14 ms·

Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017)

199 points by metafunctor 6y ago

kull 6y ago
I am buying a house and I spent months to find this perfect, simple, contemporary design. This article made me think a lot about my choice of architecture for my home. In my mind, living in ‘boring’, modern, blank, mostly empty spaces gives me a taste of how in my mind the future, 300y from now will look. Less colors and sharp edges bring to my mind less chaos, gives a sense of minimalism and simplicity. I do not want my physical space taking my attention, too many colors and shapes do not help me to think. I make my living from thinking and living my digital life, contemporary design aligns with it.
- martindbp 6y ago
  Easy solution: live in a gray box. Preferably underground so the rest of us don't have to look at it. I'm only half serious.
- martindbp 6y ago
  Easy solution: live in a gray box. Preferably underground so the rest of us don't have to look at it. I'm only half serious. Personally, I like details, but I don't like clutter. If it's complexity I have to maintain myself, I don't want it.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    I'm thinking about building a house in the future. It should be made from bricks (as I love this material) and I don't really want to make any interior finish. Just huge gray box of pure bricks with exposed electric wires, stone floor, etc. I think it's called loft or industrial style and people trying to mimic it. But I hate mimicking, things must be natural. Not sure if it's practical and I definitely did not see anyone implementing it. But that would definitely reflect my personality in some way.
    - Brian_K_White 6y ago
      A blank/empty building or space is only as right or wrong as why it was made and what is done with it. A grey box is ugly, and even disfunctional if the function of housing humans is any different from the function of storing items. But a grey box may also be a canvas, which ends up being the very opposite of ugly and dead and inhumane. One of the great appeals of the loft/industrial thing is the space is reconfigurable at will. You can have very inventive and artistic weird beds hanginging from chains at novel elevations and producing interesting spaces underneath, curtains for divisions that move around and can be opened to make a big open space one day and cozy spaces the next. There is no single form that is really the one true best form. The ability to change is more soul-filling than anything. It's not practical and most people can't afford to have 3 homes where one is all cozy spaces that feel like a claustrophobic rat warren after a while, and another that is all clean sterile Ikea which is a refreshing break from the rat warren for a while and then feels sterile and un-fulfilling after a while... one perfectly valid approach is an empty space, but empty for the sake of it's configurability, not for the sake of the emptiness itself.
    - sidpatil 6y ago
      What would the energy efficiency of such a building be?
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        Well, I simplified that a little bit. Walls are supposed to contain space filled with insulation, so it would have pretty standard energy efficiency.
- rbecker 6y ago
  So something like https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/img_9615-1.jpg https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01... ? No clutter, simple, minimal. Time-tested and completely unlike contemporary architecture.
  - paganel 6y ago
    Not the OP but looking at your example I can only think that the place lacks chairs/something to sit on.
  - carapace 6y ago
    The panels above the doors are wonderful.
gumby 6y ago
It's a shame this is a polemic when it discusses important issues. It's not as if these issues aren't discussed in architecture. And there are definitely weird pathologies and pomposities in architecture (as in any field), which manifest themselves in a variety of unpleasant ways. But this doesn't mean all we have is ugly buildings; we also have new, playful, and enjoyable buildings as well. Another HN comment this morning (on a different post) brought up Postel's law and how it is usually both misunderstood and overused. The same applies to "a house is a machine for living" or "form follows function": they can be taken as an excuse to ignore the person, or as a call for: make sure the person's needs are at the centre of the design. A case of both skill and pathology: One of my homes was designed by an architect and one simply built by a developer. The developer house is adequate. The architect-designed house was a lot more expensive but is also a lot more pleasant to live in. But speaking to those pathologies: it needed a lot of interaction with the architect to make sure it didn't get our of control on design (I'm sure we've all seen this in software too). I think this is why so many corporate buildings end up so sucky: many cooks, complex constraints, and in the end the architect has too much control.
- mc32 6y ago
  One of the keys is cost control. That aspect, in addition to municipal building codes, constrains s lot. If you want to see utilitarian built by the dweller, visit locations where there is no oversight for building: favelas. Purely utilitarian built with tight budgets.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Polemics are about all there is room left for. Ultimately, it is a failure of education. Architects will give each other awards and design contracts according to what they were taught, and they are taught crap. It is self perpetuating, as they teach the next class the kind of crap they were inculcated in. Probably your architect was obliged to make snide remarks over drinks about what he had to put up with doing your house (which I haven't seen, only heard described). I liked the barn.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
Zigurd 6y ago
Unless an architect is a genius like Wright, and they have a coherent design philosophy, like Wright, decorative architectural features way too often degenerate into middlebrow sentimentality. The same goes for cars: Bangle-butt was not the response to jellybeaned cars we were looking for.
- spc476 6y ago
  "Mr. Wright, I love the house you designed, but the roof leaks so badly we might as well not have a roof. Could you fix it?" "No. That's how you know it's a roof!"
AnotherGoodName 6y ago
Old buildings have gone through a filter. The ugly ones were destroyed with no one caring. The beautiful ones have armies of people fighting to maintain them. There are beautiful and ugly new buildings. In 1000 years time only the beautiful buildings from this era will have survived and we'll be talking about why the buildings of today are nowhere near as nice.
- yokaze 6y ago
  How was it? For every rule, there is an exception: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/ http://www.sosbrutalism.org/
  - cannam 6y ago
    Good to see Dunelm House in Durham listed there - one of my favourite buildings in any style, that has been threatened with demolition for a few years now.
    - rm445 6y ago
      The bridge across the river Wear right next to Dunelm house is an example of building with concrete done right. Use the properties of the material to make a structure that is light and airy, pleasing yet practical. The soviet bunker that is Dunelm House itself though. Bring on the day of its demolition. Please let me push the plunger and set off the explosives.
- requin246 6y ago
  There is an element of survivorship bias, but the rate of building beautiful buildings is not constant. There’s far fewer beautiful buildings built in the last 75 years than in the years preceding it (try walking into a church built after 1960 for example). The article points to several casual ideologies in architecture which contribute to this.
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    There are some noteable exceptions - growing up in Germany, it was very easy to distinguish former industrial centers (bombed to pieces, rebuilt quickly using concrete prefab monstrosities during the 50s) from the cities spared due to their tactical irrelevance (either kept in their original style or plastered over in the 60s).
hawski 6y ago
I always felt that the contemporary architecture is cheap first and easy to clean/maintain second. All those nice ornaments are expensive, not easy to clean and their replacement in any case is even more expensive. Is there a way around this. I prefer this older aesthetic, but I think I couldn't afford it. My one idea is to build with CLT and keep wood exposed both in and outside (with proper thermal insulation in the middle). That way it's cheap, but with this warm feeling of wood.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  This is giving modern architecture entirely too much credit. For example, one of the many crimes of the UWaterloo Davis Center[1] was that the roof (curved and made of panes of glass) leaked every time it rained causing a mess on the floors below. These designs are often neither attractive nor practical. The weird shapes and angles used often waste usable space, are hard to clean, and introduce additional joints between sections where water or air can get in. [1] https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-dc/ https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-dc/
  - floren 6y ago
    Ah, yes, I used to work in a building which had (at great expense, apparently) many curved walls, with "exciting" shiny metal cladding along much of the walls. The roof leaked constantly (frequently into our machine room) and the metal clad walls meant cell phones were useless inside, but I bet that architect got an award.
jeffrallen 6y ago
My architect asked me to tell her stories from the future when my family lives in the house she was designing. She asked me to not speak about details of what the house was, but to tell stories of things I dreamed would happen in the house. I told her of multitasking cooking and monitoring homework, of children laughing while chasing around walls in a circuit, of seeing children and pets from the window while doing dishes. I love my house and all those stories came true. But: My architect considers herself to be in Le Corbusier's school of thought. She understands that sleek lines and honest materials can serve human stories.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  pictures?
MoZeus 6y ago
Yeah, well, I'm not in a patient mood today, so I'll just say this is a load of idiotic horseshit not worth anyone's time or serious consideration, and leave it there.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  I would say exactly the same thing, about this comment.
nowandlater 6y ago
That Peter Eisenman building looks like it'd be a killer skate park. Say what you will about James Howard Kunstler, his TED talk on Architecture seems to be in the right direction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
gbacon 6y ago
Architects often get mad when non-architects conflate the terms “modernism,” “postmodernism,” “Brutalism,” etc. They love telling people that, say, “Frank Gehry is actually REACTING to postmodernism.” These terminological disputes can obscure the fact that everything under discussion is actually just a minor variation on the same garbage.
- bradknowles 6y ago
  The thing about Frank Gehry is not the architecture, it’s the engineering. He designs crap that couldn’t possibly be built, and then somehow his engineering team figures out how to make the impossible not only possible, but to actually realize it. The result still looks like shit, but the engineering is amazing.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
Because it's obviously and arrogantly aesthetically terrible. Architects, like the elites who commission and support their work, have a fundamentally adversarial relationship with the rest of us. Even the relatively good stuff stands alone and is, at best, aggressively indifferent towards its surroundings. Kunstler wrote a good book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250 https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-L... (and several less-good follow up books)
- api 6y ago
  Kunstler is one of those people who has one good point that he makes with a great deal of wit. His point is valid but his critique is not that deep, and outside this one point the rest of his views are reactionary trash. He's a one hit wonder. This is a common feature of notable critics, probably because it is far easier to criticize than to solve problems. It's far easier to point out why the suburbs suck than to design and advocate effectively for alternatives that address the same needs that the suburbs try to address. BTW I think your critique is actually deeper than Kunstler's in that it gets to the totalitarian underpinnings of this type of high modernism. People seem to mistakenly associate high modernism with the enlightenment when it's more of a return to pre-enlightenment authoritarianism. High modernism is a secular materialist version of divine right of kings, with baroque religious theories replaced with opulent displays of indifferent wealth and with sterility replacing aesthetic grandeur as a display of power. The latter may be because aesthetic indifference serves today as a more effective display of power than baroque over-done aesthetics with gold leaf and curlicues.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    A thought of mine a core part of totalitarianism, pick a flavor they are all the same in this. Is that they seek to callously use humanity as material to manufacture some ego driven utopia. That is at the heart of modernist architecture. People are expected to conform to the vision not the other way around.
  - WizardAustralis 6y ago
    He is always an interesting read but is usually all to eager to jump off the deep end. I recall him in 2012 saying that the aviation industry would be history by 2018... that clearly didnt pan out. The theory was reasonable but the time frame was wildly out of whack.
yokaze 6y ago
Funny, that the author shows two hospitals in Barcelona. To answer the question, you definitely want to be in the "ugly" one. For starters, the nice modernist building is not a hospital anymore. And partly due to the reason of architecture. While nice to look at, it was not terribly practical. Staircases between different wings meant that they had to transfer sometimes people with ambulance within the hospital. And sometimes even seconds matter.
- kleiba 6y ago
  But wasn't the question about where to convalesce, that is, recover after having been treated?
  - war1025 6y ago
    The answer to that is they send you home. They tend to kick you out of the hospital unless you are actively dying. At least here in America.
    - kleiba 6y ago
      Barcelona is in America?
      - kabacha 6y ago
        It applies everywhere. People recover much faster at home than any hospital, even a pretty one.
  - com 6y ago
    Hospitals are terrifically dangerous places for sick people. That and the cost of bed occupancy are the primary reasons that convalescence mostly happens at home.
galfarragem 6y ago
A metaphor: Architects, like devs, are always looking for the next “shiny new thing“. Architects, like devs, could stick to their C or even JS but, you know, there is Rust and Crystal and Elm... Architect here.
cosmodisk 6y ago
"Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly" They aren't all ugly,just functionality wrong: instead of being places for people to travel,they are parking lots for planes with the rest attached to them. No matter how beautiful the airport if I have to walk half a mile to the gate just to reach the stairs with no lift, it's a failed building already. It used to be relatively cheap to build extremely beautiful buildings because labour was cheap. Also,some cities have some sort of planning panel,where people can and do try to steer architecture certain way,so there wouldn't be pink windowless office buildings in an old town built 400 years ago and etc.But that's not in every city. And the last bit is we just need to admit that the king is naked sometimes: there are shit architects and shit designers who, by some magic stroke of luck, ended up in positions that allowed them to create those awful things no questions asked.They wouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything creative related in an alternative world.
- HelloNurse 6y ago
  That half a mile is needed for non-negotiable constraints, like the scale of airplanes (e.g. gaps between landing strips or fingers), the capacity targets (walking to board a plane is better than not flying at all) or the available space to add terminals (Heathrow is a good example). There are also practical needs, functions that follow the form, that are no less important than minimizing walking, like the convenience and cost reduction of putting a lot of travellers in the same huge terminal and if possible in the same huge hall, with one subway station, one customs funnel, and so on.
cannam 6y ago
I like Brutalism, and I speculate that one reason is that I grew up in a rural area where things are big, surfaces are rough, and there aren't decorative brickwork patterns everywhere. I live in London now, and the brutalist Barbican estate feels a lot more like "the way the world is" to me than much of "traditional" residential London does. I think that arguments like the one in this article are born from overfamiliarity with pretty little patterns - I find the focus on decoration, "universal" aesthetics, and tradition quite suspicious. (In particular I'm surprised that the article picks on Alexandra Road estate in London - it's lovely in real life, and it answers a difficult problem as well, namely how to use a road just behind a railway track. Also, while the old Penn Station which the article praises looks kind of amazing in the pics, it's not exactly human scale is it? It'd surely have been just as shivery and daunting in real life as any Soviet edifice) I had been hoping that the answer to "Why you hate contemporary architecture" would be something about your age. Brutalism has become popular with many people of my age (I'm almost 50) but I don't think it was a widely popular style when it was new. The test for me is going to be postmodernism. I don't really like it, because it's about frivolous decoration, but it's going to be venerated by a younger generation just as Brutalism is by mine. Will I be able to understand that?
- amiga_500 6y ago
  I love barbican, but it also has lots of green and a vision of community. Same for Montreal's expo habitat 67. Some of the buildings in that article were revolting. That big white one with chunks for windows looks so childish and uninspiring.
- rglullis 6y ago
  The article does mention about some integration with nature, and from some Google pictures it seems that Barbican State has at least some greenery. > Brutalism has become popular with many people of my age. Has it really? Have you lived in any of the places you mentioned and consider nice? That has always been a better test than going by people's expressed opinions. In Brazil it is quite easy to find people that praise Oscar Niemeyer's work, but none of them actually live in Brasilia - and I am yet to see a catholic that has any good thing to say about Rio de Janeiro's Cathedral.
AlexandrB 6y ago
This article reminds me strongly of how the design community, seemingly in unison, decided that UI accordances were mere frippery and ushered in our current, flat UI landscape of indistinguishable hamburger buttons and oceans of white space.
- kabacha 6y ago
  And thank god for these people. I do not miss <blink> tags and all of the things that were used in to fill up the lovely, underappreciated white-space.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I agree with you that flat design is bad design, but not that whitespace is bad. Done right it can enhance the understanding of the content and add beauty to a page.
smitty1e 6y ago
Just Gramscian damage: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260 Prophecy: 3D printing rescues architecture, allowing a Renaissance of aesthetically pleasing buildings to retire the swath of overgrown Legos besetting us.
zomglings 6y ago
I don't know much about architecture, but I found the essay very biased and unnecessarily biasing - I didn't actually think that most of the buildings they presented as monstrosities were actually unattractive. Many of them looked quite elegant from the outside. I also found some of the examples they presented as positive too complex for my tastes. It feels like the authors overextended themselves in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion to post-modern or brutal architecture that they do. The article did bring up some good points about how the sentiments of people using the buildings should be taken into account during the design process. I really enjoyed their take on how democracy should be treated in architecture. It feels profound beyond the scope of architecture itself, and something that society has been playing with in recent decades - e.g. panchayat government in India [0] and decentralized governance and decision making as embodied by various blockchains. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_in_India
- amiga_500 6y ago
  I agree with him. Every example of a bad modern building, I agreed, they are repulsive.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > ...in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion... I'm not sure they were actually so revulsed as much as whipping up indignation to sell an article. I don't think aesthetics was really what it was about at all. Also if you want large amounts of detail, expect to pay for that either directly in lots of money, or in considerable unjust exploitation of a craftsman underclass. (I also detest articles that say what YOU want or what YOU feel).
  - alejohausner 6y ago
    Skilled crafstmen are not in the underclass. They ones I've met are very well paid, and take pride in their work, and know a lot. The stone decorations of mediaeval cathedrals were very expensive. Modern architecture avoids decoration partly to avoid expense.
roenxi 6y ago
> The Tour Montparnasse. Who can possibly defend this? And if there’s something clearly wrong with it The arrogance on display is profoundly human. We've added 1.8 billion humans to the world in the last 20 years. That statistic is too large for our tiny brains to grapple but it cannot be ignored. We need buildings for those people to live and work in. Continuing to maintain cities a density appropriate to the 1800s/1900s is irresponsible. No city is a zoo to preserve what life looked like 100 years ago. They are places for people to live today.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  I'm not sure I follow the population and density argument. City densities were higher in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Paris itself has lost about 700,000 people since its 1921 population peak. If housing people is your goal, you should build lots of low- to mid-rise buildings, say between 5 and 10 floors. This size of building is able to achieve the highest densities per cost using current construction techniques. Build lower and you over-allocate and waste land. Build higher and the marginal cost of another floor rises quickly. There's a reason commercial buildings are the tallest: workers need less space working than they do living at home. High-rise residences are not economical unless people have very small apartments, which brings along its own problems.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > No city is a zoo to preserve what life looked like 100 years ago. They are places for people to live today. And why did we stop building new cities? It's cheaper than destroying and rebuilding old cities.
paultopia 6y ago
I almost got married in Boston City Hall, until my now-spouse and I actually went there in person, whereupon we immediately cancelled our date there and rescheduled in Cambridge. To me, the message of that building is vividly clear: all the concrete enclosed windows are perfect places to put machine guns to mow down protestors in the plaza when america finally goes dictator.
carapace 6y ago
See http://www.patternlanguage.com http://www.patternlanguage.com and "Building Living Neighborhoods" https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm (and especially http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html ) > Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possible conception and construction of living, beautiful communities that have real guts -- not the sugary sweetness of pseudo-traditional architecture. > The tools offered are intended for the use of ordinary people, families, communities, developers, planners, architects, designers and builders; public officials, local representatives, and neighbors; business owners and people who have commercial interests. The processes here are expressed in the belief that the common-sense, plain truth about laying out a neighborhood, or repairing one, is equally valid for all comers, amateurs and professionals. They help people build or rebuild neighborhoods in ways that contribute something to their lives. Many of the tools have their origin in 30 years of work published in Alexander's The Nature of Order. His whole idea was that people should design and build their own buildings and towns. He kind of repudiates the whole process of modern architecture and construction.
beloch 6y ago
1. 99% of everything is crap. 2. Crap buildings get torn down before beautiful buildings. This article brings up many examples of modern crap, but ignores the fact that most of that crap will not be painstakingly conserved for centuries to come, as many of the good examples shown have been. There do exist examples of beautiful modern architecture. The article also makes some valid points, such as how modern architects seem to be highly reluctant to use ornate details. The reason may be simple economics. The modern international bidding process heavily favours architects who can deliver a beautiful building for less money. Ornate details may please the eye, but they are undeniably expensive. Some cities have started mandating a certain percentage of any public project be spent on art, but that art is often an afterthought. They'll build a utilitarian overpass and then regulations will force them to put up a hideous and overpriced sculpture in the middle of a pedestrians nightmare. The only people who will ever see it are whizzing past at 80 kph. We have the will to make the places we live in more beautiful, but how can we better quantify beauty and find ways to fit it into city budgets? I feel that a system flexible enough to say, "Yes, scrap the sculpture and do the funky masonry." is a system in which ornateness could return.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Yes, this article actually makes the absolutely incredible claim that “For about 2,000 years, everything human beings built was beautiful, or at least unobjectionable.” Really? Everything?
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  I think this is reasoning does not work on this case. Take Le Corbusier, the "Cité Radieuse" in Marseille is actively maintained and considered with an almost sacred status by the partisans of this kind of design. This is a fucking ugly building that should have been destroyed decades ago, in my opinion, but I have a very strong bias against anything related to this style of design.
  - Twixes 6y ago
    Alexandra Road or Barbican Estate are pretty brutal in their brutalism, but Cité radieuse is just a very nice apartment building. Pretty upscale too.
dafoex 6y ago
You know what? I love space ships. I want to live on a space ship and flow effortlessly from my bed to the kitchen, rehydrate some food and put it in a crumb-free wrap for breakfast, flow to my office and work on my experiments, take a break in the observation deck and take in the vastness of the planet below, and at the end of the day flow back to bed, wrapping myself up in my tethered sleeping bag so that I can doze off peacefully and not float away. Do you know what would be really depressing? If that spaceship never left the ground. I live on Earth, please don't build spaceships for me to live and work in while I'm down here.
barrkel 6y ago
Industrialization and Baumol's cost disease are the reasons why. For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously. Industrial bakeries are far more efficient so only a select few can afford to pay for good bread, and so there are far fewer individual bakers, and they're more expensive because there's less demand - they can't make it up on volume. It's the same with artisans. My father was a plasterer in his 20s, and worked with old men who did the ceiling decorations in the British Embassy in Dublin. But they were the last of their kind, because nobody wanted that any more. And now they're all dead. Richly decorated edifices could be risen today, but they're far more expensive, and thus we can't afford to roll the dice and end up with a bunch of good buildings by process of survival. Instead, everything is mediocre and designed to amortise to zero value within a few decades, to be torn down and built again, not better, merely different.
- bsder 6y ago
  And maintenance. For every 1 of those pretty chapels there are 10 that are falling apart. Ironically, look at Rosslyn Chapel--it was basically falling apart until The DaVinci Code caused enough tourism that they had enough revenue to repair it.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Everything eventually falls apart. Rosslyn Chapel is 600 years old.
    - vidanay 6y ago
      See: Notre Dame being practically abandoned for a century or so.
- novalis78 6y ago
  “The contributions of sound money to human flourishing are not restricted to scientific and technological advance; they can also be seen in the art world. It is no coincidence that Florentine and Venetian artists were the leaders of the Renaissance, as these were the two cities which led Europe’s adoption of sound money. The Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, Realistic and Post-impressionistic schools were all financed by wealthy patrons holding sound money, with a very low time preference and the patience to wait for years, or even decades for the completion of masterpieces meant to survive centuries.” https://books.google.com/books?id=Sw5TDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Saifedean+architecture&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjR7rjquJHqAhUDZjUKHVctAJUQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=Saifedean%20architecture&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Sw5TDwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
WantonQuantum 6y ago
On the whole I agree but I stopped reading after this: “ It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.”
- adrian1973 6y ago
  What is the problem with the quoted statement?
  - riwsky 6y ago
    The word “only”. The article argues well that efficiency should not be absolutely important - but the remark about Freud missteps by treating efficiency (in this instance, of vertical building) as absolutely unimportant, as opposed to merely unabsolutely important - a factor to be balanced against others. A particularly egregious example of overhorizontalization would be Robert Moses’ drive to have people commute into NYC by car from Long Island. While, yes, there tends to be more greenery out there, I would contend this clashes with the author’s “harmony with nature” principle by driving an extreme increase in the reliance on fossil fuels, as well as the “make people happy” principle by lengthening commutes as compared to the higher population density permitted with vertical building.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    The point about spreading out horizontally is factually incorrect. Much like the natural limit to building height is floor plate dedicated to elevator shafts, the natural limit to sprawl is roads and traffic. In general we have a lot of unused vertical space, but not a whole lot of spare roadway.
  - Arainach 6y ago
    Spreading horizontally doesn't scale. What our society needs is more density, not less.
parenthesis 6y ago
Before modern materials and construction techniques enabled the decoupling of how a building looks from its fundamental construction I think it was at lot more difficult to make a building look bad. You are at least more limited in the ways a traditional stone/brick/wood construction can be bad.
andy_ppp 6y ago
Okay I’ll bite: “Which hospital would I rather convalesce in?”, the one with the best doctors. I find the old fashioned architecture he uses beautiful but even the cherry picked examples of bad architecture some of them I still like; let us look around London today, the Southbank and the Barbican are brutalist masterpieces, the Shard is incredible, especially when the clouds touch the top, together with the rebuilding of Kings Cross or even Terminal 5 modern architecture is everywhere and when it’s good I absolutely love it. I find it really hard to believe people dislike modern architecture; the problem with building something with fine adornments today is they end up looking extremely cheap and fake, we are capable of building clean crisp forms in ways not possible before and providing spaces that function much better at their purposes today than we were in the past. The article is sentimental about the old buildings and we can be inspired by them, but modern architecture like Taipei 101 or the Burj Khalifa just blows me away as spectacles of what science and engineering have accomplished. Creating something that looks like the Taj Mahal today would just look hokey and seem extremely dysfunctional for its intended use. Each to their own but I’m a big fan.
- lupinglade 6y ago
  Exactly right. This article seems biased and uninformed.
flr03 6y ago
Modern atchitecture is the expression of an artist pushing the limit of building as an art. If, like me, you are not educated to it this can be difficult to enjoy. Take the someone not specially versed into art to the museum, it's likely they will enjoy and value more Vermeer than let's say Pollock. Should we design buildings, that people use and see everyday, only for an elite to appreciate it ? I don't have the answer.
- tikwidd 6y ago
  I think it should depend on the context. One of the problems seems to be that there is no public space for 'monuments' in the modern world, so we get user-hostile bourgeois 'form over function' in buildings where people actually need to live and work etc. I would rather a division between 'temples' of aesthetic value, where the architects can play aesthetic games, and 'secular' spaces of more utilitarian value.
WalterBright 6y ago
I was walking around a Dutch city a few years ago, that was about half pre-war buildings and half new ones. The new ones just looked like abominations compared to the lovely old ones. All pipes and glass and strange angles.
nfoz 6y ago
I absolutely love the all-glass skyscraper aesthetic. I consider it breathtaking. Calming and magnificent. I never understand why so many people say they love the look of old buildings. I know it's not "cool", but I'll take Toronto's glass over New York's filthy gargoyles, any day. I don't even understand how people can have such opposite taste.
pkamb 6y ago
I think most of these buildings are great. What I can’t stand are the contemporary “modern” mixed-use buildings sweeping cities such as Seattle. You know the ones: multi-colored, multi-setback, multi-material. Awful.
reddog 6y ago
I highly recommend Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tears apart modem architectural pretentiousness the same way he went after the radical chic. It’s hilarious and devastating.
selectionbias 6y ago
I sympathize with the author's disdain for brutalist and some deconstructivist work. But to suggest that all contemporary architecture is a movement towards creating deliberately alienating and impractical buildings, seems to me very wrong. I think Zaha Hadid's work (which the author critiques) is aesthetically pleasing to most people, not alienating, for example https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1500x1000+0+0/resize/2400x1600!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2F2016-zaha-hadid-8.jpg https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647... . The author expresses a uniform disdain for skyscrapers, but many skyscrapers are popular with the general public, for example, the Gherkin in London https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de3cff219.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de... or say, The Empire State Building. Personally I do not find the shiny glass and sleek curves of many of these buildings unsettling or alienating nor, I think, do most people. In short, if we accept a basic premise of the author's: that what is good architecture is what is pleasing to most of the people who view and interact with it, then the author's critique is (I believe) too broad because many of the architects and buildings the author implicitly or explicitly criticizes are in fact popular. Furthermore, something that the author does not address is the movement in contemporary architecture to carefully consider the practical effect of building design on the people within it. For example, how the flow of people is directed by the building, how the layout can help its occupants interact with each other, how interior walls can support privacy or erode it, and how to cater the response to these concerns to the function of the building. This is the opposite of the approach in Eisenman's house design mentioned in the article.
Yoofie 6y ago
Reminds me of this [1] old TED talk about horrible architecture that I still find relevant as ever. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
I like Denver’s airport. Boston’s City Hall was originally designed to have trees and landscaping around it, which was replaced by pavement.
hexxiiiz 6y ago
Well geez. Unlike people, I happen to love contemporary architecture. I suppose that Christopher Alexander must feel sorry for me too. Maybe he could explain more clearly to my aesthetic sensibilities why his prosaic pattern language shouldn't leave me cold and empty. In defense of the Montparnasse building, it has a good view from the top, because you see everything except for the Montparnasse building.
kabacha 6y ago
oof, it's painful to read this article and this thread as someone who enjoys contemporary architecture. Sure there are bad apples but in general every piece is doing something new. If you take a trip in europe you'll really get bored of classical architecture in few days. There isn't much innovation and while it's great for mom-and-pops culture of homogeneous towns, it's quite boring, tiring and uninspiring. Might as well advocate for soviet's Stalinkas, just plaster some ornaments and plants on them! The whole point of contemporary culture is that we finally have the technological, creative and cultural freedom to experiment and create new things. I'm sure for X amount of people that dislike this there are same amount of people who love it.
0_gravitas 6y ago
I very much like it, it feels a lot quieter and cleaner; looking at the often more ornate and colorful older projects makes me feel claustrophobic.
lupinglade 6y ago
Less is more. Intricate details where they aren’t necessary don’t make better architecture. Or better anything, for that matter.
hootbootscoot 6y ago
Excellent article.
downerending 6y ago
Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language is not only a great book on architecture, but one of the best books on any subject I've ever read. Highly recommended. That said, once you've read it, you will forever find the flaming garbage dump that is contemporary architecture severely wanting. These days, and architect could almost be summarized as someone who designs buildings and hates people.
rurban 6y ago
Adolf Loos "Ornament is crime" Even more valid today. Only very few people hate modernism, and they can have all the warts they want. Even C++ or perl.

199 points by metafunctor 6y ago

kull 6y ago

I am buying a house and I spent months to find this perfect, simple, contemporary design. This article made me think a lot about my choice of architecture for my home. In my mind, living in ‘boring’, modern, blank, mostly empty spaces gives me a taste of how in my mind the future, 300y from now will look. Less colors and sharp edges bring to my mind less chaos, gives a sense of minimalism and simplicity. I do not want my physical space taking my attention, too many colors and shapes do not help me to think. I make my living from thinking and living my digital life, contemporary design aligns with it.

martindbp 6y ago
Easy solution: live in a gray box. Preferably underground so the rest of us don't have to look at it. I'm only half serious.
martindbp 6y ago
Easy solution: live in a gray box. Preferably underground so the rest of us don't have to look at it. I'm only half serious. Personally, I like details, but I don't like clutter. If it's complexity I have to maintain myself, I don't want it.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  I'm thinking about building a house in the future. It should be made from bricks (as I love this material) and I don't really want to make any interior finish. Just huge gray box of pure bricks with exposed electric wires, stone floor, etc. I think it's called loft or industrial style and people trying to mimic it. But I hate mimicking, things must be natural. Not sure if it's practical and I definitely did not see anyone implementing it. But that would definitely reflect my personality in some way.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    A blank/empty building or space is only as right or wrong as why it was made and what is done with it. A grey box is ugly, and even disfunctional if the function of housing humans is any different from the function of storing items. But a grey box may also be a canvas, which ends up being the very opposite of ugly and dead and inhumane. One of the great appeals of the loft/industrial thing is the space is reconfigurable at will. You can have very inventive and artistic weird beds hanginging from chains at novel elevations and producing interesting spaces underneath, curtains for divisions that move around and can be opened to make a big open space one day and cozy spaces the next. There is no single form that is really the one true best form. The ability to change is more soul-filling than anything. It's not practical and most people can't afford to have 3 homes where one is all cozy spaces that feel like a claustrophobic rat warren after a while, and another that is all clean sterile Ikea which is a refreshing break from the rat warren for a while and then feels sterile and un-fulfilling after a while... one perfectly valid approach is an empty space, but empty for the sake of it's configurability, not for the sake of the emptiness itself.
  - sidpatil 6y ago
    What would the energy efficiency of such a building be?
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      Well, I simplified that a little bit. Walls are supposed to contain space filled with insulation, so it would have pretty standard energy efficiency.
rbecker 6y ago
So something like https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/img_9615-1.jpg https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01... ? No clutter, simple, minimal. Time-tested and completely unlike contemporary architecture.
- paganel 6y ago
  Not the OP but looking at your example I can only think that the place lacks chairs/something to sit on.
- carapace 6y ago
  The panels above the doors are wonderful.

gumby 6y ago

It's a shame this is a polemic when it discusses important issues. It's not as if these issues aren't discussed in architecture. And there are definitely weird pathologies and pomposities in architecture (as in any field), which manifest themselves in a variety of unpleasant ways. But this doesn't mean all we have is ugly buildings; we also have new, playful, and enjoyable buildings as well. Another HN comment this morning (on a different post) brought up Postel's law and how it is usually both misunderstood and overused. The same applies to "a house is a machine for living" or "form follows function": they can be taken as an excuse to ignore the person, or as a call for: make sure the person's needs are at the centre of the design. A case of both skill and pathology: One of my homes was designed by an architect and one simply built by a developer. The developer house is adequate. The architect-designed house was a lot more expensive but is also a lot more pleasant to live in. But speaking to those pathologies: it needed a lot of interaction with the architect to make sure it didn't get our of control on design (I'm sure we've all seen this in software too). I think this is why so many corporate buildings end up so sucky: many cooks, complex constraints, and in the end the architect has too much control.

mc32 6y ago
One of the keys is cost control. That aspect, in addition to municipal building codes, constrains s lot. If you want to see utilitarian built by the dweller, visit locations where there is no oversight for building: favelas. Purely utilitarian built with tight budgets.
ncmncm 6y ago
Polemics are about all there is room left for. Ultimately, it is a failure of education. Architects will give each other awards and design contracts according to what they were taught, and they are taught crap. It is self perpetuating, as they teach the next class the kind of crap they were inculcated in. Probably your architect was obliged to make snide remarks over drinks about what he had to put up with doing your house (which I haven't seen, only heard described). I liked the barn.
- Gibbon1 6y ago

Zigurd 6y ago

Unless an architect is a genius like Wright, and they have a coherent design philosophy, like Wright, decorative architectural features way too often degenerate into middlebrow sentimentality. The same goes for cars: Bangle-butt was not the response to jellybeaned cars we were looking for.

spc476 6y ago
"Mr. Wright, I love the house you designed, but the roof leaks so badly we might as well not have a roof. Could you fix it?" "No. That's how you know it's a roof!"

AnotherGoodName 6y ago

Old buildings have gone through a filter. The ugly ones were destroyed with no one caring. The beautiful ones have armies of people fighting to maintain them. There are beautiful and ugly new buildings. In 1000 years time only the beautiful buildings from this era will have survived and we'll be talking about why the buildings of today are nowhere near as nice.

yokaze 6y ago
How was it? For every rule, there is an exception: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/ http://www.sosbrutalism.org/
- cannam 6y ago
  Good to see Dunelm House in Durham listed there - one of my favourite buildings in any style, that has been threatened with demolition for a few years now.
  - rm445 6y ago
    The bridge across the river Wear right next to Dunelm house is an example of building with concrete done right. Use the properties of the material to make a structure that is light and airy, pleasing yet practical. The soviet bunker that is Dunelm House itself though. Bring on the day of its demolition. Please let me push the plunger and set off the explosives.
requin246 6y ago
There is an element of survivorship bias, but the rate of building beautiful buildings is not constant. There’s far fewer beautiful buildings built in the last 75 years than in the years preceding it (try walking into a church built after 1960 for example). The article points to several casual ideologies in architecture which contribute to this.
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  There are some noteable exceptions - growing up in Germany, it was very easy to distinguish former industrial centers (bombed to pieces, rebuilt quickly using concrete prefab monstrosities during the 50s) from the cities spared due to their tactical irrelevance (either kept in their original style or plastered over in the 60s).

hawski 6y ago

I always felt that the contemporary architecture is cheap first and easy to clean/maintain second. All those nice ornaments are expensive, not easy to clean and their replacement in any case is even more expensive. Is there a way around this. I prefer this older aesthetic, but I think I couldn't afford it. My one idea is to build with CLT and keep wood exposed both in and outside (with proper thermal insulation in the middle). That way it's cheap, but with this warm feeling of wood.

AlexandrB 6y ago
This is giving modern architecture entirely too much credit. For example, one of the many crimes of the UWaterloo Davis Center[1] was that the roof (curved and made of panes of glass) leaked every time it rained causing a mess on the floors below. These designs are often neither attractive nor practical. The weird shapes and angles used often waste usable space, are hard to clean, and introduce additional joints between sections where water or air can get in. [1] https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-dc/ https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-dc/
- floren 6y ago
  Ah, yes, I used to work in a building which had (at great expense, apparently) many curved walls, with "exciting" shiny metal cladding along much of the walls. The roof leaked constantly (frequently into our machine room) and the metal clad walls meant cell phones were useless inside, but I bet that architect got an award.

jeffrallen 6y ago

My architect asked me to tell her stories from the future when my family lives in the house she was designing. She asked me to not speak about details of what the house was, but to tell stories of things I dreamed would happen in the house. I told her of multitasking cooking and monitoring homework, of children laughing while chasing around walls in a circuit, of seeing children and pets from the window while doing dishes. I love my house and all those stories came true. But: My architect considers herself to be in Le Corbusier's school of thought. She understands that sleek lines and honest materials can serve human stories.

coronadisaster 6y ago
pictures?

MoZeus 6y ago

Yeah, well, I'm not in a patient mood today, so I'll just say this is a load of idiotic horseshit not worth anyone's time or serious consideration, and leave it there.

Brian_K_White 6y ago
I would say exactly the same thing, about this comment.

nowandlater 6y ago

That Peter Eisenman building looks like it'd be a killer skate park. Say what you will about James Howard Kunstler, his TED talk on Architecture seems to be in the right direction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

gbacon 6y ago

Architects often get mad when non-architects conflate the terms “modernism,” “postmodernism,” “Brutalism,” etc. They love telling people that, say, “Frank Gehry is actually REACTING to postmodernism.” These terminological disputes can obscure the fact that everything under discussion is actually just a minor variation on the same garbage.

bradknowles 6y ago
The thing about Frank Gehry is not the architecture, it’s the engineering. He designs crap that couldn’t possibly be built, and then somehow his engineering team figures out how to make the impossible not only possible, but to actually realize it. The result still looks like shit, but the engineering is amazing.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

Because it's obviously and arrogantly aesthetically terrible. Architects, like the elites who commission and support their work, have a fundamentally adversarial relationship with the rest of us. Even the relatively good stuff stands alone and is, at best, aggressively indifferent towards its surroundings. Kunstler wrote a good book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250 https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-L... (and several less-good follow up books)

api 6y ago
Kunstler is one of those people who has one good point that he makes with a great deal of wit. His point is valid but his critique is not that deep, and outside this one point the rest of his views are reactionary trash. He's a one hit wonder. This is a common feature of notable critics, probably because it is far easier to criticize than to solve problems. It's far easier to point out why the suburbs suck than to design and advocate effectively for alternatives that address the same needs that the suburbs try to address. BTW I think your critique is actually deeper than Kunstler's in that it gets to the totalitarian underpinnings of this type of high modernism. People seem to mistakenly associate high modernism with the enlightenment when it's more of a return to pre-enlightenment authoritarianism. High modernism is a secular materialist version of divine right of kings, with baroque religious theories replaced with opulent displays of indifferent wealth and with sterility replacing aesthetic grandeur as a display of power. The latter may be because aesthetic indifference serves today as a more effective display of power than baroque over-done aesthetics with gold leaf and curlicues.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  A thought of mine a core part of totalitarianism, pick a flavor they are all the same in this. Is that they seek to callously use humanity as material to manufacture some ego driven utopia. That is at the heart of modernist architecture. People are expected to conform to the vision not the other way around.
- WizardAustralis 6y ago
  He is always an interesting read but is usually all to eager to jump off the deep end. I recall him in 2012 saying that the aviation industry would be history by 2018... that clearly didnt pan out. The theory was reasonable but the time frame was wildly out of whack.

yokaze 6y ago

Funny, that the author shows two hospitals in Barcelona. To answer the question, you definitely want to be in the "ugly" one. For starters, the nice modernist building is not a hospital anymore. And partly due to the reason of architecture. While nice to look at, it was not terribly practical. Staircases between different wings meant that they had to transfer sometimes people with ambulance within the hospital. And sometimes even seconds matter.

kleiba 6y ago
But wasn't the question about where to convalesce, that is, recover after having been treated?
- war1025 6y ago
  The answer to that is they send you home. They tend to kick you out of the hospital unless you are actively dying. At least here in America.
  - kleiba 6y ago
    Barcelona is in America?
    - kabacha 6y ago
      It applies everywhere. People recover much faster at home than any hospital, even a pretty one.
- com 6y ago
  Hospitals are terrifically dangerous places for sick people. That and the cost of bed occupancy are the primary reasons that convalescence mostly happens at home.

galfarragem 6y ago

A metaphor: Architects, like devs, are always looking for the next “shiny new thing“. Architects, like devs, could stick to their C or even JS but, you know, there is Rust and Crystal and Elm... Architect here.

cosmodisk 6y ago

"Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly" They aren't all ugly,just functionality wrong: instead of being places for people to travel,they are parking lots for planes with the rest attached to them. No matter how beautiful the airport if I have to walk half a mile to the gate just to reach the stairs with no lift, it's a failed building already. It used to be relatively cheap to build extremely beautiful buildings because labour was cheap. Also,some cities have some sort of planning panel,where people can and do try to steer architecture certain way,so there wouldn't be pink windowless office buildings in an old town built 400 years ago and etc.But that's not in every city. And the last bit is we just need to admit that the king is naked sometimes: there are shit architects and shit designers who, by some magic stroke of luck, ended up in positions that allowed them to create those awful things no questions asked.They wouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything creative related in an alternative world.

HelloNurse 6y ago
That half a mile is needed for non-negotiable constraints, like the scale of airplanes (e.g. gaps between landing strips or fingers), the capacity targets (walking to board a plane is better than not flying at all) or the available space to add terminals (Heathrow is a good example). There are also practical needs, functions that follow the form, that are no less important than minimizing walking, like the convenience and cost reduction of putting a lot of travellers in the same huge terminal and if possible in the same huge hall, with one subway station, one customs funnel, and so on.

cannam 6y ago

I like Brutalism, and I speculate that one reason is that I grew up in a rural area where things are big, surfaces are rough, and there aren't decorative brickwork patterns everywhere. I live in London now, and the brutalist Barbican estate feels a lot more like "the way the world is" to me than much of "traditional" residential London does. I think that arguments like the one in this article are born from overfamiliarity with pretty little patterns - I find the focus on decoration, "universal" aesthetics, and tradition quite suspicious. (In particular I'm surprised that the article picks on Alexandra Road estate in London - it's lovely in real life, and it answers a difficult problem as well, namely how to use a road just behind a railway track. Also, while the old Penn Station which the article praises looks kind of amazing in the pics, it's not exactly human scale is it? It'd surely have been just as shivery and daunting in real life as any Soviet edifice) I had been hoping that the answer to "Why you hate contemporary architecture" would be something about your age. Brutalism has become popular with many people of my age (I'm almost 50) but I don't think it was a widely popular style when it was new. The test for me is going to be postmodernism. I don't really like it, because it's about frivolous decoration, but it's going to be venerated by a younger generation just as Brutalism is by mine. Will I be able to understand that?

amiga_500 6y ago
I love barbican, but it also has lots of green and a vision of community. Same for Montreal's expo habitat 67. Some of the buildings in that article were revolting. That big white one with chunks for windows looks so childish and uninspiring.
rglullis 6y ago
The article does mention about some integration with nature, and from some Google pictures it seems that Barbican State has at least some greenery. > Brutalism has become popular with many people of my age. Has it really? Have you lived in any of the places you mentioned and consider nice? That has always been a better test than going by people's expressed opinions. In Brazil it is quite easy to find people that praise Oscar Niemeyer's work, but none of them actually live in Brasilia - and I am yet to see a catholic that has any good thing to say about Rio de Janeiro's Cathedral.

AlexandrB 6y ago

This article reminds me strongly of how the design community, seemingly in unison, decided that UI accordances were mere frippery and ushered in our current, flat UI landscape of indistinguishable hamburger buttons and oceans of white space.

kabacha 6y ago
And thank god for these people. I do not miss <blink> tags and all of the things that were used in to fill up the lovely, underappreciated white-space.
tomjen3 6y ago
I agree with you that flat design is bad design, but not that whitespace is bad. Done right it can enhance the understanding of the content and add beauty to a page.

smitty1e 6y ago

Just Gramscian damage: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260 Prophecy: 3D printing rescues architecture, allowing a Renaissance of aesthetically pleasing buildings to retire the swath of overgrown Legos besetting us.

zomglings 6y ago

I don't know much about architecture, but I found the essay very biased and unnecessarily biasing - I didn't actually think that most of the buildings they presented as monstrosities were actually unattractive. Many of them looked quite elegant from the outside. I also found some of the examples they presented as positive too complex for my tastes. It feels like the authors overextended themselves in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion to post-modern or brutal architecture that they do. The article did bring up some good points about how the sentiments of people using the buildings should be taken into account during the design process. I really enjoyed their take on how democracy should be treated in architecture. It feels profound beyond the scope of architecture itself, and something that society has been playing with in recent decades - e.g. panchayat government in India [0] and decentralized governance and decision making as embodied by various blockchains. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_in_India

amiga_500 6y ago
I agree with him. Every example of a bad modern building, I agreed, they are repulsive.
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> ...in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion... I'm not sure they were actually so revulsed as much as whipping up indignation to sell an article. I don't think aesthetics was really what it was about at all. Also if you want large amounts of detail, expect to pay for that either directly in lots of money, or in considerable unjust exploitation of a craftsman underclass. (I also detest articles that say what YOU want or what YOU feel).
- alejohausner 6y ago
  Skilled crafstmen are not in the underclass. They ones I've met are very well paid, and take pride in their work, and know a lot. The stone decorations of mediaeval cathedrals were very expensive. Modern architecture avoids decoration partly to avoid expense.

roenxi 6y ago

> The Tour Montparnasse. Who can possibly defend this? And if there’s something clearly wrong with it The arrogance on display is profoundly human. We've added 1.8 billion humans to the world in the last 20 years. That statistic is too large for our tiny brains to grapple but it cannot be ignored. We need buildings for those people to live and work in. Continuing to maintain cities a density appropriate to the 1800s/1900s is irresponsible. No city is a zoo to preserve what life looked like 100 years ago. They are places for people to live today.

jackcosgrove 6y ago
I'm not sure I follow the population and density argument. City densities were higher in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Paris itself has lost about 700,000 people since its 1921 population peak. If housing people is your goal, you should build lots of low- to mid-rise buildings, say between 5 and 10 floors. This size of building is able to achieve the highest densities per cost using current construction techniques. Build lower and you over-allocate and waste land. Build higher and the marginal cost of another floor rises quickly. There's a reason commercial buildings are the tallest: workers need less space working than they do living at home. High-rise residences are not economical unless people have very small apartments, which brings along its own problems.
lazyjones 6y ago
> No city is a zoo to preserve what life looked like 100 years ago. They are places for people to live today. And why did we stop building new cities? It's cheaper than destroying and rebuilding old cities.

paultopia 6y ago

I almost got married in Boston City Hall, until my now-spouse and I actually went there in person, whereupon we immediately cancelled our date there and rescheduled in Cambridge. To me, the message of that building is vividly clear: all the concrete enclosed windows are perfect places to put machine guns to mow down protestors in the plaza when america finally goes dictator.

carapace 6y ago

See http://www.patternlanguage.com http://www.patternlanguage.com and "Building Living Neighborhoods" https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm (and especially http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html ) > Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possible conception and construction of living, beautiful communities that have real guts -- not the sugary sweetness of pseudo-traditional architecture. > The tools offered are intended for the use of ordinary people, families, communities, developers, planners, architects, designers and builders; public officials, local representatives, and neighbors; business owners and people who have commercial interests. The processes here are expressed in the belief that the common-sense, plain truth about laying out a neighborhood, or repairing one, is equally valid for all comers, amateurs and professionals. They help people build or rebuild neighborhoods in ways that contribute something to their lives. Many of the tools have their origin in 30 years of work published in Alexander's The Nature of Order. His whole idea was that people should design and build their own buildings and towns. He kind of repudiates the whole process of modern architecture and construction.

beloch 6y ago

1. 99% of everything is crap. 2. Crap buildings get torn down before beautiful buildings. This article brings up many examples of modern crap, but ignores the fact that most of that crap will not be painstakingly conserved for centuries to come, as many of the good examples shown have been. There do exist examples of beautiful modern architecture. The article also makes some valid points, such as how modern architects seem to be highly reluctant to use ornate details. The reason may be simple economics. The modern international bidding process heavily favours architects who can deliver a beautiful building for less money. Ornate details may please the eye, but they are undeniably expensive. Some cities have started mandating a certain percentage of any public project be spent on art, but that art is often an afterthought. They'll build a utilitarian overpass and then regulations will force them to put up a hideous and overpriced sculpture in the middle of a pedestrians nightmare. The only people who will ever see it are whizzing past at 80 kph. We have the will to make the places we live in more beautiful, but how can we better quantify beauty and find ways to fit it into city budgets? I feel that a system flexible enough to say, "Yes, scrap the sculpture and do the funky masonry." is a system in which ornateness could return.

jameshart 6y ago
Yes, this article actually makes the absolutely incredible claim that “For about 2,000 years, everything human beings built was beautiful, or at least unobjectionable.” Really? Everything?
stephc_int13 6y ago
I think this is reasoning does not work on this case. Take Le Corbusier, the "Cité Radieuse" in Marseille is actively maintained and considered with an almost sacred status by the partisans of this kind of design. This is a fucking ugly building that should have been destroyed decades ago, in my opinion, but I have a very strong bias against anything related to this style of design.
- Twixes 6y ago
  Alexandra Road or Barbican Estate are pretty brutal in their brutalism, but Cité radieuse is just a very nice apartment building. Pretty upscale too.

dafoex 6y ago

You know what? I love space ships. I want to live on a space ship and flow effortlessly from my bed to the kitchen, rehydrate some food and put it in a crumb-free wrap for breakfast, flow to my office and work on my experiments, take a break in the observation deck and take in the vastness of the planet below, and at the end of the day flow back to bed, wrapping myself up in my tethered sleeping bag so that I can doze off peacefully and not float away. Do you know what would be really depressing? If that spaceship never left the ground. I live on Earth, please don't build spaceships for me to live and work in while I'm down here.

barrkel 6y ago

Industrialization and Baumol's cost disease are the reasons why. For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously. Industrial bakeries are far more efficient so only a select few can afford to pay for good bread, and so there are far fewer individual bakers, and they're more expensive because there's less demand - they can't make it up on volume. It's the same with artisans. My father was a plasterer in his 20s, and worked with old men who did the ceiling decorations in the British Embassy in Dublin. But they were the last of their kind, because nobody wanted that any more. And now they're all dead. Richly decorated edifices could be risen today, but they're far more expensive, and thus we can't afford to roll the dice and end up with a bunch of good buildings by process of survival. Instead, everything is mediocre and designed to amortise to zero value within a few decades, to be torn down and built again, not better, merely different.

bsder 6y ago
And maintenance. For every 1 of those pretty chapels there are 10 that are falling apart. Ironically, look at Rosslyn Chapel--it was basically falling apart until The DaVinci Code caused enough tourism that they had enough revenue to repair it.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Everything eventually falls apart. Rosslyn Chapel is 600 years old.
  - vidanay 6y ago
    See: Notre Dame being practically abandoned for a century or so.
novalis78 6y ago
“The contributions of sound money to human flourishing are not restricted to scientific and technological advance; they can also be seen in the art world. It is no coincidence that Florentine and Venetian artists were the leaders of the Renaissance, as these were the two cities which led Europe’s adoption of sound money. The Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, Realistic and Post-impressionistic schools were all financed by wealthy patrons holding sound money, with a very low time preference and the patience to wait for years, or even decades for the completion of masterpieces meant to survive centuries.” https://books.google.com/books?id=Sw5TDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Saifedean+architecture&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjR7rjquJHqAhUDZjUKHVctAJUQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=Saifedean%20architecture&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Sw5TDwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

WantonQuantum 6y ago

On the whole I agree but I stopped reading after this: “ It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.”

adrian1973 6y ago
What is the problem with the quoted statement?
- riwsky 6y ago
  The word “only”. The article argues well that efficiency should not be absolutely important - but the remark about Freud missteps by treating efficiency (in this instance, of vertical building) as absolutely unimportant, as opposed to merely unabsolutely important - a factor to be balanced against others. A particularly egregious example of overhorizontalization would be Robert Moses’ drive to have people commute into NYC by car from Long Island. While, yes, there tends to be more greenery out there, I would contend this clashes with the author’s “harmony with nature” principle by driving an extreme increase in the reliance on fossil fuels, as well as the “make people happy” principle by lengthening commutes as compared to the higher population density permitted with vertical building.
- closeparen 6y ago
  The point about spreading out horizontally is factually incorrect. Much like the natural limit to building height is floor plate dedicated to elevator shafts, the natural limit to sprawl is roads and traffic. In general we have a lot of unused vertical space, but not a whole lot of spare roadway.
- Arainach 6y ago
  Spreading horizontally doesn't scale. What our society needs is more density, not less.

parenthesis 6y ago

Before modern materials and construction techniques enabled the decoupling of how a building looks from its fundamental construction I think it was at lot more difficult to make a building look bad. You are at least more limited in the ways a traditional stone/brick/wood construction can be bad.

andy_ppp 6y ago

Okay I’ll bite: “Which hospital would I rather convalesce in?”, the one with the best doctors. I find the old fashioned architecture he uses beautiful but even the cherry picked examples of bad architecture some of them I still like; let us look around London today, the Southbank and the Barbican are brutalist masterpieces, the Shard is incredible, especially when the clouds touch the top, together with the rebuilding of Kings Cross or even Terminal 5 modern architecture is everywhere and when it’s good I absolutely love it. I find it really hard to believe people dislike modern architecture; the problem with building something with fine adornments today is they end up looking extremely cheap and fake, we are capable of building clean crisp forms in ways not possible before and providing spaces that function much better at their purposes today than we were in the past. The article is sentimental about the old buildings and we can be inspired by them, but modern architecture like Taipei 101 or the Burj Khalifa just blows me away as spectacles of what science and engineering have accomplished. Creating something that looks like the Taj Mahal today would just look hokey and seem extremely dysfunctional for its intended use. Each to their own but I’m a big fan.

lupinglade 6y ago
Exactly right. This article seems biased and uninformed.

flr03 6y ago

Modern atchitecture is the expression of an artist pushing the limit of building as an art. If, like me, you are not educated to it this can be difficult to enjoy. Take the someone not specially versed into art to the museum, it's likely they will enjoy and value more Vermeer than let's say Pollock. Should we design buildings, that people use and see everyday, only for an elite to appreciate it ? I don't have the answer.

tikwidd 6y ago
I think it should depend on the context. One of the problems seems to be that there is no public space for 'monuments' in the modern world, so we get user-hostile bourgeois 'form over function' in buildings where people actually need to live and work etc. I would rather a division between 'temples' of aesthetic value, where the architects can play aesthetic games, and 'secular' spaces of more utilitarian value.

WalterBright 6y ago

I was walking around a Dutch city a few years ago, that was about half pre-war buildings and half new ones. The new ones just looked like abominations compared to the lovely old ones. All pipes and glass and strange angles.

nfoz 6y ago

I absolutely love the all-glass skyscraper aesthetic. I consider it breathtaking. Calming and magnificent. I never understand why so many people say they love the look of old buildings. I know it's not "cool", but I'll take Toronto's glass over New York's filthy gargoyles, any day. I don't even understand how people can have such opposite taste.

pkamb 6y ago

I think most of these buildings are great. What I can’t stand are the contemporary “modern” mixed-use buildings sweeping cities such as Seattle. You know the ones: multi-colored, multi-setback, multi-material. Awful.

reddog 6y ago

I highly recommend Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tears apart modem architectural pretentiousness the same way he went after the radical chic. It’s hilarious and devastating.

selectionbias 6y ago

I sympathize with the author's disdain for brutalist and some deconstructivist work. But to suggest that all contemporary architecture is a movement towards creating deliberately alienating and impractical buildings, seems to me very wrong. I think Zaha Hadid's work (which the author critiques) is aesthetically pleasing to most people, not alienating, for example https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1500x1000+0+0/resize/2400x1600!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2F2016-zaha-hadid-8.jpg https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647... . The author expresses a uniform disdain for skyscrapers, but many skyscrapers are popular with the general public, for example, the Gherkin in London https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de3cff219.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de... or say, The Empire State Building. Personally I do not find the shiny glass and sleek curves of many of these buildings unsettling or alienating nor, I think, do most people. In short, if we accept a basic premise of the author's: that what is good architecture is what is pleasing to most of the people who view and interact with it, then the author's critique is (I believe) too broad because many of the architects and buildings the author implicitly or explicitly criticizes are in fact popular. Furthermore, something that the author does not address is the movement in contemporary architecture to carefully consider the practical effect of building design on the people within it. For example, how the flow of people is directed by the building, how the layout can help its occupants interact with each other, how interior walls can support privacy or erode it, and how to cater the response to these concerns to the function of the building. This is the opposite of the approach in Eisenman's house design mentioned in the article.

Yoofie 6y ago

Reminds me of this [1] old TED talk about horrible architecture that I still find relevant as ever. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

TYPE_FASTER 6y ago

I like Denver’s airport. Boston’s City Hall was originally designed to have trees and landscaping around it, which was replaced by pavement.

hexxiiiz 6y ago

Well geez. Unlike people, I happen to love contemporary architecture. I suppose that Christopher Alexander must feel sorry for me too. Maybe he could explain more clearly to my aesthetic sensibilities why his prosaic pattern language shouldn't leave me cold and empty. In defense of the Montparnasse building, it has a good view from the top, because you see everything except for the Montparnasse building.

kabacha 6y ago

oof, it's painful to read this article and this thread as someone who enjoys contemporary architecture. Sure there are bad apples but in general every piece is doing something new. If you take a trip in europe you'll really get bored of classical architecture in few days. There isn't much innovation and while it's great for mom-and-pops culture of homogeneous towns, it's quite boring, tiring and uninspiring. Might as well advocate for soviet's Stalinkas, just plaster some ornaments and plants on them! The whole point of contemporary culture is that we finally have the technological, creative and cultural freedom to experiment and create new things. I'm sure for X amount of people that dislike this there are same amount of people who love it.

0_gravitas 6y ago

I very much like it, it feels a lot quieter and cleaner; looking at the often more ornate and colorful older projects makes me feel claustrophobic.

lupinglade 6y ago

Less is more. Intricate details where they aren’t necessary don’t make better architecture. Or better anything, for that matter.

hootbootscoot 6y ago

Excellent article.

downerending 6y ago

Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language is not only a great book on architecture, but one of the best books on any subject I've ever read. Highly recommended. That said, once you've read it, you will forever find the flaming garbage dump that is contemporary architecture severely wanting. These days, and architect could almost be summarized as someone who designs buildings and hates people.

rurban 6y ago

Adolf Loos "Ornament is crime" Even more valid today. Only very few people hate modernism, and they can have all the warts they want. Even C++ or perl.