hating architecture

[mindstalk]

New link: why we hate modern architecture. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture Long but mostly good. Big-name architects hate beauty and plant life. Modern buildings in general hate decoration. I think there's one possible reason for that which the authors only lightly touch on: labor is relatively more expensive these days. This is related a couple of quibbles: one is an end-piece swipe at skycrapers in general, and the other is a repeated claim "until 1900 when people made things they were beautiful." Strong selection effect there: we see the better made and preserved elite buildings more. Relatedly, in 1800 your artisans to cover your building in rococo carvings were a lot cheaper, if you were someone who could build a big building in the first place.

Though they note that for the cost of keeping a Gehry building functional, you could probably afford a lot of decoration.

Peter Eisenman is a nasty piece of work:

"For example, Eisenman split the master bedroom in two so the couple could not sleep together, installed a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms."

"Eisenman had used oddly-angled walls, making placing furniture well impossible, and putting the windows at floor level, so one would have to get on one’s knees to see outside."

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I may have linked this already, but a kchoze piece on modelitis seems relevant to the above article. Planners viewing cities and buildings from above, not from the view of pedestrians actually using them. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2015/08/point-of-view-matters-scourge-of.html

Comments

[poshmerchant]

I find some of the bad buildings prettier than some of the good buildings in the article. Some of those church interiors are really ugly. The level of detail only works if there's blank space to contrast it against.

Also, the author lays out a principle of local context, but I suspect that they wouldn't consistently apply it to places where the local context is stark modernism -- they'd still want new buildings in modernist areas to be non-modernist.

The integrating nature thing is already a trend in modern architecture. Everything is getting a green roof (though I may be confusing an architectural trend with local bylaws here in Toronto).

For example, how do we explain why, in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London, more conservative commentators were calling for more comfortable and home-like public housing, while left-wing writers staunchly defended the populist spirit of the high-rise apartment building, despite ample evidence that the majority of people would prefer not to be forced to live in or among such places?

I think that mischaracterizes the debate. The issue in that debate was shortness vs tallness, not starkness vs intricate decor. The side calling for short housing wasn't about to pay for it either.

Brutalism is the opposite of democracy: it means imposing on people something they hate, all for the sake some narrow and arbitrary formalistic conceptual scheme.

No, brutalism means working with raw (brute) concrete.

I'm not convinced of there being an alignment between democracy and the essay writer's views. Modernist architecture was also intended as democratic -- the rationale being that everyone's housing would be the same, thus equal. That's the danger of trying to relate architecture to democracy -- there's more than one way to do it.