11 ms·

One reason old buildings seem generally better than new buildings is survivorship bias. We only see the exceptional old buildings that were worth preserving. Th

by 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.

by tlb 8y ago

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.