Most people prefer traditional architecture • Hacker News Board

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#241

Post by AlotOfReading » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #217

kelseyfrog wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have to convince the design community that form can follow things other than function. Until form is no longer synonymous with function, design will eschew ornamentation.

Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry would like a word. Taste is subjective, but is there really a more beautiful building in the world than the Heydar Aliyev Center?

Is that a serious question? Many people would consider Potala palace, the Milan Duomo, Neuschwanstein, etc more beautiful than anything designed by Zaha Hadid and Gehry. Myself included, even as someone who likes their work. Limiting ourselves only to the category of modern event centers, I'd still put the Harbin Grand Theater ahead of it.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#242

Post by bluegatty » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:24 AM UTC

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…

It's fair to have a cynical take but that's not what modernism is and modernism is not necessarily ugly.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#243

Post by kccqzy » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #96

Perhaps there’s a difference between what people prefer looking at and what’s actually nicer to inhabit? Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. It’s like if you asked someone to judge a phone based on a photo. Yes there’s some aesthetic judgement but it matters more if the phone is usable. I know that personally I find New York’s prewar buildings more be…

Prewar is such a big range. The surviving tenement-style apartment homes on the Lower East Side are certainly less beautiful than say The Dakota on the Upper West Side.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#244

Post by shermantanktop » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

m0llusk wrote: post #234

Mostly this is looking at architecture as urban sculpture. That is relevant, but the most critical experience of a building is on the inside. Modern designs spearheaded modern interior spaces including spacious corridors, atriums for exposing important views and improving navigation, and other such features. More than that modernist buildings are good at presenting functional spaces with a minimum of details to inter…

Each room is lived in by a few people, each building has an exterior which is looked at by thousands or millions.

I live in a hundred-year old house (old for the region I’m in), with rabbit warren hallways. I wouldn’t want it any other way. That might just be my taste in interiors, but (as with the article about exteriors) I suspect it is more common than all the modernist functional people would prefer.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#245

Post by cryptonector » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #214

cryptonector wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. Entertainment is a non-productive activity. But people need entertainment. People like to live comfortably. But people also like beauty. It's that simple. People do care about the looks of buildings. Aesthetics matters.

The people outside the building aren't paying rent.

But the people in the building go outside too you know. Few like the brutalist style.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

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Post by bigbuppo » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #120

rbanffy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.

Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.

Or just following the bandwagon. Here's looking at you hamburger menu... the thing that 83% of people don't even realize is a thing that can be clicked on.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#247

Post by adrianN » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:43 AM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #154

AlexandrB wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.

My kingdom to have RAD developer tools be the norm again. I don't want yet another website as an app, or website bundled in a Chrome fork as an app. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources in the 2000s...

Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#248

Post by vineyardmike » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #214

cryptonector wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. Entertainment is a non-productive activity. But people need entertainment. People like to live comfortably. But people also like beauty. It's that simple. People do care about the looks of buildings. Aesthetics matters.

The people outside the building aren't paying rent.

People actively spend lots of money to make the outside of their houses look aesthetically pleasing.

They also do this with cars, clothes, wives, phones, and their own faces.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#249

Post by strstr » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:01 AM UTC

I always like to look at the windows for these “more attractive” buildings. They always lead me to believe the indoor experience is worse in some way. Either cramped or similar. Sometimes they imply a dark windowless rooms. Generally, they seem like they prioritize the appearance of the building over the experience of being inside the building, which is unambiguously the more important part of the building.

The funny one is the buildings that have better landscaping. A few of the buildings in the post only look attractive as a consequence of the green courtyard in front. If you cover up that part of the photo, they just don’t look as stunning compared to the other. Perhaps that’s an argument for traditional courtyards (fair enough), but it doesn’t imply the need for traditional building construction.

Re: Most people prefer traditional architecture

#250

Post by vineyardmike » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 3:11 AM UTC

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?

Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was 2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.

Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.

Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.