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Most people prefer traditional architecture

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Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#331

Post by rbanffy »

tengbretson wrote: post #212
rbanffy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.

"they just don't know what they actually need" Classic butt-guy response.

As Henry Ford would say, "They didn't want a car. They wanted a faster horse".

Often we go out exploring the solution space for new things that were never done before and nobody ever asked for them because nobody had imagined them until they saw the first one. Remember how blown away everyone was with the Jeff Han's multitouch demo? It became immediately obvious it was the future of direct manipulation interfaces.

If you go back further, do you remember how sci-fi pictured the computers we would be using "in the future"? In 2001 there were no alphanumeric keyboards. Neither on the Enterprise. We are finally catching up with the vision of Tron, of the computer as an environment for intelligent agents (it took decades for most people to even formulate this understanding of the movie). We get a lot of things wrong, but our job is to try the things nobody is asking for, because they don't know they can be.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#332

Post by rbanffy »

bobthepanda wrote: post #171
rbanffy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.

Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.

It's hard to build something new based on empirical evidence because the thing you are building might be such a radical departure from previous experience the data you have simply does not apply.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#333

Post by Nursie »

hardbass wrote: post #326
Nursie wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am saying if someone dislikes an architectural style they shouldn't blame it on the materials. Cool, then we’ll blame it on the choice of how and where to use those materials? So when there’s an architectural style that for example is very heavy on chunky raw concrete, is pretty universally despised and has negative social consequences, it’s fair to say “we should probably stop doing that, it seems like a bad ide…

Many countries in Asia use concrete by default. People don't seem to have any problems with it. Architecture obviously impacts a person's mood and behavior, eg unwalkable architecture would force a lot of driving. I just am not certain if brutalism can be said to cause whatever negative issues you are claiming it does. At least I am sure the movement wasn't designed to be anti human in any way.

> eg unwalkable architecture would force a lot of driving

That's purely a utilitarian take. You don't believe that design language could ever have an effect on mood?

You said yourself you find neoclassical and gothic styles induce despair. What do you think would be the long term effect of living somewhere that induced despair in you?

> At least I am sure the movement wasn't designed to be anti human in any way.

A system is what it does, not what it was designed to do. The thinking behind it was often utopian, there was high-minded talk of "streets in the sky" and the idea of giving everyone their own front door to the outside, as if they had their own private house on a raised terrace.

The results were not in line with the expectations.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#334

Post by Nursie »

rightnutwingjob wrote: post #323
Nursie wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?

Words? What are words? We just don’t know. If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts, or whatever it was that preceded the very idea of this thing here is not that thing over there. I guess that’s why design school graduates had to invent the concept of User Experience in an effort to regress the pursuit of functionality and basic design-consistency to the undifferentiated…

> If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts

I'm not sure my comment was meant to be that deep, I was suggesting that beauty or at least pleasantness be added to the list of things which come under the category of "function" when buildings are being designed.

Maximising utility without considering that people will be conducting their lives there, or the effects design choices can have on the feel of a place beyond pure utilitarianism, seems inadequate.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#335

Post by kragen »

msy wrote: post #187
boh wrote: post #61

Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. It may come as a surprise but it required years of cultural development and education for most people to accept the work of Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass p…

The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.

Apple hardware is glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepipeds very similar to the glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepiped skyscrapers that this article is decrying. The main difference is that Apple hardware has rounded corners as a necessary concession to practicality.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#336

Post by rbanffy »

vixen99 wrote: post #279
rbanffy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This whole newsletter is a white guy advocating for a 1950s world. But with flock cameras. It reads uncomfortably close to an anti-intellectual discourse so popular in the far-right.

If think you have a substantive point to make why not spell it out rather than indulging in empty rhetorical flourish. Who's the anti-intellectual?

The article feels like it was written by someone with conservative views, someone who resents change, and believes in a nostalgic view of the past. It becomes anti-intellectual when it points out the divergence between the opinion of experts and the laypeople on what constitutes a building fit for purpose, and takes those two opinions as equivalent.

It's kind of similar to the general "two-sides" thing where, if you talk to, say, a climatologist who talks about a community consensus on global warming, there will be someone who has never studied the climate, exposes a completely different opinion, sometimes in opposition to observed facts.

In this case, in architecture, the thing to measure is not the opinion of people, but how they use the architectural object - how their relationship with the environment changes in that space and why. I brought to this discussion three examples of architectural landmarks that turned a somewhat degraded space into vibrant community spaces.

Architects don't design buildings - they design the interaction of the building users with their environment.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#337

Post by jameshart »

boh wrote: post #61

Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. It may come as a surprise but it required years of cultural development and education for most people to accept the work of Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass p…

A lot of the sample images shown of ‘traditional’ architecture in this piece are not what you’re talking about - they aren’t ’traditional materials’ or ‘traditional techniques’, they just use choices of exterior cladding and window layouts that are evocative of traditional choices - but they are just as much a soulless product of low cost materials and construction efficiency.

Not the case for all of them (the brick-built viaduct proposal for example looks like it would be a nightmare to build and maintain), but most of the buildings shown, the ‘traditional’ variant just uses less visible steel and glass, in favor of ‘layer cake’ designs with stone cladding panels on the lowest level.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#338

Post by lotsofpulp »

paulorlando wrote: post #97
bix6 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?

If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions. My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost o…

>My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?

The land is far more expensive now. Plus legal liability insurance costs. And costs of permitting/zoning/bureaucracy is much higher.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#339

Post by lotsofpulp »

paleotrope wrote: post #100
recursivedoubts wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are too rich to be able to afford things like Sears Roebuck houses now.

So rich but nobody has any money anymore.

All the money is (or will be) spent on land near other rich people so your kids can have a school peer group with parents who have higher education/wealth/social network achievements, and after that, healthcare, and after that, liability coverage.

If there is money left over, then you decorate. But you’ve probably bought into a new housing development with an HOA that doesn’t allow exterior modifications without approval.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#340

Post by kragen »

rbanffy wrote: post #126
anon291 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities. I have a 1920s home and with like a few days of work it lives like a modern place. This is not some dichotomy.

> It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities In my experience, the biggest issue is natural light - it's hard to beat glass walls when you need a structural skin with some windows where possible.

Ultramodernist glass-skinned skyscrapers have to cover their glass walls with mirror-reflective film to keep out the majority of the natural light. Otherwise, they are solar ovens. A 2.6 m × 3 m office outside wall facing east or west becomes √2 × 2.6 × 3 ≈ 11 square meters of sunlight when the sun is 45° away from its normal, and sunlight is 1000W/m², so it's like an 11000-watt space heater. Without aggressive air conditioning, the temperature in that office rises even faster than the temperature in a parked car with the windows rolled up. You could be dead in minutes if the air conditioning failed.

The standard passive solar rule of thumb, for traditional windows without those coatings, is to keep glazing to 20% of the floor area to prevent overheating: https://sustainableengineering.co.nz/glazing-percentage-hand...

The ultramodernist alternative is to build the entire wall out of windows coated to reflect 80% of the light, a "g-value" of 0.2, or a little bit more light if the windows open onto a larger interior space. You can let in slightly more visible light than the traditional approach by using coatings that have even higher reflectance in the infrared, but the vast majority of solar radiation is visible light, so the improvement is small.

Those walls of glass do give you a wider view, which can be nice, but in order to keep from killing you, they don't give you more natural light, except marginally.

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