4 ms·

Perhaps there’s a difference between what people prefer looking at and what’s actually nicer to inhabit? Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the bu

Perhaps there’s a difference between what people prefer looking at and what’s actually nicer to inhabit? Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. It’s like if you asked someone to judge a phone based on a photo. Yes there’s some aesthetic judgement but it matters more if the phone is usable. I know that personally I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower. But I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.

kccqzy 18d ago
Prewar is such a big range. The surviving tenement-style apartment homes on the Lower East Side are certainly less beautiful than say The Dakota on the Upper West Side.
lukeify 18d ago
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph With modern materials and structural design you can absolutely have both.
- kelseyfrog 18d ago
  You would have to convince the design community that form can follow things other than function. Until form is no longer synonymous with function, design will eschew ornamentation.
  - rbanffy 18d ago
    When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
    - AlexandrB 18d ago
      Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.
      - bigbuppo 18d ago
        Or just following the bandwagon. Here's looking at you hamburger menu... the thing that 83% of people don't even realize is a thing that can be clicked on.
        rightnutwingjob 18d ago
        I’ve recently come across a number of websites where the hamburger menu has been eschewed and what is obviously a drop down menu placed at the centre of the page immediately below the page title graphic. I’m not sure if it’s a particular framework or whatever, I’m just a computer user. The sites where I’ve seen it have predominantly been for business whose primary activities are not-online. It’s refreshing.
      - giancarlostoro 18d ago
        My kingdom to have RAD developer tools be the norm again. I don't want yet another website as an app, or website bundled in a Chrome fork as an app. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources in the 2000s...
        adrianN 18d ago
        Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
    - kelseyfrog 18d ago
      Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
    - Nursie 18d ago
      Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
      - rightnutwingjob 18d ago
        Words? What are words? We just don’t know. If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts, or whatever it was that preceded the very idea of this thing here is not that thing over there. I guess that’s why design school graduates had to invent the concept of User Experience in an effort to regress the pursuit of functionality and basic design-consistency to the undifferentiated mess of Un-usability minima we seem to be stuck in.
        Nursie 18d ago
        > If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts I'm not sure my comment was meant to be that deep, I was suggesting that beauty or at least pleasantness be added to the list of things which come under the category of "function" when buildings are being designed. Maximising utility without considering that people will be conducting their lives there, or the effects design choices can have on the feel of a place beyond pure utilitarianism, seems inadequate.
        SAI_Peregrinus 17d ago
        Beauty has a function in improving the emotional state of people observing it. Ignoring this function in favor of all other functions can result in getting trapped in a suboptimal local maximum, where a more beautiful design could sacrifice only slightly in other domains and have a greater overall utility.
        afiori 16d ago
        IMO one of the main insight in the maxim is the importance to have the form communicate the function to the user.
    - alberto-m 18d ago
      “Form follows function” is attributed to Louis Sullivan, author of very beautiful buildings. Whatever excuse modernist architects have for inflicting misery upon us laymen, this principle is not one of them.
      - kelseyfrog 17d ago
        There are countless cases of a leader/authority summarizing their thought into an aphorism and followers/practitioners completely misinterpreting it with disasterous results. We find this pattern across time and domains from religion to Agile development. If anything, we're biased toward this social anti-pattern and should deeply consider it likely before makeing a conclusion.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 17d ago
      Aesthetics have a function though, so ignoring them and focusing on all other functions when creating the form can decrease the total functionality.
  - nl 18d ago
    Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry would like a word. Taste is subjective, but is there really a more beautiful building in the world than the Heydar Aliyev Center?
    - Nursie 18d ago
      It's certainly striking and interesting, but "more beautiful" is going to be subjective and is up against some pretty tough competition. I don't know about you, but I'd certainly put the Taj Mahal ahead of that, as well as any number of gothic Cathedrals.
    - kelseyfrog 18d ago
      The article literally talks about polling people. The disparity between lay people and architects is the point of the piece. Architectural taste doesn't align with the taste of everyone else. Why should that be the case? Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy?
      - bigstrat2003 18d ago
        > Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy? In many fields (architecture, art, cooking all come to mind) there seems to be an outright resistance to doing things that people actually enjoy. My hypothesis is that practitioners in those fields have spent so much time studying them, they have become bored of the "normal" stuff which people actually enjoy. In an effort to satisfy themselves, they optimize for novelty, either not knowing or not caring that doing so is making their work something which can only really be appreciated by people as desperate for novelty and steeped in the field as they are. With food at least it isn't so bad, because there are a ton of not pretentious restaurants you can go to enjoy. Nobody can force you to go to the pretentious restaurants run by chefs bored of normal food. But with architecture, a building is something everyone in that city is forced to experience, whether they like it or not. It would be nice if architects were therefore more mindful that they should try to appeal to a broad range of tastes, not just architecture nerds who are bored of what came before.
        18d ago
- bluegatty 18d ago
  Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored
mmooss 18d ago
> I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower There might be some survivorship bias there.
- chanakya 18d ago
  https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the... Not according to this article, which looks into it.
jltsiren 18d ago
Architecture is about optimizing for people inhabiting the city. Cities with detailed human-scale architecture at the lowest few floors are nicer to live in. You can still have a city full of soulless luxury towers, as long as you avoid cheap hostile architecture in places pedestrians can't avoid looking at.
agumonkey 18d ago
It might be subtle but interior and exterior matters. The housing projects (70s, 80s) often had nicer interior design and comfort, but the overall neighborhood felt void, full and worse.
someluccc 18d ago
It just so happens that humans inhabit the outside world too? And that the outside is shared by everybody?
cryptonector 18d ago
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. Entertainment is a non-productive activity. But people need entertainment. People like to live comfortably. But people also like beauty. It's that simple. People do care about the looks of buildings. Aesthetics matters.
- nitwit005 18d ago
  The people outside the building aren't paying rent.
  - cryptonector 18d ago
    But the people in the building go outside too you know. Few like the brutalist style.
  - vineyardmike 18d ago
    People actively spend lots of money to make the outside of their houses look aesthetically pleasing. They also do this with cars, clothes, wives, phones, and their own faces.
  - watwut 17d ago
    I know how the building I live in looks like. I am also aware of my own hairstyle and cloth and backpack and ...
scythe 18d ago
This is a defense of glass, specifically, and not a class of architecture in general. And "traditional" architecture is not a properly descriptive term; it tells us where the architecture came from, not what it is. Architecture is basically a creative process, and we can't handwave away the complexity by using temporal language like "traditional" and "modern". The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.
SoftTalker 18d ago
Living in a tower will always be soulless, IMO. If an able bodied person needs an elevator to get in and out of their house, it's game over.
in_absentia 18d ago
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building For the most part, it's about optimizing construction cost. Everything else is secondary. The reason you don't see ornate stonework is mostly that skilled labor is a lot more expensive today than it was a century ago. Even if you want to spend 50% more to make an architectural statement, you still do it with prefabricated steel and glass.
- NewsaHackO 18d ago
  This is still in line with his point; presumably, people who live in the building and pay rent will want construction cost to be as low as possible as it will help reduce the rent needed for a builder to break even. An ornate stonework is great for someone looking at it, but if it requires rent to be raised by 100 dollar a month for a tenant, most would rather it not be there.
Nursie 18d ago
Part of inhabiting somewhere is how nice it is to look at. And it's is a false dichotomy, both can be done. > I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures. Now imagine if it had looked good as well! It could have really lit up the area of the city it was in.
chr15m 18d ago
Why not both?
rob74 18d ago
Well, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, does it? An old building doesn't have to be run down, and a new one can be both expensive and shoddily built.
jillesvangurp 18d ago
It's not that hard to bring old buildings (altbau in German) up to modern standards via renovation. Here in Berlin, there are lots of buildings from early last century that are very desirable property not just because of their exterior but because of their interiors. You get modern insulation, wiring, bathrooms, kitchens, etc. And high ceilings, wooden floors. When I moved here 18 years ago, there were still a lot of these buildings in their original state with no insulation, coal burners for heating, etc. You could smell the coal in the winter. All that has been renovated at this point. The communists actually attempted to cover up the nice facades by just plastering over it as that was considered decadent. A lot of that property has been restored to its original state at this point. A challenge with some old construction is that it was (at the time) cheap construction. Which means that after a century there can be lots of structural issues, mold, leaky roofs, problems with foundations, etc. But you should compare that to modern cheap construction, which isn't all that great either and doesn't age well. A lot of West Berlin post war construction is particularly grim and ugly because it was obviously built on the cheap with little or no attention to how things looked. Surviving, pre-war construction is a lot nicer. Especially if somebody invests in fixing that up. You can see the contrast throughout the city because heavy bombing left a lot of gaps that were later filled in with some typically very bland and sometimes very ugly and now very dated construction. It seems some architects had some weird notions of modern. Especially some seventies and eighties architecture is a combination of cheap and very ugly. Cheap concrete does not age well. And painting it some weird shade of yellow or purple doesn't make it better. More recent construction is a lot less offensive, thankfully. The DDR mostly didn't bother with filling in the gaps and as a result, a lot of recent construction has been addressing that using more premium materials and architects that actually know what they are doing.
Al-Khwarizmi 18d ago
I would argue that the inner spaces are also nicer in traditional architecture. Taller ceilings where those of us who are tall can walk below a hanging lamp without hitting anything, or just stretch, taller windows that let more light in, etc. Obviously no one likes having a small or no elevator, or poor insulation, but that's related to technological progress, not aesthetic trends. If we kept building in the traditional styles, we would obviously have incorporated this anyway. In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings (where the scale of facades, windows, etc. is old, but the floor slabs, insulation, elevator, etc. are brand new) are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings.
- spwa4 18d ago
  Yep. Simple, ~20m2-30m2 square boxes, densily packed (with ideally thick walls) is by far the easiest kind of space to use. Then maybe one 50m2 for having a big living room. > In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings ... are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings. Isn't that because of location? These places tend to be right next to the rail/bus station in the middle of the city.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 18d ago
    No, I mean controlling for location. A specific example. The very same building developer completed these two buildings and offered the flats for sale more or less simultaneously, in the second half of last year IIRC. Building 1. Renovated early 20th century building (originally built in 1923). Google Maps coordinates (the renovation is not yet visible in Google Maps): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3621801,-8.4070271,11a,75y,251.11h,107.56t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sSwUCJXrtn9c-tqWTSI7Dcw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-17.561135027733428%26panoid%3DSwUCJXrtn9c-tqWTSI7Dcw%26yaw%3D251.10712789308934!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3621801,-8.4070271,11a,75y,2... Photos of the renovated building: https://ammapromocion.com/plaza-de-vigo/ https://ammapromocion.com/plaza-de-vigo/ Flats have 117 useful sqm and the middle flats were being offered at between 1.1M-1.2M €, and sold fast (you can still buy the 1st floor flat for 950K. But it's a 1st floor with a bar directly below, which reduces its value rather sharply. This is Spain, bars are noisy and open until late). Building 2. Newly built. Google Maps coordinates (again, finished building not visible yet in Google Maps): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3599669,-8.4061383,23a,75y,225.22h,129.96t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s4Xhw4YZdMZ0PmrJ81_6OPQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-39.95721284285423%26panoid%3D4Xhw4YZdMZ0PmrJ81_6OPQ%26yaw%3D225.2204453226884!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3599669,-8.4061383,23a,75y,2... Photos of the finished building: https://ammapromocion.com/promocion-juan-florez/ https://ammapromocion.com/promocion-juan-florez/ Flats are different sizes, but some are only slightly smaller than in the other building - around 110 useful sqm. They were being offered for around 700K. They also sold fast. The distance between both buildings according to Google Maps is 290 m, a 4-minute walk, so they are basically in the same neighborhood. You can argue that the new one is in a worse location because it has more traffic and the street is uglier, and it's true (although the other is in an area with many bars, so I think not everyone would prefer its location). Anyway, that kind of difference could be worth at most 50K in this market, being generous - and most likely more than fully offset by fact that the newly built flats include garage while the renovated ones don't have it! Anyhow, it definitely doesn't explain a 400K+ price difference. It's just one concrete example, but I've seen many (I was recently looking for flats... finally I settled from one from the 1940s, building not renovated :)). Of course I don't know the trends outside my city, but at least here, fully renovated old buildings are the apex of the housing market.
mrweasel 18d ago
This is probably entirely fixable, but I don't do particularly well in modern homes. When we looked for a house, we specifically didn't want one built after 2000 (or there about). The indoor climate in many modern homes, and hotels as well, triggers something. Maybe it's allergies, maybe I don't do well in dry, recycled air, I don't know, but living in a newly built house would mean having a constant running nose and red eyes. From a energy conservation point of view I get it, but something in my also tells me that pressure testing houses is a bit off. I don't think I'm meant to live in an airtight box with an HVAC system.
keiferski 18d ago
Architecture built today is mostly optimizing for the developers’ budget and the local regulations.
- modo_mario 18d ago
  Often not even that. There's loads of examples of ornamental classical construction being cheaper or the same price than modernist equivalent with even smaller floorspace and that's without economies of scale for a lot of that ornamentation. Hell the Sears Roebuck houses someone else mentioned had a lot more ornamentation than your average new built
deterministic 16d ago
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building Not my experience at all. Quite the opposite. I have seen so many "designer buildings" that looked beautiful in pictures but were a nightmare for the people working there.

kccqzy 18d ago

Prewar is such a big range. The surviving tenement-style apartment homes on the Lower East Side are certainly less beautiful than say The Dakota on the Upper West Side.

lukeify 18d ago

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph With modern materials and structural design you can absolutely have both.

kelseyfrog 18d ago
You would have to convince the design community that form can follow things other than function. Until form is no longer synonymous with function, design will eschew ornamentation.
- rbanffy 18d ago
  When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
  - AlexandrB 18d ago
    Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.
    - bigbuppo 18d ago
      Or just following the bandwagon. Here's looking at you hamburger menu... the thing that 83% of people don't even realize is a thing that can be clicked on.
      - rightnutwingjob 18d ago
        I’ve recently come across a number of websites where the hamburger menu has been eschewed and what is obviously a drop down menu placed at the centre of the page immediately below the page title graphic. I’m not sure if it’s a particular framework or whatever, I’m just a computer user. The sites where I’ve seen it have predominantly been for business whose primary activities are not-online. It’s refreshing.
    - giancarlostoro 18d ago
      My kingdom to have RAD developer tools be the norm again. I don't want yet another website as an app, or website bundled in a Chrome fork as an app. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources in the 2000s...
      - adrianN 18d ago
        Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
  - kelseyfrog 18d ago
    Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
  - Nursie 18d ago
    Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
    - rightnutwingjob 18d ago
      Words? What are words? We just don’t know. If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts, or whatever it was that preceded the very idea of this thing here is not that thing over there. I guess that’s why design school graduates had to invent the concept of User Experience in an effort to regress the pursuit of functionality and basic design-consistency to the undifferentiated mess of Un-usability minima we seem to be stuck in.
      - Nursie 18d ago
        > If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts I'm not sure my comment was meant to be that deep, I was suggesting that beauty or at least pleasantness be added to the list of things which come under the category of "function" when buildings are being designed. Maximising utility without considering that people will be conducting their lives there, or the effects design choices can have on the feel of a place beyond pure utilitarianism, seems inadequate.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 17d ago
        Beauty has a function in improving the emotional state of people observing it. Ignoring this function in favor of all other functions can result in getting trapped in a suboptimal local maximum, where a more beautiful design could sacrifice only slightly in other domains and have a greater overall utility.
      - afiori 16d ago
        IMO one of the main insight in the maxim is the importance to have the form communicate the function to the user.
  - alberto-m 18d ago
    “Form follows function” is attributed to Louis Sullivan, author of very beautiful buildings. Whatever excuse modernist architects have for inflicting misery upon us laymen, this principle is not one of them.
    - kelseyfrog 17d ago
      There are countless cases of a leader/authority summarizing their thought into an aphorism and followers/practitioners completely misinterpreting it with disasterous results. We find this pattern across time and domains from religion to Agile development. If anything, we're biased toward this social anti-pattern and should deeply consider it likely before makeing a conclusion.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 17d ago
    Aesthetics have a function though, so ignoring them and focusing on all other functions when creating the form can decrease the total functionality.
- nl 18d ago
  Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry would like a word. Taste is subjective, but is there really a more beautiful building in the world than the Heydar Aliyev Center?
  - Nursie 18d ago
    It's certainly striking and interesting, but "more beautiful" is going to be subjective and is up against some pretty tough competition. I don't know about you, but I'd certainly put the Taj Mahal ahead of that, as well as any number of gothic Cathedrals.
  - kelseyfrog 18d ago
    The article literally talks about polling people. The disparity between lay people and architects is the point of the piece. Architectural taste doesn't align with the taste of everyone else. Why should that be the case? Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy?
    - bigstrat2003 18d ago
      > Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy? In many fields (architecture, art, cooking all come to mind) there seems to be an outright resistance to doing things that people actually enjoy. My hypothesis is that practitioners in those fields have spent so much time studying them, they have become bored of the "normal" stuff which people actually enjoy. In an effort to satisfy themselves, they optimize for novelty, either not knowing or not caring that doing so is making their work something which can only really be appreciated by people as desperate for novelty and steeped in the field as they are. With food at least it isn't so bad, because there are a ton of not pretentious restaurants you can go to enjoy. Nobody can force you to go to the pretentious restaurants run by chefs bored of normal food. But with architecture, a building is something everyone in that city is forced to experience, whether they like it or not. It would be nice if architects were therefore more mindful that they should try to appeal to a broad range of tastes, not just architecture nerds who are bored of what came before.
      - 18d ago
bluegatty 18d ago
Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored

mmooss 18d ago

> I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower There might be some survivorship bias there.

chanakya 18d ago
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the... Not according to this article, which looks into it.

jltsiren 18d ago

Architecture is about optimizing for people inhabiting the city. Cities with detailed human-scale architecture at the lowest few floors are nicer to live in. You can still have a city full of soulless luxury towers, as long as you avoid cheap hostile architecture in places pedestrians can't avoid looking at.

agumonkey 18d ago

It might be subtle but interior and exterior matters. The housing projects (70s, 80s) often had nicer interior design and comfort, but the overall neighborhood felt void, full and worse.

someluccc 18d ago

It just so happens that humans inhabit the outside world too? And that the outside is shared by everybody?

cryptonector 18d ago

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. Entertainment is a non-productive activity. But people need entertainment. People like to live comfortably. But people also like beauty. It's that simple. People do care about the looks of buildings. Aesthetics matters.

nitwit005 18d ago
The people outside the building aren't paying rent.
- cryptonector 18d ago
  But the people in the building go outside too you know. Few like the brutalist style.
- vineyardmike 18d ago
  People actively spend lots of money to make the outside of their houses look aesthetically pleasing. They also do this with cars, clothes, wives, phones, and their own faces.
- watwut 17d ago
  I know how the building I live in looks like. I am also aware of my own hairstyle and cloth and backpack and ...

scythe 18d ago

This is a defense of glass, specifically, and not a class of architecture in general. And "traditional" architecture is not a properly descriptive term; it tells us where the architecture came from, not what it is. Architecture is basically a creative process, and we can't handwave away the complexity by using temporal language like "traditional" and "modern". The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.

SoftTalker 18d ago

Living in a tower will always be soulless, IMO. If an able bodied person needs an elevator to get in and out of their house, it's game over.

in_absentia 18d ago

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building For the most part, it's about optimizing construction cost. Everything else is secondary. The reason you don't see ornate stonework is mostly that skilled labor is a lot more expensive today than it was a century ago. Even if you want to spend 50% more to make an architectural statement, you still do it with prefabricated steel and glass.

NewsaHackO 18d ago
This is still in line with his point; presumably, people who live in the building and pay rent will want construction cost to be as low as possible as it will help reduce the rent needed for a builder to break even. An ornate stonework is great for someone looking at it, but if it requires rent to be raised by 100 dollar a month for a tenant, most would rather it not be there.

Nursie 18d ago

Part of inhabiting somewhere is how nice it is to look at. And it's is a false dichotomy, both can be done. > I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures. Now imagine if it had looked good as well! It could have really lit up the area of the city it was in.

chr15m 18d ago

Why not both?

rob74 18d ago

Well, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, does it? An old building doesn't have to be run down, and a new one can be both expensive and shoddily built.

jillesvangurp 18d ago

It's not that hard to bring old buildings (altbau in German) up to modern standards via renovation. Here in Berlin, there are lots of buildings from early last century that are very desirable property not just because of their exterior but because of their interiors. You get modern insulation, wiring, bathrooms, kitchens, etc. And high ceilings, wooden floors. When I moved here 18 years ago, there were still a lot of these buildings in their original state with no insulation, coal burners for heating, etc. You could smell the coal in the winter. All that has been renovated at this point. The communists actually attempted to cover up the nice facades by just plastering over it as that was considered decadent. A lot of that property has been restored to its original state at this point. A challenge with some old construction is that it was (at the time) cheap construction. Which means that after a century there can be lots of structural issues, mold, leaky roofs, problems with foundations, etc. But you should compare that to modern cheap construction, which isn't all that great either and doesn't age well. A lot of West Berlin post war construction is particularly grim and ugly because it was obviously built on the cheap with little or no attention to how things looked. Surviving, pre-war construction is a lot nicer. Especially if somebody invests in fixing that up. You can see the contrast throughout the city because heavy bombing left a lot of gaps that were later filled in with some typically very bland and sometimes very ugly and now very dated construction. It seems some architects had some weird notions of modern. Especially some seventies and eighties architecture is a combination of cheap and very ugly. Cheap concrete does not age well. And painting it some weird shade of yellow or purple doesn't make it better. More recent construction is a lot less offensive, thankfully. The DDR mostly didn't bother with filling in the gaps and as a result, a lot of recent construction has been addressing that using more premium materials and architects that actually know what they are doing.

Al-Khwarizmi 18d ago

I would argue that the inner spaces are also nicer in traditional architecture. Taller ceilings where those of us who are tall can walk below a hanging lamp without hitting anything, or just stretch, taller windows that let more light in, etc. Obviously no one likes having a small or no elevator, or poor insulation, but that's related to technological progress, not aesthetic trends. If we kept building in the traditional styles, we would obviously have incorporated this anyway. In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings (where the scale of facades, windows, etc. is old, but the floor slabs, insulation, elevator, etc. are brand new) are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings.

spwa4 18d ago
Yep. Simple, ~20m2-30m2 square boxes, densily packed (with ideally thick walls) is by far the easiest kind of space to use. Then maybe one 50m2 for having a big living room. > In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings ... are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings. Isn't that because of location? These places tend to be right next to the rail/bus station in the middle of the city.
- Al-Khwarizmi 18d ago
  No, I mean controlling for location. A specific example. The very same building developer completed these two buildings and offered the flats for sale more or less simultaneously, in the second half of last year IIRC. Building 1. Renovated early 20th century building (originally built in 1923). Google Maps coordinates (the renovation is not yet visible in Google Maps): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3621801,-8.4070271,11a,75y,251.11h,107.56t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sSwUCJXrtn9c-tqWTSI7Dcw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-17.561135027733428%26panoid%3DSwUCJXrtn9c-tqWTSI7Dcw%26yaw%3D251.10712789308934!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3621801,-8.4070271,11a,75y,2... Photos of the renovated building: https://ammapromocion.com/plaza-de-vigo/ https://ammapromocion.com/plaza-de-vigo/ Flats have 117 useful sqm and the middle flats were being offered at between 1.1M-1.2M €, and sold fast (you can still buy the 1st floor flat for 950K. But it's a 1st floor with a bar directly below, which reduces its value rather sharply. This is Spain, bars are noisy and open until late). Building 2. Newly built. Google Maps coordinates (again, finished building not visible yet in Google Maps): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3599669,-8.4061383,23a,75y,225.22h,129.96t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s4Xhw4YZdMZ0PmrJ81_6OPQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-39.95721284285423%26panoid%3D4Xhw4YZdMZ0PmrJ81_6OPQ%26yaw%3D225.2204453226884!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3599669,-8.4061383,23a,75y,2... Photos of the finished building: https://ammapromocion.com/promocion-juan-florez/ https://ammapromocion.com/promocion-juan-florez/ Flats are different sizes, but some are only slightly smaller than in the other building - around 110 useful sqm. They were being offered for around 700K. They also sold fast. The distance between both buildings according to Google Maps is 290 m, a 4-minute walk, so they are basically in the same neighborhood. You can argue that the new one is in a worse location because it has more traffic and the street is uglier, and it's true (although the other is in an area with many bars, so I think not everyone would prefer its location). Anyway, that kind of difference could be worth at most 50K in this market, being generous - and most likely more than fully offset by fact that the newly built flats include garage while the renovated ones don't have it! Anyhow, it definitely doesn't explain a 400K+ price difference. It's just one concrete example, but I've seen many (I was recently looking for flats... finally I settled from one from the 1940s, building not renovated :)). Of course I don't know the trends outside my city, but at least here, fully renovated old buildings are the apex of the housing market.

mrweasel 18d ago

This is probably entirely fixable, but I don't do particularly well in modern homes. When we looked for a house, we specifically didn't want one built after 2000 (or there about). The indoor climate in many modern homes, and hotels as well, triggers something. Maybe it's allergies, maybe I don't do well in dry, recycled air, I don't know, but living in a newly built house would mean having a constant running nose and red eyes. From a energy conservation point of view I get it, but something in my also tells me that pressure testing houses is a bit off. I don't think I'm meant to live in an airtight box with an HVAC system.

keiferski 18d ago

Architecture built today is mostly optimizing for the developers’ budget and the local regulations.

modo_mario 18d ago
Often not even that. There's loads of examples of ornamental classical construction being cheaper or the same price than modernist equivalent with even smaller floorspace and that's without economies of scale for a lot of that ornamentation. Hell the Sears Roebuck houses someone else mentioned had a lot more ornamentation than your average new built

deterministic 16d ago

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building Not my experience at all. Quite the opposite. I have seen so many "designer buildings" that looked beautiful in pictures but were a nightmare for the people working there.