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Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture. Modern architecture has destroye

Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture. Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood. Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe. In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build, they've not been able to build anything even close to pretty. The best they do is a bad copy of old style.

boringg 3y ago
People de-risk their asset by building it as easy to not offend as possible so if they have to sell it they can find a buyer with relative ease.
- pixl97 3y ago
  You may be understating this quite considerably. I remember reading Future Shock when I was quite young and the parts about people changing jobs quite often and living closer to nomads stuck with me, even though I have to say I've forgotten most of the book. Simply put anything modern is likely to change its purpose many times in the lifetime of the building. A company might have its headquarters in one place for 100 years, but probably not. It may move to a bigger building, be bought and dissolved, or go out of business before the usefulness of the building itself. Having a generic asset is worth more in cases like this. Same with housing and the 'millennial grey' people point out these days. Most people expect to move many, many times within their lives. I've moved 10 times myself, and I know people that have moved far more than that. A house is rarely looked at like a forever place, and few families seem to keep their houses in the family for multiple generations. Add to this that family size in the US is rapidly shrinking there are a lot of people who know their assets won't be passed on, but sold instead.
hannasanarion 3y ago
The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures. > Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more. This is called "survivorship bias". Don't base your opinions of the past exclusively on the things that survived til now. The things that survived til now are, by definition, the exception to the norm from the time. Not every european building is a work of art, not every Lancaster Bomber avoided being shot in the engines, not all the dinosaurs were animated skeletons. > Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe. What do you think Barcelona is? > In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA. No. [https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/construction-costs-hit-highest-spike-in-50-years/2891677/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/construction-costs-hit-hig...]
- airstrike 3y ago
  > The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures. I'd say that's their stated purpose, not their inherent one. Beauty is only useless to those who choose to believe so. If you're not convinced, I recommend Roger Scruton's "Why Beauty Matters" https://vimeo.com/549715999 https://vimeo.com/549715999
- gravescale 3y ago
  I know the economics must somehow make sense, but it's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that even with quite literally once-unimaginable computing power, semi-magical modern materials, structural theory, decades of recorded research and testing, international standardisation, leaps in simulations, optimisation, robotics, pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, networking, transmission, logistics and supply chain engineering, economies of scale that dwarf the imagination of the most ardent technologist of yesteryear....humans still can't stack bricks or nail frames cheaply enough to reliably put roofs over heads. It's a hell of a Red Queen thing.
  - bigbillheck 3y ago
    "Won't", not "can't".
    - gravescale 3y ago
      You're right, but there's a lot of people here making excuses predicated on treating entirely socially-voluntary problems (like providing no public transport, or allowing regulatory capture to inflate costs) as laws of nature.
  - spaniard89277 3y ago
    We can do that. But we can't make new space.
    - pegasus 3y ago
      If the footprint is so expensive, you'd expect more investment in building quality, not less.
nextworddev 3y ago
It is much cheaper to build McMansions, etc
- bluGill 3y ago
  McMansions are also functional. They may not look good, but they do what people need in a house well (obviously with thousands of different McMansions there will be thousands of different things). I have a house in 1970 - it is okay, but modern houses of a similar size are a lot more functional because space is used differently. I've been in houses built in 1920 which were really bad - they looked nice but as an engineer I see a lot of things that are just wrong.
prmoustache 3y ago
The thing is, most of the 60's/70's building look like shit from outside but are pretty nice and super funcional from the inside while some older ones were made for an era where people had huge hotel particuliers with servants and stuff and the current appartments have been build by splitting those in parts. Those appartments that aren't as well made/functionnal despite being nice to look at and having lots of vertical space, nice carved/moulded ceiling, etc.
- spaniard89277 3y ago
  In Spain it's not only 60s/70s, pretty much everything build between the 60s and the 90s is not only ugly AF, but very low quality. And Barcelona is not even the worst offender. In northern spanish cities there's a lot of grey in the buildings, with basically no insulation in a humid and cold climate. My GF used to joke it was colder inside her home than outside. After the new construction code in the early 00s the quality has improved a lot but we still build very ugly buildings. No wonder why people chose to gather and spend their time where the historial centers are. Seems architects really refuse to extract some lessons from this.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Well I hate to say it as I am also living in Spain, in the south, but there is definitely a culture of making stuff with the minimum effort and a lack of focus on quality. And I too do joke that it feels colder inside than outside from mid november to mid february.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    And half the Barcelona buildings from the 60s/70s were made with concrete that turns to sand when it gets wet (aluminosis). People have died in buildings that suddenly collapsed.
  - harry_ord 3y ago
    The cold thing was the biggest surprise when I was in Barcelona one November
- 3y ago
MattGaiser 3y ago
You are understating cheaper to build. A lot of the beautiful buildings took decades if not centuries to construct. Cost hundreds of millions of dollars inflation-adjusted. They are also extremely expensive to maintain, as stone is expensive in so many ways.
mikey_p 3y ago
Check out Brent Hull on YouTube who is answering this very question. His basic premise is that post WWII the focus on efficiency and mass production ruined the craftsmanship that went into older buildings.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  I love Brent and his redesigns of existing buildings are really eye opening. It really shows how bad people fail at building traditional buildings today. He makes a compelling argument for why his redesign makes more sense and to my eye the buildings tend to look much better and simpler too. It's based around some basic theory that had served builders well for a long time and has been thrown out to build gaudy things that imitate very poorly. One of my favorite observations of his is that a modern cheap door isn't even really a door - it's more a simulation of a door than an actual door. It is made of plastic and filled with foam but is made to look like wood and has stiles and rails and fake paneling pressed into the moulding to look like what people think a door looks like. And it comes in a pre-fabricated frame and is installed, not crafted. But it doesn't feel like a door or sound like a door. Just a flimsy thing that closes a passage off. And we admire installers today, not craftsmen. One thing about him, and I think he acknowledges it, is that efficiency and mass production are why so many more people can live in relatively nice homes today. Not everyone (in fact most people can't) can live in a well crafted home made from the best materials, etc. But I do agree with him that developers could at least try and make things that are rooted in some sense of design principal.
- pas 3y ago
  Meh, we're still very very far from mass-production. We got rich and spend a lot of that on inefficiently building higher quality houses. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-tasks-have-gotten https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale
nemo44x 3y ago
A few things. first off, we have code now. Until the 1950s you could do whatever you wanted. But nowadays there a bunch of things that need to be "up to code" and it's not just internals like electrical, etc. Stairways, railings, heights, room sizes, construction technique, etc are all affected by this. And we continue to add more and more code for things like efficiency, etc. And this isn't a bad thing - code means we have safer buildings and when someone buys a building there's at least a minimum standard that has been met. So this means you are going to build in ways that are proven and will be up to code. Which leads to the second thing. Construction materials have become standardized over the last 100 years or so. We went from a world where things were crafted to a world where things are manufactured and installed. Buildings are made mainly of commoditized parts and materials today which makes a lot of things look simplistic and similar. This is good in many ways because when a craftsman was hand carving things they were not very productive and it cost a lot of money. Today, a worker is amazingly productive since their tools are powered and their materials are pre-fabricated and just need to be cut to size. Lastly, buildings are far more complex today than 100+ years ago. Lots more electrical and plumbing, complex HVAC, insulation requirements, etc. These things were not considered long ago. You had carpentry and maybe a bit of plumbing and some basic electrical. You can still get really nice custom work done and it's unbelievable expensive.
alistairSH 3y ago
Be careful to avoid survivorship bias here. Only the "best" buildings from Medieval and Renaissance times (or even later into the 1800s) are still around. Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so. Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.
- kiney 3y ago
  Nope, visit ANY old german village that wasn't bombed during ww2. Most of the old houses still stand and every single one is prettier than what is being build today.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    And how much would that same house cost to build now? Again, this is survivorship bias at best.
    - fuy 3y ago
      Are you saying medieval Germany was richer than present-day Germany or USA? That's of course not true. And it's also not clear why you call it a survivorship bias - these villages were probably above-the-median in their days, but it's not some singular building like Pyramids that is not representative of overall building of that era/territory. It was just how the houses were built there and then.
  - loglog 3y ago
    An average pre-WW2 house in a German village may be prettier than an average house from the 1950s, but certainly not than an average house being built today. Your perception is presumably clouded by the touristy "villages", which in fact have been at least locally important towns at some point in the past.
    - kiney 3y ago
ebiester 3y ago
We underestimate the pressure the world has been under in the last century. In 1950, we had about 2.5 billion people. Today, we have 8 billion. We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people who all expected to have a greater standard of living with electricity and living space; something had to give. We had to be more parsimonious with the materials at our disposal.
- hollerith 3y ago
  "We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people" is irrelevant to a discussion of one city in Spain that did not grow quickly: Spain has its own architects that haven't been influenced much by architects in countries like Nigeria and India where the population grew very fast.
  - pas 3y ago
    Population of Barcelona grew from 500K to more than 1.7M in 70 years.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      OK (that is much faster growth than Spain as a whole) but the 5.5 billion new people is still irrelevant.
      - superturkey650 3y ago
        It’s not irrelevant as a ratio. 2.5 billion to 8 billion is very comparable to 500k to 1.7 million. The population tripled in 70 years and, in the current times, you also have to deal with all the existing architecture and infrastructure in the city that wasn’t built for anywhere near that population level.
- pixl97 3y ago
  People really don't understand how big the 'boomers' generation really was. Populations exploded in the post war era and with the rapid rise in technology people were disinterested in doing things in the way of the past. In the US at least there was a mass migration over the country and a massive need for housing that could be quickly built. Later this rapid expansion of 'sameness' would be captured in popular media in songs like "Little Boxes".
Gimpei 3y ago
Le Courbousier is what happened. He actually wanted to demolish Paris and put up a huge office park. But I love modern architecture. Try going to the Salk institute or even the Marin County Civic Center. It’s pretty mystical.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  Try going to Palma, Salk institute looks like a depressive lifeless concrete mess OCD creation. https://www.spain.info/en/destination/palma/ https://www.spain.info/en/destination/palma/
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    It really does look depressing, even in the best photos
  - coryrc 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biological_Studies#/media/File%3A2019_Salk_Institute_north_building_from_east.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biologica... is a picture of the named building. Your link, for me, puts up a beautiful (sandstone?) cathedral.
    - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      We have very different minds ;). I see why you like it, it's interesting in a desert clean kind of way. But it's not a loving livable place. I have a hard time believing most people will express the same kind of feeling of inspiration they have walking on the old cobblestone streets of for instance France or Italy. Or take a random Amsterdam outskirt, not famous at all, but lovely: https://www.ehr.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/71011393_5.jpg https://www.ehr.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/71011393_5.jpg
      - coryrc 3y ago
        Well, different climates have different building requirements and materials. Plus, a cathedral isn't meant for living in. I think you'd find that feeling walking the old market streets, covered by cloths to block most of the sun, bees buzzing around the honey vendor, people bustling by. I can't find the perfect picture, but https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M-g876LtXFs/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M-g876LtXFs/maxresdefault.jpg isn't bad. That one's a little more tourist-focused and lacking in crowds than the exact street I'm remembering.
dbrgn 3y ago
> It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood. Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;) A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.
audunw 3y ago
What happened is that a vast quantity of people moved into and around the cities. We also have more strict building codes that take into account light, air quality, longevity, energy effiency etc. You’re looking at an old city built for a relatively small elite over many hundreds of years, and you’re surprised why cities built for many millions of people over a few decade look a bit basic in comparison? I came across some pre-WW2 photographs of a European city I know, of the more poor districts that don’t often get photographed. You think they looked nice? A modern apartment building looks much better than those cheap wooden shacks and lasts 100 times longer. I think there’s hope in the long term. My grandmas apartment building was built quickly and cheaply and looked like trash when I was a child. It has since been renovated with a nicer brick facade. Could be better, but it’s a step in the right direction. Give it a hundred years and compounding refurbishment and survivorship bias will make most cities look great.
- ido 3y ago
  I just came back from San Francisco and plenty of post WW2 buildings there (mostly high rises) look nice.
  - __loam 3y ago
    And we're also facing a severe housing shortage.
    - UncleOxidant 3y ago
      Do the two have to be mutually exclusive? Are crappy architecture and plenty of housing or interesting architecture and a housing shortage our only options?
      - __loam 3y ago
        Obviously not but we shouldn't slow down development over some boring looking buildings.
- __loam 3y ago
BurningFrog 3y ago
Buildings used to be made by rich people or institutions who built what they wanted. Now it's controlled by bureaucrats and regulations.
- azulster 3y ago
  old buildings used to also be death traps, we only know of the survivors, but lots of old construction would burn down, collapse in a minor earthquake, or rot from water. we only have the survivors to admire now
reddog 3y ago
You might enjoy the Tom Wolfe book, From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tries to explain the observations you make. Very lively, funny writing and you know he is on the right track because he was universally panned by modern architects.
azulster 3y ago
"modern architecture" is a following the same pricniples of most architecture, engineer it to be strong enough, for as cheap as possible, if you are very very lucky somebody may be willing to pay extra to make it look good. usually the church was more than willing to pay extra for beauty, but the average apartment building or urban mixed-use building built in the last few decades is likely focused on being affordable and efficient.
throw0101b 3y ago
> Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture. To a certain extent: economics. Beauty generally does not show up on a spreadsheet, and when it does it often adds cost. Glass costs less than steel, concrete, or stone, so it's lower CapEx to have glass towers. (Of course glass sucks as a thermal insulator, so your OpEx for heating/cooling may be higher.)
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Glass is also not heavy, which is very important. (At least, relative to steel and brick.) The modern glass curtain wall is popular because it is not load bearing and costs very little extra to hold up. High-rise steel frame was very expensive, and high-rise masonry basically impossible, because the frames also had to bear the weight of their own upper floors. The structural part of a modern skyscraper is basically floors cantilevering off a small concrete core, and the glass wall simply hangs off the cantilever.
rsynnott 3y ago
I used to work in a Georgian building. I'll take the ugly 70s concrete block I work in nowadays any day. It's _extremely_ difficult to adapt a lot of these old forms to functional, comfortable housing and offices. There are exceptions, but practicality is a big part of the change. You're also seeing a certain amount of survivor bias in many cities; the old buildings that are still around are the ones that someone thought it would be worthwhile to keep around.
- distances 3y ago
  We don't have to go that far back in time, European cities have loads of beautiful buildings still from early 1900s. For example whole neighborhoods of Jugendstil apartment buildings that mainly housed working class people moving to cities. New construction in these same neighborhoods simply do not match the beauty of the existing housing stock. And early 1900s housing is usually quite nice if it's been at least slightly renovated (double glazing etc).
  - trgn 3y ago
    The schism was modernism, a mental breakdown in the west after the world wars. What was easy, convenient, efficient from a machine perspective, therefore was wholesome, aspirational, valuable from a human perspective. Other explanations, survivor bias, population boom, ... are fundamentally wrong because even though they may have ab after the fact rationalization, they were not the instincts that animated this revolution. We're turning out of it, finally, luckily.
    - distances 3y ago
      One of the major points, afaik, is that these beautiful buildings require a lot more manual work. It used to be that materials were expensive and labor cheap, but that equation reversed, and skilled labor required for such a nice facade now comes with a heavy price. But I have no expertise in construction nor history so can't say if that's true.
      - 3y ago
javier_e06 3y ago
I agree. Kids watch Harry Potter and dream about Hogwarts and their school pretty much looks like a prison without the barbwire and guard towers. They don't play in the woods but on a asphalt blacktop or a square of grass. Sad.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
Scott Alexander has written a good blog post about the numerous things that could be contributing to this result: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
Lance_ET_Compte 3y ago
The desire of people to drive (and park) their personal automobiles everywhere has killed cities. Density is forced to be lower.
Affric 3y ago
Do you mean “Modernist”? Art Nouveau, Gaudí’s dialect being Modernisme, was a movement which aimed to democratise and modernise architecture and design compared to previous periods.
levocardia 3y ago
Swaminarayan Akshardham in New Jersey is new and beautiful. Probably noteworthy that it is also a religious building. I think ugly modern buildings are a problem of aesthetics and ambition, not one of finances or possibility. Old buildings on American college campuses are wonderful; new ones are dreadful yet certainly much more expensive, even inflation-adjusted.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Did they ever settle up and give the back pay to the indentured servants they essentially imported?
maxglute 3y ago
Mass urbanization, raising wages, labour saving construction methods and mass produced materials. I think dutch modern architecture does an alright blending blending constraints and modernism. Sagrada Familia is not a model for mass development. That said, I do love me some blood equity monumentality. It would be "neat" importing 10,000 cheap labourers, train them up on traditional masonery techiques and build some more monuments.
viewtransform 3y ago
This sky garden building in Shanghai looks sci-fi https://youtu.be/pzjpK2BYGCQ?t=66 https://youtu.be/pzjpK2BYGCQ?t=66

boringg 3y ago

People de-risk their asset by building it as easy to not offend as possible so if they have to sell it they can find a buyer with relative ease.

pixl97 3y ago
You may be understating this quite considerably. I remember reading Future Shock when I was quite young and the parts about people changing jobs quite often and living closer to nomads stuck with me, even though I have to say I've forgotten most of the book. Simply put anything modern is likely to change its purpose many times in the lifetime of the building. A company might have its headquarters in one place for 100 years, but probably not. It may move to a bigger building, be bought and dissolved, or go out of business before the usefulness of the building itself. Having a generic asset is worth more in cases like this. Same with housing and the 'millennial grey' people point out these days. Most people expect to move many, many times within their lives. I've moved 10 times myself, and I know people that have moved far more than that. A house is rarely looked at like a forever place, and few families seem to keep their houses in the family for multiple generations. Add to this that family size in the US is rapidly shrinking there are a lot of people who know their assets won't be passed on, but sold instead.

hannasanarion 3y ago

The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures. > Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more. This is called "survivorship bias". Don't base your opinions of the past exclusively on the things that survived til now. The things that survived til now are, by definition, the exception to the norm from the time. Not every european building is a work of art, not every Lancaster Bomber avoided being shot in the engines, not all the dinosaurs were animated skeletons. > Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe. What do you think Barcelona is? > In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA. No. [https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/construction-costs-hit-highest-spike-in-50-years/2891677/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/construction-costs-hit-hig...]

airstrike 3y ago
> The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures. I'd say that's their stated purpose, not their inherent one. Beauty is only useless to those who choose to believe so. If you're not convinced, I recommend Roger Scruton's "Why Beauty Matters" https://vimeo.com/549715999 https://vimeo.com/549715999
gravescale 3y ago
I know the economics must somehow make sense, but it's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that even with quite literally once-unimaginable computing power, semi-magical modern materials, structural theory, decades of recorded research and testing, international standardisation, leaps in simulations, optimisation, robotics, pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, networking, transmission, logistics and supply chain engineering, economies of scale that dwarf the imagination of the most ardent technologist of yesteryear....humans still can't stack bricks or nail frames cheaply enough to reliably put roofs over heads. It's a hell of a Red Queen thing.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  "Won't", not "can't".
  - gravescale 3y ago
    You're right, but there's a lot of people here making excuses predicated on treating entirely socially-voluntary problems (like providing no public transport, or allowing regulatory capture to inflate costs) as laws of nature.
- spaniard89277 3y ago
  We can do that. But we can't make new space.
  - pegasus 3y ago
    If the footprint is so expensive, you'd expect more investment in building quality, not less.

nextworddev 3y ago

It is much cheaper to build McMansions, etc

bluGill 3y ago
McMansions are also functional. They may not look good, but they do what people need in a house well (obviously with thousands of different McMansions there will be thousands of different things). I have a house in 1970 - it is okay, but modern houses of a similar size are a lot more functional because space is used differently. I've been in houses built in 1920 which were really bad - they looked nice but as an engineer I see a lot of things that are just wrong.

prmoustache 3y ago

The thing is, most of the 60's/70's building look like shit from outside but are pretty nice and super funcional from the inside while some older ones were made for an era where people had huge hotel particuliers with servants and stuff and the current appartments have been build by splitting those in parts. Those appartments that aren't as well made/functionnal despite being nice to look at and having lots of vertical space, nice carved/moulded ceiling, etc.

spaniard89277 3y ago
In Spain it's not only 60s/70s, pretty much everything build between the 60s and the 90s is not only ugly AF, but very low quality. And Barcelona is not even the worst offender. In northern spanish cities there's a lot of grey in the buildings, with basically no insulation in a humid and cold climate. My GF used to joke it was colder inside her home than outside. After the new construction code in the early 00s the quality has improved a lot but we still build very ugly buildings. No wonder why people chose to gather and spend their time where the historial centers are. Seems architects really refuse to extract some lessons from this.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Well I hate to say it as I am also living in Spain, in the south, but there is definitely a culture of making stuff with the minimum effort and a lack of focus on quality. And I too do joke that it feels colder inside than outside from mid november to mid february.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  And half the Barcelona buildings from the 60s/70s were made with concrete that turns to sand when it gets wet (aluminosis). People have died in buildings that suddenly collapsed.
- harry_ord 3y ago
  The cold thing was the biggest surprise when I was in Barcelona one November
3y ago

MattGaiser 3y ago

You are understating cheaper to build. A lot of the beautiful buildings took decades if not centuries to construct. Cost hundreds of millions of dollars inflation-adjusted. They are also extremely expensive to maintain, as stone is expensive in so many ways.

mikey_p 3y ago

Check out Brent Hull on YouTube who is answering this very question. His basic premise is that post WWII the focus on efficiency and mass production ruined the craftsmanship that went into older buildings.

nemo44x 3y ago
I love Brent and his redesigns of existing buildings are really eye opening. It really shows how bad people fail at building traditional buildings today. He makes a compelling argument for why his redesign makes more sense and to my eye the buildings tend to look much better and simpler too. It's based around some basic theory that had served builders well for a long time and has been thrown out to build gaudy things that imitate very poorly. One of my favorite observations of his is that a modern cheap door isn't even really a door - it's more a simulation of a door than an actual door. It is made of plastic and filled with foam but is made to look like wood and has stiles and rails and fake paneling pressed into the moulding to look like what people think a door looks like. And it comes in a pre-fabricated frame and is installed, not crafted. But it doesn't feel like a door or sound like a door. Just a flimsy thing that closes a passage off. And we admire installers today, not craftsmen. One thing about him, and I think he acknowledges it, is that efficiency and mass production are why so many more people can live in relatively nice homes today. Not everyone (in fact most people can't) can live in a well crafted home made from the best materials, etc. But I do agree with him that developers could at least try and make things that are rooted in some sense of design principal.
pas 3y ago
Meh, we're still very very far from mass-production. We got rich and spend a lot of that on inefficiently building higher quality houses. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-tasks-have-gotten https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale

nemo44x 3y ago

A few things. first off, we have code now. Until the 1950s you could do whatever you wanted. But nowadays there a bunch of things that need to be "up to code" and it's not just internals like electrical, etc. Stairways, railings, heights, room sizes, construction technique, etc are all affected by this. And we continue to add more and more code for things like efficiency, etc. And this isn't a bad thing - code means we have safer buildings and when someone buys a building there's at least a minimum standard that has been met. So this means you are going to build in ways that are proven and will be up to code. Which leads to the second thing. Construction materials have become standardized over the last 100 years or so. We went from a world where things were crafted to a world where things are manufactured and installed. Buildings are made mainly of commoditized parts and materials today which makes a lot of things look simplistic and similar. This is good in many ways because when a craftsman was hand carving things they were not very productive and it cost a lot of money. Today, a worker is amazingly productive since their tools are powered and their materials are pre-fabricated and just need to be cut to size. Lastly, buildings are far more complex today than 100+ years ago. Lots more electrical and plumbing, complex HVAC, insulation requirements, etc. These things were not considered long ago. You had carpentry and maybe a bit of plumbing and some basic electrical. You can still get really nice custom work done and it's unbelievable expensive.

alistairSH 3y ago

Be careful to avoid survivorship bias here. Only the "best" buildings from Medieval and Renaissance times (or even later into the 1800s) are still around. Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so. Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.

kiney 3y ago
Nope, visit ANY old german village that wasn't bombed during ww2. Most of the old houses still stand and every single one is prettier than what is being build today.
- pixl97 3y ago
  And how much would that same house cost to build now? Again, this is survivorship bias at best.
  - fuy 3y ago
    Are you saying medieval Germany was richer than present-day Germany or USA? That's of course not true. And it's also not clear why you call it a survivorship bias - these villages were probably above-the-median in their days, but it's not some singular building like Pyramids that is not representative of overall building of that era/territory. It was just how the houses were built there and then.
- loglog 3y ago
  An average pre-WW2 house in a German village may be prettier than an average house from the 1950s, but certainly not than an average house being built today. Your perception is presumably clouded by the touristy "villages", which in fact have been at least locally important towns at some point in the past.
  - kiney 3y ago

ebiester 3y ago

We underestimate the pressure the world has been under in the last century. In 1950, we had about 2.5 billion people. Today, we have 8 billion. We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people who all expected to have a greater standard of living with electricity and living space; something had to give. We had to be more parsimonious with the materials at our disposal.

hollerith 3y ago
"We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people" is irrelevant to a discussion of one city in Spain that did not grow quickly: Spain has its own architects that haven't been influenced much by architects in countries like Nigeria and India where the population grew very fast.
- pas 3y ago
  Population of Barcelona grew from 500K to more than 1.7M in 70 years.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    OK (that is much faster growth than Spain as a whole) but the 5.5 billion new people is still irrelevant.
    - superturkey650 3y ago
      It’s not irrelevant as a ratio. 2.5 billion to 8 billion is very comparable to 500k to 1.7 million. The population tripled in 70 years and, in the current times, you also have to deal with all the existing architecture and infrastructure in the city that wasn’t built for anywhere near that population level.
pixl97 3y ago
People really don't understand how big the 'boomers' generation really was. Populations exploded in the post war era and with the rapid rise in technology people were disinterested in doing things in the way of the past. In the US at least there was a mass migration over the country and a massive need for housing that could be quickly built. Later this rapid expansion of 'sameness' would be captured in popular media in songs like "Little Boxes".

Gimpei 3y ago

Le Courbousier is what happened. He actually wanted to demolish Paris and put up a huge office park. But I love modern architecture. Try going to the Salk institute or even the Marin County Civic Center. It’s pretty mystical.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Try going to Palma, Salk institute looks like a depressive lifeless concrete mess OCD creation. https://www.spain.info/en/destination/palma/ https://www.spain.info/en/destination/palma/
- bmicraft 3y ago
  It really does look depressing, even in the best photos
- coryrc 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biological_Studies#/media/File%3A2019_Salk_Institute_north_building_from_east.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biologica... is a picture of the named building. Your link, for me, puts up a beautiful (sandstone?) cathedral.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    We have very different minds ;). I see why you like it, it's interesting in a desert clean kind of way. But it's not a loving livable place. I have a hard time believing most people will express the same kind of feeling of inspiration they have walking on the old cobblestone streets of for instance France or Italy. Or take a random Amsterdam outskirt, not famous at all, but lovely: https://www.ehr.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/71011393_5.jpg https://www.ehr.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/71011393_5.jpg
    - coryrc 3y ago
      Well, different climates have different building requirements and materials. Plus, a cathedral isn't meant for living in. I think you'd find that feeling walking the old market streets, covered by cloths to block most of the sun, bees buzzing around the honey vendor, people bustling by. I can't find the perfect picture, but https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M-g876LtXFs/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M-g876LtXFs/maxresdefault.jpg isn't bad. That one's a little more tourist-focused and lacking in crowds than the exact street I'm remembering.

dbrgn 3y ago

> It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood. Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;) A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.

audunw 3y ago

What happened is that a vast quantity of people moved into and around the cities. We also have more strict building codes that take into account light, air quality, longevity, energy effiency etc. You’re looking at an old city built for a relatively small elite over many hundreds of years, and you’re surprised why cities built for many millions of people over a few decade look a bit basic in comparison? I came across some pre-WW2 photographs of a European city I know, of the more poor districts that don’t often get photographed. You think they looked nice? A modern apartment building looks much better than those cheap wooden shacks and lasts 100 times longer. I think there’s hope in the long term. My grandmas apartment building was built quickly and cheaply and looked like trash when I was a child. It has since been renovated with a nicer brick facade. Could be better, but it’s a step in the right direction. Give it a hundred years and compounding refurbishment and survivorship bias will make most cities look great.

ido 3y ago
I just came back from San Francisco and plenty of post WW2 buildings there (mostly high rises) look nice.
- __loam 3y ago
  And we're also facing a severe housing shortage.
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    Do the two have to be mutually exclusive? Are crappy architecture and plenty of housing or interesting architecture and a housing shortage our only options?
    - __loam 3y ago
      Obviously not but we shouldn't slow down development over some boring looking buildings.
__loam 3y ago

BurningFrog 3y ago

Buildings used to be made by rich people or institutions who built what they wanted. Now it's controlled by bureaucrats and regulations.

azulster 3y ago
old buildings used to also be death traps, we only know of the survivors, but lots of old construction would burn down, collapse in a minor earthquake, or rot from water. we only have the survivors to admire now

reddog 3y ago

You might enjoy the Tom Wolfe book, From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tries to explain the observations you make. Very lively, funny writing and you know he is on the right track because he was universally panned by modern architects.

azulster 3y ago

"modern architecture" is a following the same pricniples of most architecture, engineer it to be strong enough, for as cheap as possible, if you are very very lucky somebody may be willing to pay extra to make it look good. usually the church was more than willing to pay extra for beauty, but the average apartment building or urban mixed-use building built in the last few decades is likely focused on being affordable and efficient.

throw0101b 3y ago

> Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture. To a certain extent: economics. Beauty generally does not show up on a spreadsheet, and when it does it often adds cost. Glass costs less than steel, concrete, or stone, so it's lower CapEx to have glass towers. (Of course glass sucks as a thermal insulator, so your OpEx for heating/cooling may be higher.)

bobthepanda 3y ago
Glass is also not heavy, which is very important. (At least, relative to steel and brick.) The modern glass curtain wall is popular because it is not load bearing and costs very little extra to hold up. High-rise steel frame was very expensive, and high-rise masonry basically impossible, because the frames also had to bear the weight of their own upper floors. The structural part of a modern skyscraper is basically floors cantilevering off a small concrete core, and the glass wall simply hangs off the cantilever.

rsynnott 3y ago

I used to work in a Georgian building. I'll take the ugly 70s concrete block I work in nowadays any day. It's _extremely_ difficult to adapt a lot of these old forms to functional, comfortable housing and offices. There are exceptions, but practicality is a big part of the change. You're also seeing a certain amount of survivor bias in many cities; the old buildings that are still around are the ones that someone thought it would be worthwhile to keep around.

distances 3y ago
We don't have to go that far back in time, European cities have loads of beautiful buildings still from early 1900s. For example whole neighborhoods of Jugendstil apartment buildings that mainly housed working class people moving to cities. New construction in these same neighborhoods simply do not match the beauty of the existing housing stock. And early 1900s housing is usually quite nice if it's been at least slightly renovated (double glazing etc).
- trgn 3y ago
  The schism was modernism, a mental breakdown in the west after the world wars. What was easy, convenient, efficient from a machine perspective, therefore was wholesome, aspirational, valuable from a human perspective. Other explanations, survivor bias, population boom, ... are fundamentally wrong because even though they may have ab after the fact rationalization, they were not the instincts that animated this revolution. We're turning out of it, finally, luckily.
  - distances 3y ago
    One of the major points, afaik, is that these beautiful buildings require a lot more manual work. It used to be that materials were expensive and labor cheap, but that equation reversed, and skilled labor required for such a nice facade now comes with a heavy price. But I have no expertise in construction nor history so can't say if that's true.
    - 3y ago

javier_e06 3y ago

I agree. Kids watch Harry Potter and dream about Hogwarts and their school pretty much looks like a prison without the barbwire and guard towers. They don't play in the woods but on a asphalt blacktop or a square of grass. Sad.

LordDragonfang 3y ago

Scott Alexander has written a good blog post about the numerous things that could be contributing to this result: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria

Lance_ET_Compte 3y ago

The desire of people to drive (and park) their personal automobiles everywhere has killed cities. Density is forced to be lower.

Affric 3y ago

Do you mean “Modernist”? Art Nouveau, Gaudí’s dialect being Modernisme, was a movement which aimed to democratise and modernise architecture and design compared to previous periods.

levocardia 3y ago

Swaminarayan Akshardham in New Jersey is new and beautiful. Probably noteworthy that it is also a religious building. I think ugly modern buildings are a problem of aesthetics and ambition, not one of finances or possibility. Old buildings on American college campuses are wonderful; new ones are dreadful yet certainly much more expensive, even inflation-adjusted.

selimthegrim 3y ago
Did they ever settle up and give the back pay to the indentured servants they essentially imported?

maxglute 3y ago

Mass urbanization, raising wages, labour saving construction methods and mass produced materials. I think dutch modern architecture does an alright blending blending constraints and modernism. Sagrada Familia is not a model for mass development. That said, I do love me some blood equity monumentality. It would be "neat" importing 10,000 cheap labourers, train them up on traditional masonery techiques and build some more monuments.

viewtransform 3y ago

This sky garden building in Shanghai looks sci-fi https://youtu.be/pzjpK2BYGCQ?t=66 https://youtu.be/pzjpK2BYGCQ?t=66