13 ms·

This misses a big point: highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale. So we'll have it again when it can all be done b

by Grakel 5y ago

This misses a big point: highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale. So we'll have it again when it can all be done by machine. It costs human lives to build a Notre Dame, both in deaths and in total lifespan output, and as for Sagrada Familia it's still not complete. We now value human life and labor too much to be able to afford it. I personally can't wait to have detailed, warm, organic architecture back again, but I damn sure don't want to carve any stone.

chuckee 5y ago
> highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale Is that why those award-winning buildings look like that? Because the architects tried to make them cheaper? Is 'detail' requiring highly skilled craftsmanship the only way to make pleasant buildings? Because a few of the buildings (Venice and the Italian village) the article gives as examples of beauty have only the barest, simplest of details.
- grp000 5y ago
  Those Italian buildings were created as highly practical structures at the time, in waterway locations that constrained the geometry of how the city grew, so they have an interesting and historical appearance. Also a lot of the Italian architecture is not a building, but an entire city, not sure those really count.
- Grakel 5y ago
  Its very hard to get contractors to work with materials today. So you can have some factory create panels of steel and glass, and the contractor can have (relatively) unskilled cheap labor snap them into place. That's a lot of construction today. Some really beautiful structures do use minimalism, but so many big architects today strive for speed, size, and function. I think most modern beautiful, minimalist structures are usually smaller, built for fewer people, etc. Maybe?
- mannykannot 5y ago
  I think the statement you quote is incorrect. Our society is quite capable of paying for artisans to restore the architectural splendors of earlier times, and does so. At the same time, expenditure on architecture for its own sake seems to have increased in the last decade or so, at least in centers of wealth (which, in modern times, is where non-utilitarian architecture has its first home, even if it likes to have a weekend place in the country.) What has not happened is that, for the most part, the paymasters for the latter development have demonstrated little interest in adopting styles that demand highly skilled craftsmanship of the sort formerly valued (and still valued, apparently, so long as it dates to a previous era.) Today's vanity architecture reflects the values of those who commission it, rather than being a result of market prices for artisan work.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    The Victorians had a concept of civic pride and public service which is completely absent today. I owe a lot to this dude, because he made sure that when worker was housing was being built it would have a library on the periphery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Passmore_Edwards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Passmore_Edwards There was an explicit goal of providing education and opportunities to working people. (Well - working men. But this was over a century ago now.) Modern philanthropy has no equivalent. There is no interest in creating high quality useful public spaces for ordinary people. So there's no architectural tradition to support that goal.
brenschluss 5y ago
Very glad this is mentioned. Form follows function, sure, but it follows capital and construction methods and labor practices. The author would best wonder why this is global, and not look towards solely design trends but construction methods and real estate logics for the answer.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
Stone and wood is carved by machines quite easily. Sears used to churn out homes with loads of detail and mail them out wholesale to middle class folks. Those homes are now worth fortunes. We have terrible architecture for ideological reasons. Flat roofs are not signifincantly cheaper to build than pitched roofs, and far less adept at roofiness, but we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy. As with most modern art, architecture has a fundamentially adversarial relationship with the vast majority of people.
- jahewson 5y ago
  > we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy. Not really. Frank Lloyd Wright was building with flat roofs a decade before the Bauhaus school even opened. But it was certainly an artistic endeavour and he’s a great example of somebody who had an adversarial relationship with pretty much everybody.
  - omosubi 5y ago
    Besides the Larkin building (a factory), what did he build with predominantly flat roofs? I don't think there's a home he built prior to fallingwater that was anything close to what Bauhaus did.
  - recursivedoubts 5y ago
    Wright used flat roofs and I'm sure other folks did before him, but bauhaus was the intellectually dominant influence on schools of architecture in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
- nradov 5y ago
  Hardly any new houses are built with flat roofs. That trend is mostly dead. Commercial buildings still have flat roofs because they need a place to mount stuff like HVAC and antennas.
  - zwkrt 5y ago
asdff 5y ago
Not every art deco beauty is forged in blood. Not like people need to die for you to stop installing drop cielings and beige cubicles. We've just decided as a society recently that we value spending the bare minimum. These old architectural works, even just from the 1900s-1940s, were from a different time, when property owners wanted to spend extra on making something look striking and remarkable. You don't see that line of thinking in business anymore. Imagine a CEO spending on some ornate HQ building with stonemasons and gold leaf, shareholders would fire them. You only see that level of grandeur today when the CEO founded and still is in control of the company and the shareholders can only sit and pout. Luxury buildings today come with the cheapest furnishings the developer could find on the wholesale marketplace.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Yep. For example, here's Tribune Tower in Chicago, built in mid 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Tower Look at this majestic crown: https://i.imgur.com/6W2FUz0.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/6W2FUz0.jpeg
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Um, 3d printing? Robotics? Computer aided design? I suppose it is the lack of imagination of top-end architecture that these techniques, some of the hallmark technologies of our age, that there isn't a healthy market in their use in architecture. The employment of these things all seems focused in mass production and cost reduction (which isn't a bad thing), and seems to ignore the possibilities that programmable manufacturing and production could have on architecture (which could push the state of the art). It might also be that being an architect kinda sucks these days. Not enough jobs, and those jobs are paying worse, to cover the costs of schooling. So there aren't the true geniuses anymore? Maybe it's just that the iron rule of finance has drained the budgets from every large scale project, and the ultra-rich are now no longer artistically inclined, they are either concerned with the magnitude of their fortune in numbers rather than edifices.
d--b 5y ago
This is plain wrong. Hamburg’s philarmony cost 900 million euros to build. That’s an awful lot of money. Architects decide to spend on structure and texture instead of decor. And with today’s machines, we actually could make all these intricate details without human intervention.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  The Elphi could be seen as of corruption, since the whole project was initially advertised at costing the city about a hundred and something millions, the rest to be raised by private donations, 30 to 40 million initially IIRC. Now the town basically has subsidized a hotel, a few luxury condos, some gastronomy, and got a few classic music venues which it could have gotten otherwise, and cheaper. Besides that it already had those before. Furthermore I don't see the need to fake the look of this [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kaispeicher_A.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kai... by totally removing the core of it, and putting that new thing on top, instead of simply tearing it down, and build something really new from the bottom up. I mean, if it had been this building [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kaiserspeicher1.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kai... it would at least have had a history, including the timeball on top of it, which signalled the ships the exact time they could adjust their chronometers to at exact 12:00hrs. But it wasn't. Just a functional building to store cocoa and coffee beans, built in 1963 over the ruin of the former building. Was that worth to uphold the facade of? 798.000.000€ for the town, and about 100.000.000€ by some fanbois, and who knows who? I don't get it. "Das Wahrzeichen des Wahnsinns. Mors, Mors."
- omosubi 5y ago
  I visited the elbharmonie and man that whole neighborhood is probably the most lifeless boring place in europe
  - agent327 5y ago
    Agreed. On the plus side, it has Miniatur Wunderland - arguably the best reason to visit Hamburg in the first place...
nextstep 5y ago
Exactly. The tallest building in the world (Burj Khalifa) is built in an environment where labor has too much power and human life is too highly valued to build anything complex or ornate. Lol.
cyberpsybin 5y ago
This is so wrong. We don't need slavery to run cotton fields. We can build Notre Dame without killing people.
- coffeemig 5y ago
  I’m just replying to boost your sentiment. Absolutely true.
RNCTX 5y ago
> This misses a big point: highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale. So we'll have it again when it can all be done by machine. That's not really the case. As with the internet and software, architecture was hijacked by building products corporations and tradespeople were duped into playing along, just like the employees of social media corporations one can see on this site who try to justify the evil activities of the companies they work for. Background: when I quit software in the latter half of the 2000s I bought a house built in 1908 in the central US. It needed lots of things, so I basically lived in half of it and worked on the other half for about 10 years. What I learned in the process of learning how to do all of that stuff by trial and error (including building custom windows and doors... wooden ones to replace the 'new' ones from previous owners that I threw away) is that prior to the 1980s there were lots of small machines built for the market of a small custom shop that might build things for local clientele. They have all been replaced by worse (in every respect) multi-function machines that only make boring things badly. As a baseline, the most notorious of big box stores [1] says that new plastic windows cost 800 - 1000 dollars. That's highway robbery. There's about 30 board feet of rough sawn lumber in a 4' x 3' wooden double hung window. The material cost (assuming cypress in the southeast or douglas fir in the north/west) is gonna be around 5 dollars per board foot. Glass in smallish bulk quantities lets say 3 dollars per square foot, and hardware about 50 dollars per window, I'll give 10-20 dollars for paint and what not. So we're looking at a material cost of around $250.00 per window if someone wanted wooden windows in a common size. The problem is not that it's impossible to compete with the plastic window on quality at a slight price markup, the problem is that there's no one to do it because everyone has been turned into a middle man, serving rent seekers. Outside of major cities with enough of a concentration of historic buildings to keep real craftsmen busy, there aren't going to be any such real craftsmen. They're all going to be glorified salesmen with a few hand tools from the local building supply retailer. It didn't have to be this way. As an example, up until the late 1970s a company named Powermatic built a small single end tender (model # 2A) that is shown here [2] and here [3]. These were marketed to small shops, not giant industrial factories. These machines have appreciated in value on the used market in the past 10 years, because people are still using them! Ten years ago you could buy a serviceable 2A tenoner for $500-1000 dollars, now they're going for $2500 to 3k. I met people running window and door shops doing historic preservation work around Boston that were stockpiling every one they find for sale for parts. Powermatic the company on the other hand was sold and the brand "cashed in" on cheap import imitations of other tool companies' products long ago. Another example would be the machine called a "sash trimmer" shown here [4] and here [5]. I use the term "machine" very loosely because it's not even motorized, you operate it with your foot like an old sewing machine. This machine could be replicated in a machine shop today using an old milling machine or mortiser as a base for probably $3000 dollars or so in custom parts. It's how you make fancy wooden windows like these [6]. It's virtually impossible to make such a wooden window without that machine, because modern machines can't replicate the required angled mortises. I looked for years and never found one for sale in the southeastern US. Despite the fact that thousands of historic homes in the southeastern US have such windows, that are all over 80 years old now and gradually rotting away. You can extend this to any other item in the typical single family home in the US. For instance there's no reason for kitchen cabinets to have plywood in them. Plywood is another notorious "profit margin" item by the building products corporations that is basically scrap and glue with a picture of real wood on top of it. Why isn't there a set of jigs like the ones used 80+ years ago for sale by which a local cabinet maker can produce "stick built" cabinets without plywood shells? Why does the local cabinet maker pay obscene prices for fake lumber pressed into sheets, when by the square foot solid yellow pine is cheaper? Because the local cabinet shop sees himself as a building product middle man just like the corporate stores do, there is no other reason. As if the entirety of American architecture being beholden to corporate producers of junk products isn't bad enough, general contractors are charging an additional 20-30% markup (at least) on top of the supplier's markup, to lead people to think that the junk they've bought is reasonably that expensive. As the wise machine said in the movie from the cursed decade: "the only way to win, is to not play." Read a few books, go to architectural salvage stores to look at things in person and see how they were built, go to your local woodworker's meetup group, go watch youtube videos about how to glaze windows and hang doors. You don't have to buy a shop full of antique machines and start with rough lumber if you don't want to, but if you know how to spec and order things from local craftsmen on your own without the aforementioned rent seeking middlemen charging you 20-30% to do it on your behalf, you can have a house just as nice as those from the late 19th and early 20th century, albeit with some quality of lumber compromises due to the lack of old growth supply. 1. https://www.homedepot.com/c/cost_install_replacement_windows https://www.homedepot.com/c/cost_install_replacement_windows 2. https://youtu.be/TT13WmJZyU0 https://youtu.be/TT13WmJZyU0 3. https://www.thewoodfurniturefactory.com/tour.htm https://www.thewoodfurniturefactory.com/tour.htm 4. https://www.facebook.com/seattlehistoricwindow/videos/1029249617244221/ https://www.facebook.com/seattlehistoricwindow/videos/102924... 5. http://vintagemachinery.org/photoindex/detail.aspx?id=9824 http://vintagemachinery.org/photoindex/detail.aspx?id=9824 6. https://www.google.com/search?q=diamond+window+sash https://www.google.com/search?q=diamond+window+sash
Gatsky 5y ago
I just want to say that Sagrada Familia, incomplete as it is, is a work of astounding and incomprehensible genius and I am forever grateful that I was able to see it with my own eyes.
egypturnash 5y ago
I live in New Orleans, which has some very strict rules about what you can and cannot do when building or renovating in the French Quarter. As a consequence of this, there are multiple businesses that exist mostly to create all the legally-mandated ornamentation. Their work shows up outside the historic district, too. You don't wanna carve stone, sure, but there's people out there who love sculpting and carving and all the other physical creative work involved in making a pretty building.

by Grakel 5y ago

chuckee 5y ago

> highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale Is that why those award-winning buildings look like that? Because the architects tried to make them cheaper? Is 'detail' requiring highly skilled craftsmanship the only way to make pleasant buildings? Because a few of the buildings (Venice and the Italian village) the article gives as examples of beauty have only the barest, simplest of details.

grp000 5y ago
Those Italian buildings were created as highly practical structures at the time, in waterway locations that constrained the geometry of how the city grew, so they have an interesting and historical appearance. Also a lot of the Italian architecture is not a building, but an entire city, not sure those really count.
Grakel 5y ago
Its very hard to get contractors to work with materials today. So you can have some factory create panels of steel and glass, and the contractor can have (relatively) unskilled cheap labor snap them into place. That's a lot of construction today. Some really beautiful structures do use minimalism, but so many big architects today strive for speed, size, and function. I think most modern beautiful, minimalist structures are usually smaller, built for fewer people, etc. Maybe?
mannykannot 5y ago
I think the statement you quote is incorrect. Our society is quite capable of paying for artisans to restore the architectural splendors of earlier times, and does so. At the same time, expenditure on architecture for its own sake seems to have increased in the last decade or so, at least in centers of wealth (which, in modern times, is where non-utilitarian architecture has its first home, even if it likes to have a weekend place in the country.) What has not happened is that, for the most part, the paymasters for the latter development have demonstrated little interest in adopting styles that demand highly skilled craftsmanship of the sort formerly valued (and still valued, apparently, so long as it dates to a previous era.) Today's vanity architecture reflects the values of those who commission it, rather than being a result of market prices for artisan work.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  The Victorians had a concept of civic pride and public service which is completely absent today. I owe a lot to this dude, because he made sure that when worker was housing was being built it would have a library on the periphery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Passmore_Edwards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Passmore_Edwards There was an explicit goal of providing education and opportunities to working people. (Well - working men. But this was over a century ago now.) Modern philanthropy has no equivalent. There is no interest in creating high quality useful public spaces for ordinary people. So there's no architectural tradition to support that goal.

brenschluss 5y ago

Very glad this is mentioned. Form follows function, sure, but it follows capital and construction methods and labor practices. The author would best wonder why this is global, and not look towards solely design trends but construction methods and real estate logics for the answer.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

Stone and wood is carved by machines quite easily. Sears used to churn out homes with loads of detail and mail them out wholesale to middle class folks. Those homes are now worth fortunes. We have terrible architecture for ideological reasons. Flat roofs are not signifincantly cheaper to build than pitched roofs, and far less adept at roofiness, but we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy. As with most modern art, architecture has a fundamentially adversarial relationship with the vast majority of people.

jahewson 5y ago
> we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy. Not really. Frank Lloyd Wright was building with flat roofs a decade before the Bauhaus school even opened. But it was certainly an artistic endeavour and he’s a great example of somebody who had an adversarial relationship with pretty much everybody.
- omosubi 5y ago
  Besides the Larkin building (a factory), what did he build with predominantly flat roofs? I don't think there's a home he built prior to fallingwater that was anything close to what Bauhaus did.
- recursivedoubts 5y ago
  Wright used flat roofs and I'm sure other folks did before him, but bauhaus was the intellectually dominant influence on schools of architecture in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
nradov 5y ago
Hardly any new houses are built with flat roofs. That trend is mostly dead. Commercial buildings still have flat roofs because they need a place to mount stuff like HVAC and antennas.
- zwkrt 5y ago

asdff 5y ago

Not every art deco beauty is forged in blood. Not like people need to die for you to stop installing drop cielings and beige cubicles. We've just decided as a society recently that we value spending the bare minimum. These old architectural works, even just from the 1900s-1940s, were from a different time, when property owners wanted to spend extra on making something look striking and remarkable. You don't see that line of thinking in business anymore. Imagine a CEO spending on some ornate HQ building with stonemasons and gold leaf, shareholders would fire them. You only see that level of grandeur today when the CEO founded and still is in control of the company and the shareholders can only sit and pout. Luxury buildings today come with the cheapest furnishings the developer could find on the wholesale marketplace.

enraged_camel 5y ago
Yep. For example, here's Tribune Tower in Chicago, built in mid 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Tower Look at this majestic crown: https://i.imgur.com/6W2FUz0.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/6W2FUz0.jpeg

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Um, 3d printing? Robotics? Computer aided design? I suppose it is the lack of imagination of top-end architecture that these techniques, some of the hallmark technologies of our age, that there isn't a healthy market in their use in architecture. The employment of these things all seems focused in mass production and cost reduction (which isn't a bad thing), and seems to ignore the possibilities that programmable manufacturing and production could have on architecture (which could push the state of the art). It might also be that being an architect kinda sucks these days. Not enough jobs, and those jobs are paying worse, to cover the costs of schooling. So there aren't the true geniuses anymore? Maybe it's just that the iron rule of finance has drained the budgets from every large scale project, and the ultra-rich are now no longer artistically inclined, they are either concerned with the magnitude of their fortune in numbers rather than edifices.

d--b 5y ago

This is plain wrong. Hamburg’s philarmony cost 900 million euros to build. That’s an awful lot of money. Architects decide to spend on structure and texture instead of decor. And with today’s machines, we actually could make all these intricate details without human intervention.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
The Elphi could be seen as of corruption, since the whole project was initially advertised at costing the city about a hundred and something millions, the rest to be raised by private donations, 30 to 40 million initially IIRC. Now the town basically has subsidized a hotel, a few luxury condos, some gastronomy, and got a few classic music venues which it could have gotten otherwise, and cheaper. Besides that it already had those before. Furthermore I don't see the need to fake the look of this [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kaispeicher_A.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kai... by totally removing the core of it, and putting that new thing on top, instead of simply tearing it down, and build something really new from the bottom up. I mean, if it had been this building [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kaiserspeicher1.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kai... it would at least have had a history, including the timeball on top of it, which signalled the ships the exact time they could adjust their chronometers to at exact 12:00hrs. But it wasn't. Just a functional building to store cocoa and coffee beans, built in 1963 over the ruin of the former building. Was that worth to uphold the facade of? 798.000.000€ for the town, and about 100.000.000€ by some fanbois, and who knows who? I don't get it. "Das Wahrzeichen des Wahnsinns. Mors, Mors."
omosubi 5y ago
I visited the elbharmonie and man that whole neighborhood is probably the most lifeless boring place in europe
- agent327 5y ago
  Agreed. On the plus side, it has Miniatur Wunderland - arguably the best reason to visit Hamburg in the first place...

nextstep 5y ago

Exactly. The tallest building in the world (Burj Khalifa) is built in an environment where labor has too much power and human life is too highly valued to build anything complex or ornate. Lol.

cyberpsybin 5y ago

This is so wrong. We don't need slavery to run cotton fields. We can build Notre Dame without killing people.

coffeemig 5y ago
I’m just replying to boost your sentiment. Absolutely true.

RNCTX 5y ago

> This misses a big point: highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale. So we'll have it again when it can all be done by machine. That's not really the case. As with the internet and software, architecture was hijacked by building products corporations and tradespeople were duped into playing along, just like the employees of social media corporations one can see on this site who try to justify the evil activities of the companies they work for. Background: when I quit software in the latter half of the 2000s I bought a house built in 1908 in the central US. It needed lots of things, so I basically lived in half of it and worked on the other half for about 10 years. What I learned in the process of learning how to do all of that stuff by trial and error (including building custom windows and doors... wooden ones to replace the 'new' ones from previous owners that I threw away) is that prior to the 1980s there were lots of small machines built for the market of a small custom shop that might build things for local clientele. They have all been replaced by worse (in every respect) multi-function machines that only make boring things badly. As a baseline, the most notorious of big box stores [1] says that new plastic windows cost 800 - 1000 dollars. That's highway robbery. There's about 30 board feet of rough sawn lumber in a 4' x 3' wooden double hung window. The material cost (assuming cypress in the southeast or douglas fir in the north/west) is gonna be around 5 dollars per board foot. Glass in smallish bulk quantities lets say 3 dollars per square foot, and hardware about 50 dollars per window, I'll give 10-20 dollars for paint and what not. So we're looking at a material cost of around $250.00 per window if someone wanted wooden windows in a common size. The problem is not that it's impossible to compete with the plastic window on quality at a slight price markup, the problem is that there's no one to do it because everyone has been turned into a middle man, serving rent seekers. Outside of major cities with enough of a concentration of historic buildings to keep real craftsmen busy, there aren't going to be any such real craftsmen. They're all going to be glorified salesmen with a few hand tools from the local building supply retailer. It didn't have to be this way. As an example, up until the late 1970s a company named Powermatic built a small single end tender (model # 2A) that is shown here [2] and here [3]. These were marketed to small shops, not giant industrial factories. These machines have appreciated in value on the used market in the past 10 years, because people are still using them! Ten years ago you could buy a serviceable 2A tenoner for $500-1000 dollars, now they're going for $2500 to 3k. I met people running window and door shops doing historic preservation work around Boston that were stockpiling every one they find for sale for parts. Powermatic the company on the other hand was sold and the brand "cashed in" on cheap import imitations of other tool companies' products long ago. Another example would be the machine called a "sash trimmer" shown here [4] and here [5]. I use the term "machine" very loosely because it's not even motorized, you operate it with your foot like an old sewing machine. This machine could be replicated in a machine shop today using an old milling machine or mortiser as a base for probably $3000 dollars or so in custom parts. It's how you make fancy wooden windows like these [6]. It's virtually impossible to make such a wooden window without that machine, because modern machines can't replicate the required angled mortises. I looked for years and never found one for sale in the southeastern US. Despite the fact that thousands of historic homes in the southeastern US have such windows, that are all over 80 years old now and gradually rotting away. You can extend this to any other item in the typical single family home in the US. For instance there's no reason for kitchen cabinets to have plywood in them. Plywood is another notorious "profit margin" item by the building products corporations that is basically scrap and glue with a picture of real wood on top of it. Why isn't there a set of jigs like the ones used 80+ years ago for sale by which a local cabinet maker can produce "stick built" cabinets without plywood shells? Why does the local cabinet maker pay obscene prices for fake lumber pressed into sheets, when by the square foot solid yellow pine is cheaper? Because the local cabinet shop sees himself as a building product middle man just like the corporate stores do, there is no other reason. As if the entirety of American architecture being beholden to corporate producers of junk products isn't bad enough, general contractors are charging an additional 20-30% markup (at least) on top of the supplier's markup, to lead people to think that the junk they've bought is reasonably that expensive. As the wise machine said in the movie from the cursed decade: "the only way to win, is to not play." Read a few books, go to architectural salvage stores to look at things in person and see how they were built, go to your local woodworker's meetup group, go watch youtube videos about how to glaze windows and hang doors. You don't have to buy a shop full of antique machines and start with rough lumber if you don't want to, but if you know how to spec and order things from local craftsmen on your own without the aforementioned rent seeking middlemen charging you 20-30% to do it on your behalf, you can have a house just as nice as those from the late 19th and early 20th century, albeit with some quality of lumber compromises due to the lack of old growth supply. 1. https://www.homedepot.com/c/cost_install_replacement_windows https://www.homedepot.com/c/cost_install_replacement_windows 2. https://youtu.be/TT13WmJZyU0 https://youtu.be/TT13WmJZyU0 3. https://www.thewoodfurniturefactory.com/tour.htm https://www.thewoodfurniturefactory.com/tour.htm 4. https://www.facebook.com/seattlehistoricwindow/videos/1029249617244221/ https://www.facebook.com/seattlehistoricwindow/videos/102924... 5. http://vintagemachinery.org/photoindex/detail.aspx?id=9824 http://vintagemachinery.org/photoindex/detail.aspx?id=9824 6. https://www.google.com/search?q=diamond+window+sash https://www.google.com/search?q=diamond+window+sash

Gatsky 5y ago

I just want to say that Sagrada Familia, incomplete as it is, is a work of astounding and incomprehensible genius and I am forever grateful that I was able to see it with my own eyes.

egypturnash 5y ago

I live in New Orleans, which has some very strict rules about what you can and cannot do when building or renovating in the French Quarter. As a consequence of this, there are multiple businesses that exist mostly to create all the legally-mandated ornamentation. Their work shows up outside the historic district, too. You don't wanna carve stone, sure, but there's people out there who love sculpting and carving and all the other physical creative work involved in making a pretty building.