81–90 of 211 posts
Our architecture accurately reflects our culture: hollow, rational, brutalistic, serving one shallow purpose. It's the cult of greed and this architecture is its temple.
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.…
> 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 aestheti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Germany next to all new apartment buildings (usually 3-5 stories) have flat roofs.
Alas, in the US we are not as wise to the ways of steel-reinforced concrete construction as you guys are :(
At least I have not really seen those rebar and concrete skeletons that are a common sight basically everywhere else.
This argument is ridiculous: 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 m…
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…
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…
This is plain wrong. 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."
The coolest modern airport is definitely Koh Samui in Thailand: https://www.shutterstock.com/search/koh+samui+airport I wish more significant structures were built in a style that thinks outside the box, and is locally sensitive. I wonder what this would mean for a place like the SF Bay.
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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…
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 an…
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.
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Your counter-examples appear to be yet more glass behemoths devoid of life or color
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.
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"?
It makes me wonder why we can’t offer cities around the world more “cut and paste” approaches? Not everything has to be brand new. Like, create 3-D models of communities and then drop in models of “architecture that works” from other cities. Communities could be involved in setting a vision for their own development. This would be a cheap way to create buy-in for density, if you could get a sense of what the community actually wants by presenting multiple options, rather than preparing millions on just one big proposal.
