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.
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...
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Is that a serious question? Many people would consider Potala palace, the Milan Duomo, Neuschwanstein, etc more beautiful than anything designed by Zaha Hadid and Gehry. Myself included, even as someone who likes their work. Limiting ourselves only to the category of modern event centers, I'd still put the Harbin Grand Theater ahead of it.
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?
> 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.
No one will care if you build 1000th replica of a nice building. It's just not interesting to anyone and actually becomes boring very fast. People may live in it but no one will come from afar to visit it because of its beauty. It will become another one in a row of the same.
If you build a striking, exceptional building, it can become a big success (like Gehry's in Bilbao which is a success story for the whole city), so people who commission buildings sometimes select for that.
And also there is a sizable group of people who actually enjoy interesting buildings, like people who enjoy haute couture or haute cuisine etc., so it's not like there is no market for that.
There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
It becomes change and following avant garde for the sake of it and a group of people trying to be different in all the same boring ways.
> There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
Is Palladio not taught? Christopher Alexander (of A Pattern Language)? The classical order of columns?
Brent Hull (for one) has done a whole bunch of stuff with his restoration work on trying to teach people about proper proportion:
that one looks too Calatrava-ish (specifically Oceanografic), I'd prefer the Dongdaemun Design Plaza if we are talking Zaha Hadid - especially once you see it in person.
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.
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.
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,2...
Photos of the renovated building: 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).
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.
I've also actually renovated my old place. I did it because I didn't want to rebuild the place entirely (there was no need, it was woven brick, more solid than most bunkers), and because I would have had to agree with the neigbors, which was ... let's politely call it "not guaranteed".
But very quickly it became clear why that was the right decision: building codes. People legislate building codes, but of course they're unwilling to DO anything. So old buildings, built against old building codes, don't have to change, and that means they effectively get to ignore building codes. If I rebuilt the place I would have had to move the house (as in physically move it, just 4 meters, but it's a house, 4 meters might as well be 400 kilometers, you have to rebuild it). I would have to give up at least 40% of the surface area (the "ground surface") AND one of the floors. Net result: the new house would have been about half the living surface of the old one.em.
So obviously the renovated house is worth a lot more than a new house: for starters it's double the size!
It's even self defeating: the isolation of the old house is better. Yes, people legislate modern isolation materials but if the house MUST be a lot smaller there must be a lot more contact area with the cold air, because it wouldn't be built against the neighbor's house anymore and a LOT less thermal mass (thermal mass = free heating, more or less) so you're starting from a very bad starting position.
Here's a thought. Imagine roughly 5% of available apartments are in renovated old buildings. I don't know what the real figure is, doesn't matter I just assume it's significantly lower than newly built apartments.
Now also imagine that 20% of people prefer those old buildings.
Per apartment then, there's 4 times as many interested buyers than per modern apartment, and the buyers of the old apartments are looking at a much slimmer market so they're willing to pay much more for the right one because they're unlikely to see a comparable one soon.
Also I imagine bringing an old building up to modern standards is quite expensive so that also explains some of the price.
I don't really know anything, I just think what I'm writing makes sense.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. It may come as a surprise but it required years of cultural development and education for most people to accept the work of Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production. It's only recently, (with designs like the Ferrari EV for instance) that people are starting to see how limited our aesthetic language has become. Modernism is too cheap to replace so the "beauty" of soulless minimalism will likely endure in the zeitgeist, but it's not a very interesting environment to be in.
I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.
I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.
And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t
The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.
And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?
I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.
The units are basically commodities. Same floor plans same amenities same building about the same rent. True across the country for these sort of newer buildings, only real difference is the pool doesn't close for the season for those in milder climates.
It is designed to be this way for investors more than consumers. Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all. The consumers have no choice really but to be in this market if they want to be sheltered at all. It isn't like you really can exercise free market selection for something necessary like shelter. You have to take what has been made available and you cannot do without.
There is therefore no incentive to make a smart building that is favoring the tenant since this doesn't grow the potential pool of tenants in the area, that pool remains the same size as it was. It is unlike a lot of other markets where having a better product might actually grow the customer base of the product segment overall.
> Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Lot of the finance machine works on standardization, like the are some building techniques, like spray-on insulation that work perfectly fine, but banks wont approve a loan on a building like that because its hard to inspect and repair.
This ironically makes these crappy buildings built to investor standards expensive, since banks will give cheap loans for it, on account of having low maintenance costs.
If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.
My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
> My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was <1k sqft (avg >2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.
Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.
Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.
Unfortunately only custom homes can afford to care about beauty. Developers are building for cheapest possible and letting the long term owners deal with the consequences.
Homes still aren’t really mechanized. I’ve seen attempts but they haven’t worked well yet. Labor and materials are so expensive!
And most new homes are built by one of a few big groups. Oligopoly issues again.
>Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.
>My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
The land is far more expensive now. Plus legal liability insurance costs. And costs of permitting/zoning/bureaucracy is much higher.
You mention the private equity backed builder, but the designs come from the corrupted ivory tower which just invents more and more ridiculous designs (modernism, brutalism, for example) to try to stay fresh. Same in the art world. (Banksy, Warhol, others)
We have not made any progress, and perhaps we don’t need to, when it comes to architecture since World War I. There have been a few projects like La Sagrada Família, but those are exceptionally rare.
Suburban homes. What a disaster and embarrassment to the human race.
What do you think is weird about Banksy? Looks like older pre-modern art to me.
If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too. To me, brutalism hits the same things neoclassicism does but much more organically and better.
Idk. I don't see any cultural or artistic resemblance with Balloon Girl versus say, Luncheon of the Boating Party.
Separately it's always peculiar to me that folks go on to defend some art, but I bet if I went around saying neoclassic art is terrible I'd not get much opposition. I wonder why.
> If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too.
Architecture. In both neoclassicism and brutalism, regardless of intended aim, the effect seems to be one of silublime monumental scale that humbles a person.
Both paintings you cited are very much on the traditional and representative end of the spectrum. None of them seem to be on the more abstract 20th century styles.
> Architecture. In both neoclassicism and brutalism, regardless of intended aim, the effect seems to be one of silublime monumental scale that humbles a person.
Well why would you discard the intention? I think there is more to compare as well than just the ability of the architecture to humble someone. What does the architecture say? Who does it glorify (in these cases)? How difficult is it to make?
You can also say they're similar but one is good and done well (neoclassicism as you mentioned but there are others) and one is done very poorly (brutalism).
Part of how you could argue that is something like number of visitors. Nobody visits brutalist architecture. It's extremely unpopular outside of academic circles or art establishment points of view.
> Both paintings you cited are very much on the traditional and representative end of the spectrum. None of them seem to be on the more abstract 20th century styles.
I have a hard disagreement here but I'm not sure what there is to really talk about.
Intent is not very relevant to the effect it has on people. You can make a building for any reason you want. Modern neoclassicism doesn't glorify any particular person, it may glorify the State or some Institution. Brutalism also doesn't glorify anyone, it isn't usually made by the state for itself either, I do not understand what the point of 'glorifying someone' would be to a general building. If you want to know 'who' a building glorifies someone then answer who CN Tower glorifies, and the Space Needle, and the Empire State Building.
I am neither an academic nor a member of the art establishment. I find neoclassicism nakedly fake in an irritating manner. Brutalism is a more honest and organic execution of what people try to do with neoclassical buildings.
>I have a hard disagreement here but I'm not sure what there is to really talk about.
You were the one who put Bansky among "weird and ridiculous" art movements which is frankly absurd as Bansky does very traditional and representative art. Did you have any trouble recognizing what Girl with a balloon was? It is a very clear and representational style of painting that has absolutely nothing to do with the more abstract art movements of the 20th century. Do you know of Woman with a towel? Do you consider it normal or "weird"? Girl with a balloon is no more "abstract" roughly than girl with a balloon. If you think one is and the other isn't then you have a really absurd and incorrect view.
But you pointed out the intent in your comparison between neoclassicism and brutalism, I didn't.
But to your point about the effect that some building has on people, we have things we can measure about that effect. You can look at number of visitors, or perhaps price on the market.
> You were the one who put Bansky among "weird and ridiculous" art movements which is frankly absurd as Bansky does very traditional and representative art.
Well it's ridiculous (worthy of ridicule) in part because of the poor quality and craftsmanship. It's poor art because it fails to express meaning in a way that, for example, you can clearly see if you are to compare it to Woman with a Towel. There is much more depth. Individual brushstrokes, intent.
Popular and modern art today lacks the ability to evoke meaning and depth in the same way. This is measurable. There's a reason that IKEA sells Andy Warhol prints and not Women with a Towel prints - yet many more visit and covet visiting the great masters. Modern art requires an industry to convince you that it is art and worthy of praise while the others draw people in without needing marketing. One is a faucet of the degradation of modern culture post-World War I/II (which we can rebound from of course) and is easily made and easily reproduced. The other, isn't.
> If you think one is and the other isn't then you have a really absurd and incorrect view.
Bansky is simply not modern art at all. This is not a personal opinion, it is simple objective fact. Banksy is not remotely modern or abstract art. You are absolutely absurd in thinking so. Pop art is representational and not remotely abstract. If he didn't brush it how on earth did you think he painted it? If it turns out it was not done with brushes but was painted with airbrushes it is still a painting. Unless you mean to say airbrushes are not art. There is no "intent" behind individual brushstrokes, its crap you made up, just like you accuse fans of newer art movements to make up meanings. If you disagree, list me each brushstroke, their coordinates and meanings.
Its also absurd to try to compare visitor count for Bansky against a museum piece. People go to a museum because that is the only place they can physically see the painting. Banksy's work is done in public spaces so footfall would be whatever millions traverse it over the years. Unless you can mind read and tell me exactly which of them are and aren't fans of the painting how can you compare numbers of people who like it? You tell me where is the 'poor craftsmanship' in Girl with a balloon. Its more detailed if anything, and you seem to judge art based on how detailed and representative it is. Its as good in execution as Woman with a towel, and roughly on the same level on the spectrum between representational and abstract. It has a clear subject that has been painted with a degree of realism, just like Woman with a towel. You can't explain me the exact reason, because you made up nonsense about certain paintings based just on their age in years.
So now we're arguing that there are objective facts in art? Interesting. You can't simultaneously say that there are no objective facts and then argue with my interpretation of the art which is subjective opinion, just like yours. You're just proving my point here.
Its as objective as it gets in art as eg saying the Space Needle building is not a Roman style building. Banksy clearly does not belong to any 20th century abstract or modern movement at all. Its objectively absurd and wrong to claim so. The only way such a mind bendingly absurd statement can be made is if someone is only looking at the date stamp not the pictures.
Still waiting for the coordinate by coordinate breakdown of brushstrokes.
You still didn't tell me who those buildings glorify by the way. Why didn't you answer that question?
> Why didn't you answer that question? ... Its as objective as it gets in art as eg saying the Space Needle building is not a Roman style building.
Idk I didn't find it important or interesting. Even in your case of the Space Needle one could simply argue it's a continuation of western civilization in which Rome and Athens were the founders and stewards of. Maybe the Space Needle is just a big Egyptian Obelisk that the Romans were so fond of. Who is to say it's not a Roman style building?
> Banksy clearly does not belong to any 20th century abstract or modern movement at all.
I think Banksy is very abstract, the specific nature of whether it's more close to some arbitrarily defined time period isn't all that relevant, plus there's some overlap as styles emerge.
But I would actually argue it's pretty close as an offshoot. Most of the 20th century art movement is the result of the post-war psychosis that many experienced. Girl with a Balloon is very similar, in my view, even if it's slightly different stylistically.
Regardless of what it is, it's very mediocre as far as artwork goes. It lacks attention to detail, and where one may want to ascribe importance and meaning it is done so through a lens of modernism (like brutalism) that is still reeling from bunkers and trenches in World War I/II.
You're focused on the style, but I'm focused on much bigger things. My point anyway was that pretty much everything after around 1950 or so is bad. Whether we call certain styles 20th century or modern or post-modern is important for catalog purposes but ultimately unimportant to me. Civilization in the west stopped trying, and you can see that reflected in this shit art.
You seem to have some memory issues I think. You were the one who brought up the question of who a building glorifies, not me. It was you. You should be able to justify what you yourself said. Why is it suddenly unimportant? If it was unimportant why did you, not me, bring up that question. You clearly must be able to answer those questions.
>I think Banksy is very abstract
Did you have any difficulty knowing what the painting was depicting? Its more detailed than a lot of impressionism that you seem to enjoy. Its clearly not remotely abstract at all. It has absolutely nothing to do with brutalism, brutalism is an architecture movement not a painting movement. This is in not even wrong territory of absurd nonsense. What is the attention to detail you find missing? If you will put any argument, give exact specifics and examples otherwise don't say it. Its more detailed and well executed than Impressionism, and in neither impressionism nor that painting the intent was anyways photographic representation. It is very absurd of you to say because Banksy's style has nothing post 20th century about it at all. The date stamp changes nothing. Civilization is fine. Its not civilization's fault you make up crap in your head about some art periods and refuse to play the game of making up crap about other art movements.
> You were the one who brought up the question of who a building glorifies, not me.
It wasn't a question though, I was just stating a fact. And "who" doesn't have to be a specific person, though it can be. Who can refer to a people, or a culture, or a civilization. "Who did that? The Egyptians did that", for example. There you go, it's justified and still important.
> Did you have any difficulty knowing what the painting was depicting? Its more detailed than a lot of impressionism that you seem to enjoy. Its clearly not remotely abstract at all.
I disagree completely and that is my opinion. You can't argue with my opinion without inviting objective criteria about artwork.
> What is the attention to detail you find missing?
Well partially graffiti-style art is limited by the medium, and as societies degrade we use cheaper and cheaper materials/products and do so with less knowledge until they die out. Look at suburban homes versus surviving residences in the high-end markets in places like London or Paris (there's lots of other cities just those are two obvious ones).
But from just looking at the artwork I think it's lower quality and less thought and attention was put in to it versus other artwork, including your reference point of Woman in a Towel. Girl with a Balloon seems to try to invoke a message about something but that message seems kind of silly and cliche. And then there are just these two colors. Black and red. Boring.
> It is very absurd of you to say because Banksy's style has nothing post 20th century about it at all.
I'm not trying to litigate whether some folks got together and decided that some art should be grouped in some way. That's just their opinion on the grouping, mine is different. I lump the majority of art post-World War II into a single category with the defining feature being a psychotic relationship to humanity driven by post-war psychosis. It's like brutalism. It's built off of bunker designs and fear of humanity.
In that case you should be able to answer the questions for each of the three buildings. Or the house you live in.
Level of detail is very objective. Are you saying degas is more detailed than that bansky piece? How is graffiti limited by the medium? What do you think is not possible to paint on a concrete wall that is possible to do on a plywood or wood panel or cloth?
> Look at suburban homes versus surviving residences in the high-end markets in places like London or Paris (there's lots of other cities just those are two obvious ones).
Show me average houses from the same economic class in your preferred era and in modern times.
>I'm not trying to litigate whether some folks got together and decided that some art should be grouped in some way. That's just their opinion on the grouping, mine is different. I lump the majority of art post-World War II into a single category with the defining feature being a psychotic relationship to humanity driven by post-war psychosis. It's like brutalism. It's built off of bunker designs and fear of humanity.
You are entitled to having insane beliefs of course. And to continue to invent statements without even attempting to give any explanation or example. Such as how a girl and a balloon is "fear of humanity" but a nude of some woman in a shower is not. What was the less detail? Give me specifics. Until you give specifics, you are just making up crap.
> In that case you should be able to answer the questions for each of the three buildings. Or the house you live in.
I can answer any question you have. Just let me know.
> Level of detail is very objective. Are you saying degas is more detailed than that bansky piece? How is graffiti limited by the medium? What do you think is not possible to paint on a concrete wall that is possible to do on a plywood or wood panel or cloth?
You can't get the depth of brushstrokes or color for example.
> Show me average houses from the same economic class in your preferred era and in modern times.
Why would I do that? What would be the point?
> You are entitled to having insane beliefs of course.
Your belief is insane also.
> And to continue to invent statements without even attempting to give any explanation or example. Such as how a girl and a balloon is "fear of humanity" but a nude of some woman in a shower is not. What was the less detail? Give me specifics. Until you give specifics, you are just making up crap.
There's no detail or specifics to provide that you would entertain or accept. So there's no point. It doesn't matter anyway because not only are the technical details subpar, the point of the artwork itself is, in my opinion, stupid.
>I can answer any question you have. Just let me know.
Who or what does (a) the CN Tower, (b) the Space Needle, (c) the Empire State Building, (d) your house glorify?
>You can't get the depth of brushstrokes or color for example.
In what way do you think they can't? Do you know what priming or not was applied to the concrete in his graffitis? And likewise to the wood panels of the artists you admire?
> Why would I do that? What would be the point?
Why shouldn't we compare average houses of like economic classes if you claim one style is so much better?
>There's no detail or specifics to provide that you would entertain or accept. So there's no point. It doesn't matter anyway because not only are the technical details subpar, the point of the artwork itself is, in my opinion, stupid.
Because you can't. You never yet presented a single example, detail or argument in favor of anything you stated other than "Because I feel so!!!".
> Who or what does (a) the CN Tower, (b) the Space Needle, (c) the Empire State Building, (d) your house glorify?
A - CN Tower I'm not sure. It's just tall
B - Space Needle - I'm not sure it's just tall.
C - Empire State Building - meaning there, Empire (it's in the name) business, commerce, American ingenuity, prosperity, and wealth.
D - My house probably doesn't glorify much. Most suburban houses by design I'd say they just glorify the car that's parked in front of the driveway while the front door is hidden. This is a vestige of the psychosis of post-war architecture which hides away things like windows or doors less an intruder easily find the entrance.
> In what way do you think they can't? Do you know what priming or not was applied to the concrete in his graffitis? And likewise to the wood panels of the artists you admire?
Well I just look at it. Look at it up close, look at pictures of it. It's less technically sound and older artists were much more skilled.
> Why shouldn't we compare average houses of like economic classes if you claim one style is so much better?
Why are we comparing the average house instead of the best made houses where folks had the funds to take creative liberty?
> Because you can't. You never yet presented a single example, detail or argument in favor of anything you stated other than "Because I feel so!!!".
I think the colors are poorly done and muted, the outline of the girl is really boring and euro-centric, and the intended message falls short. The medium used (graffiti) is one of the least challenging and limits the ability of the artist to focus on details which require a lot of time and effort to perfect.
Ok so you can no longer make this argument that I haven't provided a single example. It doesn't matter anyway because art is subjective and all opinions on it are equally valid.
Neither being colorful nor precise photographic representation were the point of Impressionism either. Charcoals peaked in the 19th century. Do you think charcoals are not art? If you go by level of detail and realism as your metrics then that Bansky piece is technically superior to the Degas. I would need you to explain in what sense you think it is euro centric as I have no idea how that is applicable here. What do you think was the message in a bunch of picnicers at a table or a naked woman in a bathroom?
> The medium used (graffiti) is one of the least challenging and limits the ability of the artist to focus on details which require a lot of time and effort to perfect.
Again how do you feel concrete admits of less detail than plywood or wood or cloth, which is what most older painters used?
>It doesn't matter anyway because art is subjective and all opinions on it are equally valid.
I am glad we could get down to tacks and admit neither of us are artists or art scholars and both our opinions are equally irrelevant on this topic.
> Neither being colorful nor precise photographic representation were the point of Impressionism either.
I didn't claim that photographic representation was the point. Colorful for the sake of colorful wasn't the point either, but impressionists artists (since that's what we're talking about) utilized color to a far more expert extent and then you can see that in the artwork. This is in part due to the poor medium, and in part due to the inability for the artist to do anything technically worthwhile with light and color.
There's nothing realistic about Balloon Girl for example when compared to Renoir's painting of Two Sisters. It's kind of like a silhouette or something. There really isn't anything there that would separate it from everyday graffiti or something like that.
Here you can see the masterful use of color and very precise paint strokes to illustrate different forms of lightning and how the colors interplay with each other.
The Banksy piece is kind of like, idk how to describe it in comparison without being too offensive. Even the girl's face in the Banksy work looks a little like a girl ogre or like he is a try hard trying to make some political point or something. It's really jarring and weird to look at. When folks are like "omg this is art, it speaks to me" I'm like, did you have an aneurysm?
> I would need you to explain in what sense you think it is euro centric as I have no idea how that is applicable here.
Happy to, the outline of the girl is western. It's not an asian girl, for example. You can clearly see that. The use of a heart balloon is arguably a European interpretation. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing I guess, I do think European art prior to the wars was the best that has been created but others may think differently.
> Again how do you feel concrete admits of less detail than plywood or wood or cloth, which is what most older painters used?
It absorbs paint differently. Can you identify an example where concrete is used paint something such as the Mona Lisa or perhaps something that Renoir created as I mentioned above?
> I am glad we could get down to tacks and admit neither of us are artists or art scholars and both our opinions are equally irrelevant on this topic.
I'm still confused as to why you are asking me to justify my thoughts here. It's just my opinion and if you believe art is subjective you simply have to accept my opinion and that it's just as valid as yours might be. There isn't any possible substance to debate unless you want to also argue there is objective criteria in which we can evaluate art. Is that your position?
We know nothing of any priming or not that had been used by Banksy. Plywood and wood also are not good mediums for paint but many painters primed it with gesso first. Unless you have verified information how the concrete was prepared and how it admits of less possible detail than the other media you like (and list what media you think your favorite paintings were) then its bs to say. And size is its own scale, at the scale of his paintings almost any medium admits of very high detail.
Pre-WW1 had already abandoned representational styles to a much larger extent than Banksy ever did, eg Cubism and Futurism so you are bullshitting. I don't see much difference in detail level between the painting you gave and the Banksy painting. Muted colors is a stylistic choice. You didn't tell me why charcoal is or isn't a valid medium. Charcoal has even less color.
> You didn't tell me why charcoal is or isn't a valid medium. Charcoal has even less color.
I don't have to or care to answer the question?
> and list what media you think your favorite paintings were
I don't have to give you anything other than "no it's not as good". Art is subjective. Balloon Girl is one of the worst pieces of art I've ever seen and anyone off the street could make something that lame and pointless.
> Pre-WW1 had already abandoned representational styles to a much larger extent than Banksy ever did, eg Cubism and Futurism so you are bullshitting.
You can't answer that question because it punctures your stupid and absurd crap. You could easily look up Cubism and Futurism and what era they peaked in even if you didn't know, but you won't because you will have to admit you were spewing bullshit if you did.
You're not counting the people who die of homelessness, or of depression because they seem stuck in a situation where they'll never have reliable housing, or in a car accident on their too-long commute, or of a heart attack because of years of stress related to rising rents, or...
Justice delayed is justice denied, and housing that takes years to build because of stupid NIMBY bullsh*t is just an indirect way for the haves to tell the rest of us to kys.
Modern materials and production methods eliminated the need for ornamentation to prove a craftsman's skill and attention to detail.
I'm thinking of something like a violin. You can't pick up a violin and judge the perfection of the fitting between the wood surfaces that are glued together. If that work isn't perfect, the instrument will eventually fly apart. But you can look at the "scroll" and "bees sting" which are unforgiving of tiny errors. These kinds of features persist to this day due to traditionalism, but have disappeared from most industrial products.
Today, I don't expect an ornamented house to be of any better quality than a plain house.
There's plenty of traditional architecture that's not baroque, and is therefore not very rich in ornamentation. An austere brick home with a tiled roof still wins over a modernist cube house in both form and function, if not cost.
> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy.
I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.
What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.
I actually think this is a big part of nimbyism. People know that whatever is built is going to make the neighborhood uglier because they have no faith in architecture, so they start opposing everything.
The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.
Apple hardware is glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepipeds very similar to the glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepiped skyscrapers that this article is decrying. The main difference is that Apple hardware has rounded corners as a necessary concession to practicality.
But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.
A lot of the sample images shown of ‘traditional’ architecture in this piece are not what you’re talking about - they aren’t ’traditional materials’ or ‘traditional techniques’, they just use choices of exterior cladding and window layouts that are evocative of traditional choices - but they are just as much a soulless product of low cost materials and construction efficiency.
Not the case for all of them (the brick-built viaduct proposal for example looks like it would be a nightmare to build and maintain), but most of the buildings shown, the ‘traditional’ variant just uses less visible steel and glass, in favor of ‘layer cake’ designs with stone cladding panels on the lowest level.
White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia.
It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.
I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house".
Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal.
What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.
If I lived in Australia, I would have the exterior of my house to be very white (except solar panels), so as to reflect most of the visible and IR light, and stay cooler.
Problem is most newer places are built of concrete or brick. I mean sure slap some white paint on but the that thermal material is going to take a lot of cooling/heating.
A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.
> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production.
That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain.
Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.
I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.
You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!
I think a lot of the reflexive distaste for the modern would be softened if we were still able to build in The Old Way, whatever that might be. People like these older brick mid rise buildings with the bit of trimming decoration. But, they just don't get built. Sometimes in NYC or chicago someplace you might see a more recent build where they tried to get those old elements down. They used brick and made it square and tried to do a little decoration, but something is missing. They didn't do the thing where they use nicer brick on the street facing side of the structure, or they didn't do the actual cement formed decorative trim pieces throughout. All the brick is laid the same instead of having some lines on the top edge turned out in a decorative way for example. The whole thing feels severely value engineered even if on paper it's actually a quality building with modern amenities and comforts.
Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.
I think that's an essential point, though maybe for a different reason.
I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?
Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.
Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?
>Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that.
It very much does, unfortunately. In the US, the places with the highest housing shortages are mired with endless red tape, discretionary reviews, parking requirements etc. that substantially increase costs. This leaves little room for anything else, including aesthetics.
Developers have gotten very good at navigating this, but it has also led to them sticking to basic "good enough" designs like the five-over-ones we see when new apartments are built.
I'm not sure that squares what I see in these places. Seems to me that pretty much everywhere has the same red tape. Who is letting you build without consideration of fire safety, egress points, floor area ratios, parking minimums, etc? Everywhere across the country has such "red tape" and regulation.
But what I notice in the housing crisis cities is that this is almost irrelevant. Whatever the actual limits of the zoning are, that is pretty much what you see built. Regulation be damned, it will get bulldozed through and built if it is allowed to be built in these cities. And the real only dam preventing the flood of development becomes these zoning laws that finally say "no" to development happening at all. The red tape is just cost add that gets passed to the buyer. It isn't like there are a glut of homes too expensive to sell in these places (what you'd see if red tape were really the issue), quite the opposite, after all.
Parking minimums are how we ended up with cities that are substantially composed of car storage, instead of housing which people need to live. There's little reason to force developers to build car storage when what people need is housing. People in cities get along just fine without a car, and it's possible to adopt a similar model to Japan that requires people to prove they have a parking spot available before they can register a car.
>Whatever the actual limits of the zoning are, that is pretty much what you see built.
Exactly, the limits are set very low, and so much red tape, that so little housing gets built, which is why we have a shortage.
There's a converse effect too, though - because conservatives tend to attack modernist and postmodernist art, liberals tend to defend even things that are too ridiculous to be seriously defended.
It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana. It's just common sense. But if you insist that everyone who does so is secretly motivated by some kind of bigotry, you end up pushing them towards the right wingers anyway.
Ugly is in the right of the beholder when it comes to individuals, but societies also have collective preferences.
> It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana.
Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:
> too ridiculous to be seriously defended
Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.
How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)
In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)
> It's just common sense.
Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:
- First they laugh at you (ridicule you)
- Then they say it's not in the orthodoxy (if ridicule fails,
you go from being ridiculous to being a threat to norms)
- Then they say they knew it all along (you're now within norms)
The same happens with social change, like women working - Ridicule, then a threat to norms, then normalized. What was absurd becomes normalized. In art, Impressionists were once objects of ridicule; now of course it's arguably the most popular style of painting in human history.
> societies also have collective preferences
They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.
Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.
If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.
At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)
Wince and shrug is a politely expressed ridicule, yes.
And yes, common norms are a social phenomenon (and that is exactly what the "collective preference" of society is). And yes they do change. However they are not completely random, either. And if you have had something being pushed on people for well over a century, to the point where most experts insist that it's better, but your average person from the street still thinks it's ridiculous, I think the reasonable conclusion is that it's not completely random.
As a Satanist, I am very much in favor of rejecting norms in general. But that doesn't mean that literally anything that is outside of the norm is better!
> You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
What if it's almost everyone's preference? Except for the high priests of architecture who have their own agenda. Then we end up living in a world full of buildings they design for themselves that most of us dislike.
> Why is it so important?
Because the rest of us have to live with it at street level, every day.
> A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
But they are the norm and have been for some time. It's time to challenge that norm.
If we go back to (for example) Le Corbusier, we see this sort of thing thrown around in discussions all the time - you just don't accept innovation, you're hung up on traditionalism, get with the way of the future. Only it's not the future, it's one part of the past, and for all there was noble intent behind some of this stuff, we've had adequate time to judge the outcomes as lacking.
I find it very irritating looking at fake or overdone things. I don't think that's minority. Each era of architecture was suited in some way to the building materials and technology of it's time. I do not understand this movement to rob concrete, steel and plywood of it's natural voice and force it to conform to design styles made for different substances and tech.
> I find it very irritating looking at fake or overdone things. I don't think that's minority.
1. I think the onus is on you to prove that it's not a minority, in the face of people overwhelmingly favouring older, more ornamented designs.
2. Beauty does not have to feel 'fake' and ugliness can be very authentic indeed, especially when it comes to concrete. I'd take a faux-neogothic revival over another period of brutalism without even blinking.
It's a hideous blot on the landscape, the wind blows through mercilessly and constantly, it feels desolate and dystopian to be around. It smells of piss and depression. It's notorious for drug dealing. But someone managed to get it listed and protected anyway so now the town's stuck with it permanently.
> I do not understand this movement to rob concrete, steel and plywood of it's natural voice and force it to conform to design styles made for different substances and tech.
Perhaps we don't have to force it to be 'traditional' but it's clear that the 'natural voice' afforded by these materials and the current set of design languages in architecture result in ugly buildings that the large majority of people just do not like.
We don't have to look at the overwhelming preference for traditional buildings and take away from that "We must go back to exactly that", but we should at least take away "People don't like what's being made now, we can do better"
And if there is no way for concrete, steel and plywood to express more beauty then perhaps we could think about using other things that might. Either way, ploughing on with creating spaces and edifices that the majority think are ugly and worse than what came before, either because of a professional disdain for what humans actually like to be around, or some high-minded ideas about material expression seems ... well, pretty pig-headed.
That building looks normal to me. Any building would feel ugly if its less inhabited and full of druggies and homeless.
Its not about high mindedness. Tell me suppose you took steel started making cuboids out of it and sanding it rough then stacking it with cement. Does that in any way do justice to steel or is it a complete waste and misuse of the substance? What these people are trying to imagine as their ideal are not as extreme as forcing steel to behave like brick but it is on the same spectrum. Neoclassical buildings are another good example. They are completely fake. I would bet they mix wildly different centuries apart greek and roman designs. And we know they are steel and concrete structures internally just facaded over with marble, not structural load bearing all-marble like the original greek stuff. Brutalism is just a more honest form of those massive neoclassical buildgings, the scale and power of it minus the fake marble nonsense. But I am not even saying you have to be brutalist, it's just one example of an honest medium.
If I only have hand tools and solid wood, I would make Colonial furniture for example. If I have stainless steel tubing and plywood I would make bent tube legs and plywood rests.
Plywood is an amazing substance why do people hate it? It uses wood to make large panels that lack the directional weakness of wood and to quite an extent the movement issues of wood are also avoided. Concrete is pourable rock. Steel is a flexible and easy to cut and join structural substance. You may disagree with certain design ideas that use these substances snd cwn say we could try different designs but I think its ridiculous to cargo cult brick and mortar or marble for instance (which are perfectly fine materials for their tooling and design) and wholly reject modern substances.
Brick cuboids don't grown on trees or are found in nature either. I would say the funniest one is people calling structures like hypar shaped halls as unnatural. That's as natural as it gets, nature itself leaves the hypar the only shape that is optimal to be supported atop a grid of columns, not the flat roof. These curves are more natural that flat and square walls. At least people should be wrested of the naturalist argument if they use it against designs like this.
> Any building would feel ugly if its less inhabited and full of druggies and homeless.
You have cause and effect backwards IMHO. The brutalist housing monstrosities in the UK, with the notable exception of the Barbican which is more gentrified, create the conditions that encourage this. They create grim, cold, bleak, colourless liminal spaces. Their look of decay doesn't inspire community, care for the place you live or happiness, instead they are dull, oppressive monoliths that people piss on. And the story is repeated across the country.
> Does that in any way do justice to steel
Who cares? Is "justice to steel" a design goal? Why?
> Neoclassical buildings are another good example. They are completely fake.
And?
> Brutalism is just a more honest form of those massive neoclassical buildgings, the scale and power of it minus the fake marble nonsense. But I am not even saying you have to be brutalist, it's just one example of an honest medium.
And again, who cares? Is "honesty" a design goal? Why is that more important than creating human-friendly spaces with a bit of beauty to them?
I'm not arguing against the use of specific materials, I am arguing against allowing the materials to dictate a heavily disliked outcome. Are we really saying "Everyone hates what we build now but we actually can't do any better"?
Because that's not what I get from discussions like these. What I get is "Everyone hates what we build because <insert piece of philosophical sophism that explains why everyone else is wrong>"
Its nonsense. If a building has people and businesses, it is good, if it doesn't and has druggies it will feel bad. An unmaintained mansion with druggies will be equally creepy. I am not sure how you are saying a place is inviting of druggies, what are the physical designs that you think make it so? If you say lack of buyers, then to a druggie wny structure is good enough.
I find crttain kinds of fakeness disgusting. I am entitled ot my opinion as are you to yours if you prefer fakeness.
I think McMansions are honest. Stick framing and plywood is a functional, affordable and most people seem to find it looks okay.
If people disagree with steel and concrete, nothing is stopping them from pooling money to build a brick building. I don't think zoning should be an issue, if a place allows skyscrapers it probably will allow your brick multistorey building. If its liked so much why aren't people funding it?
Either this design is too expensive or its not liked enough.
And I disagree, I find neoclassical buildings cold and inhuman, I think its actually its itnended design too, to overwhelm with sheer scale and induce despair. But I see it as just a design choice not a religion ir existential theory. Gothic is even more deliberately hostile looking.
The barrier to entry for interior is even lower, who is stopping you from buying tools or commisining a cabinet shop to build your vision?
Brutalism is perfectly human friendly, its a building, its meant to house people and take them in and out of their office or apartment. If anything I'd say brutalist structures are probably more walkabale than other multi storey structures. What you make of the interior is up to you. Paint your home as you want, put any furniture you like, as with any other building.
What specific way do you think brutalism or any other building style you would prefer as example is not human friendly?
> I am not sure how you are saying a place is inviting of druggies, what are the physical designs that you think make it so?
The concrete voids, semi-open outdoor stairwells and other weird half-hidden spaces in many of these buildings appear to encourage a lot of antisocial behaviour like drug-dealing and urination.
The greyness and water-staining leaves an area looking deprived, and against a (usually) grey and water-stained sky it makes these areas feel lifeless and barren. Especially where the wind constantly whistles through their straight-lined, hard-surfaced open plazas.
The general ugliness of them just depresses the human spirit, kills community cohesion. People don't care about them. So they come to expect the lifts to smell of piss and the stairways to be full of dealers.
The fact that you don't think building design could have such an effect is deeply weird. Have you ever had to live near any brutalist buildings? They take down your mood just by being near them.
> >I find crttain kinds of fakeness disgusting
> And I disagree, I find neoclassical buildings cold and inhuman
We've already established you're the voice of the minority here.
> If its liked so much why aren't people funding it?
That's a very interesting question, why are we stuck in a world where governments and large companies are building modernist stuff that people in general don't like? I think partly it's probably cost, I think partly it's down to the overwhelming majority of architects being taught this particular gospel. But beyond that I don't know.
(The idea that it's a choice of the same individuals expressing their preferences is somewhat silly, most people will never in their lifetimes have any sort of meaningful impact on new buildings in a city)
> What specific eay do you think brutalism or any other building style you would prefer as example is not human friendly?
The whole philosophy of form following function is misdirected from the outset. Beauty, attractiveness is an important part of function in human habitation.
And you still haven't answered my question - why is 'honesty' or 'justice to steel' in the slightest bit important? Why should we prioritise that over things like happiness? Why should we not use artifice and skill to make spaces that are attractive, warm and friendly, regardless of material?
I am not talking about some abstract honesty to some subtance. I am saying if someone dislikes an architectural style they shouldn't blame it on the materials. Some people like wood for a rustic look. I can make a cabinet with wood that uses all curves and circular openings and so on, I bet this person would hate it, but that doesn't mean they hate wood.
I like warm and humane spaces..i would need to see specific examples to see how brutalism violates it. I think if the situation in your locality is so bad that any public space will be taken over by druggies is not the buildings fault. You should say then that you need highly enclosed and guarded structures to prevent this problem.
> I am saying if someone dislikes an architectural style they shouldn't blame it on the materials.
Cool, then we’ll blame it on the choice of how and where to use those materials? So when there’s an architectural style that for example is very heavy on chunky raw concrete, is pretty universally despised and has negative social consequences, it’s fair to say “we should probably stop doing that, it seems like a bad idea” rather than some abstract verbiage about doing justice to the raw materials?
Because to be clear - I don’t care about the materials, I care about the outcomes. If someone can use concrete/steel/ply to make something attractive that isn’t going to degrade is a short handful of years, go for it.
> I think if the situation in your locality is so bad that any public space will be taken over by druggies is not the buildings fault.
Nope, repeated pattern across the whole country, for reasons given and now explained multiple times.
Do you believe architecture can have any effect on a place? How people feel in that place, how that then translates into how they act in those spaces, positive or negative?
If yes, then perhaps it’s time to admit that some styles can be on the negative side.
Many countries in Asia use concrete by default. People don't seem to have any problems with it.
Architecture obviously impacts a person's mood and behavior, eg unwalkable architecture would force a lot of driving. I just am not certain if brutalism can be said to cause whatever negative issues you are claiming it does. At least I am sure the movement wasn't designed to be anti human in any way.
> eg unwalkable architecture would force a lot of driving
That's purely a utilitarian take. You don't believe that design language could ever have an effect on mood?
You said yourself you find neoclassical and gothic styles induce despair. What do you think would be the long term effect of living somewhere that induced despair in you?
> At least I am sure the movement wasn't designed to be anti human in any way.
A system is what it does, not what it was designed to do. The thinking behind it was often utopian, there was high-minded talk of "streets in the sky" and the idea of giving everyone their own front door to the outside, as if they had their own private house on a raised terrace.
The results were not in line with the expectations.
Lack of drivability isn't just a mechanical thing, it shapes how a locality lives and moves, the kind of community that can form or not and also mood eg whether distances cause a feeling of isolation or one of not feeling cooped up and so on.
I understand what you are trying to get at, its just that I simply am unable to understand the mood of despair as associated with brutalism. Maybe others feel otherwise.
> I understand what you are trying to get at, its just that I simply am unable to understand the mood of despair as associated with brutalism
We've established that your view is the minority position and that people in general prefer more ornamented architecture (that's what the article is about). We've established that you understand the premise of feelings of despair caused by architecture.
If you can't put two and two together to understand that other people feel that way when confronted with brutalist architecture, and that being in/around it might affect their lives, it feels like either a lack of imagination or simple obstinacy.
As I said earlier, I doubt you've had to live near many of these architectural tumours, or you might have more insight.
All the money is (or will be) spent on land near other rich people so your kids can have a school peer group with parents who have higher education/wealth/social network achievements, and after that, healthcare, and after that, liability coverage.
If there is money left over, then you decorate. But you’ve probably bought into a new housing development with an HOA that doesn’t allow exterior modifications without approval.
My guess is that at best it's a specious argument. It would be interesting but difficult to try to elucidate. Still what occurs to me is
– Cheaper: than what? Is it that premodern architects had the same technology and materials available but chose not to use them <because they had a higher aesth-ethical integrity>?
– What is a 'side effect' in architecture in a way that's unique from the necessary compromising that the needs of occupants, material constraints, longevity, cost, time, labor, aesthetics, and etc. which essentially is architecture?
> given {cheap material, not the good stuff / I don't feel like it / measuring sucks / I just want to cram people that will ruin your neighborhood everywhere}, the average roll of the dice yields simpler geometry with less ornamentation.
But simpler geometry is structurally stronger and allows more spacious airflow / less heat trapping. The cost of materials is not inert, the demand for them affects the cost obviously. Energy efficiency is beneficial to all. Open floor plans are less prohibitive on use cases. Large window sectioning allows for more light/efficiency and also keeps the street level perspective from seeming insular.
The logic doesn't follow for me that capital was plainly more benevolent, then around some time or another they began the project of "educating" people into accepting their cheap and accidental aesthetic standard.
What survives the past are its most accomplished projects, and thus maybe per capita it appears of higher quality than modern. And more importantly re: the submitted article, it has informed centuries of signing what "home", safe, hospitable, threatening, and etc. mean. So the whole measurement of who prefers what says something but I don't think it speaks to natural perception.
That's it yeah. These kinds of pieces have been written for centuries. Surprise: people like what they are familiar with! There is no meaningful conclusion to draw from this. Look at Monet or Satie. In their own time? Grotesque, offensive - the kind of art scruffy pompous intellectuals enjoy. Now, a century later? At home in a greige IKEA showroom house being sold on the open market. To be clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with this - I love IKEA! I am buying a greige house as we speak! It is just not an interesting observation, and when writers attempt to use it as an argument against making new things, it's facetious at best, and at worst? Well, several interesting possibilities.
In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about.
One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades.
Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture.
There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on.
Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day.
In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad.
There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK).
Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years.
Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day.
The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from.
Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce!
The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car.
The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it.
The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the 'peak car' maintainable vehicles that people wish they had today.
Fortunately I will never be a customer for Ferrari, however, if I was a tax-dodging benevolent dictator with the wealth to put together a motor museum, I would not hesitate to buy a Luxe for the collection, to go alongside an OG Tesla Model S, with the faux grille, and a Xiaomi SU7. I would like to add a Ford Cortina and a Ford Sierra too, however, millions were made and millions rusted away, leaving none for my fantasy museum, particularly in the desired Saluki Bronze colour.
> The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
And now it's used for bungee jumping.
The US equivalent is the Hunter's Point crane.[1] This was built to do a very specific job - lifting battleship turrets. It's not used any more.
Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment.
But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.
Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful.
But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.)
The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.
The bathtub curve is not the most optimal however.
I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun?
Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill.
Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?
I am not sure how it is about "cheaper". Lathering on a finish with a roller is much cheaper than a carefully prepared spray system. Modern furniture and structures often use uniformly sprayed coatings. You are mistaking cleanness of look with cheapness, getting such a uniform coating is quite expensive and takes skill and discipline regarding hygiene and cleanup between abrasive grits etc as well.
And if you are against things generally in the sphere of "Bauhaus" interior design then I would say you are engaging in a cargo cult of using modern materials in unnatural ways to copy older designs without eye to how the modern material has its own natural form and manner of usage. I would say, for example if one only has hand tools and solid wood then it is reasonable to follow Colonial design school, but if one has glass, stainless steel and plywood, it is wasteful to force them into a Colonial shape rather than their natural forms. Either style respects the substances and tooling it uses.
You are free to pay four digit prices for every piece of furniture if you truly oppose designs that are aligned toward mass production.
Not really. That may have been true in the past, but it would be so cheap to CNC carve or extrude or injection-mould some ornamentation. Certain materials have gotten more expensive, but I think most of modernism was driven by materials progress and a boredom with previous trends
That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas.
So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.
This is sort of a just-so story that isn't completely true. Stalin pushed "socialist classicism" [1] as an aesthetic, and it wasn't until his successors took over that modernist architectural ideas imported from the West became a hallmark of actually-existing socialism.
There was a whole decade of Soviet design before Stalin, which was often radically modernist even by the standards of its day, and that is what the OP was referring to. Stalin was notoriously conservative in his artistic tastes.
A huge part of the Soviet period before Stalin was the civil war and minimal efforts to do anything other than fight it ("war communism"). After that you got the NEP and things going traditional.
Stalin pushed classical and actually within the soviet union Stalinst buildings were considered the best. These are called Stalinka.
Khrushchev embarked on a massive post-war building campaign in an effort to improve living conditions within the USSR by providing millions of new housing units.
These were modernist mid-rise and high-rise buildings and were designed for mass production and efficiency above everything else. These were regarded as considerably lower quality buildings than the Stalinka and were called Khrushchyovka. The Krushchyovka were the classic "commie blocks."
Again, this comment is not informed (I work in a field largely centered around the early Soviet era). Mass housing construction of dispiriting blocks boomed in the Khrushchev era, and the early Soviet era was indeed tumultuous, but the 1920s and even early 1930s saw architectual designs for public buildings that were remarkably modernist. Wikipedia has more than enough coverage if you want to learn more.
This person may be an expert but I have no way to assess that because this low-effort garbage comment provides absolutely no evidence their background and no effort to back up their claims.
Most of this comment, after saying I'm "not informed" just repeated everything I said in my comment with less details.
This seems to be a comment where someone started with a prompt of "no ur wrong" and had AI elaborate it out into something less juvenile.
1930s modernism was about new materials to allow luxury for the modern man (electricity! large windows! electric oven! washing machines! fridges! indoor toilets!)
1960/70s modernism was about creating new communities, adapting land to fit the modern car based world. No more pokey little shops with only a few items, requiring a trudge along a wobbly high street. NO! drive your car, go to a futuristic supermarket only once a week.
I don't think we see a modernism now, not as a movement. I will now divert to UK building, because in the US its different. Part of the reason why thats the case in the UK is that councils used to build houses, facilities and infrastructure with their own money. This meant they had their own architects. This lead to town plans that were coherent, if not always successful. See Birmingham, milton keynes, roehamton.
Housing wise, council houses were built, or should have been built to a standard. They were, especially in cities much bigger, brighter and luxurious compared to what preceded them. Were they pretty? no, modern is never pretty, because its not what you grew up with. When I was a kid everyone _hated_ victorian terrace houses, because thats what poor people have. They were more pokey compared to executive estate housing, and in some places didn't have a drive for your four door saloon.
Now, those estates are meh and terrace houses are very expensive, despite being cold, draughty, dingey little shitboxes with odd toilet arrangements. (unless you've slapped in a loft conversion and extended over the kitchen/outdoor toilet)
> Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production.
The problem is, Rams was about bringing the complex new object into the house in a was that was reliable and simple. If we were all about Rams' vision, then we'd have got rid of radiators, had decent windows, insulated the place, had lots of cupboards and cleanly separated living spaces. Not an everything room and a bedroom with inbuilt mould farm (shower + shitter)
Yes the modern apartment is inspired by loft living and dieter rams, but that requires 100sqm/1000sqft and high ceilings. none of which most places have. So you get a kitchen diner because it allows developers to shave off one room from the floorplan and increase density by 1/3rd without extra mateiral costs.
But thats not modernism, thats poor fucking standards, and the lack of competition in the uk in the form new council houses. (a 3 bedroom council house will be at least 90sqm with seperate kitchen, living room)
Which side is modern and which is traditional? The examples on the right are clearly more modern than the examples on the left to my eye: the left looks like it's from the '70s while the right is unmistakably 21st century. But the examples on the left are run-down, plain, and feature advertisements and bricked-up windows and steel shutters and security doors, while the examples on the right are brand new and shiny and walkable. There's graffiti in the first example and in the last one they replaced the asphalt with pavers!
Hard to take the conclusions seriously when the authors have their thumbs on the scale.
There's more to architecture than just the façade, which is what people are rating when they are just looking at photos of the exterior. The interiors, structure, and services, etc. of modern building are often far superior to older ones, and i suspect many 'ordinary' people would agree.
Yes, every time people get grumpy about modern architecture and look over to see if I agree I tell the story about how I used to work at a company in Boston which moved from a beautiful 19th century building to a soulless Modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper. And thank fucking god: the old building was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, had too little natural light, and was too cramped. The Modernist building was better to actually be in in every way. Buildings are there to be used, not just looked at in pictures.
I'm pretty sure that some kind of hybrid can be found where the exterior could look nice and the interior would be very nice as well.
Now, not every modern building has to look like a glass and steel colorless brick.
For example, I really like the look of Oodi [0], Helsinki's new library: it reminds me of wood covered with snow, and the interior is exactly what you would expect from a modern building (built in 2018).
It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities. I have a 1920s home and with like a few days of work it lives like a modern place. This is not some dichotomy.
Ultramodernist glass-skinned skyscrapers have to cover their glass walls with mirror-reflective film to keep out the majority of the natural light. Otherwise, they are solar ovens. A 2.6 m × 3 m office outside wall facing east or west becomes √2 × 2.6 × 3 ≈ 11 square meters of sunlight when the sun is 45° away from its normal, and sunlight is 1000W/m², so it's like an 11000-watt space heater. Without aggressive air conditioning, the temperature in that office rises even faster than the temperature in a parked car with the windows rolled up. You could be dead in minutes if the air conditioning failed.
The ultramodernist alternative is to build the entire wall out of windows coated to reflect 80% of the light, a "g-value" of 0.2, or a little bit more light if the windows open onto a larger interior space. You can let in slightly more visible light than the traditional approach by using coatings that have even higher reflectance in the infrared, but the vast majority of solar radiation is visible light, so the improvement is small.
Those walls of glass do give you a wider view, which can be nice, but in order to keep from killing you, they don't give you more natural light, except marginally.
Right but that's not because modern architectural style has made the interiors better. It's mainly technological improvements that allow larger windows, bigger space, better insulation, etc.
You can totally have a traditional style building with a modern interior without a hint of brutalism or concrete.
If it's my building, e.g. the building that I live in - I care more about the ease of maintenance and repair than any facade.
Because I spend 80% of my time indoors, and 20% working in the garden, so frankly don't even care what the building looks like.
Maybe only care that the property looks neat when it's time to sell.
As it stands, these studies are just cherry-picked navel gazing with extra steps. You can't design a study like this well. There are hundreds of thousands of buildings, and tens of thousands of variations of subjective preference. And all of those go out of the window as soon as practical concerns (like affordability) arise.
Nonetheless, I think it is a failure of architecture that modern design is ugly. It shouldn't be impossible to make good looking, practical, cost-effective buildings with all the options of materials and engineering that is available.
So let's start as the baseline of these 77 to 23 blowout victories by traditional architecture.
Now gradually substitute other modern designs until you can get more of a 50/50 agreement at least, and hopefully 60/40 in favor of modernism.
You could be right. Some of these might be cherry picked bad modern designs. From the article one of them looked like it should have the wicked witch of the West telling her pretties to fly out from their caves to go attack Dorothy. Another one looks like a massive collection of missile launch tubes.
Some designs I almost have to laugh at, when almost similarly disjointed mcmansion hell type monstrosities are snootily dismissed.
we only care about facades because architecture, in California, where I live, is co-opted by NIMBYs.
when it's a twee victorian, they say it's part of the unique appearance of the neighborhood. when it's a hideous laundromat, they say it's historical. they don't actually care about any of it. normal people and their preferences for "traditional architecture" (whatever that means? i guess, "old") are just collateral damage.
While my karma might get incinerated with this quote, it is incisive on traditional architecture. The author is reviled by many.
“Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!”
The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
“Look,” said Roark. “The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”
It's amusing to watch the movie version of The Fountainhead and see what are supposed to be Roarke's buildings. He likes the pedestal style, where the first floor is mostly open-work columns around a small lobby. Turns out this is terrible in cold or windy areas. Wind hits the side of the building and is forced down into the area around the lobby. Doors are forced shut by wind pressure. People are knocked off their feet. A strong wind in snow produces a horizontal blizzard.
The Meteorology Building (bldg 54) at MIT was built that way, with all of the above problems. Much embarrassment. Later, much computational fluid dynamics and, in 2019, a rebuild of the plaza level with more walls.
"Traditional" isn't really defined here, but seems to mean "first half of the 20th century," which feels like a relatively narrow tradition. Not a lot of preference for teepees and yurts.
People definitely like teepees and yurts (and thatched roofs, dry stone walls, log cabins, etc.), it's just that at some point the practicality gap becomes too wide to contemplate.
But this is a reasonable point to raise. Although both would serve their purpose a concrete viaduct is much cheaper to build than a masonry one, to the point that it may be difficult to justify the latter no matter how strong the public preference is for it.
Not to mention their comparison, modernist architecture, is just mid-century. There is post-modern architecture after that and arguably also contemporary architecture further after that (however vaguely defined).
It seems like these comparisons are more "expensive traditional design vs low cost modern design." None of their examples had what I would consider a single expensive and nice modern design. But every single example of "traditional" design was essentially luxury pricing.
It's not just that, but that too. E.g. a cottage like this https://www.superkul.ca/projects/double-island-cottage/ vs a "traditional" cottage. I'm sure people have preferences for both, but to me this is still a beautiful design where all the examples in the article are just low cost ugly designs.
I think it's true that construction in general has become cheaper over time, so comparing older buildings to newer ones often results in comparing more expensive design to cheaper design. But that's different than aesthetic. To properly compare aesthetic they should normalize for cost at least, if not also execution.
I suppose they did have the expert vs non-expert study, but the only example they showed from it had a hideous buildings in both types so I'm not sure what that's supposed to really accomplish.
> The missing part is that traditional building used to be cheap (in fact the cheapest way of building things).
This is only partially true.
Traditional building used to be cheaper than it is now, yes, but things like ornate decorations and facades were still expensive additional work. It's worth considering the survivorship bias here - the traditional buildings people know and love are the ones that were well built and cared for.
> but things like ornate decorations and facades were still expensive additional work
This again, is partially true. A lot of ornamental decorative elements in public facades were, essentially, mass produced using molds --- very few were hand-made in the way they are done now.
They would degrade over time, however they could also be repaired or replaced relatively easily.
Your point about survivorship bias is also somewhat more nuanced. The buildings that have survived were often, as you said, made with more expensive materials, and they lasted longer; but there was also a change in tastes over time, in particular against ornament and decorative elements, and a change in the idea that certain buildings should be maintained. In the past, people were just way more accepting of tearing down or replacing buildings. Conservation as a general approach was not as common, nor were people as inclined to see certain buildings in particular as uniquely worthy of conservation. It is those buildings which were deemed "appropriate" for conservation and "historically significant" which have largely shaped our understanding of "traditional" architecture, a somewhat snapshot idea of architecture on the cusp of modernism,
In public spaces I have no doubt this is the case.
I'm more curious about residential though - see huge interesting in MCM over the last decades. I am biased but I think there is a great deal of interest in warm, modernist spaces with ideas like natural materials and lots of natural lighting, especially when compared to the beige boxes of American home building.
Indeed, the beige boxes are neither modernist nor classicist.
My family lives in a MCM house built around 1960. We bought it in a "hot" market where you couldn't be particular about anything. We chose a house based on location and the interior.
Next thing you're gonna tell me that English speakers overwhelmingly prefer novels written in English.
Cultures have visual languages just the same as they have written and spoken (and signed) languages. The crucifix symbol has an understood meaning in most European cultures, because of how foundational Christianity is to their cultures. Is it really so surprising that people prefer buildings in a visual language they already understand?
There's also this paragraph at the very end:
>If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.
In a world where we've seen nothing but modernist designs for 70 years, is it really that surprising that people might prefer novel designs? Especially novel designs in a style they are repeatedly told is better, or references a more refined time?
Seems to me that your positions are in opposition to each other.
1. There’s a traditional visual language that people instinctively prefer.
2. Modern architectural sensibilities have superseded traditional visual language through repetition.
I’m reading this to mean something like “people like their own traditional foods but since they've been drowning in pizza for the last 70 years, they’ve forgotten about their traditional foods.”
How can a basal, instinctive preference just disappear? Can the sex drive disappear with enough brainwashing?
I'm not claiming that people instinctively prefer anything. I'm saying that they've been socialized to believe that "traditional" architecture is some indicator of societal excellence. I don't think its weird that people report a bias they've been taught to have.
The article even seems aware of this possibility when it mentions that architecture students prefer modernism (with the semi-covert implication that their education is poisoning their aesthetic sensibilities). I claim its at most partially because they've been taught to prefer modern designs, but mainly because they've been taught to think about visual languages consciously, so they are able to recognize what a given architect is trying to do, in a way that a layperson might not. That's certainly why Thomas Kinkade gets as much hate as he does (that and the dodgy business practices...).
I'm also not claiming that people have been starved of traditional architecture entirely, just that nobody is building things in the traditional style now. They're not tearing them down either, the White House East Wing not withstanding. This is a novelty bias, nothing more. If you only ever see neoclassical architecture in buildings that are designated as "fancy" or "special" or "august", and all these modern, ordinary buildings do not, you're going to assume that the style itself, and not simply the age and intent at construction are what contributes to that.
I mean, 39 out of 50 US state capitol buildings have domes, as does the nation's capitol building. I think anybody in the US can be forgiven for thinking that dome = legitimate seat of authority. Certainly, that was the hypothesis behind the design decision.
Speaking only for myself, I found Washington DC, which is all neo-classical all the time, just really boring. All the buildings look the same, and I couldn't escape the sense that I was in museum that hadn't been updated in a long time. Chicago's Fields Museum has the same quality.
I wish more people were building brand new, modern neoclassical buildings that are truly beautiful in a Haussmannian way, yet as practical as modern skyscrapers.. something like 1 Mayfair in London or 150 East 78th Street in New York.
"In other words, there seems to be a mysterious divergence between people’s stated and revealed preferences. Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike?"
Oh, this is actually pretty obvious to explain. There are several equally big reasons, in no particular order here:
- Modernist/brutalist/bauhaus etc. building with any stated use type is on paper cheaper to build, because it removes all aesthetic features and many functional features - like rain pipes, slanted roof in favor of flat roof, human oriented features like benches etc. It will be much more expensive to maintain in long run, due to the environmental damage from missing functional features, but that's not architect's problem then.
- These buildings are build as a class warfare. Notice the stark difference between designs of private houses where higher class actually lives, and the designs which the are commissioning for the common public.
- Performative architecture. The weirder the art form, the better PR and resulting fame.
Always seems weird to me that "classical" is stark white columns and sculptures. The original Greek buildings were quite colorful, it's only the intervening millenia that are responsible for wearing away their paint.
I think the perspective from inside vs outside the buildings is important. Consider Meta’s classic campus vs their newer buildings designed by Frank Gehry. I like the exterior appearance of the classic campus much better as it feels “friendlier”, but from the inside, it flips drastically. The newer buildings are far superior in every way compared to the dimly lit, fluorescent feeling you get inside the older buildings with the small windows.
Mostly this is looking at architecture as urban sculpture. That is relevant, but the most critical experience of a building is on the inside. Modern designs spearheaded modern interior spaces including spacious corridors, atriums for exposing important views and improving navigation, and other such features. More than that modernist buildings are good at presenting functional spaces with a minimum of details to interfere with usage and customization. Different uses can add decoration or functional features as necessary as there is plenty of space available and no ornamentation to interfere with.
And then there is the issue of construction. Many older designs use materials and methods that are either out of date or expensive to replicate with currently popular building materials. Simply going back to older designs is not a practical option for most buildings. There has to be some balance of old ideas with newer methods.
Each room is lived in by a few people, each building has an exterior which is looked at by thousands or millions.
I live in a hundred-year old house (old for the region I’m in), with rabbit warren hallways. I wouldn’t want it any other way. That might just be my taste in interiors, but (as with the article about exteriors) I suspect it is more common than all the modernist functional people would prefer.
When we moved to the bay area in 2015 (south bay), I was absolutely stunned at the variety of residential architecture, having come from the mid-Atlantic where everything tended to be uniform based roughly on construction date/period. Since land is exorbitantly costly, homeowners tend to build what they like, no matter whether it fits the neighborhood aesthetic or not.
Well then. The solution is obvious: we need to educate the public so that it attains the correct tastes. It's doable: after all, the architecture students do manage to obtain the taste for the modernist architecture during their time in the college/university.
Or maybe do nothing, it's not like the public opinion really matters in the technocratic settings.
If you're really looking for causes, the largest one is price optimization.
But, I think one missing piece between architects and the general public is how architecture students are taught to design (and thus, see) buildings first through the lens of massing [0]. When you compose a building primarily by shaping the different masses, you lose sight of the ornamentation and complex decoration that sets old buildings apart. Then, you add air conditioning and modern building systems and the need for high ceilings and windows with airflow also disappears.
What you are left with is a sealed box. Essentially, architecture has ceded too much design space to engineering in the name of cost optimization and there isn't much 'art' left in it. But look around - that's true across our society.
Nah I think modern architecture is popular among many architects and unpopular with almost all of the public for the same reason modern art is: it justifies their existence.
It gives them some clever thing to know that normal people don't know anything about. If King Charles is right about architecture (he is), then what new experimental architecture can you research? You can't, because we've basically already discovered what people like.
I fully agree! And if they still disagree, perhaps we could open special camps where we could forcefully reeducate them! After all, there is but one correct design language for buildings and it's a hideous slab of concrete that our ancestors would weep if they could see.
On a serious note, I've seen conspiracy theories about how such ugly modernist architecture is being used to break our spirits, to make us numb to ugliness and to promote an acceptance of mediocrity. While I originally dismissed it, I've become old enough to see many beautiful buildings replaced with caricatures of them. I'm starting to wonder if there weren't a kernel of truth to these ramblings.
I can't tell if this is serious or sarcastic. I'm going to err on the side of serious though. Maybe the majority is actually correct, and traditional architecture is just plain better. I certainly find it more welcoming than the modern concrete and glass box jungle.
I do actually like the "concrete jungle" style like the Barbican and Salk Institute (by all accounts a pleasantly human place to work despite the famously stark-looking courtyard).
I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly. Whereas even quite dilapidated neo-classical-ish buildings look innately reasonably pleasing.
>I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly.
There's a trend in some Eastern European countries to paint older brutalist concrete buildings as a cost-effective measure to reduce concrete spalling and do thermo-modernization. It's actually pretty amazing how much nicer some of these buildings look even with just a uniform white paint job (others involve more color).
Architects seem to be largely opposed, seeing it as an erasure of the material honesty that brutalism was supposed to represent, but IMHO it suggests that a lot of the core issue with these designs wasn't the shape or creativity of the buildings themselves but just the way the concrete look quickly aged.
Well, let's try crank the knob yet another notch then.
> Maybe the majority is actually correct
What a horrible thing to say. The liberal democracy, may it be known to you, is about protecting and empowering the minorities of various kind, and the aesthetical minority exists, and its tastes matter.
I always like to look at the windows for these “more attractive” buildings. They always lead me to believe the indoor experience is worse in some way. Either cramped or similar. Sometimes they imply a dark windowless rooms. Generally, they seem like they prioritize the appearance of the building over the experience of being inside the building, which is unambiguously the more important part of the building.
The funny one is the buildings that have better landscaping. A few of the buildings in the post only look attractive as a consequence of the green courtyard in front. If you cover up that part of the photo, they just don’t look as stunning compared to the other. Perhaps that’s an argument for traditional courtyards (fair enough), but it doesn’t imply the need for traditional building construction.
I just wish there were more acceptance of experimentation. I like well-executed Art Deco, Art Nouveau, 60s high modernism, whatever you call the 70s angular wooden buildings, “natural” styles like adobe that use clay and wood, all kinds really. As long as a style is appropriate for the structure’s use and environment, it’s fine. But economics favors ugly boxes, and local building restrictions make it even more expensive (or even impossible) to be creative. It’s no wonder that many builders don’t bother, sticking to “safe” styles.
OT, but I've discussed Gothic cathedrals with Gemini, and we don't make 'em like we used to--charitably, because they take up a lot of space? A Gothic cathedral looks like a bird with massive wings. Those "wings" are outside of the church's interior; people call them "flying buttresses"--they stop the walls from bursting outwards.
Then again, I wonder whether the modern innovation of using steel under tension could enable us to make the "wings" (buttresses) smaller.
the tragedy is that architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable. the other tragedy is before 'regulations' normies designed buildings - they didn't have architecture degrees. don't know if that's still possible anymore.
& buildings shape lives.
the only way to reverse the modernist trend is to have laws that incentivize classical buildings otherwise we gonna keep getting ugly buildings.
> architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable.
Good architects match modernism with livability. A couple months back I visited the Barbican Centre in London and it never ceases to amaze me how thoughtful is every little design item.
The Barbican is a standout exception though. It always comes up in these discussion, and I think it's because in contrast to most other buildings, it was really thought through. The fact is that like in other walks of life, when talent meets opportunity then occasionally great things can happen. But that sort of outlier talent isn't evident in most architecture.
As such the vast majority of the Barbican's disparate cohort of brutalist concrete buildings in the UK were not built for humans, they were built for middling architects who were never going to have to suffer living in them. They need to be razed to the ground and thankfully many/most are going that way.
Stark, grey-brown, crumbling, water-stained monstrosities that just add to the feeling of misery in a country which is already stark, grey-brown, crumbling and water stained in so many other ways.
Just the usual things. There are a handful of gatekeepers who somehow, miraculously, dictate trends, and everyone follows them like some sacred text. To draw a parallel with porn, OnlyFans showed that people actually do not care that much about long form porn movies. I wonder when people will realize that most minimalist modern buildings are cheap, tasteless, and soulless, and start building whatever they actually find beautiful.
Cost is a big factor, but so are modern building codes. Some classic architectural features are outright illegal to build in 2026. Others might be allowed, but there's almost no one left who knows how to do it (e.g. plaster walls or ceilings).
Robots are not going to bring any of this back because robots will just create a new set of optimizations and constraints needed to make robotic construction cheaper and easier. If modern cars (which are the result of similar optimization) are anything to go by, this will result in output that's easy to build but hard to maintain or modify - so largely a continuation of existing trends.
Take a look at "3d printed" houses for an imperfect example of this kind of optimization for automation in action. Better robotics will bring about a more balanced version of this trade-off (walls will probably be possible to modify, unlike 3d printed ones) but the incentives remain the same.
Edit:
Trivial example: One of the easiest way to autonomously insulate a house will probably be with spray foam insulation - you can get a robot arm to hold the sprayer and move it in a specific, continuous motion pretty readily even today. But spray foam insulation is hard to modify after the fact. Removing it is time-intensive compared to removing insulation "batting" and applying it again requires specialized tools, PPE, and perhaps licensing.
Now try 1970s public housing in Paris and Vienna, socialist blocks in Poland or projects in Chicago. It will be a lot more balanced because these places were designed for people to live in, not as radical statements. They are simple to save costs but there is no "artistic" movement behind them doing it on purpose.
Abstract modernism with random shapes and obsessively minimalist design is only the worst case scenario where all the hate is justified. It's what happens when architects design for each other and not the rest of us.
Architecture schools don't really teach you the pragmatic side of the trade. Their projects are building those sorts of abstracted models, talking about forms and voids. It is just so far abstracted from the sort of practical architecture that leads to stuff like built in cupboards in a Sears catalog home. Something to also consider is while these young architects are getting trained they aren't really living like adults either. They are in their early 20s after all, still perhaps lashing out in reflexive opposition from their suburban upbringing, and probably don't understand why a built in cupboard would be so exciting.
The results will absolutely be the same. Having spent the first 12 years of my life in a commie block apartment, the absolute best thing that has happened to that building over the years is the trees have covered progressively more of the ugliness. Note that this article is about external visuals, not the layout or any other consideration relevant to buildings being "designed for people to live in". This is about buildings being designed for people to look at.
You can design two buildings for people to live in, make them identical in layout and build quality but one of them has slightly more classical style of architecture and people will invariably prefer it, all else being equal.
> one of them has slightly more classical style of architecture
If aesthetic sense is distributed according a bell curve, the majority of the population will have "average" taste. If you say good taste is one standard deviation above the median, then the majority will have worse taste.
Several things are at play here. The first is that pre-Modernist architecture was heavily designed around natural lighting and cooling. Many buildings and houses designed and built before the 1920s used combinations of materials and elements that maximized the use of daylight. Transom lights and polished marble floors for example were often used to allow light to bounce through a room and to induce airflow. The light came in from a high place and bounced from the floor to fill normally unlit spaces, while hot air was pushed up and vented through the transom windows. If you've ever been in an office building built from the 1870s through the 1940s you'll notice every single transom only opens outwards towards the hall, as the hall created a high pressure space that pushed air into the low pressure rooms, an effect that is amplified when paired with ceiling fans. Meanwhile things such as mullions allowed the windows themselves to be set more deeply inside the wall by providing a strengthening member that allowed a larger opening. That larger opening with the windows set further in provided shade while still allowing in diffused light, and helped in preventing glare upon the glass while creating an overhang using the building's facade or cornices to allow the windows to be opened while it was raining because eaves are useless above two stories of height.
People don't understand these individual parts and don't understand how they all work together. But they definitely feel the cumulative effects, and those cumulative effects are much friendlier than Modernist and post-Modernist design. Modernism and all the schools that followed it rely on electric technology to fill in the gaps in the design, which makes them feel less accomodating to humans. Electric lighting, electric heating and cooling, and electro-mechanical traversal. Those things aren't as tactile, and many aren't even visible. The Modernist building does not present itself as something humans made, maintain, and interact with, but instead presents itself as a machine that you are temporarily inside of as a foreign entity because everything designed to outwardly accomodate humans is instead either streamlined down or fully away. The overhead lights shine light that you cannot influence, the hidden vents expel air from a place you cannot see or change, and the hanging facade glass walls provide no palpable separation from the outside world. Your mind tells you that this mid-century tower is a place where you do not belong.
In general you have to separate what people prefer from what they're willing to pay for. It's very clear that people will pay more for a slightly larger home with one extra bedroom or bathroom than for a smaller home with more ornate decoration. These are the forces which lead to the construction we see today: people build at the lowest cost what people will buy for the highest price.
I personally generally agree, but I actually quite like the very most recently constructed buildings in my area (southwest Paris), which are still clearly modern but more generous with ornamentation and featuring more organic shapes and often incorporating greenery.
I feel similar positive about new buildings in my native Netherlands, which seem to be getting less flat and with smaller, more reasonably sized windows (if you know, you know!)
Modern architecture, like modern art and modern classical music and jazz, is supposed to be ugly. That's because it is based on existentialist philosophy that believes that life is meaningless and what ordinary people consider a good life is an attempt to escape this alleged truth. The purpose of the arts is supposed to be to push the ugly truth into people's faces so they can't ignore it.
Once there was a blackout in my neighborhood that affected commercial properties too. While driving down the street in total darkness the only structure that stuck out when my headlights pressed them was the local Mexican restaurant which isn't traditional in the least—it sort of looks like what Davy Crockett would've built if he survived the Alamo and opened a Cheesecake Factory. But it stood out that night.
I think the problem can be traced back to the fact that we've failed to develop a popular design language since pre-WW2^1.
That in itself could be traced back to the professionalization of building manufacturing - the small-scale building and design that happened before this industrialisation of construction did away with all the little vernacular architectural decisions that would have been part of a building's design. Far more of the labour-force was involved in building construction, and less was done with pre-fabricated materials (probably just bricks and mortar), and certainly not as much was done on a mass-scale with the same homogenous approach^2, and with much less concern for the labour costs associated with those little details that add "character" to an older building^3.
I'm starting to find small examples of lower-scale construction projects in my home city (Sydney) that seem to return some interesting elements to newer building construction, like variation in materials such as perforated shading or different colours or textures of prefab cladding, using brick for feature walls in other pre-fabricated concrete buildigs, more external hanging gardens, etc). This is better, and I'm happy to see it, because while the older federation terraces in Sydney are nice to look at, they're hopelessly underdesigned for the climate (too hot in summer, too cold in winter, too dark in a country that is blessed with natural light, and often with damp and mould problems that shouldn't exist on a building post 1900).
^1 popular in the sense that its widespread amongst the general population, not the way modernism is popular with architects, both for its cost and the way its become part of the popular taste of architects as a profession
^2 the treasured old neighbourhoods in cities that are preserved and made "heritage" are the results of hundreds of individual decisions by dozens of individual builders and tradespeople, which although similar, contain enough difference to convey a sense of character. Compare that with a small team of planners working for a single construction company remaking a block or entire suburb.
^3 I could be wrong, but I would have thought labour costs were a much lower component of building construction then, or at least there was far more labour hours that go into a building's construction, allowing more time for the little details that give an older building its little characteristics like lacing, fancy brickwork or unusual reliefs.
I wonder how many of the competitions for new buildings include traditional designs as candidates. Are people picking modernist designs because that's all there is to choose from? Also, cost doesn't seem to be mentioned. Are traditional designs more expensive to build?
When I was a child I saw Blade Runner. Ever since that day I've had a weakness for concrete jungles. Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai- that's how humans were intended to live.
Unfortunately my European brothers and sisters prefer to live in open air museums. However slowly but surely skyscrapers have been creeping up into the Netherlands- you just can't beat the efficiency.
I DO NOT prefer traditional architecture.
I prefer whatever is inexpensive and practical.
Hanging brick cladding in front of a modern building is neither inexpensive nor practical.
What I really care about is the savings associated with this ruthless cost cutting and brutalist simplification to be passed on to the ordinary folks instead of being hoarded by the oligarchs.
Plenty of people will rate the design of classic cars more highly, and will visit shows that display them. They also won't buy a car that looks like that.
You see the same thing in literature, where modernism has crowded out of other styles. As one example, you see way less description today than in older books.
I'm not a hater on modernism -- I like stripped down literature and architecture (though I wish concrete buildings were cleaned more regularly). But there does seem to be some truth in this idea that "the elite critics" have dominated these fields, resulting in the production of art (and buildings) that are broadly unpopular. I think the overriding goal of these critics is avoiding kitsch, which they see in classical forms.
Many have never seen a really, truly beautiful high modern home, and it shows. Lots of both traditional and modern slop out there, with gems on both sides every once in a while.
TLDR: Architecture optimizes for what is cheap to construct and meets the needs of the commissioning entity at the time of construction. This is often about a big facade, a dream, grandstanding or power dynamics instead of livability or community experience, particularly street acceptance. It's no wonder people prefer older architecture: it was necessarily more reasonably scaled, often more ornate and particular (since hand tools were used anyway: why not make it beautiful?), and featured now basically unavailable materials like giant timber beams which present more softly.
Depends on the era and place. Very old farm houses generally had low ceilings but hey, the people were shorter and you cooked under an open chimney so better have a small space to heat.
Later classic buildings especially in cities had higher ceilings and consequentially a more roomy vibe than modern residential buildings.
It’s interesting how many studies were performed that confirmed this, and yet most (all?) of the time, the modernist building was built anyway. What was the point?
I would ask about their needs, but, definitely, I would measure those if possible. People are frequently surprised about what they actually wanted (there are lots of genie stories and jokes on that theme)
I dislike a badly designed mall like everyone else, but is it already sealioning if an article ends on a leading question to hide its far-right liberal conservative agenda?
The National Civic Art Society is designing the White House State Ballroom [1] and Create Streets is a conservative influence group that likes speaking at Reform UK events [2]. As many others here have pointed out, visual preference, especially in such a binary choice between obviously cheap and ugly vs expensive and generous, is of course highly biased - pseudo greek style doesn't fly in Asia, even in Australia minimalist styles are much more en vogue.
The most important claims like "exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles" are completely unsupported - especially when a few lines down they literally use their own review of an architect's design, but then call it "in a style drawing on Victorian commercial architecture and Art Deco", again unsubstantiated - it has pretty "modern" clear lines, probably due to sustainability [3], and brick facades themselves have been around for long. In the report they praise the 2010 (!) London city building design guide recommending exactly this brick design. "hardly a single public commission" and "we commissioning styles"?
Where is the line between justifying dictator-style grandiose architecture and the actual empathy needed for simply good design?
The traditional examples look sturdier and heavier. The brick bridge looks overbuilt and hence safer.
The examples where arch students gave higher scores, like with that god awful-looking house, I don't have an answer to. Maybe they had terrible taste. Just because you are a student of architecture it does not mean you have good taste or how to build beautiful things that evoke a specific emotion.
> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.
I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.
All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.
If survivorship bias had anything to do with it, you would not have old villages where every house is in the same style, and they're all beautiful. There's simply no evidence that old buildings were randomly ugly or beautiful, and only the beautiful ones survived.
Almost all the buildings in those postcards look old, plain, and boring to me. Some look decent. The Radio City Music Hall building, while definitely impressive for 1932, just looks old and worn out and it's and old postcard. Ooh wow another government building in the classical revival style with big tall roman pillars making up a Portico made from white stone, how original, never seen that before. And are you really telling me the building on the left here actually looks good? That's the kind of building you'd love to walk past every day, the kind of building you'd want to spend all day inside? These buildings look like they're covered in tons of nasty soot and gunk and generally don't seem like clean places to be.
To me a building like this looks a lot more interesting. Lots of mixtures in materials, textures, and colors. And as mentioned before, this building lets in a lot of natural lighting. It lets you see outside instead of just constantly feeling like you're trapped in a jail cell.
Its not even like I really hate old architecture, I just think a lot of these examples given suck. I like this, for example (although it is getting close to overstylized for my taste):
Buildings like this as well, although definitely not as much natural light. Notice its actually nice, clean, and maintained compared to the other examples given. Still kind of old and boring though in the end.
> you have NO place complaining about originality,
I can definitely complain about a lack of originality for works which lack originality.
Modern designs can often lack originality, I agree. Classical designs can lack originality as well. A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things. Its not good to put yourself in a camp and act like everything in group A is good without question, everything in camp B is bad without question.
You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting? Are you really saying you'd prefer to actually be in and use one of the buildings in that postcard image I pointed out?
Buildings like this have way more originality than all those brick buildings in the postcard I linked, other than the one featured center in that postcard. Or yet another white stone government building with roman columns in front and endless small windows. And I don't even consider it that original.
I'm not saying all modern designs are good. I'm also not saying all older designs are bad. I'm not even saying those classical revival government buildings are inherently bad, they're consistent and unoriginal for a reason. I am saying I am a human being and like to have some sunlight and see trees and the horizon from time to time, and that's more important to me for a building than some little intricate stonework that I can't even really make out because its three stories up and the whole exterior facade is covered with black gunk because its too expensive and fragile to actually maintain.
>A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things.
It can but originality is not the end of aesthetics.
What's more the modernist architecture is globalised so the "unique" building's style gets recreated and seen in every single corner of the world where they all try to be avant garde in the exact same ways.
There's no vernacular architecture elements anymore which give a sense of place. Not even much of ones that make sense due to origin in environmental factors such as rain/snow in the nordics or heat in gulfstates.
>You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting?
I'll plainly say it. It lacks originality. I'd rather it have a painting on it than a trying to be the equivalent of a shiny TCG card the novelty of which will wear of very quick.
> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
brutalism doesn't refer to the architecture being "brutal".
it refers to "béton brut" - french for 'raw concrete'. in this case, brutalism could be more readily understood as 'rawism'. it also emerged during (and is a descendant of) the modernist architectural period, which is well known for those boring, non-descript office towers.
there's nothing wrong with the simplicity of raw concrete. but just like other architecture, it can be done well and it can be done poorly. it can be done for utility, and it can be done for extravagance.
I think many people think of non-descript office towers when they think of brutalism, rather than all of the interesting things that can be done with a single material (shapes, textures, designs, etc. it's a very versatile + strong medium!).
I am a fan of brutalism, but there is also some survivorship bias at work - I'm sure some brutalist hellscapes were demolished because nobody wanted to live in them.
>But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
It's probably some combination of the subculture effect (i.e., subcultures tend to develop their own in-group aesthetics) and as a functional shibboleth (i.e., being able to "appreciate" things average people don't has an in-group signalling function).
> But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
Because they study architecture. The article is profoundly anti-intellectual. This discourse, that colleges indoctrinate people and, thus, cause them to disagree with some form of "truth" that the uneducated masses know.
If the architecture they're studying is divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? They may as well be studying their own butts.
> divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares?
Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.
Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.
It's hard to build something new based on empirical evidence because the thing you are building might be such a radical departure from previous experience the data you have simply does not apply.
The problem is that a core group of modernists kept doggedly insisting on it after it was proven to not work.
For example, we know now that pedestrian skyways only work in limited contexts and have plenty of downsides; or that a large, concrete windswept plaza is pretty to look at but pretty antisocial and unusable space, and yet you still see this kind of thing in the latest from say Zaha Hadid et al.
It’s why a next wave of architects and planners have coined terms like “bird-shit architecture” that only looks good completely devoid of context and landed from the sky.
As Henry Ford would say, "They didn't want a car. They wanted a faster horse".
Often we go out exploring the solution space for new things that were never done before and nobody ever asked for them because nobody had imagined them until they saw the first one. Remember how blown away everyone was with the Jeff Han's multitouch demo? It became immediately obvious it was the future of direct manipulation interfaces.
If you go back further, do you remember how sci-fi pictured the computers we would be using "in the future"? In 2001 there were no alphanumeric keyboards. Neither on the Enterprise. We are finally catching up with the vision of Tron, of the computer as an environment for intelligent agents (it took decades for most people to even formulate this understanding of the movie). We get a lot of things wrong, but our job is to try the things nobody is asking for, because they don't know they can be.
I've seen plenty of examples of Brutalism in architecture (in the UK) first hand and to most people it looks like ugly concrete blocks with hole in it.
Sometimes being "ugly" is the point. You want to bring out emotions - the building can be grandiose, imposing, surprising, but, if you look closely, it's a carefully crafted work of art that's also highly functional.
I don't care for this argument at all. There are functional buildings where I live from the Industrial Revolution that look quite nice. I want things to look nice where I live. I don't want them to be ugly and demoralising.
As for the building you showed me. I think it looks awful. It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium.
> It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium.
Taste is extremely subjective. I am an engineer and I've spent a whole career training my tastes (for system design, hardware architecture) to be less subjective and help guide my work towards what's good. Some of that seems to have leaked to building and city planning, because my taste seems to align well with the experts in those fields.
The article is about the schism between the experts and what people generally prefer and recommends that said experts should try to take that into account. People almost always prefer traditional architecture. Is it really subjective when a vast majority of people agree? I suppose technically it is, but at the same time not really. There is obviously something that people prefer about it other than it being old.
> They should, but it’s up to the experts to make the decision. You need an informed group to make decisions.
I've seen experts in my own field completely misunderstand what customers have wanted and/or completely missed the point. There are numerous examples where experts have made things worse or got things very wrong, especially in large construction projects.
There are many reasons why this happens, sometimes it is personal ego, adherence to ideas that are out of data, their paycheck might be dependant on a certain decision being made.
Experts should not get the say in everything. Pretending that people who aren't experts aren't capable of making reasonable decisions and ever is IMO asinine.
> Subjective preference is not data and does not offer a justification.
The point is that it isn't as subjective as you claim. It isn't simply people prefer the familiar. The article itself explores this. There are whole branch of philosophy behind aesthetics. I find it very frustrating when people believe that aesthetics is simply personal preference.
We really need to understand why people who study a subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding would show a clear preference for something...
Yes, I would like to understand why this is their preference. Aren't you curious? I don't think it's enough to say: these people are experts, so in this issue of style and taste their answer is automatically correct, no more info needed, thank you.
Also, I'd be surprised if ALL "people who study [this] subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding" would share the same preference.
No, but I'll trust their opinion on building design and urban planning over yours the same way I wouldn't trust you to do brain surgery or landing an airliner. I am a skilled pilot in simulators, but I still wouldn't trust myself to land a real plane.
I thought we were talking about how things look, not the skill that goes into making them look like it. These are sufficiently different things.
Fashion. Taste. Informed by functional and economical requirements, materials, surroundings, urban planning, yes, but in the end, there's also an element of taste and subjective preference that can clump together in periods or zeitgeist forms or whatever you like to call it.
As taste and preference go, you are free to delegate yours to others without question, as you seem to be doing here so passionately. I don't find empty appeals to authority very convincing. But maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.
I'm willing to hold two concepts in my head: my own impression of the appearance of different examples of a certain architectural style (which, like all others, has better and worse ones); and the question why some people who know a lot more than me might see it differently than me. Their reasons and my reasons might both be valid, but mine would be far less interesting. Hence, my question.
Finally: You seem to think that I asked you to trust my opinion, or even to change yours. You might want to look into why you think that, because that's not at all what I did. I asked something entirely different.
> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
Personally I'd rather spend my time in the building with large windows and tons of natural light than holed up in that dark old castle thing.
That prison building is overly stylized to my taste. And given how complex the exterior is and seeing it's state it's obvious it's hard to maintain. Unless you like all the gunk growing all over the building all the time.
Is the old building "fancy"? Sure. So is that fragile china that's kept in the fancy vitrine but rarely actually used because it's such a pain to maintain and actually use.
Then you're part of the 20% of people who prefer modern styles, for whom 99% of buildings are built. You have plenty of choices, while the rest of us are lied to about why buildings look like they do and why we can't have what we want.
I think the prison looks better from the outside, but if you asked me which building I wanted to spend time in I'd pick the school without hesitation (assuming they were both being repurposed for the same non-school/prison use).
There is a clear preference for other people to build in traditional styles, but as soon as you have to care about more than what the facade looks like from the outside people choose the uglier functional option.
> Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike? There are several interesting possibilities.
Like what? A shadowy cabal of liberal elites pulling the strings from the shadows? Stripe (who own Works In Progress) founder Patrick Collision donated to the Trump campaign in 2024. Tiresomely obvious what this "piece" is trying to do. Find a new gimmick imho.
modern architecture is best understood as an expression of the ethos of efficiency. because it is cheap, easy to maintain, uniform, reproducible (which are machine values), therefore it is good, aspirational, wholesome (which are humanist values) for people.
as an aside, for the longest time i have thought modernity was fully understood by the 60s (ellul, debord, macluhan, ...). but maybe there the focus was too narrowly political, sociological. it has been revealing to see this ethos (and it is an ethos, make no mistake) recently linked to autism. high modernists are uniform, monomaniacal people. like machines. and the world they fashion, is therefore one that is uniform, principled. how the unsociable autist colleague cannot distinguish between is and ought, so will modern architecture barrel down deductively to its unpleasant conclusion.
modernisn is the commodification of all spheres of existence, it is an unprecedented evolution, how to break out of this, how to get of this train with only a single endpoint.
How funny, they chose very beautiful old architecture and very ugly modern architecture and invented a result - why not choose things like the Bahai temple in Delhi or Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright? I'm sure there are some old ugly buildings and the ones that people hated probably got torn down so there's survivorship bias in play here too!
The article feels like it was written by someone with conservative views, someone who resents change, and believes in a nostalgic view of the past. It becomes anti-intellectual when it points out the divergence between the opinion of experts and the laypeople on what constitutes a building fit for purpose, and takes those two opinions as equivalent.
It's kind of similar to the general "two-sides" thing where, if you talk to, say, a climatologist who talks about a community consensus on global warming, there will be someone who has never studied the climate, exposes a completely different opinion, sometimes in opposition to observed facts.
In this case, in architecture, the thing to measure is not the opinion of people, but how they use the architectural object - how their relationship with the environment changes in that space and why. I brought to this discussion three examples of architectural landmarks that turned a somewhat degraded space into vibrant community spaces.
Architects don't design buildings - they design the interaction of the building users with their environment.
Something fascinating that you may not know: traditional architecture is one of those things that is simultaneously:
a) Genuinely widely preferred, with many articles on this, ranging from aesthetic preferences through to scientific studies of how eyes move and what causes fatigue. There is genuine value to architecture before modern architecture -- and...
b) A stalking horse for right-wing thinking.
It's really interesting how this happens and it mirrors other right-wing techniques. A common way to get people into right-wing thinking is to find something that is genuinely unpopular or that people have concerns about, yet which has constrained discourse. Examples: lower incomes. You then talk about the good old days, and reframe it: lower incomes becomes, 'people taking your income, agh those immigrants'. Architecture becomes, '1940 and before were better, oh and everyone was white then'. You get the idea.
Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism, disguised in the neutral or even interesting format of ancient history.
Once you recognise this, you see it everywhere.
But don't let this fool you re older architecture having genuine value. We just have to avoid saying people have no taste, or referring to their preferences as 'pabulum'. That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject of architecture, they pay attention to what else that person says.
Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".
The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.
It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.
I might object that being right-wing, or having fear of the effects of immigrants even, does not necessarily entail racism. But it would be more interesting to say that they are related, and that valuable ideas about nice traditional architecture and nostalgia for the good old days are also genuinely related to racism and colonialism and fascism, which means that there's something of value to extract from all that garbage before you can do a clean separation of the ideas. Mercifully I don't have time to write this comment right now, but it was probably going to include the word "culture" in several places.
> The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond
When politics exclude a group, or a group feels excluded, it's easy to lure the group into supporting anti-politics, which is a nice way to say "fascism".
This is kind of where we are now, with the far-right preying on the most vulnerable people that feel ignored by politicians.
So? Many people (not all) are right-wing because they want to preserve beauty. Being a right-wing is not a rare thing, it's the second most popular belief system in the West.
>Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism
Racism is much less of a thing in Europe, compared to the USA, yet fascination with Antiquity is just the same or even higher.
From your comments and the way you describe yourself, you strike me as the stereotype of the sort of person you'd find at a DSA rally. Over-schooled (as opposed to over-educated), arrogant, and finding grievance in everything.
The author writes an article observing that people find more beauty in traditional architecture and you immediately slander him as a racist white guy who wants to go back to 1950s segregation? You think you're the reasonable one in this conversation?
You don't have to return to the 1950s to find racism and segregation in present day America. There's a lot of work yet to do. Get on it or get out of the way.
Sure, but it's a massive leap to go from "there's still some racism and segregation in America" to "traditional architecture perpetuates racism." The latter sounds like something from 2020 that's now being disavowed as "woke 1.0."
Nostalgia and white guys have a fraught relationship. The good old days weren't even that good for them, killing them off with cigarettes and booze in their replica colonial and Cape Cod homes.
There isn't just "some" racism and segregation, either. Check the text messages sent by cops in the Karen Reid case. What are the odds that the most racist cops in the state worked that case?
You seem to be making up arguments against some caricature that you have built in your mind in order to satisfy some form of virtue signaling or sanctimonious belief. Whatever it is, it makes no sense and I feel dumber for having read it.
Go touch grass, it's healthy. (And get off bluesky)
> You seem to be making up arguments against some caricature that you have built in your mind in order to satisfy some form of virtue signaling or sanctimonious belief. Whatever it is, it makes no sense and I feel dumber for having read it.
> Go touch grass, it's healthy. (And get off bluesky)
You seem to have been triggered by the OP pointing out that a lot of this traditionalist architecture movement is - yes - racist old white dudes who want everything to be like it was when they were kids. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it's worth remembering that the times filled with traditionalist architecture also had entire lower classes that slept in Flop Houses [0] and Shantytowns [1].
Ultimately traditionalist architecture may look nicer, but it's not surprising that buildings which cost more to build also look nicer.
If someone simply pointing the driving force behind this upsets you so much that you start posting replies like this, I would advise spending less time on X. Go outside, take a break from your "culture war". It's healthy.
Overcomplicating things and referencing vague connections does not make an argument inherently better. Just longer.
No, it's not racist, no matter how much you try to make it so. It's exhausting and tired and makes people like Trump win. Racism is bad, good looking buildings are ... good.
Absolutely ridiculous, please listen to yourselves and please, please, think long and hard about how median American's would respond to this nonsense. (If you know any)
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.
> 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.
Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored
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.
When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.
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...
Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Aesthetics have a function though, so ignoring them and focusing on all other functions when creating the form can decrease the total functionality.
Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
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.
> 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.
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.
IMO one of the main insight in the maxim is the importance to have the form communicate the function to the user.
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?
Is that a serious question? Many people would consider Potala palace, the Milan Duomo, Neuschwanstein, etc more beautiful than anything designed by Zaha Hadid and Gehry. Myself included, even as someone who likes their work. Limiting ourselves only to the category of modern event centers, I'd still put the Harbin Grand Theater ahead of it.
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.
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?
> 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.
> things that people actually enjoy
No one will care if you build 1000th replica of a nice building. It's just not interesting to anyone and actually becomes boring very fast. People may live in it but no one will come from afar to visit it because of its beauty. It will become another one in a row of the same.
If you build a striking, exceptional building, it can become a big success (like Gehry's in Bilbao which is a success story for the whole city), so people who commission buildings sometimes select for that.
And also there is a sizable group of people who actually enjoy interesting buildings, like people who enjoy haute couture or haute cuisine etc., so it's not like there is no market for that.
There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
It becomes change and following avant garde for the sake of it and a group of people trying to be different in all the same boring ways.
> There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
Is Palladio not taught? Christopher Alexander (of A Pattern Language)? The classical order of columns?
Brent Hull (for one) has done a whole bunch of stuff with his restoration work on trying to teach people about proper proportion:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arca0o5KyTo
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9JWBWiEKWQ
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpV7m1lU_Dw
* https://www.youtube.com/@BrentHull/videos
This was all standard stuff until the 1930s.
This was specifically in reply to the "convince the design community that form can follow things other than function" parent comment.
I think Hadid and Gehry show that modern architecture doesn't just mean "form follows function".
Yes. That building is rather ugly, in my opinion. Give me gothic style over that any day of the week.
Just looked it up, and I find it rather bland. It's not bad, but not great either, and the immediate surroundings are barren and boring.
From a quick look at the Wiki page
I prefer Sydney Opera's outside shape.
The wiki pictures of the inside of the Heydar Aliyev Center also look odd to horrible to me.
Give me 5 minutes with a pencil. Emperors new clothes all these fancy architects. The worst is Bjarke Ingels.
Wow, that guy’s buildings look like they were built by someone who never made it as a Lego kit designer.
I looked up that architect. His buildings look stunning to me. What is your issue with them?
How would you test the hypothesis, "My architectural tastes align with the popular consensus"?
Some kind of survey? In this case I am not interested in popular consensus but with the particular user here.
that one looks too Calatrava-ish (specifically Oceanografic), I'd prefer the Dongdaemun Design Plaza if we are talking Zaha Hadid - especially once you see it in person.
I can see the appeal.
And, it kinda looks like someone dropped a wet handkerchief on the Sydney Opera House.
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.
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.
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,2... Photos of the renovated building: 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,2... Photos of the finished building: 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.
I've also actually renovated my old place. I did it because I didn't want to rebuild the place entirely (there was no need, it was woven brick, more solid than most bunkers), and because I would have had to agree with the neigbors, which was ... let's politely call it "not guaranteed".
But very quickly it became clear why that was the right decision: building codes. People legislate building codes, but of course they're unwilling to DO anything. So old buildings, built against old building codes, don't have to change, and that means they effectively get to ignore building codes. If I rebuilt the place I would have had to move the house (as in physically move it, just 4 meters, but it's a house, 4 meters might as well be 400 kilometers, you have to rebuild it). I would have to give up at least 40% of the surface area (the "ground surface") AND one of the floors. Net result: the new house would have been about half the living surface of the old one.em.
So obviously the renovated house is worth a lot more than a new house: for starters it's double the size!
It's even self defeating: the isolation of the old house is better. Yes, people legislate modern isolation materials but if the house MUST be a lot smaller there must be a lot more contact area with the cold air, because it wouldn't be built against the neighbor's house anymore and a LOT less thermal mass (thermal mass = free heating, more or less) so you're starting from a very bad starting position.
Here's a thought. Imagine roughly 5% of available apartments are in renovated old buildings. I don't know what the real figure is, doesn't matter I just assume it's significantly lower than newly built apartments.
Now also imagine that 20% of people prefer those old buildings.
Per apartment then, there's 4 times as many interested buyers than per modern apartment, and the buyers of the old apartments are looking at a much slimmer market so they're willing to pay much more for the right one because they're unlikely to see a comparable one soon.
Also I imagine bringing an old building up to modern standards is quite expensive so that also explains some of the price.
I don't really know anything, I just think what I'm writing makes sense.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower
There might be some survivorship bias there.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the...
Not according to this article, which looks into it.
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.
> 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.
The people outside the building aren't paying rent.
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.
But the people in the building go outside too you know. Few like the brutalist style.
I know how the building I live in looks like. I am also aware of my own hairstyle and cloth and backpack and ...
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.
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.
It just so happens that humans inhabit the outside world too? And that the outside is shared by everybody?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Architecture built today is mostly optimizing for the developers’ budget and the local regulations.
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
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.
Why not both?
Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. It may come as a surprise but it required years of cultural development and education for most people to accept the work of Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production. It's only recently, (with designs like the Ferrari EV for instance) that people are starting to see how limited our aesthetic language has become. Modernism is too cheap to replace so the "beauty" of soulless minimalism will likely endure in the zeitgeist, but it's not a very interesting environment to be in.
I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.
I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.
And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t
The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.
And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?
I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.
The units are basically commodities. Same floor plans same amenities same building about the same rent. True across the country for these sort of newer buildings, only real difference is the pool doesn't close for the season for those in milder climates.
It is designed to be this way for investors more than consumers. Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all. The consumers have no choice really but to be in this market if they want to be sheltered at all. It isn't like you really can exercise free market selection for something necessary like shelter. You have to take what has been made available and you cannot do without.
There is therefore no incentive to make a smart building that is favoring the tenant since this doesn't grow the potential pool of tenants in the area, that pool remains the same size as it was. It is unlike a lot of other markets where having a better product might actually grow the customer base of the product segment overall.
> Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Lot of the finance machine works on standardization, like the are some building techniques, like spray-on insulation that work perfectly fine, but banks wont approve a loan on a building like that because its hard to inspect and repair.
This ironically makes these crappy buildings built to investor standards expensive, since banks will give cheap loans for it, on account of having low maintenance costs.
Of course all this exists only on paper.
Yes plus everyone is competing on cost so the lowest bid gets chosen.
If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.
My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
> My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was <1k sqft (avg >2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.
Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.
Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.
Unfortunately only custom homes can afford to care about beauty. Developers are building for cheapest possible and letting the long term owners deal with the consequences.
Homes still aren’t really mechanized. I’ve seen attempts but they haven’t worked well yet. Labor and materials are so expensive!
And most new homes are built by one of a few big groups. Oligopoly issues again.
>Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.
>My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
The land is far more expensive now. Plus legal liability insurance costs. And costs of permitting/zoning/bureaucracy is much higher.
You mention the private equity backed builder, but the designs come from the corrupted ivory tower which just invents more and more ridiculous designs (modernism, brutalism, for example) to try to stay fresh. Same in the art world. (Banksy, Warhol, others)
We have not made any progress, and perhaps we don’t need to, when it comes to architecture since World War I. There have been a few projects like La Sagrada Família, but those are exceptionally rare.
Suburban homes. What a disaster and embarrassment to the human race.
What do you think is weird about Banksy? Looks like older pre-modern art to me.
If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too. To me, brutalism hits the same things neoclassicism does but much more organically and better.
Idk. I don't see any cultural or artistic resemblance with Balloon Girl versus say, Luncheon of the Boating Party.
Separately it's always peculiar to me that folks go on to defend some art, but I bet if I went around saying neoclassic art is terrible I'd not get much opposition. I wonder why.
> If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too.
What artworks would you compare here?
Architecture. In both neoclassicism and brutalism, regardless of intended aim, the effect seems to be one of silublime monumental scale that humbles a person.
Both paintings you cited are very much on the traditional and representative end of the spectrum. None of them seem to be on the more abstract 20th century styles.
> Architecture. In both neoclassicism and brutalism, regardless of intended aim, the effect seems to be one of silublime monumental scale that humbles a person.
Well why would you discard the intention? I think there is more to compare as well than just the ability of the architecture to humble someone. What does the architecture say? Who does it glorify (in these cases)? How difficult is it to make?
You can also say they're similar but one is good and done well (neoclassicism as you mentioned but there are others) and one is done very poorly (brutalism).
Part of how you could argue that is something like number of visitors. Nobody visits brutalist architecture. It's extremely unpopular outside of academic circles or art establishment points of view.
> Both paintings you cited are very much on the traditional and representative end of the spectrum. None of them seem to be on the more abstract 20th century styles.
I have a hard disagreement here but I'm not sure what there is to really talk about.
Intent is not very relevant to the effect it has on people. You can make a building for any reason you want. Modern neoclassicism doesn't glorify any particular person, it may glorify the State or some Institution. Brutalism also doesn't glorify anyone, it isn't usually made by the state for itself either, I do not understand what the point of 'glorifying someone' would be to a general building. If you want to know 'who' a building glorifies someone then answer who CN Tower glorifies, and the Space Needle, and the Empire State Building.
I am neither an academic nor a member of the art establishment. I find neoclassicism nakedly fake in an irritating manner. Brutalism is a more honest and organic execution of what people try to do with neoclassical buildings.
>I have a hard disagreement here but I'm not sure what there is to really talk about.
You were the one who put Bansky among "weird and ridiculous" art movements which is frankly absurd as Bansky does very traditional and representative art. Did you have any trouble recognizing what Girl with a balloon was? It is a very clear and representational style of painting that has absolutely nothing to do with the more abstract art movements of the 20th century. Do you know of Woman with a towel? Do you consider it normal or "weird"? Girl with a balloon is no more "abstract" roughly than girl with a balloon. If you think one is and the other isn't then you have a really absurd and incorrect view.
But you pointed out the intent in your comparison between neoclassicism and brutalism, I didn't.
But to your point about the effect that some building has on people, we have things we can measure about that effect. You can look at number of visitors, or perhaps price on the market.
> You were the one who put Bansky among "weird and ridiculous" art movements which is frankly absurd as Bansky does very traditional and representative art.
Well it's ridiculous (worthy of ridicule) in part because of the poor quality and craftsmanship. It's poor art because it fails to express meaning in a way that, for example, you can clearly see if you are to compare it to Woman with a Towel. There is much more depth. Individual brushstrokes, intent.
Popular and modern art today lacks the ability to evoke meaning and depth in the same way. This is measurable. There's a reason that IKEA sells Andy Warhol prints and not Women with a Towel prints - yet many more visit and covet visiting the great masters. Modern art requires an industry to convince you that it is art and worthy of praise while the others draw people in without needing marketing. One is a faucet of the degradation of modern culture post-World War I/II (which we can rebound from of course) and is easily made and easily reproduced. The other, isn't.
> If you think one is and the other isn't then you have a really absurd and incorrect view.
No, your view is incorrect and absurd.
Bansky is simply not modern art at all. This is not a personal opinion, it is simple objective fact. Banksy is not remotely modern or abstract art. You are absolutely absurd in thinking so. Pop art is representational and not remotely abstract. If he didn't brush it how on earth did you think he painted it? If it turns out it was not done with brushes but was painted with airbrushes it is still a painting. Unless you mean to say airbrushes are not art. There is no "intent" behind individual brushstrokes, its crap you made up, just like you accuse fans of newer art movements to make up meanings. If you disagree, list me each brushstroke, their coordinates and meanings.
Its also absurd to try to compare visitor count for Bansky against a museum piece. People go to a museum because that is the only place they can physically see the painting. Banksy's work is done in public spaces so footfall would be whatever millions traverse it over the years. Unless you can mind read and tell me exactly which of them are and aren't fans of the painting how can you compare numbers of people who like it? You tell me where is the 'poor craftsmanship' in Girl with a balloon. Its more detailed if anything, and you seem to judge art based on how detailed and representative it is. Its as good in execution as Woman with a towel, and roughly on the same level on the spectrum between representational and abstract. It has a clear subject that has been painted with a degree of realism, just like Woman with a towel. You can't explain me the exact reason, because you made up nonsense about certain paintings based just on their age in years.
So now we're arguing that there are objective facts in art? Interesting. You can't simultaneously say that there are no objective facts and then argue with my interpretation of the art which is subjective opinion, just like yours. You're just proving my point here.
Its as objective as it gets in art as eg saying the Space Needle building is not a Roman style building. Banksy clearly does not belong to any 20th century abstract or modern movement at all. Its objectively absurd and wrong to claim so. The only way such a mind bendingly absurd statement can be made is if someone is only looking at the date stamp not the pictures.
Still waiting for the coordinate by coordinate breakdown of brushstrokes.
You still didn't tell me who those buildings glorify by the way. Why didn't you answer that question?
> Why didn't you answer that question? ... Its as objective as it gets in art as eg saying the Space Needle building is not a Roman style building.
Idk I didn't find it important or interesting. Even in your case of the Space Needle one could simply argue it's a continuation of western civilization in which Rome and Athens were the founders and stewards of. Maybe the Space Needle is just a big Egyptian Obelisk that the Romans were so fond of. Who is to say it's not a Roman style building?
> Banksy clearly does not belong to any 20th century abstract or modern movement at all.
I think Banksy is very abstract, the specific nature of whether it's more close to some arbitrarily defined time period isn't all that relevant, plus there's some overlap as styles emerge.
But I would actually argue it's pretty close as an offshoot. Most of the 20th century art movement is the result of the post-war psychosis that many experienced. Girl with a Balloon is very similar, in my view, even if it's slightly different stylistically.
Regardless of what it is, it's very mediocre as far as artwork goes. It lacks attention to detail, and where one may want to ascribe importance and meaning it is done so through a lens of modernism (like brutalism) that is still reeling from bunkers and trenches in World War I/II.
You're focused on the style, but I'm focused on much bigger things. My point anyway was that pretty much everything after around 1950 or so is bad. Whether we call certain styles 20th century or modern or post-modern is important for catalog purposes but ultimately unimportant to me. Civilization in the west stopped trying, and you can see that reflected in this shit art.
You seem to have some memory issues I think. You were the one who brought up the question of who a building glorifies, not me. It was you. You should be able to justify what you yourself said. Why is it suddenly unimportant? If it was unimportant why did you, not me, bring up that question. You clearly must be able to answer those questions.
>I think Banksy is very abstract
Did you have any difficulty knowing what the painting was depicting? Its more detailed than a lot of impressionism that you seem to enjoy. Its clearly not remotely abstract at all. It has absolutely nothing to do with brutalism, brutalism is an architecture movement not a painting movement. This is in not even wrong territory of absurd nonsense. What is the attention to detail you find missing? If you will put any argument, give exact specifics and examples otherwise don't say it. Its more detailed and well executed than Impressionism, and in neither impressionism nor that painting the intent was anyways photographic representation. It is very absurd of you to say because Banksy's style has nothing post 20th century about it at all. The date stamp changes nothing. Civilization is fine. Its not civilization's fault you make up crap in your head about some art periods and refuse to play the game of making up crap about other art movements.
> You seem to have some mental issues I think.
You seem to have mental issues then.
> You were the one who brought up the question of who a building glorifies, not me.
It wasn't a question though, I was just stating a fact. And "who" doesn't have to be a specific person, though it can be. Who can refer to a people, or a culture, or a civilization. "Who did that? The Egyptians did that", for example. There you go, it's justified and still important.
> Did you have any difficulty knowing what the painting was depicting? Its more detailed than a lot of impressionism that you seem to enjoy. Its clearly not remotely abstract at all.
I disagree completely and that is my opinion. You can't argue with my opinion without inviting objective criteria about artwork.
> What is the attention to detail you find missing?
Well partially graffiti-style art is limited by the medium, and as societies degrade we use cheaper and cheaper materials/products and do so with less knowledge until they die out. Look at suburban homes versus surviving residences in the high-end markets in places like London or Paris (there's lots of other cities just those are two obvious ones).
But from just looking at the artwork I think it's lower quality and less thought and attention was put in to it versus other artwork, including your reference point of Woman in a Towel. Girl with a Balloon seems to try to invoke a message about something but that message seems kind of silly and cliche. And then there are just these two colors. Black and red. Boring.
> It is very absurd of you to say because Banksy's style has nothing post 20th century about it at all.
I'm not trying to litigate whether some folks got together and decided that some art should be grouped in some way. That's just their opinion on the grouping, mine is different. I lump the majority of art post-World War II into a single category with the defining feature being a psychotic relationship to humanity driven by post-war psychosis. It's like brutalism. It's built off of bunker designs and fear of humanity.
In that case you should be able to answer the questions for each of the three buildings. Or the house you live in.
Level of detail is very objective. Are you saying degas is more detailed than that bansky piece? How is graffiti limited by the medium? What do you think is not possible to paint on a concrete wall that is possible to do on a plywood or wood panel or cloth?
> Look at suburban homes versus surviving residences in the high-end markets in places like London or Paris (there's lots of other cities just those are two obvious ones).
Show me average houses from the same economic class in your preferred era and in modern times.
>I'm not trying to litigate whether some folks got together and decided that some art should be grouped in some way. That's just their opinion on the grouping, mine is different. I lump the majority of art post-World War II into a single category with the defining feature being a psychotic relationship to humanity driven by post-war psychosis. It's like brutalism. It's built off of bunker designs and fear of humanity.
You are entitled to having insane beliefs of course. And to continue to invent statements without even attempting to give any explanation or example. Such as how a girl and a balloon is "fear of humanity" but a nude of some woman in a shower is not. What was the less detail? Give me specifics. Until you give specifics, you are just making up crap.
> In that case you should be able to answer the questions for each of the three buildings. Or the house you live in.
I can answer any question you have. Just let me know.
> Level of detail is very objective. Are you saying degas is more detailed than that bansky piece? How is graffiti limited by the medium? What do you think is not possible to paint on a concrete wall that is possible to do on a plywood or wood panel or cloth?
You can't get the depth of brushstrokes or color for example.
> Show me average houses from the same economic class in your preferred era and in modern times.
Why would I do that? What would be the point?
> You are entitled to having insane beliefs of course.
Your belief is insane also.
> And to continue to invent statements without even attempting to give any explanation or example. Such as how a girl and a balloon is "fear of humanity" but a nude of some woman in a shower is not. What was the less detail? Give me specifics. Until you give specifics, you are just making up crap.
There's no detail or specifics to provide that you would entertain or accept. So there's no point. It doesn't matter anyway because not only are the technical details subpar, the point of the artwork itself is, in my opinion, stupid.
>I can answer any question you have. Just let me know.
Who or what does (a) the CN Tower, (b) the Space Needle, (c) the Empire State Building, (d) your house glorify?
>You can't get the depth of brushstrokes or color for example.
In what way do you think they can't? Do you know what priming or not was applied to the concrete in his graffitis? And likewise to the wood panels of the artists you admire?
> Why would I do that? What would be the point?
Why shouldn't we compare average houses of like economic classes if you claim one style is so much better?
>There's no detail or specifics to provide that you would entertain or accept. So there's no point. It doesn't matter anyway because not only are the technical details subpar, the point of the artwork itself is, in my opinion, stupid.
Because you can't. You never yet presented a single example, detail or argument in favor of anything you stated other than "Because I feel so!!!".
> Who or what does (a) the CN Tower, (b) the Space Needle, (c) the Empire State Building, (d) your house glorify?
A - CN Tower I'm not sure. It's just tall
B - Space Needle - I'm not sure it's just tall.
C - Empire State Building - meaning there, Empire (it's in the name) business, commerce, American ingenuity, prosperity, and wealth.
D - My house probably doesn't glorify much. Most suburban houses by design I'd say they just glorify the car that's parked in front of the driveway while the front door is hidden. This is a vestige of the psychosis of post-war architecture which hides away things like windows or doors less an intruder easily find the entrance.
> In what way do you think they can't? Do you know what priming or not was applied to the concrete in his graffitis? And likewise to the wood panels of the artists you admire?
Well I just look at it. Look at it up close, look at pictures of it. It's less technically sound and older artists were much more skilled.
> Why shouldn't we compare average houses of like economic classes if you claim one style is so much better?
Why are we comparing the average house instead of the best made houses where folks had the funds to take creative liberty?
> Because you can't. You never yet presented a single example, detail or argument in favor of anything you stated other than "Because I feel so!!!".
I think the colors are poorly done and muted, the outline of the girl is really boring and euro-centric, and the intended message falls short. The medium used (graffiti) is one of the least challenging and limits the ability of the artist to focus on details which require a lot of time and effort to perfect.
Ok so you can no longer make this argument that I haven't provided a single example. It doesn't matter anyway because art is subjective and all opinions on it are equally valid.
Neither being colorful nor precise photographic representation were the point of Impressionism either. Charcoals peaked in the 19th century. Do you think charcoals are not art? If you go by level of detail and realism as your metrics then that Bansky piece is technically superior to the Degas. I would need you to explain in what sense you think it is euro centric as I have no idea how that is applicable here. What do you think was the message in a bunch of picnicers at a table or a naked woman in a bathroom?
> The medium used (graffiti) is one of the least challenging and limits the ability of the artist to focus on details which require a lot of time and effort to perfect.
Again how do you feel concrete admits of less detail than plywood or wood or cloth, which is what most older painters used?
>It doesn't matter anyway because art is subjective and all opinions on it are equally valid.
I am glad we could get down to tacks and admit neither of us are artists or art scholars and both our opinions are equally irrelevant on this topic.
> Neither being colorful nor precise photographic representation were the point of Impressionism either.
I didn't claim that photographic representation was the point. Colorful for the sake of colorful wasn't the point either, but impressionists artists (since that's what we're talking about) utilized color to a far more expert extent and then you can see that in the artwork. This is in part due to the poor medium, and in part due to the inability for the artist to do anything technically worthwhile with light and color.
There's nothing realistic about Balloon Girl for example when compared to Renoir's painting of Two Sisters. It's kind of like a silhouette or something. There really isn't anything there that would separate it from everyday graffiti or something like that.
Take a look: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/14655/two-sisters-on-the-terr...
Here you can see the masterful use of color and very precise paint strokes to illustrate different forms of lightning and how the colors interplay with each other.
The Banksy piece is kind of like, idk how to describe it in comparison without being too offensive. Even the girl's face in the Banksy work looks a little like a girl ogre or like he is a try hard trying to make some political point or something. It's really jarring and weird to look at. When folks are like "omg this is art, it speaks to me" I'm like, did you have an aneurysm?
> I would need you to explain in what sense you think it is euro centric as I have no idea how that is applicable here.
Happy to, the outline of the girl is western. It's not an asian girl, for example. You can clearly see that. The use of a heart balloon is arguably a European interpretation. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing I guess, I do think European art prior to the wars was the best that has been created but others may think differently.
> Again how do you feel concrete admits of less detail than plywood or wood or cloth, which is what most older painters used?
It absorbs paint differently. Can you identify an example where concrete is used paint something such as the Mona Lisa or perhaps something that Renoir created as I mentioned above?
> I am glad we could get down to tacks and admit neither of us are artists or art scholars and both our opinions are equally irrelevant on this topic.
I'm still confused as to why you are asking me to justify my thoughts here. It's just my opinion and if you believe art is subjective you simply have to accept my opinion and that it's just as valid as yours might be. There isn't any possible substance to debate unless you want to also argue there is objective criteria in which we can evaluate art. Is that your position?
We know nothing of any priming or not that had been used by Banksy. Plywood and wood also are not good mediums for paint but many painters primed it with gesso first. Unless you have verified information how the concrete was prepared and how it admits of less possible detail than the other media you like (and list what media you think your favorite paintings were) then its bs to say. And size is its own scale, at the scale of his paintings almost any medium admits of very high detail.
Pre-WW1 had already abandoned representational styles to a much larger extent than Banksy ever did, eg Cubism and Futurism so you are bullshitting. I don't see much difference in detail level between the painting you gave and the Banksy painting. Muted colors is a stylistic choice. You didn't tell me why charcoal is or isn't a valid medium. Charcoal has even less color.
> You didn't tell me why charcoal is or isn't a valid medium. Charcoal has even less color.
I don't have to or care to answer the question?
> and list what media you think your favorite paintings were
I don't have to give you anything other than "no it's not as good". Art is subjective. Balloon Girl is one of the worst pieces of art I've ever seen and anyone off the street could make something that lame and pointless.
> Pre-WW1 had already abandoned representational styles to a much larger extent than Banksy ever did, eg Cubism and Futurism so you are bullshitting.
No you are bullshitting
You can't answer that question because it punctures your stupid and absurd crap. You could easily look up Cubism and Futurism and what era they peaked in even if you didn't know, but you won't because you will have to admit you were spewing bullshit if you did.
> The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
This is true, but usually fewer people die in the construction of those utilitarian housing projects
You're not counting the people who die of homelessness, or of depression because they seem stuck in a situation where they'll never have reliable housing, or in a car accident on their too-long commute, or of a heart attack because of years of stress related to rising rents, or...
Justice delayed is justice denied, and housing that takes years to build because of stupid NIMBY bullsh*t is just an indirect way for the haves to tell the rest of us to kys.
Speed of construction is also not the same as efficiency.
>The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
In China buildings are built faster.
The global construction industry learned a lot in the last 100 years.
Modern materials and production methods eliminated the need for ornamentation to prove a craftsman's skill and attention to detail.
I'm thinking of something like a violin. You can't pick up a violin and judge the perfection of the fitting between the wood surfaces that are glued together. If that work isn't perfect, the instrument will eventually fly apart. But you can look at the "scroll" and "bees sting" which are unforgiving of tiny errors. These kinds of features persist to this day due to traditionalism, but have disappeared from most industrial products.
Today, I don't expect an ornamented house to be of any better quality than a plain house.
There's plenty of traditional architecture that's not baroque, and is therefore not very rich in ornamentation. An austere brick home with a tiled roof still wins over a modernist cube house in both form and function, if not cost.
> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy.
I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.
What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.
I actually think this is a big part of nimbyism. People know that whatever is built is going to make the neighborhood uglier because they have no faith in architecture, so they start opposing everything.
This is not a general truth.
The Dana-Thomas House, designed and executed by Frank-Lloyd Wright, spared no expense in an age when skilled craftsmen were affordable.
Are there seeds of the Guggenheim in New York between these two buildings?
https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-ho...
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687...
The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.
Apple hardware is glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepipeds very similar to the glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepiped skyscrapers that this article is decrying. The main difference is that Apple hardware has rounded corners as a necessary concession to practicality.
Isn't that exactly their point? Every new building looks like an iPhone: sleek glass and metal.
But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
I can't believe this has to be said, but glass skyscrapers predate even the first iPhone.
The is hopefully the high watermark of Apple fans thinking Apple invented something they didn't.
That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.
A lot of the sample images shown of ‘traditional’ architecture in this piece are not what you’re talking about - they aren’t ’traditional materials’ or ‘traditional techniques’, they just use choices of exterior cladding and window layouts that are evocative of traditional choices - but they are just as much a soulless product of low cost materials and construction efficiency.
Not the case for all of them (the brick-built viaduct proposal for example looks like it would be a nightmare to build and maintain), but most of the buildings shown, the ‘traditional’ variant just uses less visible steel and glass, in favor of ‘layer cake’ designs with stone cladding panels on the lowest level.
White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia.
It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.
I painted my house blue and orange in protest at the boring colour choices most people make.
No one else on my street has followed my lead though.
I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.
This is the grey car theory of real estate.
It’s easy to sell grey, white, and black cars. So it’s what you buy.
This assumes no purchase is longterm. Which is its own indictment.
I should add: I love that you broke this idea. Can you (safely for the internet) share any photos?
I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house".
Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal.
What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
I wanted to paint my house in Razzle Dazzle, but orange and green. My wife threatened to leave me, so the idea was abandoned.
Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.
If I lived in Australia, I would have the exterior of my house to be very white (except solar panels), so as to reflect most of the visible and IR light, and stay cooler.
Problem is most newer places are built of concrete or brick. I mean sure slap some white paint on but the that thermal material is going to take a lot of cooling/heating.
A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.
> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production.
That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain.
Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.
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> Ugliness has become a cultural norm
I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.
You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!
I think a lot of the reflexive distaste for the modern would be softened if we were still able to build in The Old Way, whatever that might be. People like these older brick mid rise buildings with the bit of trimming decoration. But, they just don't get built. Sometimes in NYC or chicago someplace you might see a more recent build where they tried to get those old elements down. They used brick and made it square and tried to do a little decoration, but something is missing. They didn't do the thing where they use nicer brick on the street facing side of the structure, or they didn't do the actual cement formed decorative trim pieces throughout. All the brick is laid the same instead of having some lines on the top edge turned out in a decorative way for example. The whole thing feels severely value engineered even if on paper it's actually a quality building with modern amenities and comforts.
Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.
I think that's an essential point, though maybe for a different reason.
I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?
Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.
Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?
>Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that.
It very much does, unfortunately. In the US, the places with the highest housing shortages are mired with endless red tape, discretionary reviews, parking requirements etc. that substantially increase costs. This leaves little room for anything else, including aesthetics.
Developers have gotten very good at navigating this, but it has also led to them sticking to basic "good enough" designs like the five-over-ones we see when new apartments are built.
I'm not sure that squares what I see in these places. Seems to me that pretty much everywhere has the same red tape. Who is letting you build without consideration of fire safety, egress points, floor area ratios, parking minimums, etc? Everywhere across the country has such "red tape" and regulation.
But what I notice in the housing crisis cities is that this is almost irrelevant. Whatever the actual limits of the zoning are, that is pretty much what you see built. Regulation be damned, it will get bulldozed through and built if it is allowed to be built in these cities. And the real only dam preventing the flood of development becomes these zoning laws that finally say "no" to development happening at all. The red tape is just cost add that gets passed to the buyer. It isn't like there are a glut of homes too expensive to sell in these places (what you'd see if red tape were really the issue), quite the opposite, after all.
I wasn't talking about safety issues when mentioning red tape, but even those severely limit housing construction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfoLUumGnc
Parking minimums are how we ended up with cities that are substantially composed of car storage, instead of housing which people need to live. There's little reason to force developers to build car storage when what people need is housing. People in cities get along just fine without a car, and it's possible to adopt a similar model to Japan that requires people to prove they have a parking spot available before they can register a car.
>Whatever the actual limits of the zoning are, that is pretty much what you see built.
Exactly, the limits are set very low, and so much red tape, that so little housing gets built, which is why we have a shortage.
There's a converse effect too, though - because conservatives tend to attack modernist and postmodernist art, liberals tend to defend even things that are too ridiculous to be seriously defended.
It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana. It's just common sense. But if you insist that everyone who does so is secretly motivated by some kind of bigotry, you end up pushing them towards the right wingers anyway.
Ugly is in the right of the beholder when it comes to individuals, but societies also have collective preferences.
> It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana.
Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:
> too ridiculous to be seriously defended
Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.
How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)
In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)
> It's just common sense.
Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:
The same happens with social change, like women working - Ridicule, then a threat to norms, then normalized. What was absurd becomes normalized. In art, Impressionists were once objects of ridicule; now of course it's arguably the most popular style of painting in human history.> societies also have collective preferences
They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.
Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.
If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.
At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)
Wince and shrug is a politely expressed ridicule, yes.
And yes, common norms are a social phenomenon (and that is exactly what the "collective preference" of society is). And yes they do change. However they are not completely random, either. And if you have had something being pushed on people for well over a century, to the point where most experts insist that it's better, but your average person from the street still thinks it's ridiculous, I think the reasonable conclusion is that it's not completely random.
As a Satanist, I am very much in favor of rejecting norms in general. But that doesn't mean that literally anything that is outside of the norm is better!
> You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
What if it's almost everyone's preference? Except for the high priests of architecture who have their own agenda. Then we end up living in a world full of buildings they design for themselves that most of us dislike.
> Why is it so important?
Because the rest of us have to live with it at street level, every day.
> A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
But they are the norm and have been for some time. It's time to challenge that norm.
If we go back to (for example) Le Corbusier, we see this sort of thing thrown around in discussions all the time - you just don't accept innovation, you're hung up on traditionalism, get with the way of the future. Only it's not the future, it's one part of the past, and for all there was noble intent behind some of this stuff, we've had adequate time to judge the outcomes as lacking.
I am not an architect or high priest of anything.
No, but it appears you are part of a pretty small minority.
I find it very irritating looking at fake or overdone things. I don't think that's minority. Each era of architecture was suited in some way to the building materials and technology of it's time. I do not understand this movement to rob concrete, steel and plywood of it's natural voice and force it to conform to design styles made for different substances and tech.
> I find it very irritating looking at fake or overdone things. I don't think that's minority.
1. I think the onus is on you to prove that it's not a minority, in the face of people overwhelmingly favouring older, more ornamented designs.
2. Beauty does not have to feel 'fake' and ugliness can be very authentic indeed, especially when it comes to concrete. I'd take a faux-neogothic revival over another period of brutalism without even blinking.
I used to live near-ish to this eyesore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyndham_Court#/media/File:East...
It's a hideous blot on the landscape, the wind blows through mercilessly and constantly, it feels desolate and dystopian to be around. It smells of piss and depression. It's notorious for drug dealing. But someone managed to get it listed and protected anyway so now the town's stuck with it permanently.
> I do not understand this movement to rob concrete, steel and plywood of it's natural voice and force it to conform to design styles made for different substances and tech.
Perhaps we don't have to force it to be 'traditional' but it's clear that the 'natural voice' afforded by these materials and the current set of design languages in architecture result in ugly buildings that the large majority of people just do not like.
We don't have to look at the overwhelming preference for traditional buildings and take away from that "We must go back to exactly that", but we should at least take away "People don't like what's being made now, we can do better"
And if there is no way for concrete, steel and plywood to express more beauty then perhaps we could think about using other things that might. Either way, ploughing on with creating spaces and edifices that the majority think are ugly and worse than what came before, either because of a professional disdain for what humans actually like to be around, or some high-minded ideas about material expression seems ... well, pretty pig-headed.
That building looks normal to me. Any building would feel ugly if its less inhabited and full of druggies and homeless.
Its not about high mindedness. Tell me suppose you took steel started making cuboids out of it and sanding it rough then stacking it with cement. Does that in any way do justice to steel or is it a complete waste and misuse of the substance? What these people are trying to imagine as their ideal are not as extreme as forcing steel to behave like brick but it is on the same spectrum. Neoclassical buildings are another good example. They are completely fake. I would bet they mix wildly different centuries apart greek and roman designs. And we know they are steel and concrete structures internally just facaded over with marble, not structural load bearing all-marble like the original greek stuff. Brutalism is just a more honest form of those massive neoclassical buildgings, the scale and power of it minus the fake marble nonsense. But I am not even saying you have to be brutalist, it's just one example of an honest medium.
If I only have hand tools and solid wood, I would make Colonial furniture for example. If I have stainless steel tubing and plywood I would make bent tube legs and plywood rests.
Plywood is an amazing substance why do people hate it? It uses wood to make large panels that lack the directional weakness of wood and to quite an extent the movement issues of wood are also avoided. Concrete is pourable rock. Steel is a flexible and easy to cut and join structural substance. You may disagree with certain design ideas that use these substances snd cwn say we could try different designs but I think its ridiculous to cargo cult brick and mortar or marble for instance (which are perfectly fine materials for their tooling and design) and wholly reject modern substances.
Brick cuboids don't grown on trees or are found in nature either. I would say the funniest one is people calling structures like hypar shaped halls as unnatural. That's as natural as it gets, nature itself leaves the hypar the only shape that is optimal to be supported atop a grid of columns, not the flat roof. These curves are more natural that flat and square walls. At least people should be wrested of the naturalist argument if they use it against designs like this.
> Any building would feel ugly if its less inhabited and full of druggies and homeless.
You have cause and effect backwards IMHO. The brutalist housing monstrosities in the UK, with the notable exception of the Barbican which is more gentrified, create the conditions that encourage this. They create grim, cold, bleak, colourless liminal spaces. Their look of decay doesn't inspire community, care for the place you live or happiness, instead they are dull, oppressive monoliths that people piss on. And the story is repeated across the country.
> Does that in any way do justice to steel
Who cares? Is "justice to steel" a design goal? Why?
> Neoclassical buildings are another good example. They are completely fake.
And?
> Brutalism is just a more honest form of those massive neoclassical buildgings, the scale and power of it minus the fake marble nonsense. But I am not even saying you have to be brutalist, it's just one example of an honest medium.
And again, who cares? Is "honesty" a design goal? Why is that more important than creating human-friendly spaces with a bit of beauty to them?
I'm not arguing against the use of specific materials, I am arguing against allowing the materials to dictate a heavily disliked outcome. Are we really saying "Everyone hates what we build now but we actually can't do any better"?
Because that's not what I get from discussions like these. What I get is "Everyone hates what we build because <insert piece of philosophical sophism that explains why everyone else is wrong>"
Its nonsense. If a building has people and businesses, it is good, if it doesn't and has druggies it will feel bad. An unmaintained mansion with druggies will be equally creepy. I am not sure how you are saying a place is inviting of druggies, what are the physical designs that you think make it so? If you say lack of buyers, then to a druggie wny structure is good enough.
I find crttain kinds of fakeness disgusting. I am entitled ot my opinion as are you to yours if you prefer fakeness.
I think McMansions are honest. Stick framing and plywood is a functional, affordable and most people seem to find it looks okay.
If people disagree with steel and concrete, nothing is stopping them from pooling money to build a brick building. I don't think zoning should be an issue, if a place allows skyscrapers it probably will allow your brick multistorey building. If its liked so much why aren't people funding it?
Either this design is too expensive or its not liked enough.
And I disagree, I find neoclassical buildings cold and inhuman, I think its actually its itnended design too, to overwhelm with sheer scale and induce despair. But I see it as just a design choice not a religion ir existential theory. Gothic is even more deliberately hostile looking.
The barrier to entry for interior is even lower, who is stopping you from buying tools or commisining a cabinet shop to build your vision?
Brutalism is perfectly human friendly, its a building, its meant to house people and take them in and out of their office or apartment. If anything I'd say brutalist structures are probably more walkabale than other multi storey structures. What you make of the interior is up to you. Paint your home as you want, put any furniture you like, as with any other building.
What specific way do you think brutalism or any other building style you would prefer as example is not human friendly?
> I am not sure how you are saying a place is inviting of druggies, what are the physical designs that you think make it so?
The concrete voids, semi-open outdoor stairwells and other weird half-hidden spaces in many of these buildings appear to encourage a lot of antisocial behaviour like drug-dealing and urination.
The greyness and water-staining leaves an area looking deprived, and against a (usually) grey and water-stained sky it makes these areas feel lifeless and barren. Especially where the wind constantly whistles through their straight-lined, hard-surfaced open plazas.
The general ugliness of them just depresses the human spirit, kills community cohesion. People don't care about them. So they come to expect the lifts to smell of piss and the stairways to be full of dealers.
The fact that you don't think building design could have such an effect is deeply weird. Have you ever had to live near any brutalist buildings? They take down your mood just by being near them.
> >I find crttain kinds of fakeness disgusting > And I disagree, I find neoclassical buildings cold and inhuman
We've already established you're the voice of the minority here.
> If its liked so much why aren't people funding it?
That's a very interesting question, why are we stuck in a world where governments and large companies are building modernist stuff that people in general don't like? I think partly it's probably cost, I think partly it's down to the overwhelming majority of architects being taught this particular gospel. But beyond that I don't know.
(The idea that it's a choice of the same individuals expressing their preferences is somewhat silly, most people will never in their lifetimes have any sort of meaningful impact on new buildings in a city)
> What specific eay do you think brutalism or any other building style you would prefer as example is not human friendly?
The whole philosophy of form following function is misdirected from the outset. Beauty, attractiveness is an important part of function in human habitation.
And you still haven't answered my question - why is 'honesty' or 'justice to steel' in the slightest bit important? Why should we prioritise that over things like happiness? Why should we not use artifice and skill to make spaces that are attractive, warm and friendly, regardless of material?
I am not talking about some abstract honesty to some subtance. I am saying if someone dislikes an architectural style they shouldn't blame it on the materials. Some people like wood for a rustic look. I can make a cabinet with wood that uses all curves and circular openings and so on, I bet this person would hate it, but that doesn't mean they hate wood.
I like warm and humane spaces..i would need to see specific examples to see how brutalism violates it. I think if the situation in your locality is so bad that any public space will be taken over by druggies is not the buildings fault. You should say then that you need highly enclosed and guarded structures to prevent this problem.
> I am saying if someone dislikes an architectural style they shouldn't blame it on the materials.
Cool, then we’ll blame it on the choice of how and where to use those materials? So when there’s an architectural style that for example is very heavy on chunky raw concrete, is pretty universally despised and has negative social consequences, it’s fair to say “we should probably stop doing that, it seems like a bad idea” rather than some abstract verbiage about doing justice to the raw materials?
Because to be clear - I don’t care about the materials, I care about the outcomes. If someone can use concrete/steel/ply to make something attractive that isn’t going to degrade is a short handful of years, go for it.
> I think if the situation in your locality is so bad that any public space will be taken over by druggies is not the buildings fault.
Nope, repeated pattern across the whole country, for reasons given and now explained multiple times.
Do you believe architecture can have any effect on a place? How people feel in that place, how that then translates into how they act in those spaces, positive or negative?
If yes, then perhaps it’s time to admit that some styles can be on the negative side.
If no, then why are we even bothering?
Many countries in Asia use concrete by default. People don't seem to have any problems with it.
Architecture obviously impacts a person's mood and behavior, eg unwalkable architecture would force a lot of driving. I just am not certain if brutalism can be said to cause whatever negative issues you are claiming it does. At least I am sure the movement wasn't designed to be anti human in any way.
> eg unwalkable architecture would force a lot of driving
That's purely a utilitarian take. You don't believe that design language could ever have an effect on mood?
You said yourself you find neoclassical and gothic styles induce despair. What do you think would be the long term effect of living somewhere that induced despair in you?
> At least I am sure the movement wasn't designed to be anti human in any way.
A system is what it does, not what it was designed to do. The thinking behind it was often utopian, there was high-minded talk of "streets in the sky" and the idea of giving everyone their own front door to the outside, as if they had their own private house on a raised terrace.
The results were not in line with the expectations.
Lack of drivability isn't just a mechanical thing, it shapes how a locality lives and moves, the kind of community that can form or not and also mood eg whether distances cause a feeling of isolation or one of not feeling cooped up and so on.
I understand what you are trying to get at, its just that I simply am unable to understand the mood of despair as associated with brutalism. Maybe others feel otherwise.
> I understand what you are trying to get at, its just that I simply am unable to understand the mood of despair as associated with brutalism
We've established that your view is the minority position and that people in general prefer more ornamented architecture (that's what the article is about). We've established that you understand the premise of feelings of despair caused by architecture.
If you can't put two and two together to understand that other people feel that way when confronted with brutalist architecture, and that being in/around it might affect their lives, it feels like either a lack of imagination or simple obstinacy.
As I said earlier, I doubt you've had to live near many of these architectural tumours, or you might have more insight.
I said I can on paper understand why some people might find brutalism depressive. I just don't get it at all on a feelings basis.
We are too rich to be able to afford things like Sears Roebuck houses now.
So rich but nobody has any money anymore.
All the money is (or will be) spent on land near other rich people so your kids can have a school peer group with parents who have higher education/wealth/social network achievements, and after that, healthcare, and after that, liability coverage.
If there is money left over, then you decorate. But you’ve probably bought into a new housing development with an HOA that doesn’t allow exterior modifications without approval.
All the money belongs to a remarkably small group of people.
"The aesthetic is more or a side-effect of using cheaper resources and cheaper methods of production."
This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your statements at all?
My guess is that at best it's a specious argument. It would be interesting but difficult to try to elucidate. Still what occurs to me is
– Cheaper: than what? Is it that premodern architects had the same technology and materials available but chose not to use them <because they had a higher aesth-ethical integrity>?
– What is a 'side effect' in architecture in a way that's unique from the necessary compromising that the needs of occupants, material constraints, longevity, cost, time, labor, aesthetics, and etc. which essentially is architecture?
> given {cheap material, not the good stuff / I don't feel like it / measuring sucks / I just want to cram people that will ruin your neighborhood everywhere}, the average roll of the dice yields simpler geometry with less ornamentation.
But simpler geometry is structurally stronger and allows more spacious airflow / less heat trapping. The cost of materials is not inert, the demand for them affects the cost obviously. Energy efficiency is beneficial to all. Open floor plans are less prohibitive on use cases. Large window sectioning allows for more light/efficiency and also keeps the street level perspective from seeming insular.
The logic doesn't follow for me that capital was plainly more benevolent, then around some time or another they began the project of "educating" people into accepting their cheap and accidental aesthetic standard.
What survives the past are its most accomplished projects, and thus maybe per capita it appears of higher quality than modern. And more importantly re: the submitted article, it has informed centuries of signing what "home", safe, hospitable, threatening, and etc. mean. So the whole measurement of who prefers what says something but I don't think it speaks to natural perception.
That's it yeah. These kinds of pieces have been written for centuries. Surprise: people like what they are familiar with! There is no meaningful conclusion to draw from this. Look at Monet or Satie. In their own time? Grotesque, offensive - the kind of art scruffy pompous intellectuals enjoy. Now, a century later? At home in a greige IKEA showroom house being sold on the open market. To be clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with this - I love IKEA! I am buying a greige house as we speak! It is just not an interesting observation, and when writers attempt to use it as an argument against making new things, it's facetious at best, and at worst? Well, several interesting possibilities.
In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about.
One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades.
Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture.
There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on.
Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day.
In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad.
There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK).
Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years.
Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day.
The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from.
Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce!
The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car.
The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it.
The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the 'peak car' maintainable vehicles that people wish they had today.
Fortunately I will never be a customer for Ferrari, however, if I was a tax-dodging benevolent dictator with the wealth to put together a motor museum, I would not hesitate to buy a Luxe for the collection, to go alongside an OG Tesla Model S, with the faux grille, and a Xiaomi SU7. I would like to add a Ford Cortina and a Ford Sierra too, however, millions were made and millions rusted away, leaving none for my fantasy museum, particularly in the desired Saluki Bronze colour.
> The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
And now it's used for bungee jumping.
The US equivalent is the Hunter's Point crane.[1] This was built to do a very specific job - lifting battleship turrets. It's not used any more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter%27s_Point_crane
Yet buildings from the 20s and 30s, after the apparent death of all skilled craftsmen made it impossible, used elaborate ornament eg art deco.
Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment.
But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.
Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful.
But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.)
The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.
> But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.
It's far more common than it should be.
> The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
The economic of bathtub curves incentivises designs nobody hates, even if at the cost of nobody loving them.
The bathtub curve is not the most optimal however.
I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun?
Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill.
Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?
The influencer aesthetic. Why do people pay so much to look so boring?
It's not even always cheaper. https://youtu.be/y5w4REl_Few
I am not sure how it is about "cheaper". Lathering on a finish with a roller is much cheaper than a carefully prepared spray system. Modern furniture and structures often use uniformly sprayed coatings. You are mistaking cleanness of look with cheapness, getting such a uniform coating is quite expensive and takes skill and discipline regarding hygiene and cleanup between abrasive grits etc as well.
And if you are against things generally in the sphere of "Bauhaus" interior design then I would say you are engaging in a cargo cult of using modern materials in unnatural ways to copy older designs without eye to how the modern material has its own natural form and manner of usage. I would say, for example if one only has hand tools and solid wood then it is reasonable to follow Colonial design school, but if one has glass, stainless steel and plywood, it is wasteful to force them into a Colonial shape rather than their natural forms. Either style respects the substances and tooling it uses.
You are free to pay four digit prices for every piece of furniture if you truly oppose designs that are aligned toward mass production.
Not really. That may have been true in the past, but it would be so cheap to CNC carve or extrude or injection-mould some ornamentation. Certain materials have gotten more expensive, but I think most of modernism was driven by materials progress and a boredom with previous trends
That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas.
So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.
This is sort of a just-so story that isn't completely true. Stalin pushed "socialist classicism" [1] as an aesthetic, and it wasn't until his successors took over that modernist architectural ideas imported from the West became a hallmark of actually-existing socialism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture
I said early Soviet for a reason.
There was a whole decade of Soviet design before Stalin, which was often radically modernist even by the standards of its day, and that is what the OP was referring to. Stalin was notoriously conservative in his artistic tastes.
A huge part of the Soviet period before Stalin was the civil war and minimal efforts to do anything other than fight it ("war communism"). After that you got the NEP and things going traditional.
Stalin pushed classical and actually within the soviet union Stalinst buildings were considered the best. These are called Stalinka.
Khrushchev embarked on a massive post-war building campaign in an effort to improve living conditions within the USSR by providing millions of new housing units.
These were modernist mid-rise and high-rise buildings and were designed for mass production and efficiency above everything else. These were regarded as considerably lower quality buildings than the Stalinka and were called Khrushchyovka. The Krushchyovka were the classic "commie blocks."
Again, this comment is not informed (I work in a field largely centered around the early Soviet era). Mass housing construction of dispiriting blocks boomed in the Khrushchev era, and the early Soviet era was indeed tumultuous, but the 1920s and even early 1930s saw architectual designs for public buildings that were remarkably modernist. Wikipedia has more than enough coverage if you want to learn more.
This person may be an expert but I have no way to assess that because this low-effort garbage comment provides absolutely no evidence their background and no effort to back up their claims.
Most of this comment, after saying I'm "not informed" just repeated everything I said in my comment with less details.
This seems to be a comment where someone started with a prompt of "no ur wrong" and had AI elaborate it out into something less juvenile.
Stalin was notoriously conservative in most things. I mean, the guy banned abortions, criminalized homosexuality, and re-instituted paid high school.
> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources
Which modernism?
1930s modernism was about new materials to allow luxury for the modern man (electricity! large windows! electric oven! washing machines! fridges! indoor toilets!)
1960/70s modernism was about creating new communities, adapting land to fit the modern car based world. No more pokey little shops with only a few items, requiring a trudge along a wobbly high street. NO! drive your car, go to a futuristic supermarket only once a week.
I don't think we see a modernism now, not as a movement. I will now divert to UK building, because in the US its different. Part of the reason why thats the case in the UK is that councils used to build houses, facilities and infrastructure with their own money. This meant they had their own architects. This lead to town plans that were coherent, if not always successful. See Birmingham, milton keynes, roehamton.
Housing wise, council houses were built, or should have been built to a standard. They were, especially in cities much bigger, brighter and luxurious compared to what preceded them. Were they pretty? no, modern is never pretty, because its not what you grew up with. When I was a kid everyone _hated_ victorian terrace houses, because thats what poor people have. They were more pokey compared to executive estate housing, and in some places didn't have a drive for your four door saloon.
Now, those estates are meh and terrace houses are very expensive, despite being cold, draughty, dingey little shitboxes with odd toilet arrangements. (unless you've slapped in a loft conversion and extended over the kitchen/outdoor toilet)
> Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production.
The problem is, Rams was about bringing the complex new object into the house in a was that was reliable and simple. If we were all about Rams' vision, then we'd have got rid of radiators, had decent windows, insulated the place, had lots of cupboards and cleanly separated living spaces. Not an everything room and a bedroom with inbuilt mould farm (shower + shitter)
Yes the modern apartment is inspired by loft living and dieter rams, but that requires 100sqm/1000sqft and high ceilings. none of which most places have. So you get a kitchen diner because it allows developers to shave off one room from the floorplan and increase density by 1/3rd without extra mateiral costs.
But thats not modernism, thats poor fucking standards, and the lack of competition in the uk in the form new council houses. (a 3 bedroom council house will be at least 90sqm with seperate kitchen, living room)
It's fair to have a cynical take but that's not what modernism is and modernism is not necessarily ugly.
Look at this picture:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5kYm!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Which side is modern and which is traditional? The examples on the right are clearly more modern than the examples on the left to my eye: the left looks like it's from the '70s while the right is unmistakably 21st century. But the examples on the left are run-down, plain, and feature advertisements and bricked-up windows and steel shutters and security doors, while the examples on the right are brand new and shiny and walkable. There's graffiti in the first example and in the last one they replaced the asphalt with pavers!
Hard to take the conclusions seriously when the authors have their thumbs on the scale.
There are some rules to classical architecture styles regarding windows and window size going upwards that the ones on the right do follow more.
There's more to architecture than just the façade, which is what people are rating when they are just looking at photos of the exterior. The interiors, structure, and services, etc. of modern building are often far superior to older ones, and i suspect many 'ordinary' people would agree.
Yes, every time people get grumpy about modern architecture and look over to see if I agree I tell the story about how I used to work at a company in Boston which moved from a beautiful 19th century building to a soulless Modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper. And thank fucking god: the old building was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, had too little natural light, and was too cramped. The Modernist building was better to actually be in in every way. Buildings are there to be used, not just looked at in pictures.
I'm pretty sure that some kind of hybrid can be found where the exterior could look nice and the interior would be very nice as well.
Now, not every modern building has to look like a glass and steel colorless brick.
For example, I really like the look of Oodi [0], Helsinki's new library: it reminds me of wood covered with snow, and the interior is exactly what you would expect from a modern building (built in 2018).
[0]: https://oodihelsinki.fi/en/
Oodi is very much modern architecture. Nordics are full of pretty modern architecture.
The article reads like the author picked a conclusion and made things fit his opinion.
Le Corbusier: "A house is a machine for living in."
It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities. I have a 1920s home and with like a few days of work it lives like a modern place. This is not some dichotomy.
> It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities
In my experience, the biggest issue is natural light - it's hard to beat glass walls when you need a structural skin with some windows where possible.
Ultramodernist glass-skinned skyscrapers have to cover their glass walls with mirror-reflective film to keep out the majority of the natural light. Otherwise, they are solar ovens. A 2.6 m × 3 m office outside wall facing east or west becomes √2 × 2.6 × 3 ≈ 11 square meters of sunlight when the sun is 45° away from its normal, and sunlight is 1000W/m², so it's like an 11000-watt space heater. Without aggressive air conditioning, the temperature in that office rises even faster than the temperature in a parked car with the windows rolled up. You could be dead in minutes if the air conditioning failed.
The standard passive solar rule of thumb, for traditional windows without those coatings, is to keep glazing to 20% of the floor area to prevent overheating: https://sustainableengineering.co.nz/glazing-percentage-hand...
The ultramodernist alternative is to build the entire wall out of windows coated to reflect 80% of the light, a "g-value" of 0.2, or a little bit more light if the windows open onto a larger interior space. You can let in slightly more visible light than the traditional approach by using coatings that have even higher reflectance in the infrared, but the vast majority of solar radiation is visible light, so the improvement is small.
Those walls of glass do give you a wider view, which can be nice, but in order to keep from killing you, they don't give you more natural light, except marginally.
That doesn’t explain why the architecture students in the article prefer facades that the general public generally dislike.
Right but that's not because modern architectural style has made the interiors better. It's mainly technological improvements that allow larger windows, bigger space, better insulation, etc.
You can totally have a traditional style building with a modern interior without a hint of brutalism or concrete.
Large windows are part of the modern aesthetic.
~1580, large windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollaton_Hall
If it's my building, e.g. the building that I live in - I care more about the ease of maintenance and repair than any facade.
Because I spend 80% of my time indoors, and 20% working in the garden, so frankly don't even care what the building looks like.
Maybe only care that the property looks neat when it's time to sell.
As it stands, these studies are just cherry-picked navel gazing with extra steps. You can't design a study like this well. There are hundreds of thousands of buildings, and tens of thousands of variations of subjective preference. And all of those go out of the window as soon as practical concerns (like affordability) arise.
Am I hot or not architecture edition?
Nonetheless, I think it is a failure of architecture that modern design is ugly. It shouldn't be impossible to make good looking, practical, cost-effective buildings with all the options of materials and engineering that is available.
So let's start as the baseline of these 77 to 23 blowout victories by traditional architecture.
Now gradually substitute other modern designs until you can get more of a 50/50 agreement at least, and hopefully 60/40 in favor of modernism.
You could be right. Some of these might be cherry picked bad modern designs. From the article one of them looked like it should have the wicked witch of the West telling her pretties to fly out from their caves to go attack Dorothy. Another one looks like a massive collection of missile launch tubes.
Some designs I almost have to laugh at, when almost similarly disjointed mcmansion hell type monstrosities are snootily dismissed.
we only care about facades because architecture, in California, where I live, is co-opted by NIMBYs.
when it's a twee victorian, they say it's part of the unique appearance of the neighborhood. when it's a hideous laundromat, they say it's historical. they don't actually care about any of it. normal people and their preferences for "traditional architecture" (whatever that means? i guess, "old") are just collateral damage.
While my karma might get incinerated with this quote, it is incisive on traditional architecture. The author is reviled by many.
“Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!”
The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
“Look,” said Roark. “The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”
It's amusing to watch the movie version of The Fountainhead and see what are supposed to be Roarke's buildings. He likes the pedestal style, where the first floor is mostly open-work columns around a small lobby. Turns out this is terrible in cold or windy areas. Wind hits the side of the building and is forced down into the area around the lobby. Doors are forced shut by wind pressure. People are knocked off their feet. A strong wind in snow produces a horizontal blizzard.
The Meteorology Building (bldg 54) at MIT was built that way, with all of the above problems. Much embarrassment. Later, much computational fluid dynamics and, in 2019, a rebuild of the plaza level with more walls.
Because it looks good.
I dont prefer traditional architecture because I have high standards, I just hate all these rectangular-prism concrete stripmalls and loglo highways.
"Traditional" isn't really defined here, but seems to mean "first half of the 20th century," which feels like a relatively narrow tradition. Not a lot of preference for teepees and yurts.
People definitely like teepees and yurts (and thatched roofs, dry stone walls, log cabins, etc.), it's just that at some point the practicality gap becomes too wide to contemplate.
But this is a reasonable point to raise. Although both would serve their purpose a concrete viaduct is much cheaper to build than a masonry one, to the point that it may be difficult to justify the latter no matter how strong the public preference is for it.
Somehow, it always makes me smile that the Glenfinnan Viaduct (as seen in Harry Potter) is concrete. I'm not sure quite why.
Not to mention their comparison, modernist architecture, is just mid-century. There is post-modern architecture after that and arguably also contemporary architecture further after that (however vaguely defined).
It seems like these comparisons are more "expensive traditional design vs low cost modern design." None of their examples had what I would consider a single expensive and nice modern design. But every single example of "traditional" design was essentially luxury pricing.
The missing part is that traditional building used to be cheap (in fact the cheapest way of building things).
What changed is labour costs in western countries relative to the cost of materials and other physical things
It's not just that, but that too. E.g. a cottage like this https://www.superkul.ca/projects/double-island-cottage/ vs a "traditional" cottage. I'm sure people have preferences for both, but to me this is still a beautiful design where all the examples in the article are just low cost ugly designs.
Or on the flip side, go with cheap "traditonal design" like https://mcmansionhell.com/post/809937203073581056/mctuscan-h... and no, sorry, that's ugly as sin.
I think it's true that construction in general has become cheaper over time, so comparing older buildings to newer ones often results in comparing more expensive design to cheaper design. But that's different than aesthetic. To properly compare aesthetic they should normalize for cost at least, if not also execution.
I suppose they did have the expert vs non-expert study, but the only example they showed from it had a hideous buildings in both types so I'm not sure what that's supposed to really accomplish.
> The missing part is that traditional building used to be cheap (in fact the cheapest way of building things).
This is only partially true.
Traditional building used to be cheaper than it is now, yes, but things like ornate decorations and facades were still expensive additional work. It's worth considering the survivorship bias here - the traditional buildings people know and love are the ones that were well built and cared for.
> but things like ornate decorations and facades were still expensive additional work
This again, is partially true. A lot of ornamental decorative elements in public facades were, essentially, mass produced using molds --- very few were hand-made in the way they are done now.
They would degrade over time, however they could also be repaired or replaced relatively easily.
Your point about survivorship bias is also somewhat more nuanced. The buildings that have survived were often, as you said, made with more expensive materials, and they lasted longer; but there was also a change in tastes over time, in particular against ornament and decorative elements, and a change in the idea that certain buildings should be maintained. In the past, people were just way more accepting of tearing down or replacing buildings. Conservation as a general approach was not as common, nor were people as inclined to see certain buildings in particular as uniquely worthy of conservation. It is those buildings which were deemed "appropriate" for conservation and "historically significant" which have largely shaped our understanding of "traditional" architecture, a somewhat snapshot idea of architecture on the cusp of modernism,
Material costs changed too. Hardwood slats over a raised perimeter foundation used to be the cheapest way. Nowadays that would be a premium build.
Several of the referenced studies used award winning modernist buildings, and others used similar size and use of buildings e.g. city halls.
In public spaces I have no doubt this is the case.
I'm more curious about residential though - see huge interesting in MCM over the last decades. I am biased but I think there is a great deal of interest in warm, modernist spaces with ideas like natural materials and lots of natural lighting, especially when compared to the beige boxes of American home building.
Indeed, the beige boxes are neither modernist nor classicist.
My family lives in a MCM house built around 1960. We bought it in a "hot" market where you couldn't be particular about anything. We chose a house based on location and the interior.
Next thing you're gonna tell me that English speakers overwhelmingly prefer novels written in English.
Cultures have visual languages just the same as they have written and spoken (and signed) languages. The crucifix symbol has an understood meaning in most European cultures, because of how foundational Christianity is to their cultures. Is it really so surprising that people prefer buildings in a visual language they already understand?
There's also this paragraph at the very end:
>If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.
In a world where we've seen nothing but modernist designs for 70 years, is it really that surprising that people might prefer novel designs? Especially novel designs in a style they are repeatedly told is better, or references a more refined time?
Seems to me that your positions are in opposition to each other.
1. There’s a traditional visual language that people instinctively prefer.
2. Modern architectural sensibilities have superseded traditional visual language through repetition.
I’m reading this to mean something like “people like their own traditional foods but since they've been drowning in pizza for the last 70 years, they’ve forgotten about their traditional foods.”
How can a basal, instinctive preference just disappear? Can the sex drive disappear with enough brainwashing?
I'm not claiming that people instinctively prefer anything. I'm saying that they've been socialized to believe that "traditional" architecture is some indicator of societal excellence. I don't think its weird that people report a bias they've been taught to have.
The article even seems aware of this possibility when it mentions that architecture students prefer modernism (with the semi-covert implication that their education is poisoning their aesthetic sensibilities). I claim its at most partially because they've been taught to prefer modern designs, but mainly because they've been taught to think about visual languages consciously, so they are able to recognize what a given architect is trying to do, in a way that a layperson might not. That's certainly why Thomas Kinkade gets as much hate as he does (that and the dodgy business practices...).
I'm also not claiming that people have been starved of traditional architecture entirely, just that nobody is building things in the traditional style now. They're not tearing them down either, the White House East Wing not withstanding. This is a novelty bias, nothing more. If you only ever see neoclassical architecture in buildings that are designated as "fancy" or "special" or "august", and all these modern, ordinary buildings do not, you're going to assume that the style itself, and not simply the age and intent at construction are what contributes to that.
I mean, 39 out of 50 US state capitol buildings have domes, as does the nation's capitol building. I think anybody in the US can be forgiven for thinking that dome = legitimate seat of authority. Certainly, that was the hypothesis behind the design decision.
Speaking only for myself, I found Washington DC, which is all neo-classical all the time, just really boring. All the buildings look the same, and I couldn't escape the sense that I was in museum that hadn't been updated in a long time. Chicago's Fields Museum has the same quality.
Building design is not sex.
I absolutely love neoclassical architecture.
I wish more people were building brand new, modern neoclassical buildings that are truly beautiful in a Haussmannian way, yet as practical as modern skyscrapers.. something like 1 Mayfair in London or 150 East 78th Street in New York.
"In other words, there seems to be a mysterious divergence between people’s stated and revealed preferences. Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike?"
Oh, this is actually pretty obvious to explain. There are several equally big reasons, in no particular order here:
- Modernist/brutalist/bauhaus etc. building with any stated use type is on paper cheaper to build, because it removes all aesthetic features and many functional features - like rain pipes, slanted roof in favor of flat roof, human oriented features like benches etc. It will be much more expensive to maintain in long run, due to the environmental damage from missing functional features, but that's not architect's problem then.
- These buildings are build as a class warfare. Notice the stark difference between designs of private houses where higher class actually lives, and the designs which the are commissioning for the common public.
- Performative architecture. The weirder the art form, the better PR and resulting fame.
Classical and in a sense neoclassical architecture literally stood the test of time.
Always seems weird to me that "classical" is stark white columns and sculptures. The original Greek buildings were quite colorful, it's only the intervening millenia that are responsible for wearing away their paint.
It is a fact they improved with prolonged exposure to the atmosphere and UV light.
Many of the architectural styles didn't get enough time to stand the test of time!
"Man fears time. Time fears only the pyramids."
They have terrible natural lighting. Wouldn't recommend living in one.
Not to mention the how little usable interior area they have.
I think the perspective from inside vs outside the buildings is important. Consider Meta’s classic campus vs their newer buildings designed by Frank Gehry. I like the exterior appearance of the classic campus much better as it feels “friendlier”, but from the inside, it flips drastically. The newer buildings are far superior in every way compared to the dimly lit, fluorescent feeling you get inside the older buildings with the small windows.
Mostly this is looking at architecture as urban sculpture. That is relevant, but the most critical experience of a building is on the inside. Modern designs spearheaded modern interior spaces including spacious corridors, atriums for exposing important views and improving navigation, and other such features. More than that modernist buildings are good at presenting functional spaces with a minimum of details to interfere with usage and customization. Different uses can add decoration or functional features as necessary as there is plenty of space available and no ornamentation to interfere with.
And then there is the issue of construction. Many older designs use materials and methods that are either out of date or expensive to replicate with currently popular building materials. Simply going back to older designs is not a practical option for most buildings. There has to be some balance of old ideas with newer methods.
Each room is lived in by a few people, each building has an exterior which is looked at by thousands or millions.
I live in a hundred-year old house (old for the region I’m in), with rabbit warren hallways. I wouldn’t want it any other way. That might just be my taste in interiors, but (as with the article about exteriors) I suspect it is more common than all the modernist functional people would prefer.
To me, the public seems to prefer a design that integrates, or fit in, with the rest of the street/location it's in.
Modern buildings often are their own idiosyncratic isolate in the middle of the city.
When looking at movies, cities tend to have a uniform feel and look (like the elvish Rivendell), and I think people enjoy that.
Like Mont-Saint-Michel in France, or the Chuxi Tulou village in Fujian, China.
When we moved to the bay area in 2015 (south bay), I was absolutely stunned at the variety of residential architecture, having come from the mid-Atlantic where everything tended to be uniform based roughly on construction date/period. Since land is exorbitantly costly, homeowners tend to build what they like, no matter whether it fits the neighborhood aesthetic or not.
Well then. The solution is obvious: we need to educate the public so that it attains the correct tastes. It's doable: after all, the architecture students do manage to obtain the taste for the modernist architecture during their time in the college/university.
Or maybe do nothing, it's not like the public opinion really matters in the technocratic settings.
My theory is they end up preferring buildings that are easy to draw in AutoCAD.
Akin's Law 38: "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say."
If you're really looking for causes, the largest one is price optimization.
But, I think one missing piece between architects and the general public is how architecture students are taught to design (and thus, see) buildings first through the lens of massing [0]. When you compose a building primarily by shaping the different masses, you lose sight of the ornamentation and complex decoration that sets old buildings apart. Then, you add air conditioning and modern building systems and the need for high ceilings and windows with airflow also disappears.
What you are left with is a sealed box. Essentially, architecture has ceded too much design space to engineering in the name of cost optimization and there isn't much 'art' left in it. But look around - that's true across our society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massing
Nah I think modern architecture is popular among many architects and unpopular with almost all of the public for the same reason modern art is: it justifies their existence.
It gives them some clever thing to know that normal people don't know anything about. If King Charles is right about architecture (he is), then what new experimental architecture can you research? You can't, because we've basically already discovered what people like.
I fully agree! And if they still disagree, perhaps we could open special camps where we could forcefully reeducate them! After all, there is but one correct design language for buildings and it's a hideous slab of concrete that our ancestors would weep if they could see.
On a serious note, I've seen conspiracy theories about how such ugly modernist architecture is being used to break our spirits, to make us numb to ugliness and to promote an acceptance of mediocrity. While I originally dismissed it, I've become old enough to see many beautiful buildings replaced with caricatures of them. I'm starting to wonder if there weren't a kernel of truth to these ramblings.
I can't tell if this is serious or sarcastic. I'm going to err on the side of serious though. Maybe the majority is actually correct, and traditional architecture is just plain better. I certainly find it more welcoming than the modern concrete and glass box jungle.
I do actually like the "concrete jungle" style like the Barbican and Salk Institute (by all accounts a pleasantly human place to work despite the famously stark-looking courtyard).
I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly. Whereas even quite dilapidated neo-classical-ish buildings look innately reasonably pleasing.
>I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly.
There's a trend in some Eastern European countries to paint older brutalist concrete buildings as a cost-effective measure to reduce concrete spalling and do thermo-modernization. It's actually pretty amazing how much nicer some of these buildings look even with just a uniform white paint job (others involve more color).
Architects seem to be largely opposed, seeing it as an erasure of the material honesty that brutalism was supposed to represent, but IMHO it suggests that a lot of the core issue with these designs wasn't the shape or creativity of the buildings themselves but just the way the concrete look quickly aged.
> I can't tell if this is serious or sarcastic.
Well, let's try crank the knob yet another notch then.
> Maybe the majority is actually correct
What a horrible thing to say. The liberal democracy, may it be known to you, is about protecting and empowering the minorities of various kind, and the aesthetical minority exists, and its tastes matter.
> traditional architecture is just plain better
It's unsustainable [citation not needed].
I always like to look at the windows for these “more attractive” buildings. They always lead me to believe the indoor experience is worse in some way. Either cramped or similar. Sometimes they imply a dark windowless rooms. Generally, they seem like they prioritize the appearance of the building over the experience of being inside the building, which is unambiguously the more important part of the building.
The funny one is the buildings that have better landscaping. A few of the buildings in the post only look attractive as a consequence of the green courtyard in front. If you cover up that part of the photo, they just don’t look as stunning compared to the other. Perhaps that’s an argument for traditional courtyards (fair enough), but it doesn’t imply the need for traditional building construction.
I just wish there were more acceptance of experimentation. I like well-executed Art Deco, Art Nouveau, 60s high modernism, whatever you call the 70s angular wooden buildings, “natural” styles like adobe that use clay and wood, all kinds really. As long as a style is appropriate for the structure’s use and environment, it’s fine. But economics favors ugly boxes, and local building restrictions make it even more expensive (or even impossible) to be creative. It’s no wonder that many builders don’t bother, sticking to “safe” styles.
Idk, these seem pretty innovative:
https://www.dezeen.com/2026/02/17/chinese-projects-completed...
Not that I like all of them, but the point stands.
Hyper-modernism is fine too, it’s just rare to see this especially in mid size or smaller buildings. Most new buildings look like this: https://weburbanist.com/2019/11/28/restyling-blandmarks-thos...
And most new single family housing is similarly generic.
OT, but I've discussed Gothic cathedrals with Gemini, and we don't make 'em like we used to--charitably, because they take up a lot of space? A Gothic cathedral looks like a bird with massive wings. Those "wings" are outside of the church's interior; people call them "flying buttresses"--they stop the walls from bursting outwards.
Then again, I wonder whether the modern innovation of using steel under tension could enable us to make the "wings" (buttresses) smaller.
the tragedy is that architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable. the other tragedy is before 'regulations' normies designed buildings - they didn't have architecture degrees. don't know if that's still possible anymore.
& buildings shape lives.
the only way to reverse the modernist trend is to have laws that incentivize classical buildings otherwise we gonna keep getting ugly buildings.
> architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable.
Good architects match modernism with livability. A couple months back I visited the Barbican Centre in London and it never ceases to amaze me how thoughtful is every little design item.
The Barbican is a standout exception though. It always comes up in these discussion, and I think it's because in contrast to most other buildings, it was really thought through. The fact is that like in other walks of life, when talent meets opportunity then occasionally great things can happen. But that sort of outlier talent isn't evident in most architecture.
As such the vast majority of the Barbican's disparate cohort of brutalist concrete buildings in the UK were not built for humans, they were built for middling architects who were never going to have to suffer living in them. They need to be razed to the ground and thankfully many/most are going that way.
Stark, grey-brown, crumbling, water-stained monstrosities that just add to the feeling of misery in a country which is already stark, grey-brown, crumbling and water stained in so many other ways.
Just the usual things. There are a handful of gatekeepers who somehow, miraculously, dictate trends, and everyone follows them like some sacred text. To draw a parallel with porn, OnlyFans showed that people actually do not care that much about long form porn movies. I wonder when people will realize that most minimalist modern buildings are cheap, tasteless, and soulless, and start building whatever they actually find beautiful.
But how much say do those people have in what gets built? I can rent a flat because it's close to work without liking the building at all.
This feels frustrating.
They are comparing "same buildings" with AI but I would imagine they are not controlling cost.
Imagine gargoyles and metal dragons on drainpipes and all the ornamentation now and how much that would cost.
People prefer ancient dry stone walls over fences but they cost orders of magnitude differently.
I wonder if with robots and what not if we will see a resurgence in detail and ornamentation and other kinds of expensive but nice constructions.
Cost is a big factor, but so are modern building codes. Some classic architectural features are outright illegal to build in 2026. Others might be allowed, but there's almost no one left who knows how to do it (e.g. plaster walls or ceilings).
Robots are not going to bring any of this back because robots will just create a new set of optimizations and constraints needed to make robotic construction cheaper and easier. If modern cars (which are the result of similar optimization) are anything to go by, this will result in output that's easy to build but hard to maintain or modify - so largely a continuation of existing trends.
Take a look at "3d printed" houses for an imperfect example of this kind of optimization for automation in action. Better robotics will bring about a more balanced version of this trade-off (walls will probably be possible to modify, unlike 3d printed ones) but the incentives remain the same.
Edit:
Trivial example: One of the easiest way to autonomously insulate a house will probably be with spray foam insulation - you can get a robot arm to hold the sprayer and move it in a specific, continuous motion pretty readily even today. But spray foam insulation is hard to modify after the fact. Removing it is time-intensive compared to removing insulation "batting" and applying it again requires specialized tools, PPE, and perhaps licensing.
Now try 1970s public housing in Paris and Vienna, socialist blocks in Poland or projects in Chicago. It will be a lot more balanced because these places were designed for people to live in, not as radical statements. They are simple to save costs but there is no "artistic" movement behind them doing it on purpose.
Abstract modernism with random shapes and obsessively minimalist design is only the worst case scenario where all the hate is justified. It's what happens when architects design for each other and not the rest of us.
Architecture schools don't really teach you the pragmatic side of the trade. Their projects are building those sorts of abstracted models, talking about forms and voids. It is just so far abstracted from the sort of practical architecture that leads to stuff like built in cupboards in a Sears catalog home. Something to also consider is while these young architects are getting trained they aren't really living like adults either. They are in their early 20s after all, still perhaps lashing out in reflexive opposition from their suburban upbringing, and probably don't understand why a built in cupboard would be so exciting.
The results will absolutely be the same. Having spent the first 12 years of my life in a commie block apartment, the absolute best thing that has happened to that building over the years is the trees have covered progressively more of the ugliness. Note that this article is about external visuals, not the layout or any other consideration relevant to buildings being "designed for people to live in". This is about buildings being designed for people to look at.
You can design two buildings for people to live in, make them identical in layout and build quality but one of them has slightly more classical style of architecture and people will invariably prefer it, all else being equal.
> one of them has slightly more classical style of architecture
If aesthetic sense is distributed according a bell curve, the majority of the population will have "average" taste. If you say good taste is one standard deviation above the median, then the majority will have worse taste.
Several things are at play here. The first is that pre-Modernist architecture was heavily designed around natural lighting and cooling. Many buildings and houses designed and built before the 1920s used combinations of materials and elements that maximized the use of daylight. Transom lights and polished marble floors for example were often used to allow light to bounce through a room and to induce airflow. The light came in from a high place and bounced from the floor to fill normally unlit spaces, while hot air was pushed up and vented through the transom windows. If you've ever been in an office building built from the 1870s through the 1940s you'll notice every single transom only opens outwards towards the hall, as the hall created a high pressure space that pushed air into the low pressure rooms, an effect that is amplified when paired with ceiling fans. Meanwhile things such as mullions allowed the windows themselves to be set more deeply inside the wall by providing a strengthening member that allowed a larger opening. That larger opening with the windows set further in provided shade while still allowing in diffused light, and helped in preventing glare upon the glass while creating an overhang using the building's facade or cornices to allow the windows to be opened while it was raining because eaves are useless above two stories of height.
People don't understand these individual parts and don't understand how they all work together. But they definitely feel the cumulative effects, and those cumulative effects are much friendlier than Modernist and post-Modernist design. Modernism and all the schools that followed it rely on electric technology to fill in the gaps in the design, which makes them feel less accomodating to humans. Electric lighting, electric heating and cooling, and electro-mechanical traversal. Those things aren't as tactile, and many aren't even visible. The Modernist building does not present itself as something humans made, maintain, and interact with, but instead presents itself as a machine that you are temporarily inside of as a foreign entity because everything designed to outwardly accomodate humans is instead either streamlined down or fully away. The overhead lights shine light that you cannot influence, the hidden vents expel air from a place you cannot see or change, and the hanging facade glass walls provide no palpable separation from the outside world. Your mind tells you that this mid-century tower is a place where you do not belong.
Relevant Scott Alexander's blog post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
In general you have to separate what people prefer from what they're willing to pay for. It's very clear that people will pay more for a slightly larger home with one extra bedroom or bathroom than for a smaller home with more ornate decoration. These are the forces which lead to the construction we see today: people build at the lowest cost what people will buy for the highest price.
That is a weird dichotomy. The ornate facade does not require a room of space.
I personally generally agree, but I actually quite like the very most recently constructed buildings in my area (southwest Paris), which are still clearly modern but more generous with ornamentation and featuring more organic shapes and often incorporating greenery.
I feel similar positive about new buildings in my native Netherlands, which seem to be getting less flat and with smaller, more reasonably sized windows (if you know, you know!)
Modern architecture, like modern art and modern classical music and jazz, is supposed to be ugly. That's because it is based on existentialist philosophy that believes that life is meaningless and what ordinary people consider a good life is an attempt to escape this alleged truth. The purpose of the arts is supposed to be to push the ugly truth into people's faces so they can't ignore it.
Once there was a blackout in my neighborhood that affected commercial properties too. While driving down the street in total darkness the only structure that stuck out when my headlights pressed them was the local Mexican restaurant which isn't traditional in the least—it sort of looks like what Davy Crockett would've built if he survived the Alamo and opened a Cheesecake Factory. But it stood out that night.
I like how modernist builings look when they are just built and new. But traditional architecture usually ages much better.
I think the problem can be traced back to the fact that we've failed to develop a popular design language since pre-WW2^1.
That in itself could be traced back to the professionalization of building manufacturing - the small-scale building and design that happened before this industrialisation of construction did away with all the little vernacular architectural decisions that would have been part of a building's design. Far more of the labour-force was involved in building construction, and less was done with pre-fabricated materials (probably just bricks and mortar), and certainly not as much was done on a mass-scale with the same homogenous approach^2, and with much less concern for the labour costs associated with those little details that add "character" to an older building^3.
I'm starting to find small examples of lower-scale construction projects in my home city (Sydney) that seem to return some interesting elements to newer building construction, like variation in materials such as perforated shading or different colours or textures of prefab cladding, using brick for feature walls in other pre-fabricated concrete buildigs, more external hanging gardens, etc). This is better, and I'm happy to see it, because while the older federation terraces in Sydney are nice to look at, they're hopelessly underdesigned for the climate (too hot in summer, too cold in winter, too dark in a country that is blessed with natural light, and often with damp and mould problems that shouldn't exist on a building post 1900).
^1 popular in the sense that its widespread amongst the general population, not the way modernism is popular with architects, both for its cost and the way its become part of the popular taste of architects as a profession
^2 the treasured old neighbourhoods in cities that are preserved and made "heritage" are the results of hundreds of individual decisions by dozens of individual builders and tradespeople, which although similar, contain enough difference to convey a sense of character. Compare that with a small team of planners working for a single construction company remaking a block or entire suburb.
^3 I could be wrong, but I would have thought labour costs were a much lower component of building construction then, or at least there was far more labour hours that go into a building's construction, allowing more time for the little details that give an older building its little characteristics like lacing, fancy brickwork or unusual reliefs.
I like modern architecture but I wouldn't want to live in it or near it. Modern architecture is depressing.
I wonder how many of the competitions for new buildings include traditional designs as candidates. Are people picking modernist designs because that's all there is to choose from? Also, cost doesn't seem to be mentioned. Are traditional designs more expensive to build?
When I was a child I saw Blade Runner. Ever since that day I've had a weakness for concrete jungles. Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai- that's how humans were intended to live.
Unfortunately my European brothers and sisters prefer to live in open air museums. However slowly but surely skyscrapers have been creeping up into the Netherlands- you just can't beat the efficiency.
> you just can't beat the efficiency.
High-rise buildings are extremely inefficient compared to low-rise buildings, in pretty much every dimension except amount of people packed per area.
You might like Athens, in that case.
hive cities do have a charm
I don't see why this got downvoted. The heart wants what the hive wants.
> ... that's how humans were intended to live
Humans weren't meant to be packed like ants. Wrong species.
Ants pack themselves.
Yeah "prefer" over other aesthetics.
But most people will prioritise cost (both capex and opex) and comfort over aesthetics.
Related: https://www.bensouthwood.co.uk/p/eight-architecture-myths-bu...
Modernist builds aren't really cheaper.
I DO NOT prefer traditional architecture. I prefer whatever is inexpensive and practical. Hanging brick cladding in front of a modern building is neither inexpensive nor practical. What I really care about is the savings associated with this ruthless cost cutting and brutalist simplification to be passed on to the ordinary folks instead of being hoarded by the oligarchs.
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Plenty of people will rate the design of classic cars more highly, and will visit shows that display them. They also won't buy a car that looks like that.
Reminds of poetry. I read somewhere that people love poetry that rhymes and want more of it, but modern poets won't give it to them.
Maybe in “Whither Tartaria” by Scott Alexander, which covers a similar topic.
You see the same thing in literature, where modernism has crowded out of other styles. As one example, you see way less description today than in older books.
I'm not a hater on modernism -- I like stripped down literature and architecture (though I wish concrete buildings were cleaned more regularly). But there does seem to be some truth in this idea that "the elite critics" have dominated these fields, resulting in the production of art (and buildings) that are broadly unpopular. I think the overriding goal of these critics is avoiding kitsch, which they see in classical forms.
There is a nice youtube channel called The Aesthetic City. There are some really nice new projects done with traditional architecture in Europe.
Many have never seen a really, truly beautiful high modern home, and it shows. Lots of both traditional and modern slop out there, with gems on both sides every once in a while.
I thought this was an article about microservices.
Most people have bad taste, preferring elaborately ornate crap with multiple clashing patterns. No surprises here.
Baumol’s cost disease makes building ornamentation cost prohibitive for all except the highest profile (and budget) projects.
TLDR: Architecture optimizes for what is cheap to construct and meets the needs of the commissioning entity at the time of construction. This is often about a big facade, a dream, grandstanding or power dynamics instead of livability or community experience, particularly street acceptance. It's no wonder people prefer older architecture: it was necessarily more reasonably scaled, often more ornate and particular (since hand tools were used anyway: why not make it beautiful?), and featured now basically unavailable materials like giant timber beams which present more softly.
The exterior perhaps but definitely not the interior. If you visit Europe, the interiors are all small and cramped.
Depends on the era and place. Very old farm houses generally had low ceilings but hey, the people were shorter and you cooked under an open chimney so better have a small space to heat.
Later classic buildings especially in cities had higher ceilings and consequentially a more roomy vibe than modern residential buildings.
Most people also prefer IKEA furniture.
Most people prefer IKEA prices.
Thanks for stating my point.
Since the topic is preference qua aesthetics, your "point" wasn't analogous.
It wasn’t meant to be analogous.
Everyone loves the SF painted ladies but no one seems to build new ones.
It’s interesting how many studies were performed that confirmed this, and yet most (all?) of the time, the modernist building was built anyway. What was the point?
Not all decisions should be made based on popular vote.
Yeah, I agree with you, but I'm not sure the point of polling people in the first place.
I would ask about their needs, but, definitely, I would measure those if possible. People are frequently surprised about what they actually wanted (there are lots of genie stories and jokes on that theme)
I dislike a badly designed mall like everyone else, but is it already sealioning if an article ends on a leading question to hide its far-right liberal conservative agenda?
The National Civic Art Society is designing the White House State Ballroom [1] and Create Streets is a conservative influence group that likes speaking at Reform UK events [2]. As many others here have pointed out, visual preference, especially in such a binary choice between obviously cheap and ugly vs expensive and generous, is of course highly biased - pseudo greek style doesn't fly in Asia, even in Australia minimalist styles are much more en vogue.
The most important claims like "exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles" are completely unsupported - especially when a few lines down they literally use their own review of an architect's design, but then call it "in a style drawing on Victorian commercial architecture and Art Deco", again unsubstantiated - it has pretty "modern" clear lines, probably due to sustainability [3], and brick facades themselves have been around for long. In the report they praise the 2010 (!) London city building design guide recommending exactly this brick design. "hardly a single public commission" and "we commissioning styles"?
Where is the line between justifying dictator-style grandiose architecture and the actual empathy needed for simply good design?
I'm just asking questions.
1) https://www.dezeen.com/2025/01/29/justin-shubow-trump-archit... 2) https://www.building.co.uk/focus/reform-uk-conference-fundin... 3) https://www.archpaper.com/2025/10/biennale-architettura-carl...
Sturdy is good.
The traditional examples look sturdier and heavier. The brick bridge looks overbuilt and hence safer.
The examples where arch students gave higher scores, like with that god awful-looking house, I don't have an answer to. Maybe they had terrible taste. Just because you are a student of architecture it does not mean you have good taste or how to build beautiful things that evoke a specific emotion.
> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.
I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
Also there is survivorship bias.
The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.
I had to scroll way too far to find this comment!
All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.
>In the old days, buildings were made to impress
Google "survivorship bias".
If survivorship bias had anything to do with it, you would not have old villages where every house is in the same style, and they're all beautiful. There's simply no evidence that old buildings were randomly ugly or beautiful, and only the beautiful ones survived.
Look at 1950s New York - almost every building is beautiful, and every building is more beautiful than modern ones: https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2020/01/31/new-york-city-i...
That's not survivorship bias, that's going from near-uniformly beautiful to uniformly-ugly.
I don't think a single building in those postcards is beautiful. Most of them are incredibly forgettable run down old buildings.
Almost all the buildings in those postcards look old, plain, and boring to me. Some look decent. The Radio City Music Hall building, while definitely impressive for 1932, just looks old and worn out and it's and old postcard. Ooh wow another government building in the classical revival style with big tall roman pillars making up a Portico made from white stone, how original, never seen that before. And are you really telling me the building on the left here actually looks good? That's the kind of building you'd love to walk past every day, the kind of building you'd want to spend all day inside? These buildings look like they're covered in tons of nasty soot and gunk and generally don't seem like clean places to be.
https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...
Personally I'd prefer to spend my time in and around a building like this than any of those:
https://labs.utdallas.edu/mems/files/2021/08/nserloutside.jp...
To me a building like this looks a lot more interesting. Lots of mixtures in materials, textures, and colors. And as mentioned before, this building lets in a lot of natural lighting. It lets you see outside instead of just constantly feeling like you're trapped in a jail cell.
Its not even like I really hate old architecture, I just think a lot of these examples given suck. I like this, for example (although it is getting close to overstylized for my taste):
https://www.adventuresofacarryon.com/wordpress/wp-content/up...
Buildings like this as well, although definitely not as much natural light. Notice its actually nice, clean, and maintained compared to the other examples given. Still kind of old and boring though in the end.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Dallas_C...
> how original, never seen that before.
If you're defending modern architecture, you have NO place complaining about originality, when 99% of it is steel & glass basic geometric shapes.
> you have NO place complaining about originality,
I can definitely complain about a lack of originality for works which lack originality.
Modern designs can often lack originality, I agree. Classical designs can lack originality as well. A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things. Its not good to put yourself in a camp and act like everything in group A is good without question, everything in camp B is bad without question.
You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting? Are you really saying you'd prefer to actually be in and use one of the buildings in that postcard image I pointed out?
Buildings like this have way more originality than all those brick buildings in the postcard I linked, other than the one featured center in that postcard. Or yet another white stone government building with roman columns in front and endless small windows. And I don't even consider it that original.
https://img.imageboss.me/concrete-assets/width/3072/format:a...
I'm not saying all modern designs are good. I'm also not saying all older designs are bad. I'm not even saying those classical revival government buildings are inherently bad, they're consistent and unoriginal for a reason. I am saying I am a human being and like to have some sunlight and see trees and the horizon from time to time, and that's more important to me for a building than some little intricate stonework that I can't even really make out because its three stories up and the whole exterior facade is covered with black gunk because its too expensive and fragile to actually maintain.
>A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things.
It can but originality is not the end of aesthetics. What's more the modernist architecture is globalised so the "unique" building's style gets recreated and seen in every single corner of the world where they all try to be avant garde in the exact same ways. There's no vernacular architecture elements anymore which give a sense of place. Not even much of ones that make sense due to origin in environmental factors such as rain/snow in the nordics or heat in gulfstates.
>You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting?
I'll plainly say it. It lacks originality. I'd rather it have a painting on it than a trying to be the equivalent of a shiny TCG card the novelty of which will wear of very quick.
> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
brutalism doesn't refer to the architecture being "brutal".
it refers to "béton brut" - french for 'raw concrete'. in this case, brutalism could be more readily understood as 'rawism'. it also emerged during (and is a descendant of) the modernist architectural period, which is well known for those boring, non-descript office towers.
there's nothing wrong with the simplicity of raw concrete. but just like other architecture, it can be done well and it can be done poorly. it can be done for utility, and it can be done for extravagance.
I think many people think of non-descript office towers when they think of brutalism, rather than all of the interesting things that can be done with a single material (shapes, textures, designs, etc. it's a very versatile + strong medium!).
Brutalism isn't cheaper. Not even in the secondary market. Brutalist masterpieces like the Barbican are highly desirable residences.
I am a fan of brutalism, but there is also some survivorship bias at work - I'm sure some brutalist hellscapes were demolished because nobody wanted to live in them.
Now, as a contrast, another masterpiece from the city where I grew up: https://www.scribd.com/document/955270807/g10-Cultural-Cente...
>But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
It's probably some combination of the subculture effect (i.e., subcultures tend to develop their own in-group aesthetics) and as a functional shibboleth (i.e., being able to "appreciate" things average people don't has an in-group signalling function).
> But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
Because they study architecture. The article is profoundly anti-intellectual. This discourse, that colleges indoctrinate people and, thus, cause them to disagree with some form of "truth" that the uneducated masses know.
> Because they study architecture.
If the architecture they're studying is divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? They may as well be studying their own butts.
> divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares?
Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.
Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.
It's hard to build something new based on empirical evidence because the thing you are building might be such a radical departure from previous experience the data you have simply does not apply.
The problem is that a core group of modernists kept doggedly insisting on it after it was proven to not work.
For example, we know now that pedestrian skyways only work in limited contexts and have plenty of downsides; or that a large, concrete windswept plaza is pretty to look at but pretty antisocial and unusable space, and yet you still see this kind of thing in the latest from say Zaha Hadid et al.
It’s why a next wave of architects and planners have coined terms like “bird-shit architecture” that only looks good completely devoid of context and landed from the sky.
"they just don't know what they actually need"
Classic butt-guy response.
As Henry Ford would say, "They didn't want a car. They wanted a faster horse".
Often we go out exploring the solution space for new things that were never done before and nobody ever asked for them because nobody had imagined them until they saw the first one. Remember how blown away everyone was with the Jeff Han's multitouch demo? It became immediately obvious it was the future of direct manipulation interfaces.
If you go back further, do you remember how sci-fi pictured the computers we would be using "in the future"? In 2001 there were no alphanumeric keyboards. Neither on the Enterprise. We are finally catching up with the vision of Tron, of the computer as an environment for intelligent agents (it took decades for most people to even formulate this understanding of the movie). We get a lot of things wrong, but our job is to try the things nobody is asking for, because they don't know they can be.
If, after 75 years of trying to sell cars, people _still_ would prefer a faster horse, then Henry Ford would have been just as wrong.
Because the commenter you're replying to has no idea what brutalism is, and is confusing a ugly concrete block with holes in it with brutalism.
I've seen plenty of examples of Brutalism in architecture (in the UK) first hand and to most people it looks like ugly concrete blocks with hole in it.
Sometimes being "ugly" is the point. You want to bring out emotions - the building can be grandiose, imposing, surprising, but, if you look closely, it's a carefully crafted work of art that's also highly functional.
One great example from the city where I grew up: https://hicarquitectura.com/2024/09/lina-bo-bardi-sesc-pompe...
I don't care for this argument at all. There are functional buildings where I live from the Industrial Revolution that look quite nice. I want things to look nice where I live. I don't want them to be ugly and demoralising.
As for the building you showed me. I think it looks awful. It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium.
https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-architectural-revie...
> It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium.
Taste is extremely subjective. I am an engineer and I've spent a whole career training my tastes (for system design, hardware architecture) to be less subjective and help guide my work towards what's good. Some of that seems to have leaked to building and city planning, because my taste seems to align well with the experts in those fields.
The article is about the schism between the experts and what people generally prefer and recommends that said experts should try to take that into account. People almost always prefer traditional architecture. Is it really subjective when a vast majority of people agree? I suppose technically it is, but at the same time not really. There is obviously something that people prefer about it other than it being old.
> schism between the experts and what people generally prefer
This is true
> and recommends that said experts should try to take that into account
They should, but it’s up to the experts to make the decision. You need an informed group to make decisions.
> People almost always prefer traditional architecture
People usually prefer the familiar.
> Is it really subjective when a vast majority of people agree? I suppose technically it is
It is, unless the people can show data justifying their choice. Subjective preference is not data and does not offer a justification.
> They should, but it’s up to the experts to make the decision. You need an informed group to make decisions.
I've seen experts in my own field completely misunderstand what customers have wanted and/or completely missed the point. There are numerous examples where experts have made things worse or got things very wrong, especially in large construction projects.
There are many reasons why this happens, sometimes it is personal ego, adherence to ideas that are out of data, their paycheck might be dependant on a certain decision being made.
Experts should not get the say in everything. Pretending that people who aren't experts aren't capable of making reasonable decisions and ever is IMO asinine.
> Subjective preference is not data and does not offer a justification.
The point is that it isn't as subjective as you claim. It isn't simply people prefer the familiar. The article itself explores this. There are whole branch of philosophy behind aesthetics. I find it very frustrating when people believe that aesthetics is simply personal preference.
Why, indeed.
We really need to understand why people who study a subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding would show a clear preference for something...
Yes, I would like to understand why this is their preference. Aren't you curious? I don't think it's enough to say: these people are experts, so in this issue of style and taste their answer is automatically correct, no more info needed, thank you.
Also, I'd be surprised if ALL "people who study [this] subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding" would share the same preference.
> their answer is automatically correct,
No, but I'll trust their opinion on building design and urban planning over yours the same way I wouldn't trust you to do brain surgery or landing an airliner. I am a skilled pilot in simulators, but I still wouldn't trust myself to land a real plane.
I thought we were talking about how things look, not the skill that goes into making them look like it. These are sufficiently different things.
Fashion. Taste. Informed by functional and economical requirements, materials, surroundings, urban planning, yes, but in the end, there's also an element of taste and subjective preference that can clump together in periods or zeitgeist forms or whatever you like to call it.
As taste and preference go, you are free to delegate yours to others without question, as you seem to be doing here so passionately. I don't find empty appeals to authority very convincing. But maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.
I'm willing to hold two concepts in my head: my own impression of the appearance of different examples of a certain architectural style (which, like all others, has better and worse ones); and the question why some people who know a lot more than me might see it differently than me. Their reasons and my reasons might both be valid, but mine would be far less interesting. Hence, my question.
Finally: You seem to think that I asked you to trust my opinion, or even to change yours. You might want to look into why you think that, because that's not at all what I did. I asked something entirely different.
The worst architecture is a combination of cost optimization and aiming for looking traditional-ish. That's a recipe for future blight.
Design, like so many disciplines, can't serve two masters.
https://www.habitat67.com/en/
I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?
We need more of this.
Perhaps counter intuitive but beauty standards are not simply just sentiment.
And also change a lot over time.
> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me...
This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG...
> Not remotely cost effective.
This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC...
Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/
Personally I'd rather spend my time in the building with large windows and tons of natural light than holed up in that dark old castle thing.
That prison building is overly stylized to my taste. And given how complex the exterior is and seeing it's state it's obvious it's hard to maintain. Unless you like all the gunk growing all over the building all the time.
Is the old building "fancy"? Sure. So is that fragile china that's kept in the fancy vitrine but rarely actually used because it's such a pain to maintain and actually use.
Then you're part of the 20% of people who prefer modern styles, for whom 99% of buildings are built. You have plenty of choices, while the rest of us are lied to about why buildings look like they do and why we can't have what we want.
I think the prison looks better from the outside, but if you asked me which building I wanted to spend time in I'd pick the school without hesitation (assuming they were both being repurposed for the same non-school/prison use).
There is a clear preference for other people to build in traditional styles, but as soon as you have to care about more than what the facade looks like from the outside people choose the uglier functional option.
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Plenty of old people now grew up in a phase in history where we were building ugly cheap things
That was all of history.
So new buildings ignore externalities in the economic sense but also very literally.
Am I the only one who thinks they use especially weak modernist buildings as references?
Maybe the average modernist building really is that bad and the issue is that "traditional" buildings are more forgiving for an average architect.
This point is addressed in the article...
survivorship bias is a big factor
What is traditional now was once modern.
Yes, modern is now old 1890s-1960s. Even post modernism is aging.
> Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike? There are several interesting possibilities.
Like what? A shadowy cabal of liberal elites pulling the strings from the shadows? Stripe (who own Works In Progress) founder Patrick Collision donated to the Trump campaign in 2024. Tiresomely obvious what this "piece" is trying to do. Find a new gimmick imho.
modern architecture is best understood as an expression of the ethos of efficiency. because it is cheap, easy to maintain, uniform, reproducible (which are machine values), therefore it is good, aspirational, wholesome (which are humanist values) for people.
as an aside, for the longest time i have thought modernity was fully understood by the 60s (ellul, debord, macluhan, ...). but maybe there the focus was too narrowly political, sociological. it has been revealing to see this ethos (and it is an ethos, make no mistake) recently linked to autism. high modernists are uniform, monomaniacal people. like machines. and the world they fashion, is therefore one that is uniform, principled. how the unsociable autist colleague cannot distinguish between is and ought, so will modern architecture barrel down deductively to its unpleasant conclusion.
modernisn is the commodification of all spheres of existence, it is an unprecedented evolution, how to break out of this, how to get of this train with only a single endpoint.
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It is normal to gravitate towards beauty, it's in our nature. The root of efficiency is always someone's greed, pity that is also in our nature.
How funny, they chose very beautiful old architecture and very ugly modern architecture and invented a result - why not choose things like the Bahai temple in Delhi or Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright? I'm sure there are some old ugly buildings and the ones that people hated probably got torn down so there's survivorship bias in play here too!
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> This whole newsletter is a white guy advocating for a 1950s world. But with flock cameras.
It reads uncomfortably close to an anti-intellectual discourse so popular in the far-right.
If think you have a substantive point to make why not spell it out rather than indulging in empty rhetorical flourish. Who's the anti-intellectual?
The article feels like it was written by someone with conservative views, someone who resents change, and believes in a nostalgic view of the past. It becomes anti-intellectual when it points out the divergence between the opinion of experts and the laypeople on what constitutes a building fit for purpose, and takes those two opinions as equivalent.
It's kind of similar to the general "two-sides" thing where, if you talk to, say, a climatologist who talks about a community consensus on global warming, there will be someone who has never studied the climate, exposes a completely different opinion, sometimes in opposition to observed facts.
In this case, in architecture, the thing to measure is not the opinion of people, but how they use the architectural object - how their relationship with the environment changes in that space and why. I brought to this discussion three examples of architectural landmarks that turned a somewhat degraded space into vibrant community spaces.
Architects don't design buildings - they design the interaction of the building users with their environment.
Something fascinating that you may not know: traditional architecture is one of those things that is simultaneously:
a) Genuinely widely preferred, with many articles on this, ranging from aesthetic preferences through to scientific studies of how eyes move and what causes fatigue. There is genuine value to architecture before modern architecture -- and...
b) A stalking horse for right-wing thinking.
It's really interesting how this happens and it mirrors other right-wing techniques. A common way to get people into right-wing thinking is to find something that is genuinely unpopular or that people have concerns about, yet which has constrained discourse. Examples: lower incomes. You then talk about the good old days, and reframe it: lower incomes becomes, 'people taking your income, agh those immigrants'. Architecture becomes, '1940 and before were better, oh and everyone was white then'. You get the idea.
Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism, disguised in the neutral or even interesting format of ancient history.
Once you recognise this, you see it everywhere.
But don't let this fool you re older architecture having genuine value. We just have to avoid saying people have no taste, or referring to their preferences as 'pabulum'. That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject of architecture, they pay attention to what else that person says.
Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".
The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.
It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.
I'm kind of counting on normal being in the minority here.
Abnormal isn't distributed along a single axis.
I might object that being right-wing, or having fear of the effects of immigrants even, does not necessarily entail racism. But it would be more interesting to say that they are related, and that valuable ideas about nice traditional architecture and nostalgia for the good old days are also genuinely related to racism and colonialism and fascism, which means that there's something of value to extract from all that garbage before you can do a clean separation of the ideas. Mercifully I don't have time to write this comment right now, but it was probably going to include the word "culture" in several places.
This is the "two truths and a lie" methodology.
> That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject
And that is why all the pollsters were caught flat-footed by Trump in 2016. The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond.
> The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond
When politics exclude a group, or a group feels excluded, it's easy to lure the group into supporting anti-politics, which is a nice way to say "fascism".
This is kind of where we are now, with the far-right preying on the most vulnerable people that feel ignored by politicians.
>stalking horse for right-wing thinking.
So? Many people (not all) are right-wing because they want to preserve beauty. Being a right-wing is not a rare thing, it's the second most popular belief system in the West.
>Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism
Racism is much less of a thing in Europe, compared to the USA, yet fascination with Antiquity is just the same or even higher.
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From your comments and the way you describe yourself, you strike me as the stereotype of the sort of person you'd find at a DSA rally. Over-schooled (as opposed to over-educated), arrogant, and finding grievance in everything.
The author writes an article observing that people find more beauty in traditional architecture and you immediately slander him as a racist white guy who wants to go back to 1950s segregation? You think you're the reasonable one in this conversation?
You don't have to return to the 1950s to find racism and segregation in present day America. There's a lot of work yet to do. Get on it or get out of the way.
Sure, but it's a massive leap to go from "there's still some racism and segregation in America" to "traditional architecture perpetuates racism." The latter sounds like something from 2020 that's now being disavowed as "woke 1.0."
Nostalgia and white guys have a fraught relationship. The good old days weren't even that good for them, killing them off with cigarettes and booze in their replica colonial and Cape Cod homes.
There isn't just "some" racism and segregation, either. Check the text messages sent by cops in the Karen Reid case. What are the odds that the most racist cops in the state worked that case?
DSA is more a young person thing. This is more well-off white boomer archetype, stuck in yesterday's fads
You seem to be making up arguments against some caricature that you have built in your mind in order to satisfy some form of virtue signaling or sanctimonious belief. Whatever it is, it makes no sense and I feel dumber for having read it.
Go touch grass, it's healthy. (And get off bluesky)
> You seem to be making up arguments against some caricature that you have built in your mind in order to satisfy some form of virtue signaling or sanctimonious belief. Whatever it is, it makes no sense and I feel dumber for having read it.
> Go touch grass, it's healthy. (And get off bluesky)
You seem to have been triggered by the OP pointing out that a lot of this traditionalist architecture movement is - yes - racist old white dudes who want everything to be like it was when they were kids. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it's worth remembering that the times filled with traditionalist architecture also had entire lower classes that slept in Flop Houses [0] and Shantytowns [1].
Ultimately traditionalist architecture may look nicer, but it's not surprising that buildings which cost more to build also look nicer.
If someone simply pointing the driving force behind this upsets you so much that you start posting replies like this, I would advise spending less time on X. Go outside, take a break from your "culture war". It's healthy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanty_town
Overcomplicating things and referencing vague connections does not make an argument inherently better. Just longer.
No, it's not racist, no matter how much you try to make it so. It's exhausting and tired and makes people like Trump win. Racism is bad, good looking buildings are ... good.
Absolutely ridiculous, please listen to yourselves and please, please, think long and hard about how median American's would respond to this nonsense. (If you know any)
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