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

by lukeify 11d 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 11d 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 11d ago
  When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
  - AlexandrB 11d 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 10d 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 10d 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 11d 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 10d ago
        Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
  - kelseyfrog 11d ago
    Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
  - Nursie 10d ago
    Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
    - rightnutwingjob 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 9d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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.
      - 10d ago
bluegatty 10d ago
Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored

by lukeify 11d 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 11d 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 11d ago
When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
- AlexandrB 11d 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 10d 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 10d 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 11d 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 10d ago
      Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
- kelseyfrog 11d ago
  Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
- Nursie 10d ago
  Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
  - rightnutwingjob 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 9d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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.
    - 10d ago

bluegatty 10d ago

Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored