Hacker News

I would argue that the inner spaces are also nicer in traditional architecture. Taller ceilings where those of us who are tall can walk below a hanging lamp without hitting anything, or just stretch, taller windows that let more light in, etc.

Obviously no one likes having a small or no elevator, or poor insulation, but that's related to technological progress, not aesthetic trends. If we kept building in the traditional styles, we would obviously have incorporated this anyway.

In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings (where the scale of facades, windows, etc. is old, but the floor slabs, insulation, elevator, etc. are brand new) are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings.

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph

With modern materials and structural design you can absolutely have both.

This is probably entirely fixable, but I don't do particularly well in modern homes. When we looked for a house, we specifically didn't want one built after 2000 (or there about). The indoor climate in many modern homes, and hotels as well, triggers something. Maybe it's allergies, maybe I don't do well in dry, recycled air, I don't know, but living in a newly built house would mean having a constant running nose and red eyes.

From a energy conservation point of view I get it, but something in my also tells me that pressure testing houses is a bit off. I don't think I'm meant to live in an airtight box with an HVAC system.

Well, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, does it? An old building doesn't have to be run down, and a new one can be both expensive and shoddily built.

It's not that hard to bring old buildings (altbau in German) up to modern standards via renovation. Here in Berlin, there are lots of buildings from early last century that are very desirable property not just because of their exterior but because of their interiors. You get modern insulation, wiring, bathrooms, kitchens, etc. And high ceilings, wooden floors. When I moved here 18 years ago, there were still a lot of these buildings in their original state with no insulation, coal burners for heating, etc. You could smell the coal in the winter. All that has been renovated at this point. The communists actually attempted to cover up the nice facades by just plastering over it as that was considered decadent. A lot of that property has been restored to its original state at this point.

A challenge with some old construction is that it was (at the time) cheap construction. Which means that after a century there can be lots of structural issues, mold, leaky roofs, problems with foundations, etc. But you should compare that to modern cheap construction, which isn't all that great either and doesn't age well.

A lot of West Berlin post war construction is particularly grim and ugly because it was obviously built on the cheap with little or no attention to how things looked. Surviving, pre-war construction is a lot nicer. Especially if somebody invests in fixing that up. You can see the contrast throughout the city because heavy bombing left a lot of gaps that were later filled in with some typically very bland and sometimes very ugly and now very dated construction. It seems some architects had some weird notions of modern. Especially some seventies and eighties architecture is a combination of cheap and very ugly. Cheap concrete does not age well. And painting it some weird shade of yellow or purple doesn't make it better. More recent construction is a lot less offensive, thankfully. The DDR mostly didn't bother with filling in the gaps and as a result, a lot of recent construction has been addressing that using more premium materials and architects that actually know what they are doing.

Architecture is about optimizing for people inhabiting the city. Cities with detailed human-scale architecture at the lowest few floors are nicer to live in. You can still have a city full of soulless luxury towers, as long as you avoid cheap hostile architecture in places pedestrians can't avoid looking at.

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building

For the most part, it's about optimizing construction cost. Everything else is secondary. The reason you don't see ornate stonework is mostly that skilled labor is a lot more expensive today than it was a century ago. Even if you want to spend 50% more to make an architectural statement, you still do it with prefabricated steel and glass.

> 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.

Architecture built today is mostly optimizing for the developers’ budget and the local regulations.

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.

It just so happens that humans inhabit the outside world too? And that the outside is shared by everybody?

It might be subtle but interior and exterior matters. The housing projects (70s, 80s) often had nicer interior design and comfort, but the overall neighborhood felt void, full and worse.

> I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower

There might be some survivorship bias there.

This is a defense of glass, specifically, and not a class of architecture in general. And "traditional" architecture is not a properly descriptive term; it tells us where the architecture came from, not what it is. Architecture is basically a creative process, and we can't handwave away the complexity by using temporal language like "traditional" and "modern".

The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.

Living in a tower will always be soulless, IMO. If an able bodied person needs an elevator to get in and out of their house, it's game over.

Why not both?

Part of inhabiting somewhere is how nice it is to look at.

And it's is a false dichotomy, both can be done.

> I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.

Now imagine if it had looked good as well! It could have really lit up the area of the city it was in.

I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.

I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.

And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t

The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.

And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.

Modern materials and production methods eliminated the need for ornamentation to prove a craftsman's skill and attention to detail.

I'm thinking of something like a violin. You can't pick up a violin and judge the perfection of the fitting between the wood surfaces that are glued together. If that work isn't perfect, the instrument will eventually fly apart. But you can look at the "scroll" and "bees sting" which are unforgiving of tiny errors. These kinds of features persist to this day due to traditionalism, but have disappeared from most industrial products.

Today, I don't expect an ornamented house to be of any better quality than a plain house.

This is not a general truth.

The Dana-Thomas House, designed and executed by Frank-Lloyd Wright, spared no expense in an age when skilled craftsmen were affordable.

Are there seeds of the Guggenheim in New York between these two buildings?

https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-ho...

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687...

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

> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources

Which modernism?

1930s modernism was about new materials to allow luxury for the modern man (electricity! large windows! electric oven! washing machines! fridges! indoor toilets!)

1960/70s modernism was about creating new communities, adapting land to fit the modern car based world. No more pokey little shops with only a few items, requiring a trudge along a wobbly high street. NO! drive your car, go to a futuristic supermarket only once a week.

I don't think we see a modernism now, not as a movement. I will now divert to UK building, because in the US its different. Part of the reason why thats the case in the UK is that councils used to build houses, facilities and infrastructure with their own money. This meant they had their own architects. This lead to town plans that were coherent, if not always successful. See Birmingham, milton keynes, roehamton.

Housing wise, council houses were built, or should have been built to a standard. They were, especially in cities much bigger, brighter and luxurious compared to what preceded them. Were they pretty? no, modern is never pretty, because its not what you grew up with. When I was a kid everyone _hated_ victorian terrace houses, because thats what poor people have. They were more pokey compared to executive estate housing, and in some places didn't have a drive for your four door saloon.

Now, those estates are meh and terrace houses are very expensive, despite being cold, draughty, dingey little shitboxes with odd toilet arrangements. (unless you've slapped in a loft conversion and extended over the kitchen/outdoor toilet)

> Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production.

The problem is, Rams was about bringing the complex new object into the house in a was that was reliable and simple. If we were all about Rams' vision, then we'd have got rid of radiators, had decent windows, insulated the place, had lots of cupboards and cleanly separated living spaces. Not an everything room and a bedroom with inbuilt mould farm (shower + shitter)

Yes the modern apartment is inspired by loft living and dieter rams, but that requires 100sqm/1000sqft and high ceilings. none of which most places have. So you get a kitchen diner because it allows developers to shave off one room from the floorplan and increase density by 1/3rd without extra mateiral costs.

But thats not modernism, thats poor fucking standards, and the lack of competition in the uk in the form new council houses. (a 3 bedroom council house will be at least 90sqm with seperate kitchen, living room)

White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia.

It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.

I am not sure how it is about "cheaper". Lathering on a finish with a roller is much cheaper than a carefully prepared spray system. Modern furniture and structures often use uniformly sprayed coatings. You are mistaking cleanness of look with cheapness, getting such a uniform coating is quite expensive and takes skill and discipline regarding hygiene and cleanup between abrasive grits etc as well.

And if you are against things generally in the sphere of "Bauhaus" interior design then I would say you are engaging in a cargo cult of using modern materials in unnatural ways to copy older designs without eye to how the modern material has its own natural form and manner of usage. I would say, for example if one only has hand tools and solid wood then it is reasonable to follow Colonial design school, but if one has glass, stainless steel and plywood, it is wasteful to force them into a Colonial shape rather than their natural forms. Either style respects the substances and tooling it uses.

You are free to pay four digit prices for every piece of furniture if you truly oppose designs that are aligned toward mass production.

"The aesthetic is more or a side-effect of using cheaper resources and cheaper methods of production."

This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your statements at all?

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

In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about.

One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades.

Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture.

There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on.

Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day.

In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad.

There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK).

Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years.

Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day.

The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.

So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from.

Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce!

The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car.

The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it.

The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the 'peak car' maintainable vehicles that people wish they had today.

Fortunately I will never be a customer for Ferrari, however, if I was a tax-dodging benevolent dictator with the wealth to put together a motor museum, I would not hesitate to buy a Luxe for the collection, to go alongside an OG Tesla Model S, with the faux grille, and a Xiaomi SU7. I would like to add a Ford Cortina and a Ford Sierra too, however, millions were made and millions rusted away, leaving none for my fantasy museum, particularly in the desired Saluki Bronze colour.

Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment.

But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.

Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful.

But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.)

The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.

If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.

The influencer aesthetic. Why do people pay so much to look so boring?

Not really. That may have been true in the past, but it would be so cheap to CNC carve or extrude or injection-mould some ornamentation. Certain materials have gotten more expensive, but I think most of modernism was driven by materials progress and a boredom with previous trends

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy.

I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.

What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.

That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas.

So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.

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

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm

I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.

You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?

Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.

Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!

> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production.

That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain.

Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.

It's amusing to watch the movie version of The Fountainhead and see what are supposed to be Roarke's buildings. He likes the pedestal style, where the first floor is mostly open-work columns around a small lobby. Turns out this is terrible in cold or windy areas. Wind hits the side of the building and is forced down into the area around the lobby. Doors are forced shut by wind pressure. People are knocked off their feet. A strong wind in snow produces a horizontal blizzard.

The Meteorology Building (bldg 54) at MIT was built that way, with all of the above problems. Much embarrassment. Later, much computational fluid dynamics and, in 2019, a rebuild of the plaza level with more walls.

Because it looks good.

I dont prefer traditional architecture because I have high standards, I just hate all these rectangular-prism concrete stripmalls and loglo highways.

Yes, every time people get grumpy about modern architecture and look over to see if I agree I tell the story about how I used to work at a company in Boston which moved from a beautiful 19th century building to a soulless Modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper. And thank fucking god: the old building was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, had too little natural light, and was too cramped. The Modernist building was better to actually be in in every way. Buildings are there to be used, not just looked at in pictures.

If it's my building, e.g. the building that I live in - I care more about the ease of maintenance and repair than any facade.

Because I spend 80% of my time indoors, and 20% working in the garden, so frankly don't even care what the building looks like.

Maybe only care that the property looks neat when it's time to sell.

As it stands, these studies are just cherry-picked navel gazing with extra steps. You can't design a study like this well. There are hundreds of thousands of buildings, and tens of thousands of variations of subjective preference. And all of those go out of the window as soon as practical concerns (like affordability) arise.

Right but that's not because modern architectural style has made the interiors better. It's mainly technological improvements that allow larger windows, bigger space, better insulation, etc.

You can totally have a traditional style building with a modern interior without a hint of brutalism or concrete.

People definitely like teepees and yurts (and thatched roofs, dry stone walls, log cabins, etc.), it's just that at some point the practicality gap becomes too wide to contemplate.

But this is a reasonable point to raise. Although both would serve their purpose a concrete viaduct is much cheaper to build than a masonry one, to the point that it may be difficult to justify the latter no matter how strong the public preference is for it.

Not to mention their comparison, modernist architecture, is just mid-century. There is post-modern architecture after that and arguably also contemporary architecture further after that (however vaguely defined).

The missing part is that traditional building used to be cheap (in fact the cheapest way of building things).

What changed is labour costs in western countries relative to the cost of materials and other physical things

Several of the referenced studies used award winning modernist buildings, and others used similar size and use of buildings e.g. city halls.

Indeed, the beige boxes are neither modernist nor classicist.

My family lives in a MCM house built around 1960. We bought it in a "hot" market where you couldn't be particular about anything. We chose a house based on location and the interior.

Seems to me that your positions are in opposition to each other.

1. There’s a traditional visual language that people instinctively prefer.

2. Modern architectural sensibilities have superseded traditional visual language through repetition.

I’m reading this to mean something like “people like their own traditional foods but since they've been drowning in pizza for the last 70 years, they’ve forgotten about their traditional foods.”

How can a basal, instinctive preference just disappear? Can the sex drive disappear with enough brainwashing?

Always seems weird to me that "classical" is stark white columns and sculptures. The original Greek buildings were quite colorful, it's only the intervening millenia that are responsible for wearing away their paint.

Many of the architectural styles didn't get enough time to stand the test of time!

"Man fears time. Time fears only the pyramids."

Idk, these seem pretty innovative:

https://www.dezeen.com/2026/02/17/chinese-projects-completed...

Not that I like all of them, but the point stands.

My theory is they end up preferring buildings that are easy to draw in AutoCAD.

Akin's Law 38: "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say."

I fully agree! And if they still disagree, perhaps we could open special camps where we could forcefully reeducate them! After all, there is but one correct design language for buildings and it's a hideous slab of concrete that our ancestors would weep if they could see.

On a serious note, I've seen conspiracy theories about how such ugly modernist architecture is being used to break our spirits, to make us numb to ugliness and to promote an acceptance of mediocrity. While I originally dismissed it, I've become old enough to see many beautiful buildings replaced with caricatures of them. I'm starting to wonder if there weren't a kernel of truth to these ramblings.

I can't tell if this is serious or sarcastic. I'm going to err on the side of serious though. Maybe the majority is actually correct, and traditional architecture is just plain better. I certainly find it more welcoming than the modern concrete and glass box jungle.

> architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable.

Good architects match modernism with livability. A couple months back I visited the Barbican Centre in London and it never ceases to amaze me how thoughtful is every little design item.

When we moved to the bay area in 2015 (south bay), I was absolutely stunned at the variety of residential architecture, having come from the mid-Atlantic where everything tended to be uniform based roughly on construction date/period. Since land is exorbitantly costly, homeowners tend to build what they like, no matter whether it fits the neighborhood aesthetic or not.

Architecture schools don't really teach you the pragmatic side of the trade. Their projects are building those sorts of abstracted models, talking about forms and voids. It is just so far abstracted from the sort of practical architecture that leads to stuff like built in cupboards in a Sears catalog home. Something to also consider is while these young architects are getting trained they aren't really living like adults either. They are in their early 20s after all, still perhaps lashing out in reflexive opposition from their suburban upbringing, and probably don't understand why a built in cupboard would be so exciting.

The results will absolutely be the same. Having spent the first 12 years of my life in a commie block apartment, the absolute best thing that has happened to that building over the years is the trees have covered progressively more of the ugliness. Note that this article is about external visuals, not the layout or any other consideration relevant to buildings being "designed for people to live in". This is about buildings being designed for people to look at.

You can design two buildings for people to live in, make them identical in layout and build quality but one of them has slightly more classical style of architecture and people will invariably prefer it, all else being equal.

Most people prefer IKEA prices.

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.

Cost is a big factor, but so are modern building codes. Some classic architectural features are outright illegal to build in 2026. Others might be allowed, but there's almost no one left who knows how to do it (e.g. plaster walls or ceilings).

Robots are not going to bring any of this back because robots will just create a new set of optimizations and constraints needed to make robotic construction cheaper and easier. If modern cars (which are the result of similar optimization) are anything to go by, this will result in output that's easy to build but hard to maintain or modify - so largely a continuation of existing trends.

Take a look at "3d printed" houses for an imperfect example of this kind of optimization for automation in action. Better robotics will bring about a more balanced version of this trade-off (walls will probably be possible to modify, unlike 3d printed ones) but the incentives remain the same.

Edit:

Trivial example: One of the easiest way to autonomously insulate a house will probably be with spray foam insulation - you can get a robot arm to hold the sprayer and move it in a specific, continuous motion pretty readily even today. But spray foam insulation is hard to modify after the fact. Removing it is time-intensive compared to removing insulation "batting" and applying it again requires specialized tools, PPE, and perhaps licensing.

This point is addressed in the article...

Yes, modern is now old 1890s-1960s. Even post modernism is aging.

Also there is survivorship bias.

The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.

https://www.habitat67.com/en/

I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?

>In the old days, buildings were made to impress

Google "survivorship bias".

The worst architecture is a combination of cost optimization and aiming for looking traditional-ish. That's a recipe for future blight.

> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?

But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.

Perhaps counter intuitive but beauty standards are not simply just sentiment.

> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.

Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.

This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me...

This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG...

> Not remotely cost effective.

This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC...

Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.

The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/

Plenty of old people now grew up in a phase in history where we were building ugly cheap things

So new buildings ignore externalities in the economic sense but also very literally.

You might like Athens, in that case.

hive cities do have a charm

I don't see why this got downvoted. The heart wants what the hive wants.

> ... that's how humans were intended to live

Humans weren't meant to be packed like ants. Wrong species.

Not all decisions should be made based on popular vote.

Please observe the guidelines if you want to keep participating here, particularly these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> This whole newsletter is a white guy advocating for a 1950s world. But with flock cameras.

It reads uncomfortably close to an anti-intellectual discourse so popular in the far-right.

Something fascinating that you may not know: traditional architecture is one of those things that is simultaneously:

a) Genuinely widely preferred, with many articles on this, ranging from aesthetic preferences through to scientific studies of how eyes move and what causes fatigue. There is genuine value to architecture before modern architecture -- and...

b) A stalking horse for right-wing thinking.

It's really interesting how this happens and it mirrors other right-wing techniques. A common way to get people into right-wing thinking is to find something that is genuinely unpopular or that people have concerns about, yet which has constrained discourse. Examples: lower incomes. You then talk about the good old days, and reframe it: lower incomes becomes, 'people taking your income, agh those immigrants'. Architecture becomes, '1940 and before were better, oh and everyone was white then'. You get the idea.

Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism, disguised in the neutral or even interesting format of ancient history.

Once you recognise this, you see it everywhere.

But don't let this fool you re older architecture having genuine value. We just have to avoid saying people have no taste, or referring to their preferences as 'pabulum'. That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject of architecture, they pay attention to what else that person says.