San Francisco is undergoing exactly such a crime wave. The new apartment buildings are just glass and steel, with no redeeming features whatsoever. Compare these new buildings to the Flood Building or the Hobart Building, and you'll shed a tear or two.
Crimes in Concrete
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#22It's always been kind of amazing to me that people will get all upset over a building but that often changes with time. Same thing with a piece of art. Locally here there was a most controversial design for a parking garage. People just hated it but now its almost adored.
https://foursquare.com/v/the-habitrail-parking-garage/4eb994...
Same thing with the new Broad Art Museum by the late architect Zaha Hadid. Totally looks out of place in a Big 10 college town. Yet inside the light is the most fantastic of any art museum I've ever visited in the world.
https://www.archdaily.com/293358/eli-edythe-broad-art-museum...
Course sometimes something is built with zero redeeming value. I'd wager that something built from concrete can be beautiful.
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#23Modernists and their apologists are like flat-earthers. All criticism can be chalked up to your ignorance of the secrets that only they are willing to confront.
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#24Was just at Umass Amherst for my son's graduation. It's an open air museum of brutalism. Breuer's student center building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_D._Lincoln_Campus_Cente... The nearby parking garage is better, actually. The Fine Arts Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Arts_Center_(Amherst,_Mas...
> It's an open air museum of brutalism.
I am not sure how to interpret your comment. Was this meant to be in a negative sense or in a positive sense? Or without any judgement?
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#25I'm no architect, but I feel it's absolutely crazy to throw completely different styles of buildings into the same box, label them modernist and blanket reject them. I absolutely love some [1], but hate others [2]. I'm sure most people feel the same.
[1] https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern-ho...
[2] https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern-ho...
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#26lots of good Brutalism / Modernism accounts on Instagram if you're into that:
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
More to the point, look at what people choose to live in. Good modernist and brutalist homes sell quickly and at a significant premium over prevailing market rates. Modernism got a bad name in many Western countries, because it was used as an architectural and philosophical justification for cheap and shoddy system-built housing to fill the post-war housing gap. That doesn't make rectilinear forms and bare concrete i…
> Good modernist and brutalist homes sell quickly and at a significant premium over prevailing market rates. I admit I wouldn't be asking if it agreed with my biases, but how do we know this? Seems hard to control for all the other variables.
There are definitely some confounding factors other than architecture to account for. At least in Boston, new construction isn't replicating the century-old triple decker (of course, truly doing that would take a century of wear and tear). So I have to wonder how much of that price premium comes from having brand new stainless steel appliances and on-site gyms instead of creaky floors and questionable wiring. And then it seems to me, just wandering around town, the "modern" new construction is priced well above market price (lots of units sit vacant for a long time, with many eventually adding deal-sweetening offers like a month or two of free rent).
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#28It's fascinating how neatly being politically conservative or progressive lines up with the corresponding architectural view. I like brutalism, but I disagree with the removal of Scruton from that position, it seems political. What annoys me about articles like the above is that they seem to ignore the possibility that aesthetics involves a lot of subjectivity. The argument seems to boil down to, "of course it's ugly…
> modernist parts of Chicago, London and New York seem be appreciated at least as much as other cities and districts with well-regarded pre-20thC buildings. Not according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Favorite_Architect... - modernist buildings barely show up in that list. Of course you're right - beauty is subjective. So when a simple popularity poll fails to show support for their chosen style, archi…
> Not according to (..)
I am not sure, searching for "modern" reveals 27 hits and postmodern 14. Also, landmarks dominate the top 10 so i am not sure whether the poll more accuratly tracks the most liked building and not style. A style with more distributed votes would suffer (and, for example, there are more hits for postmodern than for art-deco).
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#29Honestly, puke. I've been watching "Grand Designs", great show about people building their own places in Britain. Many shows feature local "councils" who mandate all sorts of restrictions to "maintain the beauty and aesthetics of the town". Honestly they're protecting "old crap", that's an eyesore, eco disaster, ugly and it should be torn down. These people are doing everyone a favor. Very irritating to see the hoops…
Why have you put council in scare quotes?
Re: Crimes in Concrete
#30In the past 5 years or so, there has been a bit of a building boom in my city.
The dominant architectural style reminds me a lot of the style discussed in this article. None of it has a concrete facade, but otherwise it would fall right in line. It's ugly, depressing, and distressing.