
Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017) - metafunctor
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture
======
barrkel
Industrialization and Baumol's cost disease are the reasons why.

For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get
handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it
without paying enormously. Industrial bakeries are far more efficient so only
a select few can afford to pay for good bread, and so there are far fewer
individual bakers, and they're more expensive because there's less demand -
they can't make it up on volume. It's the same with artisans.

My father was a plasterer in his 20s, and worked with old men who did the
ceiling decorations in the British Embassy in Dublin. But they were the last
of their kind, because nobody wanted that any more. And now they're all dead.

Richly decorated edifices could be risen today, but they're far more
expensive, and thus we can't afford to roll the dice and end up with a bunch
of good buildings by process of survival. Instead, everything is mediocre and
designed to amortise to zero value within a few decades, to be torn down and
built again, not better, merely different.

~~~
gibsonf1
Actually, the opposite is true. The ornamentation of the past was painfully
and time consumingly created manually. It is trivial today to mass-produce
ornamentation - a simple form insert into a concrete form can create any
desired ornamentation. Frank Lloyd Wright is a key example of using
ornamentation within the context of modern construction techniques and
materials, his concrete block houses a classic example of both with the Hotel
Biltmore in Arizona a masterpiece example of it. The key issue is not cost, it
is philosophy. The architect striving to present their view of the world. For
Wright, his work focuses around the human experience, around human scale, all
ornament reinforcing that his buildings are to be measured by our experience
of and relation to them. Many of the more grotesque examples of modern
architecture are by architects who believe the world is chaos, in flux, that
humans have no place in the world, etc.

[Footnote on Wright] If you happen to be taller than 5'8 when visiting a
Wright building (like myself), bend your knees until you are at that eye-level
to appreciate the full experience.
[https://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=8915](https://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=8915)

~~~
vidanay
Yeah, but aren't FLW houses/buildings notorious for being crap quality
construction? Leaking, cracking, sinking, and molding?

~~~
RNCTX
No, just the opposite.

His _schools_ have had issues, because the schools were meant to be sandboxes
for the students to get real world experience, and try things which may or may
not work. The fact that the schools have become landmarks after his death has
nothing to do with Wright's design philosophies.

If you look at Wright's own house, it incorporates lots of clever ideas in
terms of engineering more rugged forms which will hold up over time (like
molding profiles that are designed to be coped from multiple directions to
keep joints in place, and stained glass patterns that lend themselves to
'hiding' extra reinforcement on one side where the structure will be invisible
to the beholder, for example).

Here are my pics of his house when I went through it last time I was in
Chicago. I tried to get as many such above examples as possible...

[https://imgur.com/a/ontIR](https://imgur.com/a/ontIR)

~~~
vidanay
I've always heard that his designs and concepts are great (that's my opinion
too), but the actual construction quality was lacking.

------
gumby
It's a shame this is a polemic when it discusses important issues.

It's not as if these issues aren't discussed in architecture. And there are
definitely weird pathologies and pomposities in architecture (as in any
field), which manifest themselves in a variety of unpleasant ways. But this
doesn't mean all we have is ugly buildings; we also have new, playful, and
enjoyable buildings as well.

Another HN comment this morning (on a different post) brought up Postel's law
and how it is usually both misunderstood and overused. The same applies to "a
house is a machine for living" or "form follows function": they can be taken
as an excuse to ignore the person, or as a call for: make sure the person's
needs are at the centre of the design.

A case of both skill and pathology: One of my homes was designed by an
architect and one simply built by a developer. The developer house is
adequate. The architect-designed house was a lot more expensive but is also a
_lot_ more pleasant to live in. But speaking to those pathologies: it needed a
lot of interaction with the architect to make sure it didn't get our of
control on design (I'm sure we've all seen this in software too). I think this
is why so many corporate buildings end up so sucky: many cooks, complex
constraints, and in the end the architect has too much control.

~~~
ncmncm
Polemics are about all there is room left for.

Ultimately, it is a failure of education. Architects will give each other
awards and design contracts according to what they were taught, and they are
taught crap. It is self perpetuating, as they teach the next class the kind of
crap they were inculcated in.

Probably your architect was obliged to make snide remarks over drinks about
what he had to put up with doing your house (which I haven't seen, only heard
described). I liked the barn.

~~~
Gibbon1
A recent conundrum that occurred to me.

Post WWI we see architecture completely incapable of producing stuff ordinary
people like. In fact it would appear the opposite, architects secretly revel
in designing stuff ordinary people hate.

Yet there was an explosion of high quality popular music. Probably the most
productive 100 years in history.

~~~
cannam
> Post WWI we see architecture completely incapable of producing stuff
> ordinary people like. In fact it would appear the opposite, architects
> secretly revel in designing stuff ordinary people hate. Yet there was an
> explosion of high quality popular music.

These are two sides of the same coin! Both are the result of radical
reinvention caused by new and strange circumstances.

Brutalist architects did not set out to make things people would hate. They
set out to make habitable spaces that put people first - that residents would
love - that prioritised the resident over the casual viewer. They sought novel
and sometimes dramatic ways to achieve this in a context of rapidly improving
technology but limited funding.

They failed a lot of the time, but I think it's quite unfair to say that they
revelled in designing stuff people would hate - they were trying to do an
honest job of hard things, the importance of which hadn't always been widely
acknowledged before.

In my interpretation of this history, the architect is definitely on the same
side as your musician.

The curious part is why the public took against the architect, but (eventually
at least - it took much of a generation) accepted the musician. Obviously the
architectural idea failed, at least to some extent. I don't know whether it
failed in practice (producing buildings that were no use) or in communication
(producing buildings that were an improvement, but that other people found
unusual and offputting to look at). Perhaps both, but from what I've heard the
60s Brutalist flat is generally no worse to live in than its 1980s
postmodernist or 1860s Peabody counterparts.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The public has a short memory and also has authoritarian tendencies of its
own. Which is why huge country estates and other trophy homes are considered
the ultimate architectural ideal, even though they're insanely inefficient and
you have to be a multi-millionaire to afford one.

Popular architecture is about _land_ and _status_ , not sculpted living space,
and the populist solution is to give people an experience of land ownership -
even if it's vicarious. The Garden City movement attempted this with some
success, but the political problem is that land is an expensive commodity, and
there was no way that kind of low density housing was ever going to be
available on a mass scale.

And consider that before modernism, most housing was _appalling._ No one loves
the flats built in the UK during the 60s, but they replaced slums which were
cold, damp, smoky, and very cheaply built, and often lacked even the most
basic plumbing.

There's a lot to hate about modernism (and its descendants) - not least that
bare concrete looks absolutely fucking awful in a rainy and cloudy climate.
But it makes no sense to compare hyper-expensive hand-crafted Victorian homes
of rich elites and high-status civic projects with modern worker housing or
utilitarian office spaces.

The fact that high-status civic projects - libraries, transport hubs, town
halls - are (mostly) not being built any more, but trophy skyscrapers are, is
a political issue, not an architectural one.

------
recursivedoubts
Because it's _obviously_ and _arrogantly_ aesthetically terrible. Architects,
like the elites who commission and support their work, have a fundamentally
adversarial relationship with the rest of us.

Even the relatively good stuff stands alone and is, at best, aggressively
indifferent towards its surroundings.

Kunstler wrote a good book on it:

[https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-
Made-L...](https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-
Landscape/dp/0671888250)

(and several less-good follow up books)

~~~
api
Kunstler is one of those people who has one good point that he makes with a
great deal of wit. His point is valid but his critique is not that deep, and
outside this one point the rest of his views are reactionary trash. He's a one
hit wonder.

This is a common feature of notable critics, probably because it is far easier
to criticize than to solve problems. It's far easier to point out why the
suburbs suck than to design and advocate effectively for alternatives that
address the same needs that the suburbs try to address.

BTW I think your critique is actually deeper than Kunstler's in that it gets
to the totalitarian underpinnings of this type of high modernism. People seem
to mistakenly associate high modernism with the enlightenment when it's more
of a return to pre-enlightenment authoritarianism.

High modernism is a secular materialist version of divine right of kings, with
baroque religious theories replaced with opulent displays of indifferent
wealth and with sterility replacing aesthetic grandeur as a display of power.
The latter may be because aesthetic indifference serves today as a more
effective display of power than baroque over-done aesthetics with gold leaf
and curlicues.

~~~
Gibbon1
A thought of mine a core part of totalitarianism, pick a flavor they are all
the same in this. Is that they seek to callously use humanity as material to
manufacture some ego driven utopia. That is at the heart of modernist
architecture. People are expected to conform to the vision not the other way
around.

------
WantonQuantum
On the whole I agree but I stopped reading after this:

“ It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After
all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they
are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no
intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left
on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are
phallic and Freudian.”

~~~
adrian1973
What is the problem with the quoted statement?

~~~
Arainach
Spreading horizontally doesn't scale. What our society needs is more density,
not less.

~~~
hyperdunc
High density is bad for the soul. What we actually need is fewer people, but
each doing more meaningful work.

------
AnotherGoodName
Old buildings have gone through a filter. The ugly ones were destroyed with no
one caring. The beautiful ones have armies of people fighting to maintain
them.

There are beautiful and ugly new buildings. In 1000 years time only the
beautiful buildings from this era will have survived and we'll be talking
about why the buildings of today are nowhere near as nice.

~~~
rm445
The filter thing seems obviously true, but it doesn't rule out whole styles
being better than others, even if the mediocre and pedestrian efforts from
those styles were eventually winnowed out. Besides, each day people,
somewhere, are making decisions about the next awful building. It doesn't seem
enough to loftily let our descendents decide whether to pull down a building
after we're all dead, before a single stone has been laid.

Consider this view as a thought experiment: say every Norman cathedral was
beautiful. Maybe some were inspired and some were pedestrian, some were less
beautiful because of the locally-available stone, some had long delays in
construction and ended up with a mishmash of styles. Or whatever. You could
filter them by appeal, or randomly, or any other method, and still end up with
a bunch of beautiful buildings. Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist
concrete cube will withstand the test of time. GIGO.

~~~
currymj
Habitat 67 in Montreal is a Brutalist concrete building (many cubes) that is
generally well-liked and has been a desirable place to live for 50 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67#/media/File:Habitat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67#/media/File:Habitat_panorama.jpg)

~~~
dafoex
It does look fairly discordant and messy, and I'm not sure if I'd like to try
navigating the structure, but there is a symmetry and level of detail that
goes above and beyond the typical vision of a concrete cube that the word
"brutalism" conjurs. From the top it looks really nice with the floor detail
and the incorporated plantlife and greenery.

Its perhaps too large of a building for my liking, and it feels a little bit
"minecraft" with seemingly unsupported cubic shapes, but it also has a nice
focus on human scale details that make it actually interesting to be in and
around.

------
AlexandrB
This article reminds me strongly of how the design community, seemingly in
unison, decided that UI accordances were mere frippery and ushered in our
current, flat UI landscape of indistinguishable hamburger buttons and oceans
of white space.

~~~
tomjen3
I agree with you that flat design is bad design, but not that whitespace is
bad. Done right it can enhance the understanding of the content and add beauty
to a page.

------
yokaze
Funny, that the author shows two hospitals in Barcelona. To answer the
question, you definitely want to be in the "ugly" one.

For starters, the nice modernist building is not a hospital anymore. And
partly due to the reason of architecture. While nice to look at, it was not
terribly practical. Staircases between different wings meant that they had to
transfer sometimes people with ambulance within the hospital. And sometimes
even seconds matter.

~~~
kleiba
But wasn't the question about where to convalesce, that is, recover after
having been treated?

~~~
war1025
The answer to that is they send you home. They tend to kick you out of the
hospital unless you are actively dying. At least here in America.

~~~
kleiba
Barcelona is in America?

~~~
kabacha
It applies everywhere. People recover much faster at home than any hospital,
even a pretty one.

------
jeffrallen
My architect asked me to tell her stories from the future when my family lives
in the house she was designing. She asked me to not speak about details of
what the house was, but to tell stories of things I dreamed would happen in
the house. I told her of multitasking cooking and monitoring homework, of
children laughing while chasing around walls in a circuit, of seeing children
and pets from the window while doing dishes.

I love my house and all those stories came true.

But: My architect considers herself to be in Le Corbusier's school of thought.
She understands that sleek lines and honest materials can serve human stories.

~~~
coronadisaster
pictures?

------
cosmodisk
"Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly" They aren't all ugly,just
functionality wrong: instead of being places for people to travel,they are
parking lots for planes with the rest attached to them. No matter how
beautiful the airport if I have to walk half a mile to the gate just to reach
the stairs with no lift, it's a failed building already.

It used to be relatively cheap to build extremely beautiful buildings because
labour was cheap.

Also,some cities have some sort of planning panel,where people can and do try
to steer architecture certain way,so there wouldn't be pink windowless office
buildings in an old town built 400 years ago and etc.But that's not in every
city.

And the last bit is we just need to admit that the king is naked sometimes:
there are shit architects and shit designers who, by some magic stroke of
luck, ended up in positions that allowed them to create those awful things no
questions asked.They wouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything creative
related in an alternative world.

~~~
HelloNurse
That half a mile is needed for non-negotiable constraints, like the scale of
airplanes (e.g. gaps between landing strips or fingers), the capacity targets
(walking to board a plane is better than not flying at all) or the available
space to add terminals (Heathrow is a good example).

There are also practical needs, functions that follow the form, that are no
less important than minimizing walking, like the convenience and cost
reduction of putting a lot of travellers in the same huge terminal and if
possible in the same huge hall, with one subway station, one customs funnel,
and so on.

------
andy_ppp
Okay I’ll bite: “Which hospital would I rather convalesce in?”, the one with
the best doctors. I find the old fashioned architecture he uses beautiful but
even the cherry picked examples of bad architecture some of them I still like;
let us look around London today, the Southbank and the Barbican are brutalist
masterpieces, the Shard is incredible, especially when the clouds touch the
top, together with the rebuilding of Kings Cross or even Terminal 5 modern
architecture is everywhere and when it’s good I absolutely love it.

I find it really hard to believe people dislike modern architecture; the
problem with building something with fine adornments today is they end up
looking extremely cheap and fake, we are capable of building clean crisp forms
in ways not possible before and providing spaces that function much better at
their purposes today than we were in the past. The article is sentimental
about the old buildings and we can be inspired by them, but modern
architecture like Taipei 101 or the Burj Khalifa just blows me away as
spectacles of what science and engineering have accomplished.

Creating something that looks like the Taj Mahal today would just look hokey
and seem extremely dysfunctional for its intended use. Each to their own but
I’m a big fan.

~~~
lupinglade
Exactly right. This article seems biased and uninformed.

------
cannam
I like Brutalism, and I speculate that one reason is that I grew up in a rural
area where things are big, surfaces are rough, and there aren't decorative
brickwork patterns everywhere. I live in London now, and the brutalist
Barbican estate feels a lot more like "the way the world is" to me than much
of "traditional" residential London does. I think that arguments like the one
in this article are born from overfamiliarity with pretty little patterns - I
find the focus on decoration, "universal" aesthetics, and tradition quite
suspicious.

(In particular I'm surprised that the article picks on Alexandra Road estate
in London - it's lovely in real life, and it answers a difficult problem as
well, namely how to use a road just behind a railway track. Also, while the
old Penn Station which the article praises looks kind of amazing in the pics,
it's not exactly human scale is it? It'd surely have been just as shivery and
daunting in real life as any Soviet edifice)

I had been hoping that the answer to "Why you hate contemporary architecture"
would be something about your age. Brutalism has become popular with many
people of my age (I'm almost 50) but I don't think it was a widely popular
style when it was new. The test for me is going to be postmodernism. I don't
really like it, because it's about frivolous decoration, but it's going to be
venerated by a younger generation just as Brutalism is by mine. Will I be able
to understand that?

~~~
dafoex
I agree to an extent. Brutalism can look very good, but I personally think it
only works on small scales like houses.

A brutalist skyscraper would look oppressive and imposing, towering above you
like a Vogon ship about to demolish your planet to build a hyperspace lane. A
brutalist house, however - while maybe not the most inviting place ever -
looks simple and easy to maintain, a space you don't have to look after so
that you can spend more time looking after yourself.

I agree with the article where it says that some brutalist buildings would be
entirely livable if there was some greenery, however. A place that allows you
to look after yourself means nothing it it doesn't also provide the tools to
help you achieve that goal, and access to nature has time and time again
proven to benefit mental health for worldweary citydwellers, and as someone
who suffers with clinical depression, I can very much vouch for the benefits
of getting out of the four walls.

~~~
cannam
> A brutalist skyscraper would look oppressive and imposing, towering above
> you like a Vogon ship about to demolish your planet to build a hyperspace
> lane.

This is kind of my point though - Nature is like that. A daunting slab of
concrete has a lot in common with a cliff face. An empty, open expanse of
concrete is like the rocky hillside. Both are more like "the world" than a
regular repetition of patterns in brick rising to two storeys high set off
with a tiled roof.

(Perhaps that's why they're offputting to people - too much like the
unfiltered natural world, not enough comfortable regularisation.)

There's no equivalent of the forest (the default natural covering for most of
the world) in any of these forms of architecture, but it's not like it's any
worse in the Brutalist model.

~~~
dafoex
You make a valid point, but I still would disagree. The closest cliffs I can
think of that are just as stark and imposing would be Dover. They are
dramatic, iconic, and even beautiful, but would you want to live there all
year round? The winter sea crashing against the shore and gale force winds
battering you would make you grateful of any shelter, but that's only because
the forces of nature have made you feel helpless, pinning you against this
bare rock face, far from the safety that other aspects of nature would
willingly provide.

I'd like to reiterate that I like brutalism, I'm just trying to convey that I
think its very easy to overdo when you only consider the macro scale of a
project.

------
beloch
1\. 99% of everything is crap.

2\. Crap buildings get torn down before beautiful buildings.

This article brings up many examples of modern crap, but ignores the fact that
most of that crap will not be painstakingly conserved for centuries to come,
as many of the good examples shown have been. There do exist examples of
beautiful modern architecture.

The article also makes some valid points, such as how modern architects seem
to be highly reluctant to use ornate details. The reason may be simple
economics. The modern international bidding process heavily favours architects
who can deliver a beautiful building for less money. Ornate details may please
the eye, but they are undeniably expensive.

Some cities have started mandating a certain percentage of any public project
be spent on art, but that art is often an afterthought. They'll build a
utilitarian overpass and then regulations will force them to put up a hideous
and overpriced sculpture in the middle of a pedestrians nightmare. The only
people who will ever see it are whizzing past at 80 kph.

We have the will to make the places we live in more beautiful, but how can we
better quantify beauty and find ways to fit it into city budgets? I feel that
a system flexible enough to say, "Yes, scrap the sculpture and do the funky
masonry." is a system in which ornateness could return.

~~~
stephc_int13
I think this is reasoning does not work on this case.

Take Le Corbusier, the "Cité Radieuse" in Marseille is actively maintained and
considered with an almost sacred status by the partisans of this kind of
design.

This is a fucking ugly building that should have been destroyed decades ago,
in my opinion, but I have a very strong bias against anything related to this
style of design.

~~~
Twixes
Alexandra Road or Barbican Estate are pretty brutal in their brutalism, but
Cité radieuse is just a very nice apartment building. Pretty upscale too.

------
zomglings
I don't know much about architecture, but I found the essay very biased and
unnecessarily biasing - I didn't actually think that most of the buildings
they presented as monstrosities were actually unattractive. Many of them
looked quite elegant from the outside. I also found some of the examples they
presented as positive too complex for my tastes. It feels like the authors
overextended themselves in the assumption that their readers would feel the
same revulsion to post-modern or brutal architecture that they do.

The article did bring up some good points about how the sentiments of people
using the buildings should be taken into account during the design process.

I really enjoyed their take on how democracy should be treated in
architecture. It feels profound beyond the scope of architecture itself, and
something that society has been playing with in recent decades - e.g.
panchayat government in India [0] and decentralized governance and decision
making as embodied by various blockchains.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_in_India)

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
> ...in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion...

I'm not sure they were actually so revulsed as much as whipping up indignation
to sell an article. I don't think aesthetics was really what it was about at
all.

Also if you want large amounts of detail, expect to pay for that either
directly in lots of money, or in considerable unjust exploitation of a
craftsman underclass.

(I also detest articles that say what YOU want or what YOU feel).

~~~
alejohausner
Skilled crafstmen are not in the underclass. They ones I've met are very well
paid, and take pride in their work, and know a lot. The stone decorations of
mediaeval cathedrals were very expensive. Modern architecture avoids
decoration partly to avoid expense.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
> Skilled crafstmen are not in the underclass

Not now but they were. Now they would cost a lot more than than, so ...

> The stone decorations of mediaeval cathedrals were very expensive. Modern
> architecture avoids decoration partly to avoid expense.

... was exactly my point. It costs money.

[https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-
prices-a...](https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-and-
wages/)

------
kull
I am buying a house and I spent months to find this perfect, simple,
contemporary design. This article made me think a lot about my choice of
architecture for my home. In my mind, living in ‘boring’, modern, blank,
mostly empty spaces gives me a taste of how in my mind the future, 300y from
now will look. Less colors and sharp edges bring to my mind less chaos, gives
a sense of minimalism and simplicity. I do not want my physical space taking
my attention, too many colors and shapes do not help me to think. I make my
living from thinking and living my digital life, contemporary design aligns
with it.

~~~
rbecker
So something like [https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01...](https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/img_9615-1.jpg) ?

No clutter, simple, minimal. Time-tested and completely unlike contemporary
architecture.

~~~
paganel
Not the OP but looking at your example I can only think that the place lacks
chairs/something to sit on.

------
paultopia
I almost got married in Boston City Hall, until my now-spouse and I actually
went there in person, whereupon we immediately cancelled our date there and
rescheduled in Cambridge.

To me, the message of that building is vividly clear: all the concrete
enclosed windows are perfect places to put machine guns to mow down protestors
in the plaza when america finally goes dictator.

------
gbacon
_Architects often get mad when non-architects conflate the terms “modernism,”
“postmodernism,” “Brutalism,” etc. They love telling people that, say, “Frank
Gehry is actually REACTING to postmodernism.” These terminological disputes
can obscure the fact that everything under discussion is actually just a minor
variation on the same garbage._

~~~
bradknowles
The thing about Frank Gehry is not the architecture, it’s the engineering. He
designs crap that couldn’t possibly be built, and then somehow his engineering
team figures out how to make the impossible not only possible, but to actually
realize it.

The result still looks like shit, but the engineering is amazing.

------
dafoex
You know what? I love space ships. I want to live on a space ship and flow
effortlessly from my bed to the kitchen, rehydrate some food and put it in a
crumb-free wrap for breakfast, flow to my office and work on my experiments,
take a break in the observation deck and take in the vastness of the planet
below, and at the end of the day flow back to bed, wrapping myself up in my
tethered sleeping bag so that I can doze off peacefully and not float away.

Do you know what would be really depressing? If that spaceship never left the
ground.

I live on Earth, please don't build spaceships for me to live and work in
while I'm down here.

------
nowandlater
That Peter Eisenman building looks like it'd be a killer skate park. Say what
you will about James Howard Kunstler, his TED talk on Architecture seems to be
in the right direction.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ)

------
hexxiiiz
Well geez. Unlike people, I happen to love contemporary architecture. I
suppose that Christopher Alexander must feel sorry for me too. Maybe he could
explain more clearly to my aesthetic sensibilities why his prosaic pattern
language shouldn't leave me cold and empty.

In defense of the Montparnasse building, it has a good view from the top,
because you see everything except for the Montparnasse building.

------
galfarragem
A metaphor: Architects, like devs, are always looking for the next “shiny new
thing“. Architects, like devs, could stick to their C or even JS but, you
know, there is Rust and Crystal and Elm...

Architect here.

------
selectionbias
I sympathize with the author's disdain for brutalist and some deconstructivist
work. But to suggest that all contemporary architecture is a movement towards
creating deliberately alienating and impractical buildings, seems to me very
wrong. I think Zaha Hadid's work (which the author critiques) is aesthetically
pleasing to most people, not alienating, for example
[https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647...](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1500x1000+0+0/resize/2400x1600!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-
brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2F2016-zaha-hadid-8.jpg) . The author
expresses a uniform disdain for skyscrapers, but many skyscrapers are popular
with the general public, for example, the Gherkin in London
[https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de...](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de3cff219.jpg)
or say, The Empire State Building. Personally I do not find the shiny glass
and sleek curves of many of these buildings unsettling or alienating nor, I
think, do most people. In short, if we accept a basic premise of the author's:
that what is good architecture is what is pleasing to most of the people who
view and interact with it, then the author's critique is (I believe) too broad
because many of the architects and buildings the author implicitly or
explicitly criticizes are in fact popular.

Furthermore, something that the author does not address is the movement in
contemporary architecture to carefully consider the practical effect of
building design on the people within it. For example, how the flow of people
is directed by the building, how the layout can help its occupants interact
with each other, how interior walls can support privacy or erode it, and how
to cater the response to these concerns to the function of the building. This
is the opposite of the approach in Eisenman's house design mentioned in the
article.

------
hawski
I always felt that the contemporary architecture is cheap first and easy to
clean/maintain second. All those nice ornaments are expensive, not easy to
clean and their replacement in any case is even more expensive. Is there a way
around this.

I prefer this older aesthetic, but I think I couldn't afford it. My one idea
is to build with CLT and keep wood exposed both in and outside (with proper
thermal insulation in the middle). That way it's cheap, but with this warm
feeling of wood.

~~~
AlexandrB
This is giving modern architecture entirely too much credit. For example, one
of the many crimes of the UWaterloo Davis Center[1] was that the roof (curved
and made of panes of glass) leaked every time it rained causing a mess on the
floors below. These designs are often neither attractive nor practical. The
weird shapes and angles used often waste usable space, are hard to clean, and
introduce additional joints between sections where water or air can get in.

[1] [https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-
dc/](https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-dc/)

~~~
floren
Ah, yes, I used to work in a building which had (at great expense, apparently)
many curved walls, with "exciting" shiny metal cladding along much of the
walls. The roof leaked constantly (frequently into our machine room) and the
metal clad walls meant cell phones were useless inside, but I bet that
architect got an award.

------
flr03
Modern atchitecture is the expression of an artist pushing the limit of
building as an art. If, like me, you are not educated to it this can be
difficult to enjoy. Take the someone not specially versed into art to the
museum, it's likely they will enjoy and value more Vermeer than let's say
Pollock.

Should we design buildings, that people use and see everyday, only for an
elite to appreciate it ? I don't have the answer.

~~~
tikwidd
I think it should depend on the context. One of the problems seems to be that
there is no public space for 'monuments' in the modern world, so we get user-
hostile bourgeois 'form over function' in buildings where people actually need
to live and work etc. I would rather a division between 'temples' of aesthetic
value, where the architects can play aesthetic games, and 'secular' spaces of
more utilitarian value.

------
carapace
See [http://www.patternlanguage.com](http://www.patternlanguage.com) and
"Building Living Neighborhoods" [https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-
exp.htm](https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm) (and especially
[http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html](http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html)
)

> Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging,
> places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live
> and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes,
> Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possible
> conception and construction of living, beautiful communities that have real
> guts -- not the sugary sweetness of pseudo-traditional architecture.

> The tools offered are intended for the use of ordinary people, families,
> communities, developers, planners, architects, designers and builders;
> public officials, local representatives, and neighbors; business owners and
> people who have commercial interests. The processes here are expressed in
> the belief that the common-sense, plain truth about laying out a
> neighborhood, or repairing one, is equally valid for all comers, amateurs
> and professionals. They help people build or rebuild neighborhoods in ways
> that contribute something to their lives. Many of the tools have their
> origin in 30 years of work published in Alexander's The Nature of Order.

His whole idea was that people should design and build their own buildings and
towns. He kind of repudiates the whole process of modern architecture and
construction.

------
nfoz
I absolutely _love_ the all-glass skyscraper aesthetic. I consider it
breathtaking. Calming and magnificent. I never understand why so many people
say they love the look of old buildings.

I know it's not "cool", but I'll take Toronto's glass over New York's filthy
gargoyles, any day. I don't even understand how people can have such opposite
taste.

------
Zigurd
Unless an architect is a genius like Wright, _and_ they have a coherent design
philosophy, like Wright, decorative architectural features way too often
degenerate into middlebrow sentimentality.

The same goes for cars: Bangle-butt was not the response to jellybeaned cars
we were looking for.

~~~
spc476
"Mr. Wright, I love the house you designed, but the roof leaks so badly we
might as well not have a roof. Could you fix it?"

"No. That's how you know it's a _roof!_ "

------
reddog
I highly recommend Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tears apart
modem architectural pretentiousness the same way he went after the radical
chic. It’s hilarious and devastating.

------
roenxi
> The Tour Montparnasse. Who can possibly defend this? And if there’s
> something clearly wrong with it

The arrogance on display is profoundly human.

We've added 1.8 billion humans to the world in the last 20 years. That
statistic is too large for our tiny brains to grapple but it cannot be
ignored. We need buildings for those people to live and work in. Continuing to
maintain cities a density appropriate to the 1800s/1900s is irresponsible.

No city is a zoo to preserve what life looked like 100 years ago. They are
places for people to live today.

~~~
jackcosgrove
I'm not sure I follow the population and density argument.

City densities were higher in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Paris itself
has lost about 700,000 people since its 1921 population peak.

If housing people is your goal, you should build lots of low- to mid-rise
buildings, say between 5 and 10 floors. This size of building is able to
achieve the highest densities per cost using current construction techniques.

Build lower and you over-allocate and waste land. Build higher and the
marginal cost of another floor rises quickly. There's a reason commercial
buildings are the tallest: workers need less space working than they do living
at home. High-rise residences are not economical unless people have very small
apartments, which brings along its own problems.

------
downerending
Christopher Alexander's _A Pattern Language_ is not only a great book on
architecture, but one of the best books on any subject I've ever read. Highly
recommended.

That said, once you've read it, you will forever find the flaming garbage dump
that is contemporary architecture severely wanting. These days, and architect
could almost be summarized as someone who designs buildings and hates people.

------
0_gravitas
I very much like it, it feels a lot quieter and cleaner; looking at the often
more ornate and colorful older projects makes me feel claustrophobic.

------
parenthesis
Before modern materials and construction techniques enabled the decoupling of
how a building looks from its fundamental construction I think it was at lot
more difficult to make a building look bad.

You are at least more limited in the ways a traditional stone/brick/wood
construction can be bad.

------
smitty1e
Just Gramscian damage:

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260)

Prophecy: 3D printing rescues architecture, allowing a Renaissance of
aesthetically pleasing buildings to retire the swath of overgrown Legos
besetting us.

------
Yoofie
Reminds me of this [1] old TED talk about horrible architecture that I still
find relevant as ever.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ)

------
WalterBright
I was walking around a Dutch city a few years ago, that was about half pre-war
buildings and half new ones. The new ones just looked like abominations
compared to the lovely old ones. All pipes and glass and strange angles.

------
pkamb
I think most of these buildings are great. What I can’t stand are the
contemporary “modern” mixed-use buildings sweeping cities such as Seattle. You
know the ones: multi-colored, multi-setback, multi-material. Awful.

------
rurban
Adolf Loos "Ornament is crime" Even more valid today.

Only very few people hate modernism, and they can have all the warts they
want. Even C++ or perl.

------
TYPE_FASTER
I like Denver’s airport. Boston’s City Hall was originally designed to have
trees and landscaping around it, which was replaced by pavement.

------
lupinglade
Less is more. Intricate details where they aren’t necessary don’t make better
architecture. Or better anything, for that matter.

------
kabacha
oof, it's painful to read this article and this thread as someone who enjoys
contemporary architecture. Sure there are bad apples but in general every
piece is doing something new. If you take a trip in europe you'll really get
bored of classical architecture in few days. There isn't much innovation and
while it's great for mom-and-pops culture of homogeneous towns, it's quite
boring, tiring and uninspiring.

Might as well advocate for soviet's Stalinkas, just plaster some ornaments and
plants on them!

The whole point of contemporary culture is that we finally have the
technological, creative and cultural freedom to experiment and create new
things. I'm sure for X amount of people that dislike this there are same
amount of people who love it.

------
hootbootscoot
Excellent article.

------
MoZeus
Yeah, well, I'm not in a patient mood today, so I'll just say this is a load
of idiotic horseshit not worth anyone's time or serious consideration, and
leave it there.

~~~
Brian_K_White
I would say exactly the same thing, about this comment.

