To latch on to this great post there are a couple of other worthwhile discussion points:

We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.

World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted into the present day where we build very weird, stressful objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and call it art.

I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that either the environmental movement or our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.

There's also no point in building a very beautiful building that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to change their location priorities and invest in their current homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible. But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via new offices, garage gyms, etc.

I'm really disappointed in our financial overlords who haven't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall

How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? I don't really buy the argument that america builds badly because of fear of destruction. It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade.

I don't think the ugliness is anything philosophical either. We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture.

I'm in Europe (in Germany to be more precise), but believe you me, new buildings that I would describe as "beautiful" are few and far between here too. I think most of it is due to what I would call cookie cutter mentality. For most architects, a building is just a job. They don't realize that even the most unassuming building is something that may be used for 100 years and more, that will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse), and deserves to be treated as such.

I think architects are certainly aware of the importance of architecture, and most would love to make beautiful quality architecture. But in the end architects are hired by someone who decide the budget, and cookie-cutter is just cheaper.

It seems the options are mostly at the extremes. Cookie cutter and Statement architecture, but maybe not much in the middle.

> even the most unassuming building […] will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse)

This bears repeating.

The amount of people who have to contend with a building will always far outnumber the number of people who inhabit or profit from the building.

How should we build, knowing that?

this makes architecture particularly important, in a way that other forms of art is not

painters are free to create ugly works of art all they like, to a first order of appoximation we are in a position to ignore them

not so with the built environment

a long conversation...

Architects certainly realise that a building is more than just a job but they also get pulled along in the strife for change for change's sake since any architect who just repeats or refines whatever has been done before is unlikely to find him- or herself chosen by the top agencies.

Have a look at where architects live and compare it to what they design. You'll find that many if not most - architects or otherwise - prefer to live in classical buildings which in nothing resemble the concrete-glass-steel(-wood) style of modern architecture. There are exceptions but they are in the minority, at least among the architects I know.

There are road bridges I pass in the UK where I think, wow that is really nice. These aren't big things, but they are beautifully designed non the less. They were of course built many years ago.

I do wonder if there is a bit of survivorship bias here. The pretty objects survive, the ugly ones do not. Though there are also changes in taste. In the UK people today like the rows or terraced houses. They were built to be the cheapest possible dwellings, but the style is now popular.

Most buildings in Greece are build by civil engineers. Architects are not needed and rarely involved. The result is very small houses with many rooms and "spaces" but all very small and ugly. For example, it's common to have 3 bedroom in 120m².

Wait, since when is 120m2 considered small for 3 bedrooms? That's quite a large apartment.

Since forever. The 3 bedrooms are box-size, there just enough space for a bedroom, a closet and an office - you can't walk around without bumping.

I love people nagging about architecture of buildings that they are not paying for.

I also disagree that most buildings will or should be used for 100 years.

I am quite of a fan of one generational building. Mostly because a lot of people will move around anyway. Unless you are really wealthy family that can afford to stay in place for generations.

Well it is cheaper to stay for generations in some village than in city center.

But most kids will probably move to the city anyway.

So building something fancy is in my opinion waste of resources and most likely having bad impact on environment.

Building something that can be easily replaced- even if not as nice - has the advantage.

New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that look like they could survive a bombing, but they're actually fragile and cheap buildings.

> building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade

A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to.

> We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture

What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?

$10m might be getting into actually architected houses, but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk.

It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com

It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago.

I mean anyone can order something from https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have some kind of a style.

But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.

There’s always been a lot of shit built. The good things will last 100’s of years and the shit will be ripped down in 40. The examples linked here are garden variety crap mainly. The 1970’s-1990’s in particular had a lot of bad stuff built. Especially if you want 6k sq feet and don’t understand that to build that inside and out at quality will cost a few million + land costs.

If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.

>https://mcmansionhell.com

Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at this.

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old.

Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an anti-establishment fervor after WW1.

Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1

Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.

Yes but how many people in Europe actually live in houses older than two centuries (about when American immigration really popped off, so let’s arbitrarily pick then)? It’s a significant minority.

I live in a mid sized European city with a city center containing buildings that go back to the 12th century, but the house I grew up in was built in 1890. It’s one of the older houses on the street too, and pretty uninspiring to be honest. The place I live in now, very near downtown, is like 20 years old.

Sure, most American homes are probably less than 50 years old, but on the scale of a couple hundred of years, does that make Europe that much more sophisticated and “cultured”, generally speaking?

We do, in a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside. A large log-house construction, the building was first erected somewhere in the late 1600's/early 1700's on the other side of the hill. It was moved to its current location during the land reform of 1823-1827 when farmers moved out to the land they worked, before that they each worked several small strips of land spread around the hamlet they inhabited.

My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been through more wars than this".

She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!

> My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. ...

heh what was she expecting? It's an old mission built on the frontier eventually used by the military for storage and barracks. It effectively was a warehouse. The building isn't the reason why it's historic, what happened there is what's important.

The "ugly $NATIONALITY" trope goes both ways, and isn't just for Americans visiting other countries. I don't know why tourists think it's a competition.

It's an accurate critique though. The Alamo is up at the top in the competition for World's most disappointing tourist destination.

“The difference between a Brit and an American is that the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.”

American old is as old as the people who have lived here- there are still signs of the native americans who lived here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't killed almost all the natives, some of those locations may still have people living in them.

"Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from actually-old designs.

> Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

An unenlightened idiot only operates on the level of seeing which things are beautiful and which things are ugly. It requires an intelligent, educated person to get involved in sophisticated games of signaling and countersignaling, like pretending to like ugly things in order to seem more sophisticated than unenlightened idiots.

Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.

> America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture.

Sure, there are places like this. Desirable old neighborhoods with interesting houses and walkable infrastructure. But those are mostly from about 100 years ago or more. What's been happening more recently?

>Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade.

I think claiming that building things to a budget is some kind of unsophisticated Nouveau riche mentality is overlooking the experience of the vast majority of people. The US median household income (usually two people) is $78,075. The majority of people don't have the resources to care about satisfying your aesthetic requirements.

Plywood and vinyl and 2x4s are inexpensive and good enough, a combination that is generally exactly the optimal solution when you're considering personal survival. Sophistication is a luxury that doesn't come for free.

The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials. It's the developer that is trying to cut as much as possible, because this means he gets increased profit margins.

>The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials.

In this environment? Citation needed. Building materials of all sorts are difficult to source, often with long lead times, and are multiples of what they were a few years ago. Labor has gone up as well. Builders are lucky to get 20% margins.

> In this environment?

It doesn't matter the environment, when we are talking about margins. Increased costs to the builder are passed along to the end customer.

> Labor has gone up as well.

Which makes any possible savings in materials contribute even more interesting as a way to increase the margin.

This is plainly and patently false. Materials are (more or less) fully half of the cost of building. If you use nonstandard materials that goes up because you need specialized labor in addition.

I've got to think a utilitarian culture would say something like "huh, maybe we should build homes that are easily served by transit." But American culture is much more strongly opposed to this than most those in most other countries.

One thing you notice if you've been in an airplane is that there's a lot of room to spread out if people want to.

And then those people will want things like “electricity” and “a network of wide paved roads” and “Internet” and “drinking water” and “sewage” and “timely package delivery to their front door” and “big box stores with parking lots the size of two city blocks” - and those things at that density have absolutely terrible unit economics and environmental externalities.

I frequently see people complain about how traffic is so bad, gas prices are so high, their local drivers are insane, and how dare they have to pay tolls and parking fees. Wow, I wish there were some form of spatial displacement that didn’t involve any of that!

Heh everything you mention there is available in thousands upon thousands of small towns across the US - basically anywhere there's a Walmart that isn't a city.

Yes, and those have terrible unit economics and environmental externalities! We should not be looking at the unsettled land in between as an opportunity to stretch ourselves even thinner!

If you want to spread out you can do it without robbing the people who didn't to pay for your roads and utilities, and then banning them from building mid rise or transit.

As they should, but a thing that needs planning maps and isn't visible from an airplane is that those who don't want to spread out can't not spread out.

So the freedom is one-way.

Example: almost all of SF bans building apartments

What people want is of far less moment than what real-estate agents, collectively, want. They drive local government and planning almost everywhere in the US, to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

Europe has been building modernist and post-modernist monstrosities gleefully for 80 years.

Everything is either an aggressively ugly concrete bunker[1], a generic cubish cement or brick and glass mishmash[2] or a glass and steel monolith, maybe with extra facets[3].

You just have to look at what the old Imperial Institute[4] was replaced with[5] and the charmless glass box they plugged onto it later[6].

Nearly every building that has been modified this century has gotten unashamedly uglier. Even cathedrals grow tumors.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall

[2]: basically any mid rise residential which can be like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-rise_flats,_Turv... to more recent variations on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartme...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard

[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_front_Imp...

[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building,_...

[6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_Lon...

> Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture

I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of person exists, "parvenu."

Not sure what you mean by "precisely this sort of person", but a "parvenu" is better thought of as the inverse of a "pariah" -- someone from an outgroup who has achieved special acceptance, status, and celebration.

> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not?

Europe is too, it's just that a lot of the older things survived. You can see brutalist and similar architecture that sprang up in the Soviet bloc. I don't think Europeans are that much more "sophisticated" than Americans or anyone else. It's more of an inheritance by happenstance.

Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did.

The factors influencing aren't quite the same. Amsterdam is a popular case [1]

I generally agree with your post, though. The caveat is that it's less about capitalism and more about lack of ability to make choices in the market (lack of capitalism and markets). You can't anywhere in America choose a new home that's built in a walkable neighborhood. It's simply not for sale (new). You can only buy existing homes in neighborhoods that survived demolition after the 1920s, and of course those are the most expensive homes by median in the country because of a lack of additional supply.

[1]https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amster...

> Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did.

Western Europe had the wealth to, it just refused, sometimes with mass protests. A good example is Amsterdam Jokinen Plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan

And Western Europe had that guy called Le Corbusier with his ideas about ideal cities where utilitarian and ugliness was the entire strategy - just because. As ridiculous it might sound, just go to Zurich and you'll see his hideous legacy everywhere: no new building is anything else than a gray rectangle, even the brand new building of the art museum. It might be garbage but it's our garbage (Swiss motto)

Europe has unmatched heritage, but I would argue the modern buildings in Italy suffer from the same problems described in the article. There is an Italo-French author called Phillipe Daverio, art critique but in reality polymath, who has discussed these problems in Italy at length.

> It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost,

Yeah, I think this is more the real reason. Nothing is intended to last. Shopping centers come and go - restaurants get built and then torn down and replaced 10 years later with some other restaurant building (actual example in my neighborhood - why didn't they just reuse the original restaurant building?), the old Montgomery Wards was torn down to build a Home Depot and a Chuck E Cheese. None of this has any permanency.

Commercial buildings in the US are incredibly cheap boxes, and knocking an old one down and rebuilding to spec is how the land-owners get new leases.

The companies that DON'T knock down are always a bit cheap.

Was the GP talking about the US? Because all of it is applicable to all over the world.

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old.

> Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost

It’s really just the second. No need for anything else

> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not?

America is young, Europe is old.

USA is nearly 250 years old. Most European states are younger, even though European peoples and cultures are indeed old. Italy is young, Rome is old.

Italy is old. It was founded in 7 bc by Augustus: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regioni_dell%27Italia_augustea...

Sure it unified again only in the 19th century, but it has had a great degree of cultural union throughout its entire history. It is actually one of the most homogeneous countries in terms of language, religion and culture. Italians like to think otherwise for some reason. Sorry for the digression!

As an Italian, I would like to learn how you measured the level of homogeneity of language and culture (on religion I agree with you).

The differences in language and in culture were definitely reduced only in very recent years AFAIK, and still remain noticeable.

About language, you have to consider how many Italians are (still today) effectively bi-lingual, Italian and local dialect, with the latter ranging from very similar to very different from Italian.

All italian dialects derive from a single language, with very low influence from the outside. Most Italian dialects are actually intelligible to an Italian speaker in written form and become difficult to understand only because of pronunciation. Try reading a few Wikipedia articles in different Italian dialects and you'll realize you understand at least 90% of text for all of them, possibly with the only exception of Sardinian.

Additionally, dialects were never the language of higher culture anywhere in Italy, all intellectuals have always used a common language and had a nationwide audience even when the country was politically fractured in many states. Said common language being Latin for many centuries after the fall of the Roman empire and Italian from around year 1500.

Dialects are rarely written, they are spoken and while (obviously) usually someone natively speaking a given dialect can talk with someone from another near region, dialects from the north (say Lombardia or Veneto) are so different from those of the south (say Campania or Sicilia) that they are effectively distinct languages.

The above is the hypothetical case of two unschooled people, as said before most if not all italians are bi-lingual with their own dialect and switch automatically to italian (possibly with some local peculiar forms or accent) that is the common language when talking to some "foreigner".

As you say, italians can usually understand (in written form) a dialect because of the common roots, but for what it matters an Italian with some good Latin knowledge can usually get the overall sense of written text in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and possibly French.

The unification of language to Italian has been a process that went on for decades, through schooling and later radio and television, when Italy was re-united in the decade 1860-1870 it was a tower of Babel.

Imagine the conversation between a (unschooled) soldier from Friuli attempting to interact with a (as well unschooled) farmer in Sicily in the early years of the unified state.

My European house is older.

Side question - always been curious. Surely these houses were not designed for plumbing, electrical, efficient insulation, etc. Do they just bodge these things onto the outside of walls, or how does that work?

I've lived in a couple of houses built in the mid 1700s with parts even older than that. They were cob cottages, one with a thatched roof, so very thick walls instead of insulation. Plumbing and electrics were just added over the years. Windows were single glazed, so not very efficient. But pretty comfortable nevertheless, provided you remember to duck when going under beams. Houses this old are not unusual where I live in Devon, but most are more recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)

Many of them are basically not insulated; the vast majority of "old Europe" is in more temperate climates for obvious reasons. And in the colder areas, you have the immense thermal mass of brick/stone buildings. Sealing air gaps provides some help.

Plumbing and electrical is "simpler" to run than it may seem, but it does result in unexpected locations for bathrooms, etc, as those were often added wherever they could fit them in.

Remember that given the population growth, the vast majority of the people living in Europe are not living in 300+ year old buildings.

Mixed, but sometimes there's trunking on walls yes. I have a little bit of that (for something disused actually, plan to remove, I've not long moved in) but it's mostly under floorboards. (There are also would-be exposed pipes in the kitchen, hidden behind counters, I believe - but they probably would have done that anywhere, that's a relatively modern extension.)

Insulation is a more complicated topic - if you're going to do it you need to do it differently, since modern new-builds and modern insulation is designed around making everything air & water tight, which will make an old house very damp and rotten (which will lead to woodworm/boring beetle) - the structure needs to 'breath'.

Indeed. There are many houses in Europe that survived 3-4 different states claiming the land on which they stand.

Well, I live in England, so unless we count devolution (of some powers in other UK constituents) or changes of royal household, just the one in my case ;)

England is pretty stable. Some places on the continent, not so much, esprcially to the east and south of modern Germany.

Two random comments:

1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are usually the most interesting thing in a city core.

2. > Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.

Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of stone veneer

Here’s the secret to this thread.

Every “adult” generation always hates 50-100 year old architecture, because that was what was slightly old and starting to show its age when they were kids.

Gen-X/Millenials associate brutalism with non-renovated stuffy classrooms, empty downtown office buildings, and dirty public plazas.

Then a bunch get torn down (usually the lowest effort versions) and people adaptively re-use the best ones and everyone remembers the original intent of the style and falls in love with it again.

Seriously, people in the 60’s thought Victorian homes were a blight on San Francisco.

> people in the 60’s

Are you sure that was the opinion of the average person or was it the opinion of someone writing a column on architecture in a magazine?

You’re not really aware of the history of city, huh?

The neighborhoods with Victorians were either torn down or became low income in the 1950s (ever wonder why hippies flocked to Haight Ashbury?)

Were they torn down or became low income because they were built in the Victorian style or was it perhaps because they were older buildings that needed a lot of renovation so it was cheaper to tear them down and build new or sell them off at lower prices?

> Then a bunch get torn down (usually the lowest effort versions) and people adaptively re-use the best ones and everyone remembers the original intent of the style and falls in love with it again.

Then why hasn't that happened with brutalism? It was hated in the '90s, '00s, and '10s, and it's still hated now. And why is the "international style" so much better regarded despite being the same age?

I’m not sure I’m tracking what you’re getting at.

International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.

And the brutalism point confuses me, since plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.

> International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.

My point is you saw a lot less of people complaining about how ugly the style was.

> plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.

Bet most people will still think it's ugly, even in 60 years.

It seems more likely that brutalist architecture is uniquely terrible, and the ascendant architects of the 1960s simply had horrific taste.

If anything, architecture seems to have been almost entirely captured by the avant-garde; people more interested in “new and different” than “classic and beautiful”.

I don’t think modern audiences are suddenly falling in love with brutalist architecture; even the best examples look like dystopian-future prisons or mental hospitals.

>It seems more likely that brutalist architecture is uniquely terrible

Interesting, it seems to me that brutalist architecture is actually pretty appealing aesthetically.

I might go so far as to say that objective beauty and taste simply does not exist and anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.

> anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.

Or maybe you haven't given enough thought to what "beauty" might mean such that it could be objective. Not everyone means by "beauty" "that which I find appealing". Some mean "the will's response to truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals

A wonderful example of this is given in _All Hallows Eve_ by Charles Williams:

> "Over here," Jonathan said, and took his friend round to the other side of the room. A second easel was standing back to back with the first, also holding a canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look at it.

> It was of a part of London after a raid—he thought, of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of St. Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was of a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting, and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so governed the painting that all other details and elements were contained within it. They floated in that imaginary light as the earth does in the sun's. The colours were so heightened that they were almost at odds. Richard saw again what the critics meant when they said that Jonathan Drayton's paintings "were shrill" or "shrieked", but he saw also that what prevented this was a certain massiveness. The usual slight distinction between shape and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Colour was more intensely image than it can usually manage to be, even in that art. A beam of wood painted amber was more than that; it was light which had become amber in order to become wood. All that massiveness of colour was led, by delicate gradations almost like the vibrations of light itself, towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards towards their source. It was then that the style of the painting came fully into its own. The spectator became convinced that the source, of that light was not only in that hidden sun; as, localized, it certainly was. "Here lies the east; does not the day break here?" The day did, but the light did not. The eye, nearing that particular day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of the light behind. It was everywhere in the painting—concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colours of those lesser limits. It was universal, and lived.

~ All Hallows Eve: II. — THE BEETLES by Charles Williams https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400061h.html

See also: * _Beauty as a transcendental in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger_ by John Jang for University of Notre Dame Australia at https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

I think you've just done a better job proving my point than I ever could.

You could go so far to claim that, but it’s exactly that point of view that produced so much objectively ugly, human-unfriendly architecture.

Relativists replace the moral imperative of “good for everyone” with “interesting to people like me”, and think they’ve stumbled onto a more sophisticated or accurate view of the world, instead of just vapid sophistry.

Yeah totally, anyone that disagrees with you on obviously objective things such as "does this building look good" is a vapid idiot!

To believe that how good a building looks is 100% objective is dumb, but to believe that it's 100% subjective is even dumber.

I really implore you to seek out the articles where people promoting modernism used nearly identical language to you when describing Victorian buildings.

It’s hard to see the air when it’s the environment we’ve lived in our entire lives.

https://www.abc.net.au/cm/lb/4285602/data/manifesto-of-futur...

There's a different between fashionable vs passe, and good vs bad. I think this thread is aiming to discuss good vs bad.

I won’t get into the debate of if it’s possible to have an objective “good” or “bad” but when it comes to architecture that is almost always subjective.

> possible to have an objective “good” or “bad”

yes

> when it comes to architecture that is almost always subjective.

no

Ok you proved me wrong. You succeeded at designing and constructing an objectively bad comment.

Touche.

If you like complicated rooflines, you'll love McMansion Hell:

https://mcmansionhell.com/

That site is just about equal parts hilarious and traumatic to browse.

This is very good! But now I wonder if there's something similar for good architecture.

She has it behind the paywall ;)

> Did you just join my team of patrons?! Yes, yes you did. THANK YOU! As an official patron, you'll have access to my patron-only feed, the **NEW Discord server**, as well as access to the "Good House of the Month!" - The antidote to the month's house roast.

> You'll also receive a special slideshow featuring a curated collection of abandoned McMansions!

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3844491

> I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are.

If don't have the money to build, then you bid over whatever is on the market; whatever some developer and architect duo thought would differentiate themselves ten or twenty years ago. People prioritize commute, distance to family, distacne to the grocery, school zones, number of bedrooms and space, kitchen/bath vintage, and price way, way before what a home actually looks like on the outside. No one really wants to live in a McMansion, but outward appearance is so far down on the priorities that it doesn't matter.

That's a fine, valid rationalization.

But I would disagree with one aspect: part of it is that they like it. We don't have fine taste anymore and we don't have a desire to impress in a classical way. It used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner and everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.

When money is king, everything else is demoted.

> It used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner and everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.

Because anyone can do that, it's not impressive. You don't need to have studied Latin to know a Latin phrase. We have google translate and the entire internet. It's no longer an "exotic" thing. Hell, I see people still do things like that, with Latin or some other relevant language. It's weird to think that's impressive.

I think you missed my point by taking the example too literally. I'm saying that being well-educated (in a classical sense -- deeply knowing Latin, Greek, Philosophy, Mythology, etc) used to be considered impressive. It would dictate your value, socially, to a large extent.

That has transitioned to being good-looking, along with the amount of your wealth and how you spend it. Education and intellectual endeavors are no longer in the mix.

Yea I think people just don't understand "what they like" here. It's like if you grew up on fast food like I did. It's also mind-boggling to me when people travel to Europe or Macinac Island and they come back home and gush about it, but can't get over some sort of mental blocker they have that you could actually live like that here too in the US if we stopped building for cars and started building for people.

Although I do think it's an influential factor, I don't think money is the primary issue. If anything having more money and making more money gives you access to "finer" things and more experience. It's much more complicated than that. It reminds me of the anecdote about Tik Tok (which should be banned IMO) that shows funny videos and 'dumb' content to Americans and shows chess championships and educational materials to the Chinese. That's what we're dealing with here at a societal level.

Great post, David. :)

De gustibus non est disputandum. The thing about taste is that it's relative.

It's really not -- at least not in the finer things, which is what we're talking about.

Yes, you can enjoy pistachio ice cream; feel free. But the Louvre doesn't choose what it puts on its walls randomly. The curators don't shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, I mean, it is relative."

Well, that's a strong opinion. Sounds like you've got everything figured out.

Are you pointing out my conviction or just signaling the lack of yours?

I think that the statement "taste is not relative" is so strong and counterintuitive that it must be thoroughly supported, otherwise it is absurd.

Never seen the Boston City Hall before. I clicked thinking "How bad could it be?" and was sort of surprised at my visceral negative reaction. It is truly hideous! The article describes it as Brutalist, but most Soviet Brutalist stuff I've seen at least gives me a sense of simplicity, efficiency and usually symmetry even if the structures are depressing. This building seems to have eschewed even those positive traits!

I had the same reaction, I think it might have to do with the many rectangular holes along the top. It gives me a slightly trypophobic reaction.

Massachusetts strongly dislikes you and wants you to know you should go away. It's built into architecture across the state.

We did build beautiful things post war! A driving tenant of Modernism was to bring good design to the masses through mass manufacturing - better living through ~science~ good design (see eg MoMA's Good Design Exhibition [1]). If you are thinking chiefly about architecture, consider the Sydney Opera House or the Gateway Arch. If you are thinking about houses, consider the Kaufmann house [2] or the Stahl House[3].

The fact is that we literally do not design homes in the US; over 90% of homes were just built by someone. That someone does not stop to consider design, aesthetics, ergonomics or joy. House developers are more or less doing enterprise sales. They just go by a checklist and the developer with the most checks wins. "Upgrades" merely change the quality of the thing on the checklist (formica -> granite), but thats the extent of it.

1. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1714 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufmann_Desert_House 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahl_House

I mean the houses are "designed" insofar as plans are drawn up, etc. They're just all the "same" and the builders want the ability to "add uncharges" so you have a basic house that looks pretty decent, but once you select all the available admins (the three car garage, dormers on every root, gables everywhere) you end up with a McMansion.

I can't speak about Austin, TX, but here in NYC a number of aesthetically pleasing buildings have been built in last, say, 30 years. Even asymmetric ones, like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Spruce_Street>, look great; I'm saying so as someone who used to see downtown Manhattan every day during commute. (One thing I miss after switching to WFH.)

That might be a very subjective opinion. Personally, I find the weird creases on that building disconcerting and unpleasant to look at.

Yeah, that's ... weird. But then again (in my opinion) all skyscrapers look like crap and only become "iconic" by being there for a long time and people get used to them.

I don't think that the Art Deco style skyscrapers look like crap. I quite enjoy them. I think most modern sky scrapers look like crap because they're all done in a modern style with no decoration. Other styles never really got a chance to express themselves since everything was taken over by the modernist look.

Art Deco are the best, but I wonder how much of that is "the skyscraper looks good" and how much that is "it looks good on the ground".

I know to each his own, but I love the aesthetic of the Boston City Hall, and while not fully brutalist, a lot of really cool and abstract designs came from brutalism. My favorite college campuses I've been to have fully embraced the brutal with bizarre overhangs, odd shapes, posts, etc.

The ugliest campuses to me are either the ones that create a faux old world feel or just opt for business park chic.

Same goes for neighborhoods. I love seeing neighborhoods from the 60s or 70s that took a more brutalist/abstract inspiration. Large windows, backless stairs, conversation pits, etc.

To me it looks a whole lot nicer than modern home construction trying to mix southern porches with Victorian styles, all on top of a sears foundation.

I used to have to deal with some Brutalist structures. Ghastly things, look like they were built by some kind of enormous alien wasp-like creatures that spit out a paste of concrete. Unfriendly interiors. Stairwells almost deliberately vertiginous. Floors with the warmth and charm of a Detroit loading dock. A building which does not learn, its unfortunate inhabitants must adapt to it.

> A building which does not learn, its unfortunate inhabitants must adapt to it.

That's one of the most interesting and depressing parts of post-WW2 architecture (it's present in certain "high culture" architecture before, but not as ubiquitous). It seems narcissistic, entirely focused on what the architect thought would look cool, and completely detached from the individuals who would actually be using the space.

There's a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building near hear, and the usage of space is simply terrible. It's only a few stories tall, and you have to either wait a long time for the slow and unpleasant elevators to arrive, or rummage around several sets of doors behind them to find the hidden stairs. There's another "urban renewal project" nearby designed by I.M. Pei, and it's a huge deadzone in the middle of a bustling area. It feels almost like finding a dead city from a Lovecraft story - you have these empty huge expanses of concrete that seem much too large for humans. Places where people would congregate, like retail, is deliberately placed underground and away from the road, making the whole area feel abandoned.

Say what you will about modern architecture, but I find it much more pleasant than the stuff that was coming out post-war.

It's one thing to decide for cool instead of beautiful (or useful) but a whole another thing to get paid for it. Those architects won a contest, right? One the premise of... what? We can build the ugliest, yay? Humans are just details? What exactly is the selling point of brutalism for a communal living area? You want to design your own bunker, be my guest. But something paid by the public should serve the public, not be a practical joke on the citizens. Yet another failure of the local authorities, move on...

Some of it was needing to build cheap, low-maintenance buildings quickly, to replace what had been destroyed in the war. There's nothing wrong with making a considered decision to build something ugly and cheap because getting usable space is a higher priority than making it look good. But when you try to make a virtue of that by pretending ugly is pretty, then you're making a major mistake.

Makes fully sense indeed. Ironically enough, what is built nowadays around me is exactly the other way around: personal space buildings look at least half-way passable, and public/office buildings are all those gray square turds, with some glass. But yes this is Switzerland, birthplace of Le Corbusier...

Steward Brand, "How Buildings Learn".

https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-buildings-learn-what-happen...

> That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature.

Maybe you meant architects like him, but not "him"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright

he was born in 1867. Much of his important work was done before WW I.

Have you ever been to Taliesyn or Fallingwater? Those are not "bunkers that blended in with nature." Blending in with nature was completely his aesthetic, so much so that Taliesyn in Wisconsin was uninhabitable in the winter.

Most of the rest of your post, I agree with.

One of the things any tour of London will talk about is how up to his eyeballs in work Christopher Wren was after the London Fire. His concession to get more work done for everyone lining up for a new cathedral was that he wouldn’t build you a bell tower. Most (all?) of the bell towers on his post-fire churches were added on later in his life once things calmed down.

Since we're talking about ugly city hall buildings...

> When you do a city hall, it has to convey an image of the people, and this had to represent the people of Dallas ... The people I met – rich and poor, powerful and not so powerful – were all very proud of their city. They felt that Dallas was the greatest city there was, and I could not disappoint them. – I.M. Pei (architect)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_City_Hall

Despite best intentions this building feel intimidating. Just walking up to it, it hangs over your head, and feels like the weight of government is about to be inflicted upon me and I just want to file a permit for my home security alarm. Just pointing out, the artists themselves have trouble making their designs match their intentions.

It was used (with a matte painting to make it taller) as the OCP building in robocop, for reference on how "evil" it either already was considered or now is considered.

the inside is even more ridiculous. It would be easier and faster to get in, do what you need to do, and get out if it was just an office building. No one physically goes to City Hall unless there's absolutely no other option.

> unless there's absolutely no other option

I hit that scenario a couple times a year. Basic stuff that a city should do online, Dallas does not.

> I'm hopeful that ... our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.

But don't we need that passion (and hope) before we can become a space faring civilization? We kind of had that space-faring passion back in the 60s when the US/NASA did the Apollo program - at that point the general feeling was that the government was capable of doing good things. That general feeling has been gone for a while now and has been replaced with a general distrust of institutions like government. To some extent it seems like you need some level of hope before you can trust.

> I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods).

We are building for the shareholders and the market. They are our new gods.

What if "beautiful buildings" are simply too expensive to build nowdays and there are cheaper alternatives that are functional, yet look sterile and boring? There is a reason almost nobody builds brick mansions anymore.

If these buildings are ugly because we're cheaping out on them then we should at least acknowledge the fact and have an honest conversation about it.

But actually they tend to be just as expensive as beautiful buildings.

> We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.

No, we're in a capitalist mental model. It's the same in the UK.

It's build cheap, maximise profit, and a race to the bottom.

Want that bas-relief from a master stonemason? No chance. Two reasons - profit. Second reason, so few master stonemasons because... the chase for profit and cheap buildings has removed any superfluous detailing, and hence destroyed a profession.

I can't envisage a new Chrysler building being built in the US (or UK) in the near future, or any of the 20-30s skyscrapers with ornate detailing up on the 40+ floor. Yes, I know we're all about steel and glass, but that doesn't stop elegant design and innovation.

It's the same on residential housing in the UK. You can just see it evolve over the last century from well built bricks and mortar with detailing, to modern (often grey) boxes, using the cheapest materials erected in the fastest time.

One of the small towns I grew up in had a post office, probably built in the early 20th century or very late 19th (I don't recall for sure, but I'm certain it had the date displayed on one or more floor or wall plaques, somewhere)

Heavy metal doors with perfectly smooth-operating hinges. Marble everywhere—floors, counters, stairs, [edit: hell, even the walls!], everywhere, and this was not in an area that mined marble, it was surely imported from at least several hundred miles away, and likely much farther. Thick, ornate brass doors on the PO Boxes. Serious- and heavy-looking metal light fixtures. I loved going there as a kid. It seems silly, maybe, but that post office felt magical.

Similar story for older libraries (including the one in that same town), older university buildings (ditto), older bank buildings even. They're all so nice to be in, and embody a confidence in some kind of permanence and continuity.

Now all that shit's in strip malls or buildings that are otherwise intended to have a 50-year lifespan at most. Cheap low-pile carpet on plywood, comically fake ornamentation if they bother to have any at all.

What's so weird is that we built basic public buildings like we were rich, back when we were, relatively speaking, paupers, but now that we're wildly rich we build everything like we're paupers. It'd be inconceivable for anyone to get half the budget it'd take to build a post office like that one, for a new post office building these days.

Hell, even my Grandparents' cheap, small post-WWII house in a cheap rural town had details that are rarely found outside luxury homes today—the heavy solid-wood front door and extremely solid-and-smooth-feeling metal doorknob, nice metal switch-plates and heavy-feeling, satisfying switches, that kind of thing. I bet you'd have to special-order a storm door to get one with more than half the metal in it that theirs had and it'd cost a fortune, and god, all that stuff felt so nice, and held up to years and years of use without being the worse for it. Their whole working-class neighborhood was built like that.

> Cheap low-pile carpet on plywood

Part of it is that carpet and plywood are fabricated materials. Prefabricated plywood and wall-to-wall carpeting weren't really things until ~1930s. The older materials seems more luxurious now, but that's because the newer materials have become cheap. It's like how aluminum was once more expensive than gold, but is now ubiquitous because the material itself has become much cheaper.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-history-of-plywood-in-ten-o...

https://www.thisoldhouse.com/flooring/21017998/all-about-wal...

Kinda, but there were definitely far-cheaper options for materials in the early 20th century than ornamental sorts of stone like marble, they could definitely make much cheaper doors than big-ass heavy metal ones that'd still last at least as long as cheap modern doors, and they could make stick-built structures instead of e.g. heavy stone or brick buildings back then, and they often did—far nicer in some ways than ours, but that part of our slide in quality has the excuse that there simply isn't any lumber as good as what they used, anymore, unless you tear it out of an old building—but instead they chose to spend quite a bit more to make serious institutional buildings feel serious. Even for something as mundane as a post office or library in a little nowheresville coal town.

I was curious how expensive marble actually was, so this is my attempt at looking at historical archives:

Tiles were ~1" thick: https://archive.org/details/TheBookOfVermontMarbleAReference...

Using an 1889 price book, it cost ~$0.25/ft2 of tile. Add $0.70/ft3 for shipping to St Louis, which is $0.06/ft2 of tile @ 1" thick. That's ~$0.30/ft2 total in materials. https://archive.org/details/pricelistrutland00verm/page/16/m...

50' x 50' x 10' building, (floor:(50 x 50) + walls:(4 x 50 x 10)) = 4.5k ft2, which @ $0.30/ft2 is $1,350 of marble.

For comparison,

- Average annual wages look like ~$700: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002738212&vi... - A 50'x50' 2 story house was probably $4-5k: https://archive.org/details/gfbarber1905/page/n20/mode/1up

So adding the marble interiors may have been 25-33% of the price of a house. If the average US house today is $400k, then that's $100-130k for the marble interior.

I'm sure capitalism has an effect (similar to how communism built a lot of absolutely disgusting, depressing housing) but I don't think capitalism created American suburban homes out of thin air. There isn't anything inherently cheaper about building a home that isn't symmetrical regardless of materials - in fact the opposite would be true.

I think it's less about economic models though and more about a lack of societal awareness and understanding. Really we need more capitalism and more free markets in this space in particular to provide actual market choices and competition to bring prices down. It's a tough problem. A home builder making a profit on suburban homes with car-only infrastructure is more of a symptom than a cause.

If I'm a shareholder of a company that builds office blocks, I'll be demanding dividends and a return on my investment.

Unless the customer (e.g. Apple and their giant do(ugh)nut) specifically ask for something that isn't structurally significant, a construction firm isn't going to add it.

> If I'm a shareholder of a company that builds office blocks, I'll be demanding dividends and a return on my investment.

Sorry I'm not following the point here. Can you elaborate?

> Unless the customer (e.g. Apple and their giant do(ugh)nut) specifically ask for something that isn't structurally significant, a construction firm isn't going to add it.

That's my point. There isn't any competition in the marketplace or any options for customers.

There are roughly 0 firms today that offer everyday people the ability to live in any new construction that isn't an asymmetrical suburban house built in a car-only development. A few have popped up, granted, but these are a tiny fraction of a fraction of new development in America at least.

Everyday people have insufficient wealth to shop around for homes or dictate design.

Many "ordinary" people who buy homes could custom-build, but it costs more in time and hassle and money (mainly the first two, to be sure) and then you're limited on locations.

That's some other mental model.

Apple made beautiful products to become the most valuable company in the world.

> I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for

That wouldn't be bad at all, but at the same time we are facing a humanistic crisis too. We don't respect the gods to create things for them, and we don't respect the people to create things for them.

One of the very few things the Trump admin did that I kind of liked was requiring new federal buildings to have neoclassical/gothic/beaux arts styles. I wish we could look at more federal buildings and say "wow, that's beautiful, that's cultural". That in contrast to brutalism, for which I have a slight soft spot due to growing up with it but damn it's ugly.

A lot of people responsible for 20th century architecture believed more or less that beauty is Literally Fascism, so that's another component. The ugliness isn't always accidental.

Fascism via "vokisch" movements and ideas attempted to more or less co-opt and own romanticism, classicism, and other forms of non-"modernist" aesthetics. As a result you had a counter-reaction that labeled these things fascist and embraced intentionally minimal, modernist, or decadent themes in rebellion against them.

The solution is probably to de-fascize(?) classical and romantic aesthetics. Not sure how you'd do it though since if you search Twitter for random people with greek and classical looking avatars they're inevitably raging racist totalitarians or nihilistic /pol troll types.

Maybe you could do it with shocking-to-fascists heresy like "woke" propaganda wrapped in neoclassical high culture aesthetics. No idea.

Of course it could also be useful to just point out that fascism is really a form of "high modernism." Fascism is a form of "we are smart people who know better and are going to centrally plan and re-make culture the way we think it should be," which is precisely what's wrong with the high modernist approach to the inhabited landscape.

> Fascism via "vokisch" movements and ideas attempted to more or less co-opt and own romanticism, classicism, and other forms of non-"modernist" aesthetics.

In my opinion, it's not so much that "fascism" (sort of a useless label in today's world) has co-opted traditional aesthetics, it's that the left has run away from the actual concept of beauty.

As an example: look at the body positivity movement. Everybody, no matter how obviously repulsive, is celebrated as beautiful no matter what. They're not just having their dignity as people recognized which is a great thing, but their actual level of beauty. How can the concept of aesthetics exist in a realm where everything is automatically labelled as beauty?

To have beauty, some must be recognized as better than others.

"Body positivity" is not about labeling everything as beautiful but rather not labeling people who may not match traditional standards of beauty as "ugly."

Is this actually how it's practiced? I know this is the professed meaning of the term/movement but when it comes to the implementation it seems to be turning into something much different. Also, in this definition of beauty where do you draw the line for "ugly" or is it now a word without a meaning?

I'm in a lot of these circles and usually it's exactly how it works.

You see a fat person, someone says they're beautiful.

Do you A: call them ugly to make them feel bad

or

B: keep moving.

The basis of body positivity is to help folks have less self hate while being like "wtf dude, don't be a dick" to the people constantly criticizing them.

I don't think body positivity is needed for that, just manners. Is there actually a problem that is being solved by body positivity that can't be solved by just being polite?

I agree. It's a "live and let live" movement. Not some form of austere modernism.

Beauty of people is indeed subjective. Different ethnicities have different innate preferences.

> The solution is probably to de-fascize(?) classical and romantic aesthetics.

This is all so funny. Rewind a generation or two and all this "fascist" talk was directed at folk who admired men wearing togas while emitting Latin. Back then, 'to strip down to its essence and meaning' was the revolutionary act.

> [Architecture] is a form of "we are smart people who know better and are going to centrally plan and re-make culture the way we think it should be,"

And that is the point of architecture (vs mere act of building). Your myths, religions, literature, music, philosophy, and architecture and most matter of significance that is part and parcel of your culture was most likely created and promoted by a tiny (tiny!) subset of the population. Always has been. Everywhere.

> to centrally plan and re-make culture the way we think it should be,"

Is, has been, and will always remain the prerogative of the ruling class. All this aesthetic talk is blather masking the underlying and reasonable social angst regarding the highly distorted wealth and power distribution among the population. The clique in power sets the tone and direction of culture. Heck, your kings used to have dreams, wake up and change religions, and then presto pagans become Christian or Jew or Muslim. [Don't shoot the messenger. Just pointing out facts.]

And if you think this gray "putty" business is bad, I invited you to review K-Mart catalogues from 70s. Everything came in two neon colors - some washed out puke blue and a variation of 'dirt color'. I remember asking my dad when we first came over to US (and I got my first k-mart shock) as to why won't they make nicer colors for the common people. It remained a puzzle for a long time, this insistence on making cheap consumer items look even cheaper.

So this gray is actually the progression from K-Mart Puke Pallet -> Gap's B&W T -> faux-thoughtful "gray". It is progress, of a sort, believe it or not.

Those people you mention, as far as I understand you are identifying what we call the 'Intelligentsia'. They are the ideological siblings of the Fascists, so no wonder they have the same / very similar approach.

Even before there was the idea that ornamentation was ultimately a waste of resources and is incompatible with the promise of efficiency that brings about the modern world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

Still, the Looshaus was rather ornamental for present day standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looshaus

There's also a considerable difference in modernist/brutalist architecture and current blandness. Speaking of Vienna, compare the same lot, Rathausstraße 1, Harry Glück, 1980 [1], and current replacement [2]. (It's not just the US.)

[1] former computation center of the city of Vienna: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Rechenzentrum_Harry_Glüc...

[2] commercial replacement: https://images.app.goo.gl/1S6Xjnk6XLmZ9XqbA

(BUWOG, as seen on top of the mall-like structure, is the former housing cooperative for federal officers, now privatized and mostly selling off the apartments. For the better or – as may be feared – the worse, the replacement building is literally a temple to residential building.)

The weird thing is: that aesthetic is also completely gone in fascist art. Look at New Rome, or Speer's plans. The human aspect is gone.

Some of Albert Speer's stuff is pretty cool. Certainly nowhere near the ugliness of anything Le Corbusier designed. Though it definitely does have a kind of austere bloodlessness that is also present in Italian Fascist architecture, sort of monumental yet dead.

Fun fact: Qatar's world cup football stadia were designed by Albert Speer & Partners. This Albert was the son of the Nazi.

Modernism started and co-evolved with the industrial revolution, long, long before World War 1.

Esthetics is a favorite topic for far right thinkers where the demise of civilization is caused by some art that confuse them.

Yes, this top-comment is obviously wrong and mistaken if you know anything about aesthetics and architecture. The broken timelining of Modernist design is the most obvious error. I wouldn’t expect HN to get this right though.

No, it isn't.

It isn't what is taught in school, but it is a reasonably well-informed opinion, as my sibling comments show.

Yes it is. I have an undergraduate in Architecture, and your comment reads as wildly incorrect.

Checking out the book you link, I see this in Wikipedia:

> The response to Wolfe's book from the architecture world was highly negative. Critics argued that, once again, Wolfe was writing on a topic he knew nothing about and had little insight to contribute to the conversation.

No surprised. If you're going to critique Modernist architecture, at least understand that it started about 40 years before you say it did.

I saw the U.C. Berkeley architecture department ignore and mock Christopher Alexander from their hideous (and richly deserved) concrete monstrosity, so I hope you'll forgive me if an undergraduate architecture degree doesn't impress me, and I am completely indifferent towards the same communities opinion on Wolfe's book.

You need to read my initial comment more closely, I didn't claim modernism sprung fully formed from Gropius' head on September 2nd, 1945: "World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had."

Of course forms of modernism were experimented with pre-WW1, but high modernism and it's attendant ugliness didn't come dominate the built environment until post-WW2. This is of course true, and I think you know this, but you are using snobbish nit-picking (ah yes, architecture) in an attempt to intimidate me because we disagree on aesthetics.

Of course there was a process involved, the edwardian era was stripping down classicism and art nouveau was recognizably post-classical, but WWs1&2 (and the subsequent rebuilding of europe and build out of america) is where modern architecture took over.

The earliest important modernist building from Gropius was Fagus, in 1911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_Factory

Sullivan, sometimes considered an early modernist, was building buildings like this as late at 1889:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago)

Birmingham UK is the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and as late at 1909 was building train stations that look like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Moor_Street_railway...

Surrendering the aesthetics that everyone save a small group of intellectuals, ideologues and capitalist sharpers likes to the right (and arrogantly dismissing us as intellectually unsophisticated) strikes me as an own-goal.

More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the concrete box.

Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs".

From wikipedia[1]:

"During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but now wanted to use it in new ways."

"Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade unions."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

Architecture has almost nothing to do with it...

Hipodromo in Mexico City is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the world.

Architecturally, it's a bunch of hideously ugly buildings. But there's trees and plants everywhere, and they're beautiful, and that's all you see.

The reason everything is ugly is because we don't have trees and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking instead.

There's tons of beautiful tree-lined streets in Chicago with ridiculously ugly houses. You don't notice the mismatched, horrible architecture. You just notice the trees & the birds & the squirrels.

You don't have to be classical Paris to be beautiful. You just need plants and a neighborhood designed for people to live in - not cars to park in.

I think you're describing sense of closure, the public realm as an exterior room. Trees offer that for sure. But Bruges or Amsterdam have very few trees, and they feel calm and verdant as well. The houses are super simple. Simple facades, some windows properly spaced. There's nothing to it. Yet, it feels perfect.

I'd agree that that is the most important part, the city must be a ballroom, and that architecture proper comes second. Thing is, we lost both though. No more beautiful architecture, but also a complete misunderstanding of how to build a harmonious public realm. We can only think cars. Parking lot for cars. Streets for cars. Buffer zones for the exhaust, noise, and danger of cars. It destroys all cohesion.

> The reason everything is ugly is because we don't have trees and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking instead.

I've spent a bunch of time on the 1940s.nyc site and the most striking difference between 1940s NYC and 2022 NYC is the lack of trees in 1940.

I'd agree it's possible to have a neighbourhood where most of houses aren't especially beautiful but the general layout, and in particular the placement and extent of greenery can lend a sense of overall beauty - I'd even say I live in such a suburb. But it would be far better still if the houses themselves had their own aesthetic appeal, and had been built to last hundreds of years. Plus greenery can only go so far when you're talking about larger buildings (4+ storeys). But yes, the dominance of cars in our towns and cities is almost certainly part of the problem - when you're rushing through a place at 70 or 80 k/h who cares if it's ugly?

I'm going to be a bastard and argue for the soviet take on large scale concrete construction.

My personal favorite is the Russian Academy of Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Academy_of_Sciences

It's bizarre to blame communism here when we've seen this as a global phenomenon. It's an issue of neoliberal thinking in general, capitalism also acts to minimizes all costs the exact same way, just drive through any American highway exit and look at the uniformity of the architecture.

>It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human, and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

Emphasis mine.

Louis Sullivan is quoted as saying this in 1896, prior to any world wars. I think you can blame architecture being reduced to the sum of its usefulness to our friends in Chicago, who are far more worried about function over aesthetic. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe decided "less is more" in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright. John Root. Daniel Burnham. This continues today with the premiere skyscrapers in the middle east and Asia being designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings and Merril. It's too cold to care what you look like.

I think that is factually wrong. Chicago was building beautiful, ornamented buildings well into the 40s. Burnham & Root - your examples of "less is more"? - are in fact masters of beaux arts. Burnham designed the Railway Exchange[1] in 1903 and Union Station[2] in 1909. The Board of Trade[3], a masterpiece of ornamental art deco inside and out, was built in 1930. There are countless other examples.

In fact, Chicago didn't descend into ugly modernity until well into the 50s and 60s, when Mies van der Rohe started erecting generic black monoliths like Federal Plaza[4]. But he had nothing to do with Burnham & Root, or Graham Anderson Probst & White, the two major influences in Chicago architecture up through the 1930s and both producing highly ornamented and humanist buildings their entire careers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(Chi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/media/F...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Buildin...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_Unite...

That was certainly part of it, as was the industrial revolution, but consider the auditorium building built by sullivan in 1889:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago)

There is still a strong connection with the historical aesthetics in it. The lead up to WW1, in the edwardian era, featured a move towards stripped down classicism, but the real break in my mind happened during WW1/2, and particularly post WW2.

What does "cultural unity" that you drop in at the end have to do with it? Much of the blandness of recent stuff is bad in very consistent ways already.

Clearly you and I disagree, for instance, on if victorian houses can be aesthetically pleasing on their own, but would you rather have a street full of plywood boxes or would you rather have my victorian-styled house sitting next to your [whatever] and someone else's [whatever]? I'd find that great, and much more interesting than a street full of near-identical ones.

(But in practice - even without "cultural unity" - that isn't what most new development in the US produces today - rather, you have a block-or-larger development of a bunch of near-identical [something]-esque generic builds. Unity achieved! Aesthetic appeal? Maybe not so much...)

That's a big part of what people don't realize - city centers and old neighborhoods will have houses of vastly different ages (my town's center has houses that were built this year next to houses that are almost 200 years old).

But most of the houses in America aren't those. They're in developments of different ages, and the houses in those developments look roughly the same. You might notice some differences in the very old 40s developments, because of 80 years of additions and remodeling, but most of the houses will have survived and few will have been rebuilt.

When a city builds up slowly, you get many different things mixed together, and that is more interesting.

The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture

https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...

The title image in that article is of boring old (IMHO ugly) building devoid of natural light, next to a rather boring looking modern building that looks like it is delightful to be inside of.

The next image, left building, looks amazing Bright, light filled, with a weather protected area underneath it for social gatherings.

Not the best visual supporting evidence for her argument.

If ever there was an example of "people who disagree with me are mentally ill"... What's the solution here, maintain a registry of anyone who could have an ASD and forbid/revoke them from practicing architecture.

I do wonder if we could apply this to make more human software too?

That's misreading the article.

The solution is help patrons nurture their sense of civic responsibility and internal confidence so they do not commission misanthropes like Le Corbusier.

Great article, quite provocative.

> World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had

Who is "we"?

> form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of cultural unity lurk here...

Again, cultural unity amongst whom? At best this is ambiguous, at worst it sounds like a dog whistle for a return to the aesthetics that accompanied the monarchist era.

There are real reasons that aesthetics evolve. For one thing, the hyper detailed and biological shapes and themes of classical aesthetics require a lot of poor, skilled, artisanal laborers, which is why they mostly appear on the buildings of the elite like monarchs.

Regular people during those eras lived in decidedly plainer homes, whose aesthetic charm was mostly a function of their simple shapes and materials.

That started to shift with mass production of decorative elements. The ability to mass produce what were once expensive decorative elements eventually resulted in their becoming passé and kitsch.

Those trends are as much responsible for the aesthetic shifts as the traumas of the world wars.

>> interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since...

I just assumed it's all about cost savings. Architecture has been affected by the race to the bottom as much as anything.

No. The race to the bottom doesn't explain the extreme rupture that happened in the 40s.

Another thing that may play into it (beyond a psychological breakdown), that's we diverted spending on architecture to spending on maintenance of car infrastructure. The public realm is experience through a car, and as such, sensory details, sense of closure and safety, are irrelevant. Rather, what becomes relevant is asphalt, large easy to maintain buffer zones between car infrastructure and building.

Ha and yes: and why build beautiful things at all if all you're going to do is speed past it in a blur at 75mph? The futurists preoccupation with speed. I never thought of it like that.

I don't really follow what your point is.

But, developers will build what maximizes profits. They are just answering to wallets. If it was mostly the ultra-wealthy purchasing real estate (as it mostly was pre-WW2), then the developers will build what the ultra-wealthy want to spend their money on.

Post-WW2 saw the rise of the middle class and their ability to purchase homes. Especially with government-backed mortgages (FNMA, Freddie Mac, and etc). Most of the middle class would rather spend less on gorgeous architecture and get more square footage inside their home.

I'm interested in what the economic motivations were behind ornate buildings of old. I'm talking about the craftsmanship involved in intricately decorated buildings in urban cores, such as found in most of Europe and less baroquely in the art-deco buildings in the US. Surely at that time economic factors were at work too, and it is very expensive to have custom brick-work and gargoyles and copper accents, etc. At that time did we have a higher standard of what was passable as a public building? A pride in making something pleasing? Were these features actually not more expensive to create?

Are you saying that Victorian homes, as a rule, are aesthetic disasters? I'm curious to learn more about this as it's not something I've heard before. If you have any recommended reading about that I'd greatly appreciate it.

A lot of people refer to them as the "late 19th century McMansion". They were built with intricate looking woodworking which was available suddenly to a lot more people due to the mechanization of woodworking tools. It didn't require a craftsman to spend days carving things like it used to which made those types of details only available to the truly wealthy.

The beginning of 20th century was a complete rejection of this aesthetic because it's really just trying to come off as something it isn't really. So the Arts & Crafts movement began where simplicity and high quality became more important. This was a complete rejection of victorian aesthetics.

Saying that, many examples of Victorian styled homes in pre-war towns are beautiful and far more appreciated today. Even still you see some that are just confused in what they're trying to be (we might call them "eclectic" today), similar to many McMansions today where they use ideas out of context.

In support of this, actually doing detailed tours of many "victorian houses" and then compare them to actual mansions of the era shows significant differences.

Like our McMansions of today, the houses often combine aspects that on their own can be nice in ways that don't quite "fit".

There’s a Queen Anne-ish home near me that I always joke is a window showroom. There’s like 1 of every style of window on this thing. A double hung sash with a gothic thing and then a sleeper and a casement etc. Even the lines of the home - just everywhere.

But in todays context it’s a simply gorgeous home. “Eclectic” if anything but it has stood the test of time.

But I imagine looking at it from that period and it probably looks like a poorly designed McMansion today. Except for built with really great materials.

I think a lot of the "love" for these types of homes is simply the materials and the craftsmanship - even as they became "mass produced" they were built "heavy" - modern drywall is better in almost every way but it doesn't have the gravitas.

Yeah, the materials are great -in particular the old growth wood which simply isn’t available today. There’s also a good chance the home design is completely unique since home building by and large was done very differently pre-1940s. So a neighborhood of them looks awesome compared to one where everything went up in the post-war era.

Just compare a period revival built in 1915 to one from 1970. It probably isn’t even close which one not only looks better but also uses the right lines, moldings, etc. I think there was simply a better understanding by architects about what details a particular style of home should and should not have.

But yes a well constructed modern home is probably better in most ways than an old home. Better waterproofed, more efficient, engineered better, etc. If built well which I’d argue most modern homes aren’t unfortunately. But I have seen modern homes framed out entirely in engineered wood, have advanced sheathing and waterproofing and high-end siding. Will last many generations.

There was a "bad spot" around the late 80s through the early 2000s I feel, when houses were just starting to be "improved" for energy efficiency, where some really bad decisions were being made (water barriers that trap water in the walls allowing mold to spread, etc).

Modern building science has raced past those, but not all construction crews are utilizing them; which is sad. Many times there's not an increased cost at all; it's simply correctly using materials.

And it also has to be done right. I noticed a small leak in my home that aligned with where a new vent was installed a couple years ago and I went up to confirm my suspicion that the flashing was installed wrong. And it was.

One of the better advances in recent times have been things that reduce "envelope penetration" because dammed if it is never ever done right apparently, even on brand new construction. Furnaces and water heaters venting via PVC through the wall seems to work out better.

It's the #1 reason I'd hire multiple home inspectors during construction if I ever have a house built.

Misaligned incentives do their part too, from fixed rent for older buildings to energy efficiency standards not considering the energy used in rebuilding

the timing fits but the reasoning doesn't. I'm having a hard time believing that WW1 & 2 had an impact on consumer demand. I think it's lack of appreciation of good design. People don't care if their house looks like crap. All they care about is that it's got a ton of car garages, and a crap ton of asphalt all over the place to park all their garbage everywhere.

I've seen it firsthand. There's a beautiful house on a decent lot with lots of nice trees and landscaping, I know of with a side garage. Guess what draws all the compliments? the stonework?, the bueatiful roofline? the landscaping? the archicture. Nope none of those. First thing people care about and compliment is the horrendous side garage to store their crap in.

> aesthetic unity

Was it aesthetic unity, or was it aristocratic taste that was enforced in an uniform fashion upon everyone because the people did not have neither time nor money to care about aesthetics...

I think new playgrounds are much better now than when I grew up in the 80s. The new ones in 80s did have some good things going for them but there is much more variety now and they look great.

Playgrounds passed a point somewhere in the late 90s where suddenly it was cheap enough to manufacture quite interesting climbing things, and so you suddenly went from the basic swings + slide + weird steel tower thing to complex adventure sets.

https://www.byoplayground.com/products/koala-keep for example

World war 1 was the suicide of Europe.

Almost all the people who died in WWI were very young. WWII was harder on people of all ages.