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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.

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).
rm445 6y ago
The filter thing seems obviously true, but it doesn't rule out whole styles being better than others, even if the mediocre and pedestrian efforts from those styles were eventually winnowed out. Besides, each day people, somewhere, are making decisions about the next awful building. It doesn't seem enough to loftily let our descendents decide whether to pull down a building after we're all dead, before a single stone has been laid. Consider this view as a thought experiment: say every Norman cathedral was beautiful. Maybe some were inspired and some were pedestrian, some were less beautiful because of the locally-available stone, some had long delays in construction and ended up with a mishmash of styles. Or whatever. You could filter them by appeal, or randomly, or any other method, and still end up with a bunch of beautiful buildings. Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. GIGO.
- oldgradstudent 6y ago
  > Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. Some brutalist buildings must be left standing as a warning for future generations.
  - rm445 6y ago
    This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      Maybe a few blocks of brutalist buildings would work better than the spikes.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    Just fill their insides up with solid concrete, to prevent people from entering them and having their souls sucked out.
1123581321 6y ago
This is evidently untrue. The principles of architectural schools and trends can be objectively evaluated. We also have some historical evidence of lost buildings that show they were not all the ugly ones. And we have many buildings that were not preserved intentionally that are nonetheless beautiful. Perhaps you meant that inferior or cheaper schools of architecture co-existed with the prestigious architecture of their time. That is less controversial (and is also true today, mercifully.)
hairytrog 6y ago
The winnowing theory only makes sense to people today, because we have such a massive demolition industry. But when things were built with old construction techniques, taking a lot more time and effort, using stone and brick - you built once and it remained long term. The rate of demolition was probably much lower in the past.
noobermin 6y ago
This take is naturalizing and ignorant of history, for example, urban renewal.

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).

rm445 6y ago

The filter thing seems obviously true, but it doesn't rule out whole styles being better than others, even if the mediocre and pedestrian efforts from those styles were eventually winnowed out. Besides, each day people, somewhere, are making decisions about the next awful building. It doesn't seem enough to loftily let our descendents decide whether to pull down a building after we're all dead, before a single stone has been laid. Consider this view as a thought experiment: say every Norman cathedral was beautiful. Maybe some were inspired and some were pedestrian, some were less beautiful because of the locally-available stone, some had long delays in construction and ended up with a mishmash of styles. Or whatever. You could filter them by appeal, or randomly, or any other method, and still end up with a bunch of beautiful buildings. Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. GIGO.

oldgradstudent 6y ago
> Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. Some brutalist buildings must be left standing as a warning for future generations.
- rm445 6y ago
  This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Maybe a few blocks of brutalist buildings would work better than the spikes.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Just fill their insides up with solid concrete, to prevent people from entering them and having their souls sucked out.

1123581321 6y ago

This is evidently untrue. The principles of architectural schools and trends can be objectively evaluated. We also have some historical evidence of lost buildings that show they were not all the ugly ones. And we have many buildings that were not preserved intentionally that are nonetheless beautiful. Perhaps you meant that inferior or cheaper schools of architecture co-existed with the prestigious architecture of their time. That is less controversial (and is also true today, mercifully.)

hairytrog 6y ago

The winnowing theory only makes sense to people today, because we have such a massive demolition industry. But when things were built with old construction techniques, taking a lot more time and effort, using stone and brick - you built once and it remained long term. The rate of demolition was probably much lower in the past.

noobermin 6y ago

This take is naturalizing and ignorant of history, for example, urban renewal.