In France, there's something called Les Compagnons du Devoir. I think historically they were a lot like freemasons except they never abandoned the building trades, and the fraternal-society aspects sort of went into the background (and they somehow managed not to get excommunicated, too). You have to be young to be an apprentice (<25 I think).
I always feel crazy when this comes up, because I genuinely, on aesthetic principles, like Bauhaus architecture. I like clean lines, and ornamentation doesn't do much for me. I don't give a rat's ass whether it is or is not bourgeois, I just actually enjoy looking at it more. How much of a minority am I in?
Yeah, I actually like this stuff! Brutalism is so cool, too. I wish I had the time and money to explore cool structures. Growing up in the UK, I always found the traditional style of building to be rather boring and uninteresting. We simply had so many. I genuinely love modern architecture! I got to visit the University of Technology Sydney the other month and it had a wonderful interior. Highly recommend anyone to just go there and walk around a bit if they can. I studied at UNSW, whose architecture is quite pedestrian.
I don't think you're speaking in bad faith but I think much of the existing fandom for modern architecture stems from the strange picturesque quality of brutalist buildings. I used to say I liked brutalism, and I did, in a sense; I liked how it looked in photos. How radical! How alien!
Since then I've moved to an actual post-communist brutalist city, perhaps the most brutalist-building-per-square-inch city in the world, and I have changed my opinion. The hulking concrete shapes look cool in photos because strange geometry translates well to 2D images. But to live amongst these greyish concrete spike balls and bathyspheres is misery. You feel like an ant navigating a hazardous, viciously anti-ant landscape. Even as novelties, they lose their luster very quickly.
Exactly. When you have to live/work in these things, the shine wears off very quickly.
I remember the new church building in Knock for the shrine, made in the best Modern Architectural style out of bare concrete inside.
On the west coast of Ireland. I had to wear my coat inside and the condensation was running down the walls while your breath was visible, because it was cold and wet inside to match being cold and wet outside. Experiences like that make you long for a bit of frivolous plaster finish on walls and bourgeois insulation 😁
I don't seem to be the only one with such non-proletarian longings, since it had to be refurbished by another team of architects in the meantime:
"Recent major upgrading of Knock Basilica (opened in 1976 - 3,000 sqm) has transformed a large cold space with harsh finishes into a warm meditative place for Pilgrims, where barriers between congregation and celebrant have been removed and levels of comfort and accessibility hugely improved."
They ain't joking about the 'large cold space with harsh finishes', I can personally attest to that!
I was in Burlington, VT recently and was intrigued by a church behind a chain link fence, vacant and in an uncared-for state. (I don't know that it was particularly deteriorating structurally; that would be rather an indictment of modernism if so.) It was sort of a degraded-brutalist building, or kind of like it didn't know which architectural faith it was following. Here's a not very good photo of it, and a picture of the previous church which was destroyed by arson in 1972:
My interest in it was not sneering - I didn't think it was so bad; or rather, I thought it might have once been quite nice inside, especially if it used a lot of natural materials - but I only glimpsed it in walking by at night. Unlike some people, I think church might have been easier for me to endure if there had been actual windows in the sanctuary, rather than stained glass. I actually used to attend a church atop a hill outside Austin, with an ugly blah modern building - and acrid soul that I am, used to sit and stew about the fact that the sanctuary would have given onto a wonderful view - but had no windows giving on it: where the view would have been, they put the (uggh) pipe organ.
Googling revealed the Catholics want to sell this property, and perhaps finally have. Note I spent about five hours in Burlington and that's my total familiarity with the place.
But curiosity compelled me to discover why the Catholic Church had abandoned this building, when usually they hang onto real estate pretty tightly. It seems there is only contraction in the future, for Catholicism in Burlington.
There had been pushback on demolition, though, from some preservationist quarter, enough to derail the sale for some years; and I found amusing the plea for deeming the building of "historic" architectural significance: it was said to be the first modernist building in Vermont that was softened by *landscaping*. Specifically, "123 uniformly spaced locust trees".
I'm not a student of numerology but I want there to be a significance to 123.
>that would be rather an indictment of modernism if so
Would be and is. With the benefit of 60-70 years of hindsight, we can say that Modernist buildings often age stunningly poorly, not just aesthetically but structurally.
Well, tastes differ as they say, and if you want to shiver inside a freezing cold and wet bare walls of grey concrete bunker in an Irish November on the west coast as the gales and storms pelt right in off the Atlantic, you do you, Freddie 😁
I wouldn't lump Mies van der Rohe in with the concrete brutalists. While his designs are spare and minimalist, the use of glass and metal as reflective surfaces provides all sorts of visual stimuli.
When I was little, I'd go out to visit my dad. He was an instructor at IIT (Chicago, not India). He had an office in one of the low, glass Mies van der Rohe buildings. He'd take me with him sometimes, and he worked in a Mies building. I remember the first time I saw one. The rain was falling. I had grown up in New England, and I was used to buildings made of brick and wood with small windows. The IIT campus was a revelation to me. The water on the windows distorted the landscapes. I was fascinated by the distortions. I remember dining in the cafeteria with my dad, and I watched the gardens through the windows as evening darkened the lawns and trees. It was like a giant movie I could walk into! When we left the campus, Mies's buildings were all lit up, and it amazed me that we could look into them and see people moving around.
My father knew Mies at ITT, and even though my dad wasn't an architect, he owned lots of architectural books with pictures of Mies's designs. I would study them and imagine what it would be like to live and work in a glass building.
Later, when I was a young man, I was an office worker for a while in a glass skyscraper. And a Mies van der Rohe creation was across the street from my glassed-in office. The afternoon sun would reflect from it into the office area I droned in. The boredom of my work was expunged by the golden afternoon light that surrounded me. The AC would kick in full blast, and its noise would drown out the conversations of my coworkers. It was a mystical experience sitting in the light and the roar. Later, as night fell, the fluorescent lights would come on in the offices across the street, and I would watch as people moved across them. And I was like a little kid again, watching the doll-house denizens of the IIT campus go about their business.
Anyway, glass and steel. They're wonderful substances that have an inner poetry. Brick, stone, cement? Meh.
I live in New Haven which has a ton of Brutalist buildings compared to the norm, and my father worked in a Brutalist complex at Wesleyan so I was around them every day, and I love Brutalism specifically and modernism generally.
You guys: YOU ARE NOT THE COSMOS. NOT EVERYONE LIKES WHAT YOU LIKE
I am sincerely uncertain if you are intending this point as a criticism of Scott ("Scott and the implied twitter majority are not the cosmos, lots of people actually like Brutalism even if Scott doesn't, the polls are wrong") or as a humble recognition that your perspective is unusual ("The commenters who agree with me are not the cosmos, we like something even that most people don't").
Thanks for making this point. I also love Brutalism. And Modernism. And Art Deco and Frank Lloyd Wright and Neo-Gothic and a bunch of other architectural schools and styles that we are supposed to understand as being at odds. But you know what they all have in common? They look like beautiful man-made wonders compared to the shitty slum apartments where I grew up. This whole anti-modernist perspective I'm seeing a lot of these days just seems like the next generation of rich kids setting out their manifestos against the elites of yesterday and proclaiming themselves the true voice of the people. Not everyone likes modernism, but not everyone hates it either - even dumb hillbillies like me.
I agree that they're not the cosmos. I think that Scott and much of the ACX community (and you!) are wildly and confidently full of shit about a number of things. But they're actually in the majority (objectively) and also correct (subjectively, in my opinion) when it comes to Modernist architecture's general loathsomeness.
I came the opposite way. I grew up in communist concrete boxes and loathed them, until I went to school at TU Delft whose brutalism campus is quite renowned and finally learned to appreciate it and love it. It's not only striking and monumental, befitting a high tech institution, but also, it might feel strange to hear this said but much less so to experience it in real life, incredibly warm and human. That cluster of buildings (Aula, library, physics, civil engineering) made me fall in love with brutalism. All that is just to say, as with all styles, there are good and bad executions of it. Sometimes it's useful to judge them by the best versions of each, although ofc sometimes one might say, as with suburban housing, a higher floor is more important than a higher ceiling.
Where is "perhaps the most brutalist-building-per-square-inch city in the world"? Sincerely curious. (Also, long time no new post of yours, and I love them all)
Skopje, Macedonia. However the photos on google will give you a totally false impression of how the city looks. And much appreciated, I’ve been writing a lot of fiction but want to return to essays soon.
I see. Google images does not help in this case, true. lol. But having seen Belgrade, Bratislava, Tirana, Dnipro, Saporoshje, Yekaterinburg (where some genuine Bauhaus buildings are - hideous and impractical) ... itd, itd, it seems to me: Skopje might lead in air-pollution (Tirana is pretty bad, too), but is probably just as brutalist as many other "ex-socialist" cities. I do feel your pain. - Where do you publish your fiction?
Sure. Brutalism is not my preferred style, but many modern and post-modern styles exist that are not Brutalist. If this were an article about the problems with Brutalism, I'd probably be mostly in agreement. I always point out the Robarts library at U of Toronto as a Brutalist disaster in a sea of otherwise interesting architecture. But some of that other interesting architecture is modern or post-modern.
I live in Tallinn, surrounded by brutalist architecture and I personally love it. The density of commie-blocks lets the city be incredibly green in the residential areas, and every western Europe city feels like a gray slog to me.
I have mixed feelings because I like the geometry of brutalist buildings but I also think bare concrete is a really ugly color. Maybe we need an avant-garde synthesis school of "brutalism but with cool murals or whatever."
People talk about the despair of working in a brutalist building all day. Suddenly, I can understand their point when imagining working in one of those godawful mural buildings. I love brutalist architecture. Preserve the HHS building!
I'm with you, and I've thought about it some. I think for me it comes down to: Modern-style buildings indicate how well kept-up they are. If they're not well-maintained, then they show wear and grime right away — the lines or blank faces look immediately off. While ornamented structures are good at camouflaging neglect. At one time, camouflaging neglect probably had some artistic value. But now I think that foregrounding neglect is probably the more important value. That's my theory.
Remember that during the height of modernism around 1960, old-fashioned, highly-decorated buildings tended to be covered in decades or centuries of depressing coal soot. So, many people wanted to tear them down and put up clean glass and steel buildings to start over.
But around 1961, De Gaulle's culture minister Andre Malraux started a program to scrub the coal soot off Paris's classic buildings like the Louvre. This proved hugely successful and it got people thinking harder about appreciating old buildings.
An interesting point, which I had not considered. Thanks for pointing that out.
I'll also note that as a Bostonian, one upside of our City Hall is that it makes visitors think the New England climate is much more turbulent than it actually is. (That Brutalist landmark would probably be better sited somewhere in hurricane country or Tornado Alley.) And the structure also offered a gorgeously monumental poster image for Frederick Wiseman's recent Cahiers-du-Cinéma-lauded documentary about Boston's city government.
Personally, despite mostly being on the neoclassical side of the issue, I actually really like the Boston City Hall and brutalist buildings in general. At least when they're the exception, and not the rule.
Eh, I dunno. A few ritual sacrifices of minor bureaucrats at the beginning and end of the fiscal year by the duly appointed chair of the council seems like the natural thing to do for the Boston City Hall. It wants that. It's made for that. Gozer the Gozerian will show up there, one of these solstices.
The Boston City Hall is one of those Brutalist buildings I actually like. It's not a solid slab of concrete, it's got an interesting shape and a lot of texture and fiddly bits.
Not to mention that bare Brutalist concrete also quickly gets covered in crap, and the concrete changes from white to crappy grey in a few years.
That White school gets owned by the Grey school since every white building turns grey, or brown if there's any metal elements.
Copper-sheathed roofs turn green and look reasonably good, but anything with iron in it either turns black (if you're lucky) or just rusts.
I went from high school to university in the early 80s. A friend wanted to be an architect. Then he went to a couple of university visits to learn more about the process.
He came back and said that architects were idiots. He became an engineer instead.
Yeah I just made the same point above. Ornamented structures can take a certain amount of grime and damage and it even adds to their charm, but the modern-style buildings have to look absolutely pristine or it just looks depressing. They remind me of the all-white outfits that fashion models wear- clothes they probably wear once and then throw it away, or at least dry clean after every use.
Ironically, Tom Wolfe was also known for his weird all-white suits...
He had bright-colored a suits made too, though. I read an interview where he talked about it —“ if I’m going to have suits made, I might as well shake people up.”. I believe reporter
said he was wearing an orange one at the interview.
I used to eat lunch a lot in Helmut Jahn's State of Illinois Center in Chicago's Loop, a post-modernist glass building opened in 1985. I sort of liked it -- I called it the State of Illinois Intergalactic Starport -- but it had all sorts of maintenance problems due to its novel design. From Wikipedia:
"Originally, the design called for curved, insulated (double-paned) glass panels, but these were found to be prohibitively expensive. Flat, insulated glass had been suggested, but was dismissed by Jahn. Single-paned (non-insulated), curved glass panels were eventually used, and resulted in the need for a more expensive air conditioning system, which remains very costly to operate, and is insufficient on hot days; internal temperatures have reached as high as 90 °F (32 °C).[5] The building is also bitterly cold in the winter; in its early years, ice formed on the interior of some of the wall panels. The marble floor of the atrium initially developed unsightly water stains, an issue which has since been resolved."
Also, in its first few years, the glass tended to be dirty because nobody had figured out an efficient way yet to wash all the windows.
It was a pretty hilarious illustration of Chesterton's Fence: Why _not_ design a wildly new-looking building?
Well, because traditional designs long ago figured out the solutions to a bunch of boring problems like how to keep them warm in winter and how to get the windows washed for a reasonable cost. Eventually, you'll probably figure it out, but it can be expensive in the mean time.
Toronto City Hall has two concave glass towers facing each other. All reports I've heard are that window offices in the curves get uninhabitably hot in summer.
Architects over the millennia never faced the situation of modern construction in the first place. They would have killed to be able to build big buildings out of glass and steel.
Now "cheaply build a low tech hut adapted to the local climates" is certainly a problem we can look to history for the answers to.
That's the problem when you're doing modern architecture not for eye-wateringly rich private patrons but spending government money: all the stuff that makes it look good and semi-functional is too expensive, so corners are cut and you end up with something everyone hates and it's lousy to work in.
For some of us, the fingerprints your kids left on the glass display of the bakery items are bad enough, and the dog slobber all over your glass door. Multiply that by a thousand.
Oddly, do those guys on their platforms still go up and down the sides of buildings washing windows? Haven't seen that in awhile.
For ludicrousness, I see your Thompson Center and give you the controversy over The Glare, which as you can see in this article, was very hard on the already dubious aesthetics of the Nasher sculpture garden in Dallas:
Update: the State of Illinois finally gave up on the Thompson Center and sold the property to Google. Chicago has been a significant regional center of Google's workforce, which the company apparently thinks will continue. They are overhauling the Thompson Center to become the new offices of 2,000 Google staffers, in addition to their existing Fulton Market District office building.
The building isn't landmarked so most people locally were surprised that Google elected not to tear it down and start fresh on that full block of the Loop. (My siblings and I were all on "team blow it up".) They are instead doing what appears to be a gut-rehab. The actual work started earlier this year. Apparently Google intends to keep the overall shape including the big interior atrium while re-doing basically everything else about it including the infamous exterior colors. They seem confident that the structure's many functional issues can be resolved now, and think it will be completed for occupancy by fall 2025.
> Well, because traditional designs long ago figured out the solutions to a bunch of boring problems like how to keep them warm in winter and how to get the windows washed for a reasonable cost. Eventually, you'll probably figure it out, but it can be expensive in the mean time.
It seems pretty obvious that glass boxes ARE the answer to "how do you build the best tall buildings?". There's a reason they're outcompeting everything else.
I'll also put in a word for the International Style. Its claims to universality have been clearly refuted, it's a relic of the '50s and it reminds me of all that optimism about a bright new postwar future and leaving the legacies of the old empires behind. *Obviously* the UN building is in International Style because that's what buildings looked like when people still thought the UN was a good idea.
One factor is that in many discussions of these topics, most pictures shown are buildings by famous architects who evidently put a lot of care in their projects regardless of style. Both a brutalist and a beaux-arts building can be beautiful if made with care and intention.
One argument against modern architecture that comes up from time to time is that it's harder (than traditional styles) to do well when you're *not* a famous architect working on a museum or some other prestigious building. So most people's real experience of modern architecture is tenements like Pruitt-Igoe, i.e. not great.
I don’t think that’s exactly right. I think many of those big tenements were designed by famous architects, while the 1950s cookie-cutter suburban ranch homes that people like just fine are examples of modernism built by no-names. I think it’s more that the high theory of modernism when applied to communal living just didn’t work as well as their practical knowledge gained from rethinking the house.
Frank Gehry has never made a beautiful building, and yet is quite famous. Fame has less correlation to care and skill in architecture than in many fields.
Frank Gehry's buildings certainly have aesthetic qualities that rise far above most buildings. They show a lot of care and intention. They're interesting. All of that is true even if you or most people wouldn't describe them as "beautiful".
Successful terrorists tend to employ a great deal of care and intention, too. Mao lived an interesting life. Aesthetic qualities like terrorizing the neighbors and causing car accidents [1]? I'm reminded of the Pratchett quote about "Elves are terrific. They beget terror." Gehry is interesting and intentional; doesn't make his work Good.
TBH, the only time I start talking about this is when Scott brings it up!
I understand what you're saying though. I think the feeling of being gaslit certainly comes across when Scott talks about this subject even if he doesn't specifically say "I feel like I'm being gaslit".
I couldn't even read this whole thing because here, on Twitter, etc, I feel like there's a weird conflating of so many schools. I don't get why Scott includes a picture of an all-glass building, that seems so completely different from Bauhaus.
I definitely think most Americans have no problem with the constant inoffensive glass buildings
Old glass office buildings lining the freeways of my city, now blue, now gold, with their class c office space, and the difficulty of repurposing them for anything else - seem like exactly the unlovely stepchildren of modernism that is the real complaint. Not an individual building here or there, but the ugliest aspects of our cities - that mostly just happen to be all postwar. Hard not to notice this.
I feel like any building that engages with the street and is of what they used to call "human scale" - can be repurposed more readily than a 20-story building sheathed entirely in glass (inoperable windows of course), no balconies, low-ceilinged with acoustic tiles, much of each floor given over to elevators and passageways, surrounded by parking, with no street - only the freeway - connecting it to everything else. YMMV.
Maybe it's not a central example, but the all-glass building is Bauhaus through and through: It's called the Bauhaus Building, it's situated in the Bauhaus complex, was designed by the founder of Bauhaus, and has Bauhaus written in big letters on the side of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus_Dessau
It's a different view of the building shown in the second image.
Edit: To be fair, I do think it's quite an honest and insightful essay. Much like Scott's review of What We Owe the Future, though, taking it seriously demolishes significant portions of the rationalist and EA projects, which is why it's mostly left behind.
For completeness sake, this anonymous user completely agrees with Scott and not with you as to aesthetic merits of Modernist buildings vs classical ones.
Seconded. And all the students at Caltech hated the Bechtel house. Unfortunately it seems the pictures available online were taken from flattering angles and do not give a realistically bad impression.
Ditto! I really like minimalism, solid materials, clean lines without an ounce of ornament. I feel distracted and overwhelmed by trifles and frippery. My dream house is not the Sagrada Familia, it's the Farnsworth House.
Agreed (about the poll). And with specific photos to rate (a bit like the AI contest), rather than just "do you prefer style X or style Y" more generally.
(personally I prefer the more ornamental aesthetics for buildings - although I quite like simple modern furniture/interiors)
Remember the rule of the silent majority. I'm very much in the camp that prefers pretty ornamentation and strongly dislikes concrete exterior (I don't mind glass so much). I wasn't going to comment to say that because I didn't see the point in commenting "I liked and agree with this Scott post", but I will chime in here as a vote against "maybe most readers disagree".
Pretty sure people just want pretty and liveable buildings, care less about the specific philosophical point that the architect intended to make, and certainly don't let it be an excuse for a horror-show of a building.
The readership here probably has a overrepresentation of people that adore featureless aesthetic-free buildings for reasons related to rationalism, autism, and other neuroatypicality, but keep in mind it is a highly-selected population that reads Scott, and an even more selected one that comments.
Some modernist buildings can look nice, and I think most people would agree.
But the style doesn't scale. A shining hall of glass makes for a cool set piece, but we want our built environment at large to be comfortable and inviting.
And most modern buildings fall far short of the Bauhaus complex building, or the national library* in Athens (another modern building I like; glass is good). 99.9% of modernist structures are concrete or plywood boxes. Can we all agree we'd be better off if modern cities looked like downtown Paris or London instead?
*Actually, the Stavros Niarchis Foundation Cultural Center, which includes a national library (?)
So this made me realize my main disagreement with what seems to be most people's taste - I think concrete is good, but glass is bad. (Because concrete buildings can have lots of small variations, and a cityscape of concrete towers usually won't look monotonous, while glass skyscrapers - even if individually they look good - do.)
Which I suppose is a way of saying that, in practice, tastes really do vary that widely, even among people that think modernism was a wrong turn.
...not when the buildings are crammed together densely. It works much better when the buildings are well spaced out, with wide roads and plenty of green between them.
That’s the issue with starchitect buildings - they often treat their building like a sculpture meant to stand by itself, rather than as part of an urban fabric.
Same here. I mean, I appreciate traditional architecture for its novelty (I visited Edinburgh a while back and it was very nice to look at), but I feel like it would very... overwhelming to live there. I much prefer the more minimalist architecture for practical reasons, even if it is less artistically engaging. I'm not walking around town to look at buildings after all, and there's isn't exactly any shortage of stimulation these days.
And also, that Beaux-Arts building looks ugly as sin. It looks like some cheap Disney Land set piece. ...Honestly, I really do not want to get lectured on taste from someone who thinks AI art looks good.
The Beaux-Arts building looks terrible. The Frank Lloyd Wright one referenced in the same passage is positively gorgeous, but having spent a *lot* of time touring gorgeous Wright structures they are universally deeply impractical structures that have tons of custom-built interior pieces. The focus on practicality and ease of construction from later modernists seems like a necessary step for actually building a real city and not a house that will have to be sold off and repurposed into a museum to be maintained via charitable donations from tourists.
I feel like the beauty of a modernist buildings depend a lot on their surroundings- more so than other architectural styles. The same minimalist structure can be beautiful and cozy when surrounded by a forest or hideous and oppressive when surrounded by parking lots and highways.
Come to think of it, maybe most of what minimalism does aesthetically is amplify the beauty, ugliness and other qualities of the things around and inside of it, contributing only a small amount to the combined impression. Maybe contrast with minimalism can draw attention to aesthetics of a thing- sort of frame it in way that makes the aesthetics harder to overlook, like white space in graphic design.
I mean, it's not always the case that minimalism paired with something beautiful creates an impression of more beauty- a gothic cathedral paired with a glass cube isn't more beautiful than a cathedral paired with another cathedral. But maybe in that case, the minimalism is drawing attention the cathedral's beauty, but also contributing a sort of chill, static aesthetic to the combined impression which clashes with the cathedral's grandeur. Wheres that same static quality paired with a beautiful but disquietingly wild forest tones down the wildness, leaving an impression of coziness, and the static quality combined with the inhospitable vibe of urban sprawl reinforces that vibe to create a feeling of oppression.
Agreed. One of my very favorite buildings ever is Beinecke Library, which in the International Style and is just incredibly gorgeous, especially from the inside in the light. Saarinen's Ingalls Rink is also so cool. Ooh, and the William James building by Yamasaki is also great. But I also appreciate other kinds of architecture too, like Gothic and neo-Gothic and Arts and Crafts and Prairie! Honestly, I like most buildings that look like someone put some real form of artistic thought into them. When 99% of buildings are cookie-cutter strip-mall as-cheap-as-possible, it's exciting to see anything different.
BTW, it's not like Modernists are the only architects who ever raised form above function! For example, in most Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, anyone over 6'2" has to duck to get through doorways. When one of his clients complained that his roof was leaking onto a chair, Wright allegedly said "move the chair".
Seriously. The only reason I even realized the Ingalls Rink was by Saarinen was after seeing the picture of the "City of Culture" in this article -- described as a creation of "Le Corbusierian fundamentalists" and immediately thinking "oh, that looks a lot like the Ingalls Rink, I wonder if the Rink is by the same people? I should look it up." The differences may be vast to those inside the movement, but they are more subtle to the rest of us.
Saarinen was a modernist who liked impressing little boys. I can recall seeing his eagle wing-shaped TWA terminal at JFK Airport in 1965 when I was 6 and thinking it looked awesome and that in the future all buildings would be so awesome.
I agree that the inside of Beinecke Library is pretty great. The outside is awful though. No windows, no ornament, just blank concrete divided into squares. Why?
My optimal city is one created to be traversable on every level. Sadly nobody builds like that, but some modernist buildings come close. The lack of slanted roofs greatly helps for one.
I find it notable that a lot of (modern) East Asian buildings are, structurally, extremely similar to the featureless blocks or weird alien shapes Scott hates so much. Really the main difference is that when viewed from street level the cities tend to be more cramped, extremely colorful and have signage and other forms of non-obtrusive and mass produced ornamentation, rather than being austere and empty.
Not sure if I fully agree, but perhaps related: to me, some buildings heavy with ornament can look equally menacing, imposing, and depressing as dystopian brutalist architecture.
In pictures, Palace of Westminster looks no more cheerful or welcoming than infamous Boston City Hall. Westminster has more symmetry, but also ... all the spiky-looking ornaments.
I feel as strange as possible when someone puts up two pictures: of some maximally banal pseudo-classical palace without a single interesting feature and of a beautiful modernist building and writes that, well, it is self-evident that the palace is better. Uh... no?
That Beaux-arts building looks much worse to me than most of the supposedly 'ugly' modern buildings in this post. I generally enjoy traditional architecture but you can't treat it as a monolith, some of it sucks.
This post and the book are about 40 years out of date. It's also a nice story but really not relevant to a lot of the ugly buildings. International Style was never that influential, particularly in domestic building. LA modernism and third Bay tradition did much more. There's a also a lot of continuity between Wright and Bahaus: Praire style's horizontal orientation is replicated in IIT's campus.
Wealthy Illinois psychologists don't commission architectural pieces. They live in McMansions. And the defining feature of a McMansion isn't its size, or its traditional style, but the complete lack of skill in using that style. Symmetry and harmonious forms are cast aside in favor of a cacophony.
What we lost wasn't a particular style but the art of caring about the result, in some cases because of design review commissions that only approve the quotidean. If you care, it really doesn't matter what style is picked.
Sorry, my experience of complaints about McMansions is that people photograph a perfectly lovely house, then draw a bunch of red arrows on it with comments like "THE BEDROOM HAS MORE WINDOWS THAN THE GARAGE, THAT IS INHARMONIOUS AND SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED!!!" and it just looks . . . fine.
'McMansion' really refers to two different, and arguably opposite, problems. One is giant houses that look boring - that is, cookie-cutter subdivision houses at mansion prices (as well as mansion land/infrastructure use, often crowding out smaller homes, at cookie-cutter construction quality). The other is what you said, architects comparing about symmetry and stylistic mishmashes. (Which is ironic, given the influence of deconstructivism. And I get that the argument is 'master-created chaos versus pure randomness', but I'm not sure how much they can actually tell the difference - though, maybe.)
Randomness and asymmetry have been fashionable among prestigious architects for a few decades now. Thom Mayne, for example, tends to place windows at random like an IBM punch card from 1968.
Hmm, I get your point, but I think this is perhaps the least charitable take on it. How about something like "house bigger than mine and superficially 'nicer' but actually of low quality and utility for its price." Like noticing that the house has six bedrooms but it's for two parents and a single child. The space, though expensive, is mostly wasted. Or seeing that the ornamentation is cheaply plastered on the outside for looks and both serves no purpose and will likely need additional maintenance over time as it falls off.
As someone who finds it hard to understand the criticism of McMansions, what you've said makes a lot more sense than the aesthetic criticisms. If all anti-McMansion people stated their views in that way, I would be on their side.
In particular, the practical criticism of the ornamentation's structural quality resonates with me. If the point behind the anti-McMansion feelings is "well-off people are getting ripped off by builders constructing shoddy and cheap ornamentation that won't last," that's a reasonable thing to say, and I agree!
On the size of houses in general, though, I'm going to disagree with you. There are plenty of practical reasons why someone might want a house with more bedrooms than residents, particularly if they have the means to afford it. Maybe Mom works from home, and having a home office in one of the bedrooms is valuable. Maybe Sally can have a playroom, or there's a place to put Dad's art studio. Maybe Grandma will move in in a few years. Maybe guests are frequently entertained, and there's a place to put the cousins when they come to town.
You're certainly free to offer criticism of people having bigger houses than they necessarily *need*, but I have a hard time seeing that as anything other than sour grapes about people being wealthy in general.
The thing with McMansions is that they are *fake*. Consider, for example, shutters.
* real shutters are useful and can be quite beautiful.
* Shutters that look like the real thing but don't actually close are fine, although they upset me at a metaphysical level. I get fooled by them and I don't care, until it's pointed out to me.
*Shutters that are so fake that they cannot possibly work (i.e., by being too small to cover their window) are ugly. Deeply, viscerally ugly.
McMansions just happen to lean very heavily into that third group, presumably because the target demographic doesn't see or doesn't care. Shutters as mentioned. Fake structural supports. Roofs that don't actually follow the topology of the underlying rooms. McMansions are deeply postmodern objects.
This applies to everything btw. Suits with fake pockets. Economic background explanations in a fantasy novel. AI art.
I get suits with fake pockets and AI art, but what's wrong with economic background explanations in fantasy novels? How people would behave differently if magic was real, and how this would affect the economy, seem like fun ideas worth exploring. Even in narratives with fantasy worlds, the people in them are generally still supposed to behave like people, which means they will engage in economic activity occasionally. I know there are some fantasy stories that work on pure dream logic and aren't supposed to address any of that, but not all fantasy is like that.
I assume Vitor is talking about fantasy novels whose economics are pretty well established to be nonsensical / impossible like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter?
Exactly. Actual alternative economies are interesting. Handwaving the issue away because it's not the focus of the story is passable. Central plot elements that are completely implausible are major immersion breakers.
Where I live we have 'Tuscan' houses - all the same colour, all 3-story 2-brick cubes tarted up with fake terracotta tiles and overhangs that are too small to keep out sun or keep rain off of windows. The windows themselves are small, so the interiors are dim. The poor insulation and low roof volume mean that they bake in summer and freeze in winter. The houses are built to the limits of their stands, often in clustered complexes, so they huddle together over asphalt and brick paving instead of grass and trees. For decorative flair, they usually have a faux Greek column and lintel over the doorway.
Please find me a sociopolitical theory that explains these monstrosities better than the intersection of "customers have poor taste" and "builders get away with doing as little work as possible".
Totally. Fakeness is the core of this. There will be an element of fakery even with the best new building, if they're following a style from the distant past. Just like a pretty oil painting today. You may, with enough care, recreate the thing exactly, but its creator and context will be very different, making it, in fact, not the same at all. The architect of a gothic palace 400 years ago was working boldly at the edge of what is possible, they were helping invent a tradition. The architect who copies it today is doing something quite different. It could be impressive, some might like it, but a starting point for this debate must be that it is not close to the same thing.
The corollary of this, which I think Scott maybe isn't aware of, is that people can *love* period architecture, but still not want it copied today. (This is me.)
We love it because of what it is, not only how it looks to an unthinking camera.
I dunno about that, stone vs wood seems a pretty huge difference, not one the Greeks tried to conceal? Though this is not something I know about.
There's plenty of old (but not that old) buildings around me in London that make use of Egyptian tombs and architectural features. They're honestly kind of corny to my eye, but they're interesting because they recall a phase of Egyptophilia among wealthy English people in the 18th and 19th centuries. It adds a layer.
> The architect of a gothic palace 400 years ago was working boldly at the edge of what is possible, they were helping invent a tradition.
Try 700-800 years ago. 400 years ago the rage was all Baroque (on the continent) or Tudor style (in England). The only stuff being built in Gothic at that point was repairs or extensions to already existing Gothic structures.
The lapels on most suits could not close even if they had buttons on them. While it does bug me, I dont think it looks bad, I usually cant even tell. Neither is it "deeply postmodern", they started doing that before WWI. A lot of ornamentation are remnants of functional elements.
As a resident of the inner bay area, I find it hard to get worked up over McMansions. Let's take it for granted that they're boring and fake-looking and have aesthetically-displeasing architectural features and maybe were built cheaply. It's still housing that was actually built; and the alternative is living in an 80 year old shitty house with shitty insulation that costs as much or more than the McMansion because the inner bay area has been NIMBYist for decades and there's way too much demand chasing way too little housing stock.
The place I currently live in was built shortly after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and has no insulation or central heating. I will happily take a McMansion over this.
I privately label the thing you're describing as dishonest design, adding non-functional elements which are supposed to evoke a superior product: pocket slits that aren't pockets, a suburban house with vinyl on three sides and brick on one, cheap plastic accent shutters, etc. AI-generated images are full of this crap, cargo cult imitations of functional objects.
McMansions are also full of wasted space. Instead of having 23 useful rooms with different functions for entertaining, servants, guests, etc. they have 10 over-sized spaces and you need to put your home office in the guest room and double bunk your kids. Master bedrooms with enough space to change clothes comfortably, but then also a walk-in closet with enough space to do the same, and a transition space between them and the bathroom that is just as big.
This definitely cuts to the heart of it for me. Functionally, a McMansion is a house for people who only *need* a normal house's worth of space but pay for more anyway and then have to figure out what to do with it. And the aesthetics of the McMansion follow suit: the basic shape and structure of a normal house, plus a bunch of unplanned and unnecessary add-ons jutting out in every direction.
This article doesn't really contradict my point? The thing is, physical constraints of old create a design language. When that language is applied consistently but with modern materials, the result falls into my category 2, which is ok (but not my preference).
There are also degrees of non-functionality. A column that's *redundant* because the roof it holds up is already supported (but which is in a roughly correct place for supporting the roof), vs a column that's *useless* because its location makes it unable to support anything. The former might be "structurally dishonest" in the sense of the article you linked, but it's still honest compared to the latter.
(Lots of interesting side points to be made here. What about a column that's *inefficient* because it could have been replaced by something cheaper? What about a pavilion that was built to satisfy the owner's need for columns, rather than the other way around.)
I don't know the exact term for this in architecture, but I indeed prefer "form follows function" kind of design. When I think of beautiful brick buildings, I think of catenary arches and catalan vaulting. These can be found both in vernacular architecture and very modern designs. I don't particularly like things like the second-to-last photo of the article (Brno, Czechia), but I don't write internet rants about it either.
Sorry, I still find it hard to understand where the dislike of this comes from. It feels like being angry about having a tree in the garden if it's not a fruit tree. Some things are just there to be beautiful.
(though I admit I can't picture the kind of shutters you're talking about, and don't know enough about architecture to know which columns aren't supporting a building. Maybe if it were something obviously unusable, like a window leading to a brick wall so that it was impossible to see out of it, I'd have stronger opinions - though when I try to picture this now, I'm not finding it especially aversive)
My take, as someone that agrees with pretty much everything Vitor writes above, is that McMansions aren't like a garden of non-fruit-bearing trees, they're like a garden of fake, plastic trees.
Why do I dislike fake plants? Because they're fake...it's a subjective preference, but one I don't think is that uncommon.
I wonder if not being bothered by too-small shutters comes from never using shutters? I imagine you'd notice details like that if you use them every day. Like coming across a workshop where the tools are all proportioned wrong, it would just immediately feel "off".
This is all about aesthetics, so the best shot at explaining is just gesturing at adjacent phenomena:
* Occam's razor
* Mathematical elegance. There's a deep desire for simple statements with profound implications being supported by short, elegant proofs that intuitively hint at a reason why things *must* be so. Correct but clunky proofs are just... ugh in the same way as a roof that doesn't leak but also fails to be as roofy as it could be.
* Chocolate statues. The idea sounds great, until you realize that the kind of chocolate that has the requisite structural integrity isn't actually good to eat. Same with elaborately carved cakes that consist 80% of icing. The cakeness has been sacrificed in favor of the decoration.
* A card game or video game that devotes 80% of its presentation to some mechanic, but competitive play is all about the other 20%. Magic: the gathering is nominally about creatures smashing each other in the face, supported by cool spells. The card sets have dizzying arrays of interesting creatures with all sort of abilities and statlines. But at various points of its history, competitive strategies were all about land destruction (cheap, generic resource denial) and counterspells, which aimed to minimize interactions with the opponent and prevent them from ever having a creature in play at all.
Scott, as an experienced writer, you probably have a fairly refined taste in books. You might enjoy poetry or Franz Kafka or whatever, while most people would rather read something like Harry Potter. I bet most experienced writers prefer books similar to you, and I don't think that's because of social pressure or brainwashing or whatever. People who have a lot of experience with literature simply end up noticing and preferring different things from amateurs (and even amateurs graduate from children's books to Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings to 1984 to ... over time). Why wouldn't the same principles apply to architecture?
You might also be able to notice subtle flaws in writing that most people won't care about. I probably made you cringe by using the phrase "or whatever" twice in a short paragraph. I heard JK Rowling being criticized for using too many adverbs, which I never noticed and can't bring myself to care about even when pointed out. These would be the equivalents of weirdly spaced McMansion windows, I guess.
Some people perceive the world with mechanical interactions shading the visual; I've known several mechanical engineers and machinists like this, and I have a bit of it when it comes to mechanical linkages. If I see a static image of a set of 3-4 metal bars hooked together, I'll also "see" all the bars move slightly as though one had rotated one a degree or two, and the rest followed appropriately.
Artistic representations that break linkage movement in subtle ways is off-putting to me in much the same way that a picture of someone with slight lazy-eye is off-putting. My brain expects something it's not seeing.
I wonder if Vitor has a similar sense for architecture. His description of hating shutters that can't possibly "do the shutter thing" and pillars that can't possibly "do the pillar thing" reminds me of how linkages that can't do the linkage thing bother me.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong actually with faking materials or structure. This irritates me immensely in discussions of Gothic architecture, which some modernists praise as an example of "strucutral honesty" (while never building anything like it). In fact this is a common misconception, which I wrote about on DSL: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,10128.msg435326.html#msg435326
Oh Vitor I completely agree. I don’t know why I care so much about that, but it wasn’t something I was taught. I used to make jewelry as a hobby, and look for hours at pictures of wonderful pieces done by others, and the thing I most admired was clasps that were both ornamental and functional, with the ornament being essential to the functionality. A simple example would be a flower shape that was the “button” that slipped thru a “buttonhole” of leaves, but there are many more
While I hate the outside and the weirdly cramped entrance, each room looks more or less fine to me in isolation. I really don't care about "inexplicable ceiling details", or the funny internal columns, or the big stovetop, or the fact that the residents can sit down in the bathroom.
I think this is a perfect case in point - that looks quite nice to me, if perhaps a bit overdone for my tastes. Whereas most (but not all) brutalist buildings are horrifically ugly.
Sorry, but isn't this exactly what Scott is talking about, but with black arrows instead of red? I mean this in the nicest way: you might be in the 1% of the population that is trained to notice.
So the person with different tastes to you has been 'trained' but the natural human reaction is to like that house? I feel this attitude is verging on unfair to people with different tastes, unfair to snobs even! They have been brainwashed and are looking down on the common man's mcmansion whereas the common man's tastes are authentic and his hatred of the snob's preference for aesthetic simplicity is just uncorrupted human nature.
Scott's argument, as I understand it, is that insular communities of credentialed people, in fields and contexts where reality doesn't mug you for making mistakes, can in principle wind up with arbitrarily stupid consensus beliefs. So "random people tend to like this" is stronger evidence that something is good than "the credentialed people who all trained at the same academies tend to like this", because conformism is available as an alternative explanation for the latter but not the former. There are still arguments that can be made, in particular cases, for why the credentialed people are right and the untrained randos are wrong, but you have to *actually make those arguments*, you can't just appeal to ostensible-expert consensus and expect deference on that basis.
(This is all assuming at least a weak form of aesthetic realism, of course.)
To me the signalling argument works equally well for the untrained randos. They want to feel like they're living in opulent palaces. They want to discount the expert view because it contradicts their communities' perception that their McMansions are in good taste. Their preferences have also been trained into them by fantasies of status, acceptance and plenty, such as in fairytale books, traditional ideas of where rulers live, fantasy novels, biscuit tin artwork etc.
And what is the training we are talking about that causes elites to like some modern architectural styles? Is it only naked status games in architecture academies? I doubt it. It's also bound to include non-architects going to modern art galleries, watching sci-fi movies, seeing and appreciating functional design in other spheres such as in digital interfaces, or meditating and feeling that they see to the heart of things when the extraneous is removed and purpose is crystallised.
But even if some elite's preferences *are* – unbeknownst to them – somehow more a result of signalling than a rando's preferences are, what exactly could they do about it and why exactly should they care? (As you say, here we get into whether and in what form aesthetic realism is true.)
I don’t know if the pejorative tone you interpret from “trained” was intended. It certainly isn’t necessary for the broader argument.
Stipulate that the 1% of people with more training are also objectively correct about what is a “better” building, aesthetically.
It’s still the case that aesthetics preferred by 1% of the population shouldn’t be used as a guide for architecture generally.
I’m entirely willing to believe that there is some objective metric by which certain complex forms of heavy metal are the best music. Maybe all the worlds top musicologists agree. That still doesn’t mean you should start using heavy metal as the elevator music in all government buildings if most people dislike it.
Okay, we can put aside the word 'training'. I guess I have a couple of thoughts on the rest.
(1) Is it really the case that 99% of people's preferences in architecture are being ignored? Seems pretty unlikely to me. Even if it were true that 99% of people on average prefer old buildings, that's massively different than 99% of people wanting new buildings to be built to look like old buildings. TBH I personally think the absolute best and most important buildings are mostly old. But I don't see any logical path from there to thinking we should build new buildings that appear superficially similar, even if we could. And I don't think it's particularly likely the market would ignore this overwhelming level of preference, even if there is some kind of signalling-based distortion going on.
(2) If it turns out heavy metal is the best type of music, it would probably be because those who've learned to appreciate it are getting more pleasure or value from it than others are getting from inferior forms of music. In which case, maybe it actually would be good to encourage the appreciation of heavy metal, teach it in schools, play it in government buildings etc. It'd be doing people a favour in the long term, assuming they could come to share the appreciation that metalheads have.
(If taste is not that plastic, and most people cannot successfully acculturate themselves to enjoying either heavy metal or modern architecture, then I would back down from this point, but I suspect with the passing of time, in the case of architecture at least, we'll see certain modern buildings will come to be loved by more and more people and they will join the canon, while other examples will fall by the wayside. People today actually seem to like the Eiffel Tower for example, which most Parisians thought was extremely ugly at first.)
Give someone a chile to eat and they won't. Cook edible food with chiles and the natural reaction is to be unable to eat the food. Children have to be told that hot food is desirable, or that avoiding it is unmanly, and acclimate themselves to eating it.
Once this has happened, the preference is there; if you're omniscient, the historical record will show me ordering and eating food prepared in big piles of chiles, alone in my apartment where no one will ever know.
But the fact that you can train a different reaction into someone does nothing to discredit the idea that there's a natural reaction and an indoctrinated one.
Right but there's a valence to describing that as natural vs indoctrinated (rather than e.g. childish vs cultivated) that seems to take a side, as well as imply there's some deliberate and possibly nefarious process going on. You can very well discover a love for chile (e.g. by trying it as an adult to see what the fuss is about) without a parent deliberately causing it to happen. Similarly you can discover a love for modernist architecture without being led to it by some architecture professor. You can go out in culture for yourself, and find yourself liking it; millions do. (I am not even sure that kids always move from liking classical architecture to liking modernism later, in the way that I suppose they do from liking bland food to liking chile later.)
I'm not trained at all, I'm barely educated in fact. But when even properly decorated mansions are generally uncomfortable to be in, looking at that is just... It's like that trope in horror media where you see someone in the distance acting strangely, and it becomes increasingly clear that they're just a corpse being puppeted by something else.
I can see how someone would find it garish from the outside, though I'm indifferent. But I have never found McMansions uncomfortable on the inside. I live in a tight but expensive house in an HCOL area, when I go to a relative's McMansion I'm always amazed.
If you think genuinely disliking that is 1% of people with training only you are not calibrated I think. I know nothing of architecture, but those pictures are hideous. I would be remodeling the hell out of that if I had to live there.
In a vacuum, every individual is representative of the whole population. I wouldn't care, Scott wouldn't care, you would care, anomie would care. I could grasp for broader studies or polls on the subject, I'm sure they exist, but regardless it's obviously not the case that these buildings are obviously hideous
Most people like mcmansions. That's why they keep getting built. They have some real flaws - heating and cooling bills are ruinous - but the aesthetics are not, to the vast majority of people, one of them.
The people who buy houses live in those houses. There is no principal-agent problem. They would not be built if there was not a market for them, and there would not be a market for them if people didn't like them, or at minimum tolerate them enough to let their preference for appealing to what they think *other people* like enough to overwhelm their own preferences. This is not true for office buildings and most other Brutalism.
This suggests that any coop-owned company which gets a new headquarters built will pick something substantially less Brutalist than average. I don't know whether this is true, but I will predict that it is.
This still just feels like snobbery. Your brain gets outraged that all this fancy stuff is owned by low class people who lack the cultural context to know how to use fancy stuff appropriately. They've just gone and bought a bunch of "fancy"-coded stuff and put it all together in an incoherent mishmash. Why can't low class people conform to the expectations of their betters?
I'm a snob too, but I'm honest about it and aware that it's not a healthy impulse.
I said this in another comment but if it is unhealthy for snobs to dislike the mish mash, is it also unhealthy for the regular person to dislike the bold modern buildings downtown?
It is unvarnished snobbery. One of the McMansion Hell blogger’s put-downs is, “we want to be Vanderbilt coded but we make regional car dealership money.” I don’t know how much plainer they can make the classism.
True. I have read a ton of that blog over the years and she is extremely snobby and proud of it. She talks about how poor she is in every single post. I think she hates and envies people who know 98.5% less about architecture than her but have the $$$ to own a large home. She certainly considers herself far more sophisticated than McMansion owners, which is probably true by many definitions of sophisticated. Paul Fussell would probably call her Class X or at least a X-wannabe.
TBH this just makes you sound unhinged. Like that house looks fine. Relax. If this is all that it takes to drive you to suicide then you probably have some pre-existing issues.
They should try that experiment with the man who runs that blog. It would save the world from their constant pointless snobbery that dwells entirely on being the Stop Having Fun Guy and refusing to ever let people enjoy themselves or have nice things. There are problems with mcmansions and he never discusses any of them, just mocks things that are utterly harmless and often look legitimately pretty good.
Yeah, uh, I disagree. Many complaints about McMansions are real.
Classical, Renaissance, Baroque, neo-Classical, Empire all had artistic standards and ideals of beauty. When (as Wolfe writes) the academies abandoned old models and practice of hours of inking and rendering Renaissance buildings, these were real things thrown into dustbin of history, and the act had a real consequence: architects were no longer trained how to produce art following the classical ideals.
The problem with bad kind of McMansion is that there are random pilasters and windows placed in a way that obviously does not follow the classical-/classically inspired principles, and the end result often looks jarring. Wrong, somehow. If you have an eye for patterns and have looked at enough of old buildings drawn in classical tradition, the McMansions not following the rules often jump out, which is interpreted as bit cheap, or "premium mediocre" a best, like a McDonalds restaurant. People with classical architecture training can even call out the parts that jump out, but for regular people it can be more like a feeling.
Afterthought: Perhaps the feels just aren't there for the Americans who grow up in American suburbia. I can imagine that for a such person, McMansions are perfectly usual houses that signal nothing but affluence required to build or buy them. For an outsider, the worst offenders can look pretty weird mashups of traditional Western styles (edit. and the McD).
> here are random pilasters and windows placed in a way that obviously does not follow the classical-/classically inspired principles
JOOI, what happens to these sentiments when considering, say, an average British stately home that's been around for a couple of centuries, has been changed and extended many many times over its existence, and has ended up being a mishmash of whatever the prevailing style was when each part was built? Do people stick to their guns, or do we end up at some variant of "this one is OK because it's tasteful old money not tasteless nouveau riche"?
Perhaps Scott could do another challenge like the AI art one - "McMansion or National Trust estate?"
The best architecture today is that which appreciates old and new, like the king's cross development in London that retains old industrial facades and gas rings but also features bold modern structures, underpasses, etc. All you need to avoid a mish mash is care and effort. The problem with the clash of styles in a (bad) mcmansion is that they are unplanned and uncaring.
My father and I went on a trip to Italy a couple of decades ago. While there we saw one church which had four sides. Each side was in a different style, as it was rebuilt and extended over centuries.
I wish I could remember where it was.
It looked...okay, though when you looked at it from a corner the disparate elements could be jarring.
With a McMansion, you really only get the front side to express things with (or at least that's the only side that gets photographed).
Putting all the elements expressed in that church on one side would take some work to make it look good.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with 'premium mediocre'. It is a term created to launder snobbery and cast a perfectly reasonable and normal preference as a vice. Rao is a talentless hack.
That McDonalds looks better than most award winning buildings, even with the penalties for the corporate colours and logos. Put some classy old signage in its place that's colour works with the bricks and job done.
Red brick and grey slate roof is *very* common here in the UK, though usually the brick is a darker shade and its a classical style that predates giant windows that size.
The two examples show that Modernist (as opposed to Postmodernist) and McMansion styles have the opposite problems.
The McMansions are just "we built a funny-shaped box and tacked some random decorations on." The reason they look ugly (and most of the website's examples do look ugly) is partly that there are too many large features cramped into a small space, and partly that none of those features match each other or look nice together. Imagine The Scream, but with the Mona Lisa's face instead of the scream face and with the Fighting Temeraire being pulled along in the background.
The (better*) Modernist buildings don't have these problems, have a unified style and are very well-proportioned. Taking "Brick Cave," it looks coherent, everything's the right size and in the right place. The same applies to Boston City Hall.
The Hegelian synthesis is of course to take the Modernist approach to coherence and proportion (which isn't, strictly speaking, Modern) and build them out of elements which are individually aesthetically pleasing. Postmodernism has abandoned both, which at least makes it look interesting the first time you see it.
*Most Modernist buildings aren't even trying to be good, but are very very cheap (eg. type "British tower block" into Google Images). Where the goal is to spend the absolute bare minimum to warehouse workers/residents you don't care about, you can achieve amazing things with modern architecture.
They look nice to pass by, look at once, and think "You can DO that to a building?? Huh." But imagine living in one, does it not fill you with horror? Like the one where the stairs have no railings, imagine you just want to get up and down as quickly as possible (sometimes in the dark) but without actually falling. Now the simplicity of no railings is no longer art to appreciate but a severe design flaw getting in your way.
Most of them look, at worst, mid, but that one is actively oppressive to me. The pretty colors only make it feel like a liminal space, but at least liminal spaces are spaces designed with purpose. The structure is inscrutable and does nothing to convey a coherent purpose
Do you mean the Brick Cave? I like that (at least from the pictures) - and it makes a lot of sense.
Recall this is for a place where cooling is as much of a need as heating is a need in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, say. Recall as well that most of the world sees A/C as an environmentally irresponsible, non-sustainable solution that is more of an acknowledgement of failure - it's good to have it somewhere as a failsafe, but you don't want to depend on it.
So, you need shadow, and you need cooling. Also, you, the person in the house, apparently also want some balconies and some sitting space that is sort of outside. Having a shady courtyard in the dead of summer really helps, both physically and psychologically - everybody in southern Spain, northern Africa, etc., knows that. Clever builders in the past played with what is inside and what is outside: you have spaces that are sort of inside and sort of outside (You don't want to slavishly make a (much) lower-budget version of the Alhambra palaces (McAlhambra?) but why not pick the basic philosophy?)
At the same time, you want a solid, honest build that will last 100 years and then some, and at the same time not be obnoxiously ostentatious (though, to be honest, you may also want to subtly show off a little, though more to readers of architecture magazines than to neighbors or thieves). Good-quality brick throughout sounds good!
My only question about this house is: how does it feel to live in it? What does it look like in reality? Above all, does the passive cooling work?
If all of that works, this seems like a good place. I've been to a tea-house in a somewhat similar climate built a bit like this (by Laurie Baker, whom some architects used to pooh-pooh), though it was much more curvilinear. I thought it was nice.
"Recall as well that most of the world sees A/C as an environmentally irresponsible, non-sustainable solution that is more of an acknowledgement of failure..."
I don't think this is right. China's already over 50% penetration, and they're still quite poor, and the Indian market is growing very rapidly. Assuming they follow the model of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, they'll eventually reach or exceed US levels. If Asia agrees with us, that's most of the world right there.
Well, "people" should perhaps be "people who are starting to think seriously about global warming/carbon footprints and don't live next to a hydro station"; also, "people who think about buildings". Not that I am accusing those who get A/Cs of being unwashed proles: if your building is not built for the heat, an A/C can be a need, what with more frequent heat waves. It can also become a status symbol, in the way that being fat is where there is hunger.
But everybody having A/C, thinking of it as a basic service, and forgetting to use architectural features (e.g. a porch) that are there for a reason? That's an attitude I've seen in places in the US South, not elsewhere. If it has spread, it's a problem.
"Needing AC" might have been a problem in past decades, but nowadays it's cheaper to stick in both AC _and_ enough solar panels to power it than to design your house for thermal efficiency.
The cost of energy on a sunny day is rapidly approaching negative in most places.
"my experience of complaints about McMansions is that people photograph a perfectly lovely house, then draw a bunch of red arrows"
I think most complaints about "McMansions" *are* like this, because the people that make those complaints are trying to mimic the complaints they or other people have made about actually-ugly, poorly-built, and non-functional houses. It's become a ritual whether the building in question really deserves it or not, with no regard for who built it that way and why, or who lives in it and why.
E.g. I personally would hate to live in big houses on tiny lots, but "I need more space and land everywhere in a 100 mile radius costs millions per acre" is a perfectly good reasoning for building that way. And once you start down that route, you need your house to fit in with the neighborhood, but still feel like your own, without breaking the bank. That means you compromise on ideals of style. Some of those compromises are probably mandated by code or regulations for stupid historical reasons.
Sure, true. There can be a style for a "large house in American suburbia", many of which are not actually bad but share the same distinctive look. Then there are the worst examples with the especially weird, especially jarring or funny idiosyncrasies, and they share the same overall style. Some people call the second set of buildings "McMansion"; for others, the whole style is "McMansion", either because they dislike them all, or think the especially bad McMansions are the genre-defining archetypical exemplars.
Sorry but this is a terrible take. Especially once you see what a well designed house looks like.
Mcmansions look horrible, like some poorly trained AI designed them. The definition of Kitsch or maybe more modern /r/ATBGE. And inner design is often terrible too, bedrooms that are way too large, very ugly interior design overall. They are a stereotype of tasteless new money.
Did you hear the echo of your keyboard rippling through your mostly empty poorly designed rapidly depreciating mcmansion while you were typing this comment?
You can always sell it, but too bad that real estate agents have captured regulators and are forcing you to pay 5% each way in America's so called free market system.
So I suppose for now you are stuck in your lifeless cul de sac of slightly different looking poorly designed mcmansions. Maybe if you are bored you can drive for 20 minutes to the nearest place that offers something that can, with a bit of imagination, be called entertainment.
I'll take a McMansion over modernism any day, but I'll take a New Traditional house over a McMansion any day, too. There's a lot of low hanging fruit that would make McMansions better, and yeah I notice this stuff even as an amateur. You can blame capitalism or the upper middle class or whatever like that McMansion Hell blog does, or you can blame the loss of technical skill like you outline in this very post, but it's real.
Really? To me it conjures houses with a lumpy roofs, a proliferation of gables, and ugly stone and brick facades (often poorly constructed). Whether you think it looks bad or not is a matter of taste, but I really dislike them and it limits inventory for me (looking for a big house right now). Consider the houses on this random street for example. https://maps.app.goo.gl/uh6HCCXrgRDWQ9dC6?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy.
I have long thought that McMansion mockery is just status anxiety dressed up as architectural criticism.
That said, I will grant that there are definitely some ugly McMansions out there, albeit for me it's the ones that seem to be about 80% roof from the outside because they decided to go all in on the vaulted ceilings.
My experience of complaints about McMansions is that it's supposed to be sinful that the house fills most of the lot, to the exclusion of a front yard, as if you lived on the lawn in front of your house as opposed to living inside the house.
A striking parallel to today's state of AI, no? If you ask ChatGPT et al. for a scientific paper on topic X, the system will dutifully provide one, and most people couldn't tell it from the real thing. Never mind that the paper will say mostly nonsense, and invent citations from scratch. Close enough!
"Stanford misinformation expert admits to ChatGPT ‘hallucinations’ in court statement"
Sure, maybe in the far future AI can build a house according to the owner's specifications alone, while also adhering to any and all legal requirements. But as of today and the foreseeable future, I wouldn't let AI design anything more important than my doormat.
I agree that most of these houses seem fine. But I also agree with the author that the examples cited that are better executed using his alleged rules are in fact generally better. And these are traditional styles so nothing about modernism.
Those pictures may be cherry picked, but it would also be consistent with the above. If modernism has devoured the academy than there may be less skill to go around in traditional styles. If there were more skill the houses would look better than fine.
I don't have any expertise in architecture at all, but I would say it also struck me while reading that this criticism is out of date. Look at any modern city skyline, and the ugliest towers are probably from the '70s or '80s. I find that most more recent buildings have adequately corrected against many of the excesses of modernism.
Thanks for this! Time travel to ‘81 is always fun. I remember thinking at the time that TW treated Venturi with greater respect, even admiration, but maybe he was being sarcastic and I just missed it. Paul Goldberger, the NYT architecture critic back then, wrote that TW “has a great ear, but not much of an eye.” Ha! Pleasure to read your piece. I’ll read it again tmro for other things I may have missed. 👍
Well said! Scientists know far better than the rest of the population just how much they’re faking. We should take them at their word, since they’re such experts.
Maybe at least part of the distinction is "hard science in academia" against "hard science in private industry." You can write research papers in academia without knowing anything useful, but most private employers want tangible results.
Big problem with hard science in private industry is they can't piss off their paymasters--pharmaceutical company scientists won't release negative results on drugs for instance.
The point of academia used to be to avoid that sort of thing and fund research without immediately practical applications. Unfortunately with the left-wing takeover reaching the hard sciences, you can't even rely on academic hard scientists to be objective anymore.
The nice thing about private industry drugs is that someone expects them to *work* at some point. Even without the FDA, the drugs would be expected to work well and consistently, with limited side effects. That's how drug companies make their money. A drug that doesn't follow all of those things will not make much, or at least as much, money. The profit incentive roughly aligns with making good drugs. Now, the profit incentive also aligns with releasing something that may have long term negative effects, but the FDA doesn't fix that either. Neither does academic research, at least in timelines relevant to making the product and actually finishing the drug.
Some subset of hard scientists are real experts. You can observe their results in the real world via technological progress. Not many other academic fields get that sort of feedback.
Personally, I really like the small number of later 1930s buildings put up by the Works Progress Administration in a sort of Streamline Moderne style: elegantly decorated, but more restrained than 1920s budget-busting Art Deco designs. The Santa Monica City Hall and the San Diego County Building are decorated enough to stay interesting for centuries, but they also don't look like they wasted too much of the taxpayers' money back in the hard times of the 1930s.
My first contact with Streamline Moderne came when I moved to Seattle and started going on road trips around the area.
I met with many dams, bridges, scenic overlooks, and service areas along the highways that sported this style, even if it was something as insignificant as a railing.
Each time was a joy! Somehow it felt unobtrusive yet pleasantly decorative especially set out against the semi-desert environment around it. It felt like a human gesture from the architect and builders towards me, a complete stranger living in a future unfathomable to them.
You go to Florence or Siena, and whether or not it's because these northern Italian towns are run by communists (they all seem to have a Gramsci Street), they have no high-rise, and they are stupendously beautiful. It made me wonder why the hell we all, in the Anglosphere, fell for the ugliness, from the 1930s onwards to this hour. Wolfe at least tells the US part of the story. For the UK, I think some of it was to do with rebuilding after the devastation of German air-raids; some places were still ruins in the 1960s, and cost was no doubt as much a factor as ideology.
The Italians identify themselves foremost as citizens of their town/city, rather than as Italian. Thus there is a lot of civic pride, which makes that even communist city governments want to preserve the beauty of their towns. This in contrast to eg Britain, where civic chauvinism is suspect., thus the wrecking ball.
At least, this is what I read in some Theodore Dalrymple piece. Seems plausible.
I imagine this is a factor. It's very hard to make a skyscraper that doesn't look like a glass and concrete box, because that's basically what that shape demands.
Italian here. You want to see ugly high rise blocks, go check out Milan, or Rome, or Palermo. You'll find plenty. The main reason why you don't see them in those cities is I think that they are SO chock-full of historical buildings you can't just find room in the city centre to build anything like that without destroying some priceless cultural heritage.
But Palermo is a good example of this happening instead, and honestly the reasons here were mostly economic, not ideological or artistic. Basically, the places that were full of crony real estate businessmen often in league with corrupt politicians and organised crime had a lot of knocking down of even very pretty old buildings to replace them with a lot of absolutely ugly cheap apartment blocks. This happened in the 1960s and 1970s mainly so the style of those blocks is what was dominant at the time. But the main driver was money. It's actually interesting and ironic that really, "all ornaments get ditched in the name of building purely functional stuff" is in fact a very Moloch thing to happen and exactly the direction you'd expect capitalism to converge towards - the socialist-inspired architects just happened to be there at the right place and the right time to embody the zeitgeist, seemingly unaware that they were in fact doing the bidding of their sworn enemy.
Thanks, Simone, interesting perspective, and yes, I did think Milan would be a counter-example. Venice's Mestre has plenty of high-rise, too, at a safe distance from all the tourists. And yep, money will always talk.
> ... the architect thought he was “reinventing the idea of light” or something ...
Important point: it's possible for smart people (who've been steeped in a particular subculture) to sincerely believe such a thing and be able to say fancy words about it ... and for it to still be bullshit.
Scott, you have provided many examples of buildings that look too austere, too minimalist and too boxy to your taste. But just to calibrate our perceptions here, could you also provide some examples of buildings that look too "gaudy", too "kitsch" and too "over-ornamented" to your taste? I'm talking, like, evoking the feeling people describe looking at historically-painted roman sculptures. Not trying to make a gotcha, just wondering if different people have different thresholds of austere/normal/gauche.
Conversely, there are a number of Brutalist buildings I rather like, especially if they are surrounded by greenery. (Brazil has some nice brutalist designs that are disappearing back into the forest.)
For example, the brutalist Sunkist Building in Sherman Oaks, now being repurposed from offices to apartments as Citrus Commons, appears to be a lower-budget knockoff of the vastly hated Boston City Hall:
Same upside down human sacrifice platform. But the Sunkist is pleasantly symmetrical and nicely landscaped, so it's been modestly popular for 50 years.
Honestly I feel like pointing to landscaping to say a building's good seems like cheating. Unless the vegetation is literally covering the structure. After all vegetation just looks good on its own
Thank you. From your description, it seems like there's way more room in the "too austere" direction than in the "too tacky" direction for you. For me personally, this style is obviously uncomfortable to look at.
If you're interested to visualize how your style preferences differ from those around you, it might be worth playing with Midjourney's "personalize" option. You rank random pairs of images to teach it what looks good to you, and it infers your personal style and adjusts image generation accordingly. For me, it definitely makes the buildings more stark and less ornamented (since I do enjoy that). Maybe for you they'll be more ornamented and colorful instead.
You seem to like ornamentation a lot. A lot more than I do, even though I agree that a lot of modern architecture is ugly. ("When in doubt, leave it out" is often a pretty good principle).
I don't really dislike those Bauhaus examples you have here. Or the Illinois Institute of Technology building (based on the photos I quite like it, especially for a Institute of Technology). What I dislike is for instance the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall.
(boilerplate all due respect to cultural & religious attitudes, speaking only to personal aesthetic concerns, assume it looks better in person etc.)
major respect for that example, as a signal of intellectual honestly. because that volume of ornamentation reads like visual tinnitus. I would rather live next to... not a whole skyline, but up to a full block of brutalist Jenga prison-hedrons, since at least I can tune those out.
confession that I haven't read the full post yet and would usually hold off on comments. but I've seen enough previous posts on the topic. And those always afflict me with a tiny bit of Gell-Mann amnesia around the premise that Everybody Loves hyper ornamental classic architecture, and only begrudgingly tolerates modernism. Looking forward to the results from the next survey.
Maybe this more of a one-dimensional axis than the supposed variety of architectural styles makes it seem then.
I like modern rectangular buildings full of glass, white wall paper and clean lines. I could not stand to look at that building in real life for long. If I lived near it, I would probably develop a habit of not looking up in that direction.
A standard problem is that when a style emerges, a talented architect will eventually hit the sweet spot of just the right amount and type of decoration. After that, his successors can either copy what he'd done (ho hum), go even more over the top on decoration (overkill), or tone it down (cheap-looking).
Eventually, somebody will stop trying to compete with the classic and come up with a radically different style altogether.
I have seen credible arguments that "historically painted Roman sculptures" actually look awful because they're only cheap renders with bright primary and secondary colours slapped on a bad 3D model. We still have Roman frescoes and I've seen some in person - they're not gaudy, they're not ridiculously and jarringly coloured, they are instead arrestingly beautiful and rich of detail. I would expect a good Roman artist to be just as good at painting on a statue as they were at painting on a wall. Though of course all eras also have their bad artists, and I'm sure those would have produced cheap garbage like they always do.
Wolfe's book "From Bauhaus to Our House" inspired me to write a short history of style changes in golf course architecture: "From Bauhaus to Golf Course:"
Many of the same design trends were visible in golf course architecture. For example, Alister Mackensie's 1929 Cypress Point on the Pacific was the high point of sublime Art Deco golf course design, but his 1932 Augusta National, host of the Masters, co-designed with 30-year-old sophisticate Bobby Jones, was starting to edge toward minimalism and modernism. Then after WWII, Bobby Jones hired Robert Trent Jones to revamp Augusta National and it came out looking even more reminiscent of the Seagram's Building.
This isn't surprising since Augusta National's club members were largely Fortune 500 CEOs, the same people who were commissioning Mies van der Rohe to design their skyscraper headquarters. Postwar CEOs really liked modernist aesthetics.
One problem with modernist architecture was that it was hard to keep sparkly. E.g., flat roofs tend to lead to drip marks down the walls. But Augusta National is organized around the landscaping looking utterly perfect one week of the year (the second week of April in Georgia) for The Masters, and it utterly succeeds at that.
Golf course architecture is an interesting art form. For one reason, left wing ideologies have zero influence on golf course design. And yet, in the 20th Century, golf course architecture styles tended to move in the same general patterns as building architecture styles: e.g., Robert Trent Jones in the 1950s-1960s was designing golf courses in a quasi-Miesian International Style reminiscent of Skidmore-Owings-Merrill's modernist skyscrapers, while Pete Dye in the 1970s was doing postmodernist golf courses kind of like Robert Venturi.
I'm reminded of Paul Johnson's observation that King Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Napoleon all believed public buildings should be neoclassical in style. We are all influenced by our eras in ways that are hard to explain.
Dude, this is your passion project. Do it. Self-publish if you have to--with print on-demand it's not that hard to get a real book. Nobody else cares enough to know anything about golf course architecture, so you will be putting something genuinely new into the world. And enough people play golf at least some of them will appreciate it. Your star is rising now and there hasn't been a backlash to the second Trump administration yet. Up to you whether you want to do it under your real name or try to use a pseudonym so apolitical golf fans can have plausible deniability.
But as I got to know golf design experts, I realized they simply have better brains for it than I do. I can cognitively handle 2-D imagery pretty well, but to be a good golf course critic, much less a good golf course architect, you need extremely strong 3-D skills, which I lack.
Actually, there are tens of thousands of golf course architecture aficionados. Hundreds of illustrated books have been published on the subject over the last 110 years. Bernard Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandson, wrote perhaps the first around 1910.
The weird thing is that the subject of golf course architecture is invisible to people who aren't interested in it. Consider another minor art form: tapestry. A whole lot of people who like paintings aren't interested in tapestries and will hurry past the corner of the art museum displaying a few tapestries. But nobody who is interested in painting will assume that its unique to be interested in tapestries.
Similarly, many people who are interested in building architecture are not interested in landscape architecture. But they generally recognize landscape architecture as an art form, with its own major figures such as Capability Brown. Golf course architecture is a subdivision of landscape architecture. Granted, it's a niche art form. But many people appear surprised that some other people find it worthy of study as an art form at all.
Like a few other commenters here, I aesthetically like Bauhaus and International Style buildings— I think that the aesthetic effect is generally too harsh for housing.
The best minimalist modernist buildings are sublime in the Burke/Kant sense and sort of overwhelm you, but getting overwhelmed at home every day is a bit much.
Similarly, I enthusiastically patronize Rothko exhibits in museums (and worship at the Chapel in Houston on my every visit there) — but I would not even think of displaying a Rothko in my home. The resulting vibes would just be too heavy for everyday contemplation.
Good observation. I was deeply impressed visiting an installation by Olafur Eliasson. That guy has a better claim to "reinventing the idea of light" than most. But his works are explicitly art, meant to be experienced with your full attention on them. Not everyday spaces.
James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism is a much more recent and scholarly polemic on similar lines, with receipts aplenty. (Curl is a distinguished British architect and professor of architecture.)
Came here to recommend this. It's not perfect, but it gets into the historical antecedents and influences on the modernists and the Bauhaus school. I don't think anyone has yet done it for all the later figures like Eisenman or Libeskind.
Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" from 1981 should be read along with his dyspeptic history of post WWII NYC modern painting: "The Painted Word" in 1975.
Also alongside his Bonfires of the Vanities, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He was a curmudgeon hating everything bourgeois and bohemian with any hint of the left before it was cool.
Every time there's one of these "everyone hates modern architecture" posts I try to bring up the beautiful geometric buildings of Saarinen, who could possibly hate Saarinen?
It says a lot that the answer is "all of his contemporaries."
As far as I can tell, none of Saarinen's noted works are residential, and few are even standard office/commercial. Rather they are airport terminals, arenas, and the like - buildings that people enter on rare occasions only. If they had to deal with those buildings and their disorienting curves day in and day out, they would hate it.
l lived in a building designed by him for 2 years and while I didn't hate it I think I would've preferred a building that wasn't designed so intentionally.
Good read. Made me think about what style of architecture would be fitting for a post-scarcity civilization.
Perhaps without scarcity everyone designs their own home in their own wholly unique style, but I rather doubt this would be the case. There will always be cultural elites who drive consumer tastes.
I doubt post-scarcity would look like what we see in popular sci-fi books. Far too kitsch, our cultural overlords would never allow it. I imagine such a style would represent a sort of endpoint of the architectural dialect.
> There will always be cultural elites who drive consumer tastes.
More importantly I think there will always be underlying needs which many people share, combinations of which with limits of engineering create shared optimal solutions. We don't need to constantly radically reinvent the pipe wrench, the umbrella, the hiking boot. Adequate designs become standard, open-source development refines them further.
People designing their own spaces gets you McMansions and MySpace. If people don’t have training in thinking about what they will *actually* like, rather than what they *imagine* they will like, they do much worse than the modernists, like a kid who imagines that if they like chicken nuggets and they like chocolate ice cream, then the best dish must be chicken nuggets smothered in chocolate ice cream.
By their own metric - like the kid who thinks they will like chicken nuggets in chocolate sauce and then eats it and realizes that this combination didn’t work for their own tastes nearly as well as they imagined.
There might be some kid who actually ends up liking this, but there are far more who think they like things, get what they think they want, and then realize that they didn’t want it after all. This is what training in aesthetic appreciation is about - helping you understand what sorts of distinctions people have paid attention to because they are relevant for their own aesthetic appreciation, so that you can be more aware of what you actually want, and not just what you think you want because you lack the vocabulary and imagination to see what it would be like.
I think Pruitt-Igoe is instructive here because what was most destructive and, like, anti-civilzation about it wasn't how little architects cared about what people like to look at so much as how little they cared about how people live. Like, if Pruitt-Igoe had been a really ugly set of modernist concrete row homes with lots of public and commercial spaces, it might still exist.* If it had been a glittering art deco monument to Industria (rendered in bronze as a beautiful nude woman with clockwork wings) criss-crossed with endless blind residential corridors and poorly designed skyways and wide empty vistas you're probably still tearing it down in 20 years.
I think it's worth splitting those two considerations, even though they might flow from the same fundamental disdain for what normal people think, because you can have such different opinions about form and function here.
Like, I have an aesthetic soft spot for a lot of individual brutalist and modernist and pomo buildings—I really want to visit that crazy government complex in Albany sometime—but reasonable people can disagree. (I love examples of basically every kind of architecture I run into, so I'm a cheap aesthetic date. My 100k-population hometown has a classic state capitol, an art deco high-rise, an FLW home, a weird concrete college campus, and some pomo libraries and museums—I love that. I grew up in an early 90s McMansion and I would move back into it in an instant if I could.) A few of my favorite university libraries are from the Big Concrete Fortress era of college architecture, and while we can agree to disagree on the look, one thing the ones I like have in common is that they work really well as libraries.
Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Greene, etc., they happen to be ugly even for their type, but if they were beautiful they would still be a disaster because they do not function as intended. To me that's the real problem with so many of these modernist buildings and superprojects.
* I am intentionally eliding a third consideration, which is that lots of these buildings seemed to fall into disrepair almost immediately and so were 1. ugly 2. nonfunctional as buildings but also 3. impossible to maintain
This is the problem with trying to reinvent stuff that has been developed over millennia from scratch. It usually turns out your ancestors weren't stupid and almost everything they did for those millennia had a purpose.
I don't think it's fair to blame the architects for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. The problems with Pruitt-Igoe were the same problems as in public housing everywhere, just writ particularly large because it was a particularly large public housing development. Bad architecture doesn't cause social problems, bad tenants do.
Could you tinker around the edges to decrease antisocial behaviour slightly? Maybe. But if you're going to build three thousand units of public housing in one place and hand it out for free to the least functional residents of St Louis then it's inevitably going to be a disaster.
Yep, plenty of people in ex-Communist states live in exactly that kind of identical inconvenient blocky eyesores, and those don't usually descend into antisocial hellholes, because predominantly normal people live there, and not just the concentrated underclass.
I don’t think those buildings are equally inconvenient. In particular, those Soviet blocks are usually integrated into the streetscape, rather than set back in these “green spaces” that *sound* like a good idea but make the space more isolating.
Singapore heavily polices anti-social behavior (death penalty for drug trafficking, jail for littering, etc.), which a certain considerable segment of the US population would object to.
It also has very different demographics and culture.
> Bad architecture doesn't cause social problems, bad tenants do.
Dunno, if my house rained inside, had wild temperature swings, and was liable to kill me if I fall on any of its exposed corners, I think that would affect my mood in a way that could cause social problems.
I think "ugly but functional" is definitely way more tolerable. "Dysfunctional but beautiful" probably means you turn it into a museum or something else. But "ugly AND dysfunctional" obviously invites the demolition charges.
When I travel in Eastern Europe, I quietly think to myself that Soviet architecture is a crime against humanity, way worse than Holodomor, and that every time Putin blows up a Kiev apartment building the residents have been sacrificed for an important cause. But of course, reaching that degree of spitefulness just for ugly buildings is way too much to admit to in polite company. Honestly though, that's what I think about when I see Soviet buildings. I had never realized that there is a connection between horrific Soviet architecture and horrific modernist architecture in the US. If the Soviets had just allowed themselves to make beautiful things with the same skill that they put into making rockets, then maybe they could have won the battle for hearts and minds during the Cold War.
Keep in mind that those ugly buildings were also cheap to build and allowed swift rebuilding after WW2, as well as rapid industrialization and urbanization. The people who ended up living in those buildings were coming from adobe sheds in villages or overcrowded conditions, it was actually a massive upgrade for them in many ways. Furthermore they were not so bad at the time as they are today. Being housing for poor(er) people would inevitably lead to them becoming grimy and run-down.
The things is that the rockets were always a small part of the economy. They couldnt have put thats effort into building, anymore than North Korea could give everyone the same shitty car Kim drives.
If "making rockets" is taken as metronymic for the entire Soviet military industry, not just literal rockets, then that was a pretty huge part of the economy as they were trying to match NATO military capability with a much smaller economy. I'm having a hard time finding specific numbers, which doesn't surprise me much given what I know about how the Soviet economy was managed.
Its not metonymic. The soviets had some scientific fields they really focused on and were actually competitive at; they were ahead on rockets for a while. The military stuff at scale was... workable, just like the housing.
Compare early socialist buildings (like Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw or plans for Dworiec Sovietow, or early Nowa Huta in Cracow) with what was build after.
First soviet socialist were strongly pro-modernism, but once Stalin came to power, he was more of a fan of art "closer to people" and during his regime styles were more ornamental and classical. Socialist realism was supposed to be based on classic architecture from the region, like renaissance in Poland, or classicism in Russia. As an example - Buildings S and Z, parts of giant industrial complex built in 1950s (Stalin's orders), based on renaissance (interior was strongly based on Wawel castle architecture) - you can't go more socialism realism then this, and yet it looks nothing like Bauhaus - https://krakowznieba.pl/wp-content/gallery/art_huta-sendzimira/krakow_13-05_DJI_0564-HDR-Panorama.jpg
But there was not enough money. Like, nothing more. It wasn't stylistic choice, just building beautiful, giant buildings when housing crises ended only after fall of USSR would be a political suicide.
Also, on a personal note - some commie blocks are not that bad. A lot of greenery (like, you don't see mediocre buildings most od the year), good infrastructure, parking spaces, connection to the city... Current developments have nothing of it.
In budapest, some of the blocks have people doing different sports painted on them, and they're also painted different colors. One of them has a guy doing hang gliding, another one has a fencer. The paint job probably didn't cost that much, and it's way better than a row of gray blocks. So yeah, I still think it was a stylistic choice, even on a tight budget.
I agree with you about transport and the green spaces around the buildings. All they need is a coat of paint, really!
Krakow always seemed more castle-y to me, I never realized that was a form of socialist realism.
One person who strongly disagreed with the idea that "real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build": Joseph Stalin. While the Stalinist USSR was still building commie-blocks for the masses (because, legitimately, that's the cheapest way to house lots of people and that does matter - the current American situation where construction costs are a secondary concern compared to land/approval costs is not the norm), public buildings had plenty of decoration. Other Eastern Bloc states followed suit.
Unfortunately Khrushchev tossed all this out during destalinisation (something I hadn't actually known - I'd assumed modernism gained influence gradually, as it did elsewhere, but no, it was an official decision that too much decoration was wasteful). The communist states that kept building detailed architecture (and that's really what's missing in [most] modern architecture - detail) were Maoist China and North Korea. I suppose that does say something about sort of person that can hold back general artistic trends. On balance, though, while I do think detail-free architecture was a mistake (at least in situations that aren't just about cost), I'd rather live with boring architecture than with Stalin.
The housing units built under Khruschev (khruschóv in pronunciation) were called Khruschevki (khruschóvki); they were sometimes referred to by residents and others as truschevki (truschóvki in pronunciation), where truschóba means 'thicket; boondocks; slums', from trukhá 'dust, flakes; rubbish'.
Shouldn't that be something more like "hrushoff"? It isn't even possible for a Russian word to end in [v], and the "kh" is an accommodation to French, not to English.
Yes, I was indicating the pronunciation of the e in "Khruschev," which is just a direct transcription of the Russian spelling. The IPA you've given is odd; more accurate I think would be this: [xrʊˈɕːof]. (The older pronunciation of Щ as [ɕtɕ] is also possible.) The o is stressed, so it wouldn't be reduced to something like [ɵ]; and instead of [ʊ], [u] is possible since unstressed u doesn't reduce much.
If you transcribe a difference between e and ё, then you would write <yo>. However, ё is not generally used in normal Russian prose, and English follows this in transcribing Russian proper nouns; as Wikipedia states, "Except for a brief period after World War II, the use of ⟨ё⟩ was never obligatory in standard Russian orthography. By and large, it is used only in dictionaries and in pedagogical literature intended for children and students of Russian as a second language. Otherwise, ⟨е⟩ is used, and ⟨ё⟩ occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity (such as to distinguish between все ("everybody") and всё ("everything") when it is not obvious from the context) or in words (principally proper nouns) whose pronunciation may not be familiar to the reader." And as I stated above, this is followed in English transcriptions: We write Khruschev, Potemkin, and Pugachev(a), not Khruschyov, Potyomkin (Dimitri Tiomkin is an example of a fellow who did transcribe his name that way; it has the same root as Potemkin), and Pugachyov(a). (Note that in Russian phonology, there would be no need to write the y in Khruschov and Pugachov(a) in any case, as there is no longer a phonemic contrast of yV and V after (s)ch, though one did exist a few centuries ago that still manifests in the orthography, as in truschoba.) You might also keep in mind that I was discussing just enough of the spelling to make the Russian play on sounds clear to someone not familiar with Russian orthography; I was not writing a whole essay on Russian phonology and phonetics (which I have done). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(Cyrillic)
> And you will note that this is followed in English transcriptions. We write Khruschev and Potemkin, not Khruschyov and Potyomkin.
Perhaps, but my sense of English transcriptions of Russian is that they're not done in any systematic way. Sometimes you see Yekaterina; sometimes you see Ekaterina. We always write nyet and never net, but except for that a bare "e" is a lot more common than "ye". I've had different music rippers automatically fill in "Petr" and "Pyotr" ("Piotr"?) for the composer information on the same CDs. St. Petersburg has a card called "Potjomkin's Village". ( https://cf.geekdo-images.com/zqaOOryHYOr5zlun0laAGA__imagepagezoom/img/PxI--xa8RIDYFz0FNhqbpQyNAGA=/fit-in/1200x900/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic1177938.jpg ; in blue - they're also nice enough to say "Peterhof". ) If I see an English transcription of a Russian word, I generally have no idea how the Russian word was supposed to be pronounced or spelled, because the handling of various types of "e" is so catastrophic.
So I tend to feel that the English spellings aren't good evidence of anything.
> Note that in Russian phonology, there would be no need to write the y in Khruschov and Pugachov(a) in any case, as there is no longer a phonemic contrast of yV and V after (s)ch, though one did exist a few centuries ago that still manifests in the orthography, as in truschoba.
That is something I was wondering about. For a transcription, though, if the difference exists in the script, it seems like you'd want it in the transcription too. If we don't want to know what the Russian spelling is, why in the world did we switch from -ff to -v?
> You might also keep in mind that I was discussing just enough of the spelling to make the Russian play on sounds clear to someone not familiar with Russian orthography; I was not writing a whole essay on Russian phonology and phonetics
But the Russian phonology and phonetics is what I want to know about.
If you'll take an almost entirely unrelated question, my family lore says that an ancestor was a Russian admiral around the time of the revolution, and the name survived into the United States as "Klikoff", which is held to be a transcription of some sort of dubious quality. I'd be interested in how I might go about trying to look that ancestor up.
Khrushchev actually cared about bringing most of the population of the CCCP up to (lower-)middle-class rich(-ish) country standards of living (as they were in the 50s) ASAP - a good goal. That people soon started complaining is due in part to the fact that he pretty much succeeded.
> I'd rather live with boring architecture than with Stalin
The solution to this dilemma is to travel back in time to persuade Stalin of the merits of modernism, so that Khrushchev could then perform his necessary act of breaking continuity with the past by adopting the Socialist Baroque as a new aesthetic.
Whenever I look at buildings built after like, 1800, in whatever style, deeply and evaluatively- really think about them critically- I usually find I don't like them. That includes traditional, modernist and postmodernist buildings. Sometimes I think I just don't like buildings.
What specifically anti-inspired Ayn Rand were the sort old "old-fashioned" ornamentalist architects that also repelled the Bauhausians, as I wrote some years ago: https://www.ahponen.fi/p/book-review-fountainhead
I'm not sure if Rand ever directly commented on the Bauhaus movement (though at least Le Corbusier adored Rand, according to my sources), but her architectural vision was not all that different from what Bauhaus supported, especially the idea of an architect as an auteur who does what he wants (up to the point of blowing up a building, famously!) and does not care what the benighted normies think. I continue to be convinced that Rand, directly, plays at least in some role in the commonness of this idea among architects, one of the great sources of all the visual monstrosities that are generally associated with modern architecture.
Sure, it was Frank Lloyd Wright who was Rand's inspiration, everyone knows that, but still... if one went by descriptions Rand gives for Roark's buildings and imagined them in real life (like here: https://x.com/studiotstella/status/861340128429649922/photo/1), wouldn't they be specifically the sort of a thing featured in all the "look at what eyesores architects are designing now" lists one can think of?
Isn’t the point of the Fountainhead that the “normies”, precisely, do not think, but that they do one of the following:
1) reflect the consensus of the times and their friends’ opinion (themselves a reflection of their environment),
2) imitate the beauty canons of the past even when they do not make sense (say, comfort-wise, location-wise, or even with respect to the constraints that this canon aimed at solving), precisely at the expense of creating anything genuinely original?
Yes, which is what makes it interesting that Howard Roark's (and presumably Ayn Rand's) heroically individualist views on architecture turn out to be pretty indistinguishable from the most fashionable ideas of the time.
It's been about 30 years since I tried to read Fountainhead, but I also thought about that reading this post. I seemed to recall that Roark's buildings were described as being unornamented and having forms that seemed both striking and natural. And the similarities between that and Bauhaus-style modern architecture seem ironic given that the political philosophies associated with each are so radically opposed to one another.
Well, not that radically opposed. Neither the Bauhausians and Rand loved tradition, both shared a secular progress-centred worldview - their ideas of what progress meant and how it would be achieved simply differed.
It's sort of like a Dark Fountainhead, where instead of Roark rejecting conventional architectural ideas and the views of the public and other architects to bring about the telos of steel/concrete/glass as construction materials, he decides to make intentionally stripped down buildings as some sort of communist crusade.
As much as people tend to see a lot more building exteriors than interiors, the latter are ultimately more important. The broad field of usability is more important than it's narrow subset of ascetics. This article suffers a bit from having relatively few references to how horrible International Style buildings often are to live and work in.
Also, ornamentation not only costs more to build, but also usually costs a lot more to maintain. On one hand, the extra work involved can employ many members of the proletariat (as mentioned). Just about anything involving more manual labour than is strictly necessary is a form of wealth redistribution.
I think another factor worth considering is the rise of the television, computer and smartphone. Who cares what buildings look like when you're generally ignoring them? While people generally weren't looking at screens when walking past buildings in 1981, today people are increasing not looking at buildings much at any time. Except perhaps on Instagram.
Some video games have very nice looking architecture. FROMSoft in particular has been very consistent with its high quality and variety of the environments in their games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZenOn7WUo
The exterior of the Lewis Thomas Laboratory at Princeton was designed by Venturi; the interior was designed by a firm specializing in laboratory buildings. The rumor I heard while there is that the scientists who were to work in the building insisted upon having the interior designed by someone competent at interiors. Having worked in a residential dining hall designed (badly) by Venturi, I would say that if true, they were smart in insisting upon it. Also, I do not know how common this was, but I did hear the laboratory referred to as the "Purina Dog Chow Factory" because of the patterns on the walls. https://www.princetonianamuseum.org/artifact/5af857d9-4e7d-455d-88d5-37836864fd2b
The Royal Ontario Museum's notorious "crystal" addition was soon found unfit for purpose. For one, the original all-glass design would let in too much UV light that would damage the artefacts, so most of it had to be covered in metal sheets. Secondly, there isn't a single right-angle in the whole structure, which looks cool at first but made it very difficult to design the exhibits inside. Most Torontonians hated the damn thing.
The exteriors are harder to change than the interiors. And they are experienced by anyone walking or driving by, which is more than the number of people who even see the interior, let alone have to spend lots of time there.
It depends on the interior. A nice rectangular unornamented interior is easy to reuse in many different ways. But a highly ornate and theoretical interior you are stuck using in the way the architect imagined.
Although more people see the exterior, it has much less effect on their lives, even when summer over all the people that go by, than the interior has on the people that use it (unless you are talking about a building on a very busy street in a major city, with relatively few users).
Tom Wolfe had his protege Michael Lewis, another upper middle class Southern journalist, read through his letters home to his parents. Lewis reported that as an undergraduate at conservative Washington and Lee college, Wolfe was kind of a dull boy. He happily fit in socially as a fraternity boy and sports editor of the college newspaper. But he didn't have much to say in this congenial Southern gentry environment.
But then Wolfe arrived at liberal Yale in New Haven for his Ph.D. in American studies, and suddenly his satiric genius appears in his letters home. Lewis describes Wolfe's entire titanic career as largely motivated by the desire for literary vengeance upon the Dam' Yankees for winning at Gettysburg (where a couple of Wolfe's kin were killed in Pickett's Charge).
I imagine he was provoked when he moved to Yale, as the environment would have been both very self-satisfied and also would look down on any Southerners.
He was probably used to being "on top". Being looked down on would either discourage or motivate you.
I am simplifying a good bit here because brevity improves my communication skills.
There is a type of person who likes watching 'escapist' movies. They have a long day, at work or with their spouse or family or whatever, and they want to unwind. They want to watch something well-written, entertaining, with compelling characters, that ultimately ends an upbeat note. The idea is to temporarily 'escape' from their stressors: to be put in this mental incubator where they can feel good things and avoid thinking about their problems for a few hours.
There is another type of person who likes watching cathartic movies. They have a long day, at work or with their spouse or family or whatever, and instead of wanting to unwind, they want to watch movies that validate and recreate the emotional dynamics behind their problems. Maybe they have a history of tumultuous romantic relationships and want to watch a movie about a really bad breakup. Maybe they have a sucky job and they want to watch something that depicts that. The aim here is emotional catharsis: seeing the thing you struggle with recreated in a movie provides social validation towards the struggles you are going through (in the same way venting to a friend does), and it also might help you understand some of those dynamics a little more fully.
I am generally in the latter camp. I like postmodern architecture, because to me it accurately mirrors how modern life feels to me a lot of the time. However, I don't actually have a moral argument for why my type of aesthetic appreciation is superior to people in the escapist category.
The synthesis, of course, is a film about the struggle of a cop (escapist) against his bureaucratic superiors who “have no idea what it’s like out there; who can’t see the streets from behind that desk” (cathartic).
People with cathartic tastes tend to lean left and people with escapist tastes tend to lean right, I suspect. That's why everyone in the media thinks the cathartic tastes are superior.
You see it with genre fiction, which went woke a lot later than literary.
It is interesting that genre fell as well. Both the early Soviet and American sci-fi were optimistic, if not exactly escapist. I suppose that sort of optimism has run out these days, basically no trend-setters think that technological progress is straightforwardly good and achievable, the right by and large looks backwards for a mostly imaginary golden age, while the left looks for different mostly imaginary kinds of progress.
I've been reading the Weber/Holo Gordian novels, and was just thinking how weird it is to have a sci-fi setting where the premise is "the future turned out all right, actually." SysGov doesn't have a dark secret; it's just straightforwardly a nice place to live!
This is a really eye-opening comment for me. The way I interact with narrative is important to my sense of self and expression, and I've spent much of my life confused and alienated by the things other people enjoy. This framing will legitimately change my worldview in a non-trivial way.
I don't have anything substantial to add, I just thought you should know.
Interesting. By the same argument, the "escapist" camp should like traditional architecture.
My estimate is that in general, most people prefer "escapist" movies, and most people prefer traditional architecture. No idea if it's precisely the same people.
I wonder if the reason stories about superheroes with secret identities are so enduringly popular is the way that they are able to combine escapism and catharsis. Spider-Man swings through the city battling criminals and goes into space with the Avengers, but at the end of the day he has to return to his identity as Peter Parker and deal with his jerk boss, paying the rent, and romantic troubles (or, in earlier iterations, deal with doing homework and the school bully).
They can also combine catharsis and escapism in interesting ways: Mr. Miracle tries to build a peaceful life in the American suburbs after escaping from a traumatizing and abusive childhood (catharsis). Occasionally one of the evil gods from the planet he grew up on shows up on Earth and he and his invincible wife have to deal with them (escapism). Barry Allen has to deal with everyone thinking he is chronically late and undependable (catharsis), even though he is secretly the fastest man alive, because he keeps getting distracted by supervillains (escapism).
"So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?"
Yes, I would, and did. My art wasn't architecture, it was classical music, and when I was learning the field in the 1970s I gradually developed the courage to denounce the reigning modernist style, which was serialism, and to promote composers who wrote music that was distinctly 20th-century but which was also beautiful and attractive. I hadn't encountered the minimalists like Philip Glass yet; I promoted old-school people like Copland and Shostakovich and others by then mostly dead, inactive, or in their last years; among then-younger composers who were still active, my first discoveries included Malcolm Arnold and Alan Hovhaness. Those were the interesting composers of our time, I maintained, not those bleeps-and-whispers serialists.
Mixed, as usual. Some people eagerly wanted to trade names of favorite appealing composers. Those who disagree with me, and some do so to this day, mostly deny that the serialist hegemony ever existed, i.e. that it exerted pressure to conform. But there's plenty of testimony from direct victims of its social oppression that it did.
Is the current situation different? My impression is that people like Glass aren't exactly darlings of academic tastes, being more comparable to rock stars instead, who could also book orchestras.
It depends whose academic tastes you're talking about. The modernist hegemony still flourishes in some high academic quarters. I find that appreciation of the 'neglected ones' comes mostly from scholars in less prestigious institutions.
And the revival phenomenon is less exemplified by the likes of Glass - who, still alive and still active is still on the cutting edge of dispute - but historic modern composers like Sibelius. Sibelius had been the most popular living composer in the 1920s, but modernist disparagement sunk his reputation until by the 1950s (the initiation of the hegemony) one polemicist called him "the worst composer in the world." But gradually in the last 40 years or so his reputation has risen and he's now seriously respected. For instance, about ten years ago I attended a whole Sibelius festival at Stanford - two concerts and a scholarly symposium.
In both cases, both viewpoints have some validity; it's a matter of perspective.
Those who deny the modernist hegemony point out that the 'neglected ones' did exist and flourish commercially; but the hegemony consisted of critical disparagement and academic pressure on young composers to write in a hegemonic style.
In the case of journalism, the left-leaning is personal and editorial opinions, while the denial of it consists of their exaggerated attempts to compensate for this by normalizing Trump, etc.
Really interesting! A few random things I feel like talking about:
* +1 to all the people who say that Bauhaus and Brutalism themselves are/can be pretty good. I would add that it’s really that weird business with the rationalists, the grays, the whites, and the postmoderns that’s very ugly. Not sure what the relevant difference is. Something something Bauhaus having less "irony" and "complicated cultural references" and more "yeah we removed the bourgeois crap but on the whole it’s still a normal house and what we added is still reasonably sensible stuff like big windows and modern built-in kitchens"? Or, something something 1930s architects still having been trained in the old ways, which focused on scale and proportion, and which ratios between different parts of your buildings are okay, etc., something we’re no longer really doing? (For someone complaining that we’ve stopped doing that, see: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/polemical-doodles-of-leon-krier/
* Honestly, the argument that the common people were philistines… well I kinda see where that comes from. Not because I believe that they actually were dumb and unenlightened, but because machine-made ornament does often look worse than custom-made stuff, and when you have the same flowery wallpaper (with dirty spots) that everyone else has, together with a massive set of Renaissance-style dining-room furniture (possibly quite shoddily built) in a small room, it does look kitsch and boring. Really, that’s the sort of things that led to the rise of Arts and Crafts, but it could still be applied to the few decades after, I think. Relatedly, I’ll probably want to spend more time understanding the 1920-30s debates around the fact that late 19th c. houses were just the same ugly little boxes being put up everywhere without bothering to make them fit into their surroundings: of course it was mostly the Arts&Crafts-inspired fierce detractors of the modernists who complained about that stuff, but the modernist themselves seemed to do something a bit like it too! (which might just have been part of what "dismissing 19th c stuff as bourgeois" was).
* The book seems to completely gloss over the questions of hygiene, etc.? In the 1920-30s, the rates of infectious diseases in cities was still very high, and that definitely provided *a lot* of impetus for the "remove carpets, remove squiggly bits that trap dust, paint it all white" crew. (Of course, this links to the idea that the main customers were eg. city councils, who would want to pay attention to that sort of stuff, and could neglect the fact that the end result was ugly).
* I still think there might have been something to the argument of cost, especially wrt the cost of maintenance of ornament (again, squiggly bits hard to clean, and well-proportioned stuff may need to be big stuff, costly to build and to heat up). But it’s still true that we could have had some kind of arts and crafts without the craftspeople, that looks simple enough while still being much better-looking than most modernist stuff?
* In the 1930s, when we were inventing social science, psychology, and propaganda science (with the results we know), and generally we were still very much in the industrial revolution, you could get a lot of street cred by determining scientifically how this room should be set up, and design kitchens scientifically to minimise the number of steps one would have to take, etc. Of course, actually wanting to do all that probably required making a deliberate decision to toss overboard all the bourgeois stuff from the past, but once you’d done that, it was perfectly possible for people to be attracted to what you were doing because "science!", rather than because "proletariat!" or whatever.
* I remember reading something about how the main reason Corbu had the impact he had was actually due to a woman’s ideas: Charlotte Perriand. Now, we could discuss the specifics of that claim, but imho there’s something interesting being it. What Perriand did in her many collaborations with Corbu, starting in the 1950s, was to bring aesthetic inspiration from her many trips to Japan, and to focus a lot on interior design, and especially designing stuff like built-in furniture, etc. To me, it sounds a bit like what I said about science in the paragraph above: in order to build practical furniture actually suited to the needs of 1950s people as opposed to the needs of 1890s people, and to take inspiration from other cultures in useful ways for that, you kind of need to have tossed overboard all the bourgeois stuff that came before you, but practical furniture, big windows, and nice new Japanese/Scandinavian/whatever aesthetic tropes do have an appeal on their own?
* And, with that… I think I have a pretty good idea how we went from 1880s architecture to 1950s ‘Scandinavian’ stuff. But 1950s Scandinavian stuff still looks *good*! How do we go from there to the crap we have now? The answer given in the post — that by the 1950s, architecture had been turned into a bunch of highbrow academic debates out of touch with the rest of us, and that it eventually spiraled into what we have now after replacing the "proletariat" in its theoretical literature with the "middle class", then turning into postmodernism and all its successors — seems pretty good, but I’d love to understand it better.
Buildings start out looking shiny and new, but over time they start looking old, dirty, and tired. So, tastemakers associate the effects of time with the poor taste of the original architect and fall in love with a new look, all of the examples of it at present being shiny and new.
Rinse and repeat.
The same thing happens with golf course architecture. Over the years, the original interestingly-shaped sand traps turn into bland ovals, the big greens shrink, the trees encroach on the fairways, and so forth.
For example, by the 1970s, golf courses built before WW One were wildly out of fashion. For example, a friend of mine joined Charles Blair Macdonald's 1911 National Golf Links of America for cheap in 1982. But then the oldest golf courses started getting restored based on 1920s aerial photographs and original blue prints and other archival materials. And then golfers fell in love with pre-WWI golf courses again. These days, you have to have Masters of the Universe money to join NGLA.
The original "open plan" offices looked like they would actually be good to work in.
However, they would have been very expensive. Among other things, they assumed a very large amount of area per person.
So, the movement to open plan as being superior ran into cost, and the result was open plan but with very little area per person. The worst of both worlds.
"The original 'open plan' offices looked like they would actually be good to work in."
I have recently moved from a previous work space where my group of ~10 people had its own small area with *walls* to a large open-space floor plan with room for maybe 100+ people in easy eye view (if they are standing up).
The new work space is fairly new for the company.
And most people have a few Zoom meetings per day.
Did I mention that we do this in an 'open plan' office?
Having discussions with colleagues physically nearby is awkward in an 'open plan' office if you care about disturbing the 100 people not part of the conversation. One advantage of my older work space was that with 10 people (not always in the office ...) it was easier to avoid disturbing people. And we *knew* the people we were disturbing when it happened! But 'open space' plus Zoom seems like a terrible idea.
It's been a while, and I couldn't dig up everything I heard, but it was mostly online so at least some parts are findable. Here's a review that people passed around:
"From Bauhaus to Our House" is a polemic, and thus slanted and an only partial view, but it is very much on point and makes a valid, substantial case. But "The Kingdom of Speech" is rootedly inaccurate and almost hopelessly inane.
From reading this review, I see all the peevishness and anti-intellectualism that I associate with Wolfe’s most famous books. He’s really all about sneering at elites.
Reading this has made me notice a tension between two views I have:
1. It is possible to think about and appreciate art on a higher level than other people that allows you to more easily notice good and bad things about it. Cultivating such skills is a worthwhile pursuit.
2. A lot of people who claim to be doing this are actually snobs who are virtue signaling. They convince themselves that perfectly good things are bad just because ordinary people like them. They also convince themselves that weird art that most people don't like is the best thing ever because liking it lets them feel superior to people who don't.
I tend to agree with Scott that modern architecture is often an example of (2), but I also want to be able to say that something like artistic quality exists. I don't think that ordinary people are hopelessly benighted, I just think that someone who thinks that "Transformers 2" is a better film than "Captain America 2" is probably less discerning in some ways than someone who thinks the opposite. Can we reject the cliquish snobbery of the Modernists while still having some standards?
I also think it's possible to have postmodern self-awareness without implied sneering. You can say "look, we are aware that this kitsch thing is kitsch, and that's fine, kitsch is good. But if we add a few twists to it we can make it good in other, deeper ways without compromising its original, more basic goodness." I'm very fond of postmodern works like this (for example, "Animal Man" by Grant Morrison).
I've thought about this too. My thought was to read literary, etc. criticism from just before the 60s when all the postmodernism, etc. came in. Nobody says you can't have antiquated artistic tastes; after all, it's not like science or technology where there's an objective melting point of water you can describe better and better or computers that do the same stuff faster and faster. To the degree there's a 'truth' it's what people like, and I think the archaists have a better claim here.
I've got a day job and other interests, but it might be a starting point for someone else.
I've noticed that tension too, especially since aesthetics are *somewhat* subjective and some people genuinely get a kick of out of Modernism.
But also, some Modernists leveraged this social tension to push buildings that no one else liked. We see this with early being detractors accused of being bourgeois heretics, and you could draw a line between the early concept of "bourgeois" and today's concept of "snobbish."
I feel two ways about this:
1. It seems like these modernist manifestos wouldn't have been taken very seriously before the 18th century? But cultures before that time were pretty snobbish by today's standards, and maybe the steelman of snobbishness is it has a protective effect against manifesto-y takeovers.
2. It's easier to criticize than to create new ideas, so all critique and no alternative solutions comes across as a little lazy. Critiques of modern architecture come across as less snobbish if they're accompanied by the presentation of a new vision which is also open to be criticized.
Yes. What I disliked about this review is that it was all about sneering and denying that there could be anything like appreciation or understanding beyond the most visceral arational feeling of a first glance.
> I tend to agree with Scott that modern architecture is often an example of (2) [signalling], but I also want to be able to say that something like artistic quality exists.
This to me seems like a _very_ charitable reading of what the article at hand is trying to tell us.
It seems to me that Scott rather argues that "normal people" not just "often" but with an overwhelming majority hate modern architecture just as much as he does and that not "often" but nearly always anything said in favour of modern architecture is an expression of an agenda rather than a taste.
And what is really killing me is that without the slightest hint of irony he then goes on to complain how these people want to deny the reality of his own tastes. "Look at those shmucks who cannot imagine that someone would genuinely hate modern architecture" says the man who apparently cannot imagine that someone would genuinely like modern architecture. You can't make this up.
And predictibly the first comment thread is "well I personally quite like that stuff, actually". Yeah. Who could have imagined that.
So what is going on here? How is it that the stereotypical McMansion-dweller cannot be content in their McMansion without also claiming, as I think this article does, that any normal person would have the same preference? How is it that the stereotypical shoebox-dweller cannot be content in their shoebox without claiming, as the comment cited above claims, that the shoebox must have in inherent artistic quality that the McMansion just lacks?
Almost as if the preference for shoebox vs. McMansion is indicative of a broader preference ... of what? It as amazing how an author whos previous work uniquely equips them to interrogate this question is so uninterested in actually doing that.
To illustrate the point, there is a simple litmus test we can conduct: Would Pruitt-Igoe have been less of a failure if the buildings had been shaped like baroque castles rather than shoeboxes? Really? Or is there maybe something else going on?
> Most people like certain art which seems obviously pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better.
Reads to me as: What I like is "obviously pretty" and the thing "normal people" like. So let's discuss taste.
Consider that (wealthy-ish) normal people buy Thomas Kinkades to hang in their homes and admire regularly. Almost no one except Ozy would buy Miro's Birth of the World [1]. "Experts" claim Kinkade is schmaltzy trash and Miro is one of the greats.
Kinkade is schmaltzy, it's also pretty in a way that normal people appreciate. Finding the line between experts having Real Taste versus virtue signaling down purity spirals into appreciating literal trash (Duchamp, etc) is rather more controversial.
I, for one, will put my favorite genre of art as 16th century Flemish realism.
I think there are two components to 1). One is introspection. If I like thing A but lack expertise, I may be unable to articulate why I like it other than "it makes me feel good". But with expertise I can analyse my own feelings and separate what precisely causes them, thus describing them in much greater detail. This is commendable and useful, though I think not something that should be expected of everyone or used to mock/disparage them if they lack it.
But just introspection wouldn't outright change what I like. I'd just know why I like it better. However the thing is that in the process of acquiring the tools to perform that introspection, a side effect is that you just learn about a lot more art. Thus you may find things you like even better (good) or become jaded by overexposure and professionalization, thus lose your original sense of wonder at that form of beauty and search for weirder stuff to tickle the same bone (bad - for you, because you've actually LOST beauty in your life rather than gained it, and for others who now must suffer you being smug about how you appreciate what is TRULY beautiful unlike them).
I can’t speak so much for the advantages of modern building exteriors, but as someone who hates cleaning house, I really appreciate minimal ornamentation. I suspect some of the popularity of this style in corporate buildings is that it allows less custodial spending.
But that is also a problem with breakthrough modernist designs: nobody knows exactly how to keep them clean and well-maintained. For example, flat roofs instead of overhanging eaves seemed at first like a simpler, "cleaner" look. But it turned out that flat roofs quickly led to drip stains down the sides of many buildings.
Over time, people figure out solutions to these kind of practical problems, but by then the design is no longer cutting edge, it's a traditional look. But there are advantages to traditional looks in that they are traditional because they tend to work pretty well.
I read this book recently and I really appreciate this review. I think you nailed it.
My opinion is that a lot of these buildings look cool in stock photos, when they're photographed just right: immaculately clean, no people, and the sun hitting them just right. Usually in the "golden hour" just before sunset. But they suffer badly from real-world conditions that mar the perfect symmetry, whereas the more gingerbready non-modernist designs can absorb the damage and look even cooler.
When you have to actually work in one, every day, it really can be hellish when you're stuck sitting near a window in direct sunlight, wearing a full business suit, and there's nothing you can do about it. I feel like workplace efficiency experts should be able to measure the drop in productivity as the sun rolls over the office. But I guess these architects didn't care about things like that.
You ask: "Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”?"
But... someone did just that! Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about how terrible this modern socialist-inspired architecture was, in 1943! She used real architecture references to make a serious point, but also wrote it in the style of a Hollywood thriller/romance with lurid sex scenes so that lots of people would read it. And she was from an old European Russian-Jewish family so you couldn't dismiss her as an ignorant philistine American. It became a bestseller, and inspired some very devoted fans! But apparently none of that mattered, and the architecture establishment could still just totally ignore it.
Fountainhead was specifically about how cool modern architecture is. The snobby professors who turf out Roark for his ~vision~ continuously argue that architecture should only hew to established historical conventions and styles. Roark is the modernist challenger to those guys.
Yeah but his buildings also looked cool and were meant to be comfortable for regular people to live and work in. He didn't build commie blocks. Most people compare him to Frank Lloyd Wright.
Here's how Roark's plans for Cortlandt Homes is described:
"The drawings of Cortlandt Homes presented six buildings, fifteen stories high, each made in the shape of an irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft. The shafts contained elevators, stairways, heating systems and all the utilities. The apartments radiated from the center in the form of extended triangles. The space between the arms allowed light and air from three sides. The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors, to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it; there were few halls or lobbies to clean, a minimum of cost and labor required for the maintenance of the place. The entire plan was a composition in triangles. The buildings, of poured concrete, were a complex modeling of simple structural features; there was no ornament; none was needed; the shapes had the beauty of sculpture."
What is this if not a commieblock? Its not a *block*, sure, but the "shape of irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft" sounds very much like some East Block eyesore from the 50s that everyone passing by still quietly loathes. And it's the most important building in the whole book, the centerpiece of the entire plot arc!
It’s not his dream, if I remember correctly. It’s a project he’s very interested in, because even then, very cheap housing was important, and he was as proud to make it cheaper than thought possible at all. He has quite a few other projects going on which are not really the same style (I remember for instance Monadnock (?) Valley, which is a vacation resort where the customers have ample space to themselves and do not have to interact with other vacationers unless they want to).
There was a bad housing shortage in America in the years after WWII, more so in parts of Europe that had been blown up. So there was a lot of interest in how to build fast.
What's funny is that architects were too egomaniacal to admit: We're throwing stuff up quick and dirty. They had to tell everybody instead that they had discovered the Ultimate Style that would last down through the ages.
True, I admit that does sound like a commieblock (or more like one of Le Corbusier's towers in th epark). But then that's also designed to be as cheap as possible. I think most of us would be ok with modern archictecture if they were like "yeah it's ugly, but at least it's very cheap." But somehow it also manages to be very expensive...
When he has the chance to build a luxury house for a rich man (the Heller house) it's described differently:
"The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony. The walls, of the same granite as the rock, continued its vertical lines upward; the wide, projecting terraces of concrete, silver as the sea, followed the line of the waves, of the straight horizon. "
Kind of hard to imagine, but to me that sounds more like one of Frank Lloyd Wright's mid-century modern houses that everyone loves. Both styles use a lot of simple geometric shapes, but one adjusts them to fit humans, while the other forces humans to suffer to serve their buildings.
It still rather goes against the statement that "Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about how terrible this modern socialist-inspired architecture was", no? Your typical commieblock was also designed to be as cheap as possible, it's exactly the sort of a housing that was mass-produced for cheap in East Block countries (and many West Block countries as well) after the war.
It does. I'll admit it's been a long time since I've read the book, and I had forgotten about that part. So I guess either her views on architecture are more nuanced than I remembered, or she was just sort of incoherent on account of not really being an architect. I still think the *spirit* of the novel was against Bauhaus-inspired architecture though.
Architects' renderings of planned buildings tend to show what they hope they'll look like just before sunset on a perfect day in late May. Even the Boston City Hall looks pretty good then.
This book seems more like a polemic than an honest social history.
I have a background in painting. At least in that field, modernism developed in a much different way than what's presented here. There were multiple strands that melted together unevenly. It would be a herculean feat to explain it all as a coherent story. This book's thread seems to be commentary on the present. That's bad history. It seems like Wolfe (and you) want to write about professionals imposing their will on society, in the classic James C. Scott sort of way. Fine by me, I love that stuff. Just don't try to shoehorn it into an explanation of how modernism spread.
There are way too many details to respond to. The idea of the artist as romantic, or outside society, came way way earlier than any of this. If anything, these artists are just riding the general progressive wave of their time. Their parents had all lived in villages. Urbanization felt like a sharp turn. It felt like they had exchanged the Shire for smog and Coca Cola Santa Claus. So they lashed out in every way that occurred to them.
In 1920's Germany the most popular museum was the one dedicated to hygiene. It's weird, but I love that for them. The general appreciation for cleanliness was just the general vibe of the time. It inspired some of the simple, easily cleaned forms of modernism. The emphasis on windows was a part of that too. The idea was that the light would purify the germs. Imagine being one of these architects at the time, and you're developing buildings that will improve public health. Meanwhile the workers don't like it because they're not used to it. If I were in that situation I'd tell the workers to stop being babies. If the alternative was Beaux Arts, then know that this was basically the style of department stores. It's public health vs Macy's. The choice seems pretty clear.
I wish there were a better explanation of how modernism was accepted by the public. It still baffles me that this happened. The most consistent theme its history is that everyone denounces it. This book suggests that activist students are to blame. I really doubt that. If it's students vs trustees the trustees win every time. Art has a patronage structure. Some oligarchs must have been on board, or those buildings wouldn't have been built.
Modernism probably become popular because it's aspirational (where's The Last Psychiatrist when you need him?). Maybe modernism needed to be denounced before the majority of people wanted to be the kind of person who embraced it.
I would compare modernism to Esperanto. They're both niche languages with utopian goals. Somehow we haven't spent billions of dollars on listening rooms for people to hear Esperanto (and pretend they understand it). It's impressive that so many powerful people have felt attracted to modernism.
Maybe the tech sector played a role? Both computer hardware and software developed in similar ways aesthetically to modern architecture, with the initially rough, pragmatic, function-over-form aesthetics slowly transitioning to the more sleek, minimalist aesthetic that's more palatable to general audiences.
That's cool, I didn't know that. I'd guess for both visual arts and programming, they're both getting so much exposure to a medium that they develop specific tastes.
I don't think there was much of a tech sector when modernism was developing. I'd guess that the small number of engineers/researchers were more interested in professional respectability than romanticism but idk. The modernists themselves were ambivalent towards technology. They loved it and hated it.
> Somehow we haven't spent billions of dollars on listening rooms for people to hear Esperanto (and pretend they understand it).
I think that's just part of the nature of architecture, and what makes the subject so contentious in ways that other art forms aren't. If you make a building, it's going to sit there for a very long time. In times of population growth and/or urbanization, this maybe isn't a big deal, because you can just build something new elsewhere. I think a lot of the recent backlash comes from an idea that this style, which a lot of people don't like, is what we're going to be stuck with in most urban centers people already live in or want to live in.
Yeah I agree with that. Where I live most houses have a traditional style, but some people build houses in a modern style. It feels so awkward and misplaced. Like there's a local character that they're ignoring. It reminds me of when people renovate historical buildings and replace everything with millennial gray or whatever. Ugh.
I disagree that architecture is especially contentious. I'd bet that most highly developed practices read as pretentious to most people. Wine tasting, abstract art, noise music, whatever. It's easier to ignore those things but people still hate them. Where I live, I don't hear people complain about building styles. I hear them react against any large developments. They expect that any new large development is going to make their lives worse, to the benefit of distant elites. Details are secondary to distrust.
Final thought. A lot of the modernists would be annoyed that we talk about them like this. They don't want to be a style. They just want us to engage with forms. Interpreting a building just means looking at it. It's all surface. It's a shape. There's nothing to explain. When modernism became a set of conventions it broke itself. The details surrounding modernism obscure the actual modernist work. Kinda just thinking out loud here, I'm probably misguided. I can say that this definitely applies to abstract expressionism at least.
Exactly. This review seems to think that Eero Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright have nothing to do with modernism, and that instead they are exemplars of classical tradition that got rejected by the modernists. It seems not to have noticed how modernism designed the open floor plans, ergonomic kitchens, and big picture windows that were hugely popular among people with or without taste for the entire second half of the twentieth century, and are often maintained by McMansions whose exteriors are a mishmash of anti-modernisms.
Yeah there's definitely two strands here. There's modernism as an ideological statement, and then there's modernism as design. A lot of people hate it as a statement, but does the design part ever upset anyone? Somehow the stars aligned, and a class of people were empowered to make our objects nicer and easier to use.
This is random but I'm remembering the book 'No Place of Grace' by Jackson Lears. It's about various ways that people accommodated themselves to market society. The author wants total social reform, and he criticizes some of the half-measures people took. For instance, Arts and Crafts was a reaction against unfulfilling work. Except instead of attempting to make work more fulfilling, it just convinced people to take up hobbies. One of the chapters is about the origin of gothic architecture on ivy league campuses. I forget what problem they failed to solve, but it's goofy that they invented a self-image for themselves in the process.
I enjoyed this review until you had to bring up AI. I am an artist/artisan, and we're still shaking our fists. Why are you giving up on us? Aren't we as a society rich enough to not let this once essential part of human culture die a slow, or perhaps now accelerated, death?
The creative process, and the process of manufacture (from "made with the hand" in Latin) itself is as important if not more than the result, and imbues the object with a soul, so to speak, and it is a *human* endeavour. I could try to replicate a bower bird's bower, I suppose, but it would then by definition not be a bower bird's creation. As a plastic artist I don't have the eloquence, for that, perhaps go to Nick Cave, who could express it better? https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/
There is room in the world for a picture of the Virgin Mary in a vat of urine. There will also be room for boutique artists like yourself. The rest of the world will be content in enjoying the rapidly increasing quality of artificially generated art.
> Aren't we as a society rich enough to not let this once essential part of human culture die a slow, or perhaps now accelerated, death?
As any AI doomer worth their salt will tell you, the answer is no. As long as we optimize a metric, any metric, every other value goes on the altar.
Moloch or an AGI (or even the free market) will not leave us the slightest inch of slack if “they” “believe” “they” can “make a better use” of such a resource.
Even more prosaically, an object’s soul isn’t counted in GDP (except if you use it as a marketing tool, I guess), so it’s inexistent.
(I wish it were otherwise.)
On the other hand, an AI skeptic will answer that in fact, AI will not be transformative, the world will still be basically the same place, and there’s still a place for you. I wish I could believe this outcome.
If I ever become a rich person who can commission himself a building (which is highly unlikely at this point, but still), and I go to human architects, and they all tell me I must build a white box with a few curves, and I go to an AI and it allows me to make my own Castle of Sintra, I'll go with the AI. AI doesn't pass judgements on my (lack of) taste. I can have as many gables, turrets, decorations as I want. If AI can design such a building, and I can find robots who can build it, or print it, or whatever, why would I care about human architects? AI era is the era of ultimate pesonalization where we can finally abandon the concept of "good taste" as some kind of society-wide consensus.
So basically, modern architecture has won in the marketplace of ideas, when it was the new cool thing everyone believed that it's great. And now the fashion cycle moved on and a lot of people seem to think that it's boring and ugly.
Except that stuff that normal people actually like still isn't fashionable. I wonder, did peasants like all those gaudy palaces "back in the good old days"?
The palaces are beautiful because there was generally one person who had it built, using his own money. It glorified him, so he cared how it looked.
The modernist stuff is a committee of people hiring an architect to design something. Who's on the committee and how did they get there? Who knows? What happens if the people whose money is being used don't like it? Nothing.
Fashion doesn't chase normal people. The opposite, if anything. But when something is fashionable it kind of gives bonus appeal to it which normal people are susceptible to, unless it's simply too outlandish.
So when brutalism was in fashion, this made it more appealing than the old architecture. But now it's not a new cool thing anymore and this bonus appeal is gone, which naturally changes the perspective of normal people towards it.
The gist of how building it was accomplished is that there were several architectural contests with some political guidelines partially based on suggestions by the citizenship. I think it worked out because of the combination of some guidelines and the contests. Without any guidelines you probably wouldn't be able to steer the project in the direction you want and the contest ensured that you don't have to think about to many details.
So I grew up in Santiago (Galicia), and as I was reading the post I kept thinking about the monstrosity that was built with 500 millions euros of taxpayer money. (Keep in mind Galicia is one of the poorer regions of Spain, which itself is not one of the richest of the eurozone.) Extra sad that it's built on a city with such an iconic old town and Baroque cathedral.
So I felt some sort of shameful pride seeing the City of Culture there. What I can add is that it was totally a pharaonic project done by a dying rightwing politician that wanted to leave a Big Signal behind. It was, of course, nearly universally reviled - not just by "proles" and but also by nearly everyone I knew at the Uni. So I think we have just assimilated this kind of horrible, parodic, stuff into "this is what you do when you want to show off your money/power". The "that's so bourgeois" is gone - the guy that pushed the project as president of Galicia had been a minister under Franco, for crying out loud. For those that pay, it's just pure signaling, devoid of any modernist manifesto-y content.
The saddest bit is that it doesn't find any purpose. Not for lack of trying. It is so hostile for practical usage that most proposals fall flat. I once took part in a debate tournament hosted in the City of Culture (the club didn't have that much money so a large venue desperate for an excuse to be useful was great). It... sucked. Finding any room through the "layout" of buildings was a going through a kafkaesque maze, things that should be nearby (bathrooms) we far, passageways crammed together. The acoustics were awful, and is remarkably badly insulated for a city that sees rainfall and low-ish temperatures practically all year round. The materials, I was told, represent something something. But it is cold! That's the primary function of a building, to keep you from the outside!
Anyway, even to this date, it's still mostly empty. When I think of what the railway network could have made with the money...
Thanks for this first-person account from Europe, showing how these supposedly 'modern' buildings often don't actually perform the functions of a building, including as you say, protecting people from the weather. A building which doesn't fulfil its 'telos' ceases, maybe, to be a building.
Imagine some future historian explaining that, on such-and-such date, it became a de facto ruin, more or less permanently unfit for human habitation; then a month later, the final details of construction were completed and the first tenants moved in.
Also my own: Deconstructing Deconstructivism here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism in which "I explore an architectural movement that calls itself Deconstructivism. It is yet one more instance of the strange shapes that ‘Progress’ has taken on in the modern Western world. Buildings in this style seem like they have been constructed to appear as if there must have been a gas explosion inside or a bomb has been dropped on them. Deconstructivism can perhaps be best understood as the architectural equivalent of the current fad for deconstructing gender….. such that, whereas we once had an edifice called Men and an edifice called Women, now - in the parallel universe of gender diversity - we have man bits and woman bits strewn all over the place."
All this business about ornamentation being bourgeois and therefore immoral reminds me of earlier historical episodes when Christian or Islamic cultures had artistic efflorescences which they later renounced as sinful. I don’t know to what extent such trends are driven by some exogenous factor versus just being a cyclical thing.
Maybe people just feel a need to find things to do differently from earlier generations and argue about. Maybe there’s some Aristotelian golden mean level of ornamentation, but when we’re trending towards more opulence or austerity it’s not obvious when to stop, so we repeatedly overshoot and then overcorrect in the opposite direction.
That's probably it. One of the things I noticed about artistic movements is they tend to oscillate back and forth over time because each one's a reaction to the last one.
Scott (or anyone else hating modern architecture): do you also hate the design language of Apple? I thought their products are universally loved for how they look (sleek, simple, minimalist, cold etc), despite being the miniature equivalent of modern architecture.
Well, I don't quite hate it, but that these days everything "cool" has to look like that is pretty boring. However, the things that Apple replaced definitely weren't any better. At least Jobs had a sense of style and cared about ergonomics (unlike many of "modern artists"), whereas the eighties-nineties tech was just inconvenient thoughtless hideousness.
I like some apple products but would probably hate to live in an apple designed house, I wouldn't want my living space to feel "cold".
Likewise I think Tesla design doesn't get enough hate, which could be described the same way you just did. The interiors are far too bare (feels cheap to me) and replacing everything with a screen is bad user experience while driving. I also hate that companies see the obvious cost cutting benefit to this and followed suit.
I have to admit I don't really notice or care about this kind of thing.
I find the occasional "steampunk computer" retro styles very cool, but expect the coolness would wear off if I had to use one every day for five years.
This is the point. Well-done Bauhaus modernism is made to be usable in such a way that you don’t even notice it. Think about a well-designed kitchen, where the sink, stove, and countertops are laid out conveniently, and you can still talk to someone in the next room while cooking.
Imitators (and badly planned originals) often don’t live up to this sort of usability, but usability is actually the point, not anti-ornamentation.
"Scott (or anyone else hating modern architecture): do you also hate the design language of Apple? "
I hate some of the design language of Apple.
I like others.
A few examples:
*) I basically like their Macbook Pro computers. I actively avoided the LED touchbar versions and am happy that Apple eventually backed off. I *like* tactile feedback when I am typing (especially when I am touch typing). Clean and functional design is nice. Lack of tactile feedback is anti-functional for me.
I wish the pros were a bit less spartan and had a few more non-USB-c ports. Because then I would need fewer dongles. Clean beat out functional here, too. I understand *why* but ...
*) And I basically like the Macintosh UI (though I find the older, macOS 9 UI to be superior ... even though I never extensively used pre-OS X Macintoshes). But the new UI is flat enough that I now occasionally get to play the "is this a button?" game. Older versions of the Mac UI made the button vs label distinction clearer. The distinction is still present, but I don't find "subtle" here to be a positive.
Hiding the start button on the newer Macbook Pros seems like a bad idea. When I'm trying to start my computer I don't like wondering if I am pushing the correct spot of the featureless grey metal. I'm fine with no physical button, but a button shaped pattern etched in the metal would be easier to use.
I'll note that my complaints all follow a pattern: Apple has pushed some design aesthetic far enough that I find the functionality to be impaired (lack to tactile feedback when typing, can't find buttons easily, need dongles ...)
I hate that physical keyboards got displaced by inferior touchscreens. I never owned a Blackberry, but this thread's derision of them for not adopting the latter made me nostalgic for the former:
I'm fairly neutral on apple-style design: I do think there's a value in simplicity and minimalism for things that are primarily functional because simplicity can be a boon to usability, though it can overreach and make things worse, like when things hide buttons in awkward places for 'appearances' sake. (Remember when things like TVs had easily accessed controls and not sleek displays with a bunch of black plastic buttons on a black background on the back or side panel of the montior?)
Though you don't have great alternatives - the alternative for PC stuff is generally 'black brutalist cube with RGB accents'.
(And yes, I know talking about PCs is very retro when most people care more about stuff like phones and watches, but I don't feel like there's actually much variety in that space)
There have been attempts to diversify, at least in the phone space--they just never caught on. There has been great and subtle variety in button placement and shape for tactile control! For one example, I really wish the back of the phone screen power button design from the LG G6 caught on--it was very convenient, more so than the third button on the right side design that seems to have become the standard.
On the other hand, a lot of modern phone design has made them harder to use. I am very mad at designers for universally removing headphone jacks from phones. As someone who prefers small, wired earbuds to bulky wireless headphones (or the all too easy to lose Airpods), I've started to understand why people seem to have given up on privacy and sound pollution from their phones in public places. Unless you want to buy some rather expensive Bluetooth tech, you don't really have a choice but to play every sound for everyone around you.
I do like that my Pixel 5a has a back-of-the-phone finger print scanner for unlocking, and that does seem to have gone away in later versions.
And up until about a year ago I was also in the "headphone jack or bust" category - I switched from iPhone to Android mostly because the Pixels still had headphone jacks.
But I did try getting air-pod like pixel buds about a year ago and... yeah, it basically immediately killed any use of wired headphones - the air pods are way more convenient. I always assumed I'd immediately lose them but it hasn't happened yet in the year and a half of daily use, and I say that as someone who uses "find my phone" on a near daily basis.
(I'll admit I've a few times had to play very high pitched sounds to locate one from across a room)
So I'll say from personal experience that if you just *think* you wouldn't like airpods, you might be surprised. (Otherwise, I guess plan to buy a AUX to USB 3 dongle)
I hate modern app design. Windows 7 was peak of nice-looking OS and apps, and I wish I could have it back. Apple's own skeuomorphism style from was nice, too. These days, it's all washed-out colors, or no colors at all, and boring simple shapes everwhere. I want buttons that make WANT to touch them, dammit.
The economic aspects have been mentioned but I think they are underrated. In Europe we have many expensive requirements on building standards which leads to people/cities building very boring boxes just to be able to afford it at all. Any extra money is then not spent in ornaments but in practicalities like photovoltaics, a swimming pool, a garden, building automation, etc.
No, you're somewhat missing the point. Even people and organizations who CAN afford decorations still eschew them. Nobody questions why apartment blocks are build simple. But why a billionaire, or giant corporation, or government of a rich country would commission a building that's not too distinct from those same blocks in terms of ornamentation? This is the question that is being discussed.
I started reading this thinking it was a guest book review but part-way through I found myself thinking, 'Who IS this writing this review? It's clear, it's concise, it's incisive, it's so well-written, it's...oh I see, it's Scott himself.' Now I want to read Wolfe's book, despite not really being that interested in architecture. It's more the psychology, the way it's so hard to withstand the pressure of the herd, that is interesting. You probably have to be very strong-willed to buck the trend and it almost means fossilising your taste, since outside influences are what formed 'your' taste in the first place. To pretend otherwise is to subscribe to the idea that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Not particularly deeply thought out comment- It seems that in multiple fields, once ornamentation became possible to do mechanically for lower cost, it was no longer a mark of status, and wealthy people moved to simpler forms. Having a dress covered in lace was prestigious when that lace all had to be painstakingly handmade. Having a dress covered in polyester manufactured lace is generally considered tacky and excessively frou-frou. Similar phenomenon with spices becoming more affordable and fancy food then shifting to prioritize the subtle nuances of the ingredients themselves.
(I have to admit that I think a building covered in columns and marble statues from hundreds of years ago is charming and historically interesting, seeing a recent building in that style can feel rather artificial and pretentious. And I sort of expect if society somehow shifted back to prioritizing heavily ornamented buildings now, we'd end up not with beautiful old Europe streets, but a visually-busy, clashing mess. Most people don't have great taste, and there's a selection effect with old buildings where only the ones people like enough to maintain despite the effort survive.)
> In general, the rise of modernism was driven by artists, and rich people followed only later – if they followed at all. […] The pattern, then, is that modernism was driven by artists and the intellectual circles that surrounded them. In the case of some arts, especially music but also literature, it never really left those circles: modernist music has a tiny listening public and the richest people today are barely aware it exists.
Reading about the origins of Bauhaus leaves me with the question: why didn't Art Deco win? From what I can tell, Art Deco had its beginnings around the same time, and was inspired by modernist art and had the prestige of Paris behind it. And Art Deco actually looks good! It's probably my favorite style of architecture. Why did it lose to Bauhaus?
Bauhaus and Art Deco are pretty similar - Bauhaus just took Art Deco one step further, and used geometry for usability rather than for ornamentation. Neither one won out, because Bauhaus was then replaced by international style, which was then replaced by postmodernist eclecticism.
Art Deco has absolutely had a revival in recent years, but more the style of ornamentation, rather than the interior forms that were often hard to use, with their emphasis on circles and acute angles.
My intuition is that Art Deco is an optimistic movement, raising after WWI as a joyful antidote, looking forward to the future and to progress as positives. Then the great depression happened. Then WWII happened. Grimness took over and we haven't been able to shake off the pessimism and misanthropy ever since.
"Polls show most people hate it and prefer the old stuff."
How true is this? The interior of the office where I work is quite old school - mahogany and marble etc. And most people hate it and call it stuffy and ask for white desks instead.
If you ask people abstractly, do you prefer traditionalist ornamentation or modernist minimalism, people vote for the former. But if you make them actually use the building, they often vote for the latter.
In 2015 an organization called "Create Streets" ran a survey in the UK which found that 88% preferred houses with "historical housing forms". More interestingly, of the pictures provided to participants, the two least popular buildings had both received architectural awards, while the two most popular had not (https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/practice/culture/the-worst-building-in-the-world-awards).
A study in the UK in 1987 found that when shown a series of buildings, the buildings that architects surveyed liked most were the ones that non-architects surveyed liked least (Halpern, D. (1995). Mental Health and the Built Environment, More than bricks and mortar? Taylor & Francis.).
Another study in 2001 in Canada found that architects were unable to predict what buildings non-architects would prefer (Brown, G., Gifford, R. (2001). Architects predict lay evaluations of large contemporary buildings: whose conceptual properties? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, p.93.).
No, anecdotal evidence. I know this is heresy in some circles, but anecdotes shouldn't be dismissed so readily. I'm fairly certain that if not most, at least a very large % of people would rather work in an open plan minimalist office instead of an oak-panelled one.
Actually, there is some evidence. You can argue the public at large have no say on the design of new buildings. But they do have a say in what places they frequent. Do you see lots of trendy new restaurants covered in carpets and wallpaper and velvet upholstery?
No (because it makes cleanup a nightmare), but I do see a lot of restaurants with walls covered in ornament and decoration and more traditional exteriors.
Related to the cleanup point, there is something of a trend of "maximalist" selfie spots, like a foyer of sorts with velvet uphostered oversize chairs, warm lights, decorations, etc etc. I see that as trying to have the cake and eat it too- people get their nice decorations but most of the place remains easy to clean.
>I would like to read a book by somebody who - while gently holding onto the possibility that it’s all balderdash - tells us what this architect meant by “reinventing the idea of light”
How about getting it straight from the horse's mouth? The famous Eisenman - Alexander debate is short, readable, and to the point. https://web.archive.org/web/20211106185743/https://www.ahenryrose.com/uploads/7/9/6/4/79645630/eisenman_-_alexander_1982_debate.pdf Key Eisenman quote: "What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right." These people know their stuff is hideous, and they are proud of it!
I wonder how this squares with all the people upthread who say they really like this stuff? The architects think it's bad but ordinary people think it's . . . good? If we told the architects some people like it, would they have to change to something else?
Most people who say they like the stuff, when asked to elaborate, don't seem to mean in an actual aesthetic sense like you or I like some old cathedral. They mean they appreciate the artistic message it's trying to convey or they like it purely for novelty's sake. I agree there are people who nonetheless insist, totally sincerely, that they love Brutalism as such, and yes I don't get them either, but they are a small fraction.
You’re talking as though there is one thing here. Modernist architects have as many disagreements as any other group of people, particularly intellectuals. Some people want to design art pieces that make people think and revolt. Others want to design something functional and usable. The Bauhaus was intended to do the latter, but many people then changed it into a statement.
So, rather than directly fixing what's wrong, they want to raise awareness of the existence of problems, by building completely new problems that won't be so easy to escape?
> And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right.
It's not just architecture, we saw this thought process cascade across many artforms. Think about the dissonant classical music from the middle of the 20th century, for example.
Thom Mayne, who often designs government office buildings, strikes me as actively misanthropic, out to inflict discomfort on the bureaucrats who work in his buildings.
It sounds like it's incredibly easy to get architects to go along with whatever half-baked intellectual project you want. Let's just invent a new school called Art Deco Revival or Ornamentalism or whatever, lay down some design principles and start loudly insisting that it's the new cool thing that really interesting radicals are doing and all the people who don't like it are old-fashioned reactionaries stuck in the past. Find the right kind of rich guy to fund it. I bet once you got two or three big projects done, everyone else would fall in line and start saying it was exactly what they'd been thinking all along.
My friend and I were talking yesterday and we decided something of the opposite, about India. One day Hindus completely shake off the despair from 1000 years of colonization (V.S. Naipaul understood this well), some of it absolutely brutal violence and rape. Then they will build Hindu temples that are more modern, although ofcourse still within the rules of agama sastras required of temples. We were wondering why there has been no real innovation in temple architecture.
Curious what you think of the new Hindu temple in New Jersey - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaminarayan_Akshardham_(Robbinsville,_New_Jersey) - when I saw that, I thought it was an interesting new style I had never seen before while still being recognizably Hindu - although that might just be because the old ones never stay quite that white.
To be fair, the Diocese of Orange took over a Protestant mega-church complex and had some redesigning to do in order to make it a Catholic liturgical space.
I'm not thrilled with some of the design choices, but given that the thing was originally basically a big glass box, it's not totally hideous.
And there are modern Catholic award-winning architecture that beat it hollow, my eternal fave is the Temple of Dagon, sorry, I mean Newman Hall in Berkeley:
EDIT: Whoops, shot my mouth off too fast there! I was thinking of the former Crystal Cathedral, not the Oakland church which yeah, not the greatest. At least the image of Christ is not heretical but traditional, how did that slip past them?
The architecture of the Swaminarayan temple...the carving - it's a bit busy, I think. Is it modern? Doesn't seem that way to me. It looks like temples in northern India of the Nagara style (?).
For a contrast, Chola temple architecture (over a thousand years old) is marvelous. A sparse aesthetic. In fact, the most iconic image that represents India, would be the Chola Nataraja, I think. This is sculpture, not architecture, but the Cholas really promoted the classical arts (music and Bharatanatyam dance) and built extraordinary temples like the Brigadeeshwars temple in Tanjore. You can read about it in Columbia University professor Vidya Dahejia's book : Art of the Imperial Cholas. I recommend it highly.
"One of my pet peeves is that when I tell a classy person I don’t like modern architecture, they’ll correct me - “Oh, I’m sure you don’t like Brutalism. But it’s unfair to hold that against the whole area. Why, surely even someone like you can appreciate the unique beauty of a von Shmendenstein, a Dazervaglik, or a Mihokushino.” Then I sheepishly admit that I’ve never heard of any of those people, and maybe I was overly hasty, and I should have been more careful and done my homework. They pat me on the head and say it’s fine.
Then I’d go home and look it up and all those people’s buildings would be hideous."
This sounds like a pre-smartphone-era phenomenon. These days, I'd expect the next step to be "Show me some photos" - not necessarily in a confrontational way, just in a "yay, please share with me this thing you like so I can see if I like it too" way.
This was the passage where it felt like Scott went full reverse snobbery, where he just wanted to show off that he doesn’t like things because they’re popular with elites, and doesn’t even want to think about them!
I mostly share Scott's sensibilities on this, except I like significantly less ornate decoration. Especially inside - no one wants to have to maintain all that. I grew up on Long Island and left as soon as I could, but even as a kid had the constant sense that all the upper middle class homes built in the 70's and 80's were just hideous to look at. As I got older I realized they were also really impractical to live in. The layouts made no sense, the style created wasted and unusable spaces, they were loud and had unpleasant lighting.
I do agree that some of these buildings and styles look very nice and clean in photos, and that others can be interesting exceptions (like something a visitor would want to stare at) for particular types of places. But, that's a terrible standard for deciding what to live in and work in and walk past. Endless sameness is mind-numbing. Platonic ideals of form over function create huge amounts of wasted mental and physical effort just to get the necessities of daily life done.
We've had light and air and water and wood and stone for millions of years. Architects want to reinvent them, give some new option that expands the space of possibilities? Great! They want to popularize the new version to show people what's now possible? Great! There will absolutely be places where this kind of thing is valuable and appreciated. They want to tell me that I'm wrong for what I like to look at in my own home or office and what's practical for how I live my life? GTFO.
I generally agree with the story here in very broad lines -- it is clearly a hitpiece that's also 40 years out of date -- but I'll be honest, Scott, you mostly just come across as really out of your depth when it comes to matters of taste -- also in the last AI post.
Between that and the endless regurgitation of the San Francisco housing crisis I (as a Europan) feel like the signal to noise on this blog has fallen off pretty hard for me.
Maybe this is because I don't feel like it's possible to be "out of my depth on matters of taste" - taste isn't objective, and if I disagree with leading tastemakers, I'm happy to just say "I disagree with leading tastemakers" and leave it at that. I don't think I've ever misrepresented whether I disagree with them or not.
Look at it like this: there's no objective answer to "what is the best curry?", that's purely subjective. On the other hand, some people make curry thrice a week, have favorite recipes for curries from India to Japan to the UK, be able to instantly tell most of the ingredients in a curry by taste and explain why they're in there etc. Another person might know 2 recipes and a takeout place they like. Both equally entitled to their opinion of what their favorite curry is, but one will have much more interesting things to say than the other.
Just from the comments here I get the impression that the people who do enjoy modern architecture, and there are quite a few of them, just come away from this thinking "Scott doesn't get it and thinks everybody who disagrees with him must be (subconsciously?) playing weird status games".
The whole thing just strikes me as an eloquent, intelligent exposition of the most mundane take on the subject as possible.
Maybe I should just hold my tongue though, you're just a guy with a blog, and I don't even pay you :P. The complaint about very SF-local content still kinda stands though, it's completely unrelateable to anything going on in Europe at least, and feels very "No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Country Where This Regularly Happens".
I studied in Groningen and can confirm the Groninger Museum is an ugly-ass building. More pleasant from the inside from what I remember. The Drents Museum some 25km south in my hometown is much better.
The US just elected a pretty crazy president based substantially on the concern that SF-style blue state cities have failed to control crime and homelessness. If this isn't your problem yet, it will be in a month and sixteen days.
Truly, the rationalist and EA movements need to study how to create someone so hated as Trump, so that they can make a Trumpian puppet to get people to do the opposite of whatever he says out of sheer spite. They could Tom Sawyer the masses!
Of the two curry enthusiasts you describe, I think the one with two recipes and a takeout place might be better suited to designing the local elementary school's meal plan -- and if my local (midwestern US suburbia) elementary school cafeteria decided to heavily prioritize exotic curries to the exclusion of food that kids actually eat, I would definitely have some questions about the decision.
Is this the most interesting take on cuisine? No, of course not -- but that's not really the point.
Sure. But he’s acting as though it’s not possible to actually have better understanding of one’s own taste, as though a MySpace page thought up by a teenager is going to be as good as something designed by a thoughtful graphic designer, because it’s just taste.
It's not so much that one taste is better than another taste - but one design can be a better reflection of all the dimensions of that taste than another.
I don't know how active you ever were on MySpace in the brief period when it was prominent, but people often used the design features that were available in ways that were self-defeating. They had some favorite music, so they had that play as autoplay background music, and they also embedded a video, but the two pieces of audio made it hard to hear either. An artist might do this to create an intentionally ugly juxtaposition that destabilizes whatever and whatever - but if someone did this because they wanted you to hear their favorite music, and see their favorite video, then it was bad design.
They would write up a poem, and put it in their favorite font, and put it on an ornate background image, and it was impossible to properly see any of them. Some artists might do this sort of thing out of a desire to create frustration, but if someone just unironically likes some poetry and some visual art, they probably want you to be able to see each one, rather than feel the frustration of each making the other impossible to see.
It's true that a lot of art criticism is people with one set of tastes critiquing work done for a different set of tastes. But a lot of it is also people who have tried making a whole bunch of things, and figured out which combinations are effective at the kinds of effects that one might be aiming for. Sometimes it's easy to mistake an effective attempt at an effect you don't like as an ineffective attempt at an effect you do like. But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as effective or ineffective.
When you are saying that you are making the curry of the people for the people in the way of the people, yet you are scrapping all the traditional recipes of curry that the people actually make and eat, and you change the recipe to have a ton of new, clashing ingredients and if the people don't like it then they are to blame - as one of the people, I say "That's not curry and I don't care if you won sixteen snobby cookery awards for it".
EDIT: Then again, I remember when black pudding became (briefly) a trendy ingredient and all kinds of lah-di-dah chefs were creating new dishes with it. I rolled my eyes because yeah, fine, do a beetroot and apple coulis with lemongrass reduction but the rest of us will stick to the traditional fry/breakfast roll:
Instead, we can argue about "is it an Ulster Fry, Full Irish/British Breakfast, or what?" and "do baked beans have a place in the fry?" and "mushrooms: yes or no?"
Also, they took advantage of this guy, you *do* get soda bread with the Irish fry/breakfast, and there should also be fried bread. Toast is optional, whether you want it or not is up to you.
Modern innovation that is maximum convenience: the breakfast roll
"it is clearly a hitpiece that's also 40 years out of date"
How is it out of date though? Are new buildings being done in a way that ordinary people (not just architects) are saying "Hey, those older building were hideous but this new style is pretty good"?
Or is this a bunch of new schools of building that are indistinguishable from the older ones unless you study architecture for four years?
Wolfe's argument is that the "experts" took over, and the ordinary people (including people who pay for the buildings) don't get a say.
And the result, like our current crisis in expertise in other fields, is that the experts have shown that they're egregiously *wrong*.
> How is it out of date though? Are new buildings being done in a way that ordinary people (not just architects) are saying "Hey, those older building were hideous but this new style is pretty good"?
Yes? I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but I think the typical brand new architect-y building is much better than the ones that were going up in the truly dark days of the 50s to 70s. We have learned not to build in raw concrete because it quickly looks terrible. We don't do plain rectangles any more, nor any other seriously-unfriendly shapes. More thought goes into the street-level experience of the building than it used to. Basically, the typical new large building looks like swoopy curved glass rather than rectangular concrete, and that's an improvement.
Swoopy curved glass does look better than rotting concrete slabs, I will admit. They aren't necessarily better to live in though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_World this set of buildings is not all that far from where I live. I considered buying a suite, until I heard they had problems with heat, and problems with fitting things in.
Yes, a rectangular room may be boring, but it does fit your furniture.
When I visited Chicago in 1965 at age 6, the tour guide pointed to the new round Marina Towers and confidently stated that all buildings in the future would be round and have pie-sliced shaped apartments.
But when I lived in Chicago in the 1980s-1990s, Marina Tower rents were cheap because nobody wanted to live in a pie-slice shaped apartment because what kind of furniture fits?
When I did some college tours 15 years ago, the worst looking buildings were the middle aged ones from 1945-1985 or so. The 1920s buildings looked good and most of the new ones looked like the 1920s buildings, just with bigger windows.
But that could just be my tastes being subjected to the hamster wheel of fashion.
In the spirit of giving an inch, there are some Modernist buildings that manage light in a pretty smart way.
An example is the crow man's Tower of Shadows in Chandigarh, India. It was built to respond to the movement of the Sun by blocking direct sunlight from each direction throughout the day, which is pretty useful in a hot Indian city.
It uses thinner pieces of concrete and incorporates a lot of open space, so it avoids the monolithic slab look you see with a lot of Gray buildings.
I think the mistake people make is that they go from (rightly) rejecting mere concrete boxes, to suggesting absurdly decorated and incoherently styled buildings that *also* look terrible.
But you can build nice today without going in either direction. I think this is a lovely example in New Urbanism style (in Swedish, but you can Google translate or just look at the pictures). It’s particularly neat how it’s a decently sized area, which means it can be in harmony with itself.
In many cases, people's architectural complains seem to mostly just boil down to wanting more color in their urban life. Modern designs with a colorful exterior, like what is being built in many Nordic countries, are found quite satisfactory compared to either the gray facades of brutalism *or* the white classic-imitation buildings.
FWIW I find texture at least as important as color. I find red brick nice in almost any setting, for example—it even improves the rare brick Brutalist building.
In his video "Why Are Condos Ugly", Paige Saunders discusses how making modern architectural decisions increase public opposition, which in turn reduce building heights/density/cost-effectiveness. So the story of "no ornamentation and raw/bare materials are cheaper" isn't even a correct description of the current trade-offs being made when it comes to residential buildings.
In a later video, he recommends citizen assemblies to better navigate these trade-offs: a group of randomly selected local residents get to vote on trading-off between a pre-defined set of architectural decisions, such as height and cladding material. This would be a kind of democratic antidote to the current state of public consultations and the architectural ugliness described in this post.
I feel like there are two different things happening here, and getting conflated in a way that makes both of them harder to understand.
One is getting rid of ornamentation. This, I think, is just a general consequence of industrialization and urbanization. The Eastern bloc sort of lived in a cultural bubble, undergoing different societal patterns and fads because it was dissociated from the west. Under Stalin, the Soviets built the sort of beautiful, ornate things you like (e.g. Moscow State University, the Moscow Metro), then under Khrushchev they built a shit-ton of commie blocks because they were cheaper and they never had enough housing. I think this is probably a bigger part of things than any art fad, and ties into the loss of institutional knowledge of ornamentation: for most of human history, city populations were stagnant, so you didn't need to build that many buildings, so you could spend that time making them really ornate. With the industrial revolution, urban populations skyrocketed and you needed to get lots of buildings, and fast, for generations.
The other is that you don't like modernist styles. I like the design of the Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (though I wouldn't want to live in an all-glass building, they aren't housing), but not, say, the City of Culture (it looks like an ugly lumpy video game level). I have no particular architectural background, I just look at the building and go "ugly" or "pretty" with little further talk. I feel similarly about other modernist or classical buildings, with some being ugly and some being pretty (ugly classical buildings are too gaudy, while ugly modernist buildings are too geometric, and you seem to consider "too gaudy" to be a line far beyond where I would put it). The way to fix this would be to commission a few designs for potential buildings in different styles and then poll the public on which ones they like the best. It would get rid of whatever people actually consider to be the "ugly" designs, whether modernist or classical.
In all seriousness, I quite like the tall glass skyscrapers, with their large windows, clean white interiors, silver appliances with white countertops. They look damn cool! I live in an (almost obnoxiously) art-deco building that was once a bank and appreciate that style too, but there's something about shining skyscrapers that have been built in the past 10-20 years that really look amazing too me.
>But corporations and governments have a more complicated mandate. When executive or bureaucrats make decisions, they’re supposed to be catering to more than their personal aesthetic taste. They’re supposed to be following best practices and doing what’s responsible, maybe as judged by a sort of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” type of standard.
A single datapoint on this: I recently attended some sort of neighborhood consultation for ideas of what to do in a soon to be built park. Most of the people present agreed that they didn't want it to have concrete walkways, and that they'd rather they be more gravel-y. To this, the city representative said: "We have to make the park accessible to those with reduced mobility".
In contemporary government construction it does seem that, unless you're willing to bear significant political cost, the incentives are lined up for making stuff that's drab and featureless, you might annoy a lot of people, but you're not seriously going to offend anyone.
"In contemporary government construction it does seem that, unless you're willing to bear significant political cost, the incentives are lined up for making stuff that's drab and featureless, you might annoy a lot of people, but you're not seriously going to offend anyone."
I expect that drab and featureless also costs less money.
One of the reason that Soviet housing (Stalinkas, Khrushchevka, Brezhnevkas) look the way they do is that the Khrushchevka and Brezhnevkas were being built when (a) the Soviet Union had a housing shortage and (b) resources were still scarce. Nicer buildings meant fewer buildings and less housing.
I hate the things, but they were a pretty economical solution to "we needs lots of housing NOW and aren't a terribly wealthy society."
At the local US government level, non-drab is probably more expensive as well as some people won't like it (whichever style you pick). Less expensive is something that almost everyone can agree is good (all other things being the same). So we often optimize for the thing we can quantify rather than the thing that matters more.
You mention Works in Progress's bit about the cost of ornaments but I think their recent essay perfectly answers your call for a well considered criticism of modern architecture that gives one inch. The idea is that because architecture is a public art inflicted on the public whether they like it or not we should prefer more accessible styles. And for things like buildings where we need a lot of designs we should prefer "easy" styles where an average practitioner can do a good job rather than styles that take a genius to do well.
That's not to say I think he's correct and this is the end of the story—though I admit I find all four essays persuasive, and in one case had been making that argument for years before Hughes did. But as it is, they haven't percolated; no one who substantive disagrees with me has chewed on them and updated their arguments. I'd like to start hearing some well reasoned rebuttals, rather than the same old "it's all selection bias," "it's all cost of labor" stuff.
"I found this part of the book sudden and jarring. Okay, Americans have always had an unhealthy fascination with European culture - but, really? Everyone abandoned all previous forms of architecture within a three year period just because some cool Europeans showed up?"
This is easy for me to grasp because the same process happened internally: the Northeast > my state (and no doubt other states distant from the capital - but my state had lots of yokels with the (most) money).
This is how you get, all over the country, mod art museums, more and less cool - usually filled with very minor works someone was only too happy to unload. And always with the Andy Warhol kitsch in the gift shop ...
A notable example, which many consider successful, is the Kimbell Museum, built on the windswept prairie. It's a sort of temple of modernism, and is indeed cool. The water fountains arc in just the same manner as the barrel-vaulted ceilings.
But the building is all. The art is completely unexceptional. How could it not be? How much Western art is there, to spread among all these provincial museums?! And were Yankees really going to sell off their very best stuff?
It furnishes a space for traveling exhibits, though. I see there is a good one going on now - Dutch treasures from the Boston Museum of Art.
We're still that customer, emerging from the (oily) ooze.
Incidentally, a pretty or even less-pretty art museum, filled with forgettable art sometimes not even curated, but with a $$ cafe and a gift shop, is still less ridiculous than the weirdest thing our dumb-dumb pols ever foisted on us - the time they got in bed with the Eurotrash with Formula One*, and subsidized - yes, this was a use of state dollars - the building of an F1 track in the middle of a goddamned colonia in eastern Travis County. Yes, the cool cars rip around the track before supposed billionaires and their hot girlfriends just a couple miles from where the bodies routinely turn up in burned-up vehicles, where the roads are not necessarily graded and paved, and where the chop shops for stolen cars are - basically a Bermuda Triangle as far as law enforcement is concerned, thanks to the robust enclave-forming nature of illegal immigration.
*A sport that had to be explained to the taxpayers in a series of tutorials in the newspaper.
Exempli gratia #3: how eagerly, how absolutely unthinkingly, the wider country glommed onto Robert Moses's ideas about transportation, about the imperative of more concrete.
Scott’s clearly correct about the broader point, that this architecture is much too common given its unpopularity with the broader public, so it makes sense to investigate why and to take corrective action.
That being said, I must say that a bit of Brutalism here and there helps to add some spice.
The National Archives, which house the Constitution, and the Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI, are just a couple blocks away from each other in DC. I see each as its own kind of temple to the Law.
The Archives are neoclassical, and show the Law as an ideal, beautiful, symmetrical, sacred. The Hoover Building is an unpopular example of Brutalism, but to me it shows the Law as a duty, the grinding grimy obscure work of enforcement.
I’m happy that both exist, though I admit that too many buildings in our cities look like the Hoover Building, and not enough look like the Archives.
1. Bauhaus and the like are the architectural expression of slave morality. The architectural equivalent of wearing a burlap sack and self-flagellating to be oh so humble.
2. These artists are clearly over-socialized and too concerned with the opinions of other artists when they should rather be pursuing their own vision based on their own internal scorecard. Being water flowing into a the shape of social-incentives sized container is pathetic.
For large/tall non-government buildings in a city, I like art deco a lot. Here are some examples of art deco, including famous ones in New York City: https://www.arch2o.com/10-most-fascinating-art-deco-buildings/ I think art deco usually hits a pretty good balance for ornamentation.
For government buildings, I like neoclassical. It's a nice tribute to the ancient Rome and Greek republics.
For homes/apartment complexes, I think modern *designs* are mostly fine, but greater color variation might help.
Can someone indulge a digression: I read the Fountainhead decades ago, and to my recollection the form of architecture described sounds awfully minimalist, "functional" and effectively Bauhaus. The novel also has Roark or some other criticizing artisanal flourishing near the beginning.
I have to imagine that Ayn Rand would have been aware of the Socialist ideological associations underpinning modern architecture, but instead framed the phenomenon of unwanted ugly buildings as a case of the individual doing his own thing running counter to what the masses want. Yet that's also true of Bauhaus apostles, their work is masterful individual expression, but *also* for the masses (for their own good rather).
How did Rand square this, and was there actually a parallel libertarian/objectivist movement drumming up some time after modern architecture was in full swing?
I've commented on the Fountainhead connection below (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house/comment/79995736), but I don't think that Rand found it particularly necessary to square it in any way. This was the way her aesthetic taste ran, so it must have been objectively correct, logical and in no way in conflict with the rest of her worldview; and if the later Rand fans have found any incongruities here, they seem to be satisfied with explaining it away as there being some secret difference between Roark's buildings, as described in the book, and general ugly functionalism that is just "they're beautiful because they're described as being beautiful".
Ayn Rand "solved" the problem of the "unwanted ugly buildings as a case of the individual doing his own thing running counter to what the masses want" by having an actual individual commission and pay for the buildings that Roarke designed. Roarke wasn't shoving anything down people's throats ... he spends a large part of the novel *waiting* for people to ask him to build buildings that he was willing to build (rather than lobbying local governments ...). And since an individual was paying for this, what "the masses" wanted didn't really matter. The masses can commission their own buildings.
And I don't think Roark was terribly Bauhuas, either. Each of his building was unique and tailored to the location and the intent of the building. The novel contains this description of one of his early commissions:
"The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony. The walls, of the same granite as the rock, continued its vertical lines upward; the wide, projecting terraces of concrete, silver as the sea, followed the line of the waves, of the straight horizon."
I don't think this can be written about Bauhaus style buildings in the general case. Maybe not about any of them.
Roark is much more Frank Lloyd Wright than Soviet blockhaus.
Rand and the socialists were equally modernist. Wolfe wants to in every bad thing on the excesses of the left, but James C Scott does a better job actually thinking about it, and seeing that hyper-rationalism, without enough local lived experience, is the actual problem.
Many members of the Bauhaus actually were trying to fix that - there’s a reason they hired craftspeople and did ergonomics studies, even if some of their stuff was then picked up in the name of style.
Both the Bauhaus and the puritans thought it was important to be functional and usable, more than being ornate and decorated and pretty. Both sometimes became self-parodies by aestheticizing the lack of ornament. I wouldn’t trust Tom Wolfe to actually be correctly reporting the views of the Bauhaus architects he is talking about.
In Norway, a movement known as the "Architectural Uprising" has gained significant traction. This group is very publicly talking about how modern buildings are ugly and we need classical stuff again. Their efforts have been remarkably successful, with numerous newspapers now regularly featuring articles on their competitions for the ugliest and most beautiful buildings. They have already had a substantial impact on public discourse, and I believe we will see notable changes in Norwegian and Nordic architecture moving forward.
I have mixed feelings - their criticism is usually sound, but they also love incoherent overdecorated mash-up "classical" with no thought or reason behind it.
1. Romanticism is perhaps the ultimate luxury belief.
2. The Lyman Family cult has apparently survived the passing of its founder, Mel Lyman, and supported itself doing very high end custom design and remodelling. They also bought rundown properties on Fort Hill in Boston and renovated them, well before the area gentrified.
Apparently, Mel Lyman had exacting standards for workmanship and design and demanded that his cultists strip a building down to the studs and remodel it, then he'd find something he didn't like and make the culstits strip the building back down and do it again until Mel was entirely satisfied.
The cult now mostly do work for movie stars and the like, only work with "people they like" and don't bother with contracts or other formalities. Last I checked, they apparently get in contact with Mel via Oujia board from time to time.
Pre-rant disclosure: I like 20th century buildings, from craftsman homes and fantasy ethnic bungalows, through Art Deco public buildings (RIP UT Hicks School of Social Work and your great oaks) through midcentury split levels and Brady Bunch houses, and most especially the woodsy or faux-rustic California variety.
I don't particularly love the gargantuan late 19th century and early 20th century "classical" public buildings and hotels that once filled my state, and often had rather short lives - though the really well-done exceptions, typically stone rather than brick, and more modest in size, seem likely to outlive everything, and deserve to.
The problem is what people do with a "style", on the cheap. What it excuses them to do or not do at scale. And modernism was never going to be cool on the cheap. I can only point you to my middle school, Paul Revere, in Houston, Texas.
If you google a photo of it you may object - that's not modernism - it's just nothing! It's a couple of boxes. Ah, but that's the derivation of modernism - permission to do nothing. In fact, as you can see - it has *very little* in the way of windows. The classrooms in particular were mostly windowless boxes. We spent our entire time there lit only by flourescent tubes. (I'd like to think the teachers nowadays have figured out to bring in some little table lamps.) It's functionally just the same as if we were in that period when they taxed windows ... in this case, I imagine, they were saving money on A/C, or thought they were. And of course, awnings, being decorative, were thoroughly out at that period. (And I notice even now, when they've returned somewhat, that architects seldom have the courage to make them as deep as they need to be to have any effect.)
It was recalled to me because I was back "home" not long ago and it happened to make the front page of the paper, in a story about "crumbling" schools. They showed a picture of the principal by an interior concrete wall where the paint is peeling off - kids like to pause and give it a peel as they pass. (I know I would have been unable to resist that.) The article suggested the need for bonds to repair it and other schools; I was flabbergasted that they thought it worth repairing, but I suppose if it could be successfully transformed in some way, that would be a signal architectural triumph, and a beacon of hope.
Currently the absolutely best thing about the place is the cable box out front. In Houston as elsewhere I guess, people have been encouraged to paint the cable boxes and the results are often charming. Thus the cable box furnishes the only, and unauthorized, decorative detail at least on the exterior of the campus: a well-executed picture of the midnight rider himself.
The International Fountain in Seattle is a great example of how interesting modernist ideas can be transformed into something beloved by the public.
Originally, it was designed to feature big, irregular parabolic jets of water that were the main attraction - not the solid fountain body itself. This was a great idea. But the fountain body was covered in ugly spikes and surrounded by rocks to evoke space exploration, which was typical modernist ugliness and discouraged interaction.
In 1995 they rebuilt the fountain body, removing the spike nozzles and rocks and covering the fountain in a glittering metal. Now, it’s the star attraction of Seattle Square. Huge numbers of kids run and play in it all summer long - the fun is trying to run and touch the fountain body when the water jet at that location is not active, then running away laughing when the water shoots out again.
I know this is a book review (of a polemic that is now 40 years old), but I think there's a better and more nuanced case to be made if one just follows some leads that Scott has smelled out in passing but didn't really develop.
Take the parallel with 'woke'. Yes, I got majorly annoyed with some extremely aggressive, harmful posturers during peak woke, but a friend of mine had a point when he said, back then, that woke discourse is sometimes 'excellent heuristics, terrible dogma'. I thought and think that he was too kind - but it is true that wokedom is built in part on some valid concerns and good points - and then some chronic sophomores built a cult on top of that. Well, enough of that - but how does it apply to architecture?
'Form follows function' is a pretty darn good heuristic, in fact more of a heuristic - it's a sound philosophy. It dates to before Bauhaus - in that form, it goes back to Louis Sullivan (who did allow himself plenty of decoration on top of an appropriate structure). In fact, if it is seen as something to remember, rather than as something to apply mechanically or with single-minded brutishness, it may even be passable dogma (Sullivan did say: "[it's a] rule that shall permit of no exception.").
That becomes *clearer* if you consider some massive failures of modernism, or of a misapplication of modernist forms. Take the relatively recent Berlin airport fiasco. The architect intended the new Berlin airport to be an architectural reference to Mies van der Rohe - some sort of Farnsworth house scaled up by a very large factor. Basic function was compromised: because he would not tolerate anything other than a perfectly flat ceiling with no features, he (or rather, he and many architects and designers working with him, including a fake engineer) decided that steal in a fire safety system would be forced *downwards*, by means of a complicated system of valves. That's not where smoke wants to go. It was all a very expensive fiasco. Note the basic principle was violated - and modernism had just become another style of the past to pilfer from.
Or again, going back to genuine modernism: yes, flat roofs are not appropriate where it rains or snows a lot, glass walls configurations led to overheating, etc. This are all signs of a movement become a little too enamoured of its own new forms, associated with 'rationality', at the cost of forgetting the underlying, sound rationality. (Scott also points out that it was a general tendency of the progressivism of the age not to ask for feedback from the people for whose happiness you were supposedly working.)
Another reviewer here also made the point that many of the early modernist buildings put up on the page as warnings are actually very appealing (I'd definitely include the Stuttgart building that gets called a 'commieblock' here), and some of the more traditional buildings aren't. It may be that a movement, to be initially successful, needs to be led by intelligent, capable people, who moreover sometimes have a better working intuition than what their manifestos betray. Later generations of the movement do not undergo a selection effect in the same way.
The way that some architects who fell afoul of middle- or late-period modernist snobbishness got mistreated is appalling. But, honestly, a quick search shows that Morris Lapidus did build his share of frankly cringe-inducing hotel lobbies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Lapidus#/media/File:Eden_Roc_interior_FL1.jpg), and that some of his successes rested on a mixture of responsiveness to user experience and (gasp) functionalism:
"Beyond visual style, there is some degree of functionalism at work. His curving walls caught the prevailing ocean breezes in the era before central air-conditioning, and the sequence of his interior spaces was the result of careful attention to user experience: Lapidis [sic] heard complaints of endless featureless hotel corridors and when possible curved his hallways to avoid that effect." (thanks, Wikipedia)
It seems perfectly fair, not pathetic, for him to point out that he didn't just build chintzy big hotel lobbies in Florida - it's interesting to know he'd built a housing project on commission to the Soviets (hopefully those living there were happy, not just the planners); can anybody find pictures? (Why couldn't *he* get to design schools and projects in the US, and bring joy to people's lives, rather than have commissions that encouraged excess? Sounds like a waste.)
Plenty of things built by Saarinen are immediately appealing - and immediately recognizable as modernist, just not of a sufficiently orthodox kind according to mid-20th century tastemakers, it would seem. I just found out that I lived in a dorm designed by Saarinen when I was an undergrad. I didn't dislike it - it was more of a (solidly built) individual rowhouse (very gray on the outside) shared with other students, but I'd never have imagined it was designed by a famous architect or his studio. Maybe he just produced or put his signature on too much, some of it humdrum, in a life cut short (1910-1961).
Lastly: the main thing that is wrong with MacMansions is simply what is wrong with US suburbia (or even: with an unsustainable US idea of prosperity) dialed up to 11 - they are too large, poorly thought out, often (I get the impression) surprisingly shoddily built given their price ticket, and in general boasting of expense through sheer size and accumulation.
Pages that mock MacMansions often focus on the things that are particularly important to architecture students - they copy historical styles (generally a few particular styles) in the way that an older chatbot would try to copy a writing style (something ChatGPT is actually still quite bad at): the words are right, the basic grammar may be locally right (not really the case with the worst MacMansions, actually), but it's all rather perfunctory, goes nowhere, expresses nothing. This is less important for most of us: after all, lots of perfectly livable, nice houses that are definitely not MacMansions were built piecemeal over time, so that they are a bit of a hodgepodge, but are actually pleasant and well-thought-out on the inside, in an improvisational sort of way.
What should we think about (if we actually have the money to build a house from scratch - most of us don't)? We live in an energy crisis that will probably last the rest of our lives, and will get worse before it gets better. Now, if you or I just have a Passivhaus built by a contractor, we may succeed (given enough basic technical knowledge), but, especially if the budget is definitely an issue, it may end up looking like a pile of legos. Now that is where it would make a lot of sense for architects to go in. There may be many solutions, all of them valid, some minimalist, some Tartarian in many utterly harmless ways, none of them MacMansions; what HOAs might think of them, well, I think we can all guess.
(Some traditional features actually have a function. Another lead that I wish had been more developed is the reference to Arts and Crafts/William Morris. The point that most of what he and the craftsmen he worked could be afforded only by the rich at the time is unfortunately a valid criticism - they didn't eschew all machinery, but, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's a pity they didn't try to engage with large-scale industrial processes, rather than just recoiling from them with plenty of justification. More to the point, many of their well-thought out pieces are simultaneously 'modern' in their underlying motivation and 'Tartarian' seen with today's eyes. I have had to hear so much carping on the part of my girlfriend because I happen to like many of William Morris designs - I'm typing this from a room with a Snakeshead-pattern curtain - lying down on one blue and one burgundy cushions, both with the Pimpernel pattern; she must have provoked me at some point.)
I think this point about arts and crafts or craftsman style being inaccessible to the masses is trivially refuted by the prolific Sears kit houses across the US. As well perhaps by Eastlake being a byword for mass-produced furniture of the period. The kit houses are not going to compete with say a Thorsen House for actual craftsmanship, of course, though I expect they were easy enough for people to add whatever they wanted and perhaps could do themselves in that way.
But this is obvious, I guess - so perhaps I am not understanding what is meant by Arts and Crafts. I guess if it all has to come out of William Morris's workshop - yeah, it wasn't really going to spread.
William Morris insisted on products being made by craftsmen in workshops, earning good wages, and saw the degradation (in terms of status, income, etc.) of workers in Victorian England as being a by-product of industrialization (he wasn't wrong). He did allow for some machines and even automation (the Jacquard loom - that's where punch-cards come from). Still, things produced in his workshop or strictly according to his philosophy were expensive; that's why he became associated with wallpaper - it was the one Morris & co. item that very many people could afford.
Of course his style, and even his philosophy, were more influential than that. He eschewed ornamentation that took an inordinate amount of time, and tended to favor designs (in e.g. carpentry) that could be well-executed with standard tools. People influenced by him (in the following generation, say) often saw that machines needed to be given a more important role, not just in reducing costs, but in saving craftsmen from drudgery.
As an austrian that practically lives next door from the Kirche am Steinhof (also called Otto-Wagner-Kirche) I fail to see how that building is not transgressive and avant-garde. It's an extremely weird building, a wild clash of different styles out of different eras, yet still somehow cohesive and with its unique twist. You also have to consider that it's a church. Even today most modern churches come nowhere close to being that innovative.
I'm pretty young and always somewhat perplexed when I walk past it.
I enjoy a lot of the minimal concrete buildings in my city. They look really cool as the light changes through the day. And maybe it's because glass skyscrapers are the norm, but they also seem interesting and different.
So what makes a place pleseant? Often it's uniformity and detail. Think of greek buildings with blue roofs and white walls on a mountain. So a town that looks distinict, and composed is very pleseant, even if it's not your style. I think we need to remember architects work for us. So we shoud create a styles for our cities. Think more design system, than a menu of buildings, like all buildings should be white have blue roofs, avoid sharp corners, columns are encouraged if they are structural, but not required. Still I value freedom and diversity. We shouldn't make building something else illegal, but we should charge you for the privilage of building a snowflake, or we should set aside aestethic free zones. But your city should have consistant elements, with some freedom to play. Maybe this smacks too much of zoning, so you need to design a system that doesn't create road blocks. I firmly believe we can have nice and beautiful things.
I don't think it's productive to throw all types of buildings into the same pot. I'm not sure it's even productive to discuss groups of buildings even by the same architect.
I cannot imagine highrise office buildings that aren't modern in some form. How do you use floor space effectively and meet building codes without ending up with some variation of what we see in practice? Occupants will want natural light, so we end up without interior rooms and large, open floors instead. To maximize light coming in you end up with floor-to-celling windows because otherwise people 50ft into the open floor get very little natural light.
I understand that simpler apartment buildings, schools etc. largely look the way they do because parts are mass-produced. Arguably we'd probably end up hating these regardless what the mass-produced pieces look like just because they are mass-produced, won't be perfect and due to its omnipresence will start hating it. (That is till many of them were torn down 80 years from now, yes around then are large and then we'll love and celebrate them). I think you are right that AI and new manufacturing techniques are the best hope here.
I also cannot help but wonder to what degree is survivorship bias at work. Many more beloved buildings were hated when they were new. I also never see these articles complain about the truly beautiful modern buildings like the museums designed by Tadao Ando, the Oslo opera, the Sidney opera, the modern addition to the Louvre all of which attract tourists due to their architecture which is very, very modern.
To add, Detroit has some old skyscrapers. I've visited some of them and they looked cool from the outside but were quite bad when you were in an actual office inside them. Lots of dark spaces, cramped rooms, etc.
Without addressing the pathologies of Starchitecture, there does seem to be an element of reverse survivorship bias at play - somewhere along the line, building something cheaply started to make it more durable rather than less. Add in that a building that will not literally collapse in on itself if poorly maintained is a great target for neglect, and economizing for maintenance cost during the design phase is somewhat of an admission that nobody is expected to care about appearances down the line.
Is this an opportunity for a basic Outside View calibration to pay dividends? "In strict order, answer these questions: What are some completed projects similar to the one we're working on? How does our project look right now during the planning phase? How do those similar projects usually look at this point in the planning phase? What does the stakeholder think of those similar projects during their useful life? What do we want the stakeholder to think about our project during its useful life?"
With that out of the way, registering my obligatory contratian take: I love Boston City Hall unapologetically - "mixed material inverted step pyramid" is not a description you should give me if you want me to hate something. That said, the all-brick plaza surrounding it was an abomination where I have spent entirely too many hours freezing my ass off in a New England winter searching frantically for something, anything to act as a windbreak. The recent renovations have been a huge game-changer, and I'd invite folks to take a look at how much better it immediately is with the ol' Just Add Trees recipe popular these days.
Right - it's not that the building isn't interesting, or that brick plazas aren't nice, it's just that the square used to be very windy, to the point that it made Boston feel more like Chicago. The first impression I got when visiting the place as a skinny kid in the mid-90s was that the place didn't like me. I'm glad that this has been addressed.
It's less about decorations and more about proportions and materials, I would say. E.g. look at this 19th-century small house in a small town - hardly any decorations, but pleasing to the eye.
Importantly, it's also nice to look at from very close distances, such as a meter or two, because of the materials.
A new similarly sized house is generally not pleasing to see at close range, because of its dirty concrete and metal parts (concrete gets ugly very fast). Here's a new house of similar size and amount of decoration in the same town:
Would you say it's decoration that makes the first one more pleasing? I cannot really put my finger on why it's so profoundly better than the new houses, I just feel it very strongly. (Surely, many people would like the new ones better, but I'm probably representing the majority here.)
This really reads like a reddit sneer club post, except that instead of sneering at “rationalists” who like to pretend they’re better than you because they play with robots, it’s sneering at “architects” who like to pretend they’re better than you because they draw straight lines.
It’s one thing to dislike modern architecture, but it’s another to go in for an explicitly anti-intellectualist vision where you don’t admit any possible explanation for thought other than status signaling.
In any case, there’s a lot of problems with this attempted explanation of modernist architecture.
The most obvious - in what universe is Eero Saarinen not a modernist?!?! Just google his buildings - the St. Louis gateway arch, the terminal and hotel at jfk, etc! They are un-ornamented brutalist sensual curves, very Bauhaus.
The second - you know who was a fan of modern architecture and not a socialist? Ayn Rand. Anything that blames modern architecture on socialism has to confront that.
The third - while a lot of modernist buildings are unpleasant and unliveable (certainly the large-scale works of Le Corbusier are usually now entirely reviled by the architectural and especially urbanist communities) the Bauhaus in particular really did do a lot to make usable architecture. Every kitchen in the past century was shaped by the Bauhaus who realized that with modern technology, you don’t have to worry as much about open flames and instead can put the different workstations (sink, stovetop, cutting area) in places where they are usable.
"an explicitly anti-intellectualist vision where you don’t admit any possible explanation for thought other than status signaling."
In fairness to Scott — this is an excellent description of Wolfe's actual book.
The fact that Scott's review follows this path as well means that it's at least faithful to the source material. And that's one important virtue that a book review can offer.
I mean, Wolfe sneered at the Mercury astronauts (!!!). But nobody decries that as anti-intellectual lol.
And I don't think we're blessed with so very many engagingly readable, not-bluffing public intellectuals in the past few decades that we can throw out Wolfe just because he had a POV and a little bitchiness.
I’m not saying to throw out Wolfe! Just that whatever negative feelings one might have about the New York Times or a certain subset of redditors who like to sneer and dunk on pretentious rationalists, it might be valuable to recognize that these feelings are appropriate to the same degree about Wolfe. (I recommend being not so positive about Wolfe as Scott is, and not so negative on the nytimes, but to accept a certain kind of ambivalence about both.)
He’s writing a book review, not adopting status games as the only explanation for modern architecture. He even explicitly says he would like to read a book that is more sympathetic to what modern architects were trying to do on their own terms.
You know you can go ahead and ban me, Scott, but I think this piece is an absolutely perfect teaching tool for you to understand how you've become both a vastly more right-wing and vastly less interesting figure in the span of a half-decade: you have fallen into a pathological obsession with your fear that there are people out there looking down their noses at you.
I think this is too harsh (it may have a point but it's not very constructive, and the last bit about the motivation is presumptive). I also think (as I implied before) that's there a better essay (better than both its current form and Wolfe's polemics) shyly trying to fight its way out of this one.
Is he creating it? Or is he rather in the general anti-intellectualism trend in the US (that’s just a perception from across the ocean, I could well be wrong)?
This was probably an ill-conceived comment, but let me clarify what I meant.
I certainly wouldn’t label Scott as anti-intellectual, if nothing else because I wouldn’t have words left for a lot of people.
The point of that comment is that skepticism of intellectuals seems (in my very remote and very partial perception) to be rising in the US.
It is in this light that I was answering Kenny Easwaran’s claim that Scott created his own sneer club – that there’s no point to create one, it already exists.
(I will sometimes comment and nitpick on posts, regardless of whether I agree with their main gist. It’s one of the things that makes commenting interesting, I find.)
Scott’s full arc is definitely more intellectual than anti-intellectual. But his recent writing about taste and art is pretty close to explicitly anti-intellectual. He’s close to saying that anyone who thinks they are having thoughts about art or taste is actually just fooling themself about a status game they are playing, and that naive first impressions are the only real thing.
"Anti-elite" is probably closer, but "elite" is only slightly less slippery to define than intellectual in the sense meant here. Anti-credentialism likely plays a role as well, though Scott is not new to anti-credentialism nor does that quite align with the "starchitects make unpopular eyesores" problem.
I would also say Scott has become vastly *less* right-wing in the last decade: he outright refuses to comment on politics and culture war most of the time, he's walked back and silenced many of his old positions, etc etc.
I think you must have a different definition of “right wing”. He’s become more circumspect in public talking about race. But he’s also become a lot more explicit about endorsing anti-intellectualism in art, and a right-populist view of class, and even in the past few weeks much more specifically supportive of Christianity.
Once upon a time he interacted consistently with neo-reactionaries. Mostly in attempts to refute them, but even so.
I do not think Scott is any less the Bay Arean Progressive he's always been, and he's less of a heretical BAP than he once was. Even on the Christianity thing, he's long been much more Christian-tolerant than the rest of the rationalsphere and prog-blogosphere. Dear Fred upthread is just wildly miscalibrated and intolerant of disagreement.
If shitting on modern architecture and pretentious art is all that is required to make one right wing, then the left wing has failed the people.
Indeed, they're exactly the same thing, mocking a bunch of nobodies for trying to think better versus not appreciating the grand designs of pretentious fops that a supermajority of people hate.
The more I read the comments, the less I understand how the other commenters view the world (or perhaps it’s just “I know that I know nothing” kicking in with respect to how people in the US think).
But more seriously, if you’re the one in power, aren’t you the most exposed, and the most at risk, always? Where you always have to worry foremost about losing power (“kings don’t retire, and they don’t die in bed, either”) and look at all their actions within this single prism? Remember Damocles’s sword?
I would argue that in modern society, true peace of mind comes from being beneath notice – not necessarily small, but not big enough to be notorious. Of course, this is not the American way, but I’m not American so I couldn’t care less.
If I agreed with Freddie’s point (I do not), I would also answer “yes” to your question. If this were who Scott is now, then important value would have been lost. Such an expression would be very much at odds with the Scott meditating on Moloch, admiring the beauty of our weapons, or pleading for niceness, community and civilization.
> But more seriously, if you’re the one in power, aren’t you the most exposed, and the most at risk, always?
Not when you've eliminated all opposition and centralized power to the point that no one can challenge you. That's the ultimate reward of true power: the elimination of uncertainty. That desire is what's fueling both Scott's rightward shift and the populist revolution in the US. Of course, Scott isn't willing to admit that to himself, and is therefore unwilling to ingratiate himself with the new administration despite having the perfect opportunity to do so... *sigh* It's like he can't let himself be happy.
Scott doesn't like a style of architecture that's popular with architects therefore...he's right wing?
If he was afraid that people were looking down their noses at him then wouldn't he pretend he likes the prestigious styles? Isn't his architectural opinions better explained by aesthetics than playing status games?
No - Scott endorses Tom Wolfe saying that modern architecture is bad and is only popular because it’s socialist. Seeing everything you don’t like as a grand socialist conspiracy is pretty right wing.
Where is the conspiracy? Wolfe claims that the modern architecture styles that Scott dislikes started in artist communes in Europe, that these artist communes were heavily influenced by socialism, that many of them became prestigious academics in the US once WWII started, and that their ideas spread among an increasingly specialized expert class of architects. At no point is there a "socialist conspiracy". What part of Wolfe's book do you disagree with? Were the Bauhaus artists and those like them *not* heavily influenced by socialism?
I think the influence of these communes is being highly overhyped, as is the extent of socialism here. I don’t think there’s any evidence that socialism was any more influential in modernist architecture than, say, Hollywood screenplays, or for that matter corporate graphic design.
I don’t want to deny that any of these things was heavily influenced by socialism, because socialism, like capitalism, like Christianity, like mathematics, is very big and has influence in lots of things in lots of ways. But I want to deny that architecture is in any important way different from lots of things that are way more popular and populist, and that seems to be the claim Wolfe is making.
How is Wolfe claiming that architecture was influenced more or differently than Hollywood or graphic design?
Architecture certainly seems to be different than things that are way more popular and populist, primarily in that it is not popular and populist. Most Hollywood movies are made with the intent of being popular, after all. Most food is made with the intent of being tasty to people. Modern architecture, however, is both unpopular and ubiquitous. That does seem to be different enough to be worth asking the question of how it ended up that way.
What? Scott doesn’t like modern architecture, sees or at least believes that most other people don’t either, and is interested in learning how it gained in popularity nevertheless. He writes a book review which includes as an explanation status games between architects. This demonstrates a pathological fear that people are looking down their noses at him?
And I guess this is “right wing” because he critiques some socialist architects who embraced patently absurd ideas about the relationship between architecture and socialism? Is there any way to critique the aesthetic disaster that is 90% of modern architecture that isn’t “right wing” and “[un]interesting”? Or do all good socialists need to embrace it?
The thought that status games among architects is sufficient to explain the popularity of unpopular architecture is in fact just a pathological fear of people looking down their noses. Basically any attempted explanation of a broad social movement that is based entirely on status games among a clique is.
This comment makes little sense, but fortunately Scott hasn't been known to ban people for that.
Also the several individuals I know who deeply loath brutalist architecture (one of them being my sibling) are all people who've never voted for any flavor of Republican and never will.
To even be able to *identify* Brutalist architecture, rather than "that's a damn eyesore", likely has a strong negative correlation with ever voting Republican.
Tom Wolfe's critique of Modernist architecture really stems from the glut of poorly designed corporate-funded Modern architecture promulgated throughout America before and after WW2. People ask why we can't build Baroque-revivalist state and federal buildings like in the old days don't realize that the construction trades, before and after WW2, lost a lot of the old-world craftsmen who could do such work cost-effectively and on time. Ironically, Baroque utilized a lot of plasterwork to replicate the expensive stone of the Renaissance era because stone ornamentation was expensive! The ornamentation of the Renaissance era was a reaction to the undecorative Romanesque style.
When Mies Van Der Rohe came to the US in 1930 he brought a refined sense of craft and rigor to his modern designs, pushing the boundaries of modern design especially when he began teaching at IIT in Chicago. His early modernist buildings on the IIT campus, as well as his Lake Shore Drive apartments and Seagram building, inspired immediate knock-offs which then became the defacto "corporate" style. Mies' buildings were anything but cheap. But with middling corporate architects adapting his styling, the methods and aesthetic became cheaper as more corporations utilized the style to reflect a new era in America.
Remember the Ben Franklin aphorism - Time is Money. The post-WW2 building boom required new means and methods of building that solid stone masonry with lots of articulation and one-off decoration could not produce in the time-frame that corporations and governments required.
The U.S. Capitol building took 18 years to complete and that was by utilizing a steel-framed structure with a masonry skin! The U.S. Cathedral took 83 years to complete. That the Notre Dame Cathedral was restored in the 5-yr time-frame is not a testament to the fact that we can still build (because we can at great expense) like the old days, but a testament to national $ and resources being dedicated to rebuild the Cathedral. This meant training new craftspeople to replicate the varying construction techniques and historically accurate materials utilized over the 700 years it was built and spending $1B to achieve it. I imagine if you had to rebuild ND exactly from scratch it would be a $5B+ building and take 10+ years or more to complete.
Architecture has always been about blending the aesthetic with the functional and like all aesthetic phases in human history, the dominant styles come and go. For a brief period during the Post-Modernist phase of Architecture, there was a push to decorate the shed and it failed because the decoration was paper-thin in concept and execution. Then, for a period of time, we had the Deconstructionist phase championed by Tschumi, Hadid, Morphosis, Gehry, and Liebskind which brought about more radical efforts at what constituted decoration, movement, and exuberance to the staid International style.
Now, when we get "Traditional" architectural attempts at recreating old-world styles, especially in residential architecture, 90% of the time poorly executed pastiche of what the client and builder think is "traditional" but in many respects the details and proportions are terrible and the materials used are relatively inexpensive.
I'm still confused by what is and isn't "modernist" architecture. Before reading the review I thought I was going to write a comment like "I used to like classical architecture but 'The Fountainhead' really changed my mind and now I really like modernism." But of course, I was thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright (who was the inspiration for Roark's style). But I guess he isn't modernist?
What about Zaha Hadid? I like a lot of her stuff, and things in that style.
So, yeah, I hate brutalism and I can't say that any of the modern buildings that you included in this post are appealing, but can someone explain to me what, say, "The Big Bend" would be if it is ever built? Because I like that.
Scott said he can’t tell the difference between different modernist styles, and he approvingly quotes Tom Wolfe saying that Eero Saarinen was looked down on by modernists. Actually understanding the differences and connections between these styles helps you understand what does and doesn’t work about each, rather than just saying X Good Y Bad the way Scott does with X=“traditional” and Y=“modern”.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen talks about Frank Lloyd Wright (and others like Louis Kahn, and maybe Saarinen would count) as situated modernists. Situated modernism is a branch of modernism that remains interested in place, local context, and close engagement in a way that the International Style ("machine consensualism") explicitly forswore. She even says Le Corbusier moved toward situated modernism late in his career, though I don't know if I quite buy it.
Anyway, yeah, there are varieties of modernism, on a spectrum from International Style to Frank Lloyd Wright; the more you are toward the IS end of the spectrum, the more you're talking about the kind of modernism Scott and most sensible people hate.
Hadid is associated with parametricism, an interersting post-postmodern movement that, in my opinion, corrects for some of the mistakes of modernism but not others.
> There was one person in my entire state-sized region that could do custom tile.
Am I reading this correctly? This guy could only find a single tiler in "a very rich and very busy area"? That doesn't seem right... all the GCs and handymen whom I've met can install tile.
While there are differences between different tile materials that need to be taken into account during installation - e.g., gray thinset has the potential to discolor white marble - it's basically the same job requiring the same skills regardless of what tile material is used.
On the material supply side, I believe the situation is unambiguous: there's a greater variety of tiles, grouts, and adhesives available now compared to any previous time in history. Within 15 minutes, you can find a supplier and place an order for just about any size, shape, and color of Moroccan zellige, Italian marble, or any other esoteric tile material you can think of.
And sure, not everyone who's willing to take your money in exchange for a tile installation is going to be a master craftsman. But why should we assume that hasn't always been the case? We only see the masterfully built historic buildings, because the crappy ones aren't around anymore.
I was just trying to make sense of another user's comment, not making any assertion of whether he was right.
Actually, I have some practical questions. I know how to answer (c)-(d) in continental Europe. (Of course one can then pay to have them transported, but I said "practical"; tiles are heavy and fragile - you don't want to mail 200kg as an individual.)
a) Where can I get tiles suitable for interior or exterior usage in the new "hat tile" shape? (I know how to 3D-print for puzzles; I'd like ceramic of this or any specific rectilinear shape that doesn't cost a fortune.)
b) Where can I get Penrose tiles that are suitable for external use in a cold climate, or for inside use in wet rooms? (All I know is a Spanish company that bakes terracotta at low temperatures.)
c) Where can I get irregular pentagonal tiles that tile the plane, other than the ones for the Cairo tiling?
d) (This should be easy.) Where do I get good-quality equilateral-triangle tiles - from a company that also makes squares of the same side length?
Not trying to prove a point - helping a friend!
Also, how would you go about finding a good tile-layer in the US - someone who can do a good job on a complicated pattern without using overly thick grout, say, and protecting the grout well? I don't think this should be that hard - some capable handymen can do it - but some friends of mine have just moved to a small city in the Midwest.
I wanted a size/color of tile that Pecchioli didn't offer, and they offered to make them for me. Unfortunately, they wanted nine bucks apiece (for a few dozen 2-inch tiles). I still sometimes wish I had taken them up on it, but I wasn't 100% sure the aesthetics would have worked. Mercury Mosaics also offered to do custom work for me, and looking at their studio it seemed likely that they're sufficiently non-automated that they could make more-or-less whatever you want.
When I redo my bathrooms, I am 99% certain that I will buy from one of these two companies (in the case of Pecchioli, through Alchemy Materials in NYC).
Both of these are expensive choices, but custom work is going to be expensive.
Anyone can install tile but not everyone can do it well. Even a basic tile job takes some skill. But to do truly custom tile work requires a level of skill not found in the parking lot of a Home Depot. The same goes for finding great carpenters and people who can hang, float and finish drywall. Building buildings takes a lot of labor and no amount of wishful thinking about 3D printing spitting out what a person wants will make that disappear.
New Orleans has some master craftsman but they're few and far between, in high demand for restoration work and expensive because the level of skill to execute the work requires time.
Knowing how much this crowd thinks about Rome, I'd like to point out that the first "manifesto" on architecture is considered to be Vitruvius' De Architectura also known as the Ten Books on Architecture where he elevated the Architect up from being a simple craftsman to an artist. So you can really lay the blame at that Roman's feet because his treatise is still taught in Architecture school today...teaching woke concepts of 'Firmness, Comodity, and Delight"
I'm not sure how convincing I find "everyone hates modern architecture so we should go back to classical, highly decorated buildings." I think there's an assumption here that it's possible to make people happy. But in an age where most art can be produced to extremely niche specific tastes it might be impossible to create *any* collective style that everyone agrees on.
If all the buildings in my neighborhood suddenly had gargoyles I'd find that...unnerving.
It seems that Bob Hope’s wife didn’t like the style, so she filled it with over-the-top ornamentation, in a way that could have some appeal, but fails to take advantage of the desert vista and open air that John Lautner was trying to capture.
On the subject of AI's impact on construction, I'm bullish on its impact for two different reasons than what you posit:
* In the current state of AI, it threatens to displace a lot of white collar jobs mostly. Those marginal white collar workers might turn to skilled manual labor, making quality ornamented buildings more viable.
* If we get to robots for construction, they could significantly reduce one of the biggest costs of projects nowadays: safety. The "Build, baby, Build" crowd often laments that the Empire State was done in a single year, and the common retort is that a lot of people died in its construction. It seems that we've been increasingly trading off efficiency for safety as far as construction is concerned, and while we can argue about whether it's been worthwile until we go blue in the face, if the issue was just taken off the table altogether, then it could enable the construction of more cool things.
"All that ornament - the gilded plaster, the cast iron balcony, etc - required trained artisans. These artisans aren’t completely gone - some of them were no doubt involved in the recent restoration of Notre Dame and other similar projects...."
Charleston, SC, is full of beautiful, well-ornamented old buildings, and, as they were old, they were in need of repair, especially after the town was walloped by Hurricane Hugo. With skilled practitioners hard to find -- many of the workers dealing with Hugo damage had to be recruited from Europe -- community members came together to found the American College of Building Arts, where traditional plasterwork/carpentry/architecture/ironwork/etc. would get its due, and provide a pipeline of workers able to repair and reconstruct the city's architecture.
The work ACBA students do is beautiful, and apparently remunerative - it's likely the one place you can get the equivalent of a degree in art, and be guaranteed a job at the end of it. Worth looking at, if you are a fan of anything that is not modern architectural bilge.
Scott, as an architect, I can appreciate your consternation about finding books that would explain Modernism beyond the snide take of Wolfe's manifesto against Modernism. Sure, you can't be expected to read every history book or treatise on architecture (of which many predate Modernism and Bauhaus) but often the best education is visiting good architectural examples.
Kenneth Frampton's book Modern Architecture: A Critical History is a good book to check out to get a great understanding of the history of Modern Architecture. Witold Rybczynski's The Story of Architecture is also worth a read for anyone interested in architecture and the evolution of architectural styles over the centuries. I think people forget that the examples of Classical architecture we admire are the best iterations whereas the middling or terrible examples were torn down and replaced.
Frank Lloyd Wright is a great example of an architect's stylistic evolution over his career starting with his early, very decorative works to his Falling Water masterpiece. If you get the chance to visit it, I highly recommend it.
Louis Kahn's work is very much about shaping light and volume but also the abstraction of classical architectural tenents. His Salk Institute is a masterclass of contemporary architecture that does require more than a simple walk-by to understand and appreciate. Great Classical architecture requires this as well.
Allied Works Clyfford Still Museum in Denver is an amazing work of contemporary architecture that manages to instill an understanding of craftmanship and using natural light to create a space that is more than white walls for Still's paintings.
Another great work of modern architecture that blended craftsmanship and detail, albeit demolished to make way for the bloated MoMA expansion, was the Williams and Tsien's American Folk Art Museum.
>”Then I’d go home and look it up and all those people’s buildings would be hideous.”
This is exactly how I feel about Louis Khan’s “masterclass” Salk Institute. I had to triple check that I wasn’t looking at some other Salk Institute, because the building I saw looked like a shitty 50-year-old beachfront motel. This is supposed to be a research institute?
I have a few thoughts on this. I'm an engineering consultant who has spent 20 years working with a vast range of architects (from high design to mundane commercial), and I really do appreciate architects, what they're trying to achieve, and I will say, they are a lot more introspective than I think people are giving them credit for.
First comment; you mention in one of your responses that you're skeptical about all the criticisms of McMansions, and that they seem like lovely houses. But the main criticism of McMansions is that they don't follow any of the traditional rules of design, such as proportion, symmetry, or consistency (A mansion is not a McMansion!). These are not modern architectural design styles, these are essential components of classical architectural design too. This really does seem to me to be at the crux of the issue as to why people aren't valuing architectural design.
Second: in my long experience with architects, almost all architects adore modern architectural styles (when they're done well), but they also adore classical architecture. There is a whole segment of the professions that focuses on adaptive reuse, of updating classical architectural designs in a matching fashion. Similarly, a large proportion of architects are very critical of elements of Bauhause, modernism, and especially Brutalism. These are seen as products of their time, but there are also elements of beauty to them that architects can appreciate.
Third: one of the most important components of architecture is not just looks, it's how the building functions and flows. One of the classical issues with McMansions (and one of the core functions of an architect) is to think about how a building actually works, how it will be used, how it will feel. McMansions often fail this test horrendously; for examples, they'll have vast, cavernous spaces that feel empty and isolating, the location and placement of spaces like kitchens doesn't flow well to dining areas, rooms become abandoned because they feel too far away from living spaces. If you've lived in a properly designed house - not necessarily a fancy modern one, just one that has been carefully laid out based on these principles - it becomes very obvious what the issues are with homes that AREN'T designed to these standards.
(A similar issue arises with modern vs classical skyscrapers - people complain that all-glass towers just don't look as good, but if you've ever stoood on the 60th floor of a tower with all-glass windows, the expansive views and the feeling of looking out over a whole city is just.. like, amazing).
Fourth: I still think it's really critical to distinguish between different architectual styles even in modernism, but also in the drivers as to why buildings are designed the way they are - e.g. the difference in developer-led buildings, vs federally procured, vs privately-owned buildings - and how/why they were commissioned (e.g. was the desire for a building that functioned as a piece of art, or was it more practical or prosaic?). For example, modern apartment blocks are often awful and bland, but this is not about the architect; this is about developers valuing cost and speed of construction. I think it's important not to blur issues with Bauhaus and modernism with the spread of generic modern apartments, for instance.
Finally; understanding the rise of elements such as modern air-conditioning, modern lighting (LED's), double-glazing, curtainwall, modern materials, modern seismic and structural requirements, energy code requirements, ADA requirements, parking requirements, and I'm sure many other elements I'm forgetting about - all these things have massively influenced how buildings are designed. The technological story is extremely important and I feel this gets glossed over.
Nikos Salingos on Jim Rutt articulates well what makes architecture stand out (from a distance or while living in a space), he riffs on how it all went wrong too but that's well understood by now. If you're trying to feel less crazy about this debate, I think he might have some words to help you describe it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfyaeoWEEhg
I think that "modern=bad" and "classic=good" is overly simplistic. I'm no expert, but I did take one class about the history of architecture in college, and I had to do a presentation on Venturi's "Learning from Las Vegas." I really like a lot of modern and post-modern architecture. But I like a lot of the old stuff too, whether it's Greek temples or Gothic churches. I think you can have a "modern" building that does its job well and looks good.
Temperamentally, I'm a conservative, so I do harbor a certain hatred for the poorly thought-out buildings of starchitects--you know, the ones that ignore hundreds of years of time-tested traditions and end up with leaky ceilings, or walls that create death rays on neighboring sidewalks, or are totally unsuited to the climate. But as long as form follows function, and the building doesn't suck, I'm not going to get too upset about matters of taste.
In re "what people would or would not put up with aesthetically":
I've felt this way about the sort of sprawl that took hold in - the late 80s, 90s? At least down here in the Sun Belt. It had been quite different before that.
These new housing developments, usually isolated out on cheap land - or treeless farmland, so maybe not so cheap, in some cases never to be treed because that land just wanted to grow prairie grass - seemed almost a provocation, the identical-ness for one thing - no longer a dozen or couple dozen choices, no longer any variation in cladding.
But the weirdest was the continual pushing of the idea of they're still being single family houses, as they became squeezed into shotgun-like structures, the front walk barely capable of allowing one parked car, and the distance between your house and the next being four or five feet - that little bit of air either side of the fence that was all the view of the windows along the shotgun's sides - that little bit of air convincing people: this is a single family house! No shared walls, and no hated stomping overhead! But best not to yell anyway.
It came to seem like developers were trolling. "Granite countertops".
" Virgin Mary in a vat of urine" may not be a smart choice for a "dentist's office"- Still, I praise "Piss Christ" as beautiful&decorative photography and also: art. See the pic at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
Steven Pinker mocked it. As he did the Noble for Bob Dylan. Shrug.
The comments against modern architecture seem to be making one of two contradictory points:
a. Modern architecture is cheap and that's why cost-conscious committees love it, c.f. every drab college campus
b. Modern architecture is expensive, but architects force it through committees in spite of that. c.f. every over-designed museum or city hall
Modernist architecture is actually dozens of styles in a trench coat, which can obviously range from very cheap to very expensive. Even so, I would say that the style matters less to the overall cost of the project than whether the architect is willing to compromise his vision. If you treat the architect like a singular genius who gets to ignore nay-saying engineers and whiny residents, of course you'll get expensive boondoggles, even if he's building the most classical thing since the Parthenon.
TLDR the style doesn't matter, it's the weird insistence by design committees that every public building needs to be ~*unique~*.
I've yet to be convinced that classical buildings "age better" than modernist ones, once you account for all the money spent on restoration. If every new building were classical, most classical buildings would have no historical value and thus would not merit restoration. I'd much rather look at drip stains on concrete than have crumbling plaster and flaking paint everywhere.
Recently, Sam Kriss had an eulogy to Corbusier's Chandigarh as "incontrovertibly beautiful. There’s a certain type of person that can’t see a bit of raw concrete without frothing about ugliness and decadence and the plot to enslave the soul of western man, and they always seem to think I’m being some kind of devious contrarian when I say I find this stuff straightforwardly aesthetically pleasing, but I do, and I’m right. If you can’t appreciate the value of clean lines and pure geometric forms, I don’t really feel any need to take your opinions seriously. So far, I’ve never seen anyone actually explain why modern architecture is so intrinsically ugly. According to the traditional definition, beauty is symmetry, harmony, and proportion, and Le Corbusier’s buildings have all of those." I am kinda disappointed Scott did not response to Sam's text; mostly likely, Scott read it. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-in-india-part-2-the-city-beautiful
I was thinking - Le Corbusier had lots of cultish ideas and mad plans, but Chandigarh looks remarkable in pictures, and clearly a lot of thought was put into building for the weather - I would be willing to take a detour some day to see the city, and Le Corbusier's work in particular.
I mean, I read through the text, and like Scott above said "wow I never heard of that" and then I googled the images, and they are all pretty ugly. Like, they're cool in a way, but the buildings are ugly in a way that is intellectually interesting but I would not want to work in that Palace of Assembly, or live next to the Tower of Shadows compared to like, average European parliament building or park.
It is not that I disagree with your take/Scott's take - and if Scott had said: "Also, Sam Kriss recently praised Chandigarh, but my take is (Dusan)"; I'd nod along. But a) Sam's blog is on his "recommended" list (and Scott posted about Sam's posts at least twice), so ignoring Sam's take is kinda wilful. - b) Scotts 3 "examples" are made up names, while Le Corbusier is very much not some obscure niche-architect and state capital Chandigarh not an obscure little project somewhere (and it calls itself "city of beauty", so supposedly Indians can see some beauty there, at least they are not shouting "tear it down".).
When you think about the money and time and youth wasted on pursuing education credentials from selective schools, plus the aesthetic crimes we all are subjected to every day by architects posing as not just artists but intellectuals, and let's say you assign a 10% probability that Peter Turchin's ideas about elite overproduction and 50 year cycles of violence are correct and include a proportionate share of those costs, then negative sum status competitions start to look like a massively underrated problem in human affairs.
-- dislike brutalism both aesthetically and functionally, but don't hate it passionately.
-- have seen and been inside some Bauhaus buildings that I liked and some that I didn't; ditto postmodernism.
-- I like older styles just fine and am a big ol' history geek generally, but eyes wide open please. Classical and neo classical and Beaux Arts styles of structure have inherent practical drawbacks of their own. I grew up in a beautiful old Victorian house, raised a family in a classic early-20th American Foursquare, just completed 13 years with my office in one of Chicago's most famous 19th-century office buildings, etc. I love those sorts of spaces but they can be drafty and musty; many of them are gloomy inside; etc.
-- personal favorite style of architecture is Art Deco, of which there are a number of gorgeous examples still extant in Chicago. To me they are lovely both inside and out. Art Deco is certainly a less ornamented style than what went before it, but it does have its own flavors of ornament and those flavors to my eye look great. I'm unclear where Art Deco fits in the "classical vs modern" flame wars and haven't yet seen or read any particular reason to care.
If you agree with Wolfe or those like him, but wonder what to do: good news. There’s already a viable movement against boring buildings: https://humanise.org.
It’s from a super successful architectural studio. It already has a book, instagram, industry uptake, and great recent examples (Coal Drops Yard, Royal Pickering Singapore to pick two). Share it with anyone you can. Leave copies of the books near architecture school. Make the ‘The God of Boring’ tag from the book stick to Le Corbusier (incidentally, the Humanise book made me realise just how creepy he was - e.g. referring to cafe culture as ‘that fungus infesting Parisian life’).
Yes, it’s not pure old school, but I think that makes it less likely to lose the status game. Instead of a simple traditionalism, it has a deeper analysis of how to design buildings fit for humans; those qualities shared by older, evolved styles and the actually popular bits of modernism.
Fans of non-dystopian buildings, unite! We have a world to win ;) Buy the book then give it to your most influential friend.
The thing about Tom Wolfe is that he's intuitive, not empirical. His method is to take what he knows about the subject -- in this case a certain kind of architecture -- and develop a picture of the fashions and the snobbery and absurdity of the era, and a lot of that picture is developed imaginatively, rather than by poring over data. He's smart and funny, and very very alert to the dynamics of social status and signaling, and so can produce these portrayals of how people felt and the kinds of things they thought and said, and he's probably accurate pretty often. But with that method one's likely to have a few big misses. If he had, say, read the diaries and letters of certain people from the period, he might have had a different view of some of the people, or the prevailing attitudes in different sets.
>Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go
If it were a story of pretentious academics forcing modernism onto a populace who loves ornament, then how come modernism has taken hold in so many other consumer artistic forms? Clothing, interior design, graphic design. The common man wears simple t shirts and pants, not ornament.
Clean square lines, no ornament, white walls, very modern.
Nobody writes in cursive, and in school people rolled their eyes at the absurdity they even bothered to teach it to us.
Tech company modernism seems to have its roots in founders’ aesthetic tastes rather than a snobby New Yorker scolding them away from ornamentation. At least that’s its roots— at this point I would believe if a company feels pressured not to rock the boat with overly detailed design.
My point is that as much as people PROFESS to want ornamentation, often their behavior suggests the opposite. Might not architecture be the same?
I would add that Wolfe's interpretation of the sequence of events with the St. Louis public-housing complex is disingenuous. What residents of mid-20th century American public housing were sick of was not the architectural style of the buildings but:
(a) being warehoused in huge high rises, and
(b) those high-rises being allowed to deteriorate into conditions that would, within the same jurisdictions that were operating them, get a private landlord prosecuted.
In other words those St. Louisians were chanting "blow it up" because it had been allowed to become a large vertical slum. They weren't expressing a feeling about the architectural choices.
From the 1970s through 1990s the same thing happened in many cities including my hometown of Chicago.
In the early 1990s I co-owned and lived in a 3-flat in Chicago. Our top-floor tenants were a young working-class black family of which the parents had grown up in Cabrini-Green, a massive brutalist housing project then arriving at the final steps of the path that the St. Louis one had earlier travelled. They were sad about that because when they were kids Cabrini-Green had been "great, our families were happy there". The city hadn't yet given up on maintenance, and federal rules hadn't yet been changed to allow people lacking any income to get units. (My neighbor remembered exactly which year that rule had changed.) There was zero mention to me of the architectural style.
What the residents and their advocates in every US city seek instead is public housing which is at a more human sale, the term of art is "scattered-site". Some of that has been built, it is entirely in the bland postmodern style, and it's working better than the giant warehouses ever did -- nobody is lobbying for any of it to be blown up.
On the contrary they wish more of it could be built. That creates a policy headache because it's much less efficient: the same amount of public land and money can house far fewer poor people in low-rise and mid-rise buildings than in high-rises. This is one reason cities like Chicago and St. Louis have much less public housing than they used to.
But anyway the point here for this conversation is, the issue isn't and never was a matter of architectural preferences.
The underlying problem here is that much 20th and 21st century architecture is difficult to maintain without spending a lot. A system built pile of concrete boxes could last for centuries, but if the plumbing was run inside the concrete panels it becomes essentially impossible to fix plumbing problems. Tall buildings require proper lift maintenance, and for some reason that never gets considered in the overall cost. Flat roof means ongoing water proofing. Cladding requires pest control and debris removal for fire safety. Plate glass looks terrible unless regularly wiped down.
None of this is a problem with a reasonable maintenance budget. Public housing is not associated with sufficient ongoing maintenance. One reason lower density housing works (even if in public ownership) is because a lot of the costs of maintenance are effectively decentralized. It's hard to fix a leaking highrise as a tenant, but it's possible to climb up on the roof of a 2 floor structure to secure a loose roof tile instead of waiting for the city maintenance crew to get around to it.
I grew up in Florida. When I moved to BC, I was awestruck by the mountains, and would take every chance I could get to simply gaze at them.
This confused my partner, who grew up surrounded by mountains and didn't see what the big deal was. Meanwhile every time we visit Florida, she gets excited by things I find pedestrian, like how big the trees are, and the fact that lizards exist.
People are always more excited by aesthetics other than the ones they're used to.
For anyone curious not long after this books release (not even a year later maybe?) Christopher Alexander (representing heresy) and Peter Eisenman (representing the modernists) had a debate at Harvard which was at least on the surface over the use of space and shape. It devolved and ended up quite heated and Alexander actually appeared to win the audience over against the modernists. The most interesting point is where Eisenman actually says straight up "the point is reminding them (the public presumably) that its not ok" in reference to a building he appreciated because it apparently created a sense of unease on viewing which is a hell of a mask slip.
"demanded that everyone refer to him as “Le Corbusier” (French for “The Crow-Like One”) as some sort of combination artistic pseudonym / branding / flex. How are normal humans supposed to compete with people like these?" I don't know, mister Astral Star Codex, you tell me!
Another reason for the disaster in architecture is the death of civic culture. In the past rich people wanted to create beautiful buildings that pleased their fellow citizens. The building might be a private palace but its external beauty was a positive externality in the economic sense, a costly public good whose aesthetic appeal was available for free to the poorest. Wealthy patrons made these costly aesthetic investments because they *cared* about the esteem of their fellow citizens in the current and future generations. Sometime in the 20th century that norm collapsed; they stopped caring. Not only did they stop creating beautiful buildings, they actively took to creating public *bads,* shitty buildings emanating visual pollution that upset and depressed their fellow citizens.
> So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?
Sure, that's the kind of thing I would do, except for going to the cool party.
I had a classmate who seemed honestly confused that I might have a different opinion of which art looked good from the one that was taught in art classes.
I really appreciated this piece. I was going to build a house last year, and for a variety of reasons didn't. Mostly, I concede, it was the price-to-rent ratio being unfavorable to building vs. renting. But also high on the list was that all the architects I could find were junk. That they probably went to school in the environment Wolfe describes here goes a long way toward explaining what happened. (Also, most good architects are not available to do work for individuals; they want to work with commercial clients, because the commercial clients are a lot less emotional and a lot more professional).
That said, I'd push back on the whole "modern architecture is all terrible." Mostly on the "all". (I admit I'm not entirely sure what "modern" means: is current architecture still modern, or is this modern in the sense of like "before postmodernism"?) I agree 100% the Le Corbusier and probably most of what Wolfe was writing about was terrible. But it's been a long time since then, and there are some legitimately beautiful modern spaces, like Hermes' gorgeous store in New York (https://interiordesign.net/designwire/hermes-madison-avenue-rdai-denis-montel-new-york/), or many of Extell's apartment buildings. Also, a lot of buildings that look kind of medium on the outside are REALLY nice inside. Like the house I'm currently living in. The market has been exerting pressure for forty years on the terrible ideas Wolfe was writing about in 1981, and even an idiot communist clock is right twice a day: some of those modern ideas, even if just by chance, must have been good; and many of those have survived while the rest of this nonsense went away.
My own aesthetics are something like 1% of modernist buildings are great. 10% are good, the rest are bad. And for beaux arts 10% are great, 60% are good, the rest bad.
If those views were widely shared I think it would explain why people generally respond in polls that they prefer traditional. But it would also explain the inner view of the architects who prefer modern. Giving them an inch, of course they want to master the more challenging style, but most of them cannot, but wont just come out and say it, so instead they reinvented light.
How about churches? I know in Europe new churches are, too, built in modernist style (all of them? Some of them?), and I don't know about America. But in Russia, church buildings remain highly traditional, with lots of ornamentation. For example, the very memetic Cathedral of Russian Armed Forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces) looks like something out of Warhammer 40K universe, which means it's anything but "simple and unadorned".
This means, at the very least, means there are no actual technical problems to making this type of buildings, counteracting costs and lack of professionals arguments. The only thing remaining is will. Well, will and money, of course, but while Russian Orthodox Church is rich, it's not Amazon-rich or Google-rich.
This made me think about what sort of houses I genuinely like. I think context matters here a lot. A house should not be viewed in isolation and as others pointed out here, a photo of a house is not a house.
Scandinavian architecture looks striking in Iceland. I think it is a bit too austere but it has its charm and fits the cold frigid north. Anything too fancy would just look out of place (and would be really hard to keep up). Brutalism is a travesty the way I see it but I can imagine a simple concrete building blending with a very lush forest (or a jungle) in a contrasting way (it would still be very hard to keep it up)...and so on.
One thing that McMansions are bad at is they don't really fit into any context, since they are a mishmash of styles.They can for example look sort of Mediterranean but then have these huge modern windows which just don't fit the style. It just throws me off immediately. There are some faux-medieval 19th/early 20th century buildings where I'm from, close to actual medieval/renaissance buildings and you can see that this was just some rich guy in the 19th century who liked romanticism but did not really understand the styles. It still looks way better than brutalism, mind you, but it doesn't compare with the actual renaissance stuff...and it doesn't compare with its almost contemporary art nouveau-style buildings either. It is just a mishmash. Kind of like when you compare faux movie medieval armour with actual (high) medieval armour. It just doesn't look as good because it was randomly put together by someone who knew very little about it vs people who spend generations refining it, understood why this and that has to be in this or that way to be functional while also taking care to blend functionality with aesthetics.
Take a roman villa like this one https://www.behance.net/gallery/98658473/Roman-villa-of-VilarencCalafell-1st-century-CE# . To me this is really beautiful, if I lived in the countryside (and perhaps a bit more to the south) I would probably want to build something like this (in a city I would love a Roman Domus instead, I just love those atria ... but I probably could not afford it and also it would look so out of place outside the Mediterranean that I would actually not want it after all). But if you added large modern windows to it, you'd just ruin it completely, it would be like a movie from ancient Rome with everyone wearing jeans for some reason.
But a lot of modern architecture also does not really fit in. It so often tries to dominate over what's already there instead of blending in (that's not being exactly the same or cookie cutter but respecting the surroundings). A building is a projection of an architect's ego more than anything else ... I think this might be improving now but people like Le Corbusier were exactly like that and hopefully a special place in hell filled with a lot of McMansions was reserved for them.
Does anyone know what happened to Bauhaus between the 80s and now? I google-image-searched "Bauhaus" to get some more examples, and most of what I saw aligned with this: https://www.robern.com/article/bauhaus-style. (For those who don't want to click the link, there are some pretty dramatic colors, along with curves, rugs, high ceilings, and upholstered furniture.) I can sort of trace design elements -- there's a lot of concrete, and the rugs are at least flat-weave -- but it's a pretty far cry from what Wolfe described.
Separately, I've been shopping for large inexpensive prints on Temu to cover some damaged and stained walls in a "historic" Bay Area rental. A ton of them follow this pattern: repeated semicircles (curves!) in bright colors (not gray!) with the word "Bauhaus" on them. (Something like this: https://www.mercari.com/us/item/m49068611992/.) This was actually the first place I encountered Bauhaus, and what made me interested to read this article. I kept getting recommended these, so I assume people buy them. Does anyone know what's up with these? Are these a modern Bauhaus style? What makes them so attractive to Temu shoppers looking for large prints with a budget of $0.11?
I’m realizing I’m an outlier for genuinely liking a lot of weirder Bauhaus-derived stuff (see: the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center)
But I also like A.G. Cook, an artist who reveled in making stuff that was 50% unlistenable and 50% incredible
I think there’s something to artworks that are compelling ugly just to see what happens when you push the limits of an idea…but drawing the line from Le Corbusier to flat-panel five-over-one “luxury apartments” is an important counterpoint. A.G. Cook with the edges sanded off gets you a Charli XCX’s brat. Bauhaus with the same treatment is just bland.
Scott, have you read Wolfe's book on Darwin and Chomsky, The Kingdom of Speech? I think that if you looked into it you might reconsider his reliability as a source of art history. Your model here seems to be that while Wolfe might be a bit unfair, he's basically giving the accurate gist of things. I don't think that's true.
I have yet to find an author that does as well in “starting from 0” as Christopher Alexander in “A Pattern Language. The work starts from the stance of observation - identifying the patterns of architecture and livable spaces, the world over.
I don’t know if I would agree with the statement that spending on architecture and buildings are still considered foo-foo in the commercial world. You only have to look at the exorbitant prices of the salesforce tower, apple infinity loop, the new JP Morgan HQ, Morgan Stanley’s insanely expensive renovation, etc. to develop the stance that willingness to pay isn’t the primary driver of a lack in ornamentation.
The building captioned as "Edward Stone's Museum of Modern Art" is (or rather was) the "Gallery of Modern Art." It confused me for a bit because I know the MoMA definitely doesn't look like that. I had to do an image search to figure out the real building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Columbus_Circle
It's unfortunate (though on brand) for Wolfe to blame this on socialism. Because the real culprit is deeper than that.
Consider Adolf Loos, author of 'Ornament and Crime,' one of the primary statements of the modernist avant garde. "Behold, " he wrote "the time is at hand, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, the capital of heaven. It is then that fulfilment will have come.”
Or consider Marinetti's 'Futurist Manifesto': “Look! There on the earth, the earliest dawn! Nothing can match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, skirmishing for the first time with our thousand-year-old shadows.”
Or Le Corbusier himself: "Never has a return to the past been recorded, never has man retraced his own steps… To imitate the past slavishly is to condemn ourselves to delusion, to institute the ‘false’ as a principle… The mingling of the ‘false’ with the ‘genuine,’ far from attaining an impression of unity and from giving a sense of purity of style, merely results in artificial reconstruction capable only of discrediting the authentic testimonies that we were most moved to preserve.”
All of these are future-oriented utopian visions. And the Bauhaus, with its socialist associations (though Gropius himself wasn't particularly political), yet even more so with its functionalist ideal, was also utopian. But Loos was no socialist; Le Corbusier's politics were "whoever will pay me to instantiate my authoritarian vision"; and the futurists begat the house style of fascism. (As a side note, the early Soviet Union produced lovely architecture, including all those cool subway stations - until Corbusian modernism took off in the West and they started to worry that they seemed backwards; thus was born the Communist apartment block.)
What unites these politically diverse progenitors of early modernism was the Myth of Progress. This is in fact the *crucial* feature of modernism, because it is demanded the erasure of place, and that meant the erasure of history, particularity, distinctiveness, complexity, and ornament. The utopian future had to be uncontaminated by that particularity; thus it had to be abstract, simple, clean, easy to grasp at a glance. It also demanded the "god's-eye view," i.e. the perspective of 'High Modernism,' as James C. Scott talks about. This is because the "perfect" society, the City of the Future, could exist only in abstraction, and the visual disposition in embodiment that is entailed by the god's-eye view is necessary for their sort of abstract conceptualization.
The result is that modernism is not merely indifferent to everything that most people appreciate about architecture (including ornament, visual complexity, and solicitation at the tactile and proprioceptive registers); it is, and ideologically must be, *actively hostile* to that stuff. Because anything that makes a structure more of a meaningful place makes it *less* appropriate to the abstract space which they conceived as their proper medium. Utopia only exists in abstract space; which is to say, it exists nowhere. Modernist architecture is, then, the architecture of nowhere.
Like I say, this is deeper than the socialist influence; it's deep enough to encompass various political ideologies from left, right, and center. If the socialist influence were as dominant as Wolfe presents it, after all, wouldn't it be weird that it would come to be the dominant style of the Soviet housing block *and* Fortune 500 corporate headquarters?
The other thing I would say is that this is a little unfair to postmodernism. For one thing, I think most of the examples of "postmodernism" here are actually deconstructivist. There are plenty of examples of postmodern architecture that are quite elegant and consciously engaged in resurrecting traditional wisdom in architecture and urban design. And some postmodern theorists (e.g. Charles Jencks, Kenneth Frampton) were explicitly concerned with returning to the particularity of place.
Ironically, the criticism of postmodernism as being sort of cartoonishly baffling or "modernism-lite" is a recapitulation of what the architecture school snobs said about it. I think it's a real shame that it fell out of favor so quickly; you could imagine postmodernism developing in the direction of ever greater eclecticism, ever more deep exploration and melding of various architectural traditions, and even a reinvigoration of the crafts that had been an integral part of traditional architecture. But instead the architecture schools got bored with it after a decade or two, and then they got into that deconstructivist stuff and *actual* forms of modernism-lite that are just, like, "what if a rectangle but then one of the edges is kind of funky." They may have found a way to actually make worse stuff than International Style architecture...
I disagree that FBTOH was so much a critique of modern architecture. The real villain of the book was postmodern architecture, and I agree with that sentiment.
This seems like an underrated place for EA-style action. If (as the surveys suggest) around 75% of people are upset with modernist buildings then there is a massive potential to increase subjective well-being by advocating for traditional architectural styles. We should be sponsoring apprenticeships in stonework and ornamentation. I assume that all the defenders of modernist architecture in the comments would still agree that the data supports this approach, even if it would result in built environments that they personally find less pleasing. Happily for them there are so many concrete boxes in the world that they are unlikely to run out of refuges for their rarefied tastes.
I should note that most of what captures the masses aesthetic preferences for buildings an be captured by a few basic principles most of which stem from geometric relationships we evolved to be used to seeing in nature: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494418305280
As always when this topic comes up, it's very frustrating because you still haven't done a good job *of even defining the problem that you think exists*.
One moment you'll be talking about the ubiquity of glass boxes (which is mostly a matter of cost and convenience triumphing over all else and are actually very nice for the occupants) and the next you'll be complaining about weird sculpture-like buildings instead!
> Still, I would like to read another book by someone equally talented who gives . . . well, exactly one inch. They don’t need to praise modern architecture’s beauty and brilliance - in fact, I would rather they didn’t. I want a book by someone who is overall skeptical, who at least has as a hypothesis “this is all an elite signaling game gone tragically wrong” - but who’s also willing to explain what the modern architects thought they were doing, in their own minds.
For me, this was Seeing Like a State. It was thoroughly against modernism, but it ended up making a solid argument that... modernism isn't perfect. Which is, like, doh. In the process however it also indirectly argued that it's still pretty damn good.
Born in 1950, weaned on the brisk, rolling hills of Ithaca, New York, I was rudely transplanted to the flattest section of the Midwest, to an appropriately ironically named Urbana, Illinois. The University campus had a few interesting old buildings, but its growing pains in the 1960's were infected by the Modernist plague Wolfe describes, likely trickling down from the Chicago demigods.
While not overly aligned with the political stridence of the vanguard, the pragmatic stylings served practicality - they're far cheaper to design and construct, especially now with computer software that even specs materials, while factoring in building and fire codes. And college dorms especially were easy targets; as campuses swelled, cheap housing was satisfied with expedient rectilinearity, and a stream of residents who knew their suffering was temporary, a rite of passage. Beyond that, the infamous Chicago Cabrini Projects proved a disastrous experiment in perpetuating the worst psychological aspects of living in poverty.
Thankfully, a few designers have revisited the quaint notion, that structures should evoke qualities other than stoicism, regret, unquestioning conformity, and obeisance. There are myriad reasons why Notre Dame was rebuilt in five years, with hundreds of craftspersons thought to be extinct emerging from their huts to revive their arts, when not a single modern edifice including the Twin Towers inspires a moment's thought of rebuilding as a form of devotion.
Still, the chic designer mags disguising the upscale real estate ads and pricey furnishings, that are often laid around town in hipster coffee bars, for free, are replete with the same austere yet expensive sterility-guaranteed formats as their forebears.
Two elements are striking: first, glass walls with a lack of curtains, combined with lighting directed so as to display to the outside viewers the layout and possessions and persons within - light pollution be damned - versus creating optimally satisfying and functional lights to benefit those inside; second, the ubiquitous draining of most any color, except the sofa-sized contemporary painting, or space-consuming sculpture, again visible from across the back fence.
Cozy, comfortable, lived-in, eclectic, personally curated homes and furnishings don't sell, to those desperate to buy bragging rights. Those with money, but little genuine taste or self-confidence to commit to what pleases them, will follow their designer or gallery owner's advice, then spend a decade living in cognitive dissonance, with therapy, counseling, acrimony, and divorce, unable to blame their angst and despair on their self-imposed personal sanitarium.
There's a review of Brady Corbet's new film, The Brutalist, which complains that it portrays immigrant architects in post-WW2 America as underdogs opposed by the wealthy establishment, when in our actual history they were quickly embraced.
I think modernist and postmodernist architecture are part of an entirely deliberate plan to make us suicidally depressed. I find it curious that you never considered this as a possible motive.
I like it too. I remember visiting 450 Sutter which may or may not be a beautiful building. (https://www.sfgate.com/obscuresf/article/450-sutter-st-beautiful-lobby-17603967.php). I had a doctor's appointment on the ~24th floor. What stood out was how amazing the view was but you couldn't see the view unless you walked right up to the window and looked out because the windows were small. Compare this to modern glass buildings with floor to ceiling glass. The views are gorgeous! If that's a trade off I have to make then I'd choose the new buildings over the old.
I think the memetical winds might be blowing in your sails. Aversion towards condescension, populism, democratization / participative democracy and aesthetic relativism seem to be going strong.
Personally, I don't say I'm against modern architecture because a lot of people imagine neo-futurist buildings like those by Zaha Hadid, which I think are awesome. I also prefer kitsch over Bauhaus but I think utilitarianistically optimal buildings would be attempting to convey as much interesting experience as possible with a few elements. That's one reason why logos became simpler - good logos aren't photorealistic and thus, allow the mind to find personally interesting gestalts within their lines and in effect, co-create them.
I'm the opposite of an architect, but have stayed in areas with mostly older-style buildings (at least the areas I was in) - Boston, Cremona, and University of Chicago campus (lol). Also new ones, such as much of the Bay Area, El Paso, and the Illinois Institute of Technology campus.
Older buildings often strike me as more beautiful. My main complaint is how small and dark the interiors can be. If every single building is in built in this sort of... dark, intricate way, it feels a bit like I'm being trapped in a maze? One nice thing about California buildings is they're more spread out, and it doesn't feel like you're trapped in an elaborate box or a ship. I also like buildings which incorporate "central green space"/courtyards like the original Chinese siheyuan.
I want lots of light and space while still being decorative. I don't really know of style which prioritizes both these things. I guess the Spanish Mission style? But it's not to my taste either.
In France, there's something called Les Compagnons du Devoir. I think historically they were a lot like freemasons except they never abandoned the building trades, and the fraternal-society aspects sort of went into the background (and they somehow managed not to get excommunicated, too). You have to be young to be an apprentice (<25 I think).
In Charleston, SC, with its need for historical-preservation artisans, there is a 4-year trade school for the traditional building arts: https://gardenandgun.com/feature/a-class-by-itself/
There's also a woodworking school that focuses on traditional furniture building and repair: https://furnsoc.org/fs-connects/community/charleston-woodworking-school
I always feel crazy when this comes up, because I genuinely, on aesthetic principles, like Bauhaus architecture. I like clean lines, and ornamentation doesn't do much for me. I don't give a rat's ass whether it is or is not bourgeois, I just actually enjoy looking at it more. How much of a minority am I in?
Yeah, I actually like this stuff! Brutalism is so cool, too. I wish I had the time and money to explore cool structures. Growing up in the UK, I always found the traditional style of building to be rather boring and uninteresting. We simply had so many. I genuinely love modern architecture! I got to visit the University of Technology Sydney the other month and it had a wonderful interior. Highly recommend anyone to just go there and walk around a bit if they can. I studied at UNSW, whose architecture is quite pedestrian.
I don't think you're speaking in bad faith but I think much of the existing fandom for modern architecture stems from the strange picturesque quality of brutalist buildings. I used to say I liked brutalism, and I did, in a sense; I liked how it looked in photos. How radical! How alien!
Since then I've moved to an actual post-communist brutalist city, perhaps the most brutalist-building-per-square-inch city in the world, and I have changed my opinion. The hulking concrete shapes look cool in photos because strange geometry translates well to 2D images. But to live amongst these greyish concrete spike balls and bathyspheres is misery. You feel like an ant navigating a hazardous, viciously anti-ant landscape. Even as novelties, they lose their luster very quickly.
Exactly. When you have to live/work in these things, the shine wears off very quickly.
I remember the new church building in Knock for the shrine, made in the best Modern Architectural style out of bare concrete inside.
On the west coast of Ireland. I had to wear my coat inside and the condensation was running down the walls while your breath was visible, because it was cold and wet inside to match being cold and wet outside. Experiences like that make you long for a bit of frivolous plaster finish on walls and bourgeois insulation 😁
I don't seem to be the only one with such non-proletarian longings, since it had to be refurbished by another team of architects in the meantime:
https://www.wejchert.ie/projects/project-detail/refurbishment-of-knock-basilica-co-mayo
"Recent major upgrading of Knock Basilica (opened in 1976 - 3,000 sqm) has transformed a large cold space with harsh finishes into a warm meditative place for Pilgrims, where barriers between congregation and celebrant have been removed and levels of comfort and accessibility hugely improved."
They ain't joking about the 'large cold space with harsh finishes', I can personally attest to that!
I was in Burlington, VT recently and was intrigued by a church behind a chain link fence, vacant and in an uncared-for state. (I don't know that it was particularly deteriorating structurally; that would be rather an indictment of modernism if so.) It was sort of a degraded-brutalist building, or kind of like it didn't know which architectural faith it was following. Here's a not very good photo of it, and a picture of the previous church which was destroyed by arson in 1972:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_the_Immaculate_Conception_(Burlington,_Vermont)
My interest in it was not sneering - I didn't think it was so bad; or rather, I thought it might have once been quite nice inside, especially if it used a lot of natural materials - but I only glimpsed it in walking by at night. Unlike some people, I think church might have been easier for me to endure if there had been actual windows in the sanctuary, rather than stained glass. I actually used to attend a church atop a hill outside Austin, with an ugly blah modern building - and acrid soul that I am, used to sit and stew about the fact that the sanctuary would have given onto a wonderful view - but had no windows giving on it: where the view would have been, they put the (uggh) pipe organ.
Googling revealed the Catholics want to sell this property, and perhaps finally have. Note I spent about five hours in Burlington and that's my total familiarity with the place.
But curiosity compelled me to discover why the Catholic Church had abandoned this building, when usually they hang onto real estate pretty tightly. It seems there is only contraction in the future, for Catholicism in Burlington.
There had been pushback on demolition, though, from some preservationist quarter, enough to derail the sale for some years; and I found amusing the plea for deeming the building of "historic" architectural significance: it was said to be the first modernist building in Vermont that was softened by *landscaping*. Specifically, "123 uniformly spaced locust trees".
I'm not a student of numerology but I want there to be a significance to 123.
>that would be rather an indictment of modernism if so
Would be and is. With the benefit of 60-70 years of hindsight, we can say that Modernist buildings often age stunningly poorly, not just aesthetically but structurally.
They also age kind of fast in both ways!
False.
Well, tastes differ as they say, and if you want to shiver inside a freezing cold and wet bare walls of grey concrete bunker in an Irish November on the west coast as the gales and storms pelt right in off the Atlantic, you do you, Freddie 😁
(Congratulations on the baba, by the way!)
I wouldn't lump Mies van der Rohe in with the concrete brutalists. While his designs are spare and minimalist, the use of glass and metal as reflective surfaces provides all sorts of visual stimuli.
When I was little, I'd go out to visit my dad. He was an instructor at IIT (Chicago, not India). He had an office in one of the low, glass Mies van der Rohe buildings. He'd take me with him sometimes, and he worked in a Mies building. I remember the first time I saw one. The rain was falling. I had grown up in New England, and I was used to buildings made of brick and wood with small windows. The IIT campus was a revelation to me. The water on the windows distorted the landscapes. I was fascinated by the distortions. I remember dining in the cafeteria with my dad, and I watched the gardens through the windows as evening darkened the lawns and trees. It was like a giant movie I could walk into! When we left the campus, Mies's buildings were all lit up, and it amazed me that we could look into them and see people moving around.
My father knew Mies at ITT, and even though my dad wasn't an architect, he owned lots of architectural books with pictures of Mies's designs. I would study them and imagine what it would be like to live and work in a glass building.
Later, when I was a young man, I was an office worker for a while in a glass skyscraper. And a Mies van der Rohe creation was across the street from my glassed-in office. The afternoon sun would reflect from it into the office area I droned in. The boredom of my work was expunged by the golden afternoon light that surrounded me. The AC would kick in full blast, and its noise would drown out the conversations of my coworkers. It was a mystical experience sitting in the light and the roar. Later, as night fell, the fluorescent lights would come on in the offices across the street, and I would watch as people moved across them. And I was like a little kid again, watching the doll-house denizens of the IIT campus go about their business.
Anyway, glass and steel. They're wonderful substances that have an inner poetry. Brick, stone, cement? Meh.
I live in New Haven which has a ton of Brutalist buildings compared to the norm, and my father worked in a Brutalist complex at Wesleyan so I was around them every day, and I love Brutalism specifically and modernism generally.
You guys: YOU ARE NOT THE COSMOS. NOT EVERYONE LIKES WHAT YOU LIKE
I am sincerely uncertain if you are intending this point as a criticism of Scott ("Scott and the implied twitter majority are not the cosmos, lots of people actually like Brutalism even if Scott doesn't, the polls are wrong") or as a humble recognition that your perspective is unusual ("The commenters who agree with me are not the cosmos, we like something even that most people don't").
The former, most assuredly.
Thanks for making this point. I also love Brutalism. And Modernism. And Art Deco and Frank Lloyd Wright and Neo-Gothic and a bunch of other architectural schools and styles that we are supposed to understand as being at odds. But you know what they all have in common? They look like beautiful man-made wonders compared to the shitty slum apartments where I grew up. This whole anti-modernist perspective I'm seeing a lot of these days just seems like the next generation of rich kids setting out their manifestos against the elites of yesterday and proclaiming themselves the true voice of the people. Not everyone likes modernism, but not everyone hates it either - even dumb hillbillies like me.
I agree that they're not the cosmos. I think that Scott and much of the ACX community (and you!) are wildly and confidently full of shit about a number of things. But they're actually in the majority (objectively) and also correct (subjectively, in my opinion) when it comes to Modernist architecture's general loathsomeness.
You're very aggressive in comment sections.
I came the opposite way. I grew up in communist concrete boxes and loathed them, until I went to school at TU Delft whose brutalism campus is quite renowned and finally learned to appreciate it and love it. It's not only striking and monumental, befitting a high tech institution, but also, it might feel strange to hear this said but much less so to experience it in real life, incredibly warm and human. That cluster of buildings (Aula, library, physics, civil engineering) made me fall in love with brutalism. All that is just to say, as with all styles, there are good and bad executions of it. Sometimes it's useful to judge them by the best versions of each, although ofc sometimes one might say, as with suburban housing, a higher floor is more important than a higher ceiling.
Where is "perhaps the most brutalist-building-per-square-inch city in the world"? Sincerely curious. (Also, long time no new post of yours, and I love them all)
Skopje, Macedonia. However the photos on google will give you a totally false impression of how the city looks. And much appreciated, I’ve been writing a lot of fiction but want to return to essays soon.
I see. Google images does not help in this case, true. lol. But having seen Belgrade, Bratislava, Tirana, Dnipro, Saporoshje, Yekaterinburg (where some genuine Bauhaus buildings are - hideous and impractical) ... itd, itd, it seems to me: Skopje might lead in air-pollution (Tirana is pretty bad, too), but is probably just as brutalist as many other "ex-socialist" cities. I do feel your pain. - Where do you publish your fiction?
Sure. Brutalism is not my preferred style, but many modern and post-modern styles exist that are not Brutalist. If this were an article about the problems with Brutalism, I'd probably be mostly in agreement. I always point out the Robarts library at U of Toronto as a Brutalist disaster in a sea of otherwise interesting architecture. But some of that other interesting architecture is modern or post-modern.
I live in Tallinn, surrounded by brutalist architecture and I personally love it. The density of commie-blocks lets the city be incredibly green in the residential areas, and every western Europe city feels like a gray slog to me.
I have mixed feelings because I like the geometry of brutalist buildings but I also think bare concrete is a really ugly color. Maybe we need an avant-garde synthesis school of "brutalism but with cool murals or whatever."
My city doesn't have much true Brutalism, but has recently taken up adding murals to many non-glass walls downtown.
Be careful what you wish for. Bare brick and concrete is much more pleasant than a giant sneering portrait of Nikki Minaj.
People talk about the despair of working in a brutalist building all day. Suddenly, I can understand their point when imagining working in one of those godawful mural buildings. I love brutalist architecture. Preserve the HHS building!
I'm with you, and I've thought about it some. I think for me it comes down to: Modern-style buildings indicate how well kept-up they are. If they're not well-maintained, then they show wear and grime right away — the lines or blank faces look immediately off. While ornamented structures are good at camouflaging neglect. At one time, camouflaging neglect probably had some artistic value. But now I think that foregrounding neglect is probably the more important value. That's my theory.
Remember that during the height of modernism around 1960, old-fashioned, highly-decorated buildings tended to be covered in decades or centuries of depressing coal soot. So, many people wanted to tear them down and put up clean glass and steel buildings to start over.
But around 1961, De Gaulle's culture minister Andre Malraux started a program to scrub the coal soot off Paris's classic buildings like the Louvre. This proved hugely successful and it got people thinking harder about appreciating old buildings.
An interesting point, which I had not considered. Thanks for pointing that out.
I'll also note that as a Bostonian, one upside of our City Hall is that it makes visitors think the New England climate is much more turbulent than it actually is. (That Brutalist landmark would probably be better sited somewhere in hurricane country or Tornado Alley.) And the structure also offered a gorgeously monumental poster image for Frederick Wiseman's recent Cahiers-du-Cinéma-lauded documentary about Boston's city government.
Boston City Hall looks like it would be the last building standing after the world's first Category 6 hurricane levels Boston.
Personally, despite mostly being on the neoclassical side of the issue, I actually really like the Boston City Hall and brutalist buildings in general. At least when they're the exception, and not the rule.
Striking building. Looks like this should be going on outside it:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/P9TEPD/english-aztec-ritual-human-sacrifice-portrayed-in-the-page-141-folio-70r-of-the-codex-magliabechiano-16th-century-332-codex-magliabechiano-141-P9TEPD.jpg
For that, you want this:
https://www.austintexas.gov/page/emma-s-barrientos-mexican-american-cultural-center-rentals
Note that it is being redone with softening landscaping and grass, which will of course obviate the Aztec plaza effect the architect was shooting for.
Eh, I dunno. A few ritual sacrifices of minor bureaucrats at the beginning and end of the fiscal year by the duly appointed chair of the council seems like the natural thing to do for the Boston City Hall. It wants that. It's made for that. Gozer the Gozerian will show up there, one of these solstices.
The Boston City Hall is one of those Brutalist buildings I actually like. It's not a solid slab of concrete, it's got an interesting shape and a lot of texture and fiddly bits.
Not to mention that bare Brutalist concrete also quickly gets covered in crap, and the concrete changes from white to crappy grey in a few years.
That White school gets owned by the Grey school since every white building turns grey, or brown if there's any metal elements.
Copper-sheathed roofs turn green and look reasonably good, but anything with iron in it either turns black (if you're lucky) or just rusts.
I went from high school to university in the early 80s. A friend wanted to be an architect. Then he went to a couple of university visits to learn more about the process.
He came back and said that architects were idiots. He became an engineer instead.
Yeah I just made the same point above. Ornamented structures can take a certain amount of grime and damage and it even adds to their charm, but the modern-style buildings have to look absolutely pristine or it just looks depressing. They remind me of the all-white outfits that fashion models wear- clothes they probably wear once and then throw it away, or at least dry clean after every use.
Ironically, Tom Wolfe was also known for his weird all-white suits...
He had bright-colored a suits made too, though. I read an interview where he talked about it —“ if I’m going to have suits made, I might as well shake people up.”. I believe reporter
said he was wearing an orange one at the interview.
huh, interesting. but always a monocolor?
I used to eat lunch a lot in Helmut Jahn's State of Illinois Center in Chicago's Loop, a post-modernist glass building opened in 1985. I sort of liked it -- I called it the State of Illinois Intergalactic Starport -- but it had all sorts of maintenance problems due to its novel design. From Wikipedia:
"Originally, the design called for curved, insulated (double-paned) glass panels, but these were found to be prohibitively expensive. Flat, insulated glass had been suggested, but was dismissed by Jahn. Single-paned (non-insulated), curved glass panels were eventually used, and resulted in the need for a more expensive air conditioning system, which remains very costly to operate, and is insufficient on hot days; internal temperatures have reached as high as 90 °F (32 °C).[5] The building is also bitterly cold in the winter; in its early years, ice formed on the interior of some of the wall panels. The marble floor of the atrium initially developed unsightly water stains, an issue which has since been resolved."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Thompson_Center
Also, in its first few years, the glass tended to be dirty because nobody had figured out an efficient way yet to wash all the windows.
It was a pretty hilarious illustration of Chesterton's Fence: Why _not_ design a wildly new-looking building?
Well, because traditional designs long ago figured out the solutions to a bunch of boring problems like how to keep them warm in winter and how to get the windows washed for a reasonable cost. Eventually, you'll probably figure it out, but it can be expensive in the mean time.
Toronto City Hall has two concave glass towers facing each other. All reports I've heard are that window offices in the curves get uninhabitably hot in summer.
It's almost as if architects over the millennia have figured out what not to do...
Architects over the millennia never faced the situation of modern construction in the first place. They would have killed to be able to build big buildings out of glass and steel.
Now "cheaply build a low tech hut adapted to the local climates" is certainly a problem we can look to history for the answers to.
Reminds me of the Phone building in London, whose concave windows would fry parked cars .
I think you mean The Walkie Talkie
"these were found to be prohibitively expensive"
That's the problem when you're doing modern architecture not for eye-wateringly rich private patrons but spending government money: all the stuff that makes it look good and semi-functional is too expensive, so corners are cut and you end up with something everyone hates and it's lousy to work in.
For some of us, the fingerprints your kids left on the glass display of the bakery items are bad enough, and the dog slobber all over your glass door. Multiply that by a thousand.
Oddly, do those guys on their platforms still go up and down the sides of buildings washing windows? Haven't seen that in awhile.
For ludicrousness, I see your Thompson Center and give you the controversy over The Glare, which as you can see in this article, was very hard on the already dubious aesthetics of the Nasher sculpture garden in Dallas:
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/visual-arts/2018/10/25/museum-tower-glare-put-the-nasher-in-the-hot-seat-seven-years-ago-arts-patrons-still-wonder-when-we-ll-see-a-fix/
> Oddly, do those guys on their platforms still go up and down the sides of buildings washing windows? Haven't seen that in awhile.
At least where I work, we do get the windows cleaned regularly.
Update: the State of Illinois finally gave up on the Thompson Center and sold the property to Google. Chicago has been a significant regional center of Google's workforce, which the company apparently thinks will continue. They are overhauling the Thompson Center to become the new offices of 2,000 Google staffers, in addition to their existing Fulton Market District office building.
The building isn't landmarked so most people locally were surprised that Google elected not to tear it down and start fresh on that full block of the Loop. (My siblings and I were all on "team blow it up".) They are instead doing what appears to be a gut-rehab. The actual work started earlier this year. Apparently Google intends to keep the overall shape including the big interior atrium while re-doing basically everything else about it including the infamous exterior colors. They seem confident that the structure's many functional issues can be resolved now, and think it will be completed for occupancy by fall 2025.
Thanks.
> Well, because traditional designs long ago figured out the solutions to a bunch of boring problems like how to keep them warm in winter and how to get the windows washed for a reasonable cost. Eventually, you'll probably figure it out, but it can be expensive in the mean time.
It seems pretty obvious that glass boxes ARE the answer to "how do you build the best tall buildings?". There's a reason they're outcompeting everything else.
I'll also put in a word for the International Style. Its claims to universality have been clearly refuted, it's a relic of the '50s and it reminds me of all that optimism about a bright new postwar future and leaving the legacies of the old empires behind. *Obviously* the UN building is in International Style because that's what buildings looked like when people still thought the UN was a good idea.
Every time Scott goes on this rant and shows pics of the supposedly ugly buildings and the supposedly attractive ones I feel like I'm being gaslit.
That's probably how he feels when your camp starts talking.
For my part, I generally like both the "ugly" buildings and the "beautiful" ones. I guess I'm easy to please.
One factor is that in many discussions of these topics, most pictures shown are buildings by famous architects who evidently put a lot of care in their projects regardless of style. Both a brutalist and a beaux-arts building can be beautiful if made with care and intention.
One argument against modern architecture that comes up from time to time is that it's harder (than traditional styles) to do well when you're *not* a famous architect working on a museum or some other prestigious building. So most people's real experience of modern architecture is tenements like Pruitt-Igoe, i.e. not great.
I don’t think that’s exactly right. I think many of those big tenements were designed by famous architects, while the 1950s cookie-cutter suburban ranch homes that people like just fine are examples of modernism built by no-names. I think it’s more that the high theory of modernism when applied to communal living just didn’t work as well as their practical knowledge gained from rethinking the house.
Frank Gehry has never made a beautiful building, and yet is quite famous. Fame has less correlation to care and skill in architecture than in many fields.
Frank Gehry's buildings certainly have aesthetic qualities that rise far above most buildings. They show a lot of care and intention. They're interesting. All of that is true even if you or most people wouldn't describe them as "beautiful".
Successful terrorists tend to employ a great deal of care and intention, too. Mao lived an interesting life. Aesthetic qualities like terrorizing the neighbors and causing car accidents [1]? I'm reminded of the Pratchett quote about "Elves are terrific. They beget terror." Gehry is interesting and intentional; doesn't make his work Good.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2005/03/18/4541963/l-a-s-disney-hall-shines-a-bit-too-brightly
TBH, the only time I start talking about this is when Scott brings it up!
I understand what you're saying though. I think the feeling of being gaslit certainly comes across when Scott talks about this subject even if he doesn't specifically say "I feel like I'm being gaslit".
I couldn't even read this whole thing because here, on Twitter, etc, I feel like there's a weird conflating of so many schools. I don't get why Scott includes a picture of an all-glass building, that seems so completely different from Bauhaus.
I definitely think most Americans have no problem with the constant inoffensive glass buildings
Old glass office buildings lining the freeways of my city, now blue, now gold, with their class c office space, and the difficulty of repurposing them for anything else - seem like exactly the unlovely stepchildren of modernism that is the real complaint. Not an individual building here or there, but the ugliest aspects of our cities - that mostly just happen to be all postwar. Hard not to notice this.
Can any office space be easily repurposed?
I feel like any building that engages with the street and is of what they used to call "human scale" - can be repurposed more readily than a 20-story building sheathed entirely in glass (inoperable windows of course), no balconies, low-ceilinged with acoustic tiles, much of each floor given over to elevators and passageways, surrounded by parking, with no street - only the freeway - connecting it to everything else. YMMV.
Maybe it's not a central example, but the all-glass building is Bauhaus through and through: It's called the Bauhaus Building, it's situated in the Bauhaus complex, was designed by the founder of Bauhaus, and has Bauhaus written in big letters on the side of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus_Dessau
It's a different view of the building shown in the second image.
This is *exactly* how I feel when I see comments talking about how much they love right angles made of concrete and glass.
Reminds me of Ozy's old piece about moral mutants, fitting since she discusses her own (awful) aesthetic tastes: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/conservatives-as-moral-mutants/
The picture in question that Ozy loves and everyone with a healthy soul finds pointless at best, since it no longer loads on her blog: https://www.art.com/products/p61943832518-sa-i13023726/vintage-apple-collection-joan-miro-the-birth-of-the-world.htm
Edit: To be fair, I do think it's quite an honest and insightful essay. Much like Scott's review of What We Owe the Future, though, taking it seriously demolishes significant portions of the rationalist and EA projects, which is why it's mostly left behind.
For completeness sake, this anonymous user completely agrees with Scott and not with you as to aesthetic merits of Modernist buildings vs classical ones.
Seconded. And all the students at Caltech hated the Bechtel house. Unfortunately it seems the pictures available online were taken from flattering angles and do not give a realistically bad impression.
I'll throw in my agreement as well.
+1
Ditto! I really like minimalism, solid materials, clean lines without an ounce of ornament. I feel distracted and overwhelmed by trifles and frippery. My dream house is not the Sagrada Familia, it's the Farnsworth House.
Proudly claiming minority status here!
...I'm starting to think we're not even in the minority, at least not within the readership here. This would be a good opportunity to do a poll.
Agreed (about the poll). And with specific photos to rate (a bit like the AI contest), rather than just "do you prefer style X or style Y" more generally.
(personally I prefer the more ornamental aesthetics for buildings - although I quite like simple modern furniture/interiors)
Remember the rule of the silent majority. I'm very much in the camp that prefers pretty ornamentation and strongly dislikes concrete exterior (I don't mind glass so much). I wasn't going to comment to say that because I didn't see the point in commenting "I liked and agree with this Scott post", but I will chime in here as a vote against "maybe most readers disagree".
Definitely agree a poll would be interesting.
Pretty sure people just want pretty and liveable buildings, care less about the specific philosophical point that the architect intended to make, and certainly don't let it be an excuse for a horror-show of a building.
I prefer neoclassical restraint. But that's still worlds apart from brutalism.
I'll put it on the survey.
The readership here probably has a overrepresentation of people that adore featureless aesthetic-free buildings for reasons related to rationalism, autism, and other neuroatypicality, but keep in mind it is a highly-selected population that reads Scott, and an even more selected one that comments.
Some modernist buildings can look nice, and I think most people would agree.
But the style doesn't scale. A shining hall of glass makes for a cool set piece, but we want our built environment at large to be comfortable and inviting.
And most modern buildings fall far short of the Bauhaus complex building, or the national library* in Athens (another modern building I like; glass is good). 99.9% of modernist structures are concrete or plywood boxes. Can we all agree we'd be better off if modern cities looked like downtown Paris or London instead?
*Actually, the Stavros Niarchis Foundation Cultural Center, which includes a national library (?)
So this made me realize my main disagreement with what seems to be most people's taste - I think concrete is good, but glass is bad. (Because concrete buildings can have lots of small variations, and a cityscape of concrete towers usually won't look monotonous, while glass skyscrapers - even if individually they look good - do.)
Which I suppose is a way of saying that, in practice, tastes really do vary that widely, even among people that think modernism was a wrong turn.
I absolutely do not agree that downtown Paris and London look good
> But the style doesn't scale.
...not when the buildings are crammed together densely. It works much better when the buildings are well spaced out, with wide roads and plenty of green between them.
That’s the issue with starchitect buildings - they often treat their building like a sculpture meant to stand by itself, rather than as part of an urban fabric.
Same here. I mean, I appreciate traditional architecture for its novelty (I visited Edinburgh a while back and it was very nice to look at), but I feel like it would very... overwhelming to live there. I much prefer the more minimalist architecture for practical reasons, even if it is less artistically engaging. I'm not walking around town to look at buildings after all, and there's isn't exactly any shortage of stimulation these days.
And also, that Beaux-Arts building looks ugly as sin. It looks like some cheap Disney Land set piece. ...Honestly, I really do not want to get lectured on taste from someone who thinks AI art looks good.
Better a Disneyland set piece than a cardboard box.
(And if for some reason you want to instead be lectured on taste by someone who is pretty annoyed by AI art, I'll be happy to provide.)
The Beaux-Arts building looks terrible. The Frank Lloyd Wright one referenced in the same passage is positively gorgeous, but having spent a *lot* of time touring gorgeous Wright structures they are universally deeply impractical structures that have tons of custom-built interior pieces. The focus on practicality and ease of construction from later modernists seems like a necessary step for actually building a real city and not a house that will have to be sold off and repurposed into a museum to be maintained via charitable donations from tourists.
Also, having floor to ceiling windows is really awesome for the people in the skyscrapers.
I feel like the beauty of a modernist buildings depend a lot on their surroundings- more so than other architectural styles. The same minimalist structure can be beautiful and cozy when surrounded by a forest or hideous and oppressive when surrounded by parking lots and highways.
Come to think of it, maybe most of what minimalism does aesthetically is amplify the beauty, ugliness and other qualities of the things around and inside of it, contributing only a small amount to the combined impression. Maybe contrast with minimalism can draw attention to aesthetics of a thing- sort of frame it in way that makes the aesthetics harder to overlook, like white space in graphic design.
I mean, it's not always the case that minimalism paired with something beautiful creates an impression of more beauty- a gothic cathedral paired with a glass cube isn't more beautiful than a cathedral paired with another cathedral. But maybe in that case, the minimalism is drawing attention the cathedral's beauty, but also contributing a sort of chill, static aesthetic to the combined impression which clashes with the cathedral's grandeur. Wheres that same static quality paired with a beautiful but disquietingly wild forest tones down the wildness, leaving an impression of coziness, and the static quality combined with the inhospitable vibe of urban sprawl reinforces that vibe to create a feeling of oppression.
Agreed. One of my very favorite buildings ever is Beinecke Library, which in the International Style and is just incredibly gorgeous, especially from the inside in the light. Saarinen's Ingalls Rink is also so cool. Ooh, and the William James building by Yamasaki is also great. But I also appreciate other kinds of architecture too, like Gothic and neo-Gothic and Arts and Crafts and Prairie! Honestly, I like most buildings that look like someone put some real form of artistic thought into them. When 99% of buildings are cookie-cutter strip-mall as-cheap-as-possible, it's exciting to see anything different.
BTW, it's not like Modernists are the only architects who ever raised form above function! For example, in most Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, anyone over 6'2" has to duck to get through doorways. When one of his clients complained that his roof was leaking onto a chair, Wright allegedly said "move the chair".
I think it’s so weird that this book review treated Saarinen as an opponent of the modernists!
Seriously. The only reason I even realized the Ingalls Rink was by Saarinen was after seeing the picture of the "City of Culture" in this article -- described as a creation of "Le Corbusierian fundamentalists" and immediately thinking "oh, that looks a lot like the Ingalls Rink, I wonder if the Rink is by the same people? I should look it up." The differences may be vast to those inside the movement, but they are more subtle to the rest of us.
Saarinen was a modernist who liked impressing little boys. I can recall seeing his eagle wing-shaped TWA terminal at JFK Airport in 1965 when I was 6 and thinking it looked awesome and that in the future all buildings would be so awesome.
They weren't.
I agree that the inside of Beinecke Library is pretty great. The outside is awful though. No windows, no ornament, just blank concrete divided into squares. Why?
There are dozens of us! I never get it when Scott goes off on one on this topic.
My optimal city is one created to be traversable on every level. Sadly nobody builds like that, but some modernist buildings come close. The lack of slanted roofs greatly helps for one.
Many East Asian cities get closer to this!
I find it notable that a lot of (modern) East Asian buildings are, structurally, extremely similar to the featureless blocks or weird alien shapes Scott hates so much. Really the main difference is that when viewed from street level the cities tend to be more cramped, extremely colorful and have signage and other forms of non-obtrusive and mass produced ornamentation, rather than being austere and empty.
Not sure if I fully agree, but perhaps related: to me, some buildings heavy with ornament can look equally menacing, imposing, and depressing as dystopian brutalist architecture.
In pictures, Palace of Westminster looks no more cheerful or welcoming than infamous Boston City Hall. Westminster has more symmetry, but also ... all the spiky-looking ornaments.
There’s a reason traditional haunted houses are old ornate Queen Anne style Victorian houses.
Yep, same thing. I like modern architecture, and I'm fine with traditional one, though on occasion I find it too busy.
Turns out taste is subjective. Who could've though?
+1
I feel as strange as possible when someone puts up two pictures: of some maximally banal pseudo-classical palace without a single interesting feature and of a beautiful modernist building and writes that, well, it is self-evident that the palace is better. Uh... no?
That Beaux-arts building looks much worse to me than most of the supposedly 'ugly' modern buildings in this post. I generally enjoy traditional architecture but you can't treat it as a monolith, some of it sucks.
Something like 25% of the public in the US/UK feels like you do, depending on the survey.
This post and the book are about 40 years out of date. It's also a nice story but really not relevant to a lot of the ugly buildings. International Style was never that influential, particularly in domestic building. LA modernism and third Bay tradition did much more. There's a also a lot of continuity between Wright and Bahaus: Praire style's horizontal orientation is replicated in IIT's campus.
Wealthy Illinois psychologists don't commission architectural pieces. They live in McMansions. And the defining feature of a McMansion isn't its size, or its traditional style, but the complete lack of skill in using that style. Symmetry and harmonious forms are cast aside in favor of a cacophony.
What we lost wasn't a particular style but the art of caring about the result, in some cases because of design review commissions that only approve the quotidean. If you care, it really doesn't matter what style is picked.
Sorry, my experience of complaints about McMansions is that people photograph a perfectly lovely house, then draw a bunch of red arrows on it with comments like "THE BEDROOM HAS MORE WINDOWS THAN THE GARAGE, THAT IS INHARMONIOUS AND SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED!!!" and it just looks . . . fine.
'McMansion' really refers to two different, and arguably opposite, problems. One is giant houses that look boring - that is, cookie-cutter subdivision houses at mansion prices (as well as mansion land/infrastructure use, often crowding out smaller homes, at cookie-cutter construction quality). The other is what you said, architects comparing about symmetry and stylistic mishmashes. (Which is ironic, given the influence of deconstructivism. And I get that the argument is 'master-created chaos versus pure randomness', but I'm not sure how much they can actually tell the difference - though, maybe.)
Randomness and asymmetry have been fashionable among prestigious architects for a few decades now. Thom Mayne, for example, tends to place windows at random like an IBM punch card from 1968.
There’s an uncanny valley effect. Slightly asymmetrical things look ugly in ways precisely symmetrical and entirely asymmetrical ones don’t.
George Washington's Mt. Vernon is moderately asymmetrical. It's pretty funny.
I've always interpreted "McMansion" as meaning "house much nicer than mine, owned by someone I consider my social inferior".
Hmm, I get your point, but I think this is perhaps the least charitable take on it. How about something like "house bigger than mine and superficially 'nicer' but actually of low quality and utility for its price." Like noticing that the house has six bedrooms but it's for two parents and a single child. The space, though expensive, is mostly wasted. Or seeing that the ornamentation is cheaply plastered on the outside for looks and both serves no purpose and will likely need additional maintenance over time as it falls off.
As someone who finds it hard to understand the criticism of McMansions, what you've said makes a lot more sense than the aesthetic criticisms. If all anti-McMansion people stated their views in that way, I would be on their side.
In particular, the practical criticism of the ornamentation's structural quality resonates with me. If the point behind the anti-McMansion feelings is "well-off people are getting ripped off by builders constructing shoddy and cheap ornamentation that won't last," that's a reasonable thing to say, and I agree!
On the size of houses in general, though, I'm going to disagree with you. There are plenty of practical reasons why someone might want a house with more bedrooms than residents, particularly if they have the means to afford it. Maybe Mom works from home, and having a home office in one of the bedrooms is valuable. Maybe Sally can have a playroom, or there's a place to put Dad's art studio. Maybe Grandma will move in in a few years. Maybe guests are frequently entertained, and there's a place to put the cousins when they come to town.
You're certainly free to offer criticism of people having bigger houses than they necessarily *need*, but I have a hard time seeing that as anything other than sour grapes about people being wealthy in general.
Who cares? The people living in them aren't snobby architecture critics. If you're a normal person they look nice!
Prior to this article, I didn’t realise the McMansion discourse covered anything besides this 1st set of problems.
The thing with McMansions is that they are *fake*. Consider, for example, shutters.
* real shutters are useful and can be quite beautiful.
* Shutters that look like the real thing but don't actually close are fine, although they upset me at a metaphysical level. I get fooled by them and I don't care, until it's pointed out to me.
*Shutters that are so fake that they cannot possibly work (i.e., by being too small to cover their window) are ugly. Deeply, viscerally ugly.
McMansions just happen to lean very heavily into that third group, presumably because the target demographic doesn't see or doesn't care. Shutters as mentioned. Fake structural supports. Roofs that don't actually follow the topology of the underlying rooms. McMansions are deeply postmodern objects.
This applies to everything btw. Suits with fake pockets. Economic background explanations in a fantasy novel. AI art.
I get suits with fake pockets and AI art, but what's wrong with economic background explanations in fantasy novels? How people would behave differently if magic was real, and how this would affect the economy, seem like fun ideas worth exploring. Even in narratives with fantasy worlds, the people in them are generally still supposed to behave like people, which means they will engage in economic activity occasionally. I know there are some fantasy stories that work on pure dream logic and aren't supposed to address any of that, but not all fantasy is like that.
I assume Vitor is talking about fantasy novels whose economics are pretty well established to be nonsensical / impossible like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter?
Exactly. Actual alternative economies are interesting. Handwaving the issue away because it's not the focus of the story is passable. Central plot elements that are completely implausible are major immersion breakers.
Where I live we have 'Tuscan' houses - all the same colour, all 3-story 2-brick cubes tarted up with fake terracotta tiles and overhangs that are too small to keep out sun or keep rain off of windows. The windows themselves are small, so the interiors are dim. The poor insulation and low roof volume mean that they bake in summer and freeze in winter. The houses are built to the limits of their stands, often in clustered complexes, so they huddle together over asphalt and brick paving instead of grass and trees. For decorative flair, they usually have a faux Greek column and lintel over the doorway.
Please find me a sociopolitical theory that explains these monstrosities better than the intersection of "customers have poor taste" and "builders get away with doing as little work as possible".
Totally. Fakeness is the core of this. There will be an element of fakery even with the best new building, if they're following a style from the distant past. Just like a pretty oil painting today. You may, with enough care, recreate the thing exactly, but its creator and context will be very different, making it, in fact, not the same at all. The architect of a gothic palace 400 years ago was working boldly at the edge of what is possible, they were helping invent a tradition. The architect who copies it today is doing something quite different. It could be impressive, some might like it, but a starting point for this debate must be that it is not close to the same thing.
The corollary of this, which I think Scott maybe isn't aware of, is that people can *love* period architecture, but still not want it copied today. (This is me.)
We love it because of what it is, not only how it looks to an unthinking camera.
Greek temples are fake. They are stone imitations of wooden temples.
I dunno about that, stone vs wood seems a pretty huge difference, not one the Greeks tried to conceal? Though this is not something I know about.
There's plenty of old (but not that old) buildings around me in London that make use of Egyptian tombs and architectural features. They're honestly kind of corny to my eye, but they're interesting because they recall a phase of Egyptophilia among wealthy English people in the 18th and 19th centuries. It adds a layer.
Imitating =/= combining influences
Minor nitpick, but
> The architect of a gothic palace 400 years ago was working boldly at the edge of what is possible, they were helping invent a tradition.
Try 700-800 years ago. 400 years ago the rage was all Baroque (on the continent) or Tudor style (in England). The only stuff being built in Gothic at that point was repairs or extensions to already existing Gothic structures.
The lapels on most suits could not close even if they had buttons on them. While it does bug me, I dont think it looks bad, I usually cant even tell. Neither is it "deeply postmodern", they started doing that before WWI. A lot of ornamentation are remnants of functional elements.
As a resident of the inner bay area, I find it hard to get worked up over McMansions. Let's take it for granted that they're boring and fake-looking and have aesthetically-displeasing architectural features and maybe were built cheaply. It's still housing that was actually built; and the alternative is living in an 80 year old shitty house with shitty insulation that costs as much or more than the McMansion because the inner bay area has been NIMBYist for decades and there's way too much demand chasing way too little housing stock.
The place I currently live in was built shortly after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and has no insulation or central heating. I will happily take a McMansion over this.
I privately label the thing you're describing as dishonest design, adding non-functional elements which are supposed to evoke a superior product: pocket slits that aren't pockets, a suburban house with vinyl on three sides and brick on one, cheap plastic accent shutters, etc. AI-generated images are full of this crap, cargo cult imitations of functional objects.
McMansions are also full of wasted space. Instead of having 23 useful rooms with different functions for entertaining, servants, guests, etc. they have 10 over-sized spaces and you need to put your home office in the guest room and double bunk your kids. Master bedrooms with enough space to change clothes comfortably, but then also a walk-in closet with enough space to do the same, and a transition space between them and the bathroom that is just as big.
This definitely cuts to the heart of it for me. Functionally, a McMansion is a house for people who only *need* a normal house's worth of space but pay for more anyway and then have to figure out what to do with it. And the aesthetics of the McMansion follow suit: the basic shape and structure of a normal house, plus a bunch of unplanned and unnecessary add-ons jutting out in every direction.
Here is an article I like that argues against this line of thinking: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/in-praise-of-pastiche/
This article doesn't really contradict my point? The thing is, physical constraints of old create a design language. When that language is applied consistently but with modern materials, the result falls into my category 2, which is ok (but not my preference).
There are also degrees of non-functionality. A column that's *redundant* because the roof it holds up is already supported (but which is in a roughly correct place for supporting the roof), vs a column that's *useless* because its location makes it unable to support anything. The former might be "structurally dishonest" in the sense of the article you linked, but it's still honest compared to the latter.
(Lots of interesting side points to be made here. What about a column that's *inefficient* because it could have been replaced by something cheaper? What about a pavilion that was built to satisfy the owner's need for columns, rather than the other way around.)
I don't know the exact term for this in architecture, but I indeed prefer "form follows function" kind of design. When I think of beautiful brick buildings, I think of catenary arches and catalan vaulting. These can be found both in vernacular architecture and very modern designs. I don't particularly like things like the second-to-last photo of the article (Brno, Czechia), but I don't write internet rants about it either.
Sorry, I still find it hard to understand where the dislike of this comes from. It feels like being angry about having a tree in the garden if it's not a fruit tree. Some things are just there to be beautiful.
(though I admit I can't picture the kind of shutters you're talking about, and don't know enough about architecture to know which columns aren't supporting a building. Maybe if it were something obviously unusable, like a window leading to a brick wall so that it was impossible to see out of it, I'd have stronger opinions - though when I try to picture this now, I'm not finding it especially aversive)
My take, as someone that agrees with pretty much everything Vitor writes above, is that McMansions aren't like a garden of non-fruit-bearing trees, they're like a garden of fake, plastic trees.
Why do I dislike fake plants? Because they're fake...it's a subjective preference, but one I don't think is that uncommon.
I wonder if not being bothered by too-small shutters comes from never using shutters? I imagine you'd notice details like that if you use them every day. Like coming across a workshop where the tools are all proportioned wrong, it would just immediately feel "off".
Here are some images of fake shutters that are too small: https://metzgerterryus.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/why-fake-shutters-make-me-angry/
This is all about aesthetics, so the best shot at explaining is just gesturing at adjacent phenomena:
* Occam's razor
* Mathematical elegance. There's a deep desire for simple statements with profound implications being supported by short, elegant proofs that intuitively hint at a reason why things *must* be so. Correct but clunky proofs are just... ugh in the same way as a roof that doesn't leak but also fails to be as roofy as it could be.
* Chocolate statues. The idea sounds great, until you realize that the kind of chocolate that has the requisite structural integrity isn't actually good to eat. Same with elaborately carved cakes that consist 80% of icing. The cakeness has been sacrificed in favor of the decoration.
* A card game or video game that devotes 80% of its presentation to some mechanic, but competitive play is all about the other 20%. Magic: the gathering is nominally about creatures smashing each other in the face, supported by cool spells. The card sets have dizzying arrays of interesting creatures with all sort of abilities and statlines. But at various points of its history, competitive strategies were all about land destruction (cheap, generic resource denial) and counterspells, which aimed to minimize interactions with the opponent and prevent them from ever having a creature in play at all.
Scott, as an experienced writer, you probably have a fairly refined taste in books. You might enjoy poetry or Franz Kafka or whatever, while most people would rather read something like Harry Potter. I bet most experienced writers prefer books similar to you, and I don't think that's because of social pressure or brainwashing or whatever. People who have a lot of experience with literature simply end up noticing and preferring different things from amateurs (and even amateurs graduate from children's books to Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings to 1984 to ... over time). Why wouldn't the same principles apply to architecture?
You might also be able to notice subtle flaws in writing that most people won't care about. I probably made you cringe by using the phrase "or whatever" twice in a short paragraph. I heard JK Rowling being criticized for using too many adverbs, which I never noticed and can't bring myself to care about even when pointed out. These would be the equivalents of weirdly spaced McMansion windows, I guess.
Some people perceive the world with mechanical interactions shading the visual; I've known several mechanical engineers and machinists like this, and I have a bit of it when it comes to mechanical linkages. If I see a static image of a set of 3-4 metal bars hooked together, I'll also "see" all the bars move slightly as though one had rotated one a degree or two, and the rest followed appropriately.
Artistic representations that break linkage movement in subtle ways is off-putting to me in much the same way that a picture of someone with slight lazy-eye is off-putting. My brain expects something it's not seeing.
I wonder if Vitor has a similar sense for architecture. His description of hating shutters that can't possibly "do the shutter thing" and pillars that can't possibly "do the pillar thing" reminds me of how linkages that can't do the linkage thing bother me.
I'm pretty sure "form follows function" is a part of the modernist philosophy, for what it's worth.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong actually with faking materials or structure. This irritates me immensely in discussions of Gothic architecture, which some modernists praise as an example of "strucutral honesty" (while never building anything like it). In fact this is a common misconception, which I wrote about on DSL: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,10128.msg435326.html#msg435326
Oh Vitor I completely agree. I don’t know why I care so much about that, but it wasn’t something I was taught. I used to make jewelry as a hobby, and look for hours at pictures of wonderful pieces done by others, and the thing I most admired was clasps that were both ornamental and functional, with the ornament being essential to the functionality. A simple example would be a flower shape that was the “button” that slipped thru a “buttonhole” of leaves, but there are many more
deeply clever designs than that one
...Really? I didn't know what McMansions looked like so I looked it up, and Jesus Christ, the first result I got looks like a nightmarish parody of traditional architecture. If you put me in that house with a gun in hand, I would not survive. https://mcmansionhell.com/post/768536968831401984/new-jersey-19th-century-eclecticism
I'd take that parody over most award winning modern architecture.
While I hate the outside and the weirdly cramped entrance, each room looks more or less fine to me in isolation. I really don't care about "inexplicable ceiling details", or the funny internal columns, or the big stovetop, or the fact that the residents can sit down in the bathroom.
Heh, it's almost exactly vice versa for me. Outside is kinda silly, but whatever. Interior is so cringe it's painful.
I think this is a perfect case in point - that looks quite nice to me, if perhaps a bit overdone for my tastes. Whereas most (but not all) brutalist buildings are horrifically ugly.
Sorry, but isn't this exactly what Scott is talking about, but with black arrows instead of red? I mean this in the nicest way: you might be in the 1% of the population that is trained to notice.
So the person with different tastes to you has been 'trained' but the natural human reaction is to like that house? I feel this attitude is verging on unfair to people with different tastes, unfair to snobs even! They have been brainwashed and are looking down on the common man's mcmansion whereas the common man's tastes are authentic and his hatred of the snob's preference for aesthetic simplicity is just uncorrupted human nature.
Scott's argument, as I understand it, is that insular communities of credentialed people, in fields and contexts where reality doesn't mug you for making mistakes, can in principle wind up with arbitrarily stupid consensus beliefs. So "random people tend to like this" is stronger evidence that something is good than "the credentialed people who all trained at the same academies tend to like this", because conformism is available as an alternative explanation for the latter but not the former. There are still arguments that can be made, in particular cases, for why the credentialed people are right and the untrained randos are wrong, but you have to *actually make those arguments*, you can't just appeal to ostensible-expert consensus and expect deference on that basis.
(This is all assuming at least a weak form of aesthetic realism, of course.)
To me the signalling argument works equally well for the untrained randos. They want to feel like they're living in opulent palaces. They want to discount the expert view because it contradicts their communities' perception that their McMansions are in good taste. Their preferences have also been trained into them by fantasies of status, acceptance and plenty, such as in fairytale books, traditional ideas of where rulers live, fantasy novels, biscuit tin artwork etc.
And what is the training we are talking about that causes elites to like some modern architectural styles? Is it only naked status games in architecture academies? I doubt it. It's also bound to include non-architects going to modern art galleries, watching sci-fi movies, seeing and appreciating functional design in other spheres such as in digital interfaces, or meditating and feeling that they see to the heart of things when the extraneous is removed and purpose is crystallised.
But even if some elite's preferences *are* – unbeknownst to them – somehow more a result of signalling than a rando's preferences are, what exactly could they do about it and why exactly should they care? (As you say, here we get into whether and in what form aesthetic realism is true.)
I don’t know if the pejorative tone you interpret from “trained” was intended. It certainly isn’t necessary for the broader argument.
Stipulate that the 1% of people with more training are also objectively correct about what is a “better” building, aesthetically.
It’s still the case that aesthetics preferred by 1% of the population shouldn’t be used as a guide for architecture generally.
I’m entirely willing to believe that there is some objective metric by which certain complex forms of heavy metal are the best music. Maybe all the worlds top musicologists agree. That still doesn’t mean you should start using heavy metal as the elevator music in all government buildings if most people dislike it.
Okay, we can put aside the word 'training'. I guess I have a couple of thoughts on the rest.
(1) Is it really the case that 99% of people's preferences in architecture are being ignored? Seems pretty unlikely to me. Even if it were true that 99% of people on average prefer old buildings, that's massively different than 99% of people wanting new buildings to be built to look like old buildings. TBH I personally think the absolute best and most important buildings are mostly old. But I don't see any logical path from there to thinking we should build new buildings that appear superficially similar, even if we could. And I don't think it's particularly likely the market would ignore this overwhelming level of preference, even if there is some kind of signalling-based distortion going on.
(2) If it turns out heavy metal is the best type of music, it would probably be because those who've learned to appreciate it are getting more pleasure or value from it than others are getting from inferior forms of music. In which case, maybe it actually would be good to encourage the appreciation of heavy metal, teach it in schools, play it in government buildings etc. It'd be doing people a favour in the long term, assuming they could come to share the appreciation that metalheads have.
(If taste is not that plastic, and most people cannot successfully acculturate themselves to enjoying either heavy metal or modern architecture, then I would back down from this point, but I suspect with the passing of time, in the case of architecture at least, we'll see certain modern buildings will come to be loved by more and more people and they will join the canon, while other examples will fall by the wayside. People today actually seem to like the Eiffel Tower for example, which most Parisians thought was extremely ugly at first.)
Compare a more obviously acquired taste: pepper.
Give someone a chile to eat and they won't. Cook edible food with chiles and the natural reaction is to be unable to eat the food. Children have to be told that hot food is desirable, or that avoiding it is unmanly, and acclimate themselves to eating it.
Once this has happened, the preference is there; if you're omniscient, the historical record will show me ordering and eating food prepared in big piles of chiles, alone in my apartment where no one will ever know.
But the fact that you can train a different reaction into someone does nothing to discredit the idea that there's a natural reaction and an indoctrinated one.
Right but there's a valence to describing that as natural vs indoctrinated (rather than e.g. childish vs cultivated) that seems to take a side, as well as imply there's some deliberate and possibly nefarious process going on. You can very well discover a love for chile (e.g. by trying it as an adult to see what the fuss is about) without a parent deliberately causing it to happen. Similarly you can discover a love for modernist architecture without being led to it by some architecture professor. You can go out in culture for yourself, and find yourself liking it; millions do. (I am not even sure that kids always move from liking classical architecture to liking modernism later, in the way that I suppose they do from liking bland food to liking chile later.)
I'm not trained at all, I'm barely educated in fact. But when even properly decorated mansions are generally uncomfortable to be in, looking at that is just... It's like that trope in horror media where you see someone in the distance acting strangely, and it becomes increasingly clear that they're just a corpse being puppeted by something else.
I can see how someone would find it garish from the outside, though I'm indifferent. But I have never found McMansions uncomfortable on the inside. I live in a tight but expensive house in an HCOL area, when I go to a relative's McMansion I'm always amazed.
If you think genuinely disliking that is 1% of people with training only you are not calibrated I think. I know nothing of architecture, but those pictures are hideous. I would be remodeling the hell out of that if I had to live there.
idk, sure, maybe?
In a vacuum, every individual is representative of the whole population. I wouldn't care, Scott wouldn't care, you would care, anomie would care. I could grasp for broader studies or polls on the subject, I'm sure they exist, but regardless it's obviously not the case that these buildings are obviously hideous
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/808/566/fb0.jpeg
Interesting. I could not care less, as long as the space is functional and comfortable.
Most people like mcmansions. That's why they keep getting built. They have some real flaws - heating and cooling bills are ruinous - but the aesthetics are not, to the vast majority of people, one of them.
If this is true than most people like brutalist mondernist building because they keep getting built.
The people who buy houses live in those houses. There is no principal-agent problem. They would not be built if there was not a market for them, and there would not be a market for them if people didn't like them, or at minimum tolerate them enough to let their preference for appealing to what they think *other people* like enough to overwhelm their own preferences. This is not true for office buildings and most other Brutalism.
This suggests that any coop-owned company which gets a new headquarters built will pick something substantially less Brutalist than average. I don't know whether this is true, but I will predict that it is.
This still just feels like snobbery. Your brain gets outraged that all this fancy stuff is owned by low class people who lack the cultural context to know how to use fancy stuff appropriately. They've just gone and bought a bunch of "fancy"-coded stuff and put it all together in an incoherent mishmash. Why can't low class people conform to the expectations of their betters?
I'm a snob too, but I'm honest about it and aware that it's not a healthy impulse.
I said this in another comment but if it is unhealthy for snobs to dislike the mish mash, is it also unhealthy for the regular person to dislike the bold modern buildings downtown?
It is unvarnished snobbery. One of the McMansion Hell blogger’s put-downs is, “we want to be Vanderbilt coded but we make regional car dealership money.” I don’t know how much plainer they can make the classism.
True. I have read a ton of that blog over the years and she is extremely snobby and proud of it. She talks about how poor she is in every single post. I think she hates and envies people who know 98.5% less about architecture than her but have the $$$ to own a large home. She certainly considers herself far more sophisticated than McMansion owners, which is probably true by many definitions of sophisticated. Paul Fussell would probably call her Class X or at least a X-wannabe.
TBH this just makes you sound unhinged. Like that house looks fine. Relax. If this is all that it takes to drive you to suicide then you probably have some pre-existing issues.
Man, lighten up. I like that blog but it's just a joke. It's not actually a crime against humanity.
They should try that experiment with the man who runs that blog. It would save the world from their constant pointless snobbery that dwells entirely on being the Stop Having Fun Guy and refusing to ever let people enjoy themselves or have nice things. There are problems with mcmansions and he never discusses any of them, just mocks things that are utterly harmless and often look legitimately pretty good.
What a shock that the grown man with a cartoon girl profile picture who talks like a redditor has a wrong opinion.
Yeah, uh, I disagree. Many complaints about McMansions are real.
Classical, Renaissance, Baroque, neo-Classical, Empire all had artistic standards and ideals of beauty. When (as Wolfe writes) the academies abandoned old models and practice of hours of inking and rendering Renaissance buildings, these were real things thrown into dustbin of history, and the act had a real consequence: architects were no longer trained how to produce art following the classical ideals.
The problem with bad kind of McMansion is that there are random pilasters and windows placed in a way that obviously does not follow the classical-/classically inspired principles, and the end result often looks jarring. Wrong, somehow. If you have an eye for patterns and have looked at enough of old buildings drawn in classical tradition, the McMansions not following the rules often jump out, which is interpreted as bit cheap, or "premium mediocre" a best, like a McDonalds restaurant. People with classical architecture training can even call out the parts that jump out, but for regular people it can be more like a feeling.
Afterthought: Perhaps the feels just aren't there for the Americans who grow up in American suburbia. I can imagine that for a such person, McMansions are perfectly usual houses that signal nothing but affluence required to build or buy them. For an outsider, the worst offenders can look pretty weird mashups of traditional Western styles (edit. and the McD).
> here are random pilasters and windows placed in a way that obviously does not follow the classical-/classically inspired principles
JOOI, what happens to these sentiments when considering, say, an average British stately home that's been around for a couple of centuries, has been changed and extended many many times over its existence, and has ended up being a mishmash of whatever the prevailing style was when each part was built? Do people stick to their guns, or do we end up at some variant of "this one is OK because it's tasteful old money not tasteless nouveau riche"?
Perhaps Scott could do another challenge like the AI art one - "McMansion or National Trust estate?"
The best architecture today is that which appreciates old and new, like the king's cross development in London that retains old industrial facades and gas rings but also features bold modern structures, underpasses, etc. All you need to avoid a mish mash is care and effort. The problem with the clash of styles in a (bad) mcmansion is that they are unplanned and uncaring.
My father and I went on a trip to Italy a couple of decades ago. While there we saw one church which had four sides. Each side was in a different style, as it was rebuilt and extended over centuries.
I wish I could remember where it was.
It looked...okay, though when you looked at it from a corner the disparate elements could be jarring.
With a McMansion, you really only get the front side to express things with (or at least that's the only side that gets photographed).
Putting all the elements expressed in that church on one side would take some work to make it look good.
[edit]It may not have been a church.
"premium mediocre" a best, like a McDonalds restaurant.
What??? McDonalds is not even close to fast casual or whatever you are trying to say here.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with 'premium mediocre'. It is a term created to launder snobbery and cast a perfectly reasonable and normal preference as a vice. Rao is a talentless hack.
I agree with Scott here. The first google result for McMansion got me https://mcmansionhell.com/post/150926055196/mcmansion-hell-from-a-to-z-part-one-a-h
And if we take the first image on that page: https://64.media.tumblr.com/8665c0192cfeafc48996058174333c56/tumblr_inline_oe2kyfpjT01sppt0x_1280.png
Yes it would be better if the windows on the left lined up. Yes the two windows on the right are too narrow.
But that McMansion is a million times better than many "award winning" buildings, like this monstrosity: https://www.archdaily.com/912997/winners-of-the-2019-building-of-the-year-awards
Of course the first image gets called McMansion, it kinda looks like super fancy McDonalds. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:McDonalds_in_Moncton.jpg
That McDonalds looks better than most award winning buildings, even with the penalties for the corporate colours and logos. Put some classy old signage in its place that's colour works with the bricks and job done.
Perhaps. It is still a distinctive look in non-American eyes. (I presume snobby Americans, too.)
Red brick and grey slate roof is *very* common here in the UK, though usually the brick is a darker shade and its a classical style that predates giant windows that size.
The two examples show that Modernist (as opposed to Postmodernist) and McMansion styles have the opposite problems.
The McMansions are just "we built a funny-shaped box and tacked some random decorations on." The reason they look ugly (and most of the website's examples do look ugly) is partly that there are too many large features cramped into a small space, and partly that none of those features match each other or look nice together. Imagine The Scream, but with the Mona Lisa's face instead of the scream face and with the Fighting Temeraire being pulled along in the background.
The (better*) Modernist buildings don't have these problems, have a unified style and are very well-proportioned. Taking "Brick Cave," it looks coherent, everything's the right size and in the right place. The same applies to Boston City Hall.
The Hegelian synthesis is of course to take the Modernist approach to coherence and proportion (which isn't, strictly speaking, Modern) and build them out of elements which are individually aesthetically pleasing. Postmodernism has abandoned both, which at least makes it look interesting the first time you see it.
*Most Modernist buildings aren't even trying to be good, but are very very cheap (eg. type "British tower block" into Google Images). Where the goal is to spend the absolute bare minimum to warehouse workers/residents you don't care about, you can achieve amazing things with modern architecture.
Which of the modern buildings did you see as a monstrosity? Most of them look pretty good to me.
They look nice to pass by, look at once, and think "You can DO that to a building?? Huh." But imagine living in one, does it not fill you with horror? Like the one where the stairs have no railings, imagine you just want to get up and down as quickly as possible (sometimes in the dark) but without actually falling. Now the simplicity of no railings is no longer art to appreciate but a severe design flaw getting in your way.
Most of them look, at worst, mid, but that one is actively oppressive to me. The pretty colors only make it feel like a liminal space, but at least liminal spaces are spaces designed with purpose. The structure is inscrutable and does nothing to convey a coherent purpose
Do you mean the Brick Cave? I like that (at least from the pictures) - and it makes a lot of sense.
Recall this is for a place where cooling is as much of a need as heating is a need in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, say. Recall as well that most of the world sees A/C as an environmentally irresponsible, non-sustainable solution that is more of an acknowledgement of failure - it's good to have it somewhere as a failsafe, but you don't want to depend on it.
So, you need shadow, and you need cooling. Also, you, the person in the house, apparently also want some balconies and some sitting space that is sort of outside. Having a shady courtyard in the dead of summer really helps, both physically and psychologically - everybody in southern Spain, northern Africa, etc., knows that. Clever builders in the past played with what is inside and what is outside: you have spaces that are sort of inside and sort of outside (You don't want to slavishly make a (much) lower-budget version of the Alhambra palaces (McAlhambra?) but why not pick the basic philosophy?)
At the same time, you want a solid, honest build that will last 100 years and then some, and at the same time not be obnoxiously ostentatious (though, to be honest, you may also want to subtly show off a little, though more to readers of architecture magazines than to neighbors or thieves). Good-quality brick throughout sounds good!
My only question about this house is: how does it feel to live in it? What does it look like in reality? Above all, does the passive cooling work?
If all of that works, this seems like a good place. I've been to a tea-house in a somewhat similar climate built a bit like this (by Laurie Baker, whom some architects used to pooh-pooh), though it was much more curvilinear. I thought it was nice.
"Recall as well that most of the world sees A/C as an environmentally irresponsible, non-sustainable solution that is more of an acknowledgement of failure..."
I don't think this is right. China's already over 50% penetration, and they're still quite poor, and the Indian market is growing very rapidly. Assuming they follow the model of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, they'll eventually reach or exceed US levels. If Asia agrees with us, that's most of the world right there.
Well, "people" should perhaps be "people who are starting to think seriously about global warming/carbon footprints and don't live next to a hydro station"; also, "people who think about buildings". Not that I am accusing those who get A/Cs of being unwashed proles: if your building is not built for the heat, an A/C can be a need, what with more frequent heat waves. It can also become a status symbol, in the way that being fat is where there is hunger.
But everybody having A/C, thinking of it as a basic service, and forgetting to use architectural features (e.g. a porch) that are there for a reason? That's an attitude I've seen in places in the US South, not elsewhere. If it has spread, it's a problem.
"Needing AC" might have been a problem in past decades, but nowadays it's cheaper to stick in both AC _and_ enough solar panels to power it than to design your house for thermal efficiency.
The cost of energy on a sunny day is rapidly approaching negative in most places.
That house looks very ugly to me. I would never buy it.
From the award winners--most are ugly but the brick cave is cool.
"my experience of complaints about McMansions is that people photograph a perfectly lovely house, then draw a bunch of red arrows"
I think most complaints about "McMansions" *are* like this, because the people that make those complaints are trying to mimic the complaints they or other people have made about actually-ugly, poorly-built, and non-functional houses. It's become a ritual whether the building in question really deserves it or not, with no regard for who built it that way and why, or who lives in it and why.
E.g. I personally would hate to live in big houses on tiny lots, but "I need more space and land everywhere in a 100 mile radius costs millions per acre" is a perfectly good reasoning for building that way. And once you start down that route, you need your house to fit in with the neighborhood, but still feel like your own, without breaking the bank. That means you compromise on ideals of style. Some of those compromises are probably mandated by code or regulations for stupid historical reasons.
Sure, true. There can be a style for a "large house in American suburbia", many of which are not actually bad but share the same distinctive look. Then there are the worst examples with the especially weird, especially jarring or funny idiosyncrasies, and they share the same overall style. Some people call the second set of buildings "McMansion"; for others, the whole style is "McMansion", either because they dislike them all, or think the especially bad McMansions are the genre-defining archetypical exemplars.
Consider the possibility that most people genuinely don't like McMansions and think the disharmonious window placement is truly ugly.
Most people have never heard of the term "McMansion".
Sorry but this is a terrible take. Especially once you see what a well designed house looks like.
Mcmansions look horrible, like some poorly trained AI designed them. The definition of Kitsch or maybe more modern /r/ATBGE. And inner design is often terrible too, bedrooms that are way too large, very ugly interior design overall. They are a stereotype of tasteless new money.
Redditor parrots his peers and spews a hackneyed take. Like clockwork.
Did you hear the echo of your keyboard rippling through your mostly empty poorly designed rapidly depreciating mcmansion while you were typing this comment?
You can always sell it, but too bad that real estate agents have captured regulators and are forcing you to pay 5% each way in America's so called free market system.
So I suppose for now you are stuck in your lifeless cul de sac of slightly different looking poorly designed mcmansions. Maybe if you are bored you can drive for 20 minutes to the nearest place that offers something that can, with a bit of imagination, be called entertainment.
I'll take a McMansion over modernism any day, but I'll take a New Traditional house over a McMansion any day, too. There's a lot of low hanging fruit that would make McMansions better, and yeah I notice this stuff even as an amateur. You can blame capitalism or the upper middle class or whatever like that McMansion Hell blog does, or you can blame the loss of technical skill like you outline in this very post, but it's real.
If you want something that looks at practical failures of McMansions rather than artistic ones, I like this post a lot: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php?topic=10736.0
That was a very interesting read, thank you.
Really? To me it conjures houses with a lumpy roofs, a proliferation of gables, and ugly stone and brick facades (often poorly constructed). Whether you think it looks bad or not is a matter of taste, but I really dislike them and it limits inventory for me (looking for a big house right now). Consider the houses on this random street for example. https://maps.app.goo.gl/uh6HCCXrgRDWQ9dC6?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy.
I have long thought that McMansion mockery is just status anxiety dressed up as architectural criticism.
That said, I will grant that there are definitely some ugly McMansions out there, albeit for me it's the ones that seem to be about 80% roof from the outside because they decided to go all in on the vaulted ceilings.
Good heavens, I'm so glad it's not just me who has this experience.
My experience of complaints about McMansions is that it's supposed to be sinful that the house fills most of the lot, to the exclusion of a front yard, as if you lived on the lawn in front of your house as opposed to living inside the house.
A striking parallel to today's state of AI, no? If you ask ChatGPT et al. for a scientific paper on topic X, the system will dutifully provide one, and most people couldn't tell it from the real thing. Never mind that the paper will say mostly nonsense, and invent citations from scratch. Close enough!
Case in point:
https://stanforddaily.com/2024/12/04/hancock-admitted-to-ai-use/
"Stanford misinformation expert admits to ChatGPT ‘hallucinations’ in court statement"
Sure, maybe in the far future AI can build a house according to the owner's specifications alone, while also adhering to any and all legal requirements. But as of today and the foreseeable future, I wouldn't let AI design anything more important than my doormat.
I take it you are referring to something like this https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149622740651/mcmansions-101-windows
I agree that most of these houses seem fine. But I also agree with the author that the examples cited that are better executed using his alleged rules are in fact generally better. And these are traditional styles so nothing about modernism.
Those pictures may be cherry picked, but it would also be consistent with the above. If modernism has devoured the academy than there may be less skill to go around in traditional styles. If there were more skill the houses would look better than fine.
Horizontal orientation by itself is not what made Prairie style non-ugly in the way that International Style was ugly.
I don't have any expertise in architecture at all, but I would say it also struck me while reading that this criticism is out of date. Look at any modern city skyline, and the ugliest towers are probably from the '70s or '80s. I find that most more recent buildings have adequately corrected against many of the excesses of modernism.
Thanks for this! Time travel to ‘81 is always fun. I remember thinking at the time that TW treated Venturi with greater respect, even admiration, but maybe he was being sarcastic and I just missed it. Paul Goldberger, the NYT architecture critic back then, wrote that TW “has a great ear, but not much of an eye.” Ha! Pleasure to read your piece. I’ll read it again tmro for other things I may have missed. 👍
> hard scientists were real experts but everyone else was just kind of faking it
I have grown suspicious of this exception.
Well said! Scientists know far better than the rest of the population just how much they’re faking. We should take them at their word, since they’re such experts.
Maybe at least part of the distinction is "hard science in academia" against "hard science in private industry." You can write research papers in academia without knowing anything useful, but most private employers want tangible results.
Big problem with hard science in private industry is they can't piss off their paymasters--pharmaceutical company scientists won't release negative results on drugs for instance.
The point of academia used to be to avoid that sort of thing and fund research without immediately practical applications. Unfortunately with the left-wing takeover reaching the hard sciences, you can't even rely on academic hard scientists to be objective anymore.
I would agree with both parts of what you say.
The nice thing about private industry drugs is that someone expects them to *work* at some point. Even without the FDA, the drugs would be expected to work well and consistently, with limited side effects. That's how drug companies make their money. A drug that doesn't follow all of those things will not make much, or at least as much, money. The profit incentive roughly aligns with making good drugs. Now, the profit incentive also aligns with releasing something that may have long term negative effects, but the FDA doesn't fix that either. Neither does academic research, at least in timelines relevant to making the product and actually finishing the drug.
Some subset of hard scientists are real experts. You can observe their results in the real world via technological progress. Not many other academic fields get that sort of feedback.
Perhaps relevant: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/21/948926995/keep-it-classical-says-trump-order-on-federal-architecture. He WOULD say things like "I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better."
Here's my Twitter thread of photos of City Halls built before and after 1945: e.g., Beverly Hills vs. Malibu.
https://x.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1226758411653545984
Personally, I really like the small number of later 1930s buildings put up by the Works Progress Administration in a sort of Streamline Moderne style: elegantly decorated, but more restrained than 1920s budget-busting Art Deco designs. The Santa Monica City Hall and the San Diego County Building are decorated enough to stay interesting for centuries, but they also don't look like they wasted too much of the taxpayers' money back in the hard times of the 1930s.
Classic thread
My first contact with Streamline Moderne came when I moved to Seattle and started going on road trips around the area.
I met with many dams, bridges, scenic overlooks, and service areas along the highways that sported this style, even if it was something as insignificant as a railing.
Each time was a joy! Somehow it felt unobtrusive yet pleasantly decorative especially set out against the semi-desert environment around it. It felt like a human gesture from the architect and builders towards me, a complete stranger living in a future unfathomable to them.
You go to Florence or Siena, and whether or not it's because these northern Italian towns are run by communists (they all seem to have a Gramsci Street), they have no high-rise, and they are stupendously beautiful. It made me wonder why the hell we all, in the Anglosphere, fell for the ugliness, from the 1930s onwards to this hour. Wolfe at least tells the US part of the story. For the UK, I think some of it was to do with rebuilding after the devastation of German air-raids; some places were still ruins in the 1960s, and cost was no doubt as much a factor as ideology.
I haven't been all that many places, but postwar UK buildings tend to be exceptionally ugly.
Broke Italian peasants In the 1930s could build beautiful houses out of stone by hand. No decorations at all. Yet somehow it just aesthetically works.
The Italians identify themselves foremost as citizens of their town/city, rather than as Italian. Thus there is a lot of civic pride, which makes that even communist city governments want to preserve the beauty of their towns. This in contrast to eg Britain, where civic chauvinism is suspect., thus the wrecking ball.
At least, this is what I read in some Theodore Dalrymple piece. Seems plausible.
>they have no high-rise
I imagine this is a factor. It's very hard to make a skyscraper that doesn't look like a glass and concrete box, because that's basically what that shape demands.
Behold the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building!
Italian here. You want to see ugly high rise blocks, go check out Milan, or Rome, or Palermo. You'll find plenty. The main reason why you don't see them in those cities is I think that they are SO chock-full of historical buildings you can't just find room in the city centre to build anything like that without destroying some priceless cultural heritage.
But Palermo is a good example of this happening instead, and honestly the reasons here were mostly economic, not ideological or artistic. Basically, the places that were full of crony real estate businessmen often in league with corrupt politicians and organised crime had a lot of knocking down of even very pretty old buildings to replace them with a lot of absolutely ugly cheap apartment blocks. This happened in the 1960s and 1970s mainly so the style of those blocks is what was dominant at the time. But the main driver was money. It's actually interesting and ironic that really, "all ornaments get ditched in the name of building purely functional stuff" is in fact a very Moloch thing to happen and exactly the direction you'd expect capitalism to converge towards - the socialist-inspired architects just happened to be there at the right place and the right time to embody the zeitgeist, seemingly unaware that they were in fact doing the bidding of their sworn enemy.
Thanks, Simone, interesting perspective, and yes, I did think Milan would be a counter-example. Venice's Mestre has plenty of high-rise, too, at a safe distance from all the tourists. And yep, money will always talk.
> ... the architect thought he was “reinventing the idea of light” or something ...
Important point: it's possible for smart people (who've been steeped in a particular subculture) to sincerely believe such a thing and be able to say fancy words about it ... and for it to still be bullshit.
G.A. Cohen called that "unclarifiable-unclarity," or just pseudo-profound bullshit. Deepak Chopra probably believes everything he tweets.
Scott, you have provided many examples of buildings that look too austere, too minimalist and too boxy to your taste. But just to calibrate our perceptions here, could you also provide some examples of buildings that look too "gaudy", too "kitsch" and too "over-ornamented" to your taste? I'm talking, like, evoking the feeling people describe looking at historically-painted roman sculptures. Not trying to make a gotcha, just wondering if different people have different thresholds of austere/normal/gauche.
Conversely, there are a number of Brutalist buildings I rather like, especially if they are surrounded by greenery. (Brazil has some nice brutalist designs that are disappearing back into the forest.)
For example, the brutalist Sunkist Building in Sherman Oaks, now being repurposed from offices to apartments as Citrus Commons, appears to be a lower-budget knockoff of the vastly hated Boston City Hall:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brutalism/comments/x713dr/sunkist_building_in_los_angeles/
Same upside down human sacrifice platform. But the Sunkist is pleasantly symmetrical and nicely landscaped, so it's been modestly popular for 50 years.
Honestly I feel like pointing to landscaping to say a building's good seems like cheating. Unless the vegetation is literally covering the structure. After all vegetation just looks good on its own
If pressured, I will grudgingly admit that https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/vin_building.jpg probably goes too far for common use, although I think it is quite nice as a one-off.
A whole block of these would be a little much.
It's probably pretty cool when you're on acid, but otherwise...yeah.
Arguably we should have some areas like that in order to create cool places for people to look at on acid.
Nice idea. Call it Acid Park or maybe the LSDistrict.
Thank you. From your description, it seems like there's way more room in the "too austere" direction than in the "too tacky" direction for you. For me personally, this style is obviously uncomfortable to look at.
If you're interested to visualize how your style preferences differ from those around you, it might be worth playing with Midjourney's "personalize" option. You rank random pairs of images to teach it what looks good to you, and it infers your personal style and adjusts image generation accordingly. For me, it definitely makes the buildings more stark and less ornamented (since I do enjoy that). Maybe for you they'll be more ornamented and colorful instead.
Here's the buildings on default settings (top 4) and after personalization (bottom 4) https://i.imgur.com/w5CZs9V.png
Probably, yes. Though I support building a block in that style to test the hypothesis.
(I think the overwhelming effect is mostly the sheer variety of bright colors. The same building in black and white looks a lot more restrained.)
This photo has much saturation and not enough contrast. The Wikipedia page has several better ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meenakshi_Temple
You seem to like ornamentation a lot. A lot more than I do, even though I agree that a lot of modern architecture is ugly. ("When in doubt, leave it out" is often a pretty good principle).
I don't really dislike those Bauhaus examples you have here. Or the Illinois Institute of Technology building (based on the photos I quite like it, especially for a Institute of Technology). What I dislike is for instance the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall.
(boilerplate all due respect to cultural & religious attitudes, speaking only to personal aesthetic concerns, assume it looks better in person etc.)
major respect for that example, as a signal of intellectual honestly. because that volume of ornamentation reads like visual tinnitus. I would rather live next to... not a whole skyline, but up to a full block of brutalist Jenga prison-hedrons, since at least I can tune those out.
confession that I haven't read the full post yet and would usually hold off on comments. but I've seen enough previous posts on the topic. And those always afflict me with a tiny bit of Gell-Mann amnesia around the premise that Everybody Loves hyper ornamental classic architecture, and only begrudgingly tolerates modernism. Looking forward to the results from the next survey.
I didn't think I liked over-ornamentation. But with this... I feel like I've gone full circle. I actually really like it.
I don't think I have a good model for my taste. 😭
Maybe this more of a one-dimensional axis than the supposed variety of architectural styles makes it seem then.
I like modern rectangular buildings full of glass, white wall paper and clean lines. I could not stand to look at that building in real life for long. If I lived near it, I would probably develop a habit of not looking up in that direction.
A standard problem is that when a style emerges, a talented architect will eventually hit the sweet spot of just the right amount and type of decoration. After that, his successors can either copy what he'd done (ho hum), go even more over the top on decoration (overkill), or tone it down (cheap-looking).
Eventually, somebody will stop trying to compete with the classic and come up with a radically different style altogether.
The Beaux-Arts building fits the bill for me. Scott seems to like it, but I can't help being revolted by it.
Unsurprising that a Communist has a terrible perspective distorted by a garbage ideology and worldview.
Who's that?
I have seen credible arguments that "historically painted Roman sculptures" actually look awful because they're only cheap renders with bright primary and secondary colours slapped on a bad 3D model. We still have Roman frescoes and I've seen some in person - they're not gaudy, they're not ridiculously and jarringly coloured, they are instead arrestingly beautiful and rich of detail. I would expect a good Roman artist to be just as good at painting on a statue as they were at painting on a wall. Though of course all eras also have their bad artists, and I'm sure those would have produced cheap garbage like they always do.
Wolfe's book "From Bauhaus to Our House" inspired me to write a short history of style changes in golf course architecture: "From Bauhaus to Golf Course:"
https://web.archive.org/web/20071225132441/http://www.isteve.com/Golf_From_Bauhaus_to_Golf_Course.htm
Many of the same design trends were visible in golf course architecture. For example, Alister Mackensie's 1929 Cypress Point on the Pacific was the high point of sublime Art Deco golf course design, but his 1932 Augusta National, host of the Masters, co-designed with 30-year-old sophisticate Bobby Jones, was starting to edge toward minimalism and modernism. Then after WWII, Bobby Jones hired Robert Trent Jones to revamp Augusta National and it came out looking even more reminiscent of the Seagram's Building.
This isn't surprising since Augusta National's club members were largely Fortune 500 CEOs, the same people who were commissioning Mies van der Rohe to design their skyscraper headquarters. Postwar CEOs really liked modernist aesthetics.
One problem with modernist architecture was that it was hard to keep sparkly. E.g., flat roofs tend to lead to drip marks down the walls. But Augusta National is organized around the landscaping looking utterly perfect one week of the year (the second week of April in Georgia) for The Masters, and it utterly succeeds at that.
Golf course architecture is an interesting art form. For one reason, left wing ideologies have zero influence on golf course design. And yet, in the 20th Century, golf course architecture styles tended to move in the same general patterns as building architecture styles: e.g., Robert Trent Jones in the 1950s-1960s was designing golf courses in a quasi-Miesian International Style reminiscent of Skidmore-Owings-Merrill's modernist skyscrapers, while Pete Dye in the 1970s was doing postmodernist golf courses kind of like Robert Venturi.
I'm reminded of Paul Johnson's observation that King Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Napoleon all believed public buildings should be neoclassical in style. We are all influenced by our eras in ways that are hard to explain.
Dude, this is your passion project. Do it. Self-publish if you have to--with print on-demand it's not that hard to get a real book. Nobody else cares enough to know anything about golf course architecture, so you will be putting something genuinely new into the world. And enough people play golf at least some of them will appreciate it. Your star is rising now and there hasn't been a backlash to the second Trump administration yet. Up to you whether you want to do it under your real name or try to use a pseudonym so apolitical golf fans can have plausible deniability.
Thanks.
But as I got to know golf design experts, I realized they simply have better brains for it than I do. I can cognitively handle 2-D imagery pretty well, but to be a good golf course critic, much less a good golf course architect, you need extremely strong 3-D skills, which I lack.
Actually, there are tens of thousands of golf course architecture aficionados. Hundreds of illustrated books have been published on the subject over the last 110 years. Bernard Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandson, wrote perhaps the first around 1910.
The weird thing is that the subject of golf course architecture is invisible to people who aren't interested in it. Consider another minor art form: tapestry. A whole lot of people who like paintings aren't interested in tapestries and will hurry past the corner of the art museum displaying a few tapestries. But nobody who is interested in painting will assume that its unique to be interested in tapestries.
Similarly, many people who are interested in building architecture are not interested in landscape architecture. But they generally recognize landscape architecture as an art form, with its own major figures such as Capability Brown. Golf course architecture is a subdivision of landscape architecture. Granted, it's a niche art form. But many people appear surprised that some other people find it worthy of study as an art form at all.
Like a few other commenters here, I aesthetically like Bauhaus and International Style buildings— I think that the aesthetic effect is generally too harsh for housing.
The best minimalist modernist buildings are sublime in the Burke/Kant sense and sort of overwhelm you, but getting overwhelmed at home every day is a bit much.
Similarly, I enthusiastically patronize Rothko exhibits in museums (and worship at the Chapel in Houston on my every visit there) — but I would not even think of displaying a Rothko in my home. The resulting vibes would just be too heavy for everyday contemplation.
Good observation. I was deeply impressed visiting an installation by Olafur Eliasson. That guy has a better claim to "reinventing the idea of light" than most. But his works are explicitly art, meant to be experienced with your full attention on them. Not everyday spaces.
James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism is a much more recent and scholarly polemic on similar lines, with receipts aplenty. (Curl is a distinguished British architect and professor of architecture.)
Super-intriguing recommendation, well annotated. Thanks for this.
It’s a fun read.
Came here to recommend this. It's not perfect, but it gets into the historical antecedents and influences on the modernists and the Bauhaus school. I don't think anyone has yet done it for all the later figures like Eisenman or Libeskind.
Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" from 1981 should be read along with his dyspeptic history of post WWII NYC modern painting: "The Painted Word" in 1975.
Yea, verily.
Also alongside his Bonfires of the Vanities, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He was a curmudgeon hating everything bourgeois and bohemian with any hint of the left before it was cool.
Every time there's one of these "everyone hates modern architecture" posts I try to bring up the beautiful geometric buildings of Saarinen, who could possibly hate Saarinen?
It says a lot that the answer is "all of his contemporaries."
I remember you bringing up Saarinen to me!
Weirdly, Scott follows Wolfe in claiming that Saarinen was an opponent of modernism!
As far as I can tell, none of Saarinen's noted works are residential, and few are even standard office/commercial. Rather they are airport terminals, arenas, and the like - buildings that people enter on rare occasions only. If they had to deal with those buildings and their disorienting curves day in and day out, they would hate it.
l lived in a building designed by him for 2 years and while I didn't hate it I think I would've preferred a building that wasn't designed so intentionally.
I just did a quick google image search. The buildings of his that came up are not to my taste, but I think I can see the appeal.
Good read. Made me think about what style of architecture would be fitting for a post-scarcity civilization.
Perhaps without scarcity everyone designs their own home in their own wholly unique style, but I rather doubt this would be the case. There will always be cultural elites who drive consumer tastes.
I doubt post-scarcity would look like what we see in popular sci-fi books. Far too kitsch, our cultural overlords would never allow it. I imagine such a style would represent a sort of endpoint of the architectural dialect.
> There will always be cultural elites who drive consumer tastes.
More importantly I think there will always be underlying needs which many people share, combinations of which with limits of engineering create shared optimal solutions. We don't need to constantly radically reinvent the pipe wrench, the umbrella, the hiking boot. Adequate designs become standard, open-source development refines them further.
People designing their own spaces gets you McMansions and MySpace. If people don’t have training in thinking about what they will *actually* like, rather than what they *imagine* they will like, they do much worse than the modernists, like a kid who imagines that if they like chicken nuggets and they like chocolate ice cream, then the best dish must be chicken nuggets smothered in chocolate ice cream.
“Worse” by whose metric? Yours?
By their own metric - like the kid who thinks they will like chicken nuggets in chocolate sauce and then eats it and realizes that this combination didn’t work for their own tastes nearly as well as they imagined.
There might be some kid who actually ends up liking this, but there are far more who think they like things, get what they think they want, and then realize that they didn’t want it after all. This is what training in aesthetic appreciation is about - helping you understand what sorts of distinctions people have paid attention to because they are relevant for their own aesthetic appreciation, so that you can be more aware of what you actually want, and not just what you think you want because you lack the vocabulary and imagination to see what it would be like.
"[Architect Walter] Mies" -- I think you're confusing Walter Gropius with Ludgiw Mies van der Rohe.
Thanks, fixed.
And of course I mis-spelled Ludwig. Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation at work.
https://www.kith.org/words/1999/04/11/hhhyphen-comments/
I think Pruitt-Igoe is instructive here because what was most destructive and, like, anti-civilzation about it wasn't how little architects cared about what people like to look at so much as how little they cared about how people live. Like, if Pruitt-Igoe had been a really ugly set of modernist concrete row homes with lots of public and commercial spaces, it might still exist.* If it had been a glittering art deco monument to Industria (rendered in bronze as a beautiful nude woman with clockwork wings) criss-crossed with endless blind residential corridors and poorly designed skyways and wide empty vistas you're probably still tearing it down in 20 years.
I think it's worth splitting those two considerations, even though they might flow from the same fundamental disdain for what normal people think, because you can have such different opinions about form and function here.
Like, I have an aesthetic soft spot for a lot of individual brutalist and modernist and pomo buildings—I really want to visit that crazy government complex in Albany sometime—but reasonable people can disagree. (I love examples of basically every kind of architecture I run into, so I'm a cheap aesthetic date. My 100k-population hometown has a classic state capitol, an art deco high-rise, an FLW home, a weird concrete college campus, and some pomo libraries and museums—I love that. I grew up in an early 90s McMansion and I would move back into it in an instant if I could.) A few of my favorite university libraries are from the Big Concrete Fortress era of college architecture, and while we can agree to disagree on the look, one thing the ones I like have in common is that they work really well as libraries.
Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Greene, etc., they happen to be ugly even for their type, but if they were beautiful they would still be a disaster because they do not function as intended. To me that's the real problem with so many of these modernist buildings and superprojects.
* I am intentionally eliding a third consideration, which is that lots of these buildings seemed to fall into disrepair almost immediately and so were 1. ugly 2. nonfunctional as buildings but also 3. impossible to maintain
Yes, exactly.
Though sometimes it wasn't obvious beforehand that something was a bad idea for function, before it was tried.
Yes, but they tried a lot more than once, and didn't asked the people beforehand.
This is the problem with trying to reinvent stuff that has been developed over millennia from scratch. It usually turns out your ancestors weren't stupid and almost everything they did for those millennia had a purpose.
I don't think it's fair to blame the architects for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. The problems with Pruitt-Igoe were the same problems as in public housing everywhere, just writ particularly large because it was a particularly large public housing development. Bad architecture doesn't cause social problems, bad tenants do.
Could you tinker around the edges to decrease antisocial behaviour slightly? Maybe. But if you're going to build three thousand units of public housing in one place and hand it out for free to the least functional residents of St Louis then it's inevitably going to be a disaster.
Yep, plenty of people in ex-Communist states live in exactly that kind of identical inconvenient blocky eyesores, and those don't usually descend into antisocial hellholes, because predominantly normal people live there, and not just the concentrated underclass.
I don’t think those buildings are equally inconvenient. In particular, those Soviet blocks are usually integrated into the streetscape, rather than set back in these “green spaces” that *sound* like a good idea but make the space more isolating.
Singapore doesn't have these supposed universal problems with public housing.
OK fine, Singapore is the universal exception to everything. Nonetheless it's nothing to do with the architecture.
Singapore heavily polices anti-social behavior (death penalty for drug trafficking, jail for littering, etc.), which a certain considerable segment of the US population would object to.
It also has very different demographics and culture.
> Bad architecture doesn't cause social problems, bad tenants do.
Dunno, if my house rained inside, had wild temperature swings, and was liable to kill me if I fall on any of its exposed corners, I think that would affect my mood in a way that could cause social problems.
I think "ugly but functional" is definitely way more tolerable. "Dysfunctional but beautiful" probably means you turn it into a museum or something else. But "ugly AND dysfunctional" obviously invites the demolition charges.
When I travel in Eastern Europe, I quietly think to myself that Soviet architecture is a crime against humanity, way worse than Holodomor, and that every time Putin blows up a Kiev apartment building the residents have been sacrificed for an important cause. But of course, reaching that degree of spitefulness just for ugly buildings is way too much to admit to in polite company. Honestly though, that's what I think about when I see Soviet buildings. I had never realized that there is a connection between horrific Soviet architecture and horrific modernist architecture in the US. If the Soviets had just allowed themselves to make beautiful things with the same skill that they put into making rockets, then maybe they could have won the battle for hearts and minds during the Cold War.
Keep in mind that those ugly buildings were also cheap to build and allowed swift rebuilding after WW2, as well as rapid industrialization and urbanization. The people who ended up living in those buildings were coming from adobe sheds in villages or overcrowded conditions, it was actually a massive upgrade for them in many ways. Furthermore they were not so bad at the time as they are today. Being housing for poor(er) people would inevitably lead to them becoming grimy and run-down.
The things is that the rockets were always a small part of the economy. They couldnt have put thats effort into building, anymore than North Korea could give everyone the same shitty car Kim drives.
If "making rockets" is taken as metronymic for the entire Soviet military industry, not just literal rockets, then that was a pretty huge part of the economy as they were trying to match NATO military capability with a much smaller economy. I'm having a hard time finding specific numbers, which doesn't surprise me much given what I know about how the Soviet economy was managed.
Its not metonymic. The soviets had some scientific fields they really focused on and were actually competitive at; they were ahead on rockets for a while. The military stuff at scale was... workable, just like the housing.
Compare early socialist buildings (like Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw or plans for Dworiec Sovietow, or early Nowa Huta in Cracow) with what was build after.
First soviet socialist were strongly pro-modernism, but once Stalin came to power, he was more of a fan of art "closer to people" and during his regime styles were more ornamental and classical. Socialist realism was supposed to be based on classic architecture from the region, like renaissance in Poland, or classicism in Russia. As an example - Buildings S and Z, parts of giant industrial complex built in 1950s (Stalin's orders), based on renaissance (interior was strongly based on Wawel castle architecture) - you can't go more socialism realism then this, and yet it looks nothing like Bauhaus - https://krakowznieba.pl/wp-content/gallery/art_huta-sendzimira/krakow_13-05_DJI_0564-HDR-Panorama.jpg
But there was not enough money. Like, nothing more. It wasn't stylistic choice, just building beautiful, giant buildings when housing crises ended only after fall of USSR would be a political suicide.
Also, on a personal note - some commie blocks are not that bad. A lot of greenery (like, you don't see mediocre buildings most od the year), good infrastructure, parking spaces, connection to the city... Current developments have nothing of it.
Soviet city planners also exerted no small amount of effort, making sure that each apartment got adequate natural lighting.
In budapest, some of the blocks have people doing different sports painted on them, and they're also painted different colors. One of them has a guy doing hang gliding, another one has a fencer. The paint job probably didn't cost that much, and it's way better than a row of gray blocks. So yeah, I still think it was a stylistic choice, even on a tight budget.
I agree with you about transport and the green spaces around the buildings. All they need is a coat of paint, really!
Krakow always seemed more castle-y to me, I never realized that was a form of socialist realism.
One person who strongly disagreed with the idea that "real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build": Joseph Stalin. While the Stalinist USSR was still building commie-blocks for the masses (because, legitimately, that's the cheapest way to house lots of people and that does matter - the current American situation where construction costs are a secondary concern compared to land/approval costs is not the norm), public buildings had plenty of decoration. Other Eastern Bloc states followed suit.
Unfortunately Khrushchev tossed all this out during destalinisation (something I hadn't actually known - I'd assumed modernism gained influence gradually, as it did elsewhere, but no, it was an official decision that too much decoration was wasteful). The communist states that kept building detailed architecture (and that's really what's missing in [most] modern architecture - detail) were Maoist China and North Korea. I suppose that does say something about sort of person that can hold back general artistic trends. On balance, though, while I do think detail-free architecture was a mistake (at least in situations that aren't just about cost), I'd rather live with boring architecture than with Stalin.
The housing units built under Khruschev (khruschóv in pronunciation) were called Khruschevki (khruschóvki); they were sometimes referred to by residents and others as truschevki (truschóvki in pronunciation), where truschóba means 'thicket; boondocks; slums', from trukhá 'dust, flakes; rubbish'.
> (khruschóv in pronunciation)
Shouldn't that be something more like "hrushoff"? It isn't even possible for a Russian word to end in [v], and the "kh" is an accommodation to French, not to English.
Wikipedia has /xrʊˈɕːɵf/.
Yes, I was indicating the pronunciation of the e in "Khruschev," which is just a direct transcription of the Russian spelling. The IPA you've given is odd; more accurate I think would be this: [xrʊˈɕːof]. (The older pronunciation of Щ as [ɕtɕ] is also possible.) The o is stressed, so it wouldn't be reduced to something like [ɵ]; and instead of [ʊ], [u] is possible since unstressed u doesn't reduce much.
> the e in "Khruschev," which is just a direct transcription of the Russian spelling.
Huh? The Russian spelling seems to use O, not E. Wikipedia has ё; Russian wikipedia has ё.
Looks to me like a direct transcription would be something like "shchyov".
If you transcribe a difference between e and ё, then you would write <yo>. However, ё is not generally used in normal Russian prose, and English follows this in transcribing Russian proper nouns; as Wikipedia states, "Except for a brief period after World War II, the use of ⟨ё⟩ was never obligatory in standard Russian orthography. By and large, it is used only in dictionaries and in pedagogical literature intended for children and students of Russian as a second language. Otherwise, ⟨е⟩ is used, and ⟨ё⟩ occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity (such as to distinguish between все ("everybody") and всё ("everything") when it is not obvious from the context) or in words (principally proper nouns) whose pronunciation may not be familiar to the reader." And as I stated above, this is followed in English transcriptions: We write Khruschev, Potemkin, and Pugachev(a), not Khruschyov, Potyomkin (Dimitri Tiomkin is an example of a fellow who did transcribe his name that way; it has the same root as Potemkin), and Pugachyov(a). (Note that in Russian phonology, there would be no need to write the y in Khruschov and Pugachov(a) in any case, as there is no longer a phonemic contrast of yV and V after (s)ch, though one did exist a few centuries ago that still manifests in the orthography, as in truschoba.) You might also keep in mind that I was discussing just enough of the spelling to make the Russian play on sounds clear to someone not familiar with Russian orthography; I was not writing a whole essay on Russian phonology and phonetics (which I have done). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(Cyrillic)
> And you will note that this is followed in English transcriptions. We write Khruschev and Potemkin, not Khruschyov and Potyomkin.
Perhaps, but my sense of English transcriptions of Russian is that they're not done in any systematic way. Sometimes you see Yekaterina; sometimes you see Ekaterina. We always write nyet and never net, but except for that a bare "e" is a lot more common than "ye". I've had different music rippers automatically fill in "Petr" and "Pyotr" ("Piotr"?) for the composer information on the same CDs. St. Petersburg has a card called "Potjomkin's Village". ( https://cf.geekdo-images.com/zqaOOryHYOr5zlun0laAGA__imagepagezoom/img/PxI--xa8RIDYFz0FNhqbpQyNAGA=/fit-in/1200x900/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic1177938.jpg ; in blue - they're also nice enough to say "Peterhof". ) If I see an English transcription of a Russian word, I generally have no idea how the Russian word was supposed to be pronounced or spelled, because the handling of various types of "e" is so catastrophic.
So I tend to feel that the English spellings aren't good evidence of anything.
> Note that in Russian phonology, there would be no need to write the y in Khruschov and Pugachov(a) in any case, as there is no longer a phonemic contrast of yV and V after (s)ch, though one did exist a few centuries ago that still manifests in the orthography, as in truschoba.
That is something I was wondering about. For a transcription, though, if the difference exists in the script, it seems like you'd want it in the transcription too. If we don't want to know what the Russian spelling is, why in the world did we switch from -ff to -v?
> You might also keep in mind that I was discussing just enough of the spelling to make the Russian play on sounds clear to someone not familiar with Russian orthography; I was not writing a whole essay on Russian phonology and phonetics
But the Russian phonology and phonetics is what I want to know about.
If you'll take an almost entirely unrelated question, my family lore says that an ancestor was a Russian admiral around the time of the revolution, and the name survived into the United States as "Klikoff", which is held to be a transcription of some sort of dubious quality. I'd be interested in how I might go about trying to look that ancestor up.
Khrushchev actually cared about bringing most of the population of the CCCP up to (lower-)middle-class rich(-ish) country standards of living (as they were in the 50s) ASAP - a good goal. That people soon started complaining is due in part to the fact that he pretty much succeeded.
It's hilarious how Stalin sent Le Corbusier packing.
Even evil has standards.
> I'd rather live with boring architecture than with Stalin
The solution to this dilemma is to travel back in time to persuade Stalin of the merits of modernism, so that Khrushchev could then perform his necessary act of breaking continuity with the past by adopting the Socialist Baroque as a new aesthetic.
Whenever I look at buildings built after like, 1800, in whatever style, deeply and evaluatively- really think about them critically- I usually find I don't like them. That includes traditional, modernist and postmodernist buildings. Sometimes I think I just don't like buildings.
Do you like pre-1800 buildings? I have never really noticed a big change around 1800.
The book The Old Way of Seeing by Jonathan Hale argues everything changed around 1830, but to be honest I couldn't make anything of his argument.
"Reverse Fountainhead" is all I can think. I wonder how much Bauhaus (et al) anti-inspired Ayn Rand.
What specifically anti-inspired Ayn Rand were the sort old "old-fashioned" ornamentalist architects that also repelled the Bauhausians, as I wrote some years ago: https://www.ahponen.fi/p/book-review-fountainhead
I'm not sure if Rand ever directly commented on the Bauhaus movement (though at least Le Corbusier adored Rand, according to my sources), but her architectural vision was not all that different from what Bauhaus supported, especially the idea of an architect as an auteur who does what he wants (up to the point of blowing up a building, famously!) and does not care what the benighted normies think. I continue to be convinced that Rand, directly, plays at least in some role in the commonness of this idea among architects, one of the great sources of all the visual monstrosities that are generally associated with modern architecture.
Sure, it was Frank Lloyd Wright who was Rand's inspiration, everyone knows that, but still... if one went by descriptions Rand gives for Roark's buildings and imagined them in real life (like here: https://x.com/studiotstella/status/861340128429649922/photo/1), wouldn't they be specifically the sort of a thing featured in all the "look at what eyesores architects are designing now" lists one can think of?
Isn’t the point of the Fountainhead that the “normies”, precisely, do not think, but that they do one of the following:
1) reflect the consensus of the times and their friends’ opinion (themselves a reflection of their environment),
2) imitate the beauty canons of the past even when they do not make sense (say, comfort-wise, location-wise, or even with respect to the constraints that this canon aimed at solving), precisely at the expense of creating anything genuinely original?
Yes, which is what makes it interesting that Howard Roark's (and presumably Ayn Rand's) heroically individualist views on architecture turn out to be pretty indistinguishable from the most fashionable ideas of the time.
It's been about 30 years since I tried to read Fountainhead, but I also thought about that reading this post. I seemed to recall that Roark's buildings were described as being unornamented and having forms that seemed both striking and natural. And the similarities between that and Bauhaus-style modern architecture seem ironic given that the political philosophies associated with each are so radically opposed to one another.
Well, not that radically opposed. Neither the Bauhausians and Rand loved tradition, both shared a secular progress-centred worldview - their ideas of what progress meant and how it would be achieved simply differed.
It's sort of like a Dark Fountainhead, where instead of Roark rejecting conventional architectural ideas and the views of the public and other architects to bring about the telos of steel/concrete/glass as construction materials, he decides to make intentionally stripped down buildings as some sort of communist crusade.
As much as people tend to see a lot more building exteriors than interiors, the latter are ultimately more important. The broad field of usability is more important than it's narrow subset of ascetics. This article suffers a bit from having relatively few references to how horrible International Style buildings often are to live and work in.
Also, ornamentation not only costs more to build, but also usually costs a lot more to maintain. On one hand, the extra work involved can employ many members of the proletariat (as mentioned). Just about anything involving more manual labour than is strictly necessary is a form of wealth redistribution.
I think another factor worth considering is the rise of the television, computer and smartphone. Who cares what buildings look like when you're generally ignoring them? While people generally weren't looking at screens when walking past buildings in 1981, today people are increasing not looking at buildings much at any time. Except perhaps on Instagram.
Eh, people may be looking at screens a lot, but I'd say they still see buildings. If not immediately, then after walking/driving into them.
Some video games have very nice looking architecture. FROMSoft in particular has been very consistent with its high quality and variety of the environments in their games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZenOn7WUo
Edit: In fact, here's a video analyzing the architecture of Leyndell and its story implications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b3GUWzssZc
The exterior of the Lewis Thomas Laboratory at Princeton was designed by Venturi; the interior was designed by a firm specializing in laboratory buildings. The rumor I heard while there is that the scientists who were to work in the building insisted upon having the interior designed by someone competent at interiors. Having worked in a residential dining hall designed (badly) by Venturi, I would say that if true, they were smart in insisting upon it. Also, I do not know how common this was, but I did hear the laboratory referred to as the "Purina Dog Chow Factory" because of the patterns on the walls. https://www.princetonianamuseum.org/artifact/5af857d9-4e7d-455d-88d5-37836864fd2b
The Royal Ontario Museum's notorious "crystal" addition was soon found unfit for purpose. For one, the original all-glass design would let in too much UV light that would damage the artefacts, so most of it had to be covered in metal sheets. Secondly, there isn't a single right-angle in the whole structure, which looks cool at first but made it very difficult to design the exhibits inside. Most Torontonians hated the damn thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Ontario_Museum#/media/File%3AROMCrystal3.jpg
The exteriors are harder to change than the interiors. And they are experienced by anyone walking or driving by, which is more than the number of people who even see the interior, let alone have to spend lots of time there.
It depends on the interior. A nice rectangular unornamented interior is easy to reuse in many different ways. But a highly ornate and theoretical interior you are stuck using in the way the architect imagined.
Although more people see the exterior, it has much less effect on their lives, even when summer over all the people that go by, than the interior has on the people that use it (unless you are talking about a building on a very busy street in a major city, with relatively few users).
Tom Wolfe had his protege Michael Lewis, another upper middle class Southern journalist, read through his letters home to his parents. Lewis reported that as an undergraduate at conservative Washington and Lee college, Wolfe was kind of a dull boy. He happily fit in socially as a fraternity boy and sports editor of the college newspaper. But he didn't have much to say in this congenial Southern gentry environment.
But then Wolfe arrived at liberal Yale in New Haven for his Ph.D. in American studies, and suddenly his satiric genius appears in his letters home. Lewis describes Wolfe's entire titanic career as largely motivated by the desire for literary vengeance upon the Dam' Yankees for winning at Gettysburg (where a couple of Wolfe's kin were killed in Pickett's Charge).
What an interesting thought. You always hear writers are unhappy. Maybe if they're happy they don't have anything to write about?
Tom Wolfe was a reasonably happy man, but he needed something to be peeved about to provoke his genius.
I imagine he was provoked when he moved to Yale, as the environment would have been both very self-satisfied and also would look down on any Southerners.
He was probably used to being "on top". Being looked down on would either discourage or motivate you.
Right, Wolfe was a proud Southerner, but the Northeast was more stimulating.
I am simplifying a good bit here because brevity improves my communication skills.
There is a type of person who likes watching 'escapist' movies. They have a long day, at work or with their spouse or family or whatever, and they want to unwind. They want to watch something well-written, entertaining, with compelling characters, that ultimately ends an upbeat note. The idea is to temporarily 'escape' from their stressors: to be put in this mental incubator where they can feel good things and avoid thinking about their problems for a few hours.
There is another type of person who likes watching cathartic movies. They have a long day, at work or with their spouse or family or whatever, and instead of wanting to unwind, they want to watch movies that validate and recreate the emotional dynamics behind their problems. Maybe they have a history of tumultuous romantic relationships and want to watch a movie about a really bad breakup. Maybe they have a sucky job and they want to watch something that depicts that. The aim here is emotional catharsis: seeing the thing you struggle with recreated in a movie provides social validation towards the struggles you are going through (in the same way venting to a friend does), and it also might help you understand some of those dynamics a little more fully.
I am generally in the latter camp. I like postmodern architecture, because to me it accurately mirrors how modern life feels to me a lot of the time. However, I don't actually have a moral argument for why my type of aesthetic appreciation is superior to people in the escapist category.
The synthesis, of course, is a film about the struggle of a cop (escapist) against his bureaucratic superiors who “have no idea what it’s like out there; who can’t see the streets from behind that desk” (cathartic).
People with cathartic tastes tend to lean left and people with escapist tastes tend to lean right, I suspect. That's why everyone in the media thinks the cathartic tastes are superior.
You see it with genre fiction, which went woke a lot later than literary.
It is interesting that genre fell as well. Both the early Soviet and American sci-fi were optimistic, if not exactly escapist. I suppose that sort of optimism has run out these days, basically no trend-setters think that technological progress is straightforwardly good and achievable, the right by and large looks backwards for a mostly imaginary golden age, while the left looks for different mostly imaginary kinds of progress.
I've been reading the Weber/Holo Gordian novels, and was just thinking how weird it is to have a sci-fi setting where the premise is "the future turned out all right, actually." SysGov doesn't have a dark secret; it's just straightforwardly a nice place to live!
> You see it with genre fiction, which went woke a lot later than literary.
To explain that, it seems sufficient to note that literary fiction is all women.
Definitely, and is probably a big reason why they went to so much trouble to cleanse men from genre fiction as soon as they got to it.
This is a really eye-opening comment for me. The way I interact with narrative is important to my sense of self and expression, and I've spent much of my life confused and alienated by the things other people enjoy. This framing will legitimately change my worldview in a non-trivial way.
I don't have anything substantial to add, I just thought you should know.
Interesting. By the same argument, the "escapist" camp should like traditional architecture.
My estimate is that in general, most people prefer "escapist" movies, and most people prefer traditional architecture. No idea if it's precisely the same people.
I wonder if the reason stories about superheroes with secret identities are so enduringly popular is the way that they are able to combine escapism and catharsis. Spider-Man swings through the city battling criminals and goes into space with the Avengers, but at the end of the day he has to return to his identity as Peter Parker and deal with his jerk boss, paying the rent, and romantic troubles (or, in earlier iterations, deal with doing homework and the school bully).
They can also combine catharsis and escapism in interesting ways: Mr. Miracle tries to build a peaceful life in the American suburbs after escaping from a traumatizing and abusive childhood (catharsis). Occasionally one of the evil gods from the planet he grew up on shows up on Earth and he and his invincible wife have to deal with them (escapism). Barry Allen has to deal with everyone thinking he is chronically late and undependable (catharsis), even though he is secretly the fastest man alive, because he keeps getting distracted by supervillains (escapism).
"So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?"
Yes, I would, and did. My art wasn't architecture, it was classical music, and when I was learning the field in the 1970s I gradually developed the courage to denounce the reigning modernist style, which was serialism, and to promote composers who wrote music that was distinctly 20th-century but which was also beautiful and attractive. I hadn't encountered the minimalists like Philip Glass yet; I promoted old-school people like Copland and Shostakovich and others by then mostly dead, inactive, or in their last years; among then-younger composers who were still active, my first discoveries included Malcolm Arnold and Alan Hovhaness. Those were the interesting composers of our time, I maintained, not those bleeps-and-whispers serialists.
How did that work out?
Mixed, as usual. Some people eagerly wanted to trade names of favorite appealing composers. Those who disagree with me, and some do so to this day, mostly deny that the serialist hegemony ever existed, i.e. that it exerted pressure to conform. But there's plenty of testimony from direct victims of its social oppression that it did.
Is the current situation different? My impression is that people like Glass aren't exactly darlings of academic tastes, being more comparable to rock stars instead, who could also book orchestras.
It depends whose academic tastes you're talking about. The modernist hegemony still flourishes in some high academic quarters. I find that appreciation of the 'neglected ones' comes mostly from scholars in less prestigious institutions.
And the revival phenomenon is less exemplified by the likes of Glass - who, still alive and still active is still on the cutting edge of dispute - but historic modern composers like Sibelius. Sibelius had been the most popular living composer in the 1920s, but modernist disparagement sunk his reputation until by the 1950s (the initiation of the hegemony) one polemicist called him "the worst composer in the world." But gradually in the last 40 years or so his reputation has risen and he's now seriously respected. For instance, about ten years ago I attended a whole Sibelius festival at Stanford - two concerts and a scholarly symposium.
There's a short film about music historians researching Sibelius directed by Agnes Callard's son:
https://x.com/AgnesCallard/status/1824819608026800209
That certainly reminds me of the journalists who say "no, the media doesn't lean left. What are you talking about?"
In both cases, both viewpoints have some validity; it's a matter of perspective.
Those who deny the modernist hegemony point out that the 'neglected ones' did exist and flourish commercially; but the hegemony consisted of critical disparagement and academic pressure on young composers to write in a hegemonic style.
In the case of journalism, the left-leaning is personal and editorial opinions, while the denial of it consists of their exaggerated attempts to compensate for this by normalizing Trump, etc.
Really interesting! A few random things I feel like talking about:
* +1 to all the people who say that Bauhaus and Brutalism themselves are/can be pretty good. I would add that it’s really that weird business with the rationalists, the grays, the whites, and the postmoderns that’s very ugly. Not sure what the relevant difference is. Something something Bauhaus having less "irony" and "complicated cultural references" and more "yeah we removed the bourgeois crap but on the whole it’s still a normal house and what we added is still reasonably sensible stuff like big windows and modern built-in kitchens"? Or, something something 1930s architects still having been trained in the old ways, which focused on scale and proportion, and which ratios between different parts of your buildings are okay, etc., something we’re no longer really doing? (For someone complaining that we’ve stopped doing that, see: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/polemical-doodles-of-leon-krier/
* Honestly, the argument that the common people were philistines… well I kinda see where that comes from. Not because I believe that they actually were dumb and unenlightened, but because machine-made ornament does often look worse than custom-made stuff, and when you have the same flowery wallpaper (with dirty spots) that everyone else has, together with a massive set of Renaissance-style dining-room furniture (possibly quite shoddily built) in a small room, it does look kitsch and boring. Really, that’s the sort of things that led to the rise of Arts and Crafts, but it could still be applied to the few decades after, I think. Relatedly, I’ll probably want to spend more time understanding the 1920-30s debates around the fact that late 19th c. houses were just the same ugly little boxes being put up everywhere without bothering to make them fit into their surroundings: of course it was mostly the Arts&Crafts-inspired fierce detractors of the modernists who complained about that stuff, but the modernist themselves seemed to do something a bit like it too! (which might just have been part of what "dismissing 19th c stuff as bourgeois" was).
* The book seems to completely gloss over the questions of hygiene, etc.? In the 1920-30s, the rates of infectious diseases in cities was still very high, and that definitely provided *a lot* of impetus for the "remove carpets, remove squiggly bits that trap dust, paint it all white" crew. (Of course, this links to the idea that the main customers were eg. city councils, who would want to pay attention to that sort of stuff, and could neglect the fact that the end result was ugly).
* I still think there might have been something to the argument of cost, especially wrt the cost of maintenance of ornament (again, squiggly bits hard to clean, and well-proportioned stuff may need to be big stuff, costly to build and to heat up). But it’s still true that we could have had some kind of arts and crafts without the craftspeople, that looks simple enough while still being much better-looking than most modernist stuff?
* In the 1930s, when we were inventing social science, psychology, and propaganda science (with the results we know), and generally we were still very much in the industrial revolution, you could get a lot of street cred by determining scientifically how this room should be set up, and design kitchens scientifically to minimise the number of steps one would have to take, etc. Of course, actually wanting to do all that probably required making a deliberate decision to toss overboard all the bourgeois stuff from the past, but once you’d done that, it was perfectly possible for people to be attracted to what you were doing because "science!", rather than because "proletariat!" or whatever.
* I remember reading something about how the main reason Corbu had the impact he had was actually due to a woman’s ideas: Charlotte Perriand. Now, we could discuss the specifics of that claim, but imho there’s something interesting being it. What Perriand did in her many collaborations with Corbu, starting in the 1950s, was to bring aesthetic inspiration from her many trips to Japan, and to focus a lot on interior design, and especially designing stuff like built-in furniture, etc. To me, it sounds a bit like what I said about science in the paragraph above: in order to build practical furniture actually suited to the needs of 1950s people as opposed to the needs of 1890s people, and to take inspiration from other cultures in useful ways for that, you kind of need to have tossed overboard all the bourgeois stuff that came before you, but practical furniture, big windows, and nice new Japanese/Scandinavian/whatever aesthetic tropes do have an appeal on their own?
* And, with that… I think I have a pretty good idea how we went from 1880s architecture to 1950s ‘Scandinavian’ stuff. But 1950s Scandinavian stuff still looks *good*! How do we go from there to the crap we have now? The answer given in the post — that by the 1950s, architecture had been turned into a bunch of highbrow academic debates out of touch with the rest of us, and that it eventually spiraled into what we have now after replacing the "proletariat" in its theoretical literature with the "middle class", then turning into postmodernism and all its successors — seems pretty good, but I’d love to understand it better.
Buildings start out looking shiny and new, but over time they start looking old, dirty, and tired. So, tastemakers associate the effects of time with the poor taste of the original architect and fall in love with a new look, all of the examples of it at present being shiny and new.
Rinse and repeat.
The same thing happens with golf course architecture. Over the years, the original interestingly-shaped sand traps turn into bland ovals, the big greens shrink, the trees encroach on the fairways, and so forth.
For example, by the 1970s, golf courses built before WW One were wildly out of fashion. For example, a friend of mine joined Charles Blair Macdonald's 1911 National Golf Links of America for cheap in 1982. But then the oldest golf courses started getting restored based on 1920s aerial photographs and original blue prints and other archival materials. And then golfers fell in love with pre-WWI golf courses again. These days, you have to have Masters of the Universe money to join NGLA.
The original "open plan" offices looked like they would actually be good to work in.
However, they would have been very expensive. Among other things, they assumed a very large amount of area per person.
So, the movement to open plan as being superior ran into cost, and the result was open plan but with very little area per person. The worst of both worlds.
"The original 'open plan' offices looked like they would actually be good to work in."
I have recently moved from a previous work space where my group of ~10 people had its own small area with *walls* to a large open-space floor plan with room for maybe 100+ people in easy eye view (if they are standing up).
The new work space is fairly new for the company.
And most people have a few Zoom meetings per day.
Did I mention that we do this in an 'open plan' office?
Having discussions with colleagues physically nearby is awkward in an 'open plan' office if you care about disturbing the 100 people not part of the conversation. One advantage of my older work space was that with 10 people (not always in the office ...) it was easier to avoid disturbing people. And we *knew* the people we were disturbing when it happened! But 'open space' plus Zoom seems like a terrible idea.
How much do you trust Tom Wolfe?
I don't know much about the guy, but the things I've heard about The Kingdom of Speech make me reluctant to take his word.
What have you heard about The Kingdom of Speech? I thought it covered the whole dispute pretty well.
It's been a while, and I couldn't dig up everything I heard, but it was mostly online so at least some parts are findable. Here's a review that people passed around:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tom-wolfes-reflections-language/
Wolfe was about a million years old when he wrote his last book.
This book, in contrast, is from his long prime.
Entire agreement.
"From Bauhaus to Our House" is a polemic, and thus slanted and an only partial view, but it is very much on point and makes a valid, substantial case. But "The Kingdom of Speech" is rootedly inaccurate and almost hopelessly inane.
From reading this review, I see all the peevishness and anti-intellectualism that I associate with Wolfe’s most famous books. He’s really all about sneering at elites.
Reading this has made me notice a tension between two views I have:
1. It is possible to think about and appreciate art on a higher level than other people that allows you to more easily notice good and bad things about it. Cultivating such skills is a worthwhile pursuit.
2. A lot of people who claim to be doing this are actually snobs who are virtue signaling. They convince themselves that perfectly good things are bad just because ordinary people like them. They also convince themselves that weird art that most people don't like is the best thing ever because liking it lets them feel superior to people who don't.
I tend to agree with Scott that modern architecture is often an example of (2), but I also want to be able to say that something like artistic quality exists. I don't think that ordinary people are hopelessly benighted, I just think that someone who thinks that "Transformers 2" is a better film than "Captain America 2" is probably less discerning in some ways than someone who thinks the opposite. Can we reject the cliquish snobbery of the Modernists while still having some standards?
I also think it's possible to have postmodern self-awareness without implied sneering. You can say "look, we are aware that this kitsch thing is kitsch, and that's fine, kitsch is good. But if we add a few twists to it we can make it good in other, deeper ways without compromising its original, more basic goodness." I'm very fond of postmodern works like this (for example, "Animal Man" by Grant Morrison).
I've thought about this too. My thought was to read literary, etc. criticism from just before the 60s when all the postmodernism, etc. came in. Nobody says you can't have antiquated artistic tastes; after all, it's not like science or technology where there's an objective melting point of water you can describe better and better or computers that do the same stuff faster and faster. To the degree there's a 'truth' it's what people like, and I think the archaists have a better claim here.
I've got a day job and other interests, but it might be a starting point for someone else.
I've noticed that tension too, especially since aesthetics are *somewhat* subjective and some people genuinely get a kick of out of Modernism.
But also, some Modernists leveraged this social tension to push buildings that no one else liked. We see this with early being detractors accused of being bourgeois heretics, and you could draw a line between the early concept of "bourgeois" and today's concept of "snobbish."
I feel two ways about this:
1. It seems like these modernist manifestos wouldn't have been taken very seriously before the 18th century? But cultures before that time were pretty snobbish by today's standards, and maybe the steelman of snobbishness is it has a protective effect against manifesto-y takeovers.
2. It's easier to criticize than to create new ideas, so all critique and no alternative solutions comes across as a little lazy. Critiques of modern architecture come across as less snobbish if they're accompanied by the presentation of a new vision which is also open to be criticized.
Yes. What I disliked about this review is that it was all about sneering and denying that there could be anything like appreciation or understanding beyond the most visceral arational feeling of a first glance.
> I tend to agree with Scott that modern architecture is often an example of (2) [signalling], but I also want to be able to say that something like artistic quality exists.
This to me seems like a _very_ charitable reading of what the article at hand is trying to tell us.
It seems to me that Scott rather argues that "normal people" not just "often" but with an overwhelming majority hate modern architecture just as much as he does and that not "often" but nearly always anything said in favour of modern architecture is an expression of an agenda rather than a taste.
And what is really killing me is that without the slightest hint of irony he then goes on to complain how these people want to deny the reality of his own tastes. "Look at those shmucks who cannot imagine that someone would genuinely hate modern architecture" says the man who apparently cannot imagine that someone would genuinely like modern architecture. You can't make this up.
And predictibly the first comment thread is "well I personally quite like that stuff, actually". Yeah. Who could have imagined that.
So what is going on here? How is it that the stereotypical McMansion-dweller cannot be content in their McMansion without also claiming, as I think this article does, that any normal person would have the same preference? How is it that the stereotypical shoebox-dweller cannot be content in their shoebox without claiming, as the comment cited above claims, that the shoebox must have in inherent artistic quality that the McMansion just lacks?
Almost as if the preference for shoebox vs. McMansion is indicative of a broader preference ... of what? It as amazing how an author whos previous work uniquely equips them to interrogate this question is so uninterested in actually doing that.
To illustrate the point, there is a simple litmus test we can conduct: Would Pruitt-Igoe have been less of a failure if the buildings had been shaped like baroque castles rather than shoeboxes? Really? Or is there maybe something else going on?
> It as amazing how an author whos previous work uniquely equips them to interrogate this question is so uninterested in actually doing that.
Holy crap, I thought I was going to have to eat my own words when I saw today's headline (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/friendly-and-hostile-analogies-for) but then he just continues in stride:
> Most people like certain art which seems obviously pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better.
Reads to me as: What I like is "obviously pretty" and the thing "normal people" like. So let's discuss taste.
What the hell?
Consider that (wealthy-ish) normal people buy Thomas Kinkades to hang in their homes and admire regularly. Almost no one except Ozy would buy Miro's Birth of the World [1]. "Experts" claim Kinkade is schmaltzy trash and Miro is one of the greats.
Kinkade is schmaltzy, it's also pretty in a way that normal people appreciate. Finding the line between experts having Real Taste versus virtue signaling down purity spirals into appreciating literal trash (Duchamp, etc) is rather more controversial.
I, for one, will put my favorite genre of art as 16th century Flemish realism.
1:https://www.art.com/products/p61943832518-sa-i13023726/vintage-apple-collection-joan-miro-the-birth-of-the-world.htm
I think there are two components to 1). One is introspection. If I like thing A but lack expertise, I may be unable to articulate why I like it other than "it makes me feel good". But with expertise I can analyse my own feelings and separate what precisely causes them, thus describing them in much greater detail. This is commendable and useful, though I think not something that should be expected of everyone or used to mock/disparage them if they lack it.
But just introspection wouldn't outright change what I like. I'd just know why I like it better. However the thing is that in the process of acquiring the tools to perform that introspection, a side effect is that you just learn about a lot more art. Thus you may find things you like even better (good) or become jaded by overexposure and professionalization, thus lose your original sense of wonder at that form of beauty and search for weirder stuff to tickle the same bone (bad - for you, because you've actually LOST beauty in your life rather than gained it, and for others who now must suffer you being smug about how you appreciate what is TRULY beautiful unlike them).
I can’t speak so much for the advantages of modern building exteriors, but as someone who hates cleaning house, I really appreciate minimal ornamentation. I suspect some of the popularity of this style in corporate buildings is that it allows less custodial spending.
But that is also a problem with breakthrough modernist designs: nobody knows exactly how to keep them clean and well-maintained. For example, flat roofs instead of overhanging eaves seemed at first like a simpler, "cleaner" look. But it turned out that flat roofs quickly led to drip stains down the sides of many buildings.
Over time, people figure out solutions to these kind of practical problems, but by then the design is no longer cutting edge, it's a traditional look. But there are advantages to traditional looks in that they are traditional because they tend to work pretty well.
I read this book recently and I really appreciate this review. I think you nailed it.
My opinion is that a lot of these buildings look cool in stock photos, when they're photographed just right: immaculately clean, no people, and the sun hitting them just right. Usually in the "golden hour" just before sunset. But they suffer badly from real-world conditions that mar the perfect symmetry, whereas the more gingerbready non-modernist designs can absorb the damage and look even cooler.
When you have to actually work in one, every day, it really can be hellish when you're stuck sitting near a window in direct sunlight, wearing a full business suit, and there's nothing you can do about it. I feel like workplace efficiency experts should be able to measure the drop in productivity as the sun rolls over the office. But I guess these architects didn't care about things like that.
You ask: "Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”?"
But... someone did just that! Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about how terrible this modern socialist-inspired architecture was, in 1943! She used real architecture references to make a serious point, but also wrote it in the style of a Hollywood thriller/romance with lurid sex scenes so that lots of people would read it. And she was from an old European Russian-Jewish family so you couldn't dismiss her as an ignorant philistine American. It became a bestseller, and inspired some very devoted fans! But apparently none of that mattered, and the architecture establishment could still just totally ignore it.
> wearing a full business suit
People are still wearing suits?
Fountainhead was specifically about how cool modern architecture is. The snobby professors who turf out Roark for his ~vision~ continuously argue that architecture should only hew to established historical conventions and styles. Roark is the modernist challenger to those guys.
Yeah but his buildings also looked cool and were meant to be comfortable for regular people to live and work in. He didn't build commie blocks. Most people compare him to Frank Lloyd Wright.
Here's how Roark's plans for Cortlandt Homes is described:
"The drawings of Cortlandt Homes presented six buildings, fifteen stories high, each made in the shape of an irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft. The shafts contained elevators, stairways, heating systems and all the utilities. The apartments radiated from the center in the form of extended triangles. The space between the arms allowed light and air from three sides. The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors, to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it; there were few halls or lobbies to clean, a minimum of cost and labor required for the maintenance of the place. The entire plan was a composition in triangles. The buildings, of poured concrete, were a complex modeling of simple structural features; there was no ornament; none was needed; the shapes had the beauty of sculpture."
What is this if not a commieblock? Its not a *block*, sure, but the "shape of irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft" sounds very much like some East Block eyesore from the 50s that everyone passing by still quietly loathes. And it's the most important building in the whole book, the centerpiece of the entire plot arc!
That's the description of Rourke's dream?? Sounds like Levittown but for apartment buildings.
It’s not his dream, if I remember correctly. It’s a project he’s very interested in, because even then, very cheap housing was important, and he was as proud to make it cheaper than thought possible at all. He has quite a few other projects going on which are not really the same style (I remember for instance Monadnock (?) Valley, which is a vacation resort where the customers have ample space to themselves and do not have to interact with other vacationers unless they want to).
Hmm interesting. Rand as YIMBY.
There was a bad housing shortage in America in the years after WWII, more so in parts of Europe that had been blown up. So there was a lot of interest in how to build fast.
What's funny is that architects were too egomaniacal to admit: We're throwing stuff up quick and dirty. They had to tell everybody instead that they had discovered the Ultimate Style that would last down through the ages.
True, I admit that does sound like a commieblock (or more like one of Le Corbusier's towers in th epark). But then that's also designed to be as cheap as possible. I think most of us would be ok with modern archictecture if they were like "yeah it's ugly, but at least it's very cheap." But somehow it also manages to be very expensive...
When he has the chance to build a luxury house for a rich man (the Heller house) it's described differently:
"The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony. The walls, of the same granite as the rock, continued its vertical lines upward; the wide, projecting terraces of concrete, silver as the sea, followed the line of the waves, of the straight horizon. "
Kind of hard to imagine, but to me that sounds more like one of Frank Lloyd Wright's mid-century modern houses that everyone loves. Both styles use a lot of simple geometric shapes, but one adjusts them to fit humans, while the other forces humans to suffer to serve their buildings.
edit: this quora thread: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-visualizations-renderings-drawings-etc-of-any-of-Howard-Roarks-designs-from-The-Fountainhead-Especially-the-Heller-House has some photos of sketches used in the old movie. They look cool, like an exaggerated version of a Frank Lloyd Write house, and definitely not brutalist.
It still rather goes against the statement that "Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about how terrible this modern socialist-inspired architecture was", no? Your typical commieblock was also designed to be as cheap as possible, it's exactly the sort of a housing that was mass-produced for cheap in East Block countries (and many West Block countries as well) after the war.
It does. I'll admit it's been a long time since I've read the book, and I had forgotten about that part. So I guess either her views on architecture are more nuanced than I remembered, or she was just sort of incoherent on account of not really being an architect. I still think the *spirit* of the novel was against Bauhaus-inspired architecture though.
Architects' renderings of planned buildings tend to show what they hope they'll look like just before sunset on a perfect day in late May. Even the Boston City Hall looks pretty good then.
But not in November.
This book seems more like a polemic than an honest social history.
I have a background in painting. At least in that field, modernism developed in a much different way than what's presented here. There were multiple strands that melted together unevenly. It would be a herculean feat to explain it all as a coherent story. This book's thread seems to be commentary on the present. That's bad history. It seems like Wolfe (and you) want to write about professionals imposing their will on society, in the classic James C. Scott sort of way. Fine by me, I love that stuff. Just don't try to shoehorn it into an explanation of how modernism spread.
There are way too many details to respond to. The idea of the artist as romantic, or outside society, came way way earlier than any of this. If anything, these artists are just riding the general progressive wave of their time. Their parents had all lived in villages. Urbanization felt like a sharp turn. It felt like they had exchanged the Shire for smog and Coca Cola Santa Claus. So they lashed out in every way that occurred to them.
In 1920's Germany the most popular museum was the one dedicated to hygiene. It's weird, but I love that for them. The general appreciation for cleanliness was just the general vibe of the time. It inspired some of the simple, easily cleaned forms of modernism. The emphasis on windows was a part of that too. The idea was that the light would purify the germs. Imagine being one of these architects at the time, and you're developing buildings that will improve public health. Meanwhile the workers don't like it because they're not used to it. If I were in that situation I'd tell the workers to stop being babies. If the alternative was Beaux Arts, then know that this was basically the style of department stores. It's public health vs Macy's. The choice seems pretty clear.
I wish there were a better explanation of how modernism was accepted by the public. It still baffles me that this happened. The most consistent theme its history is that everyone denounces it. This book suggests that activist students are to blame. I really doubt that. If it's students vs trustees the trustees win every time. Art has a patronage structure. Some oligarchs must have been on board, or those buildings wouldn't have been built.
Modernism probably become popular because it's aspirational (where's The Last Psychiatrist when you need him?). Maybe modernism needed to be denounced before the majority of people wanted to be the kind of person who embraced it.
I would compare modernism to Esperanto. They're both niche languages with utopian goals. Somehow we haven't spent billions of dollars on listening rooms for people to hear Esperanto (and pretend they understand it). It's impressive that so many powerful people have felt attracted to modernism.
Maybe the tech sector played a role? Both computer hardware and software developed in similar ways aesthetically to modern architecture, with the initially rough, pragmatic, function-over-form aesthetics slowly transitioning to the more sleek, minimalist aesthetic that's more palatable to general audiences.
That's cool, I didn't know that. I'd guess for both visual arts and programming, they're both getting so much exposure to a medium that they develop specific tastes.
I don't think there was much of a tech sector when modernism was developing. I'd guess that the small number of engineers/researchers were more interested in professional respectability than romanticism but idk. The modernists themselves were ambivalent towards technology. They loved it and hated it.
> Somehow we haven't spent billions of dollars on listening rooms for people to hear Esperanto (and pretend they understand it).
I think that's just part of the nature of architecture, and what makes the subject so contentious in ways that other art forms aren't. If you make a building, it's going to sit there for a very long time. In times of population growth and/or urbanization, this maybe isn't a big deal, because you can just build something new elsewhere. I think a lot of the recent backlash comes from an idea that this style, which a lot of people don't like, is what we're going to be stuck with in most urban centers people already live in or want to live in.
Yeah I agree with that. Where I live most houses have a traditional style, but some people build houses in a modern style. It feels so awkward and misplaced. Like there's a local character that they're ignoring. It reminds me of when people renovate historical buildings and replace everything with millennial gray or whatever. Ugh.
I disagree that architecture is especially contentious. I'd bet that most highly developed practices read as pretentious to most people. Wine tasting, abstract art, noise music, whatever. It's easier to ignore those things but people still hate them. Where I live, I don't hear people complain about building styles. I hear them react against any large developments. They expect that any new large development is going to make their lives worse, to the benefit of distant elites. Details are secondary to distrust.
Final thought. A lot of the modernists would be annoyed that we talk about them like this. They don't want to be a style. They just want us to engage with forms. Interpreting a building just means looking at it. It's all surface. It's a shape. There's nothing to explain. When modernism became a set of conventions it broke itself. The details surrounding modernism obscure the actual modernist work. Kinda just thinking out loud here, I'm probably misguided. I can say that this definitely applies to abstract expressionism at least.
Exactly. This review seems to think that Eero Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright have nothing to do with modernism, and that instead they are exemplars of classical tradition that got rejected by the modernists. It seems not to have noticed how modernism designed the open floor plans, ergonomic kitchens, and big picture windows that were hugely popular among people with or without taste for the entire second half of the twentieth century, and are often maintained by McMansions whose exteriors are a mishmash of anti-modernisms.
Yeah there's definitely two strands here. There's modernism as an ideological statement, and then there's modernism as design. A lot of people hate it as a statement, but does the design part ever upset anyone? Somehow the stars aligned, and a class of people were empowered to make our objects nicer and easier to use.
This is random but I'm remembering the book 'No Place of Grace' by Jackson Lears. It's about various ways that people accommodated themselves to market society. The author wants total social reform, and he criticizes some of the half-measures people took. For instance, Arts and Crafts was a reaction against unfulfilling work. Except instead of attempting to make work more fulfilling, it just convinced people to take up hobbies. One of the chapters is about the origin of gothic architecture on ivy league campuses. I forget what problem they failed to solve, but it's goofy that they invented a self-image for themselves in the process.
I enjoyed this review until you had to bring up AI. I am an artist/artisan, and we're still shaking our fists. Why are you giving up on us? Aren't we as a society rich enough to not let this once essential part of human culture die a slow, or perhaps now accelerated, death?
The creative process, and the process of manufacture (from "made with the hand" in Latin) itself is as important if not more than the result, and imbues the object with a soul, so to speak, and it is a *human* endeavour. I could try to replicate a bower bird's bower, I suppose, but it would then by definition not be a bower bird's creation. As a plastic artist I don't have the eloquence, for that, perhaps go to Nick Cave, who could express it better? https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/
There is room in the world for a picture of the Virgin Mary in a vat of urine. There will also be room for boutique artists like yourself. The rest of the world will be content in enjoying the rapidly increasing quality of artificially generated art.
> Aren't we as a society rich enough to not let this once essential part of human culture die a slow, or perhaps now accelerated, death?
As any AI doomer worth their salt will tell you, the answer is no. As long as we optimize a metric, any metric, every other value goes on the altar.
Moloch or an AGI (or even the free market) will not leave us the slightest inch of slack if “they” “believe” “they” can “make a better use” of such a resource.
Even more prosaically, an object’s soul isn’t counted in GDP (except if you use it as a marketing tool, I guess), so it’s inexistent.
(I wish it were otherwise.)
On the other hand, an AI skeptic will answer that in fact, AI will not be transformative, the world will still be basically the same place, and there’s still a place for you. I wish I could believe this outcome.
If I ever become a rich person who can commission himself a building (which is highly unlikely at this point, but still), and I go to human architects, and they all tell me I must build a white box with a few curves, and I go to an AI and it allows me to make my own Castle of Sintra, I'll go with the AI. AI doesn't pass judgements on my (lack of) taste. I can have as many gables, turrets, decorations as I want. If AI can design such a building, and I can find robots who can build it, or print it, or whatever, why would I care about human architects? AI era is the era of ultimate pesonalization where we can finally abandon the concept of "good taste" as some kind of society-wide consensus.
So basically, modern architecture has won in the marketplace of ideas, when it was the new cool thing everyone believed that it's great. And now the fashion cycle moved on and a lot of people seem to think that it's boring and ugly.
Except that stuff that normal people actually like still isn't fashionable. I wonder, did peasants like all those gaudy palaces "back in the good old days"?
They probably thought they looked pretty and resented the people in them who took their earnings to build them.
The palaces are beautiful because there was generally one person who had it built, using his own money. It glorified him, so he cared how it looked.
The modernist stuff is a committee of people hiring an architect to design something. Who's on the committee and how did they get there? Who knows? What happens if the people whose money is being used don't like it? Nothing.
The modernist architecture community demands novelty.
Traditional builders demanded anti-modernity.
Novelty is usually bad, because usually the things that work have already been identified.
Chesterton's Fence applies in many fields.
Fashion doesn't chase normal people. The opposite, if anything. But when something is fashionable it kind of gives bonus appeal to it which normal people are susceptible to, unless it's simply too outlandish.
So when brutalism was in fashion, this made it more appealing than the old architecture. But now it's not a new cool thing anymore and this bonus appeal is gone, which naturally changes the perspective of normal people towards it.
One example where an ugly brutalist building was torn down and something beautiful was build instead is the Neue Altstadt in Frankfurt.
Here is the link to the german Wikipedia article:
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Frankfurter_Altstadt
And here to google images for pictures that do it more justice than Wikipedia does:
https://www.google.com/gasearch?q=frankfurt%20neue%20altstadt&source=sh/x/gs/m2/5
The gist of how building it was accomplished is that there were several architectural contests with some political guidelines partially based on suggestions by the citizenship. I think it worked out because of the combination of some guidelines and the contests. Without any guidelines you probably wouldn't be able to steer the project in the direction you want and the contest ensured that you don't have to think about to many details.
So I grew up in Santiago (Galicia), and as I was reading the post I kept thinking about the monstrosity that was built with 500 millions euros of taxpayer money. (Keep in mind Galicia is one of the poorer regions of Spain, which itself is not one of the richest of the eurozone.) Extra sad that it's built on a city with such an iconic old town and Baroque cathedral.
So I felt some sort of shameful pride seeing the City of Culture there. What I can add is that it was totally a pharaonic project done by a dying rightwing politician that wanted to leave a Big Signal behind. It was, of course, nearly universally reviled - not just by "proles" and but also by nearly everyone I knew at the Uni. So I think we have just assimilated this kind of horrible, parodic, stuff into "this is what you do when you want to show off your money/power". The "that's so bourgeois" is gone - the guy that pushed the project as president of Galicia had been a minister under Franco, for crying out loud. For those that pay, it's just pure signaling, devoid of any modernist manifesto-y content.
The saddest bit is that it doesn't find any purpose. Not for lack of trying. It is so hostile for practical usage that most proposals fall flat. I once took part in a debate tournament hosted in the City of Culture (the club didn't have that much money so a large venue desperate for an excuse to be useful was great). It... sucked. Finding any room through the "layout" of buildings was a going through a kafkaesque maze, things that should be nearby (bathrooms) we far, passageways crammed together. The acoustics were awful, and is remarkably badly insulated for a city that sees rainfall and low-ish temperatures practically all year round. The materials, I was told, represent something something. But it is cold! That's the primary function of a building, to keep you from the outside!
Anyway, even to this date, it's still mostly empty. When I think of what the railway network could have made with the money...
Thanks for this first-person account from Europe, showing how these supposedly 'modern' buildings often don't actually perform the functions of a building, including as you say, protecting people from the weather. A building which doesn't fulfil its 'telos' ceases, maybe, to be a building.
Imagine some future historian explaining that, on such-and-such date, it became a de facto ruin, more or less permanently unfit for human habitation; then a month later, the final details of construction were completed and the first tenants moved in.
Per Wikipedia:
>Nearly every window of the thousands that are part of the external façade has its own custom shape.
>The project has more than doubled its original budget
Goodness me, I can't imagine why.
A more recent deep dive into this fraught subject is Professor James Curl's 2018 "Making Dystopia" which I reviewed here: https://newcriterion.com/article/the-dystopia-we-made/.
Also my own: Deconstructing Deconstructivism here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism in which "I explore an architectural movement that calls itself Deconstructivism. It is yet one more instance of the strange shapes that ‘Progress’ has taken on in the modern Western world. Buildings in this style seem like they have been constructed to appear as if there must have been a gas explosion inside or a bomb has been dropped on them. Deconstructivism can perhaps be best understood as the architectural equivalent of the current fad for deconstructing gender….. such that, whereas we once had an edifice called Men and an edifice called Women, now - in the parallel universe of gender diversity - we have man bits and woman bits strewn all over the place."
All this business about ornamentation being bourgeois and therefore immoral reminds me of earlier historical episodes when Christian or Islamic cultures had artistic efflorescences which they later renounced as sinful. I don’t know to what extent such trends are driven by some exogenous factor versus just being a cyclical thing.
Maybe people just feel a need to find things to do differently from earlier generations and argue about. Maybe there’s some Aristotelian golden mean level of ornamentation, but when we’re trending towards more opulence or austerity it’s not obvious when to stop, so we repeatedly overshoot and then overcorrect in the opposite direction.
That's probably it. One of the things I noticed about artistic movements is they tend to oscillate back and forth over time because each one's a reaction to the last one.
Scott (or anyone else hating modern architecture): do you also hate the design language of Apple? I thought their products are universally loved for how they look (sleek, simple, minimalist, cold etc), despite being the miniature equivalent of modern architecture.
Well, I don't quite hate it, but that these days everything "cool" has to look like that is pretty boring. However, the things that Apple replaced definitely weren't any better. At least Jobs had a sense of style and cared about ergonomics (unlike many of "modern artists"), whereas the eighties-nineties tech was just inconvenient thoughtless hideousness.
I like some apple products but would probably hate to live in an apple designed house, I wouldn't want my living space to feel "cold".
Likewise I think Tesla design doesn't get enough hate, which could be described the same way you just did. The interiors are far too bare (feels cheap to me) and replacing everything with a screen is bad user experience while driving. I also hate that companies see the obvious cost cutting benefit to this and followed suit.
I have to admit I don't really notice or care about this kind of thing.
I find the occasional "steampunk computer" retro styles very cool, but expect the coolness would wear off if I had to use one every day for five years.
This is the point. Well-done Bauhaus modernism is made to be usable in such a way that you don’t even notice it. Think about a well-designed kitchen, where the sink, stove, and countertops are laid out conveniently, and you can still talk to someone in the next room while cooking.
Imitators (and badly planned originals) often don’t live up to this sort of usability, but usability is actually the point, not anti-ornamentation.
"Scott (or anyone else hating modern architecture): do you also hate the design language of Apple? "
I hate some of the design language of Apple.
I like others.
A few examples:
*) I basically like their Macbook Pro computers. I actively avoided the LED touchbar versions and am happy that Apple eventually backed off. I *like* tactile feedback when I am typing (especially when I am touch typing). Clean and functional design is nice. Lack of tactile feedback is anti-functional for me.
I wish the pros were a bit less spartan and had a few more non-USB-c ports. Because then I would need fewer dongles. Clean beat out functional here, too. I understand *why* but ...
*) And I basically like the Macintosh UI (though I find the older, macOS 9 UI to be superior ... even though I never extensively used pre-OS X Macintoshes). But the new UI is flat enough that I now occasionally get to play the "is this a button?" game. Older versions of the Mac UI made the button vs label distinction clearer. The distinction is still present, but I don't find "subtle" here to be a positive.
Hiding the start button on the newer Macbook Pros seems like a bad idea. When I'm trying to start my computer I don't like wondering if I am pushing the correct spot of the featureless grey metal. I'm fine with no physical button, but a button shaped pattern etched in the metal would be easier to use.
I'll note that my complaints all follow a pattern: Apple has pushed some design aesthetic far enough that I find the functionality to be impaired (lack to tactile feedback when typing, can't find buttons easily, need dongles ...)
I hate that physical keyboards got displaced by inferior touchscreens. I never owned a Blackberry, but this thread's derision of them for not adopting the latter made me nostalgic for the former:
https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1864067626378420512
I'm fairly neutral on apple-style design: I do think there's a value in simplicity and minimalism for things that are primarily functional because simplicity can be a boon to usability, though it can overreach and make things worse, like when things hide buttons in awkward places for 'appearances' sake. (Remember when things like TVs had easily accessed controls and not sleek displays with a bunch of black plastic buttons on a black background on the back or side panel of the montior?)
Though you don't have great alternatives - the alternative for PC stuff is generally 'black brutalist cube with RGB accents'.
The kind of alternative design I'd like to see more of is stuff like: https://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Design-Terra-Jade/dp/B09DKPXSFJ - normal colors, nice simple aesthetic but not overly minimalistic and no RGB strobing.
(And yes, I know talking about PCs is very retro when most people care more about stuff like phones and watches, but I don't feel like there's actually much variety in that space)
There have been attempts to diversify, at least in the phone space--they just never caught on. There has been great and subtle variety in button placement and shape for tactile control! For one example, I really wish the back of the phone screen power button design from the LG G6 caught on--it was very convenient, more so than the third button on the right side design that seems to have become the standard.
On the other hand, a lot of modern phone design has made them harder to use. I am very mad at designers for universally removing headphone jacks from phones. As someone who prefers small, wired earbuds to bulky wireless headphones (or the all too easy to lose Airpods), I've started to understand why people seem to have given up on privacy and sound pollution from their phones in public places. Unless you want to buy some rather expensive Bluetooth tech, you don't really have a choice but to play every sound for everyone around you.
I do like that my Pixel 5a has a back-of-the-phone finger print scanner for unlocking, and that does seem to have gone away in later versions.
And up until about a year ago I was also in the "headphone jack or bust" category - I switched from iPhone to Android mostly because the Pixels still had headphone jacks.
But I did try getting air-pod like pixel buds about a year ago and... yeah, it basically immediately killed any use of wired headphones - the air pods are way more convenient. I always assumed I'd immediately lose them but it hasn't happened yet in the year and a half of daily use, and I say that as someone who uses "find my phone" on a near daily basis.
(I'll admit I've a few times had to play very high pitched sounds to locate one from across a room)
So I'll say from personal experience that if you just *think* you wouldn't like airpods, you might be surprised. (Otherwise, I guess plan to buy a AUX to USB 3 dongle)
Northernlion actually did a great bit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfO9AEjaQgc
I hate modern app design. Windows 7 was peak of nice-looking OS and apps, and I wish I could have it back. Apple's own skeuomorphism style from was nice, too. These days, it's all washed-out colors, or no colors at all, and boring simple shapes everwhere. I want buttons that make WANT to touch them, dammit.
The economic aspects have been mentioned but I think they are underrated. In Europe we have many expensive requirements on building standards which leads to people/cities building very boring boxes just to be able to afford it at all. Any extra money is then not spent in ornaments but in practicalities like photovoltaics, a swimming pool, a garden, building automation, etc.
No, you're somewhat missing the point. Even people and organizations who CAN afford decorations still eschew them. Nobody questions why apartment blocks are build simple. But why a billionaire, or giant corporation, or government of a rich country would commission a building that's not too distinct from those same blocks in terms of ornamentation? This is the question that is being discussed.
I started reading this thinking it was a guest book review but part-way through I found myself thinking, 'Who IS this writing this review? It's clear, it's concise, it's incisive, it's so well-written, it's...oh I see, it's Scott himself.' Now I want to read Wolfe's book, despite not really being that interested in architecture. It's more the psychology, the way it's so hard to withstand the pressure of the herd, that is interesting. You probably have to be very strong-willed to buck the trend and it almost means fossilising your taste, since outside influences are what formed 'your' taste in the first place. To pretend otherwise is to subscribe to the idea that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Not particularly deeply thought out comment- It seems that in multiple fields, once ornamentation became possible to do mechanically for lower cost, it was no longer a mark of status, and wealthy people moved to simpler forms. Having a dress covered in lace was prestigious when that lace all had to be painstakingly handmade. Having a dress covered in polyester manufactured lace is generally considered tacky and excessively frou-frou. Similar phenomenon with spices becoming more affordable and fancy food then shifting to prioritize the subtle nuances of the ingredients themselves.
(I have to admit that I think a building covered in columns and marble statues from hundreds of years ago is charming and historically interesting, seeing a recent building in that style can feel rather artificial and pretentious. And I sort of expect if society somehow shifted back to prioritizing heavily ornamented buildings now, we'd end up not with beautiful old Europe streets, but a visually-busy, clashing mess. Most people don't have great taste, and there's a selection effect with old buildings where only the ones people like enough to maintain despite the effort survive.)
This was my theory too, but Sam Hughes from Works of Progress made what I consider a pretty convincing counterargument: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/cheap-ornament-and-status-games
Interesting.
> In general, the rise of modernism was driven by artists, and rich people followed only later – if they followed at all. […] The pattern, then, is that modernism was driven by artists and the intellectual circles that surrounded them. In the case of some arts, especially music but also literature, it never really left those circles: modernist music has a tiny listening public and the richest people today are barely aware it exists.
Reading about the origins of Bauhaus leaves me with the question: why didn't Art Deco win? From what I can tell, Art Deco had its beginnings around the same time, and was inspired by modernist art and had the prestige of Paris behind it. And Art Deco actually looks good! It's probably my favorite style of architecture. Why did it lose to Bauhaus?
Bauhaus and Art Deco are pretty similar - Bauhaus just took Art Deco one step further, and used geometry for usability rather than for ornamentation. Neither one won out, because Bauhaus was then replaced by international style, which was then replaced by postmodernist eclecticism.
Art Deco has absolutely had a revival in recent years, but more the style of ornamentation, rather than the interior forms that were often hard to use, with their emphasis on circles and acute angles.
My intuition is that Art Deco is an optimistic movement, raising after WWI as a joyful antidote, looking forward to the future and to progress as positives. Then the great depression happened. Then WWII happened. Grimness took over and we haven't been able to shake off the pessimism and misanthropy ever since.
"Polls show most people hate it and prefer the old stuff."
How true is this? The interior of the office where I work is quite old school - mahogany and marble etc. And most people hate it and call it stuffy and ask for white desks instead.
If you ask people abstractly, do you prefer traditionalist ornamentation or modernist minimalism, people vote for the former. But if you make them actually use the building, they often vote for the latter.
In 2020 the National Civic Art Society did a poll which found that 72% of Americans say they prefer classical architecture over modern architecture for public buildings (https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-for-federal-buildings)
In 2015 an organization called "Create Streets" ran a survey in the UK which found that 88% preferred houses with "historical housing forms". More interestingly, of the pictures provided to participants, the two least popular buildings had both received architectural awards, while the two most popular had not (https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/practice/culture/the-worst-building-in-the-world-awards).
In 2009 YouGov ran a survey which found 77% of respondents preferred traditional architecture to contemporary architecture, when given a series of pictures of buildings and asked to pick the one they preferred most (https://adamarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/YouGov-survey_Oct09_resultsfollowup.pdf)
A study in the UK in 1987 found that when shown a series of buildings, the buildings that architects surveyed liked most were the ones that non-architects surveyed liked least (Halpern, D. (1995). Mental Health and the Built Environment, More than bricks and mortar? Taylor & Francis.).
Another study in 2001 in Canada found that architects were unable to predict what buildings non-architects would prefer (Brown, G., Gifford, R. (2001). Architects predict lay evaluations of large contemporary buildings: whose conceptual properties? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, p.93.).
See Kenny's response above though. People say one thing in surveys, then act a different way in real life.
Do you have evidence of that? Any studies? Polls? Statistics?
No, anecdotal evidence. I know this is heresy in some circles, but anecdotes shouldn't be dismissed so readily. I'm fairly certain that if not most, at least a very large % of people would rather work in an open plan minimalist office instead of an oak-panelled one.
Actually, there is some evidence. You can argue the public at large have no say on the design of new buildings. But they do have a say in what places they frequent. Do you see lots of trendy new restaurants covered in carpets and wallpaper and velvet upholstery?
No (because it makes cleanup a nightmare), but I do see a lot of restaurants with walls covered in ornament and decoration and more traditional exteriors.
Related to the cleanup point, there is something of a trend of "maximalist" selfie spots, like a foyer of sorts with velvet uphostered oversize chairs, warm lights, decorations, etc etc. I see that as trying to have the cake and eat it too- people get their nice decorations but most of the place remains easy to clean.
Old school feels nicer and people prefer it at home. But it's less productive so they don't want it at work.
Groniger Museum by Alessandro Mendini should be "Groninger".
Thanks, fixed.
>I would like to read a book by somebody who - while gently holding onto the possibility that it’s all balderdash - tells us what this architect meant by “reinventing the idea of light”
How about getting it straight from the horse's mouth? The famous Eisenman - Alexander debate is short, readable, and to the point. https://web.archive.org/web/20211106185743/https://www.ahenryrose.com/uploads/7/9/6/4/79645630/eisenman_-_alexander_1982_debate.pdf Key Eisenman quote: "What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right." These people know their stuff is hideous, and they are proud of it!
I wonder how this squares with all the people upthread who say they really like this stuff? The architects think it's bad but ordinary people think it's . . . good? If we told the architects some people like it, would they have to change to something else?
Sadly I don't think they're quite so naive.
Amusingly, a commenter seems to appreciate it in exactly the way Eisenman approved: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house/comment/79986166 I have to admit, some of the stuff also brings me perverse enjoyment in this vein, but definitely in a "it belongs in a museum" sense, not "people actually live there" one.
Most people who say they like the stuff, when asked to elaborate, don't seem to mean in an actual aesthetic sense like you or I like some old cathedral. They mean they appreciate the artistic message it's trying to convey or they like it purely for novelty's sake. I agree there are people who nonetheless insist, totally sincerely, that they love Brutalism as such, and yes I don't get them either, but they are a small fraction.
You’re talking as though there is one thing here. Modernist architects have as many disagreements as any other group of people, particularly intellectuals. Some people want to design art pieces that make people think and revolt. Others want to design something functional and usable. The Bauhaus was intended to do the latter, but many people then changed it into a statement.
So, rather than directly fixing what's wrong, they want to raise awareness of the existence of problems, by building completely new problems that won't be so easy to escape?
"I have suffered for my art. Now it's your turn."
> And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right.
It's not just architecture, we saw this thought process cascade across many artforms. Think about the dissonant classical music from the middle of the 20th century, for example.
Thom Mayne, who often designs government office buildings, strikes me as actively misanthropic, out to inflict discomfort on the bureaucrats who work in his buildings.
It sounds like it's incredibly easy to get architects to go along with whatever half-baked intellectual project you want. Let's just invent a new school called Art Deco Revival or Ornamentalism or whatever, lay down some design principles and start loudly insisting that it's the new cool thing that really interesting radicals are doing and all the people who don't like it are old-fashioned reactionaries stuck in the past. Find the right kind of rich guy to fund it. I bet once you got two or three big projects done, everyone else would fall in line and start saying it was exactly what they'd been thinking all along.
Bravo. This is like reading something from the Atlantic in some parallel universe where conservatives read and liberals watch TV.
Here's a pair of Nathan Robinson pieces to reassure you at least some socialists agree with you:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/11/democracy-and-buildings
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture
I appreciate Nathan's willingness to say this stuff.
His writing on architecture, as well as his sympathetic appreciation of Christopher Alexander's work, are some of Robinson's best.
Judging by the way Nathan Robinson dresses, I presume he's a huge Tom Wolfe fan.
My friend and I were talking yesterday and we decided something of the opposite, about India. One day Hindus completely shake off the despair from 1000 years of colonization (V.S. Naipaul understood this well), some of it absolutely brutal violence and rape. Then they will build Hindu temples that are more modern, although ofcourse still within the rules of agama sastras required of temples. We were wondering why there has been no real innovation in temple architecture.
Be careful what you wish for - the Christians tried this in the 20th century US and the results are not exactly for the greater glorification of God. Here's my local Catholic cathedral : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Light_(Oakland,_California)#/media/File:Oak_Cathdrl_1.jpg
Curious what you think of the new Hindu temple in New Jersey - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaminarayan_Akshardham_(Robbinsville,_New_Jersey) - when I saw that, I thought it was an interesting new style I had never seen before while still being recognizably Hindu - although that might just be because the old ones never stay quite that white.
Additional point :
What makes something a cult? And not a religion? You just know it when you see it. It's hard to define.
Oops! I thought I was in the thread on yoga. So sorry.
To be fair, the Diocese of Orange took over a Protestant mega-church complex and had some redesigning to do in order to make it a Catholic liturgical space.
I'm not thrilled with some of the design choices, but given that the thing was originally basically a big glass box, it's not totally hideous.
And there are modern Catholic award-winning architecture that beat it hollow, my eternal fave is the Temple of Dagon, sorry, I mean Newman Hall in Berkeley:
https://www.stephendestaebler.com/newman-hall-intro.html
EDIT: Whoops, shot my mouth off too fast there! I was thinking of the former Crystal Cathedral, not the Oakland church which yeah, not the greatest. At least the image of Christ is not heretical but traditional, how did that slip past them?
This is the one I meant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove,_California)
Mmm, cthonic!
The architecture of the Swaminarayan temple...the carving - it's a bit busy, I think. Is it modern? Doesn't seem that way to me. It looks like temples in northern India of the Nagara style (?).
For a contrast, Chola temple architecture (over a thousand years old) is marvelous. A sparse aesthetic. In fact, the most iconic image that represents India, would be the Chola Nataraja, I think. This is sculpture, not architecture, but the Cholas really promoted the classical arts (music and Bharatanatyam dance) and built extraordinary temples like the Brigadeeshwars temple in Tanjore. You can read about it in Columbia University professor Vidya Dahejia's book : Art of the Imperial Cholas. I recommend it highly.
Nataraja bronze : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nataraja
"One of my pet peeves is that when I tell a classy person I don’t like modern architecture, they’ll correct me - “Oh, I’m sure you don’t like Brutalism. But it’s unfair to hold that against the whole area. Why, surely even someone like you can appreciate the unique beauty of a von Shmendenstein, a Dazervaglik, or a Mihokushino.” Then I sheepishly admit that I’ve never heard of any of those people, and maybe I was overly hasty, and I should have been more careful and done my homework. They pat me on the head and say it’s fine.
Then I’d go home and look it up and all those people’s buildings would be hideous."
This sounds like a pre-smartphone-era phenomenon. These days, I'd expect the next step to be "Show me some photos" - not necessarily in a confrontational way, just in a "yay, please share with me this thing you like so I can see if I like it too" way.
This was the passage where it felt like Scott went full reverse snobbery, where he just wanted to show off that he doesn’t like things because they’re popular with elites, and doesn’t even want to think about them!
I mostly share Scott's sensibilities on this, except I like significantly less ornate decoration. Especially inside - no one wants to have to maintain all that. I grew up on Long Island and left as soon as I could, but even as a kid had the constant sense that all the upper middle class homes built in the 70's and 80's were just hideous to look at. As I got older I realized they were also really impractical to live in. The layouts made no sense, the style created wasted and unusable spaces, they were loud and had unpleasant lighting.
I do agree that some of these buildings and styles look very nice and clean in photos, and that others can be interesting exceptions (like something a visitor would want to stare at) for particular types of places. But, that's a terrible standard for deciding what to live in and work in and walk past. Endless sameness is mind-numbing. Platonic ideals of form over function create huge amounts of wasted mental and physical effort just to get the necessities of daily life done.
We've had light and air and water and wood and stone for millions of years. Architects want to reinvent them, give some new option that expands the space of possibilities? Great! They want to popularize the new version to show people what's now possible? Great! There will absolutely be places where this kind of thing is valuable and appreciated. They want to tell me that I'm wrong for what I like to look at in my own home or office and what's practical for how I live my life? GTFO.
I'm a bit confused by the jumping from Bauhaus in Düsseldorf to Le Corbusier buildings in Pessac.
I generally agree with the story here in very broad lines -- it is clearly a hitpiece that's also 40 years out of date -- but I'll be honest, Scott, you mostly just come across as really out of your depth when it comes to matters of taste -- also in the last AI post.
Between that and the endless regurgitation of the San Francisco housing crisis I (as a Europan) feel like the signal to noise on this blog has fallen off pretty hard for me.
Maybe this is because I don't feel like it's possible to be "out of my depth on matters of taste" - taste isn't objective, and if I disagree with leading tastemakers, I'm happy to just say "I disagree with leading tastemakers" and leave it at that. I don't think I've ever misrepresented whether I disagree with them or not.
Look at it like this: there's no objective answer to "what is the best curry?", that's purely subjective. On the other hand, some people make curry thrice a week, have favorite recipes for curries from India to Japan to the UK, be able to instantly tell most of the ingredients in a curry by taste and explain why they're in there etc. Another person might know 2 recipes and a takeout place they like. Both equally entitled to their opinion of what their favorite curry is, but one will have much more interesting things to say than the other.
Just from the comments here I get the impression that the people who do enjoy modern architecture, and there are quite a few of them, just come away from this thinking "Scott doesn't get it and thinks everybody who disagrees with him must be (subconsciously?) playing weird status games".
The whole thing just strikes me as an eloquent, intelligent exposition of the most mundane take on the subject as possible.
Maybe I should just hold my tongue though, you're just a guy with a blog, and I don't even pay you :P. The complaint about very SF-local content still kinda stands though, it's completely unrelateable to anything going on in Europe at least, and feels very "No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Country Where This Regularly Happens".
I studied in Groningen and can confirm the Groninger Museum is an ugly-ass building. More pleasant from the inside from what I remember. The Drents Museum some 25km south in my hometown is much better.
The US just elected a pretty crazy president based substantially on the concern that SF-style blue state cities have failed to control crime and homelessness. If this isn't your problem yet, it will be in a month and sixteen days.
I've discussed food taste at more length at https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/is-wine-fake , and I think I agree that my opinions here are a natural extension of the ones there.
Trump did try to re-introduce classical architecture for government buildings first time round but that failed. Maybe second time is the charm!
The only thing that could make me appreciate concrete box architecture is if the alternative is "Trumpy Aesthetics".
Truly, the rationalist and EA movements need to study how to create someone so hated as Trump, so that they can make a Trumpian puppet to get people to do the opposite of whatever he says out of sheer spite. They could Tom Sawyer the masses!
Of the two curry enthusiasts you describe, I think the one with two recipes and a takeout place might be better suited to designing the local elementary school's meal plan -- and if my local (midwestern US suburbia) elementary school cafeteria decided to heavily prioritize exotic curries to the exclusion of food that kids actually eat, I would definitely have some questions about the decision.
Is this the most interesting take on cuisine? No, of course not -- but that's not really the point.
I don't think the defenders of modernism commenting here are actually architects who do the equivalent of "make curry thrice a week".
Sure. But he’s acting as though it’s not possible to actually have better understanding of one’s own taste, as though a MySpace page thought up by a teenager is going to be as good as something designed by a thoughtful graphic designer, because it’s just taste.
What are the grounds for saying one teenager's taste is better than another's?
It's not so much that one taste is better than another taste - but one design can be a better reflection of all the dimensions of that taste than another.
I don't know how active you ever were on MySpace in the brief period when it was prominent, but people often used the design features that were available in ways that were self-defeating. They had some favorite music, so they had that play as autoplay background music, and they also embedded a video, but the two pieces of audio made it hard to hear either. An artist might do this to create an intentionally ugly juxtaposition that destabilizes whatever and whatever - but if someone did this because they wanted you to hear their favorite music, and see their favorite video, then it was bad design.
They would write up a poem, and put it in their favorite font, and put it on an ornate background image, and it was impossible to properly see any of them. Some artists might do this sort of thing out of a desire to create frustration, but if someone just unironically likes some poetry and some visual art, they probably want you to be able to see each one, rather than feel the frustration of each making the other impossible to see.
It's true that a lot of art criticism is people with one set of tastes critiquing work done for a different set of tastes. But a lot of it is also people who have tried making a whole bunch of things, and figured out which combinations are effective at the kinds of effects that one might be aiming for. Sometimes it's easy to mistake an effective attempt at an effect you don't like as an ineffective attempt at an effect you do like. But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as effective or ineffective.
When you are saying that you are making the curry of the people for the people in the way of the people, yet you are scrapping all the traditional recipes of curry that the people actually make and eat, and you change the recipe to have a ton of new, clashing ingredients and if the people don't like it then they are to blame - as one of the people, I say "That's not curry and I don't care if you won sixteen snobby cookery awards for it".
EDIT: Then again, I remember when black pudding became (briefly) a trendy ingredient and all kinds of lah-di-dah chefs were creating new dishes with it. I rolled my eyes because yeah, fine, do a beetroot and apple coulis with lemongrass reduction but the rest of us will stick to the traditional fry/breakfast roll:
https://supervalu.ie/recipes/black-pudding-with-chilli-spiced-melon
Far from chili spiced melon we were reared! 😁
Instead, we can argue about "is it an Ulster Fry, Full Irish/British Breakfast, or what?" and "do baked beans have a place in the fry?" and "mushrooms: yes or no?"
(Personal views: full Irish, no, and yes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aCS33kU5cA
Also, they took advantage of this guy, you *do* get soda bread with the Irish fry/breakfast, and there should also be fried bread. Toast is optional, whether you want it or not is up to you.
Modern innovation that is maximum convenience: the breakfast roll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-93GwkYMs
"it is clearly a hitpiece that's also 40 years out of date"
How is it out of date though? Are new buildings being done in a way that ordinary people (not just architects) are saying "Hey, those older building were hideous but this new style is pretty good"?
Or is this a bunch of new schools of building that are indistinguishable from the older ones unless you study architecture for four years?
Wolfe's argument is that the "experts" took over, and the ordinary people (including people who pay for the buildings) don't get a say.
And the result, like our current crisis in expertise in other fields, is that the experts have shown that they're egregiously *wrong*.
> How is it out of date though? Are new buildings being done in a way that ordinary people (not just architects) are saying "Hey, those older building were hideous but this new style is pretty good"?
Yes? I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but I think the typical brand new architect-y building is much better than the ones that were going up in the truly dark days of the 50s to 70s. We have learned not to build in raw concrete because it quickly looks terrible. We don't do plain rectangles any more, nor any other seriously-unfriendly shapes. More thought goes into the street-level experience of the building than it used to. Basically, the typical new large building looks like swoopy curved glass rather than rectangular concrete, and that's an improvement.
Swoopy curved glass does look better than rotting concrete slabs, I will admit. They aren't necessarily better to live in though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_World this set of buildings is not all that far from where I live. I considered buying a suite, until I heard they had problems with heat, and problems with fitting things in.
Yes, a rectangular room may be boring, but it does fit your furniture.
When I visited Chicago in 1965 at age 6, the tour guide pointed to the new round Marina Towers and confidently stated that all buildings in the future would be round and have pie-sliced shaped apartments.
But when I lived in Chicago in the 1980s-1990s, Marina Tower rents were cheap because nobody wanted to live in a pie-slice shaped apartment because what kind of furniture fits?
When I did some college tours 15 years ago, the worst looking buildings were the middle aged ones from 1945-1985 or so. The 1920s buildings looked good and most of the new ones looked like the 1920s buildings, just with bigger windows.
But that could just be my tastes being subjected to the hamster wheel of fashion.
In the spirit of giving an inch, there are some Modernist buildings that manage light in a pretty smart way.
An example is the crow man's Tower of Shadows in Chandigarh, India. It was built to respond to the movement of the Sun by blocking direct sunlight from each direction throughout the day, which is pretty useful in a hot Indian city.
It uses thinner pieces of concrete and incorporates a lot of open space, so it avoids the monolithic slab look you see with a lot of Gray buildings.
https://architectuul.com/architecture/the-tower-of-shadows
That's more a large sculpture than a building than anyone lives or works in.
I think the mistake people make is that they go from (rightly) rejecting mere concrete boxes, to suggesting absurdly decorated and incoherently styled buildings that *also* look terrible.
But you can build nice today without going in either direction. I think this is a lovely example in New Urbanism style (in Swedish, but you can Google translate or just look at the pictures). It’s particularly neat how it’s a decently sized area, which means it can be in harmony with itself.
https://www.arkitekturupproret.se/2017/11/24/det-nya-men-vackra-sankt-eriksomradet/
In many cases, people's architectural complains seem to mostly just boil down to wanting more color in their urban life. Modern designs with a colorful exterior, like what is being built in many Nordic countries, are found quite satisfactory compared to either the gray facades of brutalism *or* the white classic-imitation buildings.
Yes, I don’t believe people typically have very strong or outrageous demands. They want pretty buildings that aren’t actively hostile to humans.
Pretty buildings, and specifically in the sense of "pretty colors" more than "pretty designs" (though the latter is still there, of course).
FWIW I find texture at least as important as color. I find red brick nice in almost any setting, for example—it even improves the rare brick Brutalist building.
In his video "Why Are Condos Ugly", Paige Saunders discusses how making modern architectural decisions increase public opposition, which in turn reduce building heights/density/cost-effectiveness. So the story of "no ornamentation and raw/bare materials are cheaper" isn't even a correct description of the current trade-offs being made when it comes to residential buildings.
https://youtu.be/3C5ow6UU9oI
In a later video, he recommends citizen assemblies to better navigate these trade-offs: a group of randomly selected local residents get to vote on trading-off between a pre-defined set of architectural decisions, such as height and cladding material. This would be a kind of democratic antidote to the current state of public consultations and the architectural ugliness described in this post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBAmW3FpyV8&t=264s
I feel like there are two different things happening here, and getting conflated in a way that makes both of them harder to understand.
One is getting rid of ornamentation. This, I think, is just a general consequence of industrialization and urbanization. The Eastern bloc sort of lived in a cultural bubble, undergoing different societal patterns and fads because it was dissociated from the west. Under Stalin, the Soviets built the sort of beautiful, ornate things you like (e.g. Moscow State University, the Moscow Metro), then under Khrushchev they built a shit-ton of commie blocks because they were cheaper and they never had enough housing. I think this is probably a bigger part of things than any art fad, and ties into the loss of institutional knowledge of ornamentation: for most of human history, city populations were stagnant, so you didn't need to build that many buildings, so you could spend that time making them really ornate. With the industrial revolution, urban populations skyrocketed and you needed to get lots of buildings, and fast, for generations.
The other is that you don't like modernist styles. I like the design of the Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (though I wouldn't want to live in an all-glass building, they aren't housing), but not, say, the City of Culture (it looks like an ugly lumpy video game level). I have no particular architectural background, I just look at the building and go "ugly" or "pretty" with little further talk. I feel similarly about other modernist or classical buildings, with some being ugly and some being pretty (ugly classical buildings are too gaudy, while ugly modernist buildings are too geometric, and you seem to consider "too gaudy" to be a line far beyond where I would put it). The way to fix this would be to commission a few designs for potential buildings in different styles and then poll the public on which ones they like the best. It would get rid of whatever people actually consider to be the "ugly" designs, whether modernist or classical.
The Fountainhead makes a little more sense now.
In all seriousness, I quite like the tall glass skyscrapers, with their large windows, clean white interiors, silver appliances with white countertops. They look damn cool! I live in an (almost obnoxiously) art-deco building that was once a bank and appreciate that style too, but there's something about shining skyscrapers that have been built in the past 10-20 years that really look amazing too me.
>But corporations and governments have a more complicated mandate. When executive or bureaucrats make decisions, they’re supposed to be catering to more than their personal aesthetic taste. They’re supposed to be following best practices and doing what’s responsible, maybe as judged by a sort of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” type of standard.
A single datapoint on this: I recently attended some sort of neighborhood consultation for ideas of what to do in a soon to be built park. Most of the people present agreed that they didn't want it to have concrete walkways, and that they'd rather they be more gravel-y. To this, the city representative said: "We have to make the park accessible to those with reduced mobility".
In contemporary government construction it does seem that, unless you're willing to bear significant political cost, the incentives are lined up for making stuff that's drab and featureless, you might annoy a lot of people, but you're not seriously going to offend anyone.
"In contemporary government construction it does seem that, unless you're willing to bear significant political cost, the incentives are lined up for making stuff that's drab and featureless, you might annoy a lot of people, but you're not seriously going to offend anyone."
I expect that drab and featureless also costs less money.
One of the reason that Soviet housing (Stalinkas, Khrushchevka, Brezhnevkas) look the way they do is that the Khrushchevka and Brezhnevkas were being built when (a) the Soviet Union had a housing shortage and (b) resources were still scarce. Nicer buildings meant fewer buildings and less housing.
I hate the things, but they were a pretty economical solution to "we needs lots of housing NOW and aren't a terribly wealthy society."
At the local US government level, non-drab is probably more expensive as well as some people won't like it (whichever style you pick). Less expensive is something that almost everyone can agree is good (all other things being the same). So we often optimize for the thing we can quantify rather than the thing that matters more.
Gravel roads in rural areas argue against cost being the reason its avoided.
You mention Works in Progress's bit about the cost of ornaments but I think their recent essay perfectly answers your call for a well considered criticism of modern architecture that gives one inch. The idea is that because architecture is a public art inflicted on the public whether they like it or not we should prefer more accessible styles. And for things like buildings where we need a lot of designs we should prefer "easy" styles where an average practitioner can do a good job rather than styles that take a genius to do well.
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/making-architecture-easy
Written by, of course, Samuel Hughes.
Honestly, people should read all his prior Works in Progress essays on this subject. All four explode common arguments: https://worksinprogress.co/our-authors/#samuel-hughes
That's not to say I think he's correct and this is the end of the story—though I admit I find all four essays persuasive, and in one case had been making that argument for years before Hughes did. But as it is, they haven't percolated; no one who substantive disagrees with me has chewed on them and updated their arguments. I'd like to start hearing some well reasoned rebuttals, rather than the same old "it's all selection bias," "it's all cost of labor" stuff.
"I found this part of the book sudden and jarring. Okay, Americans have always had an unhealthy fascination with European culture - but, really? Everyone abandoned all previous forms of architecture within a three year period just because some cool Europeans showed up?"
This is easy for me to grasp because the same process happened internally: the Northeast > my state (and no doubt other states distant from the capital - but my state had lots of yokels with the (most) money).
This is how you get, all over the country, mod art museums, more and less cool - usually filled with very minor works someone was only too happy to unload. And always with the Andy Warhol kitsch in the gift shop ...
A notable example, which many consider successful, is the Kimbell Museum, built on the windswept prairie. It's a sort of temple of modernism, and is indeed cool. The water fountains arc in just the same manner as the barrel-vaulted ceilings.
But the building is all. The art is completely unexceptional. How could it not be? How much Western art is there, to spread among all these provincial museums?! And were Yankees really going to sell off their very best stuff?
It furnishes a space for traveling exhibits, though. I see there is a good one going on now - Dutch treasures from the Boston Museum of Art.
We're still that customer, emerging from the (oily) ooze.
Incidentally, a pretty or even less-pretty art museum, filled with forgettable art sometimes not even curated, but with a $$ cafe and a gift shop, is still less ridiculous than the weirdest thing our dumb-dumb pols ever foisted on us - the time they got in bed with the Eurotrash with Formula One*, and subsidized - yes, this was a use of state dollars - the building of an F1 track in the middle of a goddamned colonia in eastern Travis County. Yes, the cool cars rip around the track before supposed billionaires and their hot girlfriends just a couple miles from where the bodies routinely turn up in burned-up vehicles, where the roads are not necessarily graded and paved, and where the chop shops for stolen cars are - basically a Bermuda Triangle as far as law enforcement is concerned, thanks to the robust enclave-forming nature of illegal immigration.
*A sport that had to be explained to the taxpayers in a series of tutorials in the newspaper.
Exempli gratia #3: how eagerly, how absolutely unthinkingly, the wider country glommed onto Robert Moses's ideas about transportation, about the imperative of more concrete.
A man who never drove a mile in his life.
Scott’s clearly correct about the broader point, that this architecture is much too common given its unpopularity with the broader public, so it makes sense to investigate why and to take corrective action.
That being said, I must say that a bit of Brutalism here and there helps to add some spice.
The National Archives, which house the Constitution, and the Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI, are just a couple blocks away from each other in DC. I see each as its own kind of temple to the Law.
The Archives are neoclassical, and show the Law as an ideal, beautiful, symmetrical, sacred. The Hoover Building is an unpopular example of Brutalism, but to me it shows the Law as a duty, the grinding grimy obscure work of enforcement.
I’m happy that both exist, though I admit that too many buildings in our cities look like the Hoover Building, and not enough look like the Archives.
Two thoughts:
1. Bauhaus and the like are the architectural expression of slave morality. The architectural equivalent of wearing a burlap sack and self-flagellating to be oh so humble.
2. These artists are clearly over-socialized and too concerned with the opinions of other artists when they should rather be pursuing their own vision based on their own internal scorecard. Being water flowing into a the shape of social-incentives sized container is pathetic.
For large/tall non-government buildings in a city, I like art deco a lot. Here are some examples of art deco, including famous ones in New York City: https://www.arch2o.com/10-most-fascinating-art-deco-buildings/ I think art deco usually hits a pretty good balance for ornamentation.
For government buildings, I like neoclassical. It's a nice tribute to the ancient Rome and Greek republics.
For homes/apartment complexes, I think modern *designs* are mostly fine, but greater color variation might help.
Good article by Scott. It was a good read.
Can someone indulge a digression: I read the Fountainhead decades ago, and to my recollection the form of architecture described sounds awfully minimalist, "functional" and effectively Bauhaus. The novel also has Roark or some other criticizing artisanal flourishing near the beginning.
I have to imagine that Ayn Rand would have been aware of the Socialist ideological associations underpinning modern architecture, but instead framed the phenomenon of unwanted ugly buildings as a case of the individual doing his own thing running counter to what the masses want. Yet that's also true of Bauhaus apostles, their work is masterful individual expression, but *also* for the masses (for their own good rather).
How did Rand square this, and was there actually a parallel libertarian/objectivist movement drumming up some time after modern architecture was in full swing?
I've commented on the Fountainhead connection below (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house/comment/79995736), but I don't think that Rand found it particularly necessary to square it in any way. This was the way her aesthetic taste ran, so it must have been objectively correct, logical and in no way in conflict with the rest of her worldview; and if the later Rand fans have found any incongruities here, they seem to be satisfied with explaining it away as there being some secret difference between Roark's buildings, as described in the book, and general ugly functionalism that is just "they're beautiful because they're described as being beautiful".
Ayn Rand "solved" the problem of the "unwanted ugly buildings as a case of the individual doing his own thing running counter to what the masses want" by having an actual individual commission and pay for the buildings that Roarke designed. Roarke wasn't shoving anything down people's throats ... he spends a large part of the novel *waiting* for people to ask him to build buildings that he was willing to build (rather than lobbying local governments ...). And since an individual was paying for this, what "the masses" wanted didn't really matter. The masses can commission their own buildings.
And I don't think Roark was terribly Bauhuas, either. Each of his building was unique and tailored to the location and the intent of the building. The novel contains this description of one of his early commissions:
"The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony. The walls, of the same granite as the rock, continued its vertical lines upward; the wide, projecting terraces of concrete, silver as the sea, followed the line of the waves, of the straight horizon."
I don't think this can be written about Bauhaus style buildings in the general case. Maybe not about any of them.
Roark is much more Frank Lloyd Wright than Soviet blockhaus.
But, again, Cortlandt Homes, as described in the book, is basically very much a Soviet blockhaus (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house/comment/80006260).
Rand and the socialists were equally modernist. Wolfe wants to in every bad thing on the excesses of the left, but James C Scott does a better job actually thinking about it, and seeing that hyper-rationalism, without enough local lived experience, is the actual problem.
Many members of the Bauhaus actually were trying to fix that - there’s a reason they hired craftspeople and did ergonomics studies, even if some of their stuff was then picked up in the name of style.
I believe I linked to a different Scott (Sumner) the last time this came up, and it's worth doing so again:
https://www.econlib.org/some-random-thoughts-on-modernism/
Yes, this is really good.
“henceforth white, beige, gray, and black became the patriotic colors, the geometric flag, of all the compound architects.”
So they turned themselves into the stereotypes of puritans?
Both the Bauhaus and the puritans thought it was important to be functional and usable, more than being ornate and decorated and pretty. Both sometimes became self-parodies by aestheticizing the lack of ornament. I wouldn’t trust Tom Wolfe to actually be correctly reporting the views of the Bauhaus architects he is talking about.
In Norway, a movement known as the "Architectural Uprising" has gained significant traction. This group is very publicly talking about how modern buildings are ugly and we need classical stuff again. Their efforts have been remarkably successful, with numerous newspapers now regularly featuring articles on their competitions for the ugliest and most beautiful buildings. They have already had a substantial impact on public discourse, and I believe we will see notable changes in Norwegian and Nordic architecture moving forward.
https://www.nrk.no/kultur/arkitekturopproret-med-pris-til-arets-styggeste-og-peneste-nybygg-1.16646489 (article in Norwegian).
Started in Sweden and apparently spread all over the place now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_Uprising
I have mixed feelings - their criticism is usually sound, but they also love incoherent overdecorated mash-up "classical" with no thought or reason behind it.
1. Romanticism is perhaps the ultimate luxury belief.
2. The Lyman Family cult has apparently survived the passing of its founder, Mel Lyman, and supported itself doing very high end custom design and remodelling. They also bought rundown properties on Fort Hill in Boston and renovated them, well before the area gentrified.
Apparently, Mel Lyman had exacting standards for workmanship and design and demanded that his cultists strip a building down to the studs and remodel it, then he'd find something he didn't like and make the culstits strip the building back down and do it again until Mel was entirely satisfied.
The cult now mostly do work for movie stars and the like, only work with "people they like" and don't bother with contracts or other formalities. Last I checked, they apparently get in contact with Mel via Oujia board from time to time.
True story, no lie.
Pre-rant disclosure: I like 20th century buildings, from craftsman homes and fantasy ethnic bungalows, through Art Deco public buildings (RIP UT Hicks School of Social Work and your great oaks) through midcentury split levels and Brady Bunch houses, and most especially the woodsy or faux-rustic California variety.
I don't particularly love the gargantuan late 19th century and early 20th century "classical" public buildings and hotels that once filled my state, and often had rather short lives - though the really well-done exceptions, typically stone rather than brick, and more modest in size, seem likely to outlive everything, and deserve to.
The problem is what people do with a "style", on the cheap. What it excuses them to do or not do at scale. And modernism was never going to be cool on the cheap. I can only point you to my middle school, Paul Revere, in Houston, Texas.
If you google a photo of it you may object - that's not modernism - it's just nothing! It's a couple of boxes. Ah, but that's the derivation of modernism - permission to do nothing. In fact, as you can see - it has *very little* in the way of windows. The classrooms in particular were mostly windowless boxes. We spent our entire time there lit only by flourescent tubes. (I'd like to think the teachers nowadays have figured out to bring in some little table lamps.) It's functionally just the same as if we were in that period when they taxed windows ... in this case, I imagine, they were saving money on A/C, or thought they were. And of course, awnings, being decorative, were thoroughly out at that period. (And I notice even now, when they've returned somewhat, that architects seldom have the courage to make them as deep as they need to be to have any effect.)
It was recalled to me because I was back "home" not long ago and it happened to make the front page of the paper, in a story about "crumbling" schools. They showed a picture of the principal by an interior concrete wall where the paint is peeling off - kids like to pause and give it a peel as they pass. (I know I would have been unable to resist that.) The article suggested the need for bonds to repair it and other schools; I was flabbergasted that they thought it worth repairing, but I suppose if it could be successfully transformed in some way, that would be a signal architectural triumph, and a beacon of hope.
Currently the absolutely best thing about the place is the cable box out front. In Houston as elsewhere I guess, people have been encouraged to paint the cable boxes and the results are often charming. Thus the cable box furnishes the only, and unauthorized, decorative detail at least on the exterior of the campus: a well-executed picture of the midnight rider himself.
The International Fountain in Seattle is a great example of how interesting modernist ideas can be transformed into something beloved by the public.
Originally, it was designed to feature big, irregular parabolic jets of water that were the main attraction - not the solid fountain body itself. This was a great idea. But the fountain body was covered in ugly spikes and surrounded by rocks to evoke space exploration, which was typical modernist ugliness and discouraged interaction.
In 1995 they rebuilt the fountain body, removing the spike nozzles and rocks and covering the fountain in a glittering metal. Now, it’s the star attraction of Seattle Square. Huge numbers of kids run and play in it all summer long - the fun is trying to run and touch the fountain body when the water jet at that location is not active, then running away laughing when the water shoots out again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fountain
I know this is a book review (of a polemic that is now 40 years old), but I think there's a better and more nuanced case to be made if one just follows some leads that Scott has smelled out in passing but didn't really develop.
Take the parallel with 'woke'. Yes, I got majorly annoyed with some extremely aggressive, harmful posturers during peak woke, but a friend of mine had a point when he said, back then, that woke discourse is sometimes 'excellent heuristics, terrible dogma'. I thought and think that he was too kind - but it is true that wokedom is built in part on some valid concerns and good points - and then some chronic sophomores built a cult on top of that. Well, enough of that - but how does it apply to architecture?
'Form follows function' is a pretty darn good heuristic, in fact more of a heuristic - it's a sound philosophy. It dates to before Bauhaus - in that form, it goes back to Louis Sullivan (who did allow himself plenty of decoration on top of an appropriate structure). In fact, if it is seen as something to remember, rather than as something to apply mechanically or with single-minded brutishness, it may even be passable dogma (Sullivan did say: "[it's a] rule that shall permit of no exception.").
That becomes *clearer* if you consider some massive failures of modernism, or of a misapplication of modernist forms. Take the relatively recent Berlin airport fiasco. The architect intended the new Berlin airport to be an architectural reference to Mies van der Rohe - some sort of Farnsworth house scaled up by a very large factor. Basic function was compromised: because he would not tolerate anything other than a perfectly flat ceiling with no features, he (or rather, he and many architects and designers working with him, including a fake engineer) decided that steal in a fire safety system would be forced *downwards*, by means of a complicated system of valves. That's not where smoke wants to go. It was all a very expensive fiasco. Note the basic principle was violated - and modernism had just become another style of the past to pilfer from.
Or again, going back to genuine modernism: yes, flat roofs are not appropriate where it rains or snows a lot, glass walls configurations led to overheating, etc. This are all signs of a movement become a little too enamoured of its own new forms, associated with 'rationality', at the cost of forgetting the underlying, sound rationality. (Scott also points out that it was a general tendency of the progressivism of the age not to ask for feedback from the people for whose happiness you were supposedly working.)
Another reviewer here also made the point that many of the early modernist buildings put up on the page as warnings are actually very appealing (I'd definitely include the Stuttgart building that gets called a 'commieblock' here), and some of the more traditional buildings aren't. It may be that a movement, to be initially successful, needs to be led by intelligent, capable people, who moreover sometimes have a better working intuition than what their manifestos betray. Later generations of the movement do not undergo a selection effect in the same way.
PS. ---------
The way that some architects who fell afoul of middle- or late-period modernist snobbishness got mistreated is appalling. But, honestly, a quick search shows that Morris Lapidus did build his share of frankly cringe-inducing hotel lobbies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Lapidus#/media/File:Eden_Roc_interior_FL1.jpg), and that some of his successes rested on a mixture of responsiveness to user experience and (gasp) functionalism:
"Beyond visual style, there is some degree of functionalism at work. His curving walls caught the prevailing ocean breezes in the era before central air-conditioning, and the sequence of his interior spaces was the result of careful attention to user experience: Lapidis [sic] heard complaints of endless featureless hotel corridors and when possible curved his hallways to avoid that effect." (thanks, Wikipedia)
It seems perfectly fair, not pathetic, for him to point out that he didn't just build chintzy big hotel lobbies in Florida - it's interesting to know he'd built a housing project on commission to the Soviets (hopefully those living there were happy, not just the planners); can anybody find pictures? (Why couldn't *he* get to design schools and projects in the US, and bring joy to people's lives, rather than have commissions that encouraged excess? Sounds like a waste.)
Plenty of things built by Saarinen are immediately appealing - and immediately recognizable as modernist, just not of a sufficiently orthodox kind according to mid-20th century tastemakers, it would seem. I just found out that I lived in a dorm designed by Saarinen when I was an undergrad. I didn't dislike it - it was more of a (solidly built) individual rowhouse (very gray on the outside) shared with other students, but I'd never have imagined it was designed by a famous architect or his studio. Maybe he just produced or put his signature on too much, some of it humdrum, in a life cut short (1910-1961).
Lastly: the main thing that is wrong with MacMansions is simply what is wrong with US suburbia (or even: with an unsustainable US idea of prosperity) dialed up to 11 - they are too large, poorly thought out, often (I get the impression) surprisingly shoddily built given their price ticket, and in general boasting of expense through sheer size and accumulation.
Pages that mock MacMansions often focus on the things that are particularly important to architecture students - they copy historical styles (generally a few particular styles) in the way that an older chatbot would try to copy a writing style (something ChatGPT is actually still quite bad at): the words are right, the basic grammar may be locally right (not really the case with the worst MacMansions, actually), but it's all rather perfunctory, goes nowhere, expresses nothing. This is less important for most of us: after all, lots of perfectly livable, nice houses that are definitely not MacMansions were built piecemeal over time, so that they are a bit of a hodgepodge, but are actually pleasant and well-thought-out on the inside, in an improvisational sort of way.
What should we think about (if we actually have the money to build a house from scratch - most of us don't)? We live in an energy crisis that will probably last the rest of our lives, and will get worse before it gets better. Now, if you or I just have a Passivhaus built by a contractor, we may succeed (given enough basic technical knowledge), but, especially if the budget is definitely an issue, it may end up looking like a pile of legos. Now that is where it would make a lot of sense for architects to go in. There may be many solutions, all of them valid, some minimalist, some Tartarian in many utterly harmless ways, none of them MacMansions; what HOAs might think of them, well, I think we can all guess.
(Some traditional features actually have a function. Another lead that I wish had been more developed is the reference to Arts and Crafts/William Morris. The point that most of what he and the craftsmen he worked could be afforded only by the rich at the time is unfortunately a valid criticism - they didn't eschew all machinery, but, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it's a pity they didn't try to engage with large-scale industrial processes, rather than just recoiling from them with plenty of justification. More to the point, many of their well-thought out pieces are simultaneously 'modern' in their underlying motivation and 'Tartarian' seen with today's eyes. I have had to hear so much carping on the part of my girlfriend because I happen to like many of William Morris designs - I'm typing this from a room with a Snakeshead-pattern curtain - lying down on one blue and one burgundy cushions, both with the Pimpernel pattern; she must have provoked me at some point.)
I think this point about arts and crafts or craftsman style being inaccessible to the masses is trivially refuted by the prolific Sears kit houses across the US. As well perhaps by Eastlake being a byword for mass-produced furniture of the period. The kit houses are not going to compete with say a Thorsen House for actual craftsmanship, of course, though I expect they were easy enough for people to add whatever they wanted and perhaps could do themselves in that way.
But this is obvious, I guess - so perhaps I am not understanding what is meant by Arts and Crafts. I guess if it all has to come out of William Morris's workshop - yeah, it wasn't really going to spread.
William Morris insisted on products being made by craftsmen in workshops, earning good wages, and saw the degradation (in terms of status, income, etc.) of workers in Victorian England as being a by-product of industrialization (he wasn't wrong). He did allow for some machines and even automation (the Jacquard loom - that's where punch-cards come from). Still, things produced in his workshop or strictly according to his philosophy were expensive; that's why he became associated with wallpaper - it was the one Morris & co. item that very many people could afford.
Of course his style, and even his philosophy, were more influential than that. He eschewed ornamentation that took an inordinate amount of time, and tended to favor designs (in e.g. carpentry) that could be well-executed with standard tools. People influenced by him (in the following generation, say) often saw that machines needed to be given a more important role, not just in reducing costs, but in saving craftsmen from drudgery.
Thank you for this!
As an austrian that practically lives next door from the Kirche am Steinhof (also called Otto-Wagner-Kirche) I fail to see how that building is not transgressive and avant-garde. It's an extremely weird building, a wild clash of different styles out of different eras, yet still somehow cohesive and with its unique twist. You also have to consider that it's a church. Even today most modern churches come nowhere close to being that innovative.
I'm pretty young and always somewhat perplexed when I walk past it.
I enjoy a lot of the minimal concrete buildings in my city. They look really cool as the light changes through the day. And maybe it's because glass skyscrapers are the norm, but they also seem interesting and different.
So what makes a place pleseant? Often it's uniformity and detail. Think of greek buildings with blue roofs and white walls on a mountain. So a town that looks distinict, and composed is very pleseant, even if it's not your style. I think we need to remember architects work for us. So we shoud create a styles for our cities. Think more design system, than a menu of buildings, like all buildings should be white have blue roofs, avoid sharp corners, columns are encouraged if they are structural, but not required. Still I value freedom and diversity. We shouldn't make building something else illegal, but we should charge you for the privilage of building a snowflake, or we should set aside aestethic free zones. But your city should have consistant elements, with some freedom to play. Maybe this smacks too much of zoning, so you need to design a system that doesn't create road blocks. I firmly believe we can have nice and beautiful things.
I don't think it's productive to throw all types of buildings into the same pot. I'm not sure it's even productive to discuss groups of buildings even by the same architect.
I cannot imagine highrise office buildings that aren't modern in some form. How do you use floor space effectively and meet building codes without ending up with some variation of what we see in practice? Occupants will want natural light, so we end up without interior rooms and large, open floors instead. To maximize light coming in you end up with floor-to-celling windows because otherwise people 50ft into the open floor get very little natural light.
I understand that simpler apartment buildings, schools etc. largely look the way they do because parts are mass-produced. Arguably we'd probably end up hating these regardless what the mass-produced pieces look like just because they are mass-produced, won't be perfect and due to its omnipresence will start hating it. (That is till many of them were torn down 80 years from now, yes around then are large and then we'll love and celebrate them). I think you are right that AI and new manufacturing techniques are the best hope here.
I also cannot help but wonder to what degree is survivorship bias at work. Many more beloved buildings were hated when they were new. I also never see these articles complain about the truly beautiful modern buildings like the museums designed by Tadao Ando, the Oslo opera, the Sidney opera, the modern addition to the Louvre all of which attract tourists due to their architecture which is very, very modern.
To add, Detroit has some old skyscrapers. I've visited some of them and they looked cool from the outside but were quite bad when you were in an actual office inside them. Lots of dark spaces, cramped rooms, etc.
Without addressing the pathologies of Starchitecture, there does seem to be an element of reverse survivorship bias at play - somewhere along the line, building something cheaply started to make it more durable rather than less. Add in that a building that will not literally collapse in on itself if poorly maintained is a great target for neglect, and economizing for maintenance cost during the design phase is somewhat of an admission that nobody is expected to care about appearances down the line.
Is this an opportunity for a basic Outside View calibration to pay dividends? "In strict order, answer these questions: What are some completed projects similar to the one we're working on? How does our project look right now during the planning phase? How do those similar projects usually look at this point in the planning phase? What does the stakeholder think of those similar projects during their useful life? What do we want the stakeholder to think about our project during its useful life?"
With that out of the way, registering my obligatory contratian take: I love Boston City Hall unapologetically - "mixed material inverted step pyramid" is not a description you should give me if you want me to hate something. That said, the all-brick plaza surrounding it was an abomination where I have spent entirely too many hours freezing my ass off in a New England winter searching frantically for something, anything to act as a windbreak. The recent renovations have been a huge game-changer, and I'd invite folks to take a look at how much better it immediately is with the ol' Just Add Trees recipe popular these days.
https://www.sasaki.com/voices/the-peoples-plaza-boston-city-hall-renovation/
Right - it's not that the building isn't interesting, or that brick plazas aren't nice, it's just that the square used to be very windy, to the point that it made Boston feel more like Chicago. The first impression I got when visiting the place as a skinny kid in the mid-90s was that the place didn't like me. I'm glad that this has been addressed.
It's less about decorations and more about proportions and materials, I would say. E.g. look at this 19th-century small house in a small town - hardly any decorations, but pleasing to the eye.
https://et.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail:19._sajandi_linnakodaniku_muuseum_Tartus_Jaani_t%C3%A4navas,_vaade_Laia_t%C3%A4nava_poolsele_nurgale,_20._juuli_2012.jpg
Importantly, it's also nice to look at from very close distances, such as a meter or two, because of the materials.
A new similarly sized house is generally not pleasing to see at close range, because of its dirty concrete and metal parts (concrete gets ugly very fast). Here's a new house of similar size and amount of decoration in the same town:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/oEqnBymbLrWTySUa7
And a slightly better one maybe: https://photos.app.goo.gl/P22nNN2MQdX47fw5A
Would you say it's decoration that makes the first one more pleasing? I cannot really put my finger on why it's so profoundly better than the new houses, I just feel it very strongly. (Surely, many people would like the new ones better, but I'm probably representing the majority here.)
This really reads like a reddit sneer club post, except that instead of sneering at “rationalists” who like to pretend they’re better than you because they play with robots, it’s sneering at “architects” who like to pretend they’re better than you because they draw straight lines.
It’s one thing to dislike modern architecture, but it’s another to go in for an explicitly anti-intellectualist vision where you don’t admit any possible explanation for thought other than status signaling.
In any case, there’s a lot of problems with this attempted explanation of modernist architecture.
The most obvious - in what universe is Eero Saarinen not a modernist?!?! Just google his buildings - the St. Louis gateway arch, the terminal and hotel at jfk, etc! They are un-ornamented brutalist sensual curves, very Bauhaus.
The second - you know who was a fan of modern architecture and not a socialist? Ayn Rand. Anything that blames modern architecture on socialism has to confront that.
The third - while a lot of modernist buildings are unpleasant and unliveable (certainly the large-scale works of Le Corbusier are usually now entirely reviled by the architectural and especially urbanist communities) the Bauhaus in particular really did do a lot to make usable architecture. Every kitchen in the past century was shaped by the Bauhaus who realized that with modern technology, you don’t have to worry as much about open flames and instead can put the different workstations (sink, stovetop, cutting area) in places where they are usable.
"an explicitly anti-intellectualist vision where you don’t admit any possible explanation for thought other than status signaling."
In fairness to Scott — this is an excellent description of Wolfe's actual book.
The fact that Scott's review follows this path as well means that it's at least faithful to the source material. And that's one important virtue that a book review can offer.
I mean, Wolfe sneered at the Mercury astronauts (!!!). But nobody decries that as anti-intellectual lol.
And I don't think we're blessed with so very many engagingly readable, not-bluffing public intellectuals in the past few decades that we can throw out Wolfe just because he had a POV and a little bitchiness.
I’m not saying to throw out Wolfe! Just that whatever negative feelings one might have about the New York Times or a certain subset of redditors who like to sneer and dunk on pretentious rationalists, it might be valuable to recognize that these feelings are appropriate to the same degree about Wolfe. (I recommend being not so positive about Wolfe as Scott is, and not so negative on the nytimes, but to accept a certain kind of ambivalence about both.)
He’s writing a book review, not adopting status games as the only explanation for modern architecture. He even explicitly says he would like to read a book that is more sympathetic to what modern architects were trying to do on their own terms.
You know you can go ahead and ban me, Scott, but I think this piece is an absolutely perfect teaching tool for you to understand how you've become both a vastly more right-wing and vastly less interesting figure in the span of a half-decade: you have fallen into a pathological obsession with your fear that there are people out there looking down their noses at you.
I think this is too harsh (it may have a point but it's not very constructive, and the last bit about the motivation is presumptive). I also think (as I implied before) that's there a better essay (better than both its current form and Wolfe's polemics) shyly trying to fight its way out of this one.
He doesn’t realize that in his attempt to reject the sneer club, he has created his own sneer club.
Is he creating it? Or is he rather in the general anti-intellectualism trend in the US (that’s just a perception from across the ocean, I could well be wrong)?
I don't see how you could possibly label Scott as anti-intellectual.
This was probably an ill-conceived comment, but let me clarify what I meant.
I certainly wouldn’t label Scott as anti-intellectual, if nothing else because I wouldn’t have words left for a lot of people.
The point of that comment is that skepticism of intellectuals seems (in my very remote and very partial perception) to be rising in the US.
It is in this light that I was answering Kenny Easwaran’s claim that Scott created his own sneer club – that there’s no point to create one, it already exists.
(I will sometimes comment and nitpick on posts, regardless of whether I agree with their main gist. It’s one of the things that makes commenting interesting, I find.)
Anti-manifesto perhaps? But is that *really* the same thing?
Scott’s full arc is definitely more intellectual than anti-intellectual. But his recent writing about taste and art is pretty close to explicitly anti-intellectual. He’s close to saying that anyone who thinks they are having thoughts about art or taste is actually just fooling themself about a status game they are playing, and that naive first impressions are the only real thing.
"Anti-elite" is probably closer, but "elite" is only slightly less slippery to define than intellectual in the sense meant here. Anti-credentialism likely plays a role as well, though Scott is not new to anti-credentialism nor does that quite align with the "starchitects make unpopular eyesores" problem.
I would also say Scott has become vastly *less* right-wing in the last decade: he outright refuses to comment on politics and culture war most of the time, he's walked back and silenced many of his old positions, etc etc.
I think you must have a different definition of “right wing”. He’s become more circumspect in public talking about race. But he’s also become a lot more explicit about endorsing anti-intellectualism in art, and a right-populist view of class, and even in the past few weeks much more specifically supportive of Christianity.
Once upon a time he interacted consistently with neo-reactionaries. Mostly in attempts to refute them, but even so.
I do not think Scott is any less the Bay Arean Progressive he's always been, and he's less of a heretical BAP than he once was. Even on the Christianity thing, he's long been much more Christian-tolerant than the rest of the rationalsphere and prog-blogosphere. Dear Fred upthread is just wildly miscalibrated and intolerant of disagreement.
If shitting on modern architecture and pretentious art is all that is required to make one right wing, then the left wing has failed the people.
Indeed, they're exactly the same thing, mocking a bunch of nobodies for trying to think better versus not appreciating the grand designs of pretentious fops that a supermajority of people hate.
...Can you really blame him, considering everything that's happened to him? The only way to achieve true peace of mind is to be the one in power.
The more I read the comments, the less I understand how the other commenters view the world (or perhaps it’s just “I know that I know nothing” kicking in with respect to how people in the US think).
But more seriously, if you’re the one in power, aren’t you the most exposed, and the most at risk, always? Where you always have to worry foremost about losing power (“kings don’t retire, and they don’t die in bed, either”) and look at all their actions within this single prism? Remember Damocles’s sword?
I would argue that in modern society, true peace of mind comes from being beneath notice – not necessarily small, but not big enough to be notorious. Of course, this is not the American way, but I’m not American so I couldn’t care less.
If I agreed with Freddie’s point (I do not), I would also answer “yes” to your question. If this were who Scott is now, then important value would have been lost. Such an expression would be very much at odds with the Scott meditating on Moloch, admiring the beauty of our weapons, or pleading for niceness, community and civilization.
> But more seriously, if you’re the one in power, aren’t you the most exposed, and the most at risk, always?
Not when you've eliminated all opposition and centralized power to the point that no one can challenge you. That's the ultimate reward of true power: the elimination of uncertainty. That desire is what's fueling both Scott's rightward shift and the populist revolution in the US. Of course, Scott isn't willing to admit that to himself, and is therefore unwilling to ingratiate himself with the new administration despite having the perfect opportunity to do so... *sigh* It's like he can't let himself be happy.
Scott doesn't like a style of architecture that's popular with architects therefore...he's right wing?
If he was afraid that people were looking down their noses at him then wouldn't he pretend he likes the prestigious styles? Isn't his architectural opinions better explained by aesthetics than playing status games?
No - Scott endorses Tom Wolfe saying that modern architecture is bad and is only popular because it’s socialist. Seeing everything you don’t like as a grand socialist conspiracy is pretty right wing.
Where is the conspiracy? Wolfe claims that the modern architecture styles that Scott dislikes started in artist communes in Europe, that these artist communes were heavily influenced by socialism, that many of them became prestigious academics in the US once WWII started, and that their ideas spread among an increasingly specialized expert class of architects. At no point is there a "socialist conspiracy". What part of Wolfe's book do you disagree with? Were the Bauhaus artists and those like them *not* heavily influenced by socialism?
I think the influence of these communes is being highly overhyped, as is the extent of socialism here. I don’t think there’s any evidence that socialism was any more influential in modernist architecture than, say, Hollywood screenplays, or for that matter corporate graphic design.
I don’t want to deny that any of these things was heavily influenced by socialism, because socialism, like capitalism, like Christianity, like mathematics, is very big and has influence in lots of things in lots of ways. But I want to deny that architecture is in any important way different from lots of things that are way more popular and populist, and that seems to be the claim Wolfe is making.
How is Wolfe claiming that architecture was influenced more or differently than Hollywood or graphic design?
Architecture certainly seems to be different than things that are way more popular and populist, primarily in that it is not popular and populist. Most Hollywood movies are made with the intent of being popular, after all. Most food is made with the intent of being tasty to people. Modern architecture, however, is both unpopular and ubiquitous. That does seem to be different enough to be worth asking the question of how it ended up that way.
What? Scott doesn’t like modern architecture, sees or at least believes that most other people don’t either, and is interested in learning how it gained in popularity nevertheless. He writes a book review which includes as an explanation status games between architects. This demonstrates a pathological fear that people are looking down their noses at him?
And I guess this is “right wing” because he critiques some socialist architects who embraced patently absurd ideas about the relationship between architecture and socialism? Is there any way to critique the aesthetic disaster that is 90% of modern architecture that isn’t “right wing” and “[un]interesting”? Or do all good socialists need to embrace it?
The thought that status games among architects is sufficient to explain the popularity of unpopular architecture is in fact just a pathological fear of people looking down their noses. Basically any attempted explanation of a broad social movement that is based entirely on status games among a clique is.
This comment makes little sense, but fortunately Scott hasn't been known to ban people for that.
Also the several individuals I know who deeply loath brutalist architecture (one of them being my sibling) are all people who've never voted for any flavor of Republican and never will.
To even be able to *identify* Brutalist architecture, rather than "that's a damn eyesore", likely has a strong negative correlation with ever voting Republican.
Tom Wolfe's critique of Modernist architecture really stems from the glut of poorly designed corporate-funded Modern architecture promulgated throughout America before and after WW2. People ask why we can't build Baroque-revivalist state and federal buildings like in the old days don't realize that the construction trades, before and after WW2, lost a lot of the old-world craftsmen who could do such work cost-effectively and on time. Ironically, Baroque utilized a lot of plasterwork to replicate the expensive stone of the Renaissance era because stone ornamentation was expensive! The ornamentation of the Renaissance era was a reaction to the undecorative Romanesque style.
When Mies Van Der Rohe came to the US in 1930 he brought a refined sense of craft and rigor to his modern designs, pushing the boundaries of modern design especially when he began teaching at IIT in Chicago. His early modernist buildings on the IIT campus, as well as his Lake Shore Drive apartments and Seagram building, inspired immediate knock-offs which then became the defacto "corporate" style. Mies' buildings were anything but cheap. But with middling corporate architects adapting his styling, the methods and aesthetic became cheaper as more corporations utilized the style to reflect a new era in America.
Remember the Ben Franklin aphorism - Time is Money. The post-WW2 building boom required new means and methods of building that solid stone masonry with lots of articulation and one-off decoration could not produce in the time-frame that corporations and governments required.
The U.S. Capitol building took 18 years to complete and that was by utilizing a steel-framed structure with a masonry skin! The U.S. Cathedral took 83 years to complete. That the Notre Dame Cathedral was restored in the 5-yr time-frame is not a testament to the fact that we can still build (because we can at great expense) like the old days, but a testament to national $ and resources being dedicated to rebuild the Cathedral. This meant training new craftspeople to replicate the varying construction techniques and historically accurate materials utilized over the 700 years it was built and spending $1B to achieve it. I imagine if you had to rebuild ND exactly from scratch it would be a $5B+ building and take 10+ years or more to complete.
Architecture has always been about blending the aesthetic with the functional and like all aesthetic phases in human history, the dominant styles come and go. For a brief period during the Post-Modernist phase of Architecture, there was a push to decorate the shed and it failed because the decoration was paper-thin in concept and execution. Then, for a period of time, we had the Deconstructionist phase championed by Tschumi, Hadid, Morphosis, Gehry, and Liebskind which brought about more radical efforts at what constituted decoration, movement, and exuberance to the staid International style.
Now, when we get "Traditional" architectural attempts at recreating old-world styles, especially in residential architecture, 90% of the time poorly executed pastiche of what the client and builder think is "traditional" but in many respects the details and proportions are terrible and the materials used are relatively inexpensive.
I'm still confused by what is and isn't "modernist" architecture. Before reading the review I thought I was going to write a comment like "I used to like classical architecture but 'The Fountainhead' really changed my mind and now I really like modernism." But of course, I was thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright (who was the inspiration for Roark's style). But I guess he isn't modernist?
What about Zaha Hadid? I like a lot of her stuff, and things in that style.
So, yeah, I hate brutalism and I can't say that any of the modern buildings that you included in this post are appealing, but can someone explain to me what, say, "The Big Bend" would be if it is ever built? Because I like that.
Scott said he can’t tell the difference between different modernist styles, and he approvingly quotes Tom Wolfe saying that Eero Saarinen was looked down on by modernists. Actually understanding the differences and connections between these styles helps you understand what does and doesn’t work about each, rather than just saying X Good Y Bad the way Scott does with X=“traditional” and Y=“modern”.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen talks about Frank Lloyd Wright (and others like Louis Kahn, and maybe Saarinen would count) as situated modernists. Situated modernism is a branch of modernism that remains interested in place, local context, and close engagement in a way that the International Style ("machine consensualism") explicitly forswore. She even says Le Corbusier moved toward situated modernism late in his career, though I don't know if I quite buy it.
Anyway, yeah, there are varieties of modernism, on a spectrum from International Style to Frank Lloyd Wright; the more you are toward the IS end of the spectrum, the more you're talking about the kind of modernism Scott and most sensible people hate.
Hadid is associated with parametricism, an interersting post-postmodern movement that, in my opinion, corrects for some of the mistakes of modernism but not others.
> There was one person in my entire state-sized region that could do custom tile.
Am I reading this correctly? This guy could only find a single tiler in "a very rich and very busy area"? That doesn't seem right... all the GCs and handymen whom I've met can install tile.
Presumably 'custom tile' means 'tile in a specific shape' (e.g., the hat monotile), a specific color, a specific material, etc.
While there are differences between different tile materials that need to be taken into account during installation - e.g., gray thinset has the potential to discolor white marble - it's basically the same job requiring the same skills regardless of what tile material is used.
On the material supply side, I believe the situation is unambiguous: there's a greater variety of tiles, grouts, and adhesives available now compared to any previous time in history. Within 15 minutes, you can find a supplier and place an order for just about any size, shape, and color of Moroccan zellige, Italian marble, or any other esoteric tile material you can think of.
And sure, not everyone who's willing to take your money in exchange for a tile installation is going to be a master craftsman. But why should we assume that hasn't always been the case? We only see the masterfully built historic buildings, because the crappy ones aren't around anymore.
I was just trying to make sense of another user's comment, not making any assertion of whether he was right.
Actually, I have some practical questions. I know how to answer (c)-(d) in continental Europe. (Of course one can then pay to have them transported, but I said "practical"; tiles are heavy and fragile - you don't want to mail 200kg as an individual.)
a) Where can I get tiles suitable for interior or exterior usage in the new "hat tile" shape? (I know how to 3D-print for puzzles; I'd like ceramic of this or any specific rectilinear shape that doesn't cost a fortune.)
b) Where can I get Penrose tiles that are suitable for external use in a cold climate, or for inside use in wet rooms? (All I know is a Spanish company that bakes terracotta at low temperatures.)
c) Where can I get irregular pentagonal tiles that tile the plane, other than the ones for the Cairo tiling?
d) (This should be easy.) Where do I get good-quality equilateral-triangle tiles - from a company that also makes squares of the same side length?
Not trying to prove a point - helping a friend!
Also, how would you go about finding a good tile-layer in the US - someone who can do a good job on a complicated pattern without using overly thick grout, say, and protecting the grout well? I don't think this should be that hard - some capable handymen can do it - but some friends of mine have just moved to a small city in the Midwest.
I wanted a size/color of tile that Pecchioli didn't offer, and they offered to make them for me. Unfortunately, they wanted nine bucks apiece (for a few dozen 2-inch tiles). I still sometimes wish I had taken them up on it, but I wasn't 100% sure the aesthetics would have worked. Mercury Mosaics also offered to do custom work for me, and looking at their studio it seemed likely that they're sufficiently non-automated that they could make more-or-less whatever you want.
When I redo my bathrooms, I am 99% certain that I will buy from one of these two companies (in the case of Pecchioli, through Alchemy Materials in NYC).
Both of these are expensive choices, but custom work is going to be expensive.
Anyone can install tile but not everyone can do it well. Even a basic tile job takes some skill. But to do truly custom tile work requires a level of skill not found in the parking lot of a Home Depot. The same goes for finding great carpenters and people who can hang, float and finish drywall. Building buildings takes a lot of labor and no amount of wishful thinking about 3D printing spitting out what a person wants will make that disappear.
New Orleans has some master craftsman but they're few and far between, in high demand for restoration work and expensive because the level of skill to execute the work requires time.
Knowing how much this crowd thinks about Rome, I'd like to point out that the first "manifesto" on architecture is considered to be Vitruvius' De Architectura also known as the Ten Books on Architecture where he elevated the Architect up from being a simple craftsman to an artist. So you can really lay the blame at that Roman's feet because his treatise is still taught in Architecture school today...teaching woke concepts of 'Firmness, Comodity, and Delight"
I'm not sure how convincing I find "everyone hates modern architecture so we should go back to classical, highly decorated buildings." I think there's an assumption here that it's possible to make people happy. But in an age where most art can be produced to extremely niche specific tastes it might be impossible to create *any* collective style that everyone agrees on.
If all the buildings in my neighborhood suddenly had gargoyles I'd find that...unnerving.
People who think they don’t like modern architecture should watch this video about Bob Hope’s house in Palm Springs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqhcFHDcAeI
It seems that Bob Hope’s wife didn’t like the style, so she filled it with over-the-top ornamentation, in a way that could have some appeal, but fails to take advantage of the desert vista and open air that John Lautner was trying to capture.
On the subject of AI's impact on construction, I'm bullish on its impact for two different reasons than what you posit:
* In the current state of AI, it threatens to displace a lot of white collar jobs mostly. Those marginal white collar workers might turn to skilled manual labor, making quality ornamented buildings more viable.
* If we get to robots for construction, they could significantly reduce one of the biggest costs of projects nowadays: safety. The "Build, baby, Build" crowd often laments that the Empire State was done in a single year, and the common retort is that a lot of people died in its construction. It seems that we've been increasingly trading off efficiency for safety as far as construction is concerned, and while we can argue about whether it's been worthwile until we go blue in the face, if the issue was just taken off the table altogether, then it could enable the construction of more cool things.
Maybe when AI creates mass white collar unemployment, these lost skills like enamel restoration will make a comeback.
"All that ornament - the gilded plaster, the cast iron balcony, etc - required trained artisans. These artisans aren’t completely gone - some of them were no doubt involved in the recent restoration of Notre Dame and other similar projects...."
Charleston, SC, is full of beautiful, well-ornamented old buildings, and, as they were old, they were in need of repair, especially after the town was walloped by Hurricane Hugo. With skilled practitioners hard to find -- many of the workers dealing with Hugo damage had to be recruited from Europe -- community members came together to found the American College of Building Arts, where traditional plasterwork/carpentry/architecture/ironwork/etc. would get its due, and provide a pipeline of workers able to repair and reconstruct the city's architecture.
The work ACBA students do is beautiful, and apparently remunerative - it's likely the one place you can get the equivalent of a degree in art, and be guaranteed a job at the end of it. Worth looking at, if you are a fan of anything that is not modern architectural bilge.
Wow, that's really encouraging to hear about.
Scott, as an architect, I can appreciate your consternation about finding books that would explain Modernism beyond the snide take of Wolfe's manifesto against Modernism. Sure, you can't be expected to read every history book or treatise on architecture (of which many predate Modernism and Bauhaus) but often the best education is visiting good architectural examples.
Kenneth Frampton's book Modern Architecture: A Critical History is a good book to check out to get a great understanding of the history of Modern Architecture. Witold Rybczynski's The Story of Architecture is also worth a read for anyone interested in architecture and the evolution of architectural styles over the centuries. I think people forget that the examples of Classical architecture we admire are the best iterations whereas the middling or terrible examples were torn down and replaced.
Frank Lloyd Wright is a great example of an architect's stylistic evolution over his career starting with his early, very decorative works to his Falling Water masterpiece. If you get the chance to visit it, I highly recommend it.
Louis Kahn's work is very much about shaping light and volume but also the abstraction of classical architectural tenents. His Salk Institute is a masterclass of contemporary architecture that does require more than a simple walk-by to understand and appreciate. Great Classical architecture requires this as well.
Allied Works Clyfford Still Museum in Denver is an amazing work of contemporary architecture that manages to instill an understanding of craftmanship and using natural light to create a space that is more than white walls for Still's paintings.
Another great work of modern architecture that blended craftsmanship and detail, albeit demolished to make way for the bloated MoMA expansion, was the Williams and Tsien's American Folk Art Museum.
>”Then I’d go home and look it up and all those people’s buildings would be hideous.”
This is exactly how I feel about Louis Khan’s “masterclass” Salk Institute. I had to triple check that I wasn’t looking at some other Salk Institute, because the building I saw looked like a shitty 50-year-old beachfront motel. This is supposed to be a research institute?
I have a few thoughts on this. I'm an engineering consultant who has spent 20 years working with a vast range of architects (from high design to mundane commercial), and I really do appreciate architects, what they're trying to achieve, and I will say, they are a lot more introspective than I think people are giving them credit for.
First comment; you mention in one of your responses that you're skeptical about all the criticisms of McMansions, and that they seem like lovely houses. But the main criticism of McMansions is that they don't follow any of the traditional rules of design, such as proportion, symmetry, or consistency (A mansion is not a McMansion!). These are not modern architectural design styles, these are essential components of classical architectural design too. This really does seem to me to be at the crux of the issue as to why people aren't valuing architectural design.
Second: in my long experience with architects, almost all architects adore modern architectural styles (when they're done well), but they also adore classical architecture. There is a whole segment of the professions that focuses on adaptive reuse, of updating classical architectural designs in a matching fashion. Similarly, a large proportion of architects are very critical of elements of Bauhause, modernism, and especially Brutalism. These are seen as products of their time, but there are also elements of beauty to them that architects can appreciate.
Third: one of the most important components of architecture is not just looks, it's how the building functions and flows. One of the classical issues with McMansions (and one of the core functions of an architect) is to think about how a building actually works, how it will be used, how it will feel. McMansions often fail this test horrendously; for examples, they'll have vast, cavernous spaces that feel empty and isolating, the location and placement of spaces like kitchens doesn't flow well to dining areas, rooms become abandoned because they feel too far away from living spaces. If you've lived in a properly designed house - not necessarily a fancy modern one, just one that has been carefully laid out based on these principles - it becomes very obvious what the issues are with homes that AREN'T designed to these standards.
(A similar issue arises with modern vs classical skyscrapers - people complain that all-glass towers just don't look as good, but if you've ever stoood on the 60th floor of a tower with all-glass windows, the expansive views and the feeling of looking out over a whole city is just.. like, amazing).
Fourth: I still think it's really critical to distinguish between different architectual styles even in modernism, but also in the drivers as to why buildings are designed the way they are - e.g. the difference in developer-led buildings, vs federally procured, vs privately-owned buildings - and how/why they were commissioned (e.g. was the desire for a building that functioned as a piece of art, or was it more practical or prosaic?). For example, modern apartment blocks are often awful and bland, but this is not about the architect; this is about developers valuing cost and speed of construction. I think it's important not to blur issues with Bauhaus and modernism with the spread of generic modern apartments, for instance.
Finally; understanding the rise of elements such as modern air-conditioning, modern lighting (LED's), double-glazing, curtainwall, modern materials, modern seismic and structural requirements, energy code requirements, ADA requirements, parking requirements, and I'm sure many other elements I'm forgetting about - all these things have massively influenced how buildings are designed. The technological story is extremely important and I feel this gets glossed over.
Nikos Salingos on Jim Rutt articulates well what makes architecture stand out (from a distance or while living in a space), he riffs on how it all went wrong too but that's well understood by now. If you're trying to feel less crazy about this debate, I think he might have some words to help you describe it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfyaeoWEEhg
I think that "modern=bad" and "classic=good" is overly simplistic. I'm no expert, but I did take one class about the history of architecture in college, and I had to do a presentation on Venturi's "Learning from Las Vegas." I really like a lot of modern and post-modern architecture. But I like a lot of the old stuff too, whether it's Greek temples or Gothic churches. I think you can have a "modern" building that does its job well and looks good.
Temperamentally, I'm a conservative, so I do harbor a certain hatred for the poorly thought-out buildings of starchitects--you know, the ones that ignore hundreds of years of time-tested traditions and end up with leaky ceilings, or walls that create death rays on neighboring sidewalks, or are totally unsuited to the climate. But as long as form follows function, and the building doesn't suck, I'm not going to get too upset about matters of taste.
In re "what people would or would not put up with aesthetically":
I've felt this way about the sort of sprawl that took hold in - the late 80s, 90s? At least down here in the Sun Belt. It had been quite different before that.
These new housing developments, usually isolated out on cheap land - or treeless farmland, so maybe not so cheap, in some cases never to be treed because that land just wanted to grow prairie grass - seemed almost a provocation, the identical-ness for one thing - no longer a dozen or couple dozen choices, no longer any variation in cladding.
But the weirdest was the continual pushing of the idea of they're still being single family houses, as they became squeezed into shotgun-like structures, the front walk barely capable of allowing one parked car, and the distance between your house and the next being four or five feet - that little bit of air either side of the fence that was all the view of the windows along the shotgun's sides - that little bit of air convincing people: this is a single family house! No shared walls, and no hated stomping overhead! But best not to yell anyway.
It came to seem like developers were trolling. "Granite countertops".
" Virgin Mary in a vat of urine" may not be a smart choice for a "dentist's office"- Still, I praise "Piss Christ" as beautiful&decorative photography and also: art. See the pic at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
Steven Pinker mocked it. As he did the Noble for Bob Dylan. Shrug.
The comments against modern architecture seem to be making one of two contradictory points:
a. Modern architecture is cheap and that's why cost-conscious committees love it, c.f. every drab college campus
b. Modern architecture is expensive, but architects force it through committees in spite of that. c.f. every over-designed museum or city hall
Modernist architecture is actually dozens of styles in a trench coat, which can obviously range from very cheap to very expensive. Even so, I would say that the style matters less to the overall cost of the project than whether the architect is willing to compromise his vision. If you treat the architect like a singular genius who gets to ignore nay-saying engineers and whiny residents, of course you'll get expensive boondoggles, even if he's building the most classical thing since the Parthenon.
TLDR the style doesn't matter, it's the weird insistence by design committees that every public building needs to be ~*unique~*.
I've yet to be convinced that classical buildings "age better" than modernist ones, once you account for all the money spent on restoration. If every new building were classical, most classical buildings would have no historical value and thus would not merit restoration. I'd much rather look at drip stains on concrete than have crumbling plaster and flaking paint everywhere.
Recently, Sam Kriss had an eulogy to Corbusier's Chandigarh as "incontrovertibly beautiful. There’s a certain type of person that can’t see a bit of raw concrete without frothing about ugliness and decadence and the plot to enslave the soul of western man, and they always seem to think I’m being some kind of devious contrarian when I say I find this stuff straightforwardly aesthetically pleasing, but I do, and I’m right. If you can’t appreciate the value of clean lines and pure geometric forms, I don’t really feel any need to take your opinions seriously. So far, I’ve never seen anyone actually explain why modern architecture is so intrinsically ugly. According to the traditional definition, beauty is symmetry, harmony, and proportion, and Le Corbusier’s buildings have all of those." I am kinda disappointed Scott did not response to Sam's text; mostly likely, Scott read it. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-in-india-part-2-the-city-beautiful
I was thinking - Le Corbusier had lots of cultish ideas and mad plans, but Chandigarh looks remarkable in pictures, and clearly a lot of thought was put into building for the weather - I would be willing to take a detour some day to see the city, and Le Corbusier's work in particular.
I mean, I read through the text, and like Scott above said "wow I never heard of that" and then I googled the images, and they are all pretty ugly. Like, they're cool in a way, but the buildings are ugly in a way that is intellectually interesting but I would not want to work in that Palace of Assembly, or live next to the Tower of Shadows compared to like, average European parliament building or park.
It is not that I disagree with your take/Scott's take - and if Scott had said: "Also, Sam Kriss recently praised Chandigarh, but my take is (Dusan)"; I'd nod along. But a) Sam's blog is on his "recommended" list (and Scott posted about Sam's posts at least twice), so ignoring Sam's take is kinda wilful. - b) Scotts 3 "examples" are made up names, while Le Corbusier is very much not some obscure niche-architect and state capital Chandigarh not an obscure little project somewhere (and it calls itself "city of beauty", so supposedly Indians can see some beauty there, at least they are not shouting "tear it down".).
When you think about the money and time and youth wasted on pursuing education credentials from selective schools, plus the aesthetic crimes we all are subjected to every day by architects posing as not just artists but intellectuals, and let's say you assign a 10% probability that Peter Turchin's ideas about elite overproduction and 50 year cycles of violence are correct and include a proportionate share of those costs, then negative sum status competitions start to look like a massively underrated problem in human affairs.
Odd that I can't find any mention of building code in this discussion.
There are a lot of aspects of fire code, setbacks, window requirements, etc. that are easier to fulfill and assess if your building is a rectangle.
Guess I'm in the middle on all this:
-- dislike brutalism both aesthetically and functionally, but don't hate it passionately.
-- have seen and been inside some Bauhaus buildings that I liked and some that I didn't; ditto postmodernism.
-- I like older styles just fine and am a big ol' history geek generally, but eyes wide open please. Classical and neo classical and Beaux Arts styles of structure have inherent practical drawbacks of their own. I grew up in a beautiful old Victorian house, raised a family in a classic early-20th American Foursquare, just completed 13 years with my office in one of Chicago's most famous 19th-century office buildings, etc. I love those sorts of spaces but they can be drafty and musty; many of them are gloomy inside; etc.
-- personal favorite style of architecture is Art Deco, of which there are a number of gorgeous examples still extant in Chicago. To me they are lovely both inside and out. Art Deco is certainly a less ornamented style than what went before it, but it does have its own flavors of ornament and those flavors to my eye look great. I'm unclear where Art Deco fits in the "classical vs modern" flame wars and haven't yet seen or read any particular reason to care.
If you agree with Wolfe or those like him, but wonder what to do: good news. There’s already a viable movement against boring buildings: https://humanise.org.
It’s from a super successful architectural studio. It already has a book, instagram, industry uptake, and great recent examples (Coal Drops Yard, Royal Pickering Singapore to pick two). Share it with anyone you can. Leave copies of the books near architecture school. Make the ‘The God of Boring’ tag from the book stick to Le Corbusier (incidentally, the Humanise book made me realise just how creepy he was - e.g. referring to cafe culture as ‘that fungus infesting Parisian life’).
Yes, it’s not pure old school, but I think that makes it less likely to lose the status game. Instead of a simple traditionalism, it has a deeper analysis of how to design buildings fit for humans; those qualities shared by older, evolved styles and the actually popular bits of modernism.
Fans of non-dystopian buildings, unite! We have a world to win ;) Buy the book then give it to your most influential friend.
> a viable movement against boring buildings
There was another at the turn of the century. Two concrete boxes came down in quick succession.
The thing about Tom Wolfe is that he's intuitive, not empirical. His method is to take what he knows about the subject -- in this case a certain kind of architecture -- and develop a picture of the fashions and the snobbery and absurdity of the era, and a lot of that picture is developed imaginatively, rather than by poring over data. He's smart and funny, and very very alert to the dynamics of social status and signaling, and so can produce these portrayals of how people felt and the kinds of things they thought and said, and he's probably accurate pretty often. But with that method one's likely to have a few big misses. If he had, say, read the diaries and letters of certain people from the period, he might have had a different view of some of the people, or the prevailing attitudes in different sets.
>Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go
If it were a story of pretentious academics forcing modernism onto a populace who loves ornament, then how come modernism has taken hold in so many other consumer artistic forms? Clothing, interior design, graphic design. The common man wears simple t shirts and pants, not ornament.
The worker who does well and buys a nice new house or renovates his kitchen will usually buy something that looks like this: https://woodhavenlumber.com/assets/news-events/568/7-new-costruction-kitchen-design-tips-for-a-small-space__detail.jpg
Clean square lines, no ornament, white walls, very modern.
Nobody writes in cursive, and in school people rolled their eyes at the absurdity they even bothered to teach it to us.
Tech company modernism seems to have its roots in founders’ aesthetic tastes rather than a snobby New Yorker scolding them away from ornamentation. At least that’s its roots— at this point I would believe if a company feels pressured not to rock the boat with overly detailed design.
My point is that as much as people PROFESS to want ornamentation, often their behavior suggests the opposite. Might not architecture be the same?
Excellent point.
I would add that Wolfe's interpretation of the sequence of events with the St. Louis public-housing complex is disingenuous. What residents of mid-20th century American public housing were sick of was not the architectural style of the buildings but:
(a) being warehoused in huge high rises, and
(b) those high-rises being allowed to deteriorate into conditions that would, within the same jurisdictions that were operating them, get a private landlord prosecuted.
In other words those St. Louisians were chanting "blow it up" because it had been allowed to become a large vertical slum. They weren't expressing a feeling about the architectural choices.
From the 1970s through 1990s the same thing happened in many cities including my hometown of Chicago.
In the early 1990s I co-owned and lived in a 3-flat in Chicago. Our top-floor tenants were a young working-class black family of which the parents had grown up in Cabrini-Green, a massive brutalist housing project then arriving at the final steps of the path that the St. Louis one had earlier travelled. They were sad about that because when they were kids Cabrini-Green had been "great, our families were happy there". The city hadn't yet given up on maintenance, and federal rules hadn't yet been changed to allow people lacking any income to get units. (My neighbor remembered exactly which year that rule had changed.) There was zero mention to me of the architectural style.
What the residents and their advocates in every US city seek instead is public housing which is at a more human sale, the term of art is "scattered-site". Some of that has been built, it is entirely in the bland postmodern style, and it's working better than the giant warehouses ever did -- nobody is lobbying for any of it to be blown up.
On the contrary they wish more of it could be built. That creates a policy headache because it's much less efficient: the same amount of public land and money can house far fewer poor people in low-rise and mid-rise buildings than in high-rises. This is one reason cities like Chicago and St. Louis have much less public housing than they used to.
But anyway the point here for this conversation is, the issue isn't and never was a matter of architectural preferences.
The underlying problem here is that much 20th and 21st century architecture is difficult to maintain without spending a lot. A system built pile of concrete boxes could last for centuries, but if the plumbing was run inside the concrete panels it becomes essentially impossible to fix plumbing problems. Tall buildings require proper lift maintenance, and for some reason that never gets considered in the overall cost. Flat roof means ongoing water proofing. Cladding requires pest control and debris removal for fire safety. Plate glass looks terrible unless regularly wiped down.
None of this is a problem with a reasonable maintenance budget. Public housing is not associated with sufficient ongoing maintenance. One reason lower density housing works (even if in public ownership) is because a lot of the costs of maintenance are effectively decentralized. It's hard to fix a leaking highrise as a tenant, but it's possible to climb up on the roof of a 2 floor structure to secure a loose roof tile instead of waiting for the city maintenance crew to get around to it.
I grew up in Florida. When I moved to BC, I was awestruck by the mountains, and would take every chance I could get to simply gaze at them.
This confused my partner, who grew up surrounded by mountains and didn't see what the big deal was. Meanwhile every time we visit Florida, she gets excited by things I find pedestrian, like how big the trees are, and the fact that lizards exist.
People are always more excited by aesthetics other than the ones they're used to.
For anyone curious not long after this books release (not even a year later maybe?) Christopher Alexander (representing heresy) and Peter Eisenman (representing the modernists) had a debate at Harvard which was at least on the surface over the use of space and shape. It devolved and ended up quite heated and Alexander actually appeared to win the audience over against the modernists. The most interesting point is where Eisenman actually says straight up "the point is reminding them (the public presumably) that its not ok" in reference to a building he appreciated because it apparently created a sense of unease on viewing which is a hell of a mask slip.
"demanded that everyone refer to him as “Le Corbusier” (French for “The Crow-Like One”) as some sort of combination artistic pseudonym / branding / flex. How are normal humans supposed to compete with people like these?" I don't know, mister Astral Star Codex, you tell me!
If I ever meet Scott, I'll insist on calling him by the blog name instead of "Scott."
That's a good idea. I wouldn't want him moving to another website and thinking of a new anagram again.
Another reason for the disaster in architecture is the death of civic culture. In the past rich people wanted to create beautiful buildings that pleased their fellow citizens. The building might be a private palace but its external beauty was a positive externality in the economic sense, a costly public good whose aesthetic appeal was available for free to the poorest. Wealthy patrons made these costly aesthetic investments because they *cared* about the esteem of their fellow citizens in the current and future generations. Sometime in the 20th century that norm collapsed; they stopped caring. Not only did they stop creating beautiful buildings, they actively took to creating public *bads,* shitty buildings emanating visual pollution that upset and depressed their fellow citizens.
> So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?
Sure, that's the kind of thing I would do, except for going to the cool party.
I had a classmate who seemed honestly confused that I might have a different opinion of which art looked good from the one that was taught in art classes.
love it
I really appreciated this piece. I was going to build a house last year, and for a variety of reasons didn't. Mostly, I concede, it was the price-to-rent ratio being unfavorable to building vs. renting. But also high on the list was that all the architects I could find were junk. That they probably went to school in the environment Wolfe describes here goes a long way toward explaining what happened. (Also, most good architects are not available to do work for individuals; they want to work with commercial clients, because the commercial clients are a lot less emotional and a lot more professional).
That said, I'd push back on the whole "modern architecture is all terrible." Mostly on the "all". (I admit I'm not entirely sure what "modern" means: is current architecture still modern, or is this modern in the sense of like "before postmodernism"?) I agree 100% the Le Corbusier and probably most of what Wolfe was writing about was terrible. But it's been a long time since then, and there are some legitimately beautiful modern spaces, like Hermes' gorgeous store in New York (https://interiordesign.net/designwire/hermes-madison-avenue-rdai-denis-montel-new-york/), or many of Extell's apartment buildings. Also, a lot of buildings that look kind of medium on the outside are REALLY nice inside. Like the house I'm currently living in. The market has been exerting pressure for forty years on the terrible ideas Wolfe was writing about in 1981, and even an idiot communist clock is right twice a day: some of those modern ideas, even if just by chance, must have been good; and many of those have survived while the rest of this nonsense went away.
Try "The second digital turn" by Mario Carpo for that book you say you'd like to find
My own aesthetics are something like 1% of modernist buildings are great. 10% are good, the rest are bad. And for beaux arts 10% are great, 60% are good, the rest bad.
If those views were widely shared I think it would explain why people generally respond in polls that they prefer traditional. But it would also explain the inner view of the architects who prefer modern. Giving them an inch, of course they want to master the more challenging style, but most of them cannot, but wont just come out and say it, so instead they reinvented light.
How about churches? I know in Europe new churches are, too, built in modernist style (all of them? Some of them?), and I don't know about America. But in Russia, church buildings remain highly traditional, with lots of ornamentation. For example, the very memetic Cathedral of Russian Armed Forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces) looks like something out of Warhammer 40K universe, which means it's anything but "simple and unadorned".
This means, at the very least, means there are no actual technical problems to making this type of buildings, counteracting costs and lack of professionals arguments. The only thing remaining is will. Well, will and money, of course, but while Russian Orthodox Church is rich, it's not Amazon-rich or Google-rich.
This made me think about what sort of houses I genuinely like. I think context matters here a lot. A house should not be viewed in isolation and as others pointed out here, a photo of a house is not a house.
Scandinavian architecture looks striking in Iceland. I think it is a bit too austere but it has its charm and fits the cold frigid north. Anything too fancy would just look out of place (and would be really hard to keep up). Brutalism is a travesty the way I see it but I can imagine a simple concrete building blending with a very lush forest (or a jungle) in a contrasting way (it would still be very hard to keep it up)...and so on.
One thing that McMansions are bad at is they don't really fit into any context, since they are a mishmash of styles.They can for example look sort of Mediterranean but then have these huge modern windows which just don't fit the style. It just throws me off immediately. There are some faux-medieval 19th/early 20th century buildings where I'm from, close to actual medieval/renaissance buildings and you can see that this was just some rich guy in the 19th century who liked romanticism but did not really understand the styles. It still looks way better than brutalism, mind you, but it doesn't compare with the actual renaissance stuff...and it doesn't compare with its almost contemporary art nouveau-style buildings either. It is just a mishmash. Kind of like when you compare faux movie medieval armour with actual (high) medieval armour. It just doesn't look as good because it was randomly put together by someone who knew very little about it vs people who spend generations refining it, understood why this and that has to be in this or that way to be functional while also taking care to blend functionality with aesthetics.
Take a roman villa like this one https://www.behance.net/gallery/98658473/Roman-villa-of-VilarencCalafell-1st-century-CE# . To me this is really beautiful, if I lived in the countryside (and perhaps a bit more to the south) I would probably want to build something like this (in a city I would love a Roman Domus instead, I just love those atria ... but I probably could not afford it and also it would look so out of place outside the Mediterranean that I would actually not want it after all). But if you added large modern windows to it, you'd just ruin it completely, it would be like a movie from ancient Rome with everyone wearing jeans for some reason.
But a lot of modern architecture also does not really fit in. It so often tries to dominate over what's already there instead of blending in (that's not being exactly the same or cookie cutter but respecting the surroundings). A building is a projection of an architect's ego more than anything else ... I think this might be improving now but people like Le Corbusier were exactly like that and hopefully a special place in hell filled with a lot of McMansions was reserved for them.
Does anyone know what happened to Bauhaus between the 80s and now? I google-image-searched "Bauhaus" to get some more examples, and most of what I saw aligned with this: https://www.robern.com/article/bauhaus-style. (For those who don't want to click the link, there are some pretty dramatic colors, along with curves, rugs, high ceilings, and upholstered furniture.) I can sort of trace design elements -- there's a lot of concrete, and the rugs are at least flat-weave -- but it's a pretty far cry from what Wolfe described.
Separately, I've been shopping for large inexpensive prints on Temu to cover some damaged and stained walls in a "historic" Bay Area rental. A ton of them follow this pattern: repeated semicircles (curves!) in bright colors (not gray!) with the word "Bauhaus" on them. (Something like this: https://www.mercari.com/us/item/m49068611992/.) This was actually the first place I encountered Bauhaus, and what made me interested to read this article. I kept getting recommended these, so I assume people buy them. Does anyone know what's up with these? Are these a modern Bauhaus style? What makes them so attractive to Temu shoppers looking for large prints with a budget of $0.11?
Much needless trouble can be avoided by avoiding education beyond necessary literacy including in math and science;
But above all every boy must learn a trade, profession and begin working at puberty.
Soldier if nothing else.
I’m realizing I’m an outlier for genuinely liking a lot of weirder Bauhaus-derived stuff (see: the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center)
But I also like A.G. Cook, an artist who reveled in making stuff that was 50% unlistenable and 50% incredible
I think there’s something to artworks that are compelling ugly just to see what happens when you push the limits of an idea…but drawing the line from Le Corbusier to flat-panel five-over-one “luxury apartments” is an important counterpoint. A.G. Cook with the edges sanded off gets you a Charli XCX’s brat. Bauhaus with the same treatment is just bland.
Scott, have you read Wolfe's book on Darwin and Chomsky, The Kingdom of Speech? I think that if you looked into it you might reconsider his reliability as a source of art history. Your model here seems to be that while Wolfe might be a bit unfair, he's basically giving the accurate gist of things. I don't think that's true.
I have yet to find an author that does as well in “starting from 0” as Christopher Alexander in “A Pattern Language. The work starts from the stance of observation - identifying the patterns of architecture and livable spaces, the world over.
I don’t know if I would agree with the statement that spending on architecture and buildings are still considered foo-foo in the commercial world. You only have to look at the exorbitant prices of the salesforce tower, apple infinity loop, the new JP Morgan HQ, Morgan Stanley’s insanely expensive renovation, etc. to develop the stance that willingness to pay isn’t the primary driver of a lack in ornamentation.
The building captioned as "Edward Stone's Museum of Modern Art" is (or rather was) the "Gallery of Modern Art." It confused me for a bit because I know the MoMA definitely doesn't look like that. I had to do an image search to figure out the real building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Columbus_Circle
It's unfortunate (though on brand) for Wolfe to blame this on socialism. Because the real culprit is deeper than that.
Consider Adolf Loos, author of 'Ornament and Crime,' one of the primary statements of the modernist avant garde. "Behold, " he wrote "the time is at hand, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, the capital of heaven. It is then that fulfilment will have come.”
Or consider Marinetti's 'Futurist Manifesto': “Look! There on the earth, the earliest dawn! Nothing can match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, skirmishing for the first time with our thousand-year-old shadows.”
Or Le Corbusier himself: "Never has a return to the past been recorded, never has man retraced his own steps… To imitate the past slavishly is to condemn ourselves to delusion, to institute the ‘false’ as a principle… The mingling of the ‘false’ with the ‘genuine,’ far from attaining an impression of unity and from giving a sense of purity of style, merely results in artificial reconstruction capable only of discrediting the authentic testimonies that we were most moved to preserve.”
All of these are future-oriented utopian visions. And the Bauhaus, with its socialist associations (though Gropius himself wasn't particularly political), yet even more so with its functionalist ideal, was also utopian. But Loos was no socialist; Le Corbusier's politics were "whoever will pay me to instantiate my authoritarian vision"; and the futurists begat the house style of fascism. (As a side note, the early Soviet Union produced lovely architecture, including all those cool subway stations - until Corbusian modernism took off in the West and they started to worry that they seemed backwards; thus was born the Communist apartment block.)
What unites these politically diverse progenitors of early modernism was the Myth of Progress. This is in fact the *crucial* feature of modernism, because it is demanded the erasure of place, and that meant the erasure of history, particularity, distinctiveness, complexity, and ornament. The utopian future had to be uncontaminated by that particularity; thus it had to be abstract, simple, clean, easy to grasp at a glance. It also demanded the "god's-eye view," i.e. the perspective of 'High Modernism,' as James C. Scott talks about. This is because the "perfect" society, the City of the Future, could exist only in abstraction, and the visual disposition in embodiment that is entailed by the god's-eye view is necessary for their sort of abstract conceptualization.
The result is that modernism is not merely indifferent to everything that most people appreciate about architecture (including ornament, visual complexity, and solicitation at the tactile and proprioceptive registers); it is, and ideologically must be, *actively hostile* to that stuff. Because anything that makes a structure more of a meaningful place makes it *less* appropriate to the abstract space which they conceived as their proper medium. Utopia only exists in abstract space; which is to say, it exists nowhere. Modernist architecture is, then, the architecture of nowhere.
Like I say, this is deeper than the socialist influence; it's deep enough to encompass various political ideologies from left, right, and center. If the socialist influence were as dominant as Wolfe presents it, after all, wouldn't it be weird that it would come to be the dominant style of the Soviet housing block *and* Fortune 500 corporate headquarters?
And then there are even deeper roots than the Myth of Progress, which go back to Descartes and the very nature of modern Western thought, but I'll leave it there for now. (More on that here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20539320.2019.1587963)
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The other thing I would say is that this is a little unfair to postmodernism. For one thing, I think most of the examples of "postmodernism" here are actually deconstructivist. There are plenty of examples of postmodern architecture that are quite elegant and consciously engaged in resurrecting traditional wisdom in architecture and urban design. And some postmodern theorists (e.g. Charles Jencks, Kenneth Frampton) were explicitly concerned with returning to the particularity of place.
Ironically, the criticism of postmodernism as being sort of cartoonishly baffling or "modernism-lite" is a recapitulation of what the architecture school snobs said about it. I think it's a real shame that it fell out of favor so quickly; you could imagine postmodernism developing in the direction of ever greater eclecticism, ever more deep exploration and melding of various architectural traditions, and even a reinvigoration of the crafts that had been an integral part of traditional architecture. But instead the architecture schools got bored with it after a decade or two, and then they got into that deconstructivist stuff and *actual* forms of modernism-lite that are just, like, "what if a rectangle but then one of the edges is kind of funky." They may have found a way to actually make worse stuff than International Style architecture...
I disagree that FBTOH was so much a critique of modern architecture. The real villain of the book was postmodern architecture, and I agree with that sentiment.
Uncle Screwtape must have loved Bauhaus.
This seems like an underrated place for EA-style action. If (as the surveys suggest) around 75% of people are upset with modernist buildings then there is a massive potential to increase subjective well-being by advocating for traditional architectural styles. We should be sponsoring apprenticeships in stonework and ornamentation. I assume that all the defenders of modernist architecture in the comments would still agree that the data supports this approach, even if it would result in built environments that they personally find less pleasing. Happily for them there are so many concrete boxes in the world that they are unlikely to run out of refuges for their rarefied tastes.
I should note that most of what captures the masses aesthetic preferences for buildings an be captured by a few basic principles most of which stem from geometric relationships we evolved to be used to seeing in nature: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494418305280
https://web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~iba/papers/PURPLSOC14_Properties.pdf
As always when this topic comes up, it's very frustrating because you still haven't done a good job *of even defining the problem that you think exists*.
One moment you'll be talking about the ubiquity of glass boxes (which is mostly a matter of cost and convenience triumphing over all else and are actually very nice for the occupants) and the next you'll be complaining about weird sculpture-like buildings instead!
> Still, I would like to read another book by someone equally talented who gives . . . well, exactly one inch. They don’t need to praise modern architecture’s beauty and brilliance - in fact, I would rather they didn’t. I want a book by someone who is overall skeptical, who at least has as a hypothesis “this is all an elite signaling game gone tragically wrong” - but who’s also willing to explain what the modern architects thought they were doing, in their own minds.
For me, this was Seeing Like a State. It was thoroughly against modernism, but it ended up making a solid argument that... modernism isn't perfect. Which is, like, doh. In the process however it also indirectly argued that it's still pretty damn good.
Born in 1950, weaned on the brisk, rolling hills of Ithaca, New York, I was rudely transplanted to the flattest section of the Midwest, to an appropriately ironically named Urbana, Illinois. The University campus had a few interesting old buildings, but its growing pains in the 1960's were infected by the Modernist plague Wolfe describes, likely trickling down from the Chicago demigods.
While not overly aligned with the political stridence of the vanguard, the pragmatic stylings served practicality - they're far cheaper to design and construct, especially now with computer software that even specs materials, while factoring in building and fire codes. And college dorms especially were easy targets; as campuses swelled, cheap housing was satisfied with expedient rectilinearity, and a stream of residents who knew their suffering was temporary, a rite of passage. Beyond that, the infamous Chicago Cabrini Projects proved a disastrous experiment in perpetuating the worst psychological aspects of living in poverty.
Thankfully, a few designers have revisited the quaint notion, that structures should evoke qualities other than stoicism, regret, unquestioning conformity, and obeisance. There are myriad reasons why Notre Dame was rebuilt in five years, with hundreds of craftspersons thought to be extinct emerging from their huts to revive their arts, when not a single modern edifice including the Twin Towers inspires a moment's thought of rebuilding as a form of devotion.
Still, the chic designer mags disguising the upscale real estate ads and pricey furnishings, that are often laid around town in hipster coffee bars, for free, are replete with the same austere yet expensive sterility-guaranteed formats as their forebears.
Two elements are striking: first, glass walls with a lack of curtains, combined with lighting directed so as to display to the outside viewers the layout and possessions and persons within - light pollution be damned - versus creating optimally satisfying and functional lights to benefit those inside; second, the ubiquitous draining of most any color, except the sofa-sized contemporary painting, or space-consuming sculpture, again visible from across the back fence.
Cozy, comfortable, lived-in, eclectic, personally curated homes and furnishings don't sell, to those desperate to buy bragging rights. Those with money, but little genuine taste or self-confidence to commit to what pleases them, will follow their designer or gallery owner's advice, then spend a decade living in cognitive dissonance, with therapy, counseling, acrimony, and divorce, unable to blame their angst and despair on their self-imposed personal sanitarium.
Are all of these quotes from Wolfe's book?
An important nominative determinism that Scott missed: “Mies” means shabby in German.
There's a review of Brady Corbet's new film, The Brutalist, which complains that it portrays immigrant architects in post-WW2 America as underdogs opposed by the wealthy establishment, when in our actual history they were quickly embraced.
https://www.curbed.com/article/what-the-brutalist-has-to-say-about-architecture.html
I think modernist and postmodernist architecture are part of an entirely deliberate plan to make us suicidally depressed. I find it curious that you never considered this as a possible motive.
I like it too. I remember visiting 450 Sutter which may or may not be a beautiful building. (https://www.sfgate.com/obscuresf/article/450-sutter-st-beautiful-lobby-17603967.php). I had a doctor's appointment on the ~24th floor. What stood out was how amazing the view was but you couldn't see the view unless you walked right up to the window and looked out because the windows were small. Compare this to modern glass buildings with floor to ceiling glass. The views are gorgeous! If that's a trade off I have to make then I'd choose the new buildings over the old.
I think the memetical winds might be blowing in your sails. Aversion towards condescension, populism, democratization / participative democracy and aesthetic relativism seem to be going strong.
Personally, I don't say I'm against modern architecture because a lot of people imagine neo-futurist buildings like those by Zaha Hadid, which I think are awesome. I also prefer kitsch over Bauhaus but I think utilitarianistically optimal buildings would be attempting to convey as much interesting experience as possible with a few elements. That's one reason why logos became simpler - good logos aren't photorealistic and thus, allow the mind to find personally interesting gestalts within their lines and in effect, co-create them.
I'm the opposite of an architect, but have stayed in areas with mostly older-style buildings (at least the areas I was in) - Boston, Cremona, and University of Chicago campus (lol). Also new ones, such as much of the Bay Area, El Paso, and the Illinois Institute of Technology campus.
Older buildings often strike me as more beautiful. My main complaint is how small and dark the interiors can be. If every single building is in built in this sort of... dark, intricate way, it feels a bit like I'm being trapped in a maze? One nice thing about California buildings is they're more spread out, and it doesn't feel like you're trapped in an elaborate box or a ship. I also like buildings which incorporate "central green space"/courtyards like the original Chinese siheyuan.
I want lots of light and space while still being decorative. I don't really know of style which prioritizes both these things. I guess the Spanish Mission style? But it's not to my taste either.