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As someone who grew up in a city that did this, it was a terrible idea then and remains so. Town planners who like brutalism and everything modern are insane. J

As someone who grew up in a city that did this, it was a terrible idea then and remains so. Town planners who like brutalism and everything modern are insane. Just look at Birmingham, England - they knocked down beautiful buildings to put up brutalist eyesores to then knock down brutalist eyesores and replace them with a different type of modern architecture that will look awful in 20 years. There's a reason that people want to live in Bath.

api 4y ago
High modernists are like the somewhat narcissistic recluse programmer who thinks everything is crap. They shut themselves in and rewrite everything in their own superior paradigm without bothering to look at any real world use case or ask anyone anything. Then they're surprised that nobody uses what they built.
- Oarch 4y ago
  As a (software) developer and (building) architect I like this analogy a lot.
- a-dub 4y ago
  "dude. i know that's not what it's supposed to do, but actually it's better. it's a feature, not a bug. no, no. it's not shitty, and no i'm not refactoring it and neither are you. it works better and they'll never be able to fire us. it's like jane jacobs and shit. leave it alone. the bits are happy."
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    haha, great comment. This whole thread is full of people who enjoyed Seeing Like a State loving the discussion
  - shoo 4y ago
    this module is a thriving, multi-use community of interacting concerns and responsibilities. yes, it would be more legible to central administrators like us if we evicted all the requirements and implementation details, paved it over, then redeveloped it into a high modernist Corbusian hexagonal microservices architecture. but truly, who would want to live or work inside such a bleak module structure, where instead of simply nipping downstairs to share surplus resources with unrelated business logic in the parent stack frame, you would have to traverse through endless tiers of serialization, transit, deserialization & be subjected to endless authoritarian checkpoints for authorisation by central authorities?
DocTomoe 4y ago
Turns out that people who dislike brutalist living silos are often also the same people who think we have a housing crisis. You can't have everyone live in Bath unless you demolish it and put Pruitt-Igoe 2.0 onto it. And as you've correctly pointed out: what then would be the attraction of any desirable place?
- swayvil 4y ago
  The problem is too many people. The question is, what horrible dystopian method are we gonna use for those who insist on breeding like rats? Forced sterilization? Containment ghettos? Euthanasia squads?... Yes, scary. But so are megablocks.
  - beecafe 4y ago
    You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.
    - swayvil 4y ago
      The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.
      - yywwbbn 4y ago
        Name a single developed country where to high birth rates are an issue? What? You can’t?
        swayvil 4y ago
        Well usa is getting pretty packed. Visit any big city and it's all giant concrete hives and special roads so we can crawl over each other.
bregma 4y ago
They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.
- shoo 4y ago
  give the people who will live and work in the space ability to locally control the design, as espoused by Christopher Alexander. that means getting the end users out in the field and teaching them how to build or customise the system to meet their needs using simpler and cheaper traditional materials. maybe perl, javascript, wordpress. maybe excel. maybe bash & cron. smother those high modernist RSI-inducing SaaS user interfaces with a layer of malleable user-written robotic process automation.
maborowsky 4y ago
I think it’s less about the specific architectural style and more about if the building itself is designed well. There are both good and bad “modern” buildings. For example, I think the Seagram building is beautiful, but I don’t like a lot of the buildings that ripped off its style. Most buildings I see attributed to a “modernist” style are actually just cheap ugly buildings. Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.

api 4y ago

High modernists are like the somewhat narcissistic recluse programmer who thinks everything is crap. They shut themselves in and rewrite everything in their own superior paradigm without bothering to look at any real world use case or ask anyone anything. Then they're surprised that nobody uses what they built.

Oarch 4y ago
As a (software) developer and (building) architect I like this analogy a lot.
a-dub 4y ago
"dude. i know that's not what it's supposed to do, but actually it's better. it's a feature, not a bug. no, no. it's not shitty, and no i'm not refactoring it and neither are you. it works better and they'll never be able to fire us. it's like jane jacobs and shit. leave it alone. the bits are happy."
- snapcaster 4y ago
  haha, great comment. This whole thread is full of people who enjoyed Seeing Like a State loving the discussion
- shoo 4y ago
  this module is a thriving, multi-use community of interacting concerns and responsibilities. yes, it would be more legible to central administrators like us if we evicted all the requirements and implementation details, paved it over, then redeveloped it into a high modernist Corbusian hexagonal microservices architecture. but truly, who would want to live or work inside such a bleak module structure, where instead of simply nipping downstairs to share surplus resources with unrelated business logic in the parent stack frame, you would have to traverse through endless tiers of serialization, transit, deserialization & be subjected to endless authoritarian checkpoints for authorisation by central authorities?

DocTomoe 4y ago

Turns out that people who dislike brutalist living silos are often also the same people who think we have a housing crisis. You can't have everyone live in Bath unless you demolish it and put Pruitt-Igoe 2.0 onto it. And as you've correctly pointed out: what then would be the attraction of any desirable place?

swayvil 4y ago
The problem is too many people. The question is, what horrible dystopian method are we gonna use for those who insist on breeding like rats? Forced sterilization? Containment ghettos? Euthanasia squads?... Yes, scary. But so are megablocks.
- beecafe 4y ago
  You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.
    - yywwbbn 4y ago
      Name a single developed country where to high birth rates are an issue? What? You can’t?
      - swayvil 4y ago
        Well usa is getting pretty packed. Visit any big city and it's all giant concrete hives and special roads so we can crawl over each other.

bregma 4y ago

They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.

shoo 4y ago
give the people who will live and work in the space ability to locally control the design, as espoused by Christopher Alexander. that means getting the end users out in the field and teaching them how to build or customise the system to meet their needs using simpler and cheaper traditional materials. maybe perl, javascript, wordpress. maybe excel. maybe bash & cron. smother those high modernist RSI-inducing SaaS user interfaces with a layer of malleable user-written robotic process automation.

maborowsky 4y ago

I think it’s less about the specific architectural style and more about if the building itself is designed well. There are both good and bad “modern” buildings. For example, I think the Seagram building is beautiful, but I don’t like a lot of the buildings that ripped off its style. Most buildings I see attributed to a “modernist” style are actually just cheap ugly buildings. Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.