
The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings - whocansay
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/04/the-psychological-cost-of-boring-buildings.html
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rjett
"So the trick, it seems, is to design a world that excites but doesn’t overly
assault our faculties with a constant barrage of information"

I just got back from my first trip to Chicago. I've been to quite a few
cities, but the variety of architecture and juxtoposition of certain styles
throughout the city made for a very enjoyable experience. Not every single
building in the city is pretty either. But taken as a whole and hearing how
history, art, architecture, and engineering shaped the city was fascinating. I
actually did the architectural river tour, which I found to be one of the most
enthralling guided tours I've ever been on. Highly recommended.

~~~
hugs
This is one of the "secret" reasons I left the Bay Area to return to Chicago -
downtown Chicago (aka The Loop) is beautiful. Please help keep it a secret so
everyone doesn't move here and drive the price of everything up. ;)

~~~
tptacek
You're joking, I know, but just to point out: Chicago is gigantic. Bring it
on, Google and Facebook and Apple. We've got more than enough space. :)

~~~
tachyonbeam
The bay area has more than enough space too. It spreads over 100 kilometers
south of San Francisco. It covers more than the surface area of NYC in total.
The real issue is that the bay area refuses to grow. The population is only
about 5 millions IIRC. The density is really low.

IMO, in order to accomodate more people, and deal with the insane rents, the
bay area needs to start growing vertically. Every other urban area I've been
to has towers, apartment complexes. Here everything is flat. Most apartment
buildings are only two floors high, rarely more than three.

I won't get into the politics of all of this, but politics are the real
problem. Many of the suburbanites around here want their suburbs to remain
suburbs. The law of offer and demand should mean that apartment towers are
getting built and rents go down as competition increase, but the regulations
in place prevent this. Many swanky new condos are being built, but these are
still flat buildings, not making efficient use of the available space.

~~~
tptacek
Chicago has a dense transit infrastructure that spreads across the whole city,
and pretty decent transit throughout the whole metro area.

Obviously, San Francisco is hemmed in by geography, but even if you compare
the metro areas, Chicago is better suited to hosting large-scale companies
than SFBA.

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jfindley
I read an interesting study a while back about architecture in London, taken
with a sample of professional architects and a sample of general population,
all based in London. All the architects in the study hated the old Edwardian
terraces, and pitied people who lived in them. All the non-architects loved
the old Edwardian terraces, and hated the majority of the buildings the
architects loved.

You could easily make an argument from the point of view of the architects in
that study that a row of Edwardian terraces are dull and boring, but most
Londoners would love to live in them.

With that in mind, I'm a bit wary of this - there are certainly plenty of
horrible buildings around - 60's brutalist concrete would be an example of a
style I particularly dislike - but how do we decide what's bland and what's
attractive?

~~~
Spooky23
Architects are in the same bind that the craftsmen whose work they now despise
were.

With modern materials, the scut work and routine labor that master masons and
carpenters cut their teeth on is gone -- they mostly assemble. So there's no
skilled tradesmen at the level that you could find 100 years ago. When my
local cathedral did a rehab, they shipped in Italian stonemasons and paid them
$150/hr.

Enter the architect. With prefabrication and computerization, tens of
thousands of man-hours of architect time has been vaporized. So at the low
end, they pay the bills with cheap templated crap that wins bids and looks
bland. At the high end, they produce stuff that is "unique" and often
completely non-functional and/or visually offensive. (But looks good in the
portfolio)

In the meantime, most lay people are attracted to more classic architecture
that has been perfected over centuries.

~~~
Scoundreller
My hypothesis is that increasingly complex building codes makes it
increasingly economic to rebuild the same stock of housing multiple times.

It's a bit unusual, what could have increased the workload of architects as
design requirements became more complex instead lead to their downfall.

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Huhuh
I really enjoyed the book 'A Pattern Language' by Christopher Alexander. It
looks at architecture from the level of the ordinary person and has some
brilliant insight into what makes a building pleasant to live in. I applied
some ideas from the book when I renovated my house and it has been a huge
success.

~~~
dang
What specific ideas did you apply?

One that I got from that book and have found to be rock solid is that a room
feels more alive when it has a window on more than one side.

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egjerlow
This is something I have thought about often, living in Norway. Seemed like
there must have been some period in the 50s-60s when building the most mind-
crushing office buildings / hospitals / apartment blocks was the goal. Maybe
the psychological effect of buildings vary over years? I.e. in the 50s-60s
boring, 'efficient' buildings were seen as modern and progressive, and thus,
gave a morale boost?

Exhibit A: [http://borghoytrykk.no/wp-
content/uploads/2012/07/Vaskhøyblo...](http://borghoytrykk.no/wp-
content/uploads/2012/07/VaskhøyblokkOslo1.jpg)

~~~
ghaff
There was a period of modernist architecture up through maybe the mid-70s--
including but not limited to Brutalism--that has aged particularly badly for
the most part. Even examples that were presumably designed to stand out, like
Boston City Hall and the Boston Public Library addition (to the original
beautiful Beaux Arts structure) look simply awful today.

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douche
Boston City Hall is quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen. The
soot-belching, ash-caked, grease-grimed, wood-burning power plant that I
worked in summers in college was more beautiful.

~~~
Analemma_
It really is hideous. I grew up in the Boston area, and even as a little kid I
distinctly remember thinking, "This has got to be the ugliest building in the
world". Then when I got older I thought, "Well, the world is a big place and I
haven't seen much of it, so I don't have much of a frame of reference. I'm
sure there are uglier buildings somewhere." And then when I got a little older
still, it was kind of satisfying to see multiple articles and polls saying
that no, it is indeed one of the ugliest buildings in the entire world.

It's not even that I think Brutalism is inherently bad. I think there are some
really nice examples, like the AT&T building in NYC:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:AT%26T_Long_Lines_building.jpg).
But Boston City Hall is Brutalism at its absolute worst.

~~~
ghaff
I once read a humorous column that described it as an attempt to give any
visiting Soviets an inferiority complex by out Soviet-ing Soviet architecture.

There are some decent brutalist buildings on the MIT campus including the MIT
Student Center--which has a lot of interesting funky angles and is a rather
useful space--and a number of IM Pei buildings (at least I think the latter
are considered brutalist). There's also the Christian Science Plaza that I'd
go so far as to call quite attractive.

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sp332
While there's room for improvement, I don't think the building looks bad. All
the glass makes it seem airy and full of light. The windows probably make it a
nice place to be inside as well. Its only problem is being too big, so that it
becomes monotonous. But how would you fix that? Design parts of the building
in different styles?

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guard-of-terra
Expose something nice in those windows instead of making them blind mirrors.

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sp332
There's too much sunlight coming in. Your options are to cook/blind everyone
inside, put something opaque (and visible to the street) inside the windows
while blocking the view, or dim the windows and let the occupants see the
street.

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guard-of-terra
You can put something interesting behind the window, then erect a wall, then
your regular space goes. Some stores do that.

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sp332
Is this different from the second option I mentioned? The wall would still
block the view of the people inside, right?

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guard-of-terra
You can make inner wall translucent perhaps?

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Kliment
As an example of how even the most pedestrian industrial function can be in a
beautiful building, here is a waste incineration plant in Vienna:
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C3%BCllverbren...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C3%BCllverbrennungsanlage_Spittelau?uselang=de#/media/File:M%C3%BCllverbrennungsanlage_Spittelau.jpg)

~~~
cm2187
The problem with "beautiful" is that it is very subjective. This picture is my
definition of ugly. Unless you were sarcastic.

~~~
wozniacki
Seconded.

There are these avant-gardes who wouldn't think twice about turning any public
building project they could lay their hands into massive brutist absurdist sea
of concrete gray from their dreams [1], if given a chance.

Add to that a couple of behemoth art pieces [2] strewn somewhere on the
premises that will no doubt one day pulverize some poor souls.

Alas, the tyranny of the stroppy and vengeful minority.

[1]

[https://lebbeuswoods.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fic-2.jpg](https://lebbeuswoods.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fic-2.jpg)

[http://www.artspace.com/filip_dujardin/untitled_2007_boxes](http://www.artspace.com/filip_dujardin/untitled_2007_boxes)

[2]

[http://art-nerd.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/...](http://art-
nerd.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2013/12/Richard-Serra-
Ballast-1.jpg)

[http://art-nerd.com/sanfrancisco/ballast-by-richard-serra/](http://art-
nerd.com/sanfrancisco/ballast-by-richard-serra/)

~~~
squeaky-clean
I actually really love the look of your first link. Though I think it only
works as a piece of art, the Escher-esque impossible shape as well as the
empty naturalness of the surroundings. You'd never see such a dense building
all by itself in isolation.

I was interested in a print until I found out it was $3,500 for an Inkjet
print.

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dewyatt
FEMA's Brooke Road Facility (BRF - "the barf") is quite the eye sore [1].
Luckily it's not in a super visible/residential area, but I always found it
depressing that people actually work there.

The outside is bad enough, but the inside is even worse. They're all stuffed
into cubicles, no windows that I recall, dirty/decrepit bathroom, just a
depressing place overall, hard to explain.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1989182,-78.1524764,3a,75y,1...](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1989182,-78.1524764,3a,75y,111.34h,87.31t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sq-4pH3muktEMb0sl1J7dwg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

~~~
Xophmeister
It looks like someone welded some shipping containers together in a car park.

~~~
david-given
That's doing shipping containers a disservice --- you can make some quite
interesting structures by welding shipping containers together:
[http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02210/CONTAINERC...](http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02210/CONTAINERCITY_2210000b.jpg)

Making something as awful as the Brooke Road Facility takes real skill and a
lot of work.

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eric_h
I live in a newly constructed apartment building in a neighborhood in queens
that's mostly houses.

I typically guide the taxi driver to it by saying "it's the big, ugly building
on the corner"

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jgalt212
These boring buildings are a micro aggression against my highly evolved and
sensitive sense of aesthetics.

