - building permit and tax regulations. In some areas if you leave even the tiniest sliver of the facade (or any wall) in place, the project is considered a "remodel" instead of "new construction". This comes with much cheaper permits and possibly lower taxes. It's not uncommon to walk past a building site that is entirely dirt except one poor little old wall being propped up desperately waiting for a new building to be constructed around it. I've seen tiny block buildings torn down except for one wall and rebuilt into ultra-trendy indoor/outdoor cafes that managed to hide that original wall somewhere in the new structure.
- andrewla 8y ago
  In New York City this happens for similar reasons. Also in "Historic Districts" it is widespread for related reasons.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Haha, If I had a bone to pick with someone or wanted to threaten them I'd sneak in under the dead of night and remove the sliver. With a ransom note made of newpaper clipped type and everything.
- wahern 8y ago
  If the regulatory environment is anything like in SF, it's less about cheaper permits and more about not getting into a years-long battle with the planning commission and NIMBYs. Many people simply give up. Realistically your only choices are to hack the system or don't touch the property. The only winning move is to not play the game.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Planning has been making noise about cracking down on these “tantamount to demolition” projects. I wouldn’t expect the loophole to be particularly durable.
    - 8y ago
peterwwillis 8y ago
The following isn't facadism, but a different turn on a similar theme: https://goo.gl/maps/doYSK7sUdSR2 https://goo.gl/maps/doYSK7sUdSR2 (turn the camera to the left to see the giant Shepard Fairey mural, which is probably destined for demolishment or painting over by the look of the scaffolding attached to it) Everywhere in gentrifying Northeast Philadelphia, there are these horrendous modern buildings going up next to traditional brick and stone rowhomes. They look like a modernist disease attacked a normal building. And they're going for a mil and a half. View here: https://goo.gl/maps/uxrVykuDmDy https://goo.gl/maps/uxrVykuDmDy and then move forward in the street one inch, and you'll see the earlier plywood skeleton of the modern building on the right. It's so sad. (these are actually the attractive examples)
Finnucane 8y ago
This sort of thing goes on everywhere, though those are some extremely bad examples. In my own neighborhood right now a block of older buildings is being knocked down. Most of them were fairly nondescript, but on the corner there was a particularly nice old granite bank building, so the facade is being saved, which will probably end up as the entryway for some new block of flats. Designed, of course, in some completely different style.
- jen729w 8y ago
  Welcome to Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Just round the corner someone has kept the most ludicrous, skinniest piece of brick facade; meanwhile an acre of land is being cleared behind it for what will presumably be an ugly behemoth of tiny units that everyone hates. I’d love to know how much keeping that facade cost. It’s shored up with a couple of tonnes of steel girder.
  - incompatible 8y ago
    The only thing they hate more is housing they can't afford at all. Facadism isn't particularly new though. I remember somebody saying the same thing back in the 1980s, that in the future it would be considered ridiculous. Now here we are in a "future generation" and it's still going strong. I think the best thing would be to document the old buildings and then demolish them, so that they can enter history gracefully. Nothing lasts forever, and modern cities need new buildings.
quantumofmalice 8y ago
As with post-modernism (which this is simply a late stage manifestation of) you shouldn't blame the superficial reaction, you should blame the initial problem, which was architectural modernism and an obsession with discarding all the lessons of the past in the name of innovation, so called. Tom Wolf nailed it in "From Bauhaus to Our House": https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312429142 https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242... As badly as these buildings suck, they at least make a gesture at a humane world. Christopher Alexander tried to warn us.
kzrdude 8y ago
It brings something philosophical to mind, if something is truly preserved if you leave only the facade. Surely in buildings and other things alike, the whole influences the surface. The empty facade is a dead husk.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
Oh whatever. Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood's cast iron facades are beautiful and historical in their precursorship to the island's pioneering of the skyscraper. When they were erected, they were called out as cheap imitations of stone frontage. Now they're revered. Another reputable facade job is the Puck Building [1], which had its ass cut off by when Elm Place was widened into Lafayette. Also, I'm not sure if the Hearst Building [2] counts as a facade, but I personally think it's a neat union of old and new. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_Building [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Tower_(Manhattan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Tower_(Manhattan)
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Yeah, but "facadism," as described in the article, is essentially hollowing out some old, architecturally significant building, and making a different, mismatched building inside the remains.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > hollowing out some old, architecturally significant building, and making a different, mismatched building inside the remains One could argue the Hearst Tower does just that. Most beloved architecture was derided when it was built. Furthermore, one must consider the broader economic context within which renovation occurrs. Is full renovation a realistic alternative? Or would the building simply fall into disrepair, caught between preservationists' costly demands and the reality of modern residential and commercial buyers' requirements.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      This is honestly worse than just knocking the original down. Look at it. https://www.architectural-review.com/pictures/1180xany/3/3/5/3095335_c5gs18lxmauh0mv.jpg https://www.architectural-review.com/pictures/1180xany/3/3/5...
      - 8y ago
dangus 8y ago
I don't think the article makes any sort of objective point. The author essentially says "I don't like it, it's cheesy." Well, I can just as easily say "I like some of these facadist buildings." And I do. If the author spoke with some more concrete reasoning about why these buildings are such abominations, perhaps I could be convinced. Until then, it's hard not to consider this just another example of every design feature having good and bad executions. There are timeless Brutalist, Modernist, Classical, and Contemporary buildings just like there are ugly, unremarkable, bad examples. The same is probably true of Facadism. I think the only argument that comes close (which the author didn't get into enough) might be the destruction of historic buildings as an alternative to full restoration. I wish more effort was taken to quantify this concept. In other words, present a particular example of a building project and demonstrate to the reader with real data why it would have worked better as a restoration project, complete tear-down, or otherwise handle the project differently. There must often be a functional desire to build a modern building, perhaps one that provides more comfort, natural light, safety, accessibility, flexibility, square footage, etc. Finally, it should be mentioned that buildings are owned by private companies and individuals, who generally have a right to do whatever they want to them!
- wahern 8y ago
  > Finally, it should be mentioned that buildings are owned by private companies and individuals, and generally have a right to do whatever they want to them! For better or worse, that's just not true. Since at least the 1800s American cities have used building codes to limit and control construction. Historic zoning rules are far more recent but the courts have been unwilling to draw lines to delineate legitimate from illegitimate public interest policies. The only real limits have been due process-related, so effected owners are at least nominally given notice and can't be singled out. However, courts have been unwilling to even enforce those protections, which is why in major American cities quid pro quo systems (exactions for permits so the city doesn't slow walk your project) have metastasized. And SCOTUS has been hesitant to jump into the fray because even they fear the wrath of NIMBYs flooding the courts with decades of challenges if courts take up the mantle of arbiter from local commissions.
- so33 8y ago
salawat 8y ago
I always thought the entire point of architecture was to create a building/structure/space that looks like it was actually there all along. You choose readily available materials to build it out of, you try to match the "style" of structure to the environment and culture of the space. Has modern architecture just thrown Vitruvius out the window?
- trgn 8y ago
  Yes. Only utility remains of his three principles of architecture. Beauty has bastardized into branding. The building is a sculpture that needs to project the values of the patron. That's why most modern buildings look futuristic, because most institutions regard themselves as forward thinking. Or buildings look "fun" or "interesting" or "special", or whatever trait the patron thinks defines his identity. Robustness isn't required anymore either, since building cost is amortized over the duration during which the typical investor expects a ROI, a generation or so. The practical result is new buildings that are no longer build to last indefinitely.
  - salawat 8y ago
    Welp... 'Scuse me while I go drink away that sorrow... Truly, modernity is a hell I can't seem to wake up from. Funny how everything we praise about the old ways has a habit of getting thrown out with the bathwater in the name of economic "profitability". I liked humanity better when we built stuff to honor things other than our checkbooks.
rdiddly 8y ago
Myself I'm more plagued by the horror of fә KAHD ism caused by leaving out the cedille (ç). Or maybe it's FACK ә dism.
rayiner 8y ago
Historical preservationists may be the worst people. Almost no buildings are worth cementing history in place and destroying the natural cycle of destruction and renewal.
- rurban 8y ago
  There are plenty, that's why there exists an expert in almost every European country who decides on such aesthetic and preservational issues. Either in bigger cities or by country. Even in the US with its very short history there would be architectonical landmarks worth preserving. But that's a cultural issue over there, in Europe people love their history, and in many cases this expert has to demand improvements on the plan (which makes it more expensive), denies it at all, or accepts a new better architecture than the old one. Facadism would never pass such experts, that's why its so ridiculous. In these cases it's only the mayor vs some citizens or newspapers.
GreeniFi 8y ago
They look like spaghetti western sets!
627467 8y ago
How do English speakers know to read "fah-sah-dism" and not "fah-kah-dism"?
- function_seven 8y ago
  Context. If I saw the word alone with no surrounding context, I might pronounce it the 2nd way. Or at least be unsure.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Like a lot of things in English, you just learn it, doesn’t always make sense. It’s similar to facial.
  - wavefunction 8y ago
    or facade
- pessimizer 8y ago
  When English borrows words from other languages, it tends to keep them as close to their original pronunciation as the average English speaker can wrap their tongue around, and if the original word was written in a Roman alphabet, to not change the spelling at all. So when pronouncing an unfamiliar English word, speakers look for markers and patterns in the spelling that indicate what language the word is borrowed from (a process that starts with shearing off or reducing standard prefixes and suffixes.) Only after determining a source language is the pronunciation attempted. This happens mostly subconsciously, and is used as a marker of social class. http://zompist.com/spell.html http://zompist.com/spell.html edit: I'm excepting the notorious British hatred of pronouncing recent French borrowings in a French way, "herb" "valet" etc. The relationship between French and English has an enormous amount of history and death behind it. Also, something like 80% of English words are borrowed, but the other 20% make up 90% of utterances.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  Ha ha, see my comment, currently right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 I'm a native English speaker but I've had enough education in French that I really miss the cedille, and find it distracting that it's not there. Likewise with the accents aigus on résumé. Without them, some part of my brain always reads it as resume (i.e. rə ZOOM). But in the latter case, I wouldn't actually do it, because in America at least, it seems to really call attention to itself and mark you as someone trying to signal "Oh look you heathens and plebes how European and cultured I am!" Whereas the ç, I feel like you kind of need it, and I would use it if I were the one writing façade or façadism.
twic 8y ago
The writer of this is the pseudonymous Gentle Author, who writes the Spitalfields Life blog: http://spitalfieldslife.com/ http://spitalfieldslife.com/ He's definitely more concerned with preserving the old ways from being abused than he is with protecting the new ways for me and for you. My favourite bit of facadism in London is the Lloyd's building. In 1928 Lloyd's of London built a big wedding cake sort of thing for their headquarters: http://archiseek.com/2013/lloyds-leadenhall-st-london/ http://archiseek.com/2013/lloyds-leadenhall-st-london/ Then in 1978 smashed it down and built a giant oil rig, thus summoning Margaret Thatcher to our dimension: https://www.rsh-p.com/projects/lloyds-of-london/ https://www.rsh-p.com/projects/lloyds-of-london/ But the wedding cake had a nice bit on the front, so they kept that: https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejones/5738790055 https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejones/5738790055 If you walk along Leadenhall Street from the west, on the south side, you're walking past a number of fairly low-rise buildings of various ages, and you don't really see the modern bit. Until you walk past the Lloyd's facade, and look through the front door, and instead of there being an atrium, receptionist, etc, there's a yard with an oil rig in it.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  I love this!
- VMG 8y ago
  > He's definitely more concerned with preserving the old ways from being abused than he is with protecting the new ways for me and for you. What more can he do?
- rurban 8y ago
  Lloyds is not at all a good example of postmodern facadism. It's to the contrary of one the worlds greatest examples of modern architecture. This tiny "wedding cake" front has nothing to do with the building itself. It's separated, everyone can see that. This is a pure example of wrongly understood city planning and preservation. But they let it build which is the most important point. He is one of the architects of the Centre Pompidou in Paris btw.
dijit27 8y ago
Why wait for future generations? Some of these seem pretty horrific and worthy of derision in the here and now. I think the biggest problem I see in looking at this trend is the utter inauthenticity of the resulting building. It fails to preserve the original building and it doesn't allow a new building to express itself. I see value in preserving or renovating the old, I see value in creating something new. I even think a real fusion of old and new could be great. But from what I see this does none of those things. This seems more akin to putting lipstick on a pig. But perhaps future generations will come to love the charm of this juxtaposition. Perhaps new construction will create new freestanding facades so that the real building can be swapped out easily without changing the frontage. And at the very least I can find amusement in the building of these abominations.
ggg9990 8y ago
Future generations are going to laugh/shudder in "horror and derision" at many, many, many things in our present day before they get to architectural facades.
peteri 8y ago
To be honest the current White Hart is better than the previous façade which had a mix of shops underneath (I used to work nearby). Even then it looked nothing like this view from 1827 https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/view-item?i=1311 https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/view-item?i=1311 so it's always been an issue. In this particular area of London I'd rather they knocked down the façade than try to keep it, unless it has particular merit (although there are less listed buildings (600) than I would have thought in the City).
- spiralx 8y ago
  You might find this animation interesting, it shows how few genuinely old buildings remain in London: https://youtu.be/NB5Oz9b84jM https://youtu.be/NB5Oz9b84jM
  - peteri 8y ago
    Thanks for that its interesting.
spaceliquid 8y ago
Adding a rain screen facade with an air barrier to buildings reduces the energy consumption. And why not have some fun with the design. I don't think anyone's going to be laughing, its just going to become the norm.
marcoperaza 8y ago
I’d rather have a neoclassical or neogothic or Art Deco facade with a standard building behind it than totally surrender to the soulless garbage that passes for “modern” architecture in cities. I have read somewhere that the general public actually prefers the older styles, but that architects prefer modern styles. I’ll see if I can find the source.
padmanabhan01 8y ago
has there been any generation that laughed in horror and derision at anything in history till now?
imhelpingu 8y ago
I thought this was going to be about information hiding in OOP leading to too many different peer-level abstractions.
surfmike 8y ago
Many beautiful San Francisco buildings are simple boxes with a Italianate facade. Many generations later, people still seem to admire them.
jackconnor 8y ago
This is hilariously short-sighted. They are kinda ugly, but future generations will definitely not have the context to “wither in horror”. More likely, it’ll be like the Louvre and architects will bitch and moan until they get old and die, and literally everyone else will either not notice or just think “cool glass pyramid”.
zilchers 8y ago
I don’t really mind these buildings - juxtaposition is always a legitimate form of artistic expression, I don’t think that goes away in architecture. Would it perhaps be better to commit one way or the other? Maybe, but it makes sense for a country with as much history as England (while wanting to be progressive as well) to make trade offs, and seeing how styles change is kind of interesting.
galfarragem 8y ago
Why does this happen? Economy explains most phenomena. a) Developers want to maximise profit: generally more area means more profit and optimizing the height of the building is the way to get it. b) City Halls will evoke (sometimes dubious) historical value to block the old building. c) Developers will finally apply for an extension of the existent. City Hall has a tougher job to justify blocking the extension. After some delays, developers eventually will build it. Other fact to mix: extensions are probably the most demanding projects. Pragmatic architects (the ones that usually get large projects) are not suitable for it, they will not spend more time than the strictly necessary.
rurban 8y ago
We already are the future generations that have to laugh at the old "facadism" sins. Great word BTW! Baroque is the old Post-Modernism. You cannot really blame Rem Koolhaas and all the fancy new movie and stage-design loving post-modern architects. You have to blame education. Modernism is not taught properly in schools. That's why those reactionary and cheap movements always came along after every modern epoche, which invented new technology and optimized architecture. Just look into every single art school, there are postmodernists all over the places.

223 points by sndean 8y ago

tlb 8y ago

One reason old buildings seem generally better than new buildings is survivorship bias. We only see the exceptional old buildings that were worth preserving. The franken-buildings in the article won't survive many generations to be laughed at. In general, the prediction "future generations will laugh at X" rarely comes to pass. Better laugh while you can.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
I share a similar conviction, if you look at pictures taken of 'old' neighborhoods it is possible to see this in action. A bunch of buildings that no longer exist because, well they weren't worth saving. That said, I had thought they would be talking about the trend I'm seeing to create offset walls in buildings to make them more "interesting" and then painting the different offsets in different colors. I suspect this will be called out as "early 21st century buildings." And like the faux adobe of the 80's will hopefully fade away into something more interesting.
- ynniv 8y ago
  That was my assumption as well. I imagine a worker being chastised for gluing "bricks" to the wall over a window in the wrong orientation, not because the wall will fail, but because they won't look right. https://images1.apartments.com/i2/kxqVDahEc7Jmxp6e5JSwEuPIJRCVoJSjTV7VJyq0bd4/117/walton-westside-atlanta-ga-building-photo.jpg https://images1.apartments.com/i2/kxqVDahEc7Jmxp6e5JSwEuPIJR...
cfmcdonald 8y ago
True, they usually cry rather than laughing. There are plenty of examples of exceptional old building that were worth preserving being destroyed in favor of what are generally agreed to be ugly monstrosities. Penn Station is the premiere example, of course.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  An interesting thought is that many of the Victorian masterpieces were considered ugly in their time. But then again, it's hard to see anyone coming around to the goofy buildings in this article.
  - cfmcdonald 8y ago
    I'd be interested to see evidence of that. It seems to me that there is a clear downward trend in building aesthetics, i.e. that it's not just a case of "no one likes new things until they are old." To stay on the subject of train stations, I don't think anyone has built a building as beautiful as, say, Saint Pancras in London or Gare de Lyon in Paris in many decades.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      I listened to the Teaching Company series of lectures about Victorian Britain, which doesn't lend itself to finding an easy citation for you.
    - jonhendry18 8y ago
      I kind of suspect that there's some kind of (tax?) benefit to retaining part of the old building, and these architects are doing the absolute minimum to qualify for it without really honoring what was probably the intent of the policy.
      - kd5bjo 8y ago
        In many stateside jurisdictions, remodeling a building makes you exempt from many zoning requirements that were instated after the original building was constructed. To qualify as a remodel rather than new construction, you can keep as little as a single wall of the previous structure.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Cincinnati public library https://cdn.citybeat.com/files/base/scomm/cb/image/2016/06/640w/aclead_insideoldmainlibrary1874.jpg https://cdn.citybeat.com/files/base/scomm/cb/image/2016/06/6...
coldtea 8y ago
>One reason old buildings seem generally better than new buildings is survivorship bias. We only see the exceptional old buildings that were worth preserving. These franken-buildings won't survive many generations to be laughed at. I don't think so. That might be true if we were speaking of random events (where the chances of a building being ugly or nice are more or less fixed, but we only get see the beautiful surviving old buildings). But architecture is also defined by "schools" and has periods where public buildings follow this or that general trend -- and not all trends of all ages are equal. Some ages just have shitty design sense. There are countries where you can see buildings from 100 and 200 and 500 even years ago, not just the exceptional ones, but rows and rows of them (e.g. the whole historical center of several European cities left mostly intact). And they still come across better than very expensive buildings by famous architects done in the same premium areas. It's not just statistics, it's also the architectural norms that defined certain eras. An average art deco building will look better to most people's sensitivities than the most expensive (or praised by critics) brutalist or modernist architecture. For a long time in the 20th century we had architecture design schools that produced monstrosities only critics ever cared about. One very easy example is the ugly-ass buildings in Soviet St. Peterburg compared to the marvels built even a few decades or years before communism. Not because of lack of funds (some where expensive and were built to be enormous) but because the ideology called for ugly ass utilitarian and boxy designs. Similarly, most celebrated Le Corbusier buildings are ugly ass affairs. The average modern architect would rather be caught dead than design a beautiful house, with ornamentation and colors and the like -- it's about minimal or "designy" to appeal to other architects and modern critics.
- 781 8y ago
  There was a great article about this recently which basically says that modern architecture schools drills into you that any sort of ornamentation is a sin. It also made another interesting point: modern buildings have no context, if you see just a picture of one, it's impossible to say if it's from London, Madrid or Shanghai. And a great quote: > There’s an easy test for whether a building is beautiful or not. Ask yourself: if this building could speak, would it sound like the Rubaiyat or the works of Shakespeare, or would it make a noise like “Blorp”? For nearly 100 years, we have been stuck in the Age of Blorp. It is time to learn to speak again. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
advisedwang 8y ago
Sure, but in the mean time this trend is taking some of those buildings that are worth preserving and turning them into ones that aren't.
cm2187 8y ago
I think there is more than that. First, architecture followed the same trend as modern art where taste and beauty have given way to being original and conceptual. This results in very mediocre constructions. Paris attracts millions of tourists who come to admire its palaces and tasteful haussmanian style. No such enthusiasm for the modern buildings of Frankfurt. Not to mention the concrete-made brutalist horrors and other modern architectural “creations”. Second, apart from the said brutalist bunkers, all modern constructions are designed for a very limited life (even infrastructures like bridges). I was visiting the Pantheon in Rome last week, a 2000 years old building which interior made of marble and stone looks almost new (after many renovations I am sure). What will be left of our glass and steel buildings? They are merely more durable than a mongol tent. The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really.
- dsnuh 8y ago
  >The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really. Not sure why you think that A) Facebook would last, and B) that we will have the ability to retrieve and display "ancient" file formats even if those selfies survive on disk?
  - cm2187 8y ago
    Actually if you think about it, books have survived through centuries better than physical constructions. There has been occasional losses, libraries burning or being sacked. But we have an incredible amount of antique texts even when the physical location of some of the cities they mention has been lost to time. I assume it will be the same with today’s knowledge. It will be cheaper to preserve the storage of our digital life than to preserve the physical monuments we value the most.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      That seems like a half-cocked assumption, because a discovery of a hard drive that's hundreds or thousands of years old is not going to reveal anything to anyone, unlike finding an old scroll will. At the very least, no if a civilization far into the future is able to read those, it will have maintained substantial continuity with today's world and will probably have a bunch of the buildings you imagine becoming ruins.
dalbasal 8y ago
I'm with the author. This sucks. Architects had been preserving parts of buildings by incorporating them into the new since the bronze age. You can see it all over ancient cities. It was organic. That has been adopted as a formal (well.. semi-formal) ruleset that basically reads: "slice off the front of the building and stick it on the new one." Someone from the council comes to check you for preservation compliance, supposedly. Job done. Urban beauty preserved. Meanwhile, it's not like they're sculpting Viennas or Oxfords. Urban planning is a jumble of chaos. I'm OK with getting creative with city planning, but either go for cheap, or beautiful, or practical. This is none of those. It's silly.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  There are some buildings done like this where the windows don't even really meet up with the windows in the old facade. I assume when you look through them you see the inner surface of the old facade.
cc439 8y ago
>"In general, the prediction "future generations will laugh at X" rarely comes to pass. Better laugh while you can." Really? I'd say mocking the styles/beliefs/misconceptions of previous generations is the topic of at least 20% of all snarky comments on the internet. It's not like it's hard to find widesread mockery and condemnation of even "high" art forms either. Even the architecturally illiterate can deride Brutalist architecture on merit despite not knowing the name of the style.
nerdponx 8y ago
Survivorship bias might apply to construction quality but I doubt it applies to architectural aesthetic appeal. Just look at New York City, or Philadelphia, or Rochester, NY, or any city with old housing stock. It so happens that everything was made out of brick, so none of those buildings are going anywhere anytime soon, except for the ones that were torn down to build condos, or the ones that caught on fire, were left to rot by slumlords, etc. It just so happens that the majority of those old buildings are (or were) handsome and tastefully designed. Nobody in the USA is tearing down perfectly good buildings solely because they are ugly or because their style is outdated.
Spooky23 8y ago
This is often said, but I don’t think that it tells the story. Large government and commercial buildings tend to stick around. I live in an old city by US standards and many 100-200 year old buildings are present, and a few as old as 400 years are as well. Even midrange residential construction from >100 years ago is in active use. Many buildings see the wrecking ball, but old buildings survive neglect. Very few postwar buildings can survive more can a few months of abandonment. They’re fundamentally junk, designed to last through their depreciation cycle and depend on building systems to stay around.
- usrusr 8y ago
  There's also a style element: ornaments will be ornaments, no matter how old or new, while minimalism will just emphasize shiny when new and mucky when not. Sustainable architectural styling could be helped a lot if there was some software for approximating how a building would look after a decade or two of minimal maintenance.

wrs 8y ago

This is happening all over the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. I don’t know if it’s worse to knock down an interesting building and replace it with a giant soulless cookie-cutter apartment building, or to leave the façade of the original stuck to the outside like a cruel joke...

mulmen 8y ago
I like the trend in Seattle personally. We are in a major building boom right now and if everything was entirely new construction it would be jarring in the future. The facadism in SLU particularly prevents the entire neighborhood from being cooike cutter glass boxes and gives some visual variety that maintains the (idealized) historical style of the city. Go look at Bellevue and Redmond, the cities were obviously built in a series of booms that had very little variety. It's all very stale and boring.

781 8y ago

In Bucharest there is this building: https://i.imgur.com/f6PFnAN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/f6PFnAN.jpg It's the office of the romanian architects guild.

artursapek 8y ago
That looks like a humorous photoshop.
meddlepal 8y ago
I like it.

newman8r 8y ago

I had no idea this was even a thing, but all the examples look pretty tacky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facadism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facadism

antishatter 8y ago

Surely there are examples that aren't comical? It must be like every other category of anything 90% is shit and 10% is pretty good.

oldcynic 8y ago

I've never understood the point of this. Why keep the often beautiful Edwardian or Victorian facade if what you construct behind it doesn't respect anything of the original you went to such lengths to keep? Bolt a standard office or apartment complex to the back and pay so little regard that the floors don't even line up with the old frontage or match in any major respect. Just build a cheap office block and be done. At least that's honest. Then again I suppose that would reveal the Emperor's New Clothes. Modern architecture simply can't do public buildings, balance, aesthetics or anything that isn't either a standard curtain wall box or a £15bn signature tower block. We didn't learn from all the Victorian buildings pulled down in the sixties that many now regret losing.

afterburner 8y ago
> Why... ? Just build a cheap office block and be done. Because those are ugly and boring.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  So is the result of just about every facade preservation. Some fine examples here: https://inspiringcity.com/2016/02/14/facadism-the-laziest-and-most-unsatisfying-form-of-preservation-is-causing-irreparable-damage-to-spitalfields-and-to-london/ https://inspiringcity.com/2016/02/14/facadism-the-laziest-an...
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  That's not a good argument for ugly and agitating.
deleted 8y ago
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jseliger 8y ago
I've never understood the point of this Because the point is about economics, not aesthetics or utility. There are many homeowner NIMBYs in the United States, who work hard to protect the value of their houses by limiting the growth of the housing supply: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8109437/how-nimbyism-is-holding-back-silicon-valley-and-the-american-economy https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8109437/how-nimbyism-is-holdin.... One commonly-cited specious argument is regarding "neighborhood character" and the supposed ugliness or sterility of modern buildings. So facadism is a way of addressing that argument. The argument itself is somewhat bogus. So we get a bogus solution to a bogus argument. The logical thing to do is let landowners build what they want to on their land: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-.... If an owner wants to build a bunch of new housing or offices, great.

madrox 8y ago

Aesthetically, people love old buildings. However, people also love modern building code that keeps us safe in things like earthquakes. Also, preservation laws are wild [1]. If you own an old building, you usually have to agree to the preservation laws that came with it. They usually state you can't mess much with the exterior, but go nuts on in the inside. In face of all these barriers, facadism is the loophole. https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/ https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/

onion2k 8y ago
These buildings are in London. There aren't any earthquakes.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Earthquakes can occur anywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraplate_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraplate_earthquake. I don't know what kinds of regulations London has around earthquake safety, presumably it is laxer than in Japan, but they are still important. There are other safety reasons to prefer new buildings too. Fire safety, perhaps? Particularly topical in London at the moment!
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    > There are other safety reasons to prefer new buildings too. Fire safety, perhaps? Particularly topical in London at the moment! Ironically in the case of Grenfell it was the new additions (the cladding) that allowed the whole building to burn when the original design would have kept the fire contained.
    - pas 8y ago
      A bit more info for those wondering: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/17/hackitt-review-grenfell-style-cladding-building-regulations https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/17/hackitt-revi... "[...] council building inspectors approved the use of cut-price combustible cladding and insulation on the 24-storey block after 16 inspections."

ranko 8y ago

This reminds me of the Potempkin Village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

pwaivers 8y ago

> "Future generations will laugh in horror and derision..." Is there anything in the past that we laugh at in horror and derision? Future generations will probably understand why we did it, or just tear it down. There is not much reason to mock the architects.

rpowers 8y ago
I laugh at the 70s deco look with pink refrigerators, green counter tops, and shag carpet.
- soared 8y ago
  That is coming back into style and I kind of like it! (I can't track it down, but someone released a phone recently that was black and white with one pastel colored button)
jhpriestley 8y ago
Marie Antoinette's fake rustic village is still held up for scorn I think.
emodendroket 8y ago
All those concrete buildings on college campuses seem like a good example.
ben_w 8y ago
I grew up with this misapprehension (thanks to seeing it aged 6 or so) that Monty Python & The Holy Grail was a historical documentary. If that wasn’t laughing in horror and derision at witch hunts, I don’t know what is. Limited just to architecture, I seem to recall quite a few derisory laughs at school about how toilets used to be designed, too.
- pwaivers 8y ago
  Very good point about the Monty Python and the Holy Grail! That is a great counter-example. I still think this title is hyperbolic, though it grabs readers' attention.

ryandrake 8y ago

This kind of tasteless fakery is all over cookie cutter USA suburbia—basically anything builtbafter 2000 or so is totally phony. Faux brick siding in front (look around the sides and back and you’ll see the cheap aluminum siding). Huge, ridiculous arches that don’t structurally support anything. 20 gables on one roof. Tons of Windows in front, with nothing (or oddly placed/sized ones) on the sides and back. Non functional shutters and chimneys. Over optimizing for curb appeal and house flipping.

soared 8y ago
That is a separate issue from what the article is describing. The article is about keeping the facade of a building and putting non-match, new buildings within the old walls. Cookie cutter houses don't start with anything - they are just poor design from the start.
Casseres 8y ago
You might enjoy reading McMansion Hell [0]. [0] http://mcmansionhell.com http://mcmansionhell.com
- rurban 8y ago
  Or the modernist manifest of all manifests "Ornament und Verbrechen", Adolf Loos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime Fulltext (english) at https://web.archive.org/web/20141108111449/http://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20141108111449/http://www2.gwu.e...
ahartmetz 8y ago
The fucking gables, man. Also five window shapes randomly distributed over one side of the house.

ageitgey 8y ago

One funny note is that a similar thing happens all the time in Southern California for a totally different reason - building permit and tax regulations. In some areas if you leave even the tiniest sliver of the facade (or any wall) in place, the project is considered a "remodel" instead of "new construction". This comes with much cheaper permits and possibly lower taxes. It's not uncommon to walk past a building site that is entirely dirt except one poor little old wall being propped up desperately waiting for a new building to be constructed around it. I've seen tiny block buildings torn down except for one wall and rebuilt into ultra-trendy indoor/outdoor cafes that managed to hide that original wall somewhere in the new structure.

andrewla 8y ago
In New York City this happens for similar reasons. Also in "Historic Districts" it is widespread for related reasons.
vinceguidry 8y ago
Haha, If I had a bone to pick with someone or wanted to threaten them I'd sneak in under the dead of night and remove the sliver. With a ransom note made of newpaper clipped type and everything.
wahern 8y ago
If the regulatory environment is anything like in SF, it's less about cheaper permits and more about not getting into a years-long battle with the planning commission and NIMBYs. Many people simply give up. Realistically your only choices are to hack the system or don't touch the property. The only winning move is to not play the game.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Planning has been making noise about cracking down on these “tantamount to demolition” projects. I wouldn’t expect the loophole to be particularly durable.
  - 8y ago

peterwwillis 8y ago

The following isn't facadism, but a different turn on a similar theme: https://goo.gl/maps/doYSK7sUdSR2 https://goo.gl/maps/doYSK7sUdSR2 (turn the camera to the left to see the giant Shepard Fairey mural, which is probably destined for demolishment or painting over by the look of the scaffolding attached to it) Everywhere in gentrifying Northeast Philadelphia, there are these horrendous modern buildings going up next to traditional brick and stone rowhomes. They look like a modernist disease attacked a normal building. And they're going for a mil and a half. View here: https://goo.gl/maps/uxrVykuDmDy https://goo.gl/maps/uxrVykuDmDy and then move forward in the street one inch, and you'll see the earlier plywood skeleton of the modern building on the right. It's so sad. (these are actually the attractive examples)

Finnucane 8y ago

This sort of thing goes on everywhere, though those are some extremely bad examples. In my own neighborhood right now a block of older buildings is being knocked down. Most of them were fairly nondescript, but on the corner there was a particularly nice old granite bank building, so the facade is being saved, which will probably end up as the entryway for some new block of flats. Designed, of course, in some completely different style.

jen729w 8y ago
Welcome to Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Just round the corner someone has kept the most ludicrous, skinniest piece of brick facade; meanwhile an acre of land is being cleared behind it for what will presumably be an ugly behemoth of tiny units that everyone hates. I’d love to know how much keeping that facade cost. It’s shored up with a couple of tonnes of steel girder.
- incompatible 8y ago
  The only thing they hate more is housing they can't afford at all. Facadism isn't particularly new though. I remember somebody saying the same thing back in the 1980s, that in the future it would be considered ridiculous. Now here we are in a "future generation" and it's still going strong. I think the best thing would be to document the old buildings and then demolish them, so that they can enter history gracefully. Nothing lasts forever, and modern cities need new buildings.

quantumofmalice 8y ago

As with post-modernism (which this is simply a late stage manifestation of) you shouldn't blame the superficial reaction, you should blame the initial problem, which was architectural modernism and an obsession with discarding all the lessons of the past in the name of innovation, so called. Tom Wolf nailed it in "From Bauhaus to Our House": https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312429142 https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242... As badly as these buildings suck, they at least make a gesture at a humane world. Christopher Alexander tried to warn us.

kzrdude 8y ago

It brings something philosophical to mind, if something is truly preserved if you leave only the facade. Surely in buildings and other things alike, the whole influences the surface. The empty facade is a dead husk.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

Oh whatever. Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood's cast iron facades are beautiful and historical in their precursorship to the island's pioneering of the skyscraper. When they were erected, they were called out as cheap imitations of stone frontage. Now they're revered. Another reputable facade job is the Puck Building [1], which had its ass cut off by when Elm Place was widened into Lafayette. Also, I'm not sure if the Hearst Building [2] counts as a facade, but I personally think it's a neat union of old and new. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_Building [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Tower_(Manhattan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Tower_(Manhattan)

emodendroket 8y ago
Yeah, but "facadism," as described in the article, is essentially hollowing out some old, architecturally significant building, and making a different, mismatched building inside the remains.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > hollowing out some old, architecturally significant building, and making a different, mismatched building inside the remains One could argue the Hearst Tower does just that. Most beloved architecture was derided when it was built. Furthermore, one must consider the broader economic context within which renovation occurrs. Is full renovation a realistic alternative? Or would the building simply fall into disrepair, caught between preservationists' costly demands and the reality of modern residential and commercial buyers' requirements.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    This is honestly worse than just knocking the original down. Look at it. https://www.architectural-review.com/pictures/1180xany/3/3/5/3095335_c5gs18lxmauh0mv.jpg https://www.architectural-review.com/pictures/1180xany/3/3/5...
    - 8y ago

dangus 8y ago

I don't think the article makes any sort of objective point. The author essentially says "I don't like it, it's cheesy." Well, I can just as easily say "I like some of these facadist buildings." And I do. If the author spoke with some more concrete reasoning about why these buildings are such abominations, perhaps I could be convinced. Until then, it's hard not to consider this just another example of every design feature having good and bad executions. There are timeless Brutalist, Modernist, Classical, and Contemporary buildings just like there are ugly, unremarkable, bad examples. The same is probably true of Facadism. I think the only argument that comes close (which the author didn't get into enough) might be the destruction of historic buildings as an alternative to full restoration. I wish more effort was taken to quantify this concept. In other words, present a particular example of a building project and demonstrate to the reader with real data why it would have worked better as a restoration project, complete tear-down, or otherwise handle the project differently. There must often be a functional desire to build a modern building, perhaps one that provides more comfort, natural light, safety, accessibility, flexibility, square footage, etc. Finally, it should be mentioned that buildings are owned by private companies and individuals, who generally have a right to do whatever they want to them!

wahern 8y ago
> Finally, it should be mentioned that buildings are owned by private companies and individuals, and generally have a right to do whatever they want to them! For better or worse, that's just not true. Since at least the 1800s American cities have used building codes to limit and control construction. Historic zoning rules are far more recent but the courts have been unwilling to draw lines to delineate legitimate from illegitimate public interest policies. The only real limits have been due process-related, so effected owners are at least nominally given notice and can't be singled out. However, courts have been unwilling to even enforce those protections, which is why in major American cities quid pro quo systems (exactions for permits so the city doesn't slow walk your project) have metastasized. And SCOTUS has been hesitant to jump into the fray because even they fear the wrath of NIMBYs flooding the courts with decades of challenges if courts take up the mantle of arbiter from local commissions.
so33 8y ago

salawat 8y ago

I always thought the entire point of architecture was to create a building/structure/space that looks like it was actually there all along. You choose readily available materials to build it out of, you try to match the "style" of structure to the environment and culture of the space. Has modern architecture just thrown Vitruvius out the window?

trgn 8y ago
Yes. Only utility remains of his three principles of architecture. Beauty has bastardized into branding. The building is a sculpture that needs to project the values of the patron. That's why most modern buildings look futuristic, because most institutions regard themselves as forward thinking. Or buildings look "fun" or "interesting" or "special", or whatever trait the patron thinks defines his identity. Robustness isn't required anymore either, since building cost is amortized over the duration during which the typical investor expects a ROI, a generation or so. The practical result is new buildings that are no longer build to last indefinitely.
- salawat 8y ago
  Welp... 'Scuse me while I go drink away that sorrow... Truly, modernity is a hell I can't seem to wake up from. Funny how everything we praise about the old ways has a habit of getting thrown out with the bathwater in the name of economic "profitability". I liked humanity better when we built stuff to honor things other than our checkbooks.

rdiddly 8y ago

Myself I'm more plagued by the horror of fә KAHD ism caused by leaving out the cedille (ç). Or maybe it's FACK ә dism.

rayiner 8y ago

Historical preservationists may be the worst people. Almost no buildings are worth cementing history in place and destroying the natural cycle of destruction and renewal.

rurban 8y ago
There are plenty, that's why there exists an expert in almost every European country who decides on such aesthetic and preservational issues. Either in bigger cities or by country. Even in the US with its very short history there would be architectonical landmarks worth preserving. But that's a cultural issue over there, in Europe people love their history, and in many cases this expert has to demand improvements on the plan (which makes it more expensive), denies it at all, or accepts a new better architecture than the old one. Facadism would never pass such experts, that's why its so ridiculous. In these cases it's only the mayor vs some citizens or newspapers.

GreeniFi 8y ago

They look like spaghetti western sets!

627467 8y ago

How do English speakers know to read "fah-sah-dism" and not "fah-kah-dism"?

function_seven 8y ago
Context. If I saw the word alone with no surrounding context, I might pronounce it the 2nd way. Or at least be unsure.
Synaesthesia 8y ago
Like a lot of things in English, you just learn it, doesn’t always make sense. It’s similar to facial.
- wavefunction 8y ago
  or facade
pessimizer 8y ago
When English borrows words from other languages, it tends to keep them as close to their original pronunciation as the average English speaker can wrap their tongue around, and if the original word was written in a Roman alphabet, to not change the spelling at all. So when pronouncing an unfamiliar English word, speakers look for markers and patterns in the spelling that indicate what language the word is borrowed from (a process that starts with shearing off or reducing standard prefixes and suffixes.) Only after determining a source language is the pronunciation attempted. This happens mostly subconsciously, and is used as a marker of social class. http://zompist.com/spell.html http://zompist.com/spell.html edit: I'm excepting the notorious British hatred of pronouncing recent French borrowings in a French way, "herb" "valet" etc. The relationship between French and English has an enormous amount of history and death behind it. Also, something like 80% of English words are borrowed, but the other 20% make up 90% of utterances.
rdiddly 8y ago
Ha ha, see my comment, currently right above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368895 I'm a native English speaker but I've had enough education in French that I really miss the cedille, and find it distracting that it's not there. Likewise with the accents aigus on résumé. Without them, some part of my brain always reads it as resume (i.e. rə ZOOM). But in the latter case, I wouldn't actually do it, because in America at least, it seems to really call attention to itself and mark you as someone trying to signal "Oh look you heathens and plebes how European and cultured I am!" Whereas the ç, I feel like you kind of need it, and I would use it if I were the one writing façade or façadism.

twic 8y ago

The writer of this is the pseudonymous Gentle Author, who writes the Spitalfields Life blog: http://spitalfieldslife.com/ http://spitalfieldslife.com/ He's definitely more concerned with preserving the old ways from being abused than he is with protecting the new ways for me and for you. My favourite bit of facadism in London is the Lloyd's building. In 1928 Lloyd's of London built a big wedding cake sort of thing for their headquarters: http://archiseek.com/2013/lloyds-leadenhall-st-london/ http://archiseek.com/2013/lloyds-leadenhall-st-london/ Then in 1978 smashed it down and built a giant oil rig, thus summoning Margaret Thatcher to our dimension: https://www.rsh-p.com/projects/lloyds-of-london/ https://www.rsh-p.com/projects/lloyds-of-london/ But the wedding cake had a nice bit on the front, so they kept that: https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejones/5738790055 https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejones/5738790055 If you walk along Leadenhall Street from the west, on the south side, you're walking past a number of fairly low-rise buildings of various ages, and you don't really see the modern bit. Until you walk past the Lloyd's facade, and look through the front door, and instead of there being an atrium, receptionist, etc, there's a yard with an oil rig in it.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago
I love this!
VMG 8y ago
> He's definitely more concerned with preserving the old ways from being abused than he is with protecting the new ways for me and for you. What more can he do?
rurban 8y ago
Lloyds is not at all a good example of postmodern facadism. It's to the contrary of one the worlds greatest examples of modern architecture. This tiny "wedding cake" front has nothing to do with the building itself. It's separated, everyone can see that. This is a pure example of wrongly understood city planning and preservation. But they let it build which is the most important point. He is one of the architects of the Centre Pompidou in Paris btw.

dijit27 8y ago

Why wait for future generations? Some of these seem pretty horrific and worthy of derision in the here and now. I think the biggest problem I see in looking at this trend is the utter inauthenticity of the resulting building. It fails to preserve the original building and it doesn't allow a new building to express itself. I see value in preserving or renovating the old, I see value in creating something new. I even think a real fusion of old and new could be great. But from what I see this does none of those things. This seems more akin to putting lipstick on a pig. But perhaps future generations will come to love the charm of this juxtaposition. Perhaps new construction will create new freestanding facades so that the real building can be swapped out easily without changing the frontage. And at the very least I can find amusement in the building of these abominations.

ggg9990 8y ago

Future generations are going to laugh/shudder in "horror and derision" at many, many, many things in our present day before they get to architectural facades.

peteri 8y ago

To be honest the current White Hart is better than the previous façade which had a mix of shops underneath (I used to work nearby). Even then it looked nothing like this view from 1827 https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/view-item?i=1311 https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/view-item?i=1311 so it's always been an issue. In this particular area of London I'd rather they knocked down the façade than try to keep it, unless it has particular merit (although there are less listed buildings (600) than I would have thought in the City).

spiralx 8y ago
You might find this animation interesting, it shows how few genuinely old buildings remain in London: https://youtu.be/NB5Oz9b84jM https://youtu.be/NB5Oz9b84jM
- peteri 8y ago
  Thanks for that its interesting.

spaceliquid 8y ago

Adding a rain screen facade with an air barrier to buildings reduces the energy consumption. And why not have some fun with the design. I don't think anyone's going to be laughing, its just going to become the norm.

marcoperaza 8y ago

I’d rather have a neoclassical or neogothic or Art Deco facade with a standard building behind it than totally surrender to the soulless garbage that passes for “modern” architecture in cities. I have read somewhere that the general public actually prefers the older styles, but that architects prefer modern styles. I’ll see if I can find the source.

padmanabhan01 8y ago

has there been any generation that laughed in horror and derision at anything in history till now?

imhelpingu 8y ago

I thought this was going to be about information hiding in OOP leading to too many different peer-level abstractions.

surfmike 8y ago

Many beautiful San Francisco buildings are simple boxes with a Italianate facade. Many generations later, people still seem to admire them.

jackconnor 8y ago

This is hilariously short-sighted. They are kinda ugly, but future generations will definitely not have the context to “wither in horror”. More likely, it’ll be like the Louvre and architects will bitch and moan until they get old and die, and literally everyone else will either not notice or just think “cool glass pyramid”.

zilchers 8y ago

I don’t really mind these buildings - juxtaposition is always a legitimate form of artistic expression, I don’t think that goes away in architecture. Would it perhaps be better to commit one way or the other? Maybe, but it makes sense for a country with as much history as England (while wanting to be progressive as well) to make trade offs, and seeing how styles change is kind of interesting.

galfarragem 8y ago

Why does this happen? Economy explains most phenomena. a) Developers want to maximise profit: generally more area means more profit and optimizing the height of the building is the way to get it. b) City Halls will evoke (sometimes dubious) historical value to block the old building. c) Developers will finally apply for an extension of the existent. City Hall has a tougher job to justify blocking the extension. After some delays, developers eventually will build it. Other fact to mix: extensions are probably the most demanding projects. Pragmatic architects (the ones that usually get large projects) are not suitable for it, they will not spend more time than the strictly necessary.

rurban 8y ago

We already are the future generations that have to laugh at the old "facadism" sins. Great word BTW! Baroque is the old Post-Modernism. You cannot really blame Rem Koolhaas and all the fancy new movie and stage-design loving post-modern architects. You have to blame education. Modernism is not taught properly in schools. That's why those reactionary and cheap movements always came along after every modern epoche, which invented new technology and optimized architecture. Just look into every single art school, there are postmodernists all over the places.