This misses a big point: highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale. So we'll have it again when it can all be done by machine.
It costs human lives to build a Notre Dame, both in deaths and in total lifespan output, and as for Sagrada Familia it's still not complete. We now value human life and labor too much to be able to afford it.
I personally can't wait to have detailed, warm, organic architecture back again, but I damn sure don't want to carve any stone.
> highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale
Is that why those award-winning buildings look like that? Because the architects tried to make them cheaper?
Is 'detail' requiring highly skilled craftsmanship the only way to make pleasant buildings? Because a few of the buildings (Venice and the Italian village) the article gives as examples of beauty have only the barest, simplest of details.
Those Italian buildings were created as highly practical structures at the time, in waterway locations that constrained the geometry of how the city grew, so they have an interesting and historical appearance. Also a lot of the Italian architecture is not a building, but an entire city, not sure those really count.
Its very hard to get contractors to work with materials today. So you can have some factory create panels of steel and glass, and the contractor can have (relatively) unskilled cheap labor snap them into place. That's a lot of construction today.
Some really beautiful structures do use minimalism, but so many big architects today strive for speed, size, and function. I think most modern beautiful, minimalist structures are usually smaller, built for fewer people, etc. Maybe?
Our society is quite capable of paying for artisans to restore the architectural splendors of earlier times, and does so. At the same time, expenditure on architecture for its own sake seems to have increased in the last decade or so, at least in centers of wealth (which, in modern times, is where non-utilitarian architecture has its first home, even if it likes to have a weekend place in the country.)
What has not happened is that, for the most part, the paymasters for the latter development have demonstrated little interest in adopting styles that demand highly skilled craftsmanship of the sort formerly valued (and still valued, apparently, so long as it dates to a previous era.) Today's vanity architecture reflects the values of those who commission it, rather than being a result of market prices for artisan work.
There was an explicit goal of providing education and opportunities to working people. (Well - working men. But this was over a century ago now.)
Modern philanthropy has no equivalent. There is no interest in creating high quality useful public spaces for ordinary people. So there's no architectural tradition to support that goal.
Very glad this is mentioned. Form follows function, sure, but it follows capital and construction methods and labor practices. The author would best wonder why this is global, and not look towards solely design trends but construction methods and real estate logics for the answer.
Stone and wood is carved by machines quite easily. Sears used to churn out homes with loads of detail and mail them out wholesale to middle class folks. Those homes are now worth fortunes.
We have terrible architecture for ideological reasons. Flat roofs are not signifincantly cheaper to build than pitched roofs, and far less adept at roofiness, but we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy.
As with most modern art, architecture has a fundamentially adversarial relationship with the vast majority of people.
Hardly any new houses are built with flat roofs. That trend is mostly dead. Commercial buildings still have flat roofs because they need a place to mount stuff like HVAC and antennas.
I've always assumed that the boxy things were more about maximizing saleable square footage and less about architecture. Also, "rooftop balcony" is a nice price adder!
I don't hate the boxy things, I just hate that there's nothing else being built in Seattle right now except boxy things. And they're not much to look at.
Yes, a common construction are these five-over-ones, with a steel-reinforced concrete first floor (for retail) and then wood framed 5-story apartments above.
This podcast goes over what an absolute disaster this type of construction is [0], but for apartments in most major US cities west of the Mississippi, it is hard to avoid _some_ sort of wood framing.
It's partly a climate thing. Flat roofs in areas with snow are begging for all sorts of leaks and general snow load problems. There are probably houses in the Northeast built with flat roofs. They probably also have leak issues. Heck, houses with sloped roofs often have problems at junctions and with ice dams. Commercial properties are, in part of the reasons you cite.
Lots of places in the northeast with flat roofs. Particularly dense city centers where snow falling off sloped roofs poses a danger to busy pedestrian sidewalks. As long as you keep your roof maintained it’ll last a long time. And “flat” roofs are always angled at like 1-2 degrees to ensure proper drainage.
Not really. Frank Lloyd Wright was building with flat roofs a decade before the Bauhaus school even opened. But it was certainly an artistic endeavour and he’s a great example of somebody who had an adversarial relationship with pretty much everybody.
Besides the Larkin building (a factory), what did he build with predominantly flat roofs? I don't think there's a home he built prior to fallingwater that was anything close to what Bauhaus did.
Wright used flat roofs and I'm sure other folks did before him, but bauhaus was the intellectually dominant influence on schools of architecture in the west.
I'm trying to pitch a flat section of roof on my house because it leaks. Flat roofs are sometimes flat because of too-low or badly-defined building height limits.
Boringness also probably comes from increasing numbers of people involved in approvals. Try getting some wild thing through public hearings and city councils. Much harder than a cube. The boringness is a feature, not a bug.
I bet there's a ton of other factors too, like the cited attention cost of detail.
I really wonder how is that so. Even in my home country which is easily in the bottom 10% of Europe's poorest I lived in a building built in 1977 (!) with flat roof. It never had a leak until this year, and on the first sign of it tenants found some company to install some membrane and gave them 10 year no-matter-what warranty on it. And it was super cheap when divided on 30 owners. And we're talking about a country with average monthly salary of $400 or so.
I've heard this stated a few times - that flat roofs are meaningfully cheaper - but really? How? The tiny bit of extra material to add a bit of height to some ridge seems trivial. Where's the cost?
Not every art deco beauty is forged in blood. Not like people need to die for you to stop installing drop cielings and beige cubicles. We've just decided as a society recently that we value spending the bare minimum. These old architectural works, even just from the 1900s-1940s, were from a different time, when property owners wanted to spend extra on making something look striking and remarkable. You don't see that line of thinking in business anymore. Imagine a CEO spending on some ornate HQ building with stonemasons and gold leaf, shareholders would fire them. You only see that level of grandeur today when the CEO founded and still is in control of the company and the shareholders can only sit and pout. Luxury buildings today come with the cheapest furnishings the developer could find on the wholesale marketplace.
I suppose it is the lack of imagination of top-end architecture that these techniques, some of the hallmark technologies of our age, that there isn't a healthy market in their use in architecture.
The employment of these things all seems focused in mass production and cost reduction (which isn't a bad thing), and seems to ignore the possibilities that programmable manufacturing and production could have on architecture (which could push the state of the art).
It might also be that being an architect kinda sucks these days. Not enough jobs, and those jobs are paying worse, to cover the costs of schooling.
So there aren't the true geniuses anymore? Maybe it's just that the iron rule of finance has drained the budgets from every large scale project, and the ultra-rich are now no longer artistically inclined, they are either concerned with the magnitude of their fortune in numbers rather than edifices.
Hamburg’s philarmony cost 900 million euros to build. That’s an awful lot of money. Architects decide to spend on structure and texture instead of decor. And with today’s machines, we actually could make all these intricate details without human intervention.
The Elphi could be seen as of corruption, since the whole project was initially advertised at costing the city about a hundred and something millions, the rest to be raised by private donations, 30 to 40 million initially IIRC.
Now the town basically has subsidized a hotel, a few luxury condos, some gastronomy, and got a few classic music venues which it could have gotten otherwise, and cheaper. Besides that it already had those before.
Furthermore I don't see the need to fake the look of this
by totally removing the core of it, and putting that new thing on top, instead of simply tearing it down, and build something really new from the bottom up.
it would at least have had a history, including the timeball on top of it, which signalled the ships the exact time they could adjust their chronometers to at exact 12:00hrs.
But it wasn't. Just a functional building to store cocoa and coffee beans, built in 1963 over the ruin of the former building.
Was that worth to uphold the facade of? 798.000.000€ for the town, and about 100.000.000€ by some fanbois, and who knows who?
This on its own isn't enough to refute OP, since it could very well be that the equivalent cost of one of these other historic buildings is even higher. (e.g. cost of skilled slave labor vs equivalent labor in modern markets, cost of materials, etc)
EDIT: Hmm, even the payer's power could be factored in. A king may be willing to spend 1/10th of his empire's wealth on an extravagant palace, but the same would likely not be approved in a democracy.
Exactly. The tallest building in the world (Burj Khalifa) is built in an environment where labor has too much power and human life is too highly valued to build anything complex or ornate. Lol.
> This misses a big point: highly skilled craftsmanship will never again be affordable on an architectural scale. So we'll have it again when it can all be done by machine.
That's not really the case. As with the internet and software, architecture was hijacked by building products corporations and tradespeople were duped into playing along, just like the employees of social media corporations one can see on this site who try to justify the evil activities of the companies they work for.
Background: when I quit software in the latter half of the 2000s I bought a house built in 1908 in the central US. It needed lots of things, so I basically lived in half of it and worked on the other half for about 10 years.
What I learned in the process of learning how to do all of that stuff by trial and error (including building custom windows and doors... wooden ones to replace the 'new' ones from previous owners that I threw away) is that prior to the 1980s there were lots of small machines built for the market of a small custom shop that might build things for local clientele. They have all been replaced by worse (in every respect) multi-function machines that only make boring things badly.
As a baseline, the most notorious of big box stores [1] says that new plastic windows cost 800 - 1000 dollars. That's highway robbery. There's about 30 board feet of rough sawn lumber in a 4' x 3' wooden double hung window. The material cost (assuming cypress in the southeast or douglas fir in the north/west) is gonna be around 5 dollars per board foot. Glass in smallish bulk quantities lets say 3 dollars per square foot, and hardware about 50 dollars per window, I'll give 10-20 dollars for paint and what not. So we're looking at a material cost of around $250.00 per window if someone wanted wooden windows in a common size.
The problem is not that it's impossible to compete with the plastic window on quality at a slight price markup, the problem is that there's no one to do it because everyone has been turned into a middle man, serving rent seekers. Outside of major cities with enough of a concentration of historic buildings to keep real craftsmen busy, there aren't going to be any such real craftsmen. They're all going to be glorified salesmen with a few hand tools from the local building supply retailer.
It didn't have to be this way. As an example, up until the late 1970s a company named Powermatic built a small single end tender (model # 2A) that is shown here [2] and here [3]. These were marketed to small shops, not giant industrial factories. These machines have appreciated in value on the used market in the past 10 years, because people are still using them! Ten years ago you could buy a serviceable 2A tenoner for $500-1000 dollars, now they're going for $2500 to 3k. I met people running window and door shops doing historic preservation work around Boston that were stockpiling every one they find for sale for parts. Powermatic the company on the other hand was sold and the brand "cashed in" on cheap import imitations of other tool companies' products long ago.
Another example would be the machine called a "sash trimmer" shown here [4] and here [5]. I use the term "machine" very loosely because it's not even motorized, you operate it with your foot like an old sewing machine. This machine could be replicated in a machine shop today using an old milling machine or mortiser as a base for probably $3000 dollars or so in custom parts. It's how you make fancy wooden windows like these [6]. It's virtually impossible to make such a wooden window without that machine, because modern machines can't replicate the required angled mortises. I looked for years and never found one for sale in the southeastern US. Despite the fact that thousands of historic homes in the southeastern US have such windows, that are all over 80 years old now and gradually rotting away.<...
> there were lots of small machines built for the market of a small custom shop that might build things for local clientele. They have all been replaced by worse (in every respect) multi-function machines that only make boring things badly.
It's funny how similar this sounds to the framework situation in software development.
To set up a table saw (generic multi-function tool) to do what a tenoner does requires quite a bit of ingenuity. It's going to be a trip to the machine shop anyway because you'll need a shaper extension (or a standalone shaper / router table) to cut the coped ends of the muntins and rails. I spent as much on a router table extension for my table saw as I spent on the saw itself (the saw was a Powermatic model 66 from the 1970s, bought used).
Cutting the grooves (rabbets) where the glass in a wooden window or door rests is not only rather dangerous (you have to use a stacked up "dado" blade which is rather rough in terms of operation, and your fingers have to be close to it), but not trivial to set up for. You have to do the muntin ends with the boards standing on end, which requires a tenon jig for the table saw. These [1] videos [2] present a pretty good picture of how silly this all is for the muntins (the 'bars' in a window) and this one [3] is how you have to use a table saw to cut the glass recess in the rails / stiles.
In the case of the tenoning jig, if you search for one, you'll find a plethora of videos and guides from people claiming to have made one on their own out of scrap lumber, plywood, particle board, etc. They're really javascript frameworks manifest into mechanical devices when you watch them. There's no concern in any of these people's faces for the lack of rigidity, unstable nature of the materials they're using to build the thing, or infinitely small likelihood of longevity for the tool they've built. The only concern is making a blog post or youtube video that gets some clicks, just like youtube "coding channels," lol.
Making windows and doors that fit together properly, from experience, needs repeatable accuracy in your cutting machines of about 5 thousandths of an inch. How do people think they can do that with plastic / plywood / particle board jigs they home-built for multi-purpose machines? It's insanity, especially when a very simple purpose-built machine from the 1960s / 1970s can do what they're spending hours on in about 10 seconds, with perfectly repeatable precision.
Eventually all of this becomes a philosophical discussion, of course. My suggestion in the post above that people educate themselves about architecture and art to improve their own houses denotes doing that in their spare time. As in, not spending their spare time as a consultant or contract developer to make more money and just throw money at the problem and hope for a better outcome. Required in the undertaking is the acceptance that money will not buy everything they want. A dangerous consideration, indeed.
The whole world was built with a post-ww2 American economic model, in which factories get expensive purpose-built machines and hobbyists get poor multi-function machines that prevent them from competing with factories. Everyone can take whatever middle-man place they prefer if they make a living in this market, and prices can always go up because demand will always go up too, right? Except when (insert cog in the machine) doesn't, then it all breaks down and starts to consume itself for the last few quarters of bonuses, and the finale is the "Goldman Sachs special" when a finance firm loads a company like Powermatic with debt that they fully intend to default on: the mob-style bust-out.
I just want to say that Sagrada Familia, incomplete as it is, is a work of astounding and incomprehensible genius and I am forever grateful that I was able to see it with my own eyes.
I live in New Orleans, which has some very strict rules about what you can and cannot do when building or renovating in the French Quarter. As a consequence of this, there are multiple businesses that exist mostly to create all the legally-mandated ornamentation. Their work shows up outside the historic district, too.
You don't wanna carve stone, sure, but there's people out there who love sculpting and carving and all the other physical creative work involved in making a pretty building.
"Modern" anything, when the focus is on "modern" and not on state of the art, will tend to produce somewhat radical things that attempt to do something never done before in the field.
These examples of architecture are certainly new, certainly a spinoff from related past designs but with new materials and angles (I'm talking out of my butt a little).
I wouldn't mind a "recession" back into Beaux Arts for government and public buildings, but that isn't going to win "modern" design prizes.
I would be far more interested in an architectural counter-revolution, with the vendee marching on these modern monstrosities with pitch forks, torches and jackhammers.
Architectural revolutions come and go in steady cycles. This guy is of the post-modern school, which hates on the modern school. They do irrational nonsense just to make a point against rationalism. They post eg in /r/evilbuildings
Modernism hated art-noveau and previous such schools, like baroque, and esp. rokoko (late baroque), the typical l'art pour l'art extremist schools.
Nobody takes them too serious, so they get angry easily. And they usually work in US or British academia.
Wow I just looked up rococo and it's absolutely astounding and beautiful. I wish every building I walked into looked like those buildings, I feel like I'd just be happier even if it were merely cheap imitation.
Rococo architecture is absolutely toooo much (to me, of course), the gulag toilet is too little.
There are options in the middle. Classicist touches (columns, simple harmonizing forms), big windows, scale, light, green, stairs, plazas. Walkable, connected to the underground public transportation, etc.
Sometimes less is more. There's no need to make houses organic looking, instead the architecture should provide spaces and light (hence a lot of glass) for real organic things. Humans, animals, plants.
Here's a skyline I think similarly-minded people might appreciate, this is Oxford which survived WW2 relatively unscathed and contains too many listed buildings for the post-war town planners to have bulldozed them all in favour of boxy concrete abominations against the sighted.
I agree with the sentiment of the article overall but this one sentence felt bizarrely out of place to me:
> Here are a couple of works by the greatest architect who ever lived, Antoni Gaudí
Really? Apart from the Sagrada Familia, the rest of his more famous works just comes off as weirdly whimsical at best, and discordantly unattractive at worst. It’s strange seeing such a definitive opinion given the grandeur of some of the ancient work the author highlights earlier, which seems far beyond Gaudí. Another irony here is that his work falls under the label of “Catalan modernism”, while the author is railing against modernism and its derivative styles.
> Another irony here is that his work falls under the label of “Catalan modernism”, while the author is railing against modernism and its derivative styles.
Gaudi seems to be one of those great artists who never managed to impart his good ideas on his students. Or maybe it was the wrong era for whimsy and measured extravagance.
When I visited Casa Mila ("La Pedrera"), one of the most striking things about it was how modern it seemed. It was commissioned in 1902 and finished in 1910. More than 100 years later, almost nothing about it felt dated (other than specific appliances), and several details felt as if they were still coming from the future.
I've had this feeling in some of Gaudi's other buildings, as if he was so far ahead of us that more than a century later, we have still not really caught up with his vision.
Couldn't agree more. The modern buildings are boring, dumb, tasteless and just plain ugly. Not only that, they look very outdated in 10 years. 20 years down the line, the sight of these buildings are just unbearable.
Society, as an economic participant, has options and alternate goods it can spend its money on.
Historically, maybe there was nothing else more interesting to spend money on, so people allocated their time and energy to these grand architecture. Now the Medicis of the world can spend their wealth on space exploration and memes instead.
Many of these places are also spiritually motivated, and the world is increasingly atheist.
I agree with the premise of the article but there’s also some survivorship bias at play. We know about (and don’t knock down) the particularly beautiful older buildings. If you go to New York City there’s beautiful stuff from the early 20th century (think Chrysler Building) and plenty of unremarkable stuff still standing (think pre-war walk ups). Maybe one in a hundred of the older buildings is remarkably beautiful.
Still, there don’t seem to be many large scale projects built to last today. Nothing on the scale of Grand Central for a public building has been attempted in a long time, and it’s a shame because it’s quite awe inspiring to commute through there.
> We know about (and don’t knock down) the particularly beautiful older buildings.
We have lots of evidence from paintings and photographs that it's not just survivorship bias, that things have gotten on average uglier.
> If you go to New York City there’s beautiful stuff from the early 20th century (think Chrysler Building) and plenty of unremarkable stuff still standing (think pre-war walk ups).
Still more aesthetically pleasing than a large majority of what's built now.
> Maybe one in a hundred of the older buildings is remarkably beautiful.
Not being actively ugly is pretty good too and a great deal more common in older buildings than newer ones. There are many, many more neighbourhoods that people will travel to just to walk around and appreciate that were built before wWW2 than after, in every country that was developed before then, and almost all that weren't.
We have lots of evidence from paintings and photographs that it's not just survivorship bias, that things have gotten on average uglier.
There's definitely a bias at play here, whatever name you give to it. Maybe a bias toward familiarity, where the longer something has been around, the more people decide they like it.
I look forward to the day when I can build my perfect glass and stone paradise and finally escape the terror of older buildings and small spaces designed for people less than 5' tall.
Where are you that's designed for people less than 5 feet tall? Generally it's the older buildings that tend to have higher ceilings - until very recently, most post-war buildings were built with 8-foot ceilings or even shorter.
Not just the ceiling height matters. Older buildings I've been in tend to have very narrow staircases and hallways (not enough room for elbows and shoulders), light fixtures mounted directly at or below my eye level, rooms in which it would be impossible to lie down with arms above head, and/or showers that barely reach chest height. And I am not particularly tall.
Isn't that just your more bias? Why would they have ugly buidings in a painting or photograph? Have you looked at the modern architecture of Singapore or Japan? Way more people visit a downtown with generic skyscapers than small old style neighborhoods.
I've not been in that building, only seen photos. I find Grand Central Station to be beautiful in its way, and I very much like the grand terminal of the Los Angeles station, which was a surprise to me (it's featured, as the police station in an opening scene of the movie "Blade Runner".)
I’ve lived in upstate NY and have taken the metro north to Grand Central everyday. I now live in New Jersey and take the path to the WTC everyday. Obviously the Oculus and GC are very different, but the Oculus is still breath taking after so many visits. I agree it’s a very good building. One thing I like about GC is that it has an infinite amount of detail. You can be blown away entering the building and seeing the grand hall, or by inspecting the tiniest detail. The Oculus, with its algorithmic design, is lacking that feature.
The survivorship bias argument has two major problems:
1) There are many older cities in Europe where the entire city center is beautiful. Paris, for example, or Tallinn. These aren't just rare 'survivors.'
2) Where are buildings from the last 40 years that will be the 'survivors' of the future? In NYC alone dozens of beautiful buildings were built in the 1920s and 30s. Where are the dozens of modern equivalents?
Lots of potential discussions on why we're stuck with "ugly" modern architecture (is it due to materials/construction costs, environmental/safety regulation, architect's desires to be different...), and generally a more enjoyable piece than this one.
Plus there's a brief discussion on a hilarious conspiracy theory.
Standards and building codes, the same sorts of reasons cars, except for a few visual design points, all have the same basic shape and look. Organizations, as well as home buyers, also look for resaleability and the ability to repurpose spaces — odd, though beautiful buildings are thought to be hard to sell, and specialized spaces are considered long-term detriments. Contemporary architecture is a monument to bureaucrats and middle managers.
For every practical reason for the flat boxy look I’m sure alternative approaches can be worked out, but people have to want to do it first.
As someone who is not a car owner I find it striking how functionally blind most people are to the ugliness of cars. Modern cars are designed to look well alone in a vast empty space, and that is how car ads pitch them. But when you see them racked and stacked bumper to bumper like in cities it is shocking just how unsightly they are and just how much space we yield to cars dramatically reducing the livability of the city. People are so functionally blind they can’t even imagine any other way. Surely, you must have cars. The notion that we have chosen to make our cities ugly and unlivable and we could choose otherwise isn’t even conceivable. When people hear I don’t have a car they always assume I rent or borrow one often. They cannot imagine how a family of four can get things done without a car, and literally the “how” question is the one I get most.
Maybe something similar has happened to architecture, where social norms have made it impossible for most to even see a different way. Things are the way they are ostensibly for practical and aesthetic reasons, but none of those practical and aesthetic reasons really stand up under scrutiny because ultimately it is down to fashion.
>Modern cars are designed to look well alone in a vast empty space, and that is how car ads pitch them.
>Things are the way they are ostensibly for practical and aesthetic reasons, but none of those practical and aesthetic reasons really stand up under scrutiny because ultimately it is down to fashion.
That is wrong, they are all the same looking for aerodynamics since Obama told car manufacturers to make them more fuel efficient. Form follows function, its why they are all generic looking, they are greener, they have a crumple zone for safety, they are not designed round and generic looking for aesthetic reasons.
>The Obama Administration today finalized groundbreaking standards that will increase fuel economy to the equivalent of 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by Model Year 2025.
The opposite is like Elon Musk asking a costume designer to design a spacesuit, then making engineer fit the function after (not efficient engineering design and in my opinion not very attractive suits either, they look like evil guards in movies). https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-design-spacex-spac...
// They cannot imagine how a family of four can get things done without a car, and literally the “how” question is the one I get most.
Everything in life is a trade off. If you want to be car free you can certainly do it. It comes at the cost of being able to take your kid to their grandma on 5 minutes notice or to swing by the store and get a ton of groceries for your party that's coming up.
Even if you don't care about those things, there's something you are giving up in every decision. Don't be shocked if others have a different priority.
I say this as someone who lived in the city and didn't have a car for many decades and just moved to the suburbs and bought an SUV. I totally get why people prefer this life and I wouldn't want to go back. But others have their free choice and what works for them.
> People are so functionally blind they can’t even imagine any other way. Surely, you must have cars.
At this point, depending where you live, you must have cars. I lived in the big Texas cities, and outside of a few places close to the city centers, it's literally impossible to live without a car. The cities are designed around cars, and unless we tear them up and rebuild them from the ground up, you simply must have a car.
Just wanted to say thanks for posting this, I loved this article. I certainly disagreed with the author on many points, but it was joyful for me to think about my own aesthetic that has been shaped by our times, and also to see some of the beautiful architecture in the article.
Can someone identify the first photo of classic Islamic architecture? I love that style of architecture and art, both intricate and detailed while also always having a "mathematical" beauty at the same time.
This is part of the Naqshe'h Jahan ('The Design of the World') complex. Designed and built by Sufi Architects of Safavid Dynasty, the complex is a symbolic occult representation of 'the world'. The 'Shah' in question here is 'The King of the world', i.e. God. Opposite the mosque is 'The market'. Along the long axis of the square is 'The Palace' of the earthly king, and opposite of that is another (quite beautiful) "Royal Mosque" that was used by the king, God's vice-regent. In the center, the field was used for Polo, the game of kings, symbolic of the "quite serious" (per Rumi) cosmological 'game'.
[p.s. After the revolution, the regime rather ignorantly renamed the Shah's Mosque to Imam's Mosque, confusing the "Shah" in question with an earthly king.]
The state of architecture is a disaster. Ever since Adolf Loos wrote “ornament is crime”, architects have booed anything decorative. We get textures, sure. Oh boy do we get textures. We get all the woods, all the stones, all the 3d printed concrete. Sculpture? Hell, no…
And no it’s not that expensive. When you build 234 park avenue, every apartment sells for $10m. maybe there is some of it that can go towards making things fun a little bit.
The worst part is even Modernist heroes like Corbusier and Wright did fun stuff. The Church at Ronchamp is weird and playful. And Wright’s blocky mayan influence is
crazy and refreshing.
Not asking your everyday architect to change overnight, but the people who influence the profession, give the prizes and write the articles seriously need to change.
Every architect I've met is like a jaded COBOL programmer at the government that refuses to leave their niche because change increases the chances of you getting fired.
That’s a good way to put it. I know a number of architects, 99.9% design the equivalent of Taco Bell’s. Unless you’re exceptional it’s a very mind numbin job where you’re easily replaceable (like most everything else).
From my experience I would say completely the oposite, every intern is a Idris or at least a Haskell programmer. Architectural offices, soon or later, will make them Java programmers.
COBOL programmers are the government authorities and the typical investor.
I remember reading that architects have one of the highest job dissatisfaction rates in the US. Which makes sense comparing the kinds of projects I saw the architecture students due in college with the architects I've met, whose excitement is designing the ductwork in strip-mall Target stores.
I kind of always wanted to be an architect, and my skillset largely seems inclined toward it; so much so that growing up, my dad was sure it was what I’d do. But EVERY exposure I had to young people in the industry, and even education to an extent (Saw a passionate friend quit the UMich program) belied the sentiment we’re bemoaning here. I wound up consigning my impulses to representational painting.
Out of curiosity, before modernism, what would an architecture curriculum have looked like? Are there any foundational texts?
*I don’t hate modernism, lots of it is pretty cool. However, I hate what it did to the pedagogy of painting. It set me back ten years because it was so hard to find anyone who knew what they were talking about. Western art departments figuratively and literally destroyed the basis for teaching representational aesthetics, which had been developed for thousands of years, and then celebrated themselves for doing so. Now, relatively, no one knows how to draw.
I suspect something similar happened in architecture, and in light of that, I don’t know who to trust or approach on how to start self-learning. I’ll never build cool buildings, but I can design them and use architecture to inform my painting.
Screw the ornamental stuff, when do we start getting different large-scale patterns in spaces to live and work?
Long dark hallways filled with apartments where nobody knows each other or has any occasion to interact. Secluded offices vs. anxiety inducing planes of "open" disasters. Apartments designed to be a shrine to a television and a small bedroom with light only suitable for cave dwellers.
The shape of spaces is important and shapes our quality of life. I would like to see a revolution in that much more than a different kinds of facade.
Local zoning/regulations/politics also play a significant role in limiting types of housing. In general, development projects are going to play it safe to try to get a plan approved.
Sure, that too. Architects don't give a shit about interior spaces. They have interns do the plans. What they are lauded for is the exterior, the big hall and the sky terrace.
To be fair the working space is being experimented upon. The open spaces are fairly new, and there are plenty of workplaces also where people don't have attributed desks, they just walk around the building and sit wherever they want. Whether any of it works, I don't know...
> Architects don't give a shit about interior spaces. They have interns do the plans. What they are lauded for is the exterior, the big hall and the sky terrace.
This probably the true for those big and famous offices (especially the part with interns). But "Architects" is broader group then that. Smaller offices often do consider internal spaces. Also sometimes it is often challenge to design it in way that can survive yak shaving [1] in commercial projects.
[1]: this one often occurs even after original budget was met in the design. That is why public projects are more attractive to many architects even if they are often more modest.
> Architects don't give a shit about interior spaces. They have interns do the plans.
As a rule of thumb, main architects are just sellers. They sell projects to clients and authorities - only. Most senior architects are project managers, they don't plan anymore, at most they give some ideas and impose limitations. The rest, including "interns", do the bulk of the project, interiors or facades.
This is the one area driven purely by economic factors, any developer commissioning the building will let the architect have free reign on the exterior or overall building shape on the proviso that it maximizes leasable floorspace inside. Exciting and interesting interior spaces either use up space or are less marketable catering to a smaller subsection of the market.
> To be fair the working space is being experimented upon. The open spaces are fairly new, and there are plenty of workplaces also where people don't have attributed desks, they just walk around the building and sit wherever they want. Whether any of it works, I don't know...
All of this is purely driven by cost cutting.
Many jobs require deep concentration and quiet and in places that respect this you get individual offices (extremely rare for the entire company, but notice that in 99% of companies every level above manager tends to get an individual office) or team offices (probably the best compromise in terms of cost - socialization trade-off).
The flexible desk ("flex desk") setups work for some things, but they tend to suck, too. You have to take everything with you, generally. Over the ear headset? Bring a bag! Favorite mug? Probably the same. Pens, notes, whatever? Nomad life style.
That's what I love about Barbican in London. It's really hard to convey in pictures, but despite being a brutalist building, it's totally unpredictable and different at every turn and is alive in a much deeper sense than "organic shapes" or wooden panels that we get nowadays. It's a maze of a block that might be annoying to get through if you're in a hurry but is so much more natural in its nature than a typical city block.
I guess it's just way more expensive to design than those standard boxes we see everywhere.
I have long wanted to make a coffee-table book called Lonely Architectural Spaces, not because I enjoy them but because I'm fascinated by how big an impact they have on my mood and psyche.
You might love "Liminal Spaces". There are a few blogs with collections of images, but I think my favorite place to view them is the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LiminalSpace/
My grandmother had a saying from when she and my grandpa moved around various Air Force bases: "the closer your neighbours, the less you want to know them"
I am imagining a psychology experiment to collect data on the value of ornamentation— eg, having people estimate the relative value of similar buildings in different styles. I think the modernists never got that part of the “function” of forms is to create a neighborhood vibe. Ornamentation can have a huge effect on this.
I’d love to see a return to small sculpture elements based on 3D printing and concrete casting — even if it starts with wholesale copying of ornamentation that works well from the late 1890s.
There are multiple problems in the architect community. One is the marquee architects were all raised up in a post-war era where--some have argued--their designs are more influenced by PTSD than art. The brutalism of a modern building was certainly influenced by the materials--prestressed concrete and poured concrete, for example--but to put a stark and ugly face on a building requires a broken mind.
Those marquee architects influenced the later architects, who aren't as broken, but still want the cache. So they add "textures." Then, when CAD took off, it got even easier to do big boxes fast and cheap. The premier design software today, Revit, is so good at churning out box buildings.
We were able, through materials science, to increase vertical density at the cost of human scale structures. Lost is the recognition that buildings don't stand alone. They are a part of society, and the way buildings are designed and built reflect the society they are in, and they affect the society in which they are placed.
We don't build grand buildings anymore. What we build looks more like the box a building would come in. The interesting thing is, if cheap energy ever becomes scarce, all these lauded brutalist structures will become useless. While the stout, high-ceilinged brick and stone structures, with operable windows and lots of natural light will remain.
It's certainly debateable. In a place with constrained real estate, like NYC and Tokyo, there isn't really any choice. When thinking about "human scale," it helps to emphasize the human part of the equation. Can a human walk up 57 flights of stairs? Yes, but not many. Can a human walk from one side of Orlando to the other? Yes, but not many, and a lot of them will be smooshed by cars.
Orlando wouldn't be human scale any more than the Burj Kalafia is. Orlando is automobile scaled, and would suffer the same consequences as the Burj if energy costs skyrocket.
That said, there are some people who thrive in places like NYC. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to deal with the sea of humanity, and not a lot of people can.
This is the intro of a Soviet Christmas romantic comedy, with the premise that the main protagonist, quite drunk, gets into a taxi, gives the address of is home, gets there, unlocks the door with his key and go to bed, only to realize a bit later that something was wrong when an unknown woman enters... Everything was identical to his apartment (street name, number, building, keys, etc)... except he is in Leningrad and not in Moscow.
I grew up in a place where new/flat/clean architecture was enviable. Lots. of. stucco. flipped. houses.
I now live in a log cabin (completely different location). None of the walls are straight and my interior doors sometimes do not close properly. I've come to love it all.
When I return to places with these perfect and completely uninteresting walls, I feel a newfound sense of dread. I sometimes doubt my ability to return to an office/cubicle setting anymore.
The Neo-Andean architecture that has sprung up in Bolivia during Evo Morales’ Socialist presidency
The pictured room is an example of a building that's called a "cholet", a multi-use commercial/residential building built by members of the Aymara ethnic group. They're stores and event halls with residences on top. The event halls are frequently used for extravagant parties and closing business deals (often at the some time). The design, interior and exterior, is crazy-dramatic, but beautiful...and very deliberately a display of wealth and status. It's both capitalist as fuck and the result of a generation of Aymaras building their own city in El Alto.
The rest of this article has moments, but I just have trouble taking the writer seriously after reading that.
Note: I have set aside for the purposes of this article the fact that our ugly buildings are all capitalistic megaprojects and thus we cannot change our design until we change our economic system.
There are plenty of beautiful buildings being built today. Just because the Pritzker Prize isn't awarded to them because the panel awarding this prize believes in hideous monstrosities doesn't mean that the only buildings being built are ugly.
Also, neither here nor there, but I wonder if Nathan's writing this article because he fired all of his writers after they tried to unionize: "Yes, we were fired by the editor-in-chief of a socialist magazine for trying to start a worker co-op."
Better for a building's inhabitants to be free to bring their own life and color, than for the building to try to impose one decade's view of life and color upon every generation for the next century.
How do you propose they do that? For example, take your typical steel-and-glass skyscraper, such as the One World Trade Center. How can the inhabitants make the exterior less hostile? Or affect it at all?
And isn't the complete absence of any kind of style, color, or pleasant features in general, an imposition of a specific view in itself?
And finally, is what you describe even a problem? How many people living in old Art Deco skyscrapers are miserable and trying to leave due to having a century-old style imposed upon them? Or people living in historic neighborhoods? Whereas featureless gray cubes "free them to bring their own life and color"?
The life of a building comes from the way it is used, not the way it is decorated. There is no need to decorate the outside of the WTC, because it's the experience of being inside that matters.
As for gray cubes, you can shine any color or pattern of light on them you want.
The capitalistic megaprojects of, say, 1750-1930 were much more likely to be beautiful than the modern ones. Incredibly ornate banks and rail terminus stations. Beautiful brick, stone, and cast-iron apartment buildings. Towering stone offices. Even factory complexes were usually brick and had some amount of ornamentation [1][2]. I'm aware that there's a lot of survivorship bias supporting this view, but is there even a single modern factory building worth mentioning?
The author tends to make very simple logic fallacies in all of his articles. If we apply the same logic to video games or movies we would ask why aren't modern games any good? Its simple survivorship bias. He also uses the Prizker prize as the highest prestige award, I have never heard anyone ever mention it, and at best never remembered what some wealthy people's opinions were or think they were relevant.
I live in Illinois where JB Prizker is the governor, I went to a drafting school and was an architecture student in college so it shows how important the prize is. Good architecture wasn't ever monopolized by self appointed tastemakers, or how many or what awards it got, people liked what they liked despite what self anointed experts decided what they think is the best. You can look at other prizes that if by the cash prize is less prestigious but not at all similar in taste, meaning building design taste is not standardized and the assuption that all buildings headed by architects only building and copying Prizker prize winners is false.
https://architectureprize.com/winners/2021.php
Building codes, materials avaliable, and standardization will cause buildings to have common characteristics, his examples are all designs that have survivorship bias from different cultures around the world and of course he had to mention how left wing he is, how the right is wrong, Trump for some reason and his own assumptions as facts and make everything political like this
>For many of the people who use these terms, they connote a vision that is ugly, fake, and deeply racist.
His articles are always childish and amateurish. He assumes that we need more modern buildings that conform to his own style, which is a deeply out of touch, privileged positon like the Prizker prize apointees and ignores the modern buildings in Singapore or Japan where they can afford such designs. Most people are going for cost efficiency with generic plans prefabs, sometimes green features (cutouts in large buildings exist at seemingly random points but they're sunlight related, and its only a consideration at scale) or just living in a mobile home of some kind due to soaring costs.
I recently designed my modest house myself all on paper. I read a pattern language and some other things in preparation. I’m convinced that communities that are nice to live in, even if only in the way they look, must be grown organically so to speak. It must be smaller scale people building the structures and becoming invested in the community. Now all I see are these giant developments that try to simulate that cozy feeling. They get bought immediately from the development company.
- revolutions in local democracy (when was last time you or anyone else voted on the local planning permissions / building code? When was last time we got opportunity to vote on layout of a town?
I live in a rapidly built new town, another thousand houses going up, everyone is moaning about and trying to petition something but the leverage is in the development corporation hands.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadIt costs human lives to build a Notre Dame, both in deaths and in total lifespan output, and as for Sagrada Familia it's still not complete. We now value human life and labor too much to be able to afford it.
I personally can't wait to have detailed, warm, organic architecture back again, but I damn sure don't want to carve any stone.
Is that why those award-winning buildings look like that? Because the architects tried to make them cheaper?
Is 'detail' requiring highly skilled craftsmanship the only way to make pleasant buildings? Because a few of the buildings (Venice and the Italian village) the article gives as examples of beauty have only the barest, simplest of details.
Some really beautiful structures do use minimalism, but so many big architects today strive for speed, size, and function. I think most modern beautiful, minimalist structures are usually smaller, built for fewer people, etc. Maybe?
Our society is quite capable of paying for artisans to restore the architectural splendors of earlier times, and does so. At the same time, expenditure on architecture for its own sake seems to have increased in the last decade or so, at least in centers of wealth (which, in modern times, is where non-utilitarian architecture has its first home, even if it likes to have a weekend place in the country.)
What has not happened is that, for the most part, the paymasters for the latter development have demonstrated little interest in adopting styles that demand highly skilled craftsmanship of the sort formerly valued (and still valued, apparently, so long as it dates to a previous era.) Today's vanity architecture reflects the values of those who commission it, rather than being a result of market prices for artisan work.
I owe a lot to this dude, because he made sure that when worker was housing was being built it would have a library on the periphery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Passmore_Edwards
There was an explicit goal of providing education and opportunities to working people. (Well - working men. But this was over a century ago now.)
Modern philanthropy has no equivalent. There is no interest in creating high quality useful public spaces for ordinary people. So there's no architectural tradition to support that goal.
We have terrible architecture for ideological reasons. Flat roofs are not signifincantly cheaper to build than pitched roofs, and far less adept at roofiness, but we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy.
As with most modern art, architecture has a fundamentially adversarial relationship with the vast majority of people.
I don't hate the boxy things, I just hate that there's nothing else being built in Seattle right now except boxy things. And they're not much to look at.
At least I have not really seen those rebar and concrete skeletons that are a common sight basically everywhere else.
This podcast goes over what an absolute disaster this type of construction is [0], but for apartments in most major US cities west of the Mississippi, it is hard to avoid _some_ sort of wood framing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVodkE47aLw
Not really. Frank Lloyd Wright was building with flat roofs a decade before the Bauhaus school even opened. But it was certainly an artistic endeavour and he’s a great example of somebody who had an adversarial relationship with pretty much everybody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
Boringness also probably comes from increasing numbers of people involved in approvals. Try getting some wild thing through public hearings and city councils. Much harder than a cube. The boringness is a feature, not a bug.
I bet there's a ton of other factors too, like the cited attention cost of detail.
Someone said: There are two types of flat roofs: Those that are leaky and those that are not leaky yet.
Look at this majestic crown: https://i.imgur.com/6W2FUz0.jpeg
I suppose it is the lack of imagination of top-end architecture that these techniques, some of the hallmark technologies of our age, that there isn't a healthy market in their use in architecture.
The employment of these things all seems focused in mass production and cost reduction (which isn't a bad thing), and seems to ignore the possibilities that programmable manufacturing and production could have on architecture (which could push the state of the art).
It might also be that being an architect kinda sucks these days. Not enough jobs, and those jobs are paying worse, to cover the costs of schooling.
So there aren't the true geniuses anymore? Maybe it's just that the iron rule of finance has drained the budgets from every large scale project, and the ultra-rich are now no longer artistically inclined, they are either concerned with the magnitude of their fortune in numbers rather than edifices.
Hamburg’s philarmony cost 900 million euros to build. That’s an awful lot of money. Architects decide to spend on structure and texture instead of decor. And with today’s machines, we actually could make all these intricate details without human intervention.
Now the town basically has subsidized a hotel, a few luxury condos, some gastronomy, and got a few classic music venues which it could have gotten otherwise, and cheaper. Besides that it already had those before.
Furthermore I don't see the need to fake the look of this
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kai...
by totally removing the core of it, and putting that new thing on top, instead of simply tearing it down, and build something really new from the bottom up.
I mean, if it had been this building
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaispeicher_A#/media/Datei:Kai...
it would at least have had a history, including the timeball on top of it, which signalled the ships the exact time they could adjust their chronometers to at exact 12:00hrs.
But it wasn't. Just a functional building to store cocoa and coffee beans, built in 1963 over the ruin of the former building.
Was that worth to uphold the facade of? 798.000.000€ for the town, and about 100.000.000€ by some fanbois, and who knows who?
I don't get it.
"Das Wahrzeichen des Wahnsinns. Mors, Mors."
EDIT: Hmm, even the payer's power could be factored in. A king may be willing to spend 1/10th of his empire's wealth on an extravagant palace, but the same would likely not be approved in a democracy.
That's not really the case. As with the internet and software, architecture was hijacked by building products corporations and tradespeople were duped into playing along, just like the employees of social media corporations one can see on this site who try to justify the evil activities of the companies they work for.
Background: when I quit software in the latter half of the 2000s I bought a house built in 1908 in the central US. It needed lots of things, so I basically lived in half of it and worked on the other half for about 10 years.
What I learned in the process of learning how to do all of that stuff by trial and error (including building custom windows and doors... wooden ones to replace the 'new' ones from previous owners that I threw away) is that prior to the 1980s there were lots of small machines built for the market of a small custom shop that might build things for local clientele. They have all been replaced by worse (in every respect) multi-function machines that only make boring things badly.
As a baseline, the most notorious of big box stores [1] says that new plastic windows cost 800 - 1000 dollars. That's highway robbery. There's about 30 board feet of rough sawn lumber in a 4' x 3' wooden double hung window. The material cost (assuming cypress in the southeast or douglas fir in the north/west) is gonna be around 5 dollars per board foot. Glass in smallish bulk quantities lets say 3 dollars per square foot, and hardware about 50 dollars per window, I'll give 10-20 dollars for paint and what not. So we're looking at a material cost of around $250.00 per window if someone wanted wooden windows in a common size.
The problem is not that it's impossible to compete with the plastic window on quality at a slight price markup, the problem is that there's no one to do it because everyone has been turned into a middle man, serving rent seekers. Outside of major cities with enough of a concentration of historic buildings to keep real craftsmen busy, there aren't going to be any such real craftsmen. They're all going to be glorified salesmen with a few hand tools from the local building supply retailer.
It didn't have to be this way. As an example, up until the late 1970s a company named Powermatic built a small single end tender (model # 2A) that is shown here [2] and here [3]. These were marketed to small shops, not giant industrial factories. These machines have appreciated in value on the used market in the past 10 years, because people are still using them! Ten years ago you could buy a serviceable 2A tenoner for $500-1000 dollars, now they're going for $2500 to 3k. I met people running window and door shops doing historic preservation work around Boston that were stockpiling every one they find for sale for parts. Powermatic the company on the other hand was sold and the brand "cashed in" on cheap import imitations of other tool companies' products long ago.
Another example would be the machine called a "sash trimmer" shown here [4] and here [5]. I use the term "machine" very loosely because it's not even motorized, you operate it with your foot like an old sewing machine. This machine could be replicated in a machine shop today using an old milling machine or mortiser as a base for probably $3000 dollars or so in custom parts. It's how you make fancy wooden windows like these [6]. It's virtually impossible to make such a wooden window without that machine, because modern machines can't replicate the required angled mortises. I looked for years and never found one for sale in the southeastern US. Despite the fact that thousands of historic homes in the southeastern US have such windows, that are all over 80 years old now and gradually rotting away.<...
It's funny how similar this sounds to the framework situation in software development.
To set up a table saw (generic multi-function tool) to do what a tenoner does requires quite a bit of ingenuity. It's going to be a trip to the machine shop anyway because you'll need a shaper extension (or a standalone shaper / router table) to cut the coped ends of the muntins and rails. I spent as much on a router table extension for my table saw as I spent on the saw itself (the saw was a Powermatic model 66 from the 1970s, bought used).
Cutting the grooves (rabbets) where the glass in a wooden window or door rests is not only rather dangerous (you have to use a stacked up "dado" blade which is rather rough in terms of operation, and your fingers have to be close to it), but not trivial to set up for. You have to do the muntin ends with the boards standing on end, which requires a tenon jig for the table saw. These [1] videos [2] present a pretty good picture of how silly this all is for the muntins (the 'bars' in a window) and this one [3] is how you have to use a table saw to cut the glass recess in the rails / stiles.
In the case of the tenoning jig, if you search for one, you'll find a plethora of videos and guides from people claiming to have made one on their own out of scrap lumber, plywood, particle board, etc. They're really javascript frameworks manifest into mechanical devices when you watch them. There's no concern in any of these people's faces for the lack of rigidity, unstable nature of the materials they're using to build the thing, or infinitely small likelihood of longevity for the tool they've built. The only concern is making a blog post or youtube video that gets some clicks, just like youtube "coding channels," lol.
Making windows and doors that fit together properly, from experience, needs repeatable accuracy in your cutting machines of about 5 thousandths of an inch. How do people think they can do that with plastic / plywood / particle board jigs they home-built for multi-purpose machines? It's insanity, especially when a very simple purpose-built machine from the 1960s / 1970s can do what they're spending hours on in about 10 seconds, with perfectly repeatable precision.
Eventually all of this becomes a philosophical discussion, of course. My suggestion in the post above that people educate themselves about architecture and art to improve their own houses denotes doing that in their spare time. As in, not spending their spare time as a consultant or contract developer to make more money and just throw money at the problem and hope for a better outcome. Required in the undertaking is the acceptance that money will not buy everything they want. A dangerous consideration, indeed.
The whole world was built with a post-ww2 American economic model, in which factories get expensive purpose-built machines and hobbyists get poor multi-function machines that prevent them from competing with factories. Everyone can take whatever middle-man place they prefer if they make a living in this market, and prices can always go up because demand will always go up too, right? Except when (insert cog in the machine) doesn't, then it all breaks down and starts to consume itself for the last few quarters of bonuses, and the finale is the "Goldman Sachs special" when a finance firm loads a company like Powermatic with debt that they fully intend to default on: the mob-style bust-out.
1. https://youtu.be/jb-KpTfgwQo
2. https://youtu.be/xlg4pgiflTA
3. https://youtu.be/5iFAm1d-rhQ
You don't wanna carve stone, sure, but there's people out there who love sculpting and carving and all the other physical creative work involved in making a pretty building.
These examples of architecture are certainly new, certainly a spinoff from related past designs but with new materials and angles (I'm talking out of my butt a little).
I wouldn't mind a "recession" back into Beaux Arts for government and public buildings, but that isn't going to win "modern" design prizes.
I would be far more interested in an architectural counter-revolution, with the vendee marching on these modern monstrosities with pitch forks, torches and jackhammers.
Modernism hated art-noveau and previous such schools, like baroque, and esp. rokoko (late baroque), the typical l'art pour l'art extremist schools.
Nobody takes them too serious, so they get angry easily. And they usually work in US or British academia.
There are options in the middle. Classicist touches (columns, simple harmonizing forms), big windows, scale, light, green, stairs, plazas. Walkable, connected to the underground public transportation, etc.
Sometimes less is more. There's no need to make houses organic looking, instead the architecture should provide spaces and light (hence a lot of glass) for real organic things. Humans, animals, plants.
https://media.jlgarchitects.com/jlgblobstorage/2019/04/sdsu-...
https://jlg-legolas.azureedge.net/jlgblobstorage/2019/01/fir...
Of course you might absolutely not agree.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/field/field_image_ma...
> Here are a couple of works by the greatest architect who ever lived, Antoni Gaudí
Really? Apart from the Sagrada Familia, the rest of his more famous works just comes off as weirdly whimsical at best, and discordantly unattractive at worst. It’s strange seeing such a definitive opinion given the grandeur of some of the ancient work the author highlights earlier, which seems far beyond Gaudí. Another irony here is that his work falls under the label of “Catalan modernism”, while the author is railing against modernism and its derivative styles.
Gaudi seems to be one of those great artists who never managed to impart his good ideas on his students. Or maybe it was the wrong era for whimsy and measured extravagance.
I've had this feeling in some of Gaudi's other buildings, as if he was so far ahead of us that more than a century later, we have still not really caught up with his vision.
Historically, maybe there was nothing else more interesting to spend money on, so people allocated their time and energy to these grand architecture. Now the Medicis of the world can spend their wealth on space exploration and memes instead.
Many of these places are also spiritually motivated, and the world is increasingly atheist.
Still, there don’t seem to be many large scale projects built to last today. Nothing on the scale of Grand Central for a public building has been attempted in a long time, and it’s a shame because it’s quite awe inspiring to commute through there.
We have lots of evidence from paintings and photographs that it's not just survivorship bias, that things have gotten on average uglier.
> If you go to New York City there’s beautiful stuff from the early 20th century (think Chrysler Building) and plenty of unremarkable stuff still standing (think pre-war walk ups).
Still more aesthetically pleasing than a large majority of what's built now.
> Maybe one in a hundred of the older buildings is remarkably beautiful.
Not being actively ugly is pretty good too and a great deal more common in older buildings than newer ones. There are many, many more neighbourhoods that people will travel to just to walk around and appreciate that were built before wWW2 than after, in every country that was developed before then, and almost all that weren't.
There's definitely a bias at play here, whatever name you give to it. Maybe a bias toward familiarity, where the longer something has been around, the more people decide they like it.
I look forward to the day when I can build my perfect glass and stone paradise and finally escape the terror of older buildings and small spaces designed for people less than 5' tall.
I am not a commuter in New York City, which may contribute to my difficulty in understanding this.
Because the Oculus Terminal looks very strange and elaborate to me, and is actually a train station. I think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_Transport...
I've not been in that building, only seen photos. I find Grand Central Station to be beautiful in its way, and I very much like the grand terminal of the Los Angeles station, which was a surprise to me (it's featured, as the police station in an opening scene of the movie "Blade Runner".)
1) There are many older cities in Europe where the entire city center is beautiful. Paris, for example, or Tallinn. These aren't just rare 'survivors.'
2) Where are buildings from the last 40 years that will be the 'survivors' of the future? In NYC alone dozens of beautiful buildings were built in the 1920s and 30s. Where are the dozens of modern equivalents?
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
Lots of potential discussions on why we're stuck with "ugly" modern architecture (is it due to materials/construction costs, environmental/safety regulation, architect's desires to be different...), and generally a more enjoyable piece than this one.
Plus there's a brief discussion on a hilarious conspiracy theory.
As someone who is not a car owner I find it striking how functionally blind most people are to the ugliness of cars. Modern cars are designed to look well alone in a vast empty space, and that is how car ads pitch them. But when you see them racked and stacked bumper to bumper like in cities it is shocking just how unsightly they are and just how much space we yield to cars dramatically reducing the livability of the city. People are so functionally blind they can’t even imagine any other way. Surely, you must have cars. The notion that we have chosen to make our cities ugly and unlivable and we could choose otherwise isn’t even conceivable. When people hear I don’t have a car they always assume I rent or borrow one often. They cannot imagine how a family of four can get things done without a car, and literally the “how” question is the one I get most.
Maybe something similar has happened to architecture, where social norms have made it impossible for most to even see a different way. Things are the way they are ostensibly for practical and aesthetic reasons, but none of those practical and aesthetic reasons really stand up under scrutiny because ultimately it is down to fashion.
>Things are the way they are ostensibly for practical and aesthetic reasons, but none of those practical and aesthetic reasons really stand up under scrutiny because ultimately it is down to fashion.
That is wrong, they are all the same looking for aerodynamics since Obama told car manufacturers to make them more fuel efficient. Form follows function, its why they are all generic looking, they are greener, they have a crumple zone for safety, they are not designed round and generic looking for aesthetic reasons.
>The Obama Administration today finalized groundbreaking standards that will increase fuel economy to the equivalent of 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by Model Year 2025.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/0...
The opposite is like Elon Musk asking a costume designer to design a spacesuit, then making engineer fit the function after (not efficient engineering design and in my opinion not very attractive suits either, they look like evil guards in movies). https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-design-spacex-spac...
Everything in life is a trade off. If you want to be car free you can certainly do it. It comes at the cost of being able to take your kid to their grandma on 5 minutes notice or to swing by the store and get a ton of groceries for your party that's coming up.
Even if you don't care about those things, there's something you are giving up in every decision. Don't be shocked if others have a different priority.
I say this as someone who lived in the city and didn't have a car for many decades and just moved to the suburbs and bought an SUV. I totally get why people prefer this life and I wouldn't want to go back. But others have their free choice and what works for them.
At this point, depending where you live, you must have cars. I lived in the big Texas cities, and outside of a few places close to the city centers, it's literally impossible to live without a car. The cities are designed around cars, and unless we tear them up and rebuild them from the ground up, you simply must have a car.
Can someone identify the first photo of classic Islamic architecture? I love that style of architecture and art, both intricate and detailed while also always having a "mathematical" beauty at the same time.
I think it is in a mosque in Shiraz.
This is part of the Naqshe'h Jahan ('The Design of the World') complex. Designed and built by Sufi Architects of Safavid Dynasty, the complex is a symbolic occult representation of 'the world'. The 'Shah' in question here is 'The King of the world', i.e. God. Opposite the mosque is 'The market'. Along the long axis of the square is 'The Palace' of the earthly king, and opposite of that is another (quite beautiful) "Royal Mosque" that was used by the king, God's vice-regent. In the center, the field was used for Polo, the game of kings, symbolic of the "quite serious" (per Rumi) cosmological 'game'.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shah+mosque+isfahan&t=ffab&iax=ima...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Jahan_Square
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2Qsm4YfnY
[p.s. After the revolution, the regime rather ignorantly renamed the Shah's Mosque to Imam's Mosque, confusing the "Shah" in question with an earthly king.]
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
The state of architecture is a disaster. Ever since Adolf Loos wrote “ornament is crime”, architects have booed anything decorative. We get textures, sure. Oh boy do we get textures. We get all the woods, all the stones, all the 3d printed concrete. Sculpture? Hell, no…
And no it’s not that expensive. When you build 234 park avenue, every apartment sells for $10m. maybe there is some of it that can go towards making things fun a little bit.
The worst part is even Modernist heroes like Corbusier and Wright did fun stuff. The Church at Ronchamp is weird and playful. And Wright’s blocky mayan influence is crazy and refreshing.
Not asking your everyday architect to change overnight, but the people who influence the profession, give the prizes and write the articles seriously need to change.
From my experience I would say completely the oposite, every intern is a Idris or at least a Haskell programmer. Architectural offices, soon or later, will make them Java programmers.
COBOL programmers are the government authorities and the typical investor.
Out of curiosity, before modernism, what would an architecture curriculum have looked like? Are there any foundational texts?
*I don’t hate modernism, lots of it is pretty cool. However, I hate what it did to the pedagogy of painting. It set me back ten years because it was so hard to find anyone who knew what they were talking about. Western art departments figuratively and literally destroyed the basis for teaching representational aesthetics, which had been developed for thousands of years, and then celebrated themselves for doing so. Now, relatively, no one knows how to draw.
I suspect something similar happened in architecture, and in light of that, I don’t know who to trust or approach on how to start self-learning. I’ll never build cool buildings, but I can design them and use architecture to inform my painting.
The treatise on Architecture from Vitruvius, a Roman architect. This is it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura
Long dark hallways filled with apartments where nobody knows each other or has any occasion to interact. Secluded offices vs. anxiety inducing planes of "open" disasters. Apartments designed to be a shrine to a television and a small bedroom with light only suitable for cave dwellers.
The shape of spaces is important and shapes our quality of life. I would like to see a revolution in that much more than a different kinds of facade.
To be fair the working space is being experimented upon. The open spaces are fairly new, and there are plenty of workplaces also where people don't have attributed desks, they just walk around the building and sit wherever they want. Whether any of it works, I don't know...
This probably the true for those big and famous offices (especially the part with interns). But "Architects" is broader group then that. Smaller offices often do consider internal spaces. Also sometimes it is often challenge to design it in way that can survive yak shaving [1] in commercial projects.
[1]: this one often occurs even after original budget was met in the design. That is why public projects are more attractive to many architects even if they are often more modest.
As a rule of thumb, main architects are just sellers. They sell projects to clients and authorities - only. Most senior architects are project managers, they don't plan anymore, at most they give some ideas and impose limitations. The rest, including "interns", do the bulk of the project, interiors or facades.
All of this is purely driven by cost cutting.
Many jobs require deep concentration and quiet and in places that respect this you get individual offices (extremely rare for the entire company, but notice that in 99% of companies every level above manager tends to get an individual office) or team offices (probably the best compromise in terms of cost - socialization trade-off).
The flexible desk ("flex desk") setups work for some things, but they tend to suck, too. You have to take everything with you, generally. Over the ear headset? Bring a bag! Favorite mug? Probably the same. Pens, notes, whatever? Nomad life style.
I guess it's just way more expensive to design than those standard boxes we see everywhere.
Though it's a bad photograph, here's a recent car rental lobby I visited: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
I worry about people who have to work in places like that.
I’d love to see a return to small sculpture elements based on 3D printing and concrete casting — even if it starts with wholesale copying of ornamentation that works well from the late 1890s.
Those marquee architects influenced the later architects, who aren't as broken, but still want the cache. So they add "textures." Then, when CAD took off, it got even easier to do big boxes fast and cheap. The premier design software today, Revit, is so good at churning out box buildings.
We were able, through materials science, to increase vertical density at the cost of human scale structures. Lost is the recognition that buildings don't stand alone. They are a part of society, and the way buildings are designed and built reflect the society they are in, and they affect the society in which they are placed.
We don't build grand buildings anymore. What we build looks more like the box a building would come in. The interesting thing is, if cheap energy ever becomes scarce, all these lauded brutalist structures will become useless. While the stout, high-ceilinged brick and stone structures, with operable windows and lots of natural light will remain.
I’m not sure the two are in opposition. I feel more connected to humanity in NY, Tokyo, Hong Kong than I do in, say, Denver or Orlando.
The economic forces that drive verticality also drive the use of ground level for retail, restaurants, etc.
Orlando wouldn't be human scale any more than the Burj Kalafia is. Orlando is automobile scaled, and would suffer the same consequences as the Burj if energy costs skyrocket.
That said, there are some people who thrive in places like NYC. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to deal with the sea of humanity, and not a lot of people can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHdFd2RKRSI
This is the intro of a Soviet Christmas romantic comedy, with the premise that the main protagonist, quite drunk, gets into a taxi, gives the address of is home, gets there, unlocks the door with his key and go to bed, only to realize a bit later that something was wrong when an unknown woman enters... Everything was identical to his apartment (street name, number, building, keys, etc)... except he is in Leningrad and not in Moscow.
I now live in a log cabin (completely different location). None of the walls are straight and my interior doors sometimes do not close properly. I've come to love it all.
When I return to places with these perfect and completely uninteresting walls, I feel a newfound sense of dread. I sometimes doubt my ability to return to an office/cubicle setting anymore.
Modern buildings incorporate fire-supression systems and HVAC and (when necessary) dynamic resistance to earthquakes or wind loads.
The pictured room is an example of a building that's called a "cholet", a multi-use commercial/residential building built by members of the Aymara ethnic group. They're stores and event halls with residences on top. The event halls are frequently used for extravagant parties and closing business deals (often at the some time). The design, interior and exterior, is crazy-dramatic, but beautiful...and very deliberately a display of wealth and status. It's both capitalist as fuck and the result of a generation of Aymaras building their own city in El Alto.
The rest of this article has moments, but I just have trouble taking the writer seriously after reading that.
And the obligatory link in response to all the concept art: https://www.archdaily.com/346374/can-we-please-stop-drawing-...
Note: I have set aside for the purposes of this article the fact that our ugly buildings are all capitalistic megaprojects and thus we cannot change our design until we change our economic system.
There are plenty of beautiful buildings being built today. Just because the Pritzker Prize isn't awarded to them because the panel awarding this prize believes in hideous monstrosities doesn't mean that the only buildings being built are ugly.
Here are a few counter-examples, out of literally millions of new buildings being built around the world: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/buildings-redefine..., all of which happen to be "capitalistic megaprojects!"
Also, neither here nor there, but I wonder if Nathan's writing this article because he fired all of his writers after they tried to unionize: "Yes, we were fired by the editor-in-chief of a socialist magazine for trying to start a worker co-op."
https://www.gawker.com/media/the-current-affair-at-current-a...
And isn't the complete absence of any kind of style, color, or pleasant features in general, an imposition of a specific view in itself?
And finally, is what you describe even a problem? How many people living in old Art Deco skyscrapers are miserable and trying to leave due to having a century-old style imposed upon them? Or people living in historic neighborhoods? Whereas featureless gray cubes "free them to bring their own life and color"?
As for gray cubes, you can shine any color or pattern of light on them you want.
[1]: https://lostnewengland.com/2014/03/smith-wesson-factory-spri... [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/mnvhlc/home/brown-county/augus...
And these factories are often converted into exclusive apartments these days. Modern factories are instead torn down.
I live in Illinois where JB Prizker is the governor, I went to a drafting school and was an architecture student in college so it shows how important the prize is. Good architecture wasn't ever monopolized by self appointed tastemakers, or how many or what awards it got, people liked what they liked despite what self anointed experts decided what they think is the best. You can look at other prizes that if by the cash prize is less prestigious but not at all similar in taste, meaning building design taste is not standardized and the assuption that all buildings headed by architects only building and copying Prizker prize winners is false. https://architectureprize.com/winners/2021.php
Building codes, materials avaliable, and standardization will cause buildings to have common characteristics, his examples are all designs that have survivorship bias from different cultures around the world and of course he had to mention how left wing he is, how the right is wrong, Trump for some reason and his own assumptions as facts and make everything political like this
>For many of the people who use these terms, they connote a vision that is ugly, fake, and deeply racist.
His articles are always childish and amateurish. He assumes that we need more modern buildings that conform to his own style, which is a deeply out of touch, privileged positon like the Prizker prize apointees and ignores the modern buildings in Singapore or Japan where they can afford such designs. Most people are going for cost efficiency with generic plans prefabs, sometimes green features (cutouts in large buildings exist at seemingly random points but they're sunlight related, and its only a consideration at scale) or just living in a mobile home of some kind due to soaring costs.
>>> THE TREE DIED TO AVOID HAVING TO LOOK AT THE BUILDING ALL DAY.
Best picture caption this month!
- revolutions in local democracy (when was last time you or anyone else voted on the local planning permissions / building code? When was last time we got opportunity to vote on layout of a town?
I live in a rapidly built new town, another thousand houses going up, everyone is moaning about and trying to petition something but the leverage is in the development corporation hands.
Brutalism and Modernism are ugly, left is good, but left is associated with Brutalism.
Right is evil and filled with nazis and racists. Right is associated with nostalgia about beautiful things.
You can still be a leftist and admire beautiful things, provided that the architect you admire is not from the evil race.
Politics is making everything rot, even architecture.