21 ms·

The window trick of Las Vegas hotels

• hammock 4y ago
  In a condo building, each unit owns their own windows and is responsible for replacement, etc. So grouping windows across multiple floors works for hotels and commercial buildings, but it does not work for residential condos
• Nifty3929 4y ago
  >In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there's too much order, it's boring and oppressive. If there's too much variety, it's chaotic and unpleasant. In his view, classical architecture all over the world aims at creating a "delicate balance between order and variety." It's how 'fractal' things are. There is at least one 3b1b video about this. I think humans prefer a fractal number of about 1.5 or so, which is about what nature is.
  • rattray 4y ago
    Very interesting. Know of any buildings which embody this well?
  • flakeoil 4y ago
    " I think humans prefer a fractal number of about 1.5 or so, which is about what nature is." Is it the Golden ratio you refer to maybe (~1.6)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
    • supernewton 4y ago
      Absolutely not. Unless you have a strong mathematical reason to expect it to show up, instances of the golden ratio is largely numerology bullshit.
      • aardvarkr 4y ago
        ^citation required
        • crazygringo 4y ago
          Here are some articles on why the golden ratio having supposed aesthetic properties is a myth: https://eusci.org.uk/2020/07/29/myth-busting-the-golden-ratio/ https://eusci.org.uk/2020/07/29/myth-busting-the-golden-rati... https://plus.maths.org/content/myths-maths-golden-ratio https://plus.maths.org/content/myths-maths-golden-ratio https://www.fastcompany.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-designs-biggest-myth https://www.fastcompany.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-designs... So it's more like, citation required for any scientific evidence it does have unique aesthetic properties. At the end of the day, it's just a myth that keeps getting repeated, not much different from anything else in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions (Which also mentions the golden ratio in one of its bullet points.)
          • finnh 4y ago
            This reminds me of film "analysis" that shows how the director keeps creating wonderful triangles between three points of tension, and our eye naturally finds such triangles pleasing. Neglecting that any three points make a triangle, so this is basically just saying "a frame with three things in it".
            • bee_rider 4y ago
              On one level there’s some intellectual wanking about triangles, then as you point out any shot with thee things will have a triangle. I wonder, though, ignoring any attempts to over-analyze, if three is a nice number of things to have in a shot. The viewer can only focus on so many things after all. Three is also a sort of especially unspecial number. Zero things is sort of special in the sense that there’s no concentration of focus (shot of a landscape that just establishes the environment). If the focus is on one thing, then that’s really drawing a ton of attention to that thing (camera zooms in on the murder weapon and lingers). Two things can often be focused on the contrast between them (the villain towers over the hero). Three is the lowest number that doesn’t have a ton of baggage.
    • sclarisse 4y ago
      No.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Humans tend to prever Fractal Dimension 1.3-1.5 (in 2D imagery) https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/2116/1/Pihel_J_110524.pdf https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/2116/1/Pihel_J_110524.pdf
      • 4gotunameagain 4y ago
        Swedish humans tend to do so. Might not extrapolate to the whole world
        • roywiggins 4y ago
          Specifically, college students from Malmö University...
      • skrebbel 4y ago
        I’m not sure that someone’s Bachelor thesis should be given this much weight.
        • robbintt 4y ago
          Certainly as much as a blog post. I think a better argument would be that it's not peer reviewed, but still weak.
• arboles 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • metisto 4y ago
    Am I missing a joke? Or is this a reference to something? Could you please explain it in more detail.
    • thedougd 4y ago
      In poor taste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
• TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Another Las Vegas Window Trick is to prevent any natural light on the casino floors. The gambler has no sense of time of day without looking at a clock, but that’s not the same as feeling “oh, it’s almost dawn” by looking at the daylight.
  • donatj 4y ago
    I have always heard this, but I suspect it’s less of an intentional trick and more just a happy accident of how large Vegas gambling floors are. Even if the buildings were wrapped in floor to ceiling windows natural light would only penetrate the first couple rows of slots. The Mirage in particular actually has a pretty large skylight towards the front of the gambling floor.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      There's a lot of psychological stuff going on with the casino floors but I'm not sure how you'd design a massive ground floor room in a way that there would be a lot of natural light. And it would actually be user-hostile (and, yes, doubtless business hostile) to spread the casino across a lot of floors.
      • loopdoend 4y ago
        Skylights
        • ghaff 4y ago
          I thought about that after I wrote the comment although a lot of the time there's convention center and other expansive spaces above the casino.
        • bee_rider 4y ago
          Works for the floor that is under the roof.
      • toast0 4y ago
        I've seen (but not entered) casinos in office towers. I imagine you have the sea of slot machines on the first floor or two, and then table games and high roller rooms on the upper floors. For a las vegas style ginormous casino and hotel, many of them have the casino footprint much larger than the hotel footprint. You could have big diffused skylights over much of the gaming area, if you wanted. Of course, you'd augement that with lots of artificial lighting, so it would save energy, but not change the experience of roughly constant lighting 24/7
• hosh 4y ago
  Christopher Alexander has a whole lifetime work on this subject. While “order” and “variety” are something that humans crave, that is something that can naturally come about because of “generative codes”. That the design process unfolds, with participation by inhabitants. Centers are identified, and design take all of that account. You end up with something that has both, universal invariants, while also uniquely in relation to everything around it and the people living within it.
  • hosh 4y ago
    For those interested, this site has links to many of Christopher Alexander’s ideas. The people who put this together are aiming to apply his ideas to software design: https://beautiful.software/ https://beautiful.software/
• sbarre 4y ago
  Huh I've walked in front of the Bellagio hotel many many times and I never even thought about this, but it's totally true. Those windows are massive but the proportions are deceptive. Neat.
  • themodelplumber 4y ago
    It reminds me of building a simple home or structure in Minecraft, and then trying out a "build a house" tutorial where the proportions are completely different. But for good reason, and the result is pretty legit.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ThinkBeat 4y ago
  Presumably, he means a single window we see is made up of 4-6 panes and those panes are bigger than a single story I am having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined from the photos of the Bellagio. The close up does not help. The first mentioned buildings seem brutalist esp. the second one. It is a form of utilitarian architecture that has great appeal to me. I think in part because it is rare now. I find them far more pleasing to the eye than the giant glass clad high rises that was the fashion for a long time. I have read that it is now going out of fashion, but I have not yet seen any examples locally. Wanting to give my dogs new and exciting places to sniff and pee I try to walk around in different neighborhoods in the area. As have been doing this for many years now and the unexplored neighborhoods are getting farther and farther out. About two years ago, at random, I found a brutalist single family dwelling. It is a big house for a single family but it is the smallest such building I have ever seen, it is beautiful. (to me) I truly stands out from all the other nearby houses. I have visited that area often to take pictures and just look at it. I would love a chance to see the inside. If I had the money and I most certainly do not, id love to live in a house like that. It would make giving directions a lot easier as well. I wonder if there exists brutalist "tiny homes". That would be something to behold For an explanation of the term brutalist see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut
  • pimlottc 4y ago
    > I am having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined from the photos of the Bellagio. The close up does not help. You can see it better in this high-res photo from Wikimedia Commons [0]. Each of the square windows appears to span four rooms on two floors, while the lower floor rectangular windows appear to span three floors, making it six rooms. 0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bellagio_hotel.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bellagio_hotel.jpg
    • treis 4y ago
      Do the windows span multiple floors?
      • 4y ago
• personjerry 4y ago
  Related to the Hong Kong building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
  • phantomathkg 4y ago
    Disclaimer: I am Hongkonger. The one mentioned in the blog is this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Building
  • fullshark 4y ago
    Very cool setting for Shenmue 2 and Bloodsport
• timeon 4y ago
  Whit Bellagio there is too much order because of symmetry if you compare it with playfulness of Unité d'Habitation.
• dguest 4y ago
  Good on the author for acknowledging (twice) that not everyone shares their sense of aesthetics. Personally I think there's a beautiful chaotic honesty in the monster building. The Vegas hotels look phony, even more so now that I know their trick.
  • atomicUpdate 4y ago
    > Good on the author for acknowledging (twice) that not everyone shares their sense of aesthetics. I disagree. For example: > unless you like them, I'm not questioning anyone's personal taste This type of soft-pedaling is too pervasive in people’s writing nowadays. It diminishes the author’s point when they are too afraid to commit to their own opinions because they might offend someone that disagrees. This constant affirmation of “you might disagree, and that’s OK,” is irritating.
    • typedfalse 4y ago
      The opposite (that it's not OK to disagree) is one of the things that has driven political and social discourse to its current hyperbolic and occasionally dangerous character. It's the source of much of the so-called "culture war". So to be clear: I disagree, you are wrong... and to follow the mindset underlying your complaint, "fuck you".
    • trgn 4y ago
      It's unnecessary in this article agreed. The author has an obvious preference, just own it already. Being tolerant is a virtue, but practice this by action, in life. When writing a polemic, say what you mean! If anything, amp it up a little. Hyperbole and saturation is great when discussing matters of taste. If you're going to critique architecture, you have the best examples. Just channel some Loos who ridiculed those in favor of ornamentation for being childish uncivilized country idiots. Had great effect, we're still living in its detritus. So just do the opposite here!
      • throw3847294 4y ago
        I disagree. Being compassionate and understanding in your writing is a good thing. I'm glad the author expressed that clearly.
• docandrew 4y ago
  By doing this, they make the casinos seem closer, easier to walk to, and more inviting.
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    The first time I went to Vegas I decided a casino I wanted to go to wasn’t that far away from where I was. You could see it, it looked “just over there”. Turns out I walked over a mile in the desert sun. Taxis and that rail after that.
    • allenu 4y ago
      I had the same experience when I went to Vegas for the first time. I wanted to walk from building to building but they all felt so much further away than they appeared. It never occurred to me it was because of this bit of visual trickery.
    • fosk 4y ago
      Tricks me every time. Also the hotel name signage is disproportionately huge, which from a distance make it seems like the hotel is close enough for a walk, but turns out it is not.
    • lucideer 4y ago
      Given how pedestrian unfriendly the Strip is, it surprises me that you even managed this at all. On the other hand, I was also surprised how much better public transit seemed in vegas than in most us cities.
      • aflag 4y ago
        That makes sense. Lots of tourists there who travelled by plane and may not know how to drive or be unwilling to rent a car. The casinos would still like these people to drop by though
        • nasmorn 4y ago
          Also people get drunk a lot in Vegas and casinos encourage it.
• Maursault 4y ago
  Muse Hall[0] at Radford University in Radford VA also uses a window trick, except to make the building look much taller than it is. When standing close to it, the facade is reasonably effective. [0] https://twitter.com/radfordu/status/1364225065974333446 https://twitter.com/radfordu/status/1364225065974333446
  • twic 4y ago
    Looks to me like it should have pigeons living in it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pigeons-tower https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pigeons-tower
• sollewitt 4y ago
  This can also be understood via Gestalt principle of visual processing - we visually group things that are proximal, we like to perceive continuity, we see parallel things as being related etc: https://www.superside.com/blog/gestalt-principles-of-design https://www.superside.com/blog/gestalt-principles-of-design Visual designers are architects are trained in these aspects of human perception.
• Miserlou57 4y ago
  I think a really good example of this is the Abraj Al Bait in Saudi Arabia. The complex is absolutely massive, but the large windows on many of the peripheral buildings are deceiving. The entire thing is 2-4x bigger than it appears. It's bonkers.
• htag 4y ago
  I think the author missing the biggest reason for these styling differences. This is their function. A long term dwelling serves a different function than a hotel. All of the residential buildings have more personalization on the outside of the building than hotels allow. I'd also like to add that the shown residential homes show much more wear and age than the hotels do, making it hard to do a side by side comparison. I'm always driven towards residential areas where the personality and style of the owner comes out in the property. In the US many suburban HOAs, apartment management and condo boards will put arbitrary limits on the appearance of the outside of the home. I can't stand the single family neighborhoods where all the homes were build at the same time, with the same builders, in the same style. In my neighborhood lots are of varying sizes, homes are built in a ~fifteen year span with different styles, and there is no hoa. Condo buildings can generate the same level of sameness if several of them are built in the same neighborhood around the same time, with similar style, and enforce strict limitations on outside visual appearance. We see this a lot in the US when an area is "upzonned" and developers flock to build "luxury" apartments and condos. I prefer buildings where residents put furniture on balconies, hang decorations from their window, grow plants outside, and have blinds open displaying rooms styled differently than their neighbors. I prefer living in urban neighborhoods where the buildings are of varying ages and show different architectural styles. Hotels can do enforce a very high level of uniformity. Additionally the amenities, furnishing, styling, and art are very much at the whim of current styles. This increases the "order" and decreases the "chaos". The order comes from function, and I wouldn't want to live in a hotel like environment.
  • chimeracoder 4y ago
    > I think the author missing the biggest reason for these styling differences. This is their function. A long term dwelling serves a different function than a hotel. All of the residential buildings have more personalization on the outside of the building than hotels allow. I'd also like to add that the shown residential homes show much more wear and age than the hotels do, making it hard to do a side by side comparison. Yeah I'm surprised nobody else mentioned this. The residential buildings have window AC units and people hanging laundry on their balconies to dry, two things you'll never see at modern hotels (the ones pictured don't even have balconies). There's no apples to apples comparison happening here.
• amluto 4y ago
  There’s a converse trick: divided lites. Many newer doors and windows that appear to have small panes of glass (“lites”) separated by strips of wood or metal are actually large insulated glass units (sets of multiple sheets of glass and their spacers and sealing hardware) decorated with wood, metal or plastic outside the glass. Sometimes a strip of something is out in between the panes glass as well to make it less obvious. It turns out that double- or triple-paned glass is a better insulator than wood, and the perimeter is a meaningful part of the cost, so one large unit is better for cost and performance than a bunch of small units.
  • mikeg8 4y ago
    I’m familiar with divided lites and your description of a modern SDL (simulated divided lite) vs TDL (true divided…) but I don’t think it’s in the same category of “architectural trick”. This post is on a change in scale/proportionality that has an optical illusion type of effect. SDLs are a change in construction method that has zero effect on the aesthetic of the architecture but solely performance and costs. Slightly different IMO
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Why does SDL exist, instead of having no dividers? What purpose do they serve besides simulating separate panes? Are they more economical than having no dividers at all?
      • amluto 4y ago
        I don’t think so. But some people like the style.
      • quesera 4y ago
        Divided lites used to be the only way to make a large window. Large panes of glass were impossible or very expensive. That's not true any more, but the "old style" is aesthetically pleasing to some, and sometimes even required by law for old houses. Today, True divided lites are more expensive -- more material, more handling, more assembly. And simulated divided lites are a cheap way to pretend to be expensive, or historically correct. I always rip 'em out, personally.
• meeks 4y ago
  Wedbush Center in LA is another classic example of this trick. <https://www.wedbushcenterla.com/ https://www.wedbushcenterla.com/>
• dmalvarado 4y ago
  > In order to make the buildings look smaller, less intimidating and messy, architects have come up with a "four or six windows in one" solution. Is there a source for this assumption? "Architects have come up with..." makes it sound like there was an explicit discussion about how to make the building look smaller. A) Why would a Vegas hotel want to look smaller, B) Does it actually look smaller? C) Smaller than what? A building with no windows? A building with too many windows? I'm not suggesting Architects are getting too much credit. I'm just suggesting, maybe the monster building had a terrible architect(s), and the Vegas buildings didn't use terrible architects.
  • ec109685 4y ago
    Architecture is a discipline and has design patterns that are shared in the industry. They are inventing techniques for each new building they design. This particular pattern is known: http://www.vegastodayandtomorrow.com/windows.htm http://www.vegastodayandtomorrow.com/windows.htm
  • aflag 4y ago
    Brutalism was popular in the 60s. You can see examples around the world. It's not really a matter of being a bad or good architect. It's more of architectural style preferences.
• gregoriol 4y ago
  Love those archtectural tricks! One I enjoy to look at here in Paris is this building: https://maps.app.goo.gl/VrMNy4RkZPyFE1SC8?g_st=ic https://maps.app.goo.gl/VrMNy4RkZPyFE1SC8?g_st=ic It looks like it is tilted, but it really has a square shape, just the vertical beige columns on each floor are placed slightly off from the other floor, and that makes the effect
  • twic 4y ago
    There's a building in London that i find genuinely unsettling to look at - it looks like perspective has got messed up somehow: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5264997,-0.0879055,3a,75y,324.12h,102.78t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sXkqlAhkoq9c6XXtJg7UKqw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5264997,-0.0879055,3a,75y,... https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/M_by_Montcalm https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/M_by_Montcalm It's basically opposite an eye hospital, so it's probably given some people nasty post-operative surprises.
• lucideer 4y ago
  > Obviously, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so maybe you think that these buildings are pretty. In that case, good on you. But I guess there are also a lot of people who find them quite ugly. > I often wondered what makes these buildings so ugly and distressing (unless you like them, I'm not questioning anyone's personal taste), and whether there was beauty in them which I am not capable of seeing, maybe because of my own biases. > maybe you don't find [Las Vegas hotels] attractive > The Monte Carlo [...] is more orderly and pleasant than the monster building thanks to its symmetry and some decorative patterns. > I am not saying that Las Vegas hotels look beautiful. The author spends a lot of the article telegraphing the fact their view is subjective and may not gel with others, so apologies for falling into this trap myself, but... using Vegas hotels as an aesthetic example to follow really jarred with me. This is indeed subjective, but I can't help but feel the author is in a minority here? No?
  • ec109685 4y ago
    If it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing to the majority, I don’t think they would keep employing it. There aren’t architectural requirements on the strip as far as I know that mandate this style.
  • ssgodderidge 4y ago
    I think the author was saying that the order of Vegas is better than the seemingly disorganized look of those apartment buildings. I doubt he was trying to argue that Vegas architecture is the best design possible
    • EricE 4y ago
      exactly - the way I read the last paragraph is he was suggesting such techniques (with less kitsch) could soften and better scale larger residential projects.
• ec109685 4y ago
  There’s a trope that Vegas doesn’t allow its windows to open / have balconies because they are afraid of suicides. Is it instead in practical to have windows that open when employing the window trick?
  • EricE 4y ago
    Don't want windows to open because it lets the air conditioning out. No balconies since you aren't supposed to be in your room but gambling. Although if you look closely the bottom rows of some of the windows on the Bellagio do have balconies.
• btucker 4y ago
  It's a bit like the forced perspective techniques Disney uses to accomplish the inverse: make small buildings seem bigger. Explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqefjmRVLTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqefjmRVLTM
• cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  I want to live in the building, not look at it and as such I want a balcony, a window that opens and an individual A/C unit that can deliver a strong blast next to my bed on summer nights. If it looks ugly from outside, who cares, make it up with a pretty, clean and safe street with shops and restaurants nearby.
  • joecasson 4y ago
    What you prefer to live in is not the point of the article. It's about why some large, many unit buildings appear imposing / overwhelming while others less so.
    • cat_plus_plus 4y ago
      Downtown Pyongyang also looks beautiful, yet I think that prioritizing needs of the residents is beautiful in the most important way. Taipei street markets are messy. That's the best food I ever had.
    • adastra22 4y ago
      People who actually live in these environments rather than out-of-town tourists don't share that experience though. They prefer the buildings you call dystopian.
  • exegete 4y ago
    That idea works until you have several such buildings near you and you get to go out on your balcony and see an ugly building everyday.
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      I’m not sure there’s any solution to this. Europe has had many uniformly designed high density residence towers, with clean and very worked out exteriors, and it’s a hell to live in. Balconies are a real QOL improvement, actual windows are as well. I had a friend who snapped after a year of not being able to fully open his windows. There’s middle grounds, with glass towers that partially hide the balconies and AC units for instance to make it look clean, but you never end with the level of uniformity of the hotels in the article.
• hliyan 4y ago
  It seems human beings have certain levels of texture detail that we find aesthetic. Any more or less, and we find it unappealing. I first realised this when I noticed that fictional spacecraft look appealing when they have a certain amount of exterior detail or "knurling". I also find trees with smaller leaves (e.g. Banyan trees) more calming to look at than those with large leaves. I suspect both phenomena are related.
  • mach1ne 4y ago
    Probably related to the more general notion of boring stuff and too dense stuff. It is as if brains optimize towards a certain percentage of surprise in their stimuli.
  • hug 4y ago
    The word for one of those small surface details is a “greeble”, and the process of adding that visual interest is known as greebling.
    • lioeters 4y ago
      > The term "greeblies" was first used by effects artists at Industrial Light & Magic in the 1970s to refer to small details added to models. According to model designer and fabricator Adam Savage, George Lucas, Industrial Light & Magic's founder, coined the term "Greeble". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble
• rgoldfinger 4y ago
  Here's an explanation I found persuasive for why the 60's and 70's buildings don't appeal to many of us: https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod... In short, the designers of these buildings experienced trauma during the wars that changed their brains, in a way that makes human features upsetting. Most buildings reference human features in some way (mouth, eyes), and this modernism avoids that and calms their brains. It aligns nicely with the astute observation about the windows, in that they humanize these large buildings.
  • jdm2212 4y ago
    That doesn't answer the question of "why did anyone let them build this crap". Why didn't the non-brain-damaged architects get to put up buildings?
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      There theory is that pretty much everyone in Europe and USA had PTSD from the Great War.
      • sofixa 4y ago
        World War II more so than the Great War. The former basically destroyed most of Europe, displaced millions and resulted in the massive collective traumas from deportations, mass murder, carpet bombing, etc. Brutalism really only emerged in the 1940/1950 after WWII.
    • slim 4y ago
      That question has an obvious answer : those architects are better at architecture than normal brain architects. Architecture is mainly functional, not esthetical
      • mmcnl 4y ago
        Citation needed? Architecture is ofcourse esthetical.
• a4isms 4y ago
  In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there's too much order, it's boring and oppressive. If there's too much variety, it's chaotic and unpleasant. In his view, classical architecture all over the world aims at creating a "delicate balance between order and variety." Jazz educator Jerry Coker made the same point about music, that to be pleasurable it must strike the right balance between familiarity and novelty. A metaphor for “familiar” and “novel” in music is to imagine that as we listen, we are “playing along in our head.” When we are correct about where the music is going next, it feels familiar. When we are surprised by it doing something else, we find it novel. Jazz that is too familiar is boring, we never are surprised, it never pushes our brain to rewire itself to accept “the new familiar.” Jazz that is too novel sounds like a chaotic mess: We cannot learn to predict it because its novelty is not built on top of a base of familiarity we can work with. The key insight that builds on top of this is that ”familiar” and “novel” are not absolutes: They vary from person to person based on their tastes and experiences. This leads to the notion of progression. When you find music that has the right balance for you, after a while what used to be novel becomes familiar, and your tastes evolve to appreciate music that adds novelty to the music you used to find balanced, but now find overly familiar. Your tastes are evolving, as most people’s tastes do. It’s never quite as cut-and-dry as that, but this notion of “a balance between familiar and novel” seems to fit a lot of aesthetic tastes, and the notion that to maintain that balance, people’s tastes evolve over time also seems to fit a lot of people’s experiences. The challenge is that as a practitioner, your personal tastes may go beyond the tastes of your audience. So either you must bring them along to where you are, create for them but not entirely for yourself, or find an audience who is in roughly the same place in their journey and will delight in the new experiences you discover for yourself. I am personally lazy, so as a blogger I always wrote for myself and let the internet sort out who would find my stuff about programming too familiar to be interesting, who would find it to avant-garde to be interesting, and who found it familiar enough to be understandable, yet novel enough to be interesting. Alas, buildings aren’t blog posts or pieces of music. When building them, you can’t always leave it up to the world to sort out who likes them and who doesn’t, you usually have a specific brief to satisfy a specific audience and society, and you should design for where their tastes are. p.s. And yes, this does apply to software design for those who take aesthetic pleasure in the code itself.
• anileated 4y ago
  I can see how these tricks could be used to attract a certain kind of person (and repeal people like me) but fail to notice some inherent appeal in this design. We can all agree that monster buildings are suboptimal in general, buildings with smaller footprint on the ground tend to feel nicer, but if a monster is the only way I know which kind I prefer. Give me Hong Kong style architecture, with its visible age and protruding A/C units, over Las Vegas style any day. The first one is functional and alive, the other is shallow, excessive and dead. European brutalist buildings also look attractive to me (alas, mostly seen on photos). Beauty comes from function, and brutalism gives that function a little bit of form but doesn’t let it prevail. FWIW the author mentions that it’s the matter of taste. The rest of the article just made no sense to me.
• wodenokoto 4y ago
  Dubai is full of absolutely massive residential houses, with Princess tower [1] being the tallest residential building in the world (well, strictly speaking 432 Park Avenue is taller, but it doesn't have all it's stories filled in) but very few buildings here uses the window trick (I'd say The Address Beach Resort does) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Tower
  • a_t48 4y ago
    I can’t be the only one who hates 432 Park - not because of the windows, but because of the impossible shape. It just looks like it shouldn’t exist.
    • brookst 4y ago
      I love it for that reason. Most things look like they exist, it’s cool to see one that doesn’t.
• sssilver 4y ago
  A similar trick that car designers use to make a car appear smaller are large headlights in relation to the rest of the car. Mini does this very effectively.
• adolph 4y ago
  The De Bakey VA Hospital in Houston TX does something similar except that the extra floors are windowless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._DeBakey_Veterans_Affairs_Medical_Center_in_Houston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._DeBakey_Veterans_Af...
• deleted 4y ago
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• coding123 4y ago
  You can't really compare hotels that are serviced to make the inside identical, and therefore the outside looks as if the building went up. The Chinese apartments are not hotels so each owner is changing things so the outside looks different in each night time lit window
• bee_rider 4y ago
  I dunno, the more chaotic buildings really emphasize that there’s a person living in each one. That can be neat to think about. Somebody’s whole home life lives in each of those tiny windows. It is interesting that people tend to take photos of the Las Vegas hotels that emphasize the visual effect that makes them look smaller, while they tend to shoot these apartment towers in a way that makes them look looming and overwhelming. It is just a matter of framing though, the apartments are shot from much closer up. And there’s also the aspect of the building maintenance. I suspect the hotels just bring in more money per day and get more aesthetic touch ups on the outside. Apartment and condo building sometimes look a little grimy just because they don’t get painted every year or whatever.
  • noobermin 4y ago
    My fiance who is an artist explained it as being due to it being an upshot. The first two pictures of the HK buildings are upclose and at an angle, with you looking up at the building, and thus it looking daunting. The picture of the Unité d'Habitation looks nowhere near as daunting to me, it just looks like a large building, actually.
• userabchn 4y ago
  The opposite is done in other buildings, such as MIT's Simmons Hall, where the building can look bigger than it actually is because each room has multiple windows: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simmons_Hall,_MIT,_Cambridge,_Massachusetts.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simmons_Hall,_MIT,_C...
  • hanspeter 4y ago
    A similar effect is seen with this office building in Copenhagen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier47 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier47
• alfor 4y ago
  They look oppressive because they are. Our perception is right, the buildings are wrong. What they mean is that someone is at the head of a structure that house thousand of people, putting the the person living there far from any impact on the whole. The tribe size for humans in around 100 people. Naturally a building that house 1000 of people is not human sized in it’s management or living organisation. The solution is not to fake the facade to trick our visual perception, it’s pushing the problem away instead of fixing it.
• captainmuon 4y ago
  Interesting, I would say those buildings in HK don't have too much order and variety, but too little. There is no order, the facade is completely chaotic, but there is also no variety, it is all same-same in its brutalist housing style. But I guess that amounts to the same. Regarding the window trick, I think I've seen something similar with very old or maybe neoclassical buildings in the US. They had a whole fake storey between the first and second to make the building look taller - or maybe they merged the first and second floor to make it look smaller? I'm not sure and can't find the link where I read this, but it is a very similar and really cool effect.
• golemiprague 4y ago
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• ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  This topic is vastly more complex that the author realizes. This window placement technique is one of many design facets that create the intended visual impact of these buildings and isn't close to their most significant difference to those large functional midcentury apartment blocks. Not only do architects need a 3 year graduate degree and board certification to start their careers, brand new architects are not the ones designing large public buildings. The author assuming that their musings about window placement on Vegas hotels could in any way inform seasoned and well-educated architects' design approach is pure hubris. Ridiculous. It reads like a non-developer reading a bunch of articles about tech buzzword du jour like blockchain or microservices and then ham-fistedly using that to "explain" the architectural shortcomings of a bunch of complex systems that they couldn't hope to understand designed by heavily educated and experienced professionals. An actual developer would roll their eyes but if the author's readers aren't developers, it not only sounds as credible, it sounds more credible because someone is finally explaining that complex thing in a way that makes sense to people who reason about problems the same way they do. If you want to learn about some knowledge domain like architecture, you're a whole lot better off reading architectural blogs than a technical person's musings about it. Misconceptions born from a similar perspective to yours are going to seem undeservedly credible and be a lot more difficult to parse and filter out.
  • tinym 4y ago
    Are there any architectural blogs you recommend?
    • ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
      I like Dezeen, Arch Daily, and The City Fix for more urban design type stuff.
  • ketzo 4y ago
    It seems like you know more of the things that the author is missing in their explanation. I think your comment would bring more value to the world if you actually talked about some of those design facets, instead of taking so much time to trash a person for their intellectual curiosity.
• gardenhedge 4y ago
  I don't see the 'trick'. The buildings still look massive to me.
• adrianh 4y ago
  On the other end of the spectrum: here in Amsterdam some of the canal houses deliberately use smaller windows for the top floors, to give the impression that the homes are taller (and more prestigious). The way it was explained to me is that it's an optical illusion when viewing the homes from street level. A 17th century window trick. :-)
  • EricE 4y ago
    Forced perspective. A lot of people like to act like Disney invented it, but it's been in use forever (as you point out).
• ilamont 4y ago
  I lived in Asia in the 1990s and was close friends with several local and international architects working on residential buildings which often had commercial space on the ground floor. One common complaint was their models and drawings never ended up looking like the result because the developer would add features (one example: a parking garage which required a large ramp) and commercial tenants would add hanging signage. Residents typically used balconies for drying laundry, not the flower gardens shown in the drawings. Almost everyone used frosted windows, not clear windows, because outside views of other buildings or the surrounding landscape were not valued - it was all about the interior amenities.
• rmetzler 4y ago
  The German Democratic Republik (East Germany) had the problem of needing housing for many thousand people in the 1970s. It was not possible to build enough flats. The only way they could scale up their efforts was through standardisation. Berlin Marzahn and other areas were villages back than. The Marzahn Village for example still exists today. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wohnungsbauprogramm_(DDR) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wohnungsbauprogramm_(DDR) People wanted individualisation, but the housing was needed. So they put color in their balconies, which made them look like color patches. And there existed big murals on the ends of some houses. After reunification, a lot of these buildings were modernised and made look the same again. Only the color scheme between houses was different. Existing murals were often painted over. People then realised, it does look nicer to have coloured walls and they start to let artists paint the ends again. Here is an example by the East German artist Mad C https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Berlin_Mural_Fest_2019_MadC_Berlin-Hellersdorf_1v3.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Berlin_Mural_Fest_2019_M... Here is a video of Team Mad Flava, painting a large mural in Greifswald. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q0vMB5k71c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q0vMB5k71c
  • nottorp 4y ago
    > People then realised, it does look nicer to have coloured walls and they start to let artists paint the ends again. I really don't understand how people can enjoy the "us homeowner association" uniformity. It's boring. Let everyone personalize their home.
    • htag 4y ago
      Here's how it happens. Step 1. Buy 640 acres of land (square mile) outside a growing and sprawling US metropolitan area. Step 2. Wait 10-30 years, until the metro has grown to the edge of your land. Step 3. Make friends with the nearest city council. Make friends with a developer. Talk about tax revenue. Talk about investing in local infrastructure and communities. Step 4. Get annexed. Take out a large loan. Partner with local utilities to extend services, build roads, donate some land to the city for a park or elementary school. Establish a strong HOA with all the current trends to avoid eyesores dragging down your big investment until you move all the units. Accept deposits for new homes. Local population growth fuels demand. Step 5. In five to ten years sell >8000 homes at an average cost of $0.5M, bringing in over $4,000M in business. You've made enough friends and connections to roll your cut into the best local opportunities.
• unit_circle 4y ago
  If you're interested in brutalist design, I highly recommend "This Brutal World" by Peter Chadwick. While there is definitely a lot of bad brutalist architecture there is also some incredible architecture from this period.
  • Solvitieg 4y ago
    Thanks, any other architecture books you would recommend?
• xchip 4y ago
  TL;DR: 'In order to make the buildings look smaller, less intimidating and messy, architects have come up with a "four or six windows in one" solution. This means they grouped several windows (usually four or six) together and made them look like one window. This creates the visual effect of "shrinking" the building, of making it more orderly and symmetrical.'
• dirtyid 4y ago
  >unless you like them, I'm not questioning anyone's personal taste Pretty questionable taste to compare seminal works like Unite and Trellick with HK "monster towers". There's at least some design rational for the former, latter mostly copy paste efforts of text book floor plans - I remember going to architecture bookstore in Beijing during 90s that sold manuals of low effort floor plan template books for hasty developers whose design process is mostly to flip through the hundreds of... not well considered designs, and tell his drafters layout X this many floors. Or in authors words, too much order. Quite a few of the manuals were imported from HK who did highrise first.
• amelius 4y ago
  Since the facade is only a fraction of the cost of a building I often wonder why we don't spend some more money on it.
• pshirshov 4y ago
  18 stories. Monster building. Pff. Russia is full of such crap. And even lot worse crap, actually: https://maps.app.goo.gl/goinnvSj1G4W9spn7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/goinnvSj1G4W9spn7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/JNwFm27o1TNvBDpe8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/JNwFm27o1TNvBDpe8 https://goo.gl/maps/SALuZLtYg4hTeKQr8 https://goo.gl/maps/SALuZLtYg4hTeKQr8 Etc, etc
• amw 4y ago
  It is strange, to me, to make a caveat about how some peoples' taste might appreciate the buildings just shown, and then immediately launch into a "universal" principle for why those examples "look bad". The one statement puts a lie to the other, but the piece just carries on as if it didn't seriously undermine its own premise.
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I've been to Las Vegas twice, once because I flew in for a triathlon, and once for CES. I do not like Las Vegas. Its existence defies logic and economics. Walking around the strip I kept looking at the huge hotels and their serpentine design. It took a while, but I finally understood it... The Las Vegas strip is like if 10-20 cruise ships beached. Each hotel is a mass of rooms, 3-8 mediocre restaurants (I said it, LV restaurants are vastly overrated). The hotels really don't want you going around the strip, that means less revenue for them. Really the entire strip is like a huge cruise ship beached. It's actually pretty hard to get off of the strip. It has these beautiful mountains in the distance, and you ... can't get to them. The lifetime fitness gym is 20 miles from the strip. There's no bike paths, walking paths away from the strip, escape from the hellish cheap crap. But yeah I can go shoot some machine guns somewhere. Just a freak show of capitalism.
  • scubbo 4y ago
    I kind-of enjoy the odd 2-3 day visit to Vegas every 3-5 years for precisely this reason - it is capitalism unleashed, in its fullest expression. It's fascinating (in a horrifying way) to see just how efficiently and completely the whole experience has been crafted to keep you spending _just a little bit more_ (time or money) the way they want you to. Walk around with the mindset of an anthropologist and wonder about the deliberate choices made about the spacing of bars and other facilities, the colour schemes and branding on display, the blend of opulence and opportunity. What are they trying to make you feel, and how are they doing it, and are they successful even when you're aware of it? I respect the dedication to the craft, even if I find the craft itself loathsome.
    • nmfisher 4y ago
      I (non-American) haven't been to Las Vegas, but what you described is very similar to my impression of the USA on the whole.
      • scubbo 4y ago
        Eh - Las Vegas is by far the pinnacle of "spend-nudges", most other places the influence is much less subtle and powerful. And there are plenty of areas of pleasant unspoiled nature (especially around the Bay Area, where I am). But, still - yeah, not a million miles off.
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  > In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there's too much order, it's boring and oppressive. If there's too much variety, it's chaotic and unpleasant. In his view, classical architecture all over the world aims at creating a "delicate balance between order and variety." I keep coming back to this. I think this is a such a fundamental truth across all walks of life and design. I see this again and again and again in systems design. I cringe when I see JavaScript take over the world because it is so free and chaotic. But I cringe equally when I hear folks talk about how they're going to enslave all computing to provable stuff. Well done systems are a balance between rigidity/order and malleabilty/nondeterminism.
• saeranv 4y ago
  Yeah, the post-modernists had some good ideas about offsetting the monolitic, scaleness nature of modernist design, like for example, bringing back ornamentation. Personally, I'm more partial to the dutch structuralists reactions to modernism, which tried to reconcile the same critique without also lapsing into kitsch. Also, Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation doesn't belong in the article's list of "ugly, distressing" buildings. Corb's built work was actually built explictly and thoughtfully around human proportions. I've walked around (and in) it, and it doesn't feel monolithic, and oppressive at all. Cutting a section across it reveals it's real cleverness - the apartment units are linked in such a way that each unit can have 2 floors, so you get a diversity of environments typical apartment units don't provide.
• deleted 4y ago
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• justhw 4y ago
  If you're having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined, here's a photo of the Bellagio at night with the room lights on. https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/1c/8a/e0/b9/bellagio-las-vegas.jpg?w=1200&h=-1&s=1 https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/1c/8...
• rjawali 4y ago
  It's faster to put together the exterior and close the building so you can continue with the interior build out, especially with the expensive interiors.
• rajnathani 4y ago
  This is such a great takeaway!: > In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there's too much order, it's boring and oppressive. If there's too much variety, it's chaotic and unpleasant. In his view, classical architecture all over the world aims at creating a "delicate balance between order and variety." The overall article is great too with the example photos.
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Maybe the glass facade skyscraper is the ultimate example of this window trick. Just one big window.