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How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? I don't really buy the argument that america builds badly

How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? I don't really buy the argument that america builds badly because of fear of destruction. It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade. I don't think the ugliness is anything philosophical either. We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture.

trgn 4y ago
> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an anti-establishment fervor after WW1. Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1 Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    "Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from actually-old designs.
  - spiritplumber 4y ago
    My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been through more wars than this". She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!
    - mikestew 4y ago
      The "ugly $NATIONALITY" trope goes both ways, and isn't just for Americans visiting other countries. I don't know why tourists think it's a competition.
      - treis 4y ago
        It's an accurate critique though. The Alamo is up at the top in the competition for World's most disappointing tourist destination.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      > My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. ... heh what was she expecting? It's an old mission built on the frontier eventually used by the military for storage and barracks. It effectively was a warehouse. The building isn't the reason why it's historic, what happened there is what's important.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    American old is as old as the people who have lived here- there are still signs of the native americans who lived here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't killed almost all the natives, some of those locations may still have people living in them.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    “The difference between a Brit and an American is that the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.”
  - jonasdegendt 4y ago
    Yes but how many people in Europe actually live in houses older than two centuries (about when American immigration really popped off, so let’s arbitrarily pick then)? It’s a significant minority. I live in a mid sized European city with a city center containing buildings that go back to the 12th century, but the house I grew up in was built in 1890. It’s one of the older houses on the street too, and pretty uninspiring to be honest. The place I live in now, very near downtown, is like 20 years old. Sure, most American homes are probably less than 50 years old, but on the scale of a couple hundred of years, does that make Europe that much more sophisticated and “cultured”, generally speaking?
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      We do, in a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside. A large log-house construction, the building was first erected somewhere in the late 1600's/early 1700's on the other side of the hill. It was moved to its current location during the land reform of 1823-1827 when farmers moved out to the land they worked, before that they each worked several small strips of land spread around the hamlet they inhabited.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort. An unenlightened idiot only operates on the level of seeing which things are beautiful and which things are ugly. It requires an intelligent, educated person to get involved in sophisticated games of signaling and countersignaling, like pretending to like ugly things in order to seem more sophisticated than unenlightened idiots.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Sure, there are places like this. Desirable old neighborhoods with interesting houses and walkable infrastructure. But those are mostly from about 100 years ago or more. What's been happening more recently?
nemo44x 4y ago
New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that look like they could survive a bombing, but they're actually fragile and cheap buildings. > building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to. > We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?
- bombcar 4y ago
  $10m might be getting into actually architected houses, but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk. It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com https://mcmansionhell.com It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago. I mean anyone can order something from https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have some kind of a style. But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.
  - p_j_w 4y ago
    >https://mcmansionhell.com https://mcmansionhell.com Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at this.
ericmay 4y ago
> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? Europe is too, it's just that a lot of the older things survived. You can see brutalist and similar architecture that sprang up in the Soviet bloc. I don't think Europeans are that much more "sophisticated" than Americans or anyone else. It's more of an inheritance by happenstance. Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did. The factors influencing aren't quite the same. Amsterdam is a popular case [1] I generally agree with your post, though. The caveat is that it's less about capitalism and more about lack of ability to make choices in the market (lack of capitalism and markets). You can't anywhere in America choose a new home that's built in a walkable neighborhood. It's simply not for sale (new). You can only buy existing homes in neighborhoods that survived demolition after the 1920s, and of course those are the most expensive homes by median in the country because of a lack of additional supply. [1]https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amsterdam-historic-images-depicting-the-transition-from-cars-to-bikes/ https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amster...
- rahen 4y ago
  > Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did. Western Europe had the wealth to, it just refused, sometimes with mass protests. A good example is Amsterdam Jokinen Plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan
  - soco 4y ago
    And Western Europe had that guy called Le Corbusier with his ideas about ideal cities where utilitarian and ugliness was the entire strategy - just because. As ridiculous it might sound, just go to Zurich and you'll see his hideous legacy everywhere: no new building is anything else than a gray rectangle, even the brand new building of the art museum. It might be garbage but it's our garbage (Swiss motto)
rob74 4y ago
I'm in Europe (in Germany to be more precise), but believe you me, new buildings that I would describe as "beautiful" are few and far between here too. I think most of it is due to what I would call cookie cutter mentality. For most architects, a building is just a job. They don't realize that even the most unassuming building is something that may be used for 100 years and more, that will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse), and deserves to be treated as such.
- goto11 4y ago
  I think architects are certainly aware of the importance of architecture, and most would love to make beautiful quality architecture. But in the end architects are hired by someone who decide the budget, and cookie-cutter is just cheaper.
  - mc32 4y ago
    It seems the options are mostly at the extremes. Cookie cutter and Statement architecture, but maybe not much in the middle.
- gffrd 4y ago
  > even the most unassuming building […] will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse) This bears repeating. The amount of people who have to contend with a building will always far outnumber the number of people who inhabit or profit from the building. How should we build, knowing that?
  - recursivedoubts 4y ago
    this makes architecture particularly important, in a way that other forms of art is not painters are free to create ugly works of art all they like, to a first order of appoximation we are in a position to ignore them not so with the built environment a long conversation...
- 4y ago
actionablefiber 4y ago
I've got to think a utilitarian culture would say something like "huh, maybe we should build homes that are easily served by transit." But American culture is much more strongly opposed to this than most those in most other countries.
- kodyo 4y ago
  One thing you notice if you've been in an airplane is that there's a lot of room to spread out if people want to.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    As they should, but a thing that needs planning maps and isn't visible from an airplane is that those who don't want to spread out can't not spread out. So the freedom is one-way. Example: almost all of SF bans building apartments
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    And then those people will want things like “electricity” and “a network of wide paved roads” and “Internet” and “drinking water” and “sewage” and “timely package delivery to their front door” and “big box stores with parking lots the size of two city blocks” - and those things at that density have absolutely terrible unit economics and environmental externalities. I frequently see people complain about how traffic is so bad, gas prices are so high, their local drivers are insane, and how dare they have to pay tolls and parking fees. Wow, I wish there were some form of spatial displacement that didn’t involve any of that!
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Heh everything you mention there is available in thousands upon thousands of small towns across the US - basically anywhere there's a Walmart that isn't a city.
      - actionablefiber 4y ago
carapace 4y ago
> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? America is young, Europe is old.
- nine_k 4y ago
  USA is nearly 250 years old. Most European states are younger, even though European peoples and cultures are indeed old. Italy is young, Rome is old.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    My European house is older.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Indeed. There are many houses in Europe that survived 3-4 different states claiming the land on which they stand.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        Well, I live in England, so unless we count devolution (of some powers in other UK constituents) or changes of royal household, just the one in my case ;)
        nine_k 4y ago
        England is pretty stable. Some places on the continent, not so much, esprcially to the east and south of modern Germany.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      Side question - always been curious. Surely these houses were not designed for plumbing, electrical, efficient insulation, etc. Do they just bodge these things onto the outside of walls, or how does that work?
oneoff786 4y ago
> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. > Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost It’s really just the second. No need for anything else
marcosdumay 4y ago
Was the GP talking about the US? Because all of it is applicable to all over the world.
ChainOfFools 4y ago
> Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of person exists, "parvenu."
- nadavr 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "precisely this sort of person", but a "parvenu" is better thought of as the inverse of a "pariah" -- someone from an outgroup who has achieved special acceptance, status, and celebration.
idiotsecant 4y ago
>Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade. I think claiming that building things to a budget is some kind of unsophisticated Nouveau riche mentality is overlooking the experience of the vast majority of people. The US median household income (usually two people) is $78,075. The majority of people don't have the resources to care about satisfying your aesthetic requirements. Plywood and vinyl and 2x4s are inexpensive and good enough, a combination that is generally exactly the optimal solution when you're considering personal survival. Sophistication is a luxury that doesn't come for free.
- rglullis 4y ago
  The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials. It's the developer that is trying to cut as much as possible, because this means he gets increased profit margins.
  - baremetal 4y ago
    >The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials. In this environment? Citation needed. Building materials of all sorts are difficult to source, often with long lead times, and are multiples of what they were a few years ago. Labor has gone up as well. Builders are lucky to get 20% margins.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      > In this environment? It doesn't matter the environment, when we are talking about margins. Increased costs to the builder are passed along to the end customer. > Labor has gone up as well. Which makes any possible savings in materials contribute even more interesting as a way to increase the margin.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    This is plainly and patently false. Materials are (more or less) fully half of the cost of building. If you use nonstandard materials that goes up because you need specialized labor in addition.
atmosx 4y ago
Europe has unmatched heritage, but I would argue the modern buildings in Italy suffer from the same problems described in the article. There is an Italo-French author called Phillipe Daverio, art critique but in reality polymath, who has discussed these problems in Italy at length.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, Yeah, I think this is more the real reason. Nothing is intended to last. Shopping centers come and go - restaurants get built and then torn down and replaced 10 years later with some other restaurant building (actual example in my neighborhood - why didn't they just reuse the original restaurant building?), the old Montgomery Wards was torn down to build a Home Depot and a Chuck E Cheese. None of this has any permanency.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Commercial buildings in the US are incredibly cheap boxes, and knocking an old one down and rebuilding to spec is how the land-owners get new leases. The companies that DON'T knock down are always a bit cheap.
Oxidation 4y ago
Europe has been building modernist and post-modernist monstrosities gleefully for 80 years. Everything is either an aggressively ugly concrete bunker[1], a generic cubish cement or brick and glass mishmash[2] or a glass and steel monolith, maybe with extra facets[3]. You just have to look at what the old Imperial Institute[4] was replaced with[5] and the charmless glass box they plugged onto it later[6]. Nearly every building that has been modified this century has gotten unashamedly uglier. Even cathedrals grow tumors. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall [2]: basically any mid rise residential which can be like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-rise_flats,_Turves_Green_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1139855.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-rise_flats,_Turv... to more recent variations on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartments_-_geograph.org.uk_-_977046.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartme... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_front_Imperial_Institute_London.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_front_Imp... [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building,_Queen%27s_Lawn.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building,_... [6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_London_down_Exhibition_Road.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_Lon...

trgn 4y ago

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an anti-establishment fervor after WW1. Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

sangnoir 4y ago
> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1 Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  "Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from actually-old designs.
- spiritplumber 4y ago
  My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been through more wars than this". She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!
  - mikestew 4y ago
    The "ugly $NATIONALITY" trope goes both ways, and isn't just for Americans visiting other countries. I don't know why tourists think it's a competition.
    - treis 4y ago
      It's an accurate critique though. The Alamo is up at the top in the competition for World's most disappointing tourist destination.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    > My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. ... heh what was she expecting? It's an old mission built on the frontier eventually used by the military for storage and barracks. It effectively was a warehouse. The building isn't the reason why it's historic, what happened there is what's important.
- dekhn 4y ago
  American old is as old as the people who have lived here- there are still signs of the native americans who lived here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't killed almost all the natives, some of those locations may still have people living in them.
- hinkley 4y ago
  “The difference between a Brit and an American is that the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.”
- jonasdegendt 4y ago
  Yes but how many people in Europe actually live in houses older than two centuries (about when American immigration really popped off, so let’s arbitrarily pick then)? It’s a significant minority. I live in a mid sized European city with a city center containing buildings that go back to the 12th century, but the house I grew up in was built in 1890. It’s one of the older houses on the street too, and pretty uninspiring to be honest. The place I live in now, very near downtown, is like 20 years old. Sure, most American homes are probably less than 50 years old, but on the scale of a couple hundred of years, does that make Europe that much more sophisticated and “cultured”, generally speaking?
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    We do, in a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside. A large log-house construction, the building was first erected somewhere in the late 1600's/early 1700's on the other side of the hill. It was moved to its current location during the land reform of 1823-1827 when farmers moved out to the land they worked, before that they each worked several small strips of land spread around the hamlet they inhabited.
philwelch 4y ago
> Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort. An unenlightened idiot only operates on the level of seeing which things are beautiful and which things are ugly. It requires an intelligent, educated person to get involved in sophisticated games of signaling and countersignaling, like pretending to like ugly things in order to seem more sophisticated than unenlightened idiots.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Sure, there are places like this. Desirable old neighborhoods with interesting houses and walkable infrastructure. But those are mostly from about 100 years ago or more. What's been happening more recently?

nemo44x 4y ago

New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that look like they could survive a bombing, but they're actually fragile and cheap buildings. > building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to. > We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?

bombcar 4y ago
$10m might be getting into actually architected houses, but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk. It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com https://mcmansionhell.com It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago. I mean anyone can order something from https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have some kind of a style. But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.
- p_j_w 4y ago
  >https://mcmansionhell.com https://mcmansionhell.com Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at this.

ericmay 4y ago

> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? Europe is too, it's just that a lot of the older things survived. You can see brutalist and similar architecture that sprang up in the Soviet bloc. I don't think Europeans are that much more "sophisticated" than Americans or anyone else. It's more of an inheritance by happenstance. Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did. The factors influencing aren't quite the same. Amsterdam is a popular case [1] I generally agree with your post, though. The caveat is that it's less about capitalism and more about lack of ability to make choices in the market (lack of capitalism and markets). You can't anywhere in America choose a new home that's built in a walkable neighborhood. It's simply not for sale (new). You can only buy existing homes in neighborhoods that survived demolition after the 1920s, and of course those are the most expensive homes by median in the country because of a lack of additional supply. [1]https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amsterdam-historic-images-depicting-the-transition-from-cars-to-bikes/ https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amster...

rahen 4y ago
> Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did. Western Europe had the wealth to, it just refused, sometimes with mass protests. A good example is Amsterdam Jokinen Plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan
- soco 4y ago
  And Western Europe had that guy called Le Corbusier with his ideas about ideal cities where utilitarian and ugliness was the entire strategy - just because. As ridiculous it might sound, just go to Zurich and you'll see his hideous legacy everywhere: no new building is anything else than a gray rectangle, even the brand new building of the art museum. It might be garbage but it's our garbage (Swiss motto)

rob74 4y ago

I'm in Europe (in Germany to be more precise), but believe you me, new buildings that I would describe as "beautiful" are few and far between here too. I think most of it is due to what I would call cookie cutter mentality. For most architects, a building is just a job. They don't realize that even the most unassuming building is something that may be used for 100 years and more, that will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse), and deserves to be treated as such.

goto11 4y ago
I think architects are certainly aware of the importance of architecture, and most would love to make beautiful quality architecture. But in the end architects are hired by someone who decide the budget, and cookie-cutter is just cheaper.
- mc32 4y ago
  It seems the options are mostly at the extremes. Cookie cutter and Statement architecture, but maybe not much in the middle.
gffrd 4y ago
> even the most unassuming building […] will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse) This bears repeating. The amount of people who have to contend with a building will always far outnumber the number of people who inhabit or profit from the building. How should we build, knowing that?
- recursivedoubts 4y ago
  this makes architecture particularly important, in a way that other forms of art is not painters are free to create ugly works of art all they like, to a first order of appoximation we are in a position to ignore them not so with the built environment a long conversation...
4y ago

actionablefiber 4y ago

I've got to think a utilitarian culture would say something like "huh, maybe we should build homes that are easily served by transit." But American culture is much more strongly opposed to this than most those in most other countries.

kodyo 4y ago
One thing you notice if you've been in an airplane is that there's a lot of room to spread out if people want to.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  As they should, but a thing that needs planning maps and isn't visible from an airplane is that those who don't want to spread out can't not spread out. So the freedom is one-way. Example: almost all of SF bans building apartments
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  And then those people will want things like “electricity” and “a network of wide paved roads” and “Internet” and “drinking water” and “sewage” and “timely package delivery to their front door” and “big box stores with parking lots the size of two city blocks” - and those things at that density have absolutely terrible unit economics and environmental externalities. I frequently see people complain about how traffic is so bad, gas prices are so high, their local drivers are insane, and how dare they have to pay tolls and parking fees. Wow, I wish there were some form of spatial displacement that didn’t involve any of that!
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Heh everything you mention there is available in thousands upon thousands of small towns across the US - basically anywhere there's a Walmart that isn't a city.
    - actionablefiber 4y ago

carapace 4y ago

> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? America is young, Europe is old.

nine_k 4y ago
USA is nearly 250 years old. Most European states are younger, even though European peoples and cultures are indeed old. Italy is young, Rome is old.
- OJFord 4y ago
  My European house is older.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Indeed. There are many houses in Europe that survived 3-4 different states claiming the land on which they stand.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Well, I live in England, so unless we count devolution (of some powers in other UK constituents) or changes of royal household, just the one in my case ;)
      - nine_k 4y ago
        England is pretty stable. Some places on the continent, not so much, esprcially to the east and south of modern Germany.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    Side question - always been curious. Surely these houses were not designed for plumbing, electrical, efficient insulation, etc. Do they just bodge these things onto the outside of walls, or how does that work?

oneoff786 4y ago

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. > Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost It’s really just the second. No need for anything else

marcosdumay 4y ago

Was the GP talking about the US? Because all of it is applicable to all over the world.

ChainOfFools 4y ago

> Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of person exists, "parvenu."

nadavr 4y ago
Not sure what you mean by "precisely this sort of person", but a "parvenu" is better thought of as the inverse of a "pariah" -- someone from an outgroup who has achieved special acceptance, status, and celebration.

idiotsecant 4y ago

>Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade. I think claiming that building things to a budget is some kind of unsophisticated Nouveau riche mentality is overlooking the experience of the vast majority of people. The US median household income (usually two people) is $78,075. The majority of people don't have the resources to care about satisfying your aesthetic requirements. Plywood and vinyl and 2x4s are inexpensive and good enough, a combination that is generally exactly the optimal solution when you're considering personal survival. Sophistication is a luxury that doesn't come for free.

rglullis 4y ago
The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials. It's the developer that is trying to cut as much as possible, because this means he gets increased profit margins.
- baremetal 4y ago
  >The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials. In this environment? Citation needed. Building materials of all sorts are difficult to source, often with long lead times, and are multiples of what they were a few years ago. Labor has gone up as well. Builders are lucky to get 20% margins.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > In this environment? It doesn't matter the environment, when we are talking about margins. Increased costs to the builder are passed along to the end customer. > Labor has gone up as well. Which makes any possible savings in materials contribute even more interesting as a way to increase the margin.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  This is plainly and patently false. Materials are (more or less) fully half of the cost of building. If you use nonstandard materials that goes up because you need specialized labor in addition.

atmosx 4y ago

Europe has unmatched heritage, but I would argue the modern buildings in Italy suffer from the same problems described in the article. There is an Italo-French author called Phillipe Daverio, art critique but in reality polymath, who has discussed these problems in Italy at length.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, Yeah, I think this is more the real reason. Nothing is intended to last. Shopping centers come and go - restaurants get built and then torn down and replaced 10 years later with some other restaurant building (actual example in my neighborhood - why didn't they just reuse the original restaurant building?), the old Montgomery Wards was torn down to build a Home Depot and a Chuck E Cheese. None of this has any permanency.

bombcar 4y ago
Commercial buildings in the US are incredibly cheap boxes, and knocking an old one down and rebuilding to spec is how the land-owners get new leases. The companies that DON'T knock down are always a bit cheap.

Oxidation 4y ago

Europe has been building modernist and post-modernist monstrosities gleefully for 80 years. Everything is either an aggressively ugly concrete bunker[1], a generic cubish cement or brick and glass mishmash[2] or a glass and steel monolith, maybe with extra facets[3]. You just have to look at what the old Imperial Institute[4] was replaced with[5] and the charmless glass box they plugged onto it later[6]. Nearly every building that has been modified this century has gotten unashamedly uglier. Even cathedrals grow tumors. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall [2]: basically any mid rise residential which can be like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-rise_flats,_Turves_Green_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1139855.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-rise_flats,_Turv... to more recent variations on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartments_-_geograph.org.uk_-_977046.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartme... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_front_Imperial_Institute_London.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_front_Imp... [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building,_Queen%27s_Lawn.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building,_... [6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_London_down_Exhibition_Road.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_Lon...