Theoretically though, under capitalism, capitalists exploit *workers* not (necessarily) consumers, right? Did Marx analyze the capitalist/consumer relationship as well as the capitalist/worker one? The claim here is that it's elite taste *among* architects and architecture critics that is dominating, not the taste of the capitalists who own shares in the companies making the buildings. Maybe that's just false, but if it's false, there can't be an obvious Marxist answer for why it's the case. Or maybe it's true, but then it's not really capitalist taste per se that is dominant: an architecture prof is a wage laborer more than a capitalist (though she might be the latter a bit too through her pension.)
I think what Scott's assuming is two things (neither of which I have a strong opinion of the truth-value of): firstly that modernist architecture is distinctly a minority taste even among super-rich people who purchase large buildings and secondly that houses bought by the average buyer, who is not a captain of industry, are also more modernist than those buyers would ideally like.
Insofar as the first thing is true-and again, I emphasize I don't really have an opinion on this, and I think Scott is assuming it without much evidence-my guess is that the explanation is that whatever the personal taste of their owners, big companies value having architecture that 'experts' (i.e. architects, critics, profs) think is good/cutting edge/interesting.
"The market will *do* XYZ" is a poorly-defined claim, as the market is not itself an actor. Instead, you need an account that describes (or better yet - predicts!) the actions of the agents within the system.
If there are more people who want to buy American shingle-style houses than currently exist, it does no good to talk about elite pressure without mentioning how that actually translates into incentives on potential homebuilders. Declining to include the latter leaves a hole in the core of what the argument is attempting to answer.
(It also leaves you in the situation of having to explain how elite taste and ideology has apparently centered around Japanese econoboxes and the Ford F-150 for the past half-century, but I digress.)
The elite (i.e. owners of companies) have at least *some* incentive to produce products people want since that is one way to make money. Obviously this is not the only incentive they have (for example, they also have an incentive to *create* wants) and other incentives could clash with this (i.e. they have a competing incentive not to produce and market a book expressing communist ideology even if people want such books. for obvious reasons, though nonetheless, publishing firms do sometimes do this to make money!). I've not read Marx, but I'd be *surprised* if he would have denied this.
Mostly true. But the odds of the term being applied seem to be inversely proportional to the number of old trees in the yard. Anything in a subdivision that was razed with bulldozers before construction is automatically a McMansion.
Partially, but it's also fairly universally a house where the contractor tries to give the appearance of MONEY while cutting enough corners to pad their margin.
Thus, it's a kind of class thing where its: "This fucking prole doesn't even know what a well build building looks like; he payed all this money for the house equivalent of big mac coated in 15 cents worth of gold leaf for 200$"
Few things inspire more contempt than low-budget ostentation.
And McMansions are tied to the whole suburbia thing, which has all sorts of destructive social side effects. So they tend to catch flak they only half deserve for (admittedly bad) things like unwalkable neighbourhoods and economic segregation.
1. "Mass produced large home" -- such homes, by nature of their mass production, were built in close proximity to other such homes, generally on smaller lots than would have been used for homes of that size in previous decades. A building that might have been appreciated standing by itself is diminished when crowded by its peers. Give it fifty years for the trees to grow in, and this will improve.
2. "Asymmetric large home" -- certain homes were designed from the inside out. That is, a floor plan was carefully chosen, then enclosed by exterior walls without regard for whether the building exterior expresses symmetry or other generally appreciated elements of aesthetics. Preferences that the interior contain certain large spaces (the great room, the three car garage, anything with vaulted ceilings), coupled with budgetary constraints that preclude anything of balancing size on the other half of the structure, lead to floor plans that could not be made symmetric even if the architect had been so included. Although the roof lines of some 00s construction imply that frequently the architect was not so inclined and was literally enclosing the predetermined interior space with the required structural elements at minimized materials cost.
Of course if you want to start pointing fingers, MOST of those design elements are a consequence of zoning laws...
What you REALLY start with is a set of laws -- setbacks, maximum height, maximum floorspace, along with certain aesthetic elements that are known to be safe (ie you won't have to risk the plan being turned down on vague "looks wrong" reasons, and having to delay six months).
So, within those constraints, you can either build a small house that looks "balanced" (according to the lights of commenters on this blog) or you can try to get as close to your ideals as possible. This leads to a lot of elements that people are mocking, like high ceilings, because mostly you are allowed a lot more height than you are allowed floor space, so you can grow upward each floor by a foot or two more, making it feel larger.
It feels like most of the people commenting here have never actually been through the process of building a house, either in terms of the planning/architecture aspects or the budgeting aspects -- or are imagining that the entire country is controlled by whatever is important in their local experience.
In a place like LA, land is phenomenally expensive. Which means that, once you have paid $600K for a small suburban lot, just the land, WHY NOT put up the most, nicest, house you can? The cost of many aspects of building is just not that high once the land cost is figured in. This is a totally different calculation from if you're building in some small town somewhere, where the lot cost you $30K.
Finally
- stone facing is not nearly as cheap as some people here seem to think. Cheap is stucco. Slightly more expensive is (many different varieties) siding. Brick is usually cheaper than the nicest stone facing.
So much of this ultimately boils down to "people should want the things I [claim to] want". All that supposed tolerance for other lifestyles goes out the window when it comes to judging houses. WHO ARE YOU to insist that the most important feature of a house is a balanced floor plan, rather than a large master bedroom or a 3-car garage or a vast kitchen?
Almost every time I post, I try to point out the discrepancy between what Woke claim they believe about the world, and the way people actually behave in any circumstance that doesn't meet a Woke template. If I made fun of someone's hairstyle, you'd be all over that with "right to self-expression, individuality, blah blah". But housing is, apparently, not a protected class, so that same ignorant mockery is considered just fine -- bring on all the stereotypes you like, feel free to mock other just because they have different values and beliefs from you.
It is, look at the side of the building. Only having stone as a facade is a clear indication of a McMansion and cost cutting. It is however a far above average McMansion.
That's just a consequence of being modern. It's not like this building has mismatched windows, or unnecessary gables, or dormers peeking out of nowhere, which I think of as many of the hallmarks of a McMansion.
Only one of those mcmansions actually looks bad to me though, all of them look substantially better than the more modernist white concrete cube thing on my street. Now that building *is* more space efficient than a mcmansion, but I would prefer a schizophrenic re-interpretation of a victorian rowhouse to almost any cubic concrete modernist building.
Which is sort of the point, even a *bad* example of older styles of architecture looks better than a relatively well done example of more modernist styles.
On the other hand, I think the colourful facades on most 5 over 1 style buildings are perfectly fine, and think they look at least as good as the more monotonous british georgian stuff. Similarly the glass towers also look fine, they're not beautiful or anything, but they're practical and not an eyesore.
It's specifically the concrete heavy brutalist/modernist stuff that I think people really dislike, the glass towers and colourful facades are a good trade off between aesthetics, space and natural light
I think it’s a learned taste. Or maybe not even that. I remember reading that not one architect of brutalism built themselves a brutalist house.
I did see a concrete house being built on grand designs once, the excellent British (ITV) house building program. The house was pretty ugly at the end, the long suffering wife was still long suffering.
Channel 4. There's more than a few episodes where the overly enthusiastic hubby gets A Look.
There's at least one where the concrete supplier turns up on site to see what he's being asked to do, and promptly refuses to get involved. Cut to structural engineer going through the plans, who basically announces that the building will not stand up.
I actually don't mind it, occasionally. But it only works when it is contrasted against other things that are more colourful or ornamented, in my view (e.g. fallingwater). It's broadly bad without that caveat imo.
Brutalism is okay when it's disappearing behind encroaching tropical jungle: for example, concrete buildings often look adequate on a sunny day in verdant Brazil.
But brutalism looks bad on a cloudy day in downtown Boston with a big windy square in front of it and no greenery to hide behind.
Boston City Hall is a notable example because of how dead of a public space it created. When the only people that want to use your space are skateboarders, and you are determined to ban them from using it because it's intended for other people who don't want to use it anyway, then that's a bad sign.
I suspect a lot of mid-century modernism gets a bad wrap because it was the transition point away from pedestrian-centric urbanism to car-centric. That plus people without the talent to do it well emulating it in context it wasn't intended for clients whose primary concern is cost per square foot.
which, if it were 300 years old would be rhapsodized as "example of traditional, simple, pre-mechanical building, the asymmetric lines and not quite right angles showing the human element of the construction"...
$2 mil is pretty cheap for a ridgetop Pasadena house with an infinity pool a million dollar view. A non-brutalist house there would probably go for $2.5 mil.
OK, the write-up of the brutalist house says there's no pool ... right above a photo of an infinity pool, which I'm now guessing is part of a different house.
That is something of my point! You are paying essentially that price for the land, not for the house. Most buyers would, I expect knock down the house and build something they preferred.
People who do not live in these large cities like LA are totally clueless as to land costs. Once the land costs so much, a very different set of calculations about the actual house are in play than when the land is much much cheaper...
There are other, much nicer, brutalist buildings in the LA area -- my point was that brutalist homes, like everything else, come in both attractive (IMHO) and horrible (IMHO) varieties.
What about Fallingwater, or other Frank Lloyd Wright houses? I love those. They just need taller doorways, screen windows, and in the case of Fallingwater, more buckets.
Yeah, Fallingwater is fine (though personally I think if the concrete had sandstone brick styling (with say facades), I think it would look better). It only works because of the greenery around it though, it suits the environment it's in. This is not true for the average thing people see, which is just this misshapen concrete cube house
Fallingwater's big problem is that it's a shit building in practical terms, not that it's ugly (although it also is grotesquely ugly). Due to the stunningly idiotic location directly over a stream, it's apparently very damp and mold-prone, and whoever's responsible had to spend over ten million dollars to renovate the structure in the early oughts (more than six times the original construction cost adjusted for inflation, although presumably there's a great deal of cost disease involved there as well) due to the... "audacious" design gradually collapsing.
It has a lot of leaks inside--there are buckets in many of the rooms to catch the water. But I think that's due more to it being Wright's first experiment with concrete, and to the cantilevered design, which puts too much stress on the concrete. (The water leaks in from above, through the cracks in the concrete, not from the stream.) I'm not a fan of cantilevers, nor of the general aesthetic criterion "appears to defy gravity", though I like the building otherwise. The location is very beautiful, and I admire the ambition if not the execution.
Fallingwater also suffers excessively from the restrictions Wright put into the contract, even more so, I think, than most of his houses, in terms of requiring the owners to keep the same decor, the same furniture in the same places, and so on. He was a great architect, but a total control freak.
The most interesting thing to me about the mansion vs. McMansion article is that the author specifically compares to the New Traditionalist style - which seems to be exactly the thing that Scott laments not existing! Quality, expensive homes built in skillful emulation of traditional styles.
The distinction between mansion and mcmansion, as far as I can actually tell from that link is just that mcmansion owners are poorer and can't afford big expensive lots. This is one of the most classist documents I've read in a long time.
The website goes into quite a lot of detail on what differentiates the two. Some examples include imitation materials, poor craftsmanship (like windows that don't really fit in the space), mixing of distinct styles or elements, and disproportionate features. I don't know how you read the whole thing or anything else on MMH and got "small lots."
It explicitly calls out "the house is too big for the space" as a major consideration for calling something a McMansion.
> A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot.
Also, why is mixing styles bad? We do that all the time, with every kind of art. These aren't being designed as canonical showpieces for a specific style in architectural school, they're designed to be somebody's house. There's no particular reason they have to be a perfect example of some pre-existing style.
> It explicitly calls out "the house is too big for the space" as a major consideration for calling something a McMansion.
As one factor among several, yes. But also, what you said above is a complete misrepresentation. Many McMansions are on quite large lots, but the house is proportionally very large. I grew up near many McMansions; they aren't being built by poor people. The author, as far as I can tell, is certainly not an heiress snobbishly looking down on the upper middle class.
> Also, why is mixing styles bad?
You should read the actual blog instead of my exceedingly brief summary. The older styles have thought put into them so that elements go together for a particular reason. Mixing styles isn't necessarily bad, but taking a handful of elements you like and throwing them together without rhyme or reason is very likely to be unattractive, like orange juice and milk are both good but disgusting together.
No, they are being built by the merely upper middle class who fancy themselves rich - which, from the perspective of the sort of people who can afford New Traditionalist mansions built by “serious” architects (or who fancy themselves serious architects), is even worse.
Disagree, McMansions are built for lower-middle-class but wealthy people. The sort of people who somehow got rich despite going to an unprestigious college or (shock, gasp) not even going to college at all.
Upper middle class people _really_ hate it when they see lower-middle class people with more money than them.
I read your "in particular, try this article" link, which seemed like enough research to make comments. I didn't get the impression of conscious classist bias, but it's a lot like the different covid policies for planes versus cars crossing borders - it's de facto pretty classist, even so.
I didn't post a link, I'm just familiar with MMH. A big part of the distinction is that McMansions are cheaply trying to imitate high quality stuff. However, that doesn't mean it's classism. Some things you just can't fake easily for cheap. Some things are different--for a post about how real diamonds are better just because they're real even though they look identical to the naked eye, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But even to my untrained eye when I was 10, these houses looked kind of ridiculous.
You can make an equally big building that doesn't look too big for its space, if you're willing to change the style. But if you've chosen a style that has big eaves and high ceilings, and then compressed it onto a small lot, you're going to tighten up all the angles in ways that just make it look crowded. You'd be better off building a modernist cube of the same square footage (and perhaps even larger cubic footage) that will fit well with that smaller lot.
What is WRONG with it "looking crowded"? I personally love that look.
If someone wants a garden, great. But if they don't want a garden, just some strips of greenery around the house to meet local ordinances and provide some slight framing, so what?
My region of LA is full of houses like that, and while I may dislike some design elements of some of them, I basically love the way they fill the lot for every single one of them.
This is no different from complaining that skyscrapers are too tall, should be less vertical!
I suspect that "modernist styles more effectively use the same space" is true, and an element of Moloch. That said, some people don't like it, some people prefer inefficient traditionalist styles. So then it comes down to a style trade-off, would you rather have a not-great implementation of a style you like (crowded traditional) or a good implementation of a style you don't like (not-crowded modern) to arrive at the same usable space?
Some people are going to make the crowded traditional choice, and I think shaming them as McMansions moves us away from solving the housing crisis.
The first paragraph seems right to me. Different people have different taste, and might as a result be better off with different houses. I do think they'd be better off if they learned to like the style that works better for their situation, but not everyone can do that with every single feature of their life, so some amount of compromises will be essential.
I don't see how "shaming" McMansions causes any problems with the housing crisis though. There is no legal bite to any of this shame, and if the shame leads them to live in houses that make more efficient use of our limited land, that could even help the housing crisis. It would only be a problem if somehow McMansion shaming meant that less housing got constructed, or if it got constructed more expensively, rather than more cheaply because people start eschewing the ostentatious decorations that add cost without function.
"A house too big for its lot" describes a lot of the houses on my street, including mine, where the distance from one side wall to the property line is less than my arm span on one side, and I don't have any greenery on the other side because the driveway runs from the wall to the property line. In front I have perhaps 15 feet from the front wall to the sidewalk. My house occupies (proportionately) more of its lot that the house I grew up in.
One of the houses was built in the twenties, and one in the eighties.
It's the one built in the twenties that is less well-fitted to its lot; having 2/3 the floorspace but less than half the lot of the one built in the eighties.
If I had the money and could do it in compliance with code, I'd both raise the roof on my house AND put an extension out the back that would eat up a good third of the remaining back yard.
My dad, a property developer, pointed out just that. "Look how smashed together those houses are. My lots are a half acre."
And it's not a new observation that elites (and wannabe elites) heartily enjoy punching down and abusing the poors. You can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you've picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying.
The actual dynamics of McMansion sneering are all about people with higher social class + little money punching people of low social class + a lot of money.
Whether that's seen as punching "up" or "down" rather depends on whether you're more conscious of economic or social class; I think that on the whole Americans tend to be shockingly blind to social class (much more so than in other countries) which is why the likes of McMansion Hell seem to think that they're actually behaving virtuously rather than merely seething with outrage that the peasants have money.
The attitude and language of the critique is very elitist. It’s not just that they are ugly (lots of high art is ugly, often intentionally so), it’s that they are ugly in the way a cheap unlearned person would create. That is, they are gauche.
I don't see that they are ugly, probably because I am socially lower-class and lack the refinement to notice you never mix taupe with exposed moulding.
I love the way you claim "they are ugly", as though that's some objective fact.
Nevermind that not only do plenty of people want a house like this, but many people involved, from the architect to the buyer to the town planners all did NOT think they were ugly.
I personally dislike the elites (whoever they are) punching at lowers; I come from a society that never had their own aristocracy and I don't know which social class I'm supposed to be in, but anyway, I'd never insult anyone for having an un-developed taste.
But I can somehow see a difference between McMansions and mansions and I dislike the first aesthetically. Having not studied art, I don't know what the relevant aspects are that irritate me when looking at McMansions, but the intuition is strong. I also dislike most of the modern architecture though, so my only way to be satisfied is to buy an actual old house in frail condition and try to fix it up. (Old houses in good condition are far too expensive).
You don't need to be educated to spot a house with three unnecessary roof lines, or 6 different window sizes subtly out of square and go "Eugh."
While I LOVE a decent amount of modern architecture (not you calatrava, fuck off. Ghery, you're on the watch list.), the things you don't like in it are probably replicated in mcmansions, but without the intentionality.
I am sure this is occasionally true but in my mind when I see a McMansion I think, "It is unfortunate that you could have had a nicer house but instead you chose to show off what you think people will see as a nice house."
It is purchasing for show. I suppose I do view this differently, depending on the wealth of the culprit. I view the behavior much more harshly when done by the rich.
It reminds me a lot of MySpace pages. You give people a lot of freedom to express themselves in a medium, but you give them no training in that medium, and they choose a bunch of things that may individually look nice, but just fail horribly when they go together.
It’s about more than that, though. There are a lot of places in the US where it’s illegal to build almost anything *but* a McMansion. And the size and shape of many of those homes isn’t being driven by consumer demand based on lifestyle preferences, but on ticking certain boxes in terms of square footage and arrangement to get the house valued as high as possible as an investment. Or at least that’s how a lot of McMansions got built. It’s not all sneering at “poor people with money”, because it’s not clear what percentage of their actual tastes or desires is being represented in these houses. They’re products of perverse legal and economic incentives, too, and thus objects of scorn.
Are modernist cubes banned in these places? My understanding is that it's common for zoning laws to force people into modernist cubes, but nothing forces you to have mismatched eaves and gables, and different styles of window in every room.
But shouldn't one make do with a small lot if one has no intention of ever /using/ the lot? Mansions originally had vast lands, on which to graze sheep, ride horses, construct hedge mazes, and hold garden parties; and I suspect the purpose of a lawn was to show you were so wealthy that you could afford to maintain a lawn (which was fabulously expensive in the days before lawnmowers, fertilizers, weedkiller, rubber hoses, and so on). The lawn no longer proves anything, parties are held indoors, and horses are zoned out; big lawns are useless even to the old money.
I think gardens (not lawns) are beautiful, and one of the things most lacking in cities is more greenery. Put a bunch of big old trees around a McMansion and it goes from eyesore to quirky - around an actually well0designed mansion, they bring it up from "nice" to "stunningly beautiful". Unfortunately, big trees make construction complicated, so developers cut down everything to save money, and people wonder why the suburbs are soulless. The only solution is to build things that last, plant trees, and wait - truly magnificent trees take decades to grow, which is why it's such a travesty when they get cut down
Trees also cause long term issues when they get too large and are a risk to the house (and any surrounding houses). But yes if you have tons of open space that is not being used for anything then putting a big tree there is nice.
Yes, but the way to design a house to look good on a smaller lot involves different edges and roof lines than the way to design a house to look good from a distance on a larger lot.
Yes, you're right about the distinction, but the conclusion is incorrect.
A lot of design and material choices simply do not work unless they're expensive. A good example is fake wood panelling on car interiors or really cheap emerald colored cars.
Like wearing purple, it requires a certain minimum level of style, quality and care before it is something that can be pulled off. Opulence without care is tacky, and that general assessment has little to do with class.
McMansions show a desperate attempt at wanting to look 'rich' rather than look 'good'. It shows a lack of understanding of why mansions are special. I don't mean this in a 'subjective absence of taste', but a ubiquitous absence of taste, veering on consensus across location and time. That's as close as objective as you get in the art world.
I don't really think the mcmansions are meant to be aping the "specialness" of mansions. I think they're for people who have several children and want lots of space for them and entertaining guests. And maybe make it look decent as an after thought if it isn't too pricey. Everything else follows from that, the lot size, cheaper exterior finishes, oversized car ports because you need an suv for the kids and a commute car for both parents, maybe some extra space for projects. Size isn't a style.
Yes, this. They have a vague idea of what a “big house” should look like, and a big house they can afford is going to be built like a McMansion. Many of the problems with McMansion design come from having a big thing you don’t want to look like an unbroken featureless slab, but lacking the design experience (or the budget) to do that “right”.
My neighborhood is in the process of converting all of the two-flats (buildings with a unit above a main residence on the bottom: aka, medium density housing) to large, 5,000+ sqft homes. None of which would be called McMansions, but still much larger than is traditional for the neighborhood. So far as I can tell, almost none of them are bought by large families. Often, they have enough bedrooms for each child to have two.
My theory is that people want to put their money into homes, but the older sized homes don't sell for as much money as the 1% want to invest, so they buy homes much larger than they need and then leave the doors closed on half the space. I'd expect McMansions are just the suburban equivalent, combined with inelegant architecture.
(I don't buy the idea that anyone wants houses with random features; but I can imagine many people want houses with elements they like and, lacking examples of the mashup being done well, are pleased with it being done less well. I've seen this with my own experiences in design. I see something that looks good to me until somebody comes up with something better. Then the old thing is revealed as being sub-par.)
You don't need to be a large family to have a use for lots of rooms, especially with the shift to working from home. Just because something is marked "bedroom" on the plans doesn't mean it's being used that way. It might be a home office, a playroom (or school room!) for the kids, a crafting/sewing room or home gym, etc. Also having a dedicated guest room is really important if you like having friends and family come visit you regularly. My partner and I have zero kids, but still live in a "three-bedroom" house; one bedroom is ours, one doubles as the guest room and my sewing room, and the smallest one is the home office my partner uses 3-4 days/week. I'd love to have a dedicated sewing room, but unfortunately it wasn't feasible for this round of house-buying.
People like having space to do things. There's not really anything more complicated about it.
Yeah, I'm with Scott on this. The only ugly thing about most of those McMansion pictures is the slew of whiny arrows somebody scattered across a picture of a perfectly nice house.
Agreed. I really like most of them. And "mixing styles" is usually considered good and creative, like in fusion cooking, or creating new sub-genres of literature or film.
(Although I don't personally like mixing architerctural styles when it involves a traditional-looking house with a concrete block bolted onto the side -- which I see too much of in my hometown and on Facebook home renovation groups -- but I don't think that's what McMansion Hell is complaining about.)
"fusion cooking" is an incredibly deprecated term, right now.
Most foodie types think of it as "Taking two great things, and combining them in a way that makes them worse".
The thing is, they're totally right. Most fusion cooking is garbage; thoughtless combinations that produce inferior results once you strip away the theater and fancy menu descriptions.
All the good "fusion" food these days doesn't conspicuously market itself that way.
Involving elements of multiple styles can work great. But just checking off the boxes of including one window from each of six different styles, with no thought about what contexts work better with one style or another, doesn't.
It's interesting how the McMansion is nice from the outside but hell on the inside, while Valerio Olgiati's house looks a bit hellish on the outside but actually really nice on the inside https://www.kaleidoscope.media/article/valerio-olgiati.
I'm just registering my disagreement here - bare concrete looks industrial and very uncomfortable, and this effect is magnified for interior walls. Nice furniture and an excellent garden doesn't make up for shit walls everywhere you look
How is that really nice on the inside? It looks like an abandoned factory, and wildly uncomfortable. Meanwhile most McMansions are very comfortable to live, with modern insulation and HVAC, convenient layouts, stuff like plenty of conveniently-placed electrical outlets and easy-to-find light switches, ample counter space and practical if boring kitchen layouts, etc. Not exciting stuff, but the things that make living in a house pleasant.
It's a matter of taste I think. The example I replied to (https://mcmansionhell.com/) does look like hell to me, but to each their own. I don't know if it's representative or not of what goes on in these houses.
My point is that I'm not talking about taste. I find the current top example on the McMansion website equally *ugly*, if in a different way (admittedly a way that I find hilarious and somewhat charming, rather than just depressing). But the McMansion looks like a place where I would not be *physically uncomfortable*. Mostly it's just badly decorated and could be perfectly inoffensive with a good redecorating.
4 different styels of windows, palladian windows on a French eclectic style building, stone veneer in the front and hardieboard on the sides, no headers above the top floor windows (headers are structural elements required to not crack windows, unless it's a McMansion of course and the wall is made of plywood).
So while it's not a disaster, this building does carry quite a few big McMansion warning signs.
Headers only need to be able to withstand the load of the wall, and when you build a cheaper house and the wall is made of wood and cosmetic stone tile, the header is integrated in the wood. A good McMansion adds a fake non-load bearing header on the outside of the stone tile but not all. So when the visible header is missing you know it's not real stone, and that's how you know it's a McMansion.
I'm gonna throw my support in here that the example is very tame by McMansion standards. The stone siding (real stone or fake?) is a bit McMansion since it's obviously a facade, but the only really McMansion element is the shutters that I'm *pretty* sure are non functional.
I'd also like to point out that a lot of people are posting about how the hallmark of a McMansion is attempting to appear wealthy without understanding why the wealthy choose those design elements, and then a bunch of other people post about how 'this is elitist and why can't you just let these people enjoy their pretty things?', but I think the *Real* hallmark of a McMansion is not just misunderstanding the aesthetic purpose of a design element, but the Functional Purpose.
To me it always significantly detracts from a design when I notice it is replicating what is normally a part of practical, functional design, but without actually using or understanding that function. (see again the shutters)
McMansionHell represents a simplistic architectural prescriptivist view. The blog doesn't even get the McWord snowclone right, as it implies a set of largely similar things. Your average row of townhomes is more of a McHouse than what shows up there.
Formatting note, looks like a paragraph of commentary ended up mixed into the quotation of The Great Male Renunciation wikipedia: (beginning with "I see no reason to disagree")
"In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions"
This made me suddenly wonder-- is it possible that architects all prefer the modern style because the constant exposure to the current trends in architecture and studying thousands of buildings often results in liking that style more, like an acquired taste? I ask this because I listen to a lot of music, probably more than most people, and some of the music I really enjoy is experimental and sometimes dissonant. But I genuinely enjoy it a lot. Could some architects have experienced a similar effect?
I tend to agree with this explanation. I think there may be more coincidence involved here than real intention on the parts of the participants.
"I guess I’m willing to accept “some people did this originally, and those people were cool, and then that became the cool thing, and then we ended up in a vicious cycle where everyone has to pretend to like it”, but if that were true it would still be pretty astonishing."
I think this is genuinely less unlikely than Scott thinks; furthermore, while I understand that that statement was intentionally a little flippant, to suggest that everyone is just *pretending* to like modern art and architecture is probably inaccurate. N=1, but I genuinely enjoy modern visual art specifically, and that enjoyment, at least in part, came from exposure. Many architects, I'm sure, went through the same process with modern architecture, especially if they had profs in school who were able to passionately explain the style to them until they "got it".
This XKCD is about how being exposed to lots of Brutalism can make you like it. Cal asks whether exposure to lots of traditional architecture can make you like Brutalism.
In music it happens all the time. But the opposite happens too - learning a lot of music theory can make one appreciate Pop music again (as evidenced by the numerous music theory Youtube videos dedicated to it, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-XSTSnqXxo). And there are quite a few contemporary composers who apply their vast knowledge of music to writing film soundtracks that are both pleasant to listen to for laymen and are interesting to dive into for professionals. Why can composers bridge the gap between academic and popular tastes and architects can't?
Because fancy buildings cost WILD amounts of money; and have to be located on wildly expensive land to mean anything. You only get one shot at the building; you can't get reviews and go in for a second pass without spending another couple mil.
You can listen to music in the burbs, but you can't build a statement building in bumfuck, NoWhere and have it be a statement.
You can if you're Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan and have burned through all of your career earnings and are desperate for commissions and your name recognition inspires people in small towns/cities to hire you and let you do your thing in their downtowns.
OK, but even with a limit on a public building's budget you can choose whether to optimize for popularity in the public or among architects. And there are ways of taking the public opinion into consideration - survey the opinions about existing buildings in the area, show various proposed models online and read the comments etc. These days you may even create a VR tour inside and around the proposed building.
This is true of novels, as well. There's a whole genre of experimental fiction that (as far as I can tell) only people who read a ton of all kinds of novels, and/or write novels themselves, appreciate. Most of these books seem like nonsense to most readers; only after education and exposure and having read lots and lots of other books do they start to seem genuinely beautiful.
I've never paid much attention to buildings, and I don't like modernist / brutalist architecture. I much prefer fancy, ornate traditional architecture. But maybe if I really studied architecture, I would learn to appreciate a vast concrete cube, the way I appreciate some novels that my friends think are total nonsense.
I remember the first time I saw the Salk institute after the ... I don't know, aesthetic paradigm shift, and went from 'Why the fuck is it like that' to 'Holy shit, this is amazing!'.
Okay, I'll bite :). Why the fuck is it like that? What makes it amazing? It clearly photographs well from one particular location that everybody photographs it from, but it doesn't seem especially appealing as a place to go to work every day, and the huge unshaded central plaza seems like it would be miserable on a hot summer day.
It's the personality trait of Openness. People with high Openness constantly desire *novelty*. They always want something new, and are easily bored. They are the ones who change software interfaces for no good reason.
Dissonant and atonal are quite importantly different, as far as I can tell. (Though I'm not expert and this is coming from wikipedia exploration rather than a music degree!). *Dissonant* just means 'lots of note combinations that sound harsh/wrong' (perhaps entirely for reasons of them being unusual, or perhaps because of inherent properties of how some combos interact with the human auditory system too in some cases: I'm not sure.) But atonal means something much stronger than this: it means that no notes of whatever scale your using appear more often than any others: this is a unique feature of Western modernism not found in any other pitched music (as far as I know), and it turns out this makes it super-hard to heard the music as having phrasing and structure, especially large scale structure. In comparison, music can be quite dissonant but still fairly easy to parse, even if it sounds harsh and nasty: some extreme metal I think is quite dissonant but not *that* difficult to make sense of.
Consonance and dissonance are just how close the frequency intervals are to low integer ratios, like 1:2 or 3:4, which our auditory systems like to hear. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_ratio
Thanks: so they are natural/innate then? I'm sure I'd read though that how harsh certain chords and intervals sound is *partly* a matter of what the ear is used to?
I think there's a natural and innate basis, which is always partially modified by culture and personal history. Like most things. And I think people argue about which aspects of this are natural and which are cultural, because it's so hard to tell something that's cultural but universal from something that's natural.
But I think with consonance, it's closer to natural. Like, if you have a tone, and you remove every other sound wave from it, you end up with the octave below. So, whenever you hear a tone, you're also hearing that lower octave. Hearing a tone and hearing the other consonant tones that comprise it are the same thing. Tones are always in numeric relationships with each other, and the closer those numeric relationships are to small integer ratios, the more often the sound waves hitting your ear literally sync up with each other. If the sound waves hitting your ear almost never sync up, it sounds like a crazy dissonant mess. If they sync up perfectly, you can't even tell that there are two different tones (because there aren't; perfectly consonant tones *are* each other) (you can hear this if you play around with very pure tones, like from a synthesizer).
I don’t pretend to be an expert, but this is my writeup of the innate argument I was taught in the class I took on sound and sound perception: https://observablehq.com/d/a4998192c14c618f
Well, sort of. Whether an interval is interpreted as dissonant is highly context-dependent. A tritone might be considered a dissonant interval, but there is a tritone in any dominant seventh chord, and these chords appear in traditional music.
Rootless chords are kind of interesting. They don’t sound like much on their own, but in the right context it just sounds kind of jazzy because you understand that the missing root is implied.
A major seventh chord has an obvious beating effect, sometimes considered dissonant, but in context it’s understood as kind of clean and peaceful.
Learning to recognize intervals (ear training) is challenging in part because it’s hard to avoid being influenced by context. The same interval often doesn’t sound like the same thing in different contexts.
Can't dissonance also describe rhythmically unnatural seeming progressions? (beyond syncopation) I find melodic music with (what I think of as) dissonant rhythms very appealing. (e.g. Lamb - Cotton Wool (1min-2min))
There's traditionally two different conceptions of dissonance.
One is an intrinsic feature of the interval, that is as you say - smaller integer ratios are considered consonant, and larger integer (or even irrational) ratios are considered dissonant.
The other is a relational feature that depends on the position in functional harmony. In any particular musical tradition, certain combinations of pitches are "stable" and others are "unstable", and feel a "need" to "resolve" to a "stable" combination of pitches. The "unstable" ones are called "dissonant" and the "stable" ones are called "consonant".
In classical western music, there is a strong correlation between these two things. But by the time you get to jazz, there often isn't. Major sevenths, or even 9ths or 11ths, can often be considered consonant, despite the 15 to 16 ratios. I'm not sure exactly what it depends on, but you can hear it if you're familiar with jazz, whether a particular harmony is stable or unstable, even if both are full of dissonances in the ratio sense.
That might be true, but maybe there's more to it. About music, specifically, I've observed something like what happened with architecture, but on the last 5/10 years. I listen to a lot of stuff, most of which is usually seen as weird by most people. But I have no problem with most music that used to be on the radio 10/15 years ago. These days however? I feel like most of what """zoomers""" listen to is shitty trap-style music. But I don't mind experimental music at all, or mass-produced nice music. What I mind is mass-produced shitty music. That's probably suggestive, but I wonder if other people feel the same.
I just wanted to say that the buildings in the photos to illustrate works by "frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid" are more attractive to me than any older building illustrated in any photo on this post or the previous.
The Frank Lloyd Wright building (I assume that's the one with the water) is brilliant. Would love to live in that, or even just near it with a good view.
The FLW building is nice, but man, it is built for hobbits. I visited it in highschool, and even being 5'10" at the time everything seemed tiny. Many of features, mostly the windows, also seemed really expensive to maintain/insulate for the western PA winters as well, but just nitpicking there.
Overall it would be a really nice basis for a modern house design, although I don't know if you could build a house that straddles a fair sized stream these days due to the immense environmental regulations around that.
Flooding would also be a major issue, as there is literally no space between the house and the water. Anything you could do about it would certainly run into more environmental issues.
I lived for some years in Oak Park IL and met some homeowners who lived in Wright houses. They overwhelmingly found that actually living in the houses was a giant pain in the ass due to maintenance headaches, insane repair costs, in some ways just literal physical discomfort. That's why Wright houses change hands pretty regularly.
(And the furniture Wright designed, which he tried to force his clients to buy and use, was just hilariously uncomfortable and awkward. Beautiful to look at just like the houses but not useful to actual human beings as furniture.)
I'd be interested in reading candid interviews with people who used to live in famous design homes like that. You know, after they sold the place and don't need to act like it was the best thing ever to make back their money. I'd bet there would be a lot of interesting bits, both good and bad. So many things must seem really great on paper but just turn out miserable, while other things I bet just click in a way you would never expect. It'd be neat to get some insight there, so long as I didn't have to buy and maintain one of the places to get it :D
My dad experienced Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the best manner: from living next-door to one. He grew up from 1917-1930 on Superior Street in Oak Park next to the Moore House:
The Moore House burned down on Christmas 1923 (before electric Christmas lights, people put candles in their Christmas tree, which looked great but were absurdly dangerous) and then Wright came back from Tokyo and rebuilt it to be a combination Tudor Cottage with sinister samurai overtones.
As I recall with Falling Waters the house was up over the stream enough that the water would have to go pretty high before it came into serious contact.
Not like 2-3 feet high, but it had to rise something like a foot high and 25 feet wide, or something to that effect according to the tour guide. I guess the lower parts were really well waterproofed? I don't recall there being a basement.
Granted, no one has lived there for a long time, so who knows... if I had an expensive house where the bottom half flooded every spring and fall, I would try to get it made an UNESCO site too, just to get it off my hands. :D
Never say you'd want to live in a house because you like the way it looks from the outside. Doubly so if it's a Frank Lloyd Wright house. I mean, unless you like leaky roofs, drafts, cracked foundations, low ceilings, inadequate storage space, minimal flexibility for interior design and furnishing, poor lighting, and all the rest. The one thing it's got going for it, is the one thing you won't be able to enjoy once you've moved in. But the architect will have cashed the check by then, so what does he care?
That photo depicted a place where I'd love to live, yes, but the garden, river especially, was doing all the work and the house seemed "fine". It is of course possible that FLW was responsible for the landscaping too, in which case he deserves serious kudos.
The architecture of the original architect, or the impromptu architecture of the contractor who quietly doubled the reinforcement of the cantilever, or the architecture of the subsequent architects called in when even the double-strength cantilever started to sag noticeably?
When you see an impressive cantilever, there's a structural engineer that deserves the credit. Some architects double as de facto engineers, and some just envision very pretty structures that they don't actually know how to build.
As usual, we can partly blame Ayn Rand. She made the idea of ugly concrete geometry puzzles and hyperstylized sculptures sound romantic by describing them, but not needing to show them.
Re: furniture, I have found that the furniture at "cheap, lower class" furniture stores like, for example, American Furniture Warehouse, have very appealing offerings. Their furniture, often in the $500 range for large book shelves or furniture items, has character and uniqueness, and is made of appealing materials. Your local "high class" furniture store, in contrast, will sell bookshelves that look like you could probably make them yourself in an afternoon, and they'll never cost less than $3000.
I seriously doubt Ayn Rand had any significant influence on the architecture profession, or on the public perception of architecture. And as for not showing them, she was clearly inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright when writing The Fountainhead and admitted as much.
I worked for a famous architect-engineer. Most of the architects had read the Fountainhead and were fond of the book, and thought it illustrated the difficulties of artistic integrity within architecture quite well, I think. If you are a young architect and want to read a novel about an architect, there is nothing else to read that I can think of.
As far as Rand's influence on the public is concerned, it's enormous, more than any other American novelist that I can think of. Then again, I can't think of any novelist aside from S. King who has had a broad influence on contemporary American society.
There's definitely one class of cheap-ass furniture but the affordable furniture that I have purchased from AFW is made out of real wood. Maybe AFW is some kind of outlier, I don't know. My point is more that the high-end stores seem to have only ugly, "minimalist" offerings.
A big problem with the furniture argument is that while OLD furniture is quite expensive, new furniture is actually very, very affordable; it cost about as much to furnish a house in 2011 as it did in 1980. Obviously you can buy expensive new furniture; I remember once seeing dining chairs for a thousand dollars plus. But if you want something good, affordable and comfortable, you really won't break the bank at all.
I think you'd be quite surprised by the quality of some cheap furniture now. Sites like Wayfarer have made commodity furniture from overseas very accessible. Much of it is solid wood (though not exactly hardwoods) and will last very long. The kitchen table I have is solid pine (I assume) and is just four legs and a top. It is a mid century style and I don't see any reason it will fall apart any time soon (I have had it for 4 years so far). I think it was less than $200.
My parents still have the set of dresser drawers I used as a child. They are well over 30 years old and have a cardboard back. No solid wood, but they do hold up.
It is worth noting that the discounts come from mass production: I'm quite tall and getting a table and chairs that weren't too low for me was a bit of an ordeal, ended up getting the table custom made. It looks fantastic, but it was *quite* pricey
>Did Google think about the horrors of WWII before deciding to build a kind of ugly headquarters?
The generalization of this that the people at Google may have though was "I'm not good enough to deserve nice things", and plenty of people in the West feel that way. Or is it just me, that I feel guilty when I indulge in nice things?
I'm no architect, but this looks a lot like rich people or nobles signaling that they can afford expensive stuff. The first thing that jumped out at me was that this is basically a greenhouse. In California. It must cost a lot to keep the place cool, if not in A/C units then in technical expertise. Those curved glass panels don't seem like you can order them at Home Depot or have your general contractor uncle build for you, either. Nope. This is basically a modernist palace or a rich merchant's headquarters.
I'm not an architect, but as I understand it, the canonical solution to this problem is to put a reflective layer on the glass, so your building looks like a mirror. That way 90% of the sunlight reflects back into the environment and doesn't heat up your building, and you still have lots of natural light and a wide field of view. This gets dangerous when you have concave surfaces; you have to be careful you're not melting the asphalt or setting the neighbor's building on fire.
But I think the envelope you're seeing in these drawings isn't intended to be airtight; it's just a webwork of cables that supports the swooping walkways, suspending them from the towers.
Many of the most famous buildings in history were so expensive that they they caused civil unrest or wars. E.g., to pay for the Parthenon, Pericles hijacked the treasury of the Delian League, which eventually led to the Athens losing the Peloponnesian War. The construction of Santa Sophia had something to do with the famous Green vs. Blue chariot racing fans uprising. Selling indulgences for St. Peter's brought about the Reformation. The sultan who built the Taj Mahal as his wife's tomb was overthrown by his son when he wanted to build a matching black one for his tomb.
That looks like simulation images - massive amounts of glass can be a lot more obnoxious in real life, with reflections cooking things. One building in London famously focused the light enough that cars parked across the street would have their dashboards melt
Especially because, as I pointed out last time in the comments, Google did NOT build its own headquarters. All the buildings in the Mountain View campus were acquired, and the centrepiece is a building originally constructed by SGI that does in fact have an 'interesting' design. The part Scott chose to show was one of the many generic office buildings that were acquired from other firms over the years as the company grew.
When tech firms do finally get around to building their own head quarters, they often do have quite interesting buildings in the middle. But then because they keep growing those buildings end up surrounded by generic office blocks again. Apple's HQ is I think an example of this: a lovely glass donut designed by a famed industrial designer, but I don't think all their employees get to work in it, even when they are in Cupertino.
Maybe I should clarify that my point was not about Google's headquarters specifically, but about the fact that "I'm not good enough to deserve nice things" is more relatable than "we can't have nice thing after WW2".
“ Since the turn of the 21st century, the value of much 18th and 19th century furniture has plummeted….
Compared with the heyday of antiques collecting, prices for average pieces are now “80 percent off,” said Colin Stair, the owner of Stair Galleries auction house in Hudson, N.Y. “Your typical Georgian 18th century furniture, chests of drawers, tripod tables, Pembroke tables,” he noted, can all be had for a fraction of what they cost 15 to 20 years ago.
In 2002, Mr. Stair sold a set of eight George III-style carved mahogany chairs for $8,000; in 2016, he sold a similar set of eight chairs for $350.”
Great roundup. On the matter of certain styles "all looking the same," I feel like again and again in my life, I've encountered certain genres - whether it's music (punk, reggae, house), art (abstract impressionism, japanese printing), or literature (science fiction, mysteries) - that I thought all looked/sounded/read the same. And again and again, when I became more interested and involved and knowledgeable about those styles, I had an "a-ha!" moment where the subtle differences became clear, and I suddenly enjoyed the form in a deeper and more rewarding way.
I think there's a bit of a chasm between not paying attention to something like buildings or chairs (and music, food, clothing, etc, etc) and having the attention to detail to tell the subtle differences that can make a thing exemplary *within* its style. But there's a leap of faith - usually backed by aesthetic interest and a lot of exposure - before you can enjoy things that "all look the same"
Fantastic point. I got the sense Scott used Valerio Olgiati as a "Look at this ugly thing" moment, but when I looked at his work, it's magisterial in its subtle use of color and scale to convey age and a sense of place. I've not visited the Pearling Path Visitors Center, but it must be an incredible experience if you're willing to invest in it.
I had the thought after your initial post that some of the kitsch in new buildings in old style comes from the fact that merely aping the older style with new materials just...may not work due to subtle differences.
A Twitter thread at about that same time discussed the new Netflix Cowboy Bebop in live action. They deliberately recreate the original Cowboy Bebop opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2N-9EmedA
But in the live action version, it looks uncanny-valley weird for a human being to be moving that way. Something that worked well in animation just looks *off* in live-action, because people don't move that way naturally. I think the stylization of an animated character can work with that, but an actual human in front of a camera may not be able to.
Similarly, if you try to recreate, say colonnades with modern curtain-wall materials, it just comes off as fake. We might also be in the interim where people are finding beautiful ways to work with what's widely available. I dunno, just a hypothesis from that show opening that happened to get pointed out to me the same day as your OP.
I dunno, I actually loved the intro. It makes a lot of sense too. The intro song is legendary and a huge part of the 'first adopters' are going to be returning fans. Starting the show with a high effort faithful homage to the original feels great.
As for those who don't like, they can do what they do for every netflix show. IE. skip the intro.
It is a 'win - no lose' situation. I love that it is off, highlighting how much effort goes into making animations feel natural despite the much lower 'frame rate' in anime.
At the Dublin meetup recently, one of the attendees used to work in architecture and construction, and we talked for a while about your last post on this.
He brought up the interesting fact that apparently very large sheets of glass, as are used in a lot of glass-fronted buildings and "fancy" boxy architecture, are actually absurdly expensive. Apparently the cost of the equipment involved goes up exponentially with the width of the glass sheet. He estimated that it would be considerably cheaper to just have smaller windows surrounded by decorative stonework - the exact opposite of the "cost disease" hypothesis.
This raised the interesting idea that these designs ARE driven by signaling wealth ... but it only works on fellow architects who know how expensive the "minimalist" materials are!
In art, as well, where you can get incredible representational artwork that puts the Old Masters to shame quite cheap from freelance artists online, there is definitely no cost disease at work.
People love big windows. It's something missing from the architecture discussion. An architect friend of mine loves the way old buildings used thermal mass around a central chimney for efficient heating pointed out that that kind of design—as most of these older styles—only work with the whole package. If you try to make a house in a style designed for thermal mass chimneys, but then want big windows and open rooms, you've just created a really poor building.
Likewise, if you decide to save money on your office tower, you have to justify to renters why they're getting less light.
There’s your explanation, which seems almost absurdly obvious. Buildings today are designed for the maximum comfort of the people *inside* the building, and that requires aesthetic compromises on the outside. Modern office buildings may look boring on the outside, but large windows, elevators, HVAC, carpeting, open floor plans, etc. make them a lot more pleasant than most 19th century buildings. I used to work in an office in a beautiful 19th century Viennese building and it was not very convenient. In that sense maybe architecture is like clothing - we prize individual comfort over looking attractive.
Open plan offices make a good first impression, but they are often disliked by office workers who would prefer fewer distractions and more privacy. So this might be more a matter of designing impressive interiors rather than comfortable ones?
But you’re right, this whole discussion seems rather biased towards aesthetics - how it looks from the curb, how it looks to the tourist. It’s difficult to avoid judging architecture by appearance when looking at images, but ideally we would have the informed imagination to judge the more practical aspects of a design.
My impression is that open plan offices are hated by workers and appreciated by managers; of course, the people choosing which office design to use are usually the higher-ups who benefit from the panopticon, and thus it is "preferred" despite the opinions of the lower level workers
I think this definitely underpins most "boring" new builds - a combination of cost and comfort gives you rectangular skyscrapers with lots of lots of window (in smallish pieces, of course, to keep the steel frame affordable).
This doesn't explain why the high concept designs that win art awards are so ugly, though, but if the arty space and the mass market space are different then there isn't much pressure for the internal fashions of the designer world to match common aesthetic preferences.
Most houses have windows set in brick/wood/whatever walls, and I've never heard anyone say that they'd rather have huge wall-sized glass panels instead.
I wouldn't want one in most rooms of my house for privacy reasons (and you need to stick with one style of windows for aesthetic reasons), but I absolutely would replace the current window in my office with a wall-size one if I could.
You can definitely mix windows for aesthetic reasons. For example a huge multi story central window and smaller ones elsewhere. Now sticking a random room sized window in whichever room happens to be the office, that won't work.
I live in a 2 bed apartment where 1 wall of both bedrooms and 2 walls of the living room/kitchen are all glass, and everything else is pretty minimalist. I love it.
Huge walls of glass is fantastic, it's just expensive. My new-build house has an entire wall that's all glass, looking out onto the back garden, and it makes the relatively small house feel really spacious and open, while also letting lots of natural light in which helps with mood, since I'm a nerd who doesn't spend enough time outside.
The deciding factor in buying the house I live in right now was the oversized french doors that form one wall of the living room and the two sets of french doors that form the external corner of the kitchen. I'd like to eventually replace the master bedroom windows with a large set of french doors as well.
TBH I wouldn't classify French doors with the sort of wall-sized glass panels we see in modernist skyscrapers. Regardless, my point wasn't that people dislike wall-sized glass panels where they exist (at least as long as they don't have to look at them from the outside), but rather that people don't generally seem to miss them all that much when living or working in buildings with normal walls and windows. Whatever the reason for so many modernist buildings being constructed with giant glass panes instead of walls, therefore, I don't think it's because people would complain to the architect.
I wouldn't want a huge wall-sized glass panel. If it gets broken by tree branches/errant lawnmower rocks/neighbor kids' baseballs, I want to be able to drive to the local hardware store, buy another panel, and put it in. Or hire someone to do that for me. Not spend tens of thousands of dollars on giant panel replacement.
People say they love a lot of things which go against their actual feelings in the presence of those things. For a long time I was in the Big Plate Glass camp myself. Most of my early apartments right out of college were contemporary luxury spaces with floor to ceiling living room windows, and they were nice to look at for a while, but eventually you come to understand that these windows are alienating and cold. That’s what a “picture window” is – the world outside becomes an image to look at instead of a lived experience that enriches one’s life. Small windows and small panes often make the space they open on more beautiful, counterintuitive as that may seem.
———
“Take the use of enormous plate windows...they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.” — Luis Barragán
One of my current favorite examples is Anna Marinova. I found her on instagram, and purchased a signed copy of her latest art book "Nuance", direct from St Petersberg. She's won a stack of awards. She's as good as any of the 19C masters, and better than most.
Once you find her on Instagram and follow her, it will start recommending lots of high skill high craft new representationlists who use instagram to show their work.
One thing that bothers me about this post and its precursor is the monolithic presentation of 'traditional' styles. Classical, baroque, folk, Arts and Crafts, Georgian, etc. are different, and many were in response to perceived flaws with others. The practitioners of each did not see themselves as aesthetically aligned (though of course they did not have modern styles as a point of comparison). It may be true that there are lines of similarity between all of these that separate them from 'modern' forms, but I think the point needs to be developed further.
I've now been put on blast by three whole rationalist celebrities! I guess that's what I deserve for running my mouth about Tartaria without doing more research. (Though, have *you* seen Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin in the same room at the same time? I thought not.
About the window thing, I don't know about basements specifically, but England and Wales, France, and Scotland assessed property taxes by number of windows in a building. Square footage or other measures were difficult to assess and would require intrusion by assessors into the building, but windows could be counted from the street. Since taxing something is a good way to make things go away, a lot of people bricked up their windows. Seeing Like A State talks about this, IIRC, because lack of sunlight and ventilation supposedly caused some long-term health effects. I'm going to be daring again and keep that in the post without independently confirming it.
Anyway, I don't know about basement windows specifically, but that might be what they're referring to? As far as I know, no mud floods were involved. Also, what kind of measly empire gets taken out by a merely great mud flood? You can't claim first-rate geopolitical power status unless your empire is rated for at least Excellent Mud Floods and most superpowers would require full-blown Ultra Mud Floods to be destroyed!
Bricked up basement windows are common in Rome, because the ground level of Rome is gradually rising around the buildings as the seven hills erode into the streets. There may be a few other cities with this sort of erosional structure.
I saw (not in person) a Roman building where, in the middle ages, they cut a new doorway at the new ground level. Then in modern times they excavated the building so now the medieval doorway is at least a story above the ground.
Gah. Yuri Gagarin died in 1968, before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; since Yuri (as far as I can tell) never toured the US, it would have been almost impossible for the two men to have ever been in the same room.
And yes, I suspect you're joking, but my God, the level of historical illiteracy these days is absolutely appalling.
Of course Yuri died before Armstrong walked on the moon! He had to go to America to pretend to be Neil Armstrong, and his absence needed to be explained.
>Tartaria was destroyed by a “Great Mud Flood” which explains why so many buildings have basements with bricked-up windows (I have never seen this - is it true? If so, what is the explanation?)
If I had to guess, it's likely related to the installation of sewers in American cities during the 1800s. In several cities the streets were actually raised up to allow proper drainage for newly installed sewages systems: Chicago was raised about 14 feet: they actually put jacks under buildings and raised them up to the new street level but it wouldn't suprise me if in some buildings they just build another story on top and turned the first story into a basement. That's what happened in Seattle after the fire of 1889. The city planners decided that since they were rebuilding a big chunk of the city anyway they would regrade many of the roads to be much higher while they were at it. The new buildings that were constructed were built one story higher than they needed to be so that the first story could be buried once the streets were rebuilt higher.
I think many other cities of the same time period went through similar situations during the "sanitary revolution" where better sewer systems and clean water systems were introduced across Europe and America.
You see this a lot in Europe. New streets and other city infrastructure is frequently built on-top of the existing structures, and so old buildings often find themselves slipping below 'ground' level over time.
Re: fifty capitalisms, I propose a vending machine that dispenses bits of clay that the general public can use to attach ornamentation onto the building, and I guess also crowbar things that can be used to remove bits of clay that are unattractive. That way, hobbyists that are good at ornamentation will make good ornamentation and it will stay attached to the building if everyone likes it. This idea is good because it is also democracy.
doesn't mean the principle doesn't apply - here in Melbourne there are alleys that are actively tourist destinations because of the quality of the "graffiti", of which the bigger pieces are often commissioned by either building owners or the city council.
I imagine you're joking, but I would deeply love to see someone try this experiment, ideally on an existing faceless generic downtown cube <3
Maybe instead of crowbar things, it would be more elegant to let people veto unattractive ornamentation by covering it with their own bits of clay? That way one purchase equals one small change in either direction.
This guy, who writes with smoke coming from his ears and a gun on his blotter, has a lot of receipts on the intellectual trends in architecture that intentionally condemned traditional, human-scale architecture as wicked and, in taking over architecture-school faculties, put a stranglehold on the built environment:
> that (among other things) that Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin were the same person, but scientists have covered this up. It also includes the truly excellent sentence “Researchers concluded that history and science are probably a set of lies".
I thought the whole bit about technological regress was quite obviously bonkers, but this strikes me as obviously true.
> “Researchers concluded that history and science are probably a set of lies"
I mean... they're not wrong. Although I wouldn't have thought it was a grand revelation, both groups are pretty up front about the fact that they don't have all the answers and are just making their best guess from what they have.
I generally like Santiago Calatrava, but his Oculus at the World Trade Center transit hub was absolutely not worth the $4 billion spent on it. It does have many of the advantages of the old Penn Station or current Grand Central Station, but the WTC station just doesn't have the same purpose as a waiting area for intercity travel, and you can get much of this functional benefit for much less:
Some people might classify Calatrava as "modernist", but I would classify it as relatively baroque and ornate, and thus put it on the "aesthetic" side rather than "functionalist".
It’s very weird that they describe the place as “Trumpist” when Trump’s own penthouses are the exact opposite - exactly the sort of busy, gilded, highly ornamented spaces overstuffed with ostentatious displays of wealth. Not a huge but spartan, empty stone hall.
When going around Europe, there is quick rule of thumb to see if you are in a Calatraba building:
If you find yourself in a in a place that is, very obviously, not fulfilling one of the main purposes it should in some uncomfortable way (say, a completely open train station in the cold Belgian winter without any kind of protection from the wind, or a dangerously slippery bridge with a glass floor in a place known for it's rain), and the thing is completely white and looks modern, welp, you got yourself a Calatrava.
I think you hit on something that is missing in Scott's discussion, modernism does not always mean minimalist, minimalism a strain of thought within modernist architecture and art (as well as within certain veins of traditionalist architecture and art, like traditional Japanese art (at least the traditional Japanese art that's usually associated with Japan)), but it is not the only straight of thought in modernist architecture
You might find the architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser to be an interesting anomaly, with bright colors and ornate designs, in a maybe-kitschy, maybe-traditionalist, or maybe-modernist style, depending on how your eye parses these things:
As soon as I saw the first picture on that article I felt dizzy and disoriented. My first reaction was that the picture was low-res and full of artifacts: it took my brain a bit to accept that it was a picture of a real place.
I think it's cool that somebody did it but on first viewing it evokes a very unpleasant experience.
A little off-topic, but I think the concept that some of this stuff "doesn't photograph well" is actually really important to these conversations. I've heard this not just about architecture but about some art as well (specifically Rothko). If a building or piece of art mainly works because of the physical context around it, or because it has subtle details that are hard to display on a screen, or because its sheer scale is awe-inspiring, then of course it's going to look ugly or pointless to someone who's only seen it through a Google image search.
Of course, I understand why it doesn't come up a lot, because it's kind of a conversation-ender. If someone claims that a piece of art might look really ugly, but you'd totally understand how amazing it is if only you saw it in person, then the only way to really verify that is... to see it in person. So practically speaking, you end up needing to (a) blindly trust someone who claims to have seen it in person, (b) blindly call the person making the claim a liar, or (c) retreat into uncertainty until you've flown out to whatever exotic location you're discussing because you really want to settle the argument. But something being difficult to falsify doesn't mean it's false.
Most well done painted flat art does not photograph well. When I started going to museums and seeing with my own eyes paintings that I had loved in art books, I discovered that. It's even more true looking at things in sRGB glowing displays. Its the difference between artificial fruit flavoring vs real sunripe heirloom organic fruit.
My grudging concession to mid20C modern paint "art" was discovering that the same was true for may of them, that they were playing with texture, brushwork, and reflectivity, and something that looks like a flat field of white can have a "there" there, that you can only see in person under good lighting. That's mid20C tho. By late20C and early21C, their successors were putting stuff on with a paint roller. Or an inkjet printer.
I am surprised that the confusion about Google persists. I don't recognise the building you call "Google HQ". The Googleplex looks like this: https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/12/googleplex-experience-center-construction/ But Google didn't build it; SGI did, between 1994 and 1997. In the stairways you can find fire risers that still say SGI on them.
I think that's some random building elsewhere in Google's Mountain View campus, but not the Googleplex proper.
I initially thought it was the northwest corner of Building 40, but I just checked on Street View and while that's boring and blocky, it's got a lot more glass and less concrete in the facade.
But the building we keep pointing to as "the" HQ is the one in the park because it's the most interesting, where the company first moved in to, where Charlies (the first cafe) was built and where TGIF was held. So that interestingly designed building was the central hub for the company for many years.
"The ASLA noted that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space and awarded the project the ASLA Centennial Medallion in 1999."
"The former SGI facilities were leased by Google beginning in 2003"
But you can't really characterize the Googleplex as being anything in particular:
"Google in its 2012-year-end annual report said it had 3.5 million square feet of office space in Mountain View"
Although the interiors have or had a somewhat consistent design, at least when I worked there, the exteriors were just whatever other people built. Which was normally low-rise boxes because they were just normal companies that Google wrote big cheques to, to convince them to give up their space.
I've heard "Googleplex" used to refer both to the whole MTV campus, and specifically to buildings 40/41/42/43 (and sometimes including 1900/1950/2000).
It's been a while since I worked at Google (left in late 2013) so I may be misremembering or usage may have shifted, but I remember more or less the same as @Paul: "Googleplex" sometimes used loosely to refer to the whole MTV campus (excluding the Crittendon and Rengstorff buildings, which are also in Mountain View but are 0.5-1 mile away from the main cluster of buildings in either direction and have their own separate building number prefixes), but I primarily associated it with the core block of buildings (40/41/42/43) containing Charlie's, the T-Rex skeleton, and the main corporate lobby.
Yeah, it was the same when I was there. Someone using the term could mean the entire campus or just the "good" bits, which is why it's not really a precise term to use when discussing architecture.
An additional point: survivorship bias is a major factor warping our perception of old buildings. There were many shoddily built or non-beautiful buildings in the past, designed around strict functionality or just badly designed. They have not survived, and the damage they suffered (unlike valued buildings) has not been restored. Again, this may not defeat the fundamental point, but it should be acknowledge and accounted for in the analysis.
A lot of people say this as a kneejerk reaction to criticism of architectural modernism in toto, but I've never seen any actual evidence for it. It's always just posited as a bald assertion, as if it must obviously true, but is it? A lot of the townhouses and cottages that we consider charming residences for the wealthy today were simple working class accomodation or even straight up tenements back when they were built. Granted they have undergone a lot of renovation and improvement since then, but they still very much look the same way that they did back then.
I guess a systematic way would be to look at the original construction date on a sample of property records. In lieu of the actual research, take a look at the buildings in the background of these views of DC from the 19th century:
Compare to downtown DC today - my quick, eyeballed guess is that the vast majority of these are gone now. And the old background buildings look more functional than beautiful to me, though of course that's in the eye of the beholder.
>"A lot of people say this as a kneejerk reaction to criticism of architectural modernism in toto, but I've never seen any actual evidence for it. It's always just posited as a bald assertion, as if it must obviously true, but is it? A lot of the townhouses and cottages that we consider charming residences for the wealthy today were simple working class accomodation or even straight up tenements back when they were built. Granted they have undergone a lot of renovation and improvement since then, but they still very much look the same way that they did back then."
And on the other side of the equation, where are the modern-day Parthenons or Notre Dames? It's all very well saying that, five hundred years from now, people will think 21st-architecture was great because only the beautiful buildings will have survived, but it would be a stronger argument if people could actually point to some examples.
How can we provide examples to you that won't be examples for another few hundred years? We can only speculate on which buildings will last. If you just want buildings that people think look good, that comes down to aesthetic preferences.
If the only reason we think traditional architecture looks better than modern architecture is that the ugly traditional buildings have been pulled down, then the best modern buildings ought to look as good as the best traditional buildings. So my question is, where are these modern buildings that look just as good as the best traditional buildings? Which modern buildings are considered as beautiful as the Parthenon, or Notre Dame, or the White House, or the Taj Mahal?
The old TWA terminal at JFK which was preserved and is now a TWA themed hotel
The original WTC towers (though they are not standing any longer so they probably don't count)
The "Birds Nest" stadium built for the 2008 olympics
Changi Airport
Many would point to Frank Ghery buildings, though I am not a fan.
Habitat 67
The Guggenheim
The Seagrams Building
Thats just off the top of my head, I am surely missing dozens more especially outside the US.
For residential there is Falling Water, Farnsworth House, the case study houses in LA, the Barcelona pavilion and many more. I actually think the best examples of modern architecture have been on the residential side but they are not as noticeable because they are private residence. Here is an article that is about 2020 only and has a lot of examples of private homes: https://www.archdaily.com/953193/best-architectural-projects-of-2020
I would say that modern, especially mid century modern, excelled with private homes because the new designs started being built around how people actually live in the 20th and 21st century. Colonials, tudors, victorians, etc. were designed around different patterns of living where moderately wealthy families would have servants to cook and clean, heating was done by fire places, cooling was non existent, and lighting came from candles or gas.
Modern families didn't and don't live that way. The center hall colonial built in 1950 that I grew up in is basically the same layout as a Denver four square built at the same time. The facade determined the style. This is even more pronounced on McMansions and other new developments where the inner layout and design are completely detached from the facade which is usually nothing more than a thin veneer of "stone" or "brick" or wood siding or stucco.
Midcentury residential homes started to incorporate the living and dining and cooking spaces within the same area. Creating open areas that fostered communication and flow through the home. They also preserved private spaces where people could retreat too. Now, a lot of the build quality wasn't great so the homes have needed lot of repairs. however, in the article linked above you can see the evolution of this thinking. Open spaces to create public living, private spaces to preserve the family and the exterior of the building flows from this interior. A Machine for Living as Le Corbusier put it.
If those are really the best that modern architecture can offer, I think that rather proves my point. Several of them are literally just nondescript glass cuboids.
I recall a comedy sci-fi setting that listed the prized historical buildings preserved from the city once known as London; among such classics as St Pauls, and Buckingham palace was listed The Gherkin :D
I'm not sure how much I agree with this... For example, I live in an old home that's considered very charming, but it was hardly a working class residence - it was built by one of the wealthiest residents of the town at the time (1890.)
For comparison, is Bose home audio equipment elite? They make a lot of money, and they sell to customers with money.
For paintings, modern art is hardly the only sort of thing to hang on walls, stuff visually pleasing for the average person is in fact quite popular.
Buildings have many more complications with materials and labor, but the actual homes of people (including the wealthy) are hardly only in avant-garde modern styles either.
There is a market for selling weird novel stuff to rich people at high prices in New York etc. But how would you charge high prices for not-novel stuff, which has an unlimited supply? And certainly the limited-supply stuff in the old styles still goes for high prices.
Being an artist or studying art is not particularly lucrative, in general. Maybe being a modern artist is not in fact high status. Maybe it's just a subculture like being a furry. And the marketing at rich people is just a separate thing where novelty is required to justify the high prices.
In home audio, "elite" starts with the likes of the Bowers and Wilkins 800 speakers, or the KEF Reference, and goes up from there. OK, maybe the B&W 700 series. Extra points for obscure Danish (not Bang & Olufsen!), French, or German manufacturers.
Actually in amplifiers, the modernist aesthetic is on full display. You buy a preamp which has only a volume control and a power button, and two "monoblock" power amplifiers, one per channel, all of which look like bland slabs of aluminum. See the Plinius Reference A-150 for the general style, although that particular amp happens to have two channels.
I don't think that novelty (of appearance) plays a role here. It's more about signaling status to your peers.
Many of these elite components are both objectively and subjectively worse in terms of sound reproduction than more reasonably priced alternatives. Some of them expect you to modify your room, adding to their cachet.
That's true, in terms of audio equipment there are probably better analogs (and of course for home speakers I don't actually think Bose is the peak of sound quality or a great value).
I guess my point was questioning what elite means here and if certain big dollar artwork sales might make the artistic elite seem more important or influential than they actually are. The culture around marketing art as investments for wealthy people is probably a pretty small % of the total art produced and consumed, and the rest is probably a lot more 'normal' on average. So the analogy basically was: if we decided what was important in the audio world only based on money Bose might come out on top. But that seems kind of ridiculous, and it seems worth questioning if the high-end art scene is actually that influential in society as a whole either (and personally I don't know anyone outside of that scene that relies on them for their own opinion on art).
The "horrors of WWII" argument doesn't fit the timeline. Modernism, as an avant-garde movement, predates WWII by several decades. Le Corbusier presented his infamous Plan Voisin for Paris in 1925.
The argument is superficially plausible because economic factors- first due to the Depression and then to the war- limited the amount of the non-military construction that occurred for 15 years or so. But the theory kept spreading during those years, which became apparent to the average person when the post-war building boom commenced.
Yes. My father was an architect, a follower of "De Stijl", modernism with Dutch characteristics. De Stijl started as a reaction to late 19th century styles. Opposition reflex rules us all.
The architects (Oud & co.) were a few years behind the visual arts artists.
One factor not really explicit in Scott's exposition is the timing of innovations in materials.
Pre-stressed concrete was invented about the end of the 19th century and came into modest popularity between WWI and WWII. It really took off after WWII, when there was in Europe a need to rebuild and to build very rapidly and cheaply.
Prestressed concrete is so much cheaper (because faster and lower mass) than older methods, even reinforced concrete, that it was difficult for companies or governments to justify using any other material to their stakeholders.
Pouring concrete around stretched steel tendons just naturally gives you rectangular prisms. The later, even cheaper post-tensioned concrete material doesn't get away from this constraint.
So there was a coincidence of fashion and material choice. A counterfactual to ponder: posit a cheap, quick-to-use material that naturally leads to highly colored, ornate buildings. Would that have taken off after WWII? Would buildings have been built with it and then hidden in gray, flat cladding?
Well, before the advent of pre-stressed concrete you had the advent of structural steel which provided an almost completely bare structural canvas on which to place whatever facade you wished. And people did, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries you see a proliferation of new materials designed to produce highly ornamented and textural exteriors in an affordable, capital-intensive way. Cast iron, glazed and terracotta tiles and paneling, moulded and dyed concrete, all were used for making lavish beaux arts, neo-gothic, art nouveau, and other highly ornamented styles cheaply and less labour-intensively than in the past.
Yes, those glazed tiles and other decorations could be done more cheaply than they could before (_pace_ Baumol), but not as cheaply nor as quickly as not doing them at all. They were still extra time and expense over the bare shell.
When an aesthetic of "burn _all_ the Chesterton's Fences" became dominant, they went.
I'm trying to imagine a structural material (for floors as well as walls) that has those decorations built in, and is cheaper than tensioned concrete, and what would have happened then. My gut feel is that shades-of-gray cladding would have been added for a decade or two, but after a while that Fence would also have been torn down.
Yes, I think that aesthetic and philosophical nihilism ("Life is confusing, meaningless, and hellish, so all our art and architecture should be as well") predates even WW1. People may have taken the horrors of the World Wars as proof of nihilism, particularly if they already had tendencies in that direction, but the trend itself predates the wars.
How about “horrors of WWI.” That war had trench warfare and mustard gas among other miseries. It’s been used to explain the transition in philosophy and poetry.
Clearly, lots of people like McMansions or there would not be so many of them. The criticism of them is strictly elitist, namely that they are huge but built cheaply on small parcels of land, with faux finishes “slapped on like wallpaper”. Designs plucked from a catalog rather than designed custom for the lot by “real” architects. In short, the biggest problem with McMansions is that they are the sort of place a gauche, upjumped poor person with money might aspire to.
People don't ask for a McMansion. They ask for Traditional, and a McMansion is what they get.
It's always been true that the top architects don't design houses for average people. The elite architects get the high profile commissions. Their employees go off and start less prominent firms and get decent commissions. And so on down the ladder...until a few rungs down you have carpenters doing design-build houses. That was true in 1920 and it's still true.
With each step down the ladder comes a reduction in design quality. If the top isn't so great, a few rungs down will be terrible. But if the top is really, really good, a few rungs down will still be pretty good. That's the difference between a McMansion and a house built in a nice New Jersey suburb in 1920.
It's basically porn (literally printed on the same presses, bright pictures of beautiful things you will never be allowed to touch yourself), but what it showcases is what *builders* (not architects) build for *themselves* after they get prosperous to build their own dream home. As builders, they know where the shortcuts are, and don't do them to their own homes. These people are general contractors for custom home construction, basically the "carperters" you describe poorly.
My "if I am ever rich" dream is to have a house like a house in that magazine.
Fine Homebuilding is a great magazine, but the median general contractor is probably only vaguely aware that it even exists. If that.
And if you look at the design articles in there, you'll often find that what they correctly describe as the right way to do things is little or no more expensive than the wrong way. The traditional design knowledge is just less widely disseminated among homebuilders than it was in 1925. That's due to ideology at the top rungs of the profession, which leads to a simple lack of knowledge on the lower rungs.
I work in this business, so I'm well aware of what GCs for custom home construction are like, and what they generally know and don't know.
At least, the things I think of as McMansions (typically found on new suburban developments) don't have eaves of any use (the roof goes basically straight into the walls like with Scott's example).
I should also clarify my confusing pronoun above - the look of the things I'm referring to as McMansions jars, to me, because *eaves* are so common here.
It does have eaves, but it looks ridiculous thanks to the mismatch between the Versailles-style grandeur of the style and the suburban naffness of the block and location, combined with the obvious cheapness of every part of the house that isn't important for showing off (check out the contrast between the front and back facades, or the fact that the bedrooms are quite small to make room for that enormous staircase).
I note that it doesn't actually have any of the properties that the mcmansionhell site likes to sneer at. It's not asymmetric, and the windows are all the same size, whoop de freaking doo. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the design, except that it was built on the wrong side of the world, in the wrong century, and in a dull middle-middle-class suburb instead of on its own palatial grounds.
Having said that, I am well aware that there's a strong element of classism in my sneering at this sort of house. But at least I'm open about my classism rather than trying to pass it off as actual virtue (unlike the mcmansion hell guy).
Those "quite small" bedrooms are about the size of our master bedroom, in a not-especially-small house.
And I really cannot understand why it's bad to have something awesome in an environment that is typically not as awesome as it. Isn't that just an improvement to the area?
I agree with you about the back facade, though. They could have done better there.
If it actually were awesome then yes, but it's not awesome, it's just garish, and out of harmony with its surroundings.
It's a six year old's idea of what a fancy house would look like. It's a collection of random architectural elements pasted together with the only criterion being "Does it look _fancy_?" The house next door is no great beauty either, but doesn't try to attract attention.
It's much better executed than most of the McMansion Hell examples. On the other hand, the neighbors must feel low class just from its existence. On the other other hand, it's raising property values on the block and maybe in 40 years all the houses on the block will look like that.
My aunt resented that her perfectly nice but nothing special suburban block in Arcadia, CA was targeted by millionaires from the other side of the world who bought up her neighbors houses and tore them down and replaced them with giant buildings filling up the entire lot. On the other hand, when she died, her kids sold her house for a tidy sum because of this bizarre predilection of foreign millionaires.
Verandas seem to have been replaced by back patios / decks. Probably a car culture thing? Also, air conditioning leads to a preference for more fully enclosed space instead of the indoor/outdoor space of a veranda or large porch.
That's half the story. As someone living in a stuccoed manufactured home (so no great aesthetics), I also make fun of McMansions, but admire actual mansions, and enjoy modest houses, both old and new, in the local traditional style. Both actual mansions and modest traditional houses make the area more beautiful in a way that isn't only for the house owner, but also for neighbors and visitors. They're enjoyable to walk or drive by. Mcmansions come across as selfish -- they're (presumably) roomier and more comfortable inside, at the expense of everyone else who has to endure the eyesore.
That isn't necessarily true of Scott's example, though I saw a house like that plopped into the middle of a city that's otherwise full of adobe and Spanish colonial architecture, and they had lawn rumbas clipping an even green lawn in a desert, which earned scorn instead of envy even from the plebes.
Are McMansions actually plucked from a catalog? Do you mean instead that the builders let the lot owners pick features at random? Because it seems to me like a home coming out of a catalog would obviously be designed by an architect, and taking, say, Sears Modern Homes as a comparison, would be nicer than the median McMansion.
I’m not sure - the lower end of McMansions probably are (the mcmansionhell website says they start at 3000 feet) and many of the homes I see in that range are still fundamentally the product of big builders of the sort that build subdivisions where every house is one of maybe a dozen designs, with some minor customization.
This is my experience in my neck of the woods. In fact, my parents live in such a neighborhood where some of the models are just your typical large suburban fare and others are very much McMansions, all prebuilt from a handful of different model homes. This undercuts the claims that the "McMansion" bashing is classist (this is a pretty homogenous neighborhood class-wise, yet some homes are McMansions and others are just houses), although some people definitely do end up using it that way.
Many are, yes. Builders will offer a set of core floorplans in their development, then you can add parts and pieces as the buyer. It often leads to the silly many-angled roofs you see on McMansions, because they don't revise the overall design to return it to symmetry and a sensible roofline after changes.
I've been talking about this with someone on discord, and my basic question is this: how much customization typically is there? If you really are just picking a house out of a catalog, there's really no excuse for it to look bad. (And conversely, if there's basically nothing wrong with it, then sure, lob those accusations of class snobbery!) But if buyers are customizing the house, and there's no architect overseeing it, so builders are just kind of doing whatever... well, you can see how questionable decisions are made and the house ends up with problems anyone with a critical eye would notice, no snobbery necessary.
There are definitely non-elitist criticisms of McMansions.
- They are designed very poorly in non-aesthetic terms - because of the way they're designed, they create a lot of waste in terms of construction cost, conditioned volume, and material use.
- They are built poorly - they don't last, and what seems "nice" when built quickly reveals itself as underbuilt and prone to damage or decay.
- They're hideously bad for the climate.
- They're bad for the mental health of the people who live in them.
- They're terrible for cities - they are ultra-low density and produce excess traffic.
I don't understand your last point. Wouldn't ultra-low density ameliorate traffic? It seems to me that higher density residential areas have more cars per street than lower density residential areas. What's the mechanism here I am missing?
Low-density means everything's spread out more, meaning that you probably have to drive to get anywhere because the shops, civic centre, friends' houses, etc., are all outside of walking distance.
Because they're not built into the fabric of a city, every trip must be done by car. Their neighborhoods are also often designed to prevent through traffic, which means all traffic into and out of the neighborhoods flows through only a couple of bottlenecks.
Lower density also requires more infrastructure per household - more streets, sewers, power, etc.
That is still confusing, however, as higher density areas always have more traffic congestion than lower density areas. Maybe it is just a US thing, or an Northern East Coast and Midwest thing, but usually people are driving cars everywhere, and the more people the more cars. NYC is a nightmare to drive through, as is DC and its suburbs, and Philly, Baltimore, Minneapolis, St Paul... I can't think of a high density area I have lived in that didn't have bad traffic. Compared to the low density and rural areas where traffic is "3 cars at a 4 way stop intersection and a buggy", well, there is no comparison.
That's exactly it, actually - where did all that traffic in Manhattan or DC come from? Unwalkable suburbs, mostly. Building *for* density and with walkability in mind reduces traffic.
I can see that to an extent, but as cities grow residents need to get from one side to the other and won't want to walk. Walking longer than a mile is out of the question for most people when it comes to getting groceries or really anything other than exercise. To achieve total walkability you need to have everything people want to do in a very small space, and everything includes different employers for the hundreds of people in that space.
The desirability of being in cities is largely due to working there, and that is difficult to make walkable when you have multiple working adults in a home who might change jobs a few dozen times over their life.
From another angle, given a designated lot with infrastructure built around it, the decision to build a large single family home vs a large multi family home is going to alter your traffic congestion only one way: single family will be less traffic, multi family more. If your option set includes tearing up and redesigning a large chunk of city from scratch there is probably more room to tweak that outcome, but so long as there is weather and all the jobs are not in a very small radius it is going to be very hard to have high residential density with low traffic.
You say "built into the fabric of a city" and I hear "walkup tenements for the plebs, brownstones for the lucky professionals, and penthouses with doormen for the elites". Screw that.
What do you think the plebs get today, beautiful well-built mansions in the countryside? They get shoddily built houses far from work, school, and activities and are then forced to commute.
"they are ultra-low density and produce excess traffic."
Actually, because McMansions are big houses crammed onto small lots, they reduce traffic and commute times versus building a Mansion on an aesthetically pleasing large lot even further out in the exurbs.
Probably a lot of buyers will wind up renting out one wing of their McMansion on Air-BnB or whatever, so they might ultimately accommodate more people than a more modest 4 bedroom house on the same lot.
They're higher density than some suburban housing, but much lower density than most city housing. It would take some detail I haven't got to compare density for where McMansions are usually built.
"Actually, because McMansions are big houses crammed onto small lots, they reduce traffic and commute times versus building a Mansion on an aesthetically pleasing large lot even further out in the exurbs."
This is just saying that very low density is better for traffic than incredibly low density. The choice isn't between suburban McMansions and exurban/rural mansions - McMansion buyers can't afford mansions, which have prices commensurate with actual quality - it's between McMansions in car-mandatory suburban cul-de-sacs and reasonable-size houses, duplexes, townhouses etc built in actual neighborhoods.
By the way, people love to put down cul-de-sacs, but living on a cul-de-sac is wonderful, especially if you have kids. It reduces your worries about them being run over by thru-traffic immensely.
While preference does play a part, there are other factors that have pushed this style to become so dominant. Some of it is regulatory - certain approved building products or techniques are easier to get inspector sign off for. Some if economic - certain products or techniques are cheaper. And some is that these are the least offensive to the people who make the most noise about such projects. Least offensive does not necessarily mean good.
In Russia, they have tried to reverse some of the architectural damage of 20th Century History. For example, in Moscow they rebuilt the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Originally built in the 19th Century. Stalin tore it down. The land was used for a municipal swimming pool for a while. after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Cathedral was rebuilt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour
Near St. Petersburg, the palaces of Peter and of Catherine created during their respective reigns were destroyed by the Nazis during their investment of Leningrad. Both the Soviet and Russian regimes worked to recreate both, including recreating the Amber room at the Catherine Palace.
I believe that several Korean and Japanese palaces are the same - destroyed during one of the wars in the first half of the 20th century, and later rebuilt in identical style.
Good point. I think there are some buildings, mostly temples, in East Asia that are made out of wood. They must be rebuilt periodically with new timbers.
I don't know that this explains the aesthetic issues, but I think it goes a way towards explaing the state of the institutional foundation of our society.
"The People and Their Rulers Increasingly Loathe Each Other" By Michael Brendan Dougherty | October 4, 2021
"A democracy cannot long put up with such a glaring mismatch between the people — broadly conceived — and their ruling institutions. One writer tried, in his own age, to descry “the cause of the present discontents.” He is something of a model for me in these times. “I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong,” he wrote. “They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people.” That was the inveterate populist Edmund Burke.
"The next decade is going to see a fantastic contest. One the one side are nearly uniformly liberal governing institutions. They will claim to defend liberalism — our inalienable rights, as mediated to us by the media, Silicon Valley, and NGOs — from the predations of populist demagogues. And they will often be caught merely defending their present privileges. They will demand respect for institutions in which their opponents have no voice or share. On the other side will be the ragged populists, democratic in spirit, but prone to wild misstatement and intemperate promises of violence and cataclysm.
A problem with the Baumol cost disease explanation is that modern architecture is nowhere near any sort of efficient frontier of cost versus beauty. They seem to be willing to pay extra to make a building uglier than a simple glass box. Three out of four of your examples of top works by modern architects fit that description.
Frank Gehry -- looks like the nuke-blasted twisted remains of a glass and steel skyscraper
Moshe Safdie -- That irregular collection of concrete boxes seems like the most inefficient form of brutalism I've ever seen.
Zaha Hadid -- Really? What the world needs is a standard glass and steel box, but crooked?
I think all of them are pretty. The curved metal looks cool. The irregular boxes avoid the "oppressive concrete monolith" problem. The crooked glass box is probably the most boring, but it's still not *bad.*
(I'm very annoyed by how "airy glass box," "weird curvy metal designs" and "ugly concrete cube" all get described as "modernist" as if they have any similarity beyond the basic building materials.)
For another example: Raleigh Cathedral in North Carolina cost $46 million to make; Los Angeles Cathedral cost $190 million. "Ugly and modernist" does not by any means equate to "cheap".
Right across the Hollywood Freeway from the L.A. Cathedral is the Ramon Cortines High School, which looks like a Japanese Robot from Outer Space trying to destroy the Cathedral with its flamethrower:
Do people not like the LA cathedral? I always thought that, if you're going to put something on a freeway, that's a pretty nice looking building for the job, with the appropriate sort of scale and grandeur. As is the school across the way.
Much of modern architecture is the result of the career dynamics of what it takes to become a famous starchitect. You don't get to be as famous as, say, Thom Mayne by designing buildings in time-tested good looking styles. You need a signature look: in Mayne's case, his government buildings look like IBM punchcards from 1965 with windows placed randomly. Nobody ever did that before! (Nobody ever wanted to do that before either, but now a lot of people want to do that because doing it made Mayne famous: he's the punchcard architect.)
On the architecture piece, I'm going to keep screaming into the void that you have to consider the whole built environment and not just the building itself, and a huge reason the built environment is ugly is that a lot of it is dedicated to car infrastructure.
If we are entertaining the idea that people won't build nice buildings because of Auschwitz, then we should entertain the idea that people have less reason to build nice buildings because it'll still be ugly anyway when it's between a parking lot and a highway.
Cities used to have more human-scale stuff in them, more trees, more space for people. It's not surprising to me that as the car infrastructure tends to result in lots of huge plain-concrete structure, the buildings tend towards that too. Taking your Google HQ example - is it in a place where anyone ever walks by for any reason other than they're going to work? People mostly probably drive by at like 50 mph. Why would you invest time in making it nice to walk around?
I'm not sure that Google hq is very meaningful since it was built before Google existed and Google bought it before they were anything like the behemoth of today.
But having said that, googlers get around campus mostly by walking or biking, so it's really set up to be walkable, with lots of investment to build bridges, pathways, etc.
Google may be making a nice attempt to retrofit its campus to be walkable, but it's still incredibly pedestrian-hostile suburbia. They spend a fortune on a private bus system to try to fight the nature of that region, but the cities won't let anyone build anything like an actual walkable neighborhood.
True, I don't think this is the only cause. Though it also seems like even in places whose layout predates cars, new development is often built around cars. Lots of older cities have lots of buildings that were built before changes in zoning laws towards more sprawl-oriented development, and couldn't be built today.
It's usually illegal to build something bigger than the surrounding parking lot, even in places that didn't used to have parking lots. There's a few parts of a few urban cores where they've fixed that, but the car still has to come first in most cities.
Eh, I find Albert Kahn’s Detroit to be quite lovely (it’s current semi-abandoned decrepitude notwithstanding) and it was built around the car both figuratively and literally.
Meanwhile I find “human scale” cities to be nice places to visit, but the thought of actually living there makes me puke. Walkable is great - if you never want to leave! For me, I’ll live with car infrastructure if it means I can get the hell out of dodge on my day off and seek some actual natural, secluded spaces, not the manicured faux-nature of a park or garden. Living my whole life inside a few blocks sounds like hell.
Actually, that’s why I hate LA. Not that it is car-optimized, but that even with a car it’s just too damn huge and takes far too long to escape.
Well, are we talking about new build walkable cities where the apartments all have parking garages and the streets are pedestrian friendly but still handle decent traffic, or the old “human scale” pre-car cities where car ownership is much more challenging?
Indeed. In my line of work (ecological restoration and open space) this is a big-ass problem. We're doing amazing restored natural spaces/trails in or near major metros having plenty of handy commuter rail (I personally live and work in Chicago) but the rail networks are mostly useless as ways for people to get out and enjoy our stuff.
Even in the rare cases where the rail-transit infrastructure happens to almost align with a bunch of beautiful natural areas and trail networks (e.g. in our region the Indiana Dunes), that "almost" is a killer. On the map the train stop is a nice convenient walk to the lovely dunes and beaches....but speaking from experience nobody with small children will ever try it a second time. Let alone anyone whose family group includes grandparents, or someone in a wheelchair, etc.
When I moved from Santa Monica to lakefront yuppie Chicago in the fall of 1982, I vowed to do it without a car. I got through my first Midwestern winter fine by taking public transit in the big city. But when spring came and I wanted to go hiking and play golf outside of the city, it turned out I needed my car, so my parents drove my Datsun out from L.A. in June 1983.
Well taste is subjective, but I'll just point out that more dense development means it's faster to get to nature. The fact that LA takes forever to escape is a natural result of car dependence, and is increasingly happening in other places.
Well there's a difference between "serious hikers" and people who want to sometimes hike (presumably a much larger group). Also more than 90% of households have a car, hikers or not. So I'm not sure what this proves exactly.
But if your main desire is to have a car and access to nature, then you could also have something like "missing middle" development, ability to have a car but not necessarily practical to drive for every trip, with mass transit, perhaps on the outskirts of an urban area that's more transit/walking/dense housing. Take transit to your job downtown, and other destinations are a mix of walking/driving/transit.
What we mostly seem to build now is single family housing and strip malls built next to roads that are practically highways. Not only bad for walking, but so much sprawl that in order to be near where you want to go as a "serious hiker" you also have to be pretty far from job centers.
One does not need to own a car personally for the occasional hike. Even if you're planning on driving out of the city every single weekend, it can still make more sense to take advantage of car-sharing solutions like Zipcar, rather than own a few tons of metal that sits idle 90% of the time. So walkable cities can indeed be combined with its denizens getting out an about. Just rather than 2 cars per household, the number could be more like 0.3-0.5 cars per household.
It's not impossible to merge a great walking street with ample parking. For example, State Street in Santa Barbara is a a beautiful street of boutiques and restaurants all in the California Mission style as rebuilt in the late 1920s after the 1923 earthquake. As a tourist attraction, it brings in many motorists, whose parking needs are accommodated in multistory garages. But rather than be eyesores, the parking structures are hidden, with the outer edges of the structures are commercial space such as shops. So you can walk for a couple of miles on State Street window-shopping the whole way without ever having to pass by a boring parking lot. But you can still park a 3 minute walk from State Street.
I think we should separate out discussions of (i) your standard "podium building" from (ii) a bespoke "starchitect" building that's supposed to be cutting edge but everyone hates.
The podium buildings are designed to be as cheap as possible while fitting into all the various zoning/etc rules, and the "starchitect" buildings are less concerned with cost and more with, I guess, making a statement?
Your argument is complicated by an important facet of commercial buildings: how well the building works for its actual the tenants.
I can tell you having worked as a process server / temp in many skyscrapers in NYC the difference between modern glass boxes and art deco skyscrapers on the INSIDE is night and day. A glass rectangle is actually very efficient, people love windows, natural light, and corner offices, and the amenities of having large floors is much nicer than the cramped higher floors of skiny pencil art deco skyscrapers. Take the old RCA Victor building[New York Architecture Images- General Electric Building](https://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID017.htm) (unquestionably beautiful on the outisde) or even the Chrysler building. The lobby to the Chrysler building is pretty but tiny compared to modern skyscrapers. And the upper floors on both are very cramped (I’ve been to offices in both of these buildings).
Modern glass and steel skyscrapers can be dazzling, but they also maximize utility for the tenants, who love floor to ceiling windows and (for commercial tenants) large floors. These design constrainst limit how a building can look from the outside, though some skyscrapers have been built in “postmodern” retro style, like Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building. [550 Madison Avenue - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/550_Madison_Avenue) Many newer buildings have grand lobbies much larger than the lobbies in art deco buildings.
My problem with historical preservation is that often only the merits of the building from the outside to a passing tourist are taken into consideration. A glass box skyscraper is much more functional in actual use.
Also, I know you said you were trying not to cherry pick, but the modern buildings were from unflattering angles. How about this for a comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Pyramid
I like my floor to ceiling window looking out on my backyard in my suburban ranch house. I don't like floor to ceiling windows in high rises because I fear tripping and smashing through the window to my doom. When I lived on the 23rd floor in Chicago, I was very happy with a window that started hip high.
If natural light is desired, I don't see why we can't build more buildings like Hardwick Hall ("more glass than wall"), which has large windows to let in plenty of light whilst also being quite nice to look at.
“We should find these same architects and ask them to coordinate us into only building environmentally-sound buildings in order to prevent climate change, or whatever.”
I’m confused by the flippant tone…? This is happening. The American Institute of Architects has a program called the 2030 Commitment to push the design of all new buildings as carbon neutral (https://www.aia.org/resources/202041-the-2030-commitment). Something like half of all US architecture firms are part of the program and almost all the big ones.
Carbon neutral buildings are not a style. They can look like anything. We may not not see think pieces about it, but I am a professional engineer in architecture and yes, I do think carbon neutral buildings will be the norm in a generation. Not three. Laws adopting stringent energy codes (see IECC and ASHRAE 90.1) are forcing everyone’s hand and renewed with stricter guidelines every 3 years. Increasingly it matters less and less what an architect or developer or homeowner personally believes when it comes to climate change. The government mandates it, and it is happening. (But a majority of architects are on board.)
My (delusional) hope is that video games, and especially VR, will save us. Enough people will see From Software's mega-cathedrals and demand better from real-world buildings.
On a moderately related tangent, the section on artistic rebellion reminded me of the UI design of Persona 5. It's done in a "ransom-note" style that I'm sure breaks all sorts of design principles, but even a philistine like me can tell that the designer understood the rules and chose to break them in a calculated manner.
When you think about it, it's actually true with most of what the video games world touches on. Take video game soundtrack. Jeremy Soule, one of the vg's world most famous composer, has been producing amazing neoclassical music to great success. I've never met anyone who described Guild Wars 1 soundtrack as kitsch, even the professional musicians I know admit it's beautiful and subtle.
I recently realize that, exactly as you say, my aesthetic preferences have clearly been shaped by the period of my youth when I played video games. I remember how marvelous it felt to discover hidden dungeons of Final Fantasy XII, or the tremendous design of airships in FF X.
And it really illustrate what our aesthetics could be if we didn't stop making art. It always felt to me that Art Nouveau was where we left off. Everybody loves it. And this mix of japanese designs, modern forms yet art nouveau ornaments feel novel in ways we haven't seen before.
Some examples from the aforementioned video games:
Perhaps modern architecture's problem is credentialing.
I have a friend who studied architecture in college, in one of the leading programs in America. He's a bit quirky, a bit of a recluse, wickedly funny, and a superb architect. He showed our whole fraternity his big senior design project, which was a stunning - and practical! - building to revitalize the fishing economy of his home state. He'd worked closely with the state government, including scientists, fishery experts, economists, conservationists ... he had chosen three sites to build these facilities, and he and his team felt that there was a solid chance that if they managed to build two of them it could rescue his state's economy and a few key native species for decades.
His plan out of college? Go apprentice himself for five years so he would be legally certifiable to lead the project he had already designed.
It's not like this credentialing came from nowhere! Those regulations were written in blood. But they have costs that mere capitalism can't overcome. As one of the highlights noted, it doesn't matter how cheap yellow or dragon patterns are if they're illegal.
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But also, I know a number of people who lament the death of classical music. At the same time, most of the big-orchestra classical music I own was written in my lifetime for games and movies. Now, maybe I'm just a rube and this filtering has worked on me, but I think that for many arts we don't live in an era of want. In fact, we live in an era of such bewildering wealth that we've lost sight of it all. The art and artistry of movies and video games - which runs bills comparable to buildings and can take years to produce - is nothing short of astonishing, and getting better all the time.
Sure, the particular ways that people used to make art aren't in vogue right now. I don't know anyone who builds palace anymore, but battleships and aircraft carriers sure feel crenelated enough for my tastes. Plato had a lot to say about shadows on a cave wall, but everyone you know has seen high resolution pictures of Pluto. If someone tells you art is dying, ask them for Monet's goddamn renders.
"for many arts we don't live in an era of want. In fact, we live in an era of such bewildering wealth that we've lost sight of it all."
BINGO, that's well-said and I am likely to plagiarize this line in future conversations.
I'll give my own personal-knowledge example which is jazz. Most people who self-identify as jazz fans consider it to be just obvious truth that the music's heyday was decades ago. (_which_ decade, which means which stylistic wave in jazz history, then becomes a thing to performatively argue about.)
And when I was younger I shared that presumption, in part because it is baked into the world of jazz fans that I grew up into. But in fact that view is completely wrong: we live today in a golden age of virtuosic and enjoyable and creative new jazz. But there is so much of it, so many jazz musicians younger than me who are absurdly brilliant, that even within the relatively tiny world of "jazz fans" we can't possibly find and absorb it all. It's way easier, and of course comfier in some ways, to cue back up our favorite Mingus or Miles albums one more time.
Well just off the top of my head, some regulars in my current MP3 rotation would include,
Omar Avital
Cecile McLoren Salvant
Either/Orchestra
Joey DeFrancesca
Bela Fleck (yea I'm serious, and have successfully converted some of my fellow jazzheads-of-a-certain-age) (though I'm also cheating because Bela is older than anyone else listed here)
Michel Camilo
Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band
Victor Wooten
Grant Geissman
Nueva Manteca
Robert Glasper
Barbara Dennerlein
Miguel Zenon
Monty Alexander
Trio Globo
To be clear this is just one guy's semi-random list and in no special order at all. There are many more, too many nowadays to even keep up with let alone try to rank.
>I might be the only person in the world who likes McMansions. They just look like nice, pleasant buildings made by people who want to vaguely enjoy the place where they live. Probably the least offensive thing people are making these days.
I totally agree with this, there are some examples of ugly modern big houses that people trot out but on the whole big modern houses are comfortable and tend to look alright.
As a YIMB-ish guy living in Boston, I think I have a relevant data point for your "maybe opposition to housing is because the buildings now suck" point. We have a style here (like most older cities do) that characterizes the mass housing that was built ~80-120 years ago. Here it's the triple decker; you can name your other-city equivalents (Philly/Baltimore row house, etc). People love them. I've lived in a couple, and owned a condo in one, and I too love them.
That said, one of our local YIMBY guys did some research on how people felt about these things when they were being built. No great shock: they fucking hated them. They were destroying neighborhoods, they were hideous, they were a threat to the moral fiber of society.
I don't particularly like the look of the new stuff they build these days. I very strongly suspect that this is because some primeval wiring in my brain associates older with classier and recognizes the new stuff as some sort of nouveaux riche thing it oughta think poorly of.
So whatever's going on with architecture, I very much doubt that it's to blame for our housing crisis; finger pointing there has to stick squarely with "people hate when their immediate neighborhood changes and we decided to give everyone immense asymmetric power to prevent their immediate neighborhood from changing."
Okay, well, we got used to triple deckers and now we love them, right? So why can't we keep building them, instead of trying really, really hard to build things people really, really hate?
Triple-deckers are one of those small multifamily styles that used to be common, but the legal and financial systems have made them a lot harder now. When they were built, it was assumed that the owner would live on the first floor, and the second and third floors would be occupied by tenants that rent from the owner. But with the legalization of condominium ownership, many of these buildings were converted so that each resident owns their own floor, or else different floors are owned by different investors who rent them out separately. Since the 1930s, most mortgages have been backed by the FHA through Sallie Mae and the like, but they are only willing to back certain sorts of mortgages. They won't back mortgages in buildings that have retail on the ground floor for instance. I don't know if they have rules directly preventing them from backing mortgages on condos in three unit buildings, but regardless, the legal and financial structures of today are different enough that most builders won't go through the hurdles of setting up condominium titles while building something, unless it's a much bigger building.
On top of that, many of the areas where triple deckers would make sense are already built out with triple deckers, and you can't increase density unless you go for a bigger condo or apartment building.
But Wikipedia adds: "Recently, a new wave of triple-decker apartment houses has been built in areas of Boston as an alternative to the townhouse style condominium or apartment buildings more typically associated with suburban areas. Boston's zoning regulations allow new three-family houses to be constructed in areas with existing triple-deckers. However, building codes for the new buildings are far more stringent today, with requirements for fire sprinkler systems and handicap access."
It's not that hard to set up condo association for a three-family. I've done it for very similar buildings. You need an engineer to draw a simple plot plan and as-built floor plans, and a lawyer to draft a master deed and a declaration of trust. It might cost $5,000 per building or so. Maybe less if you do more than one building.
And I don't think lending practices are any barrier to the creation of new three-deckers. There are tons of condo units in three-deckers with normal mortgages on them.
The Wikipedia quote is accurate. It's illegal to build a new three-decker exactly like the ones from 100+ years ago. The codes were extremely simple to nonexistent back then. Now you would need sprinklers, much bigger staircases, fire-rated assemblies, possibly some accessibility features, etc.
I owned part of a triple-decker in the Boston area. Having ownership split is a big hassle, because one person can decide to sit there and not do any regular maintenance, playing a game of chicken, that the other owners have to then do on their own. I've seen it at least twice.
Legally, units can force the condo association to fix things. But having to sue for regular maintenance to happen is a giant hassle and basically removes the concept of sweat equity from a house.
I wouldn't mind living in a triple-decker owned by one person, whether I was the owner or a tenant, because ownership is clear and the owner will take care of it.
The simple explanation is that existing residents don't like their neighborhoods to change, which is true. Another possible explanation is that previous generations hated three-deckers because they're uglier than what they replaced, but people now like them because they're less ugly than what modern developers want to replace them with. I think there is some truth in that too.
Anyway, it's overstating the case to say that design is THE reason for development restrictions. It's one reason among a number of reasons. But I have found that it matters. Probably it makes a bigger difference in convincing the various boards- historic, zoning, etc- than it does your direct abutters. But the board members are the people you most need to convince.
Re. this: "Remember, the Baumol effect happens when new technology makes some industries more productive. Since the high-tech industries are so lucrative, wages go up. Then low-tech industries have to raise their wages so that their workers don’t all desert them for the high-tech industries. But since low-tech industries aren’t improving their productivity, they just become more expensive, full stop."
This might explain why wages in low-tech industries don't fall as much as you'd expect them to, but I'm not convinced this makes sense as a complete explanation of why some low-tech things cost /more/, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they did before.
Suppose in the year 2000 we have a population consisting of nothing but widget-makers and tuba players, who make widgets and tuba music for each other. Tech increases, widget-makers make 10 times as many widgets, and by 2010, their salaries increase by a factor of 3. The salary of tuba players also increases by a factor of 3, via Baumol. But the Baumol effect can't drive a tuba-player's salary above that of a widget-maker, or else the effect would switch directions, driving up the salary of widget-makers as they quit to become tuba players.
So, in the best-possible scenario for tuba players, everyone in 2010 is making 3 times as much money as before, and tuba music costs 3 times as much as before. /The amount of hours that anyone has to work to hear tuba music has remained the same. /
It seems to me that the Baumol effect can never raise the wages of tuba players above that of widget-makers, nor make the inflation-adjusted price of tuba music rise. If so, then it can't explain bridges costing more /in inflation-adjusted dollars/ to build, let alone costing hundreds of times more.
I suspect the effect is more due to all those widget-makers having to spend less of their income on widgets, and having lots more left over to spend on tuba-music, so that absolute demand for tuba music goes up. Tuba-player wages then do go up because band directors have to pay them more, but that's not to keep TP salary in line with WM salary (mediated by the decisions of existing tuba players); it's to convert more widget-makers to tuba players, to try (and fail) to keep up with the increasing demand.
BUT, there are many, MANY fewer professional musicians today than there were 200 years ago, even without adjusting for population. So this hasn't happened, at least not with tuba players. In this case, I'd say that technology has amplified the productivity of tuba players more than that of widget-makers--they can make recordings, and fill not just opera houses but entire stadiums and cable TV channels with paying audiences. (That's not even mentioning iTubas and YouTuba.) Tuba player salaries go up not because bosses are trying to return tuba players--they aren't; they've been firing them like mad since John Philip Sousa died. Salaries go up for the opposite reason: we don't need all those tuba players; we just need a few tuba superstars. A single tuba player could provide literally all of the tuba music for the entire world, as Chuck Mangione did with the flugelhorn and Zamfir did with the pan flute.
But then we have to invest millions of dollars in marketing each of those superstars, putting them in a position to demand a lot of money. Like EL James, or the cast of Seinfeld.
Stone masons are probably different. Maybe something is happening on the other end of the demand curve, with a greatly diminished demand for fine masonry, resulting in the kind of job where customers have to pay higher prices because demand isn't evened out by large numbers--each mason will sometimes be unemployed (and must charge more when he works because of that), and will sometimes have multiple job offers at the same time (and can charge even more when that happens).
The second part of your claim about Baumol doesn't follow. Yes, the wage of tuba players can't exceed widget makers, and probably lags it a little because labor substitution is imperfect. But that doesn't mean that the price of tuba play doesn't rise faster than inflation! You're right that the amount of hours of work to pay for tuba play doesn't change. But in your example there's massive deflation on the (widget, tuba) consumption basket, because widgets got 3x cheaper (10x increase in production, 3x increase in wages). If the price of tuba play stays the same in terms of hours worked, then the price of tuba play increases at a rate wildly faster than inflation.
I obviously don't understand inflation as well as I thought I did. But the effects Scott described above are ones in which the price of handiwork has increased so much that people who would have been able to afford it earlier, now can't nearly afford it. My example showed that THAT can't happen in the 2-job <widget, tuba> economy, so I still don't think Baumol can explain that effect--the rising cost of low-tech goods in terms of hours worked per unit bought.
The feedback loops involved make even my 2-good economy too difficult to analyze just in words. I'd probably need to see an example worked out mathematically to convince me.
That region of Toronto is one of my architecturally favorite places in the world. So many beautiful historic buildings with big modernist neighbors or additions - often from very different decades and styles.
I heard of the Great Masculine Renunciation through the Beau Brummel controversy, but didn't check or remember most of the details. This was a "I heard a relevant phrase once" moment.
On music: There is still plenty of classical/baroque/romantic music being written - for movie soundtracks. The Lord of the Rings soundtrack is 13 hours long, involves 400 musicians, and has over 100 leitmotifs. [1] This is comparable to Mahler's Ring cycle, although perhaps lower quality. [2] Other movie series - Marvel, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc also use operatic music, usually performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.
On drawing / painting: we certainly still do know how to produce high quality artwork, and quickly. This is perhaps best seen in webcomics, some of which update 3-4 times a week. (!!!) Painting an entire story is not prohibitively difficult: it is given away for free online. Two particular ones worth mentioning are Stand Still Stay Silent [3] and Unsounded [4].
[3] http://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=687 This is the chapter cover for Ch. 15. I think that this is a particularly good chapter cover, bad it does drop you in the middle of a sad part of the story.
[4] http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch14/ch14_01.html This is the chapter cover for Ch. 14. This is a side story, so you don't need to have read the rest of the story to follow it. I'm not linking to the first page (although it's easy to find) because the art was simpler then.
Talking about comics, I feel like pointing out here is / was a line between the high art and illustration. Professional illustrators have always been required to create something that is popular enough to sell. Think about likes of Norman Rockwell, he worked and mostly gained recognition as a popular illustrator, doing illustration jobs for magazines. Go get an old Andrew Loomis [1] textbook: he is all about how a successful professional is the one who knows how to draw and paint about any kind of illustration that is requested, often for an advertisement, usually human figures who look like human figures, on deadline, and get it sold.
Comics are traditionally an illustrator discipline. For the creators who have made it a job, it has been viewed as a trade / a job / a business (in the old bad good days, often the kind where the creator gets the short end of the stick in matters of contracts).
Slightly unrelated, for all art deco lovers, here is Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, the Sunday comic strip of New York Herald (1900s-1920s): [2] [3].
Then here is random covers and pages of award-winning Monstress, written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda, published by Image (2010s-2020s): [4]
So yes, the skill of creating pretty pictures is still with us, for those who want to pay for it.
(SSSS updates are free on the web, but the author seems to able to raise 300 000+ USD per 300-page book in Kickstarter.)
Webcomics show that we could still have beautiful, custom made images covering the insides of important buildings - whether they're high art or illustrations.
Our society somehow does not connect people who make these illustrations with public places. Minna Lundberg makes her art available for free online and paid in print. But she is not being hired to paid the counsel rooms of city halls or the ceilings of churches.
She is far from the only person capable of producing intricate illustrations. Progress in art education results in a lot of talented artists. But many artists remain unemployed or employed where they don't use their talents, while many of the walls of public spaces, businesses, and homes go unadorned.
Not disagreeing about your main point. I wanted to point out that there is a long-standing difference between illustration / high art subcultures: traditionally art snobs have had a habit of looking down upon illustrations (IIRC Norman Rockwell was considered kitsch until he started doing politically relevant art), and professional illustration has been always around, with defining characteristic that it needs to be commercially viable with the public who buys the illustrated things.
For this reason I picked McCay: His whole career reads like an archetype of the American dream-chasing, with lots of attempts to capitalize on his art skills and innovations in both sales methods (vaudeville, comics) and new technologies (experimenting in animation before Disney but less successfully).
On the other hand, there are commercially viable projects with modernist or experimental looks, too, so it is not like public wants art nouveau and art nouveau only, but the market won't provide.
> homes go unadorned
Public spaces and businesses I understand, because there the decision about decorations are done by someone else (usually a committee). But only person to blame for a plain-looking home is the individual themself (or not, if that's how the individual likes their house).
Minor correction - it's Wagner's Ring Cycle (which of course was also a major inspiration for Tolkien), which are themselves a major inspiration for Mahler's symphonies. But the music is more based on Wagner than Mahler, even though it does use some of the more modern sounds that Mahler (and later Puccini) adapted into their Romanticist styles.
I guess that's as good a reason as any for why all my favorite bands list King Crimson as one of their top influences, but all their songs sound terrible to me.
Unless it's some sort of joke. If I ever make it big as a musician I think I'll list Green Jelly as my top influence, to see if it catches on. Who's coming with me!?
King Crimson is great (particularly the incarnation that did Larks' Tongues in Aspic through Red), it's modern music that has gotten bad. I will admit though, I don't think their live improvisations are as good as the stuff they composed in studio.
Is there a connection between my disliking King Crimson and my disliking all the jazz I've ever heard? It just sounds excessively odd, like they left behind the thing that makes music a shared bonding experience.
Yeah, jazz and prog are related. Jazz fusion also emerged around that time. Older jazz was popular music to dance to, but rock dethroned it and jazz became musicians' music.
I have a mellow King Crimson playlist that I still enjoy. The Night Watch, Matte Kudasai, Walking on Air, and some others. And I still enjoy "Red" and "Starless." Most of their improvs are junk, to be honest. I read an interview where one of the band members himself said that he considers the improvs to be evil at times, and that they often grew out of intense hostility among the band members. Frak actually sounded evil. Fripp's bizarre attempt to make himself into a psychological guru is a strange story.
I don't think many rationalists would like "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction". Benjamin seems almost aggressively uninterested in convincing anybody that he's right; it's like he's just writing down his conclusions without even much of a gesture toward how he got there or why it must be so. That's how it struck me, at least. I think it's the style in a certain branch of Continental philosophy, which is also marked by a general distrust of rationality. Still, I'd be very interested to read a rationalist review / analysis of it.
I was noting a general tendency in Continental philosophy, not attributing any specific position to Benjamin, which is clear from what I wrote. I thought that rationalist readers of the Benjamin essay might be frustrated by his writing style, and I wanted them to know that within its proper milieu, that style isn't out of the ordinary. My remark about rationality was a hint at why I suspect the style exists. As I thought would be apparent from language like, "That's how it struck me, at least," nothing I was saying was meant to be taken as a definitive statement of fact, but rather as my own general impression, which might or might not be helpful.
However! If this article (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/) from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is to be trusted, Benjamin's attitude toward rationality does seem to fit within the trend I meant to highlight with the phrase "general distrust of rationality". I think it vindicates my general impression pretty well. Your mileage may vary.
Walter Benjamin is best known for his prophetic style of poetic prose:
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Based on your reading, you would consider Benjamin to have a strong commitment to the Enlightenment-era principle of rationality? Would you say that Continental philosophers generally hold a similar commitment?
For modernist architecture, as well as fashion and some art, much of the genre seems to evoke a quality of distinctive neutrality. It has to be unique, yet have a "clean" look in order to be able to fade into the background. That's an attribute that's hard, but not impossible, to appreciate. Look at that Frank Lloyd Wright house. Part of its charm is that it's interesting to look at, but doesn't take away from the beauty of the natural surroundings.
Modernism also has a different failure mode from traditional aesthetics. Modernist aesthetics, when it fails, just looks bland, impossible to tell apart from lazy utilitarianism or alienating hellscapery. If you're a designer of a bad building, maybe trying to frame it as "modernist" is a way to salvage your reputation by pretending you did it intentionally. That would explain part of the persistence of modernism. It's a way to cover up sheer bad design or lack of inspiration, and the trick works often enough that people keep coming back to it.
Why do we need art and architecture that can "fade into the background," you ask? Perhaps it's population growth and mobility. When people are moving around all the time, you don't know who's going to be buying your house next, or wanting to rent your office space, or are designing a building for a diverse public (about half of whom just hate government spending in general), you need a structure that's appealing yet neutral.
Even for our fashion, we don't know what sort of aesthetic standards we'll be judged on by the strangers we'll be meeting every day. Even if we are high status in a particular institution or social scene, we'll meet people every day who are totally outside of that, and might enjoy making fun of us for trying to display our high status with exaggerated ornamentation.
So think of modernism, for the most part, as a way to "gussy up neutrality." If you view it as the highest yearning of a nice safe rectangle, rather than the sad decay of an extravagent gothic cathedral, I think the aesthetic will start to make more sense in its own right.
FWIW, Yale just recently built two new residential colleges that are in the “old style” of trying to look like Cambridge. So occasionally, hugely wealthy institutions do indeed spend money like this.
When I arrived at Rice U. in 1976, they had just put up a new building on the main quad that was identical on the outside to the beloved 1920s art deco Romanesque chemistry building across the quad from it, but on the inside the new Sewell Hall had All Mod Cons. All the professors loved it and wanted to have an office in it.
A lot of campus architecture from, say, 1985-2008 was to replicate the general look of the beloved pre-1929 buildings on the campus quad, just with bigger windows. I haven't spent much time on campuses in the last decade, so I can't say what the most recent trend is, but the turn of the century college fashion was pretty retro.
Egalitarianism was also the reason for the Mao suit. Everyone dressed the same; everyone was equal. I'm honestly surprised today's wokies haven't adopted a similar garment. It would place a barrier between them and the rest of the country and make it clear who are the anti-racists and who are the racists.
Antifa has their uniform, but it's designed to provoke terror, much like other violent organizations.
Black bloc outfits were originally designed to make it more difficult for the police to identify individuals. Separately, it's also a way to for people who are OK with black bloc tactics to distinguish themselves from other protestors.
I think that each art form that we've discussed here has different dynamics, which makes picking out a single cause that has led to all of them tricky. I'd go so far as to say that all the plausible mechanisms that has been suggested is partially true.
Fashion: Notable in that there's no real difference between elite and mass opinion. Everyone can watch the latest James Bond movie and agree that everyone in it is wearing very nice clothes. As already noted it got simplified and de-ornamented some decades earlier than the other art forms. More recently we seem to have undergone a second great reunciation, as men have collectively decided that actually even a plain suit is too fancy and they'd rather just wear shirt sleeves, then t-shirts and jeans... and over the past couple of years suddenly it's okay to wear sweat pants. Men didn't need much persuasion to do this, we just needed an excuse, which leads me to suspect that the first great renunciation was also just about comfort and convenience.
Architecture: worth noting there's several streams of architecture going on. In residential architecture, where middle class people get to call the shots, there's plenty of building in traditional styles still going on. In office and apartment buildings and shopping centres, where property developers call the shots, you'll see a lot of fairly boring towers and boxes because that's a sensible way to get bang for your buck. It's only in public architecture (public buildings, museums, universities) that the elites get to call the shots based on the tastes that they have (or want to be seen as having) and this is where you'll see the biggest gap between what people want and what they get. Still, I think architecture is slowly recovering from its 20th century experiment with high modernism, and I'll take a 2010s public building over a 1970s one any day.
Music: really complicated, defies simple analysis. "Art" music drove itself off a cliff sometime around 1930, but "popular" music has gone from a bunch of "Hey nonny nonny" to a vast array of genres with varying levels of complexity.
Painting, sculpture, poetry: these are dead art forms in search of purpose, calmly floating away unmoored from the laws of supply and demand.
Prose: notable for being the only major art form that _hasn't_ undergone a major simplification. If this one had followed the same trajectory as the others then the top-selling novels of 2020 would look more like See Spot Run.
Great comment, but prose has been subject to these trends, compare the winners of literary prizes like Don DeLilo or whatever to Stephen King / other bestseller (see https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/) also I think that “elite taste” is a misnomer, it’s more people who formally study and really care about something vs the vast majority who don’t really care. Rich people aren’t listening to atonal music, it’s just classical music nerds.
' Rich people aren’t listening to atonal music, it’s just classical music nerds.' Yes (although, actually plenty of them hate it too!), but it's not a coincidence that people who are classical music nerds *tend* to be from well-off families ( though not necessarily elite in the Bezos sense!).
Hemingway in the late 1920s was hugely influential on subsequent writers, such as Waugh and Stoppard, for finally, definitively, laying rest to Victorian (e.g., Dickens) ornateness and sentimentality.
Subsequently, various high brow authors created complex prose styles rooted in, say, Joyce. But in general, nobody anymore expects, say, the President to deliver the State of the Union address in the convoluted prose of the 19th Century.
> Fashion: Notable in that there's no real difference between elite and mass opinion. Everyone can watch the latest James Bond movie and agree that everyone in it is wearing very nice clothes.
Well yes, it'd be anachronistic to wear anything else than suits. And, as you accurately pointed out, people no longer wear suits, except James Bond (and even...) and it has been the object of much lamenting, just like in architecture. Certainly a lot of people would like it if men and women started wearing suits and dresses again. That's the first thing anybody notices when they watch Mad Men.
Thank you for the quotation, and the honour of taking the biggest hit!
I don't disagree. I felt I addressed your point that there's clearly beauty out there in referring lone genius. They're not necessarily uncommon, just evidently not common enough that we can rely on them alone. My claim is that the general and systemic capacity to produce beauty, once lost, is difficult to recapture.
If it isn't obvious I see beauty in 19th century terms, it's a phenomenological object that emerges from free and healthy life. But I think my points hold for a broader and more subjective view that fits this comments section. Are we not here grappling with the failure to make things that please people, in the most general sense? In a box that big surely, whatever you make of beauty, it can fit.
I think my point is worth reiterating because we're doomed to miss the truth in this discussion if we don't contemplate the possibility of a singularness to beauty. Modern manners and habits keeps us from declaring the taste of modernists basically wrong, but it could be. These people could be aesthetically sick.
I don't know, but it's a view we shouldn't avoid considering. It's incredibly problematic if true, so we should be suspicious of a desire to just stamp beauty as subjective and move along.
'Modernist' is super-broad, right? There isn't *that* much in common between Virginia Woolf (who I think is worthwhile) and Pierre Boulez (who I think is garbage, although I admit I haven't tried very hard.) Obviously music is different from the novel, but what I mean is that something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W56pQqEVetA is a MUCH bigger departure from the techniques of music in 1870, than To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway are from 1870 novel writing. Different art forms also arrived at modernism quite differently: i.e. in music, the most avant-garde modernists (Schoenberg, and those whose music derives from him) got there by extending a line of technical development (more and more chromaticism, less and less clear what key the music is in) that goes way way back as a trend into Romantic music that sounds "traditional". In poetry, on the other hand, they got their in English at least by (officially) anyway trying to reject Romanticism. But unlike in music, where the most avant-garde composers were all about pushing forward, the two most influential English-language modernist poets in their own time are probably Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, who were fascinated by poetry of the Medieval and Renaissance past, and Eliot sometimes claimed to be reclaiming the 'real' tradition of English poetry of people like Donne and Shakespeare that the Enlightenment and Romanticism had interrupted/corrupted. In the novel meanwhile, they arrived at modernism not via either rejecting Romanticism or extending Romantic techniques but out of a Realist period that there isn't really a poetry or music equivalent to. (Both extending and rejecting realism.) This difference is marked by the fact that some major modernist novelists like Woolf and Proust are actually pretty rational and comprehensible (well, if you can take Proust's sentence-length!). Even within music there is quite a lot of variation. No one is going to say Stravinsky wasn't a modernist, but compare neo-classical Stravinsky to Boulez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmnfwnfnKBA Modernism is cool, calm anti-Romantic objectivity as well as shock the bourgeios incomprehensible nihilism.
Given this diversity, I am a bit suspicious of the view that modernism can be good or bad in total. I have a highly positive opinion of some modernist novels for example (In Search of Lost Time, To the Lighthouse, *large parts* of Ulysses, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Late_It_Was%2C_How_Late, but definitely not Finnegans Wake, though I admit I've only read a few pages*), but I think atonal music is generally trash. On the other hand it does feel like there is *something* *most* modernism has in common, that you could be for or against overall without that being totally weird. But it's a little hard to say what. Something something death of God? (But Stravinsky remained an Orthodox Christian and wrote several religious works, at least one of which is supposed to be 'major': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUSfrgPQjRM).
*Have some doubt about how many people have *actually* read more, even among English profs who work on modernism. I mean *just look at the thing*: http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm
I'm entrapped by my own words again! I can't claim to know enough about what is called "Modernism" in literature or music to comment. From a vague familiarity with the works you cite I'm surprised that's called Modernism.
Modernism to me is a catch-all for the aesthetic manifestations of top down technocratic power, elite power in the globalised homogeneous world. To make a firm point in the web of observation and feeling I'm drawing from, Modernism tends to remove detail and the living emergent quality of systems. In politics this is the mindset that drove the Soviet union and the urban planners, treating man as a machine to be striped of finery and made pure. It is the removal of the rainforest for the monocrop. In architecture this is the stripping of ornamental detail for monolithic concrete. It is rationalism ordering life where faith has protected customs that are wiser than ourselves.
In all these cases there's a steel man to be made. I've seen brutalist buildings that impressed me as a work of art. But I make a harsh distinction where the architect decided an entire patch of the earth should be claimed and blighted as the gallery for this art work. The world is a commons, and architecture ought to strive towards beauty, harmony, repose, as it once did, because it makes up the human contribution to our environment that belongs to everyone.
So I suppose I'm really talking of architecture, inasmuch as there's no rightful way to denounce a person's taste, where it departs from functional ideals, except where they impose that taste on others.
'Modernism to me is a catch-all for the aesthetic manifestations of top down technocratic power, elite power in the globalised homogeneous world.' Hmmm. I get what you mean now, but I feel this use of the term can be a bit confusing. (Though I get that it is *one* already current way people use the term and you haven't just made it up.) The problem is that 'modernism' is a standard term used as a fairly neutral descriptor for all of the broadly avant-garde or innovative art in the Western world in roughly the first half of the 20th century, plus other stuff that resembles the paradigm cases. (See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_modernism) It's like 'Baroque' or 'Romantic' in that respect. (I've even see a pop music critic describe *The Beatles* as 'modernists', which I think is false generally, but true of A Day in the Life and perhaps a few other things.) It's kind of begging the question against that art to say that *by definition* it's always a 'manifestation of top down technocratic power, elite power in the globalised homogeneous world.' Read To the Lighthouse or The Sound and the Fury nd tell me if you think that's what's going on! (And I don't even particularly like the latter!) Particularly since, whilst modernism was certainly intensely elitist, the attitude of modernist artists and writers in the standard sense of 'modernism' I'm talking about to 'technocracy' probably varied a great deal. On the other hand, as I say, your use of the term is standard too, so it's not clear what to do about this.
On the substantive point about architecture: I agree that architects have a greater duty to produce artworks that the public at the very least doesn't actively hate, given that, uniquely, people are forced to encounter their art in their adult daily lives, whether they like it or not.
I'm comfortable saying that there are many traditions in different domains about "Modernism", and when you're talking of modernism in literature, for instance, we're talking about something particular. As long as you avoid confusion it's fine. But I'm also comfortable with there being a debate over whether there could be an overriding and most legitimate definition. This probably isn't true of every word with many meanings. What I think distinguishes modernism here is it's political dimension, to use another word that could get me in trouble.
Specifically I think "Modernism" has been an anchoring word marking the emergence of a politico-social phenomena. It's a "quality that cannot be named" in Christopher Alexander's sense that the most complete images of living things are necessarily as deep as the thing itself, and so contain the irreducibility of life and the universe. The more you try to be exact the more it slips away. I was self conscious of missing the mark in referring to "technocratic power, elite power", because of course reality doesn't conform to language, it's more complicated, but it would've been foolish to try and be more exact.
In context, I am claiming there's a world-historic force that is discovered over and again individually, and we discover others have seen this "quality" in a sort of orbit of ideas around "Modernism". It is the mantle claimed by the technocratic elite leviathan, and the word by which it is seen by it's adversaries. For this reason I think there is a contingent case for bearing through inevitable confusion around the use of "Modernism", to preserve the recognition of this political force. More, an insistence on a more bland apolitical definition demands scrutiny as to the sensibilities and aims it protects. Confusion of language is easily a confusion of historical memory.
We should keeping in mind, for the sake of clarity, that people are actors in an emergent system, and we needn't be talking about intentional conspiracy to speculate on class interests. I do not mean to suggest that individuals who do see Modernism in apolitical terms have more or less conscious ulterior motives. But I do personally believe that their opinion is consequent of a larger power struggle playing out as much in language as in the world.
Good point about Modernism as an anchoring word. When I look back over the last 130 years of cultural production in the “West,” the term modernism has definitely been used to refer to different things over time. Goalpost shifts around the definition of “modern.” When it was just starting out it was in opposition to classical, expressionist, Victorian, impressionist and the beginnings of Soviet style. James Joyce was a “modernist” and his work is quite ornate.
Then existentialism and increasing abstraction post-war and “mid-century modern” arrived (orange and green, mirrors, suburbs.) Then “postmodernism” including certainly Foucault, Philip Glass, Derrida, etc. Then 1970s-1980s a bit like how the name “new left” had been used for political movements for 100 years and no longer made sense (fourth wave!) same with “modernist.” By 2000 I would say the term had rolled up everything since 1900 and meant “recent.” Now in 2021 some of that’s forgotten and it means “recent” being the last 20 years- “contemporary” and “post-modern” became disfavored.
Having a conversation about it becomes quite difficult when one has to find out which part of “modern” one is referring to, as you said. The literary versus paint vs image/graphic vs digital vs architectural vs urban planning vs orchestral music vs experimental music vs jazz vs philosophy (British, continental, American, et cetera) vs poetry vs novel vs experimental form vs comic/graphic novel versus finally architecture and fashion and on and on. And I forgot cubism and surrealism and abstract expressionism. All collapsed into “modernism”. And various folk revivals.
When modernism is the word for all of it the mechanism of discussion is lost.
'I do not mean to suggest that individuals who do see Modernism in apolitical terms have more or less conscious ulterior motives. But I do personally believe that their opinion is consequent of a larger power struggle playing out as much in language as in the world.'
This seems odd to me, because there are other very similar terms like Baroque' and 'Romantic', that do the same job of picking out a sort of period of work with unifying aesthetic characteristics. It seems like exactly the kind of thing that people who are interested in the history of art and culture like to have words for that are fairly neutral anyway. So I don't really see a need to posit sinister socio-political forces to explain why we have 'modernism' specifically.
Every generation has a few vastly talented artists and they will tend to create in the style of their age, but also sometime they will alter the zeitgeist.
I've really enjoyed these posts, and hope it may continue into a longer series.
I got a degree in art education, and despite liking both making and teaching art, constantly wanted to give up over all the rubbish "art is intentionality" conversations, and find aesthetics very difficult to think or talk about. This is a problem professionally, because I'm supposed to lead aesthetic conversations, but mostly just paint and sculpt and run kilns and such things. Students mostly don't want to talk about aesthetics beyond things like "I want to draw this musician because I connect with his music" or "I like this galaxy painting because it's beautiful" either.
For the most part, we seem to be living in parallel artistic universes that hardly overlap. Maybe three of them.
The popular universe, full of graphic novels, fantasy, sci-fi, and generally highly detailed story worlds with realism, attention to detail, classical sound tracks, and so on. That's the conceptual world Burning Man installation art inhabits. There are fun art spaces in this sphere, like Meow Wolf, no expanded into Omega Mart and a new franchise.
Then there's a local and traditional art scene. My suburb holds an annual studio tour, and while a portion of it is scammy crystal stuff, much of it is quite technical and traditional, describing itself with labels like "Hudson River School" and local metalworking or pottery traditions.
Then there's the "high art" world. Which I've studied a bit, and sometimes understand where people are coming from, but it's more intuitively foreign than traditional architecture from anywhere in the world. There's a lot going on about material innovation -- photography, tube paints, acrylics, screen printing, and so on. Much of which is quite interesting. But it's interesting historically, rather than aesthetically. I keep encountering people trying to teach pop art lessons, because it's bright and simple, but am not convinced that either they or I particularly understand pop art. There seems to be an interesting personality and story there, but it's more historical than artistic, in a way that neoclassical sculptures aren't. Some 21st Century art does connect on a more intuitive level -- I feel that say about the Harlem Renaissance, for instance; probably because it's outsider art more than establishment, and the iconography mostly isn't obscure. The current planting style, especially the work of Piet Oudolf, is rather romantic and very attractive -- especially the seasonality of how it's planned out to grow and decay through late summer and fall. I'm especially a fan of the Lurie Garden in Chicago.
Both in making and teaching art, I mostly inhabit that second space, and there's a lot there, though it's fairly regionally specific. While it might not be feasible to find Art Deco furniture in places without an Art Deco tradition, there are very attractive regional styles still in production, as well as conventionally popular murals on plenty of neighborhood buildings. In an otherwise basic mobile home, I have hand carved wooden posts on the carport in the local style. A neighbor has wooden architectural accents, as well as an attractive, traditional hand carved wooden bench. They can be had from roadside sellers at a working class salary (for people who want to invest in that sort of thing). Our wrought iron isn't Art Deco, but it's common and attractive, with some especially nice gates and courtyards. I think New Orleans might also still have an active tradition in this. People are still building lovely small churches, as well, with charming domes and lovely traditional frescoes. But religiosity is down, so it's not surprising less money has been going into this lately (Russia excepted). Anyway, my current city isn't rich and international enough to need towers of glass and steel.
We have our share of ugly subdivisions, but I think that really is a budget constraint. There's strong demand for single family homes with yards, new appliances, and updated heating and cooling, and the fastest way to get this done is in the form of boring subdivisions. Alas.
In any event, I've come to the conclusion that, as interesting as it might be to find out the specifics of why organizations in New York or other big cities make the choices they do, it mostly doesn't affect me very much. The subdivisions do affect me, and I would strongly prefer they take the form of villages with a plaza and shops in the center, but the incentives to make that happen aren't there. I'm not sure why capitalism seems to be failing there, but it seems to be something to do with zoning, but more to do with people already committing the most they're able to for a house and yard, with nothing left over to pay extra for aesthetically appealing small walkable shopping areas -- or not more than a couple such areas per city. I certainly don't shop at my local market, and go to the big ugly warehouse stores instead.
As a busy architect living in New Orleans, I'm coming late to the discussion but I thought I would add my thoughts to the highlight reel instead of trying to say something in the 1000+ comments of the original post. The post and resulting discussion were a great read and within the comments, some were good, some bad, and a few that have a misunderstanding of architecture as both an art and science and that somehow Modern Architecture really just started appearing post-WW2.
Taking a step back, the idea that all old/classical architecture was supremely ornamental, solid, and stately is because for many of the surviving buildings they were intended to be signifiers of the dominant culture, ruling classes or thriving capitalists. The important buildings were built with narrative decoration but also narrative & symbolic floor plans. This applied mainly to government buildings, religious buildings, palaces, then the later mansions, museums, libraries & courthouses.
But a deeper study of the mundane buildings surrounding those architectural gems, most were not highly decorative nor constructed to last centuries. Many were made of low-quality brick, stone and/or wood timber (later replaced with cast iron & steel framing.)
There have been stylistic shifts even within classical architecture that swung from the austerity of the Romanesque to the highly decorative aesthetics of the Baroque. The classical buildings that make up our Nation's Capital are modernist interpretations of Roman & Greek architecture that were never crisply detailed nor marble white. Those are modern steel structures with stone skins. The last traditional stone building constructed in D.C. (that I'm aware of) is the National Cathedral, which took 83 years to complete.
Historically, the building arts in the early U.S., with regards to stone construction, lag compared to Europe because we had an abundance of timber and a dearth of cathedral stonemasons for decades. This is why early American & Colonial architecture is much more austere and less decorative than the later classical buildings we admire that came along. Yes, we had some brick buildings back then but early brick buildings back then sucked. I've worked on them - low quality brick that had to be covered in plaster to keep it from melting. Even Washington's Mt. Vernon is all-wood construction w/ wood siding cut to look like stone block.
Burnham and Root's Monadnock Building in Chicago appeared in 1891 and was lambasted for being too austere because it lacked decoration. It's also the tallest load-bearing brick wall building at 16 stories. Burnam and Root ushered in the Chicago style that was less decorative than previous buildings but decidedly more decorative than today's buildings.
But the modern architecture we're focusing on is the style that has its roots in the early 1900s. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos helped kick off the movement with his polemic 'Ornament and Crime' and while he eschewed the overt ornamentalism that prevailed in his city of Vienna, Loos designed several buildings that are examples of rational ornamentalism where the elements of building and craft become the decoration vs. the filigree of the then classical architecture. Japanese architecture was becoming known in the West as well and its minimalism had profound effects on many architects that would become pioneers of 20th C modernism. WW1 had a huge impact on bringing about modernism in architecture, art, music, and literature and the rejection of Imperialism and the Belle Époque era. Between WW1 and WW2, modernist architecture was seen as utilitarian and egalitarian and less ostentatious than the Art Deco & Moderne Movements. The Mid 20s & 30s saw early Modernist works by Aalto, Mies, Corbusier, and other European architects and the new methods for building as a way to create affordable aesthetically modener buildings for everyone, this was true of the original Bauhaus school and its founders. IN the U.S., FLW, R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and others were pushing modernism especially in California
But it wasn't until after WW2, did the efficiencies and minimalism of Modernism collide with the reconstruction demands of the markets and, in the U.S., an exuberance and embrace of the New. When Mies Van der Rohe completed his Lake Shore towers and Seagram buildings in 1951, and SOM's Lever House in 1952, the International Style (Mid Century Modernism) became the de facto style for corporate America. These early Modernist towers were not cheap nor unornamented. The ornamentation was expressed through tectonics, materiality, and massing vs. applied ornament (we'll skip PoMo for now.) Once Corporate America attached itself to the International Style. we soon started to see lesser quality iterations of the Seagram and Lever buildings being built across America and we get the crap that Facebook inhabits.
At the same time, we had a shift in how construction was done, buildings became more complex to build, maintain and operate. Skilled labor was still unionized, you had trade schools that taught building trades, so you still had craftsmen to create classical elements when needed or commissioned. Today we have stricter building codes that dictate the life-safety, health, and welfare of building occupants, accessibility codes, energy codes, hurricane and earthquake criteria to design against which all impact the overall cost of a building. Not to mention the complexity of the operation and the building automation systems.
And while it seems absurd that architecture can't operate like a car factory, it's because literally, almost every building is a one-off structure that is never duplicated again (office parks not withstanding.) Prefabrication is utilized and can save on some labor costs, the construction industry is also heavily dependent on global supply chains and impacted by mother nature in a way other industries are not. The U.S. is facing a poly-iso insulation shortage due to a TX factory shutting down during their big freeze (broken sprinkler pipes flooded the factory) and a 1/3 of the U.S. supply chain disappeared. These impacts cause delays & rising costs that no one can plan for. Again, a client's budget is the biggest driver in what a building gets constructed out of and its resulting aesthetics.
Another big reason we don't see more classical architecture being built for public buildings and institutions is that that style of architecture is too expensive to replicate with traditional stone cladding and ornamentation and taxpayers balk at any public building that has the whiff of being ostentatious. For private developers, investors, and Wall Street, there exists the same issues but now you have to factor in an ROI of 5-10yrs on a building before it is sold.
The commoditization of architecture, both commercial and residential, has had a huge impact on the investment of capital one puts into commissioning a building. If you're building a spec office building to cash in on a hot market, you can't afford to spend 10 years building a stone edifice so you build a contemporary building that costs $200/SF and you can build it in 12months and lease it out to WeWorks until you clear your note, make money and then sell the building.
The residential arena is the inverse of the commercial arena where most homebuilders throw up cheaply constructed schlock houses using 5 different floor plans & finished with cultured stone trim, foam columns, and some vinyl siding, then call it Traditional or Transitional Premium Custom Homes. Whereas most modernist-style homes are custom-built one-offs that are often times bespoke construction.
Architecture and construction are complicated and complex which is why it befuddles so many, including the architects and contractors. As for why can't modern architecture be colorful, it is can be. Check out Legoretta's work. Dezeen the website as plenty of examples of colorful, playful, and ornamented modern buildings. They may not have Corinthian columns and a marble entablature telling the story of Eros but they're decidedly not boring or ugly. Despite the protestations of the National Civic Art Society and their push poll on "traditional" architecture.
"Another big reason we don't see more classical architecture being built for public buildings and institutions is that that style of architecture is too expensive to replicate with traditional stone cladding and ornamentation and taxpayers balk at any public building that has the whiff of being ostentatious. For private developers, investors, and Wall Street, there exists the same issues but now you have to factor in an ROI of 5-10yrs on a building before it is sold."
But the government commissions starchitects like Thom Mayne to design federal buildings like the one in San Francisco. It seems like you're saying the public would never pay extra for a building they like, but would pay extra for a building they hate.
Not necessarily. The courthouse that Thom Mayne did, and that people love to hate, wasn't designed in a vacuum though. It would be easy to think so. But Thom Mayne and judges met over a long period of time visiting old and new courthouses, the results are as much about responding to contemporary demands and programmatic needs as it is the aesthetic end result. His SF tower is also a result of a long design process with the client. Whether or not the Owner's reps took a poll to see if the average employee wanted a cloistered office or a light filled office, I don't know. That period of Federal buildings designed from the early 2000s was a conscience decision by the Federal government to modernize and update their buildings.
Federal office buildings have strict programmatic and security requirements and building a stone clad tower can be expensive whether done in a classical motif or modernist aesthetic. But again, the detailing required to be a properly designed Classical style building is far more expensive to craft.
I like classical architecture but I also don't think every new Federal office buildings need to look like insular Roman temples. Is there bad modern architecture? Sure. There's also bad classical and traditional architecture. I like Mayne's SF tower more than his Oregon courthouse but Morphosis has always designed aesthetically challenging buildings. You don't choose Mayne if you want a traditional design.
One of the best Modern buildings is the Salk Institute. If you haven't visited, I suggest checking it out.
There is plenty of great contemporary architecture that takes cues from classical design through massing, composition, color, materials and scale but dispenses with the overt decorative motifs. I'm less concerned about the aesthetics of Federal or public buildings as long as they're done well and built to last. What we should be pressing for are better quality 'everyday' buildings and houses that are designed and built well - regardless of the aesthetics. We've done a great job with the historic preservation of classical and traditionally designed buildings, but now that many Modern buildings from the 60s & 70s are approaching the 50yr mark & qualify for historic preservation, it will be interesting to how we treat these buildings.
I haven't been to the Salk Institute, but looking at pictures online, presumably the beauty shots... is that really one of the best Modern buildings? If that is the case, then there really is a huge disconnect between people's tastes, because to me that looks half done at best, and like the remnants of an abandoned WW2 era bunker system, or perhaps a nuked city. I am not trying to be mean or pick a fight, but I honestly recoil from the design, although it looks neat the way it lines up with the sunset. If the Salk Institute is considered excellent in the realm of Modern architecture, the gulf is a lot bigger than I would have thought, something akin to the difference between Earth architecture and Martian, and I think that supports the elites vs laymen hypothesis.
I think this is where the disconnect occurs between experiencing a building vs. looking at just pictures and understanding the design intent of Louis Kahn and Jonas Salk. Having been there, I can attest that trying to photograph the spaces adequately is difficult because the craftsmanship and precision is remarkable and the central plaza provides openness for contemplation and collaboration that cannot be experienced via a screen. It's like looking at a picture of a mountain vs being on the mountain. The entire design intent was for scientists to collaborate while also offering space for cloistered thinking. It's decidedly not a bunker. The material contrasts between the teak and concrete is very refined. The concrete mix was based off of Roman techniques. The plaza is cut travertine.
I think the issue that many people have with Modern architecture is that, at first observation, there appears to be no 'there' there but many of the exemplary Modern buildings require time to understand and dissect what the building is doing. Louis Kahn's use of concrete, light, and shadow are masterful. He drew upon classical architecture and monuments and distilled them. His Kimbell Art Museum is another great work of contemporary and contemplative architecture.
Excellent Modern architecture requires a different mindset when decoding the design as well as an understanding of the design intent by the architect.
Walking through a Peter Zumthor building is a unique experience, as is appreciating the detail and craftsmanship of a Williams & Tsien building.
I think it helps to understand the history and symbology of certain classical buildings and why they have certain ornamentation (beyond just aesthetics) but most people won't make that effort beyond the front door pamphlet they grabbed at the start of the tour. The Chartres cathedral has greater meaning to me knowing the history of the structure and why it has 2 different towers and the historical symbology used throughout than simply walking in and admiring the visuals.
That's what makes architecture an art and not simply a building - regardless of the style.
I think you might have nailed the gulf: Modern architecture is for architects to enjoy, not humans in general. Architects can appreciate the concrete mix, humans in general just see giant flat concrete panels. Architects' design intent is for collaboration; as a non-architect all I can see is a complete lack of places to sit outside to enjoy the air, zero shade, and really hardly even a place to plan to meet.
I think this all really supports the elite vs layman hypothesis. I am thinking of it in the same vein as movies or books. Imagine that there are two main levels of appreciation and quality in a book. Level 1 is explicit, the solid story, narration, characters with story arcs, etc. Level 2 is esoteric, the references, subtle inversions and nods to what has come before that only people really plugged into things will get.
Truly great works will excel both in Levels 1 and 2: the kinds of books and movies where lots of people enjoy them, but they really reward going back to them again and again because you always find something new, and serious nerds can really find some subtle gems. Tolkien or Lewis hit those notes often, or Pratchett, along with your Shakespeares of the world etc. These often form the core of X Appreciation classes.
If you only can do Level 1 well you have those books and movies that are good or fun, but not really something you go back to a lot. Very popular with the young who don't have the background to get the references or lack thereof. To the extent there is reflections and interactions with past work it is unintentional or kind of awkward, copying or mashing things together mixed with breaking convention just for the sake of it in an awkward way. Most popular cultural goods seem to fall here.
Level 2 only goes in the opposite direction: a book or movie than only a serious nerd could love. Not because the story or characters are good, interesting or even likable, but because it is entirely about other books or movies, and so is a sort of inside joke or secret conversation between author and audience. In fact, having likable characters or other good story elements would make it worse from this perspective, because it would be letting outsiders in on the secret conversation. Good becomes defined as "things only people who really know everything about the subject can enjoy". As an example... every Rotten Tomatoes movie with 90%+ critics score and under 20% audience? A better example might be older movies that make laymen say "Oh, this is just like X" but people who know film say "That's because this did it first and X ripped it off!" Those films notable for being ground breaking, but not really enjoyable for most people. Books I was made to read in high school English but never wanted to touch again fall into this space for me, but to be more fair things like listening to pod casts of people dissecting game play is probably more charitable.
To get back to Scott's overarching question, modern architecture is unappealing to the masses because it isn't really made for them. The elites, those who can appreciate Level 2 are in control of the schools and are the big expert names that get called into design big important buildings, and they are aiming for Level 2 types to show off to other elites. Not many are talented enough to master both Levels 1 and 2, and even those who are are looked at askance for mixing the popular with the elite, so the system selects hard for Level 2. After all, the populace doesn't have a lot of say in the design of the building the same way they can throw money at books and movies that appeal to them and not to critics. It isn't elite if it isn't stylish, and it isn't stylish if it isn't just uncomfortable that it doesn't keep out the riffraff.
I get where you're coming from but I don't think it's supportive of the laymen vs. elite hyphothesis. Again, your impressions of what you think is lacking at the Salk Institute are from the photos you're looking at. The places to site for shade and meet are along the edges. But again, one would have to visit the space to better understand it. And I encourage you, the next time you're in a building you like, to actually touch the materials.
I think that it is lazy elitism to think that only elites can or do enjoy Modern architecture or art. I've worked with plenty of craftsmen and tradespeople (laymen) who appreciate modern design as well as people who aren't architects that enjoy Modern architecture. I mean if the laymen are incapable or don't appreciate modern design, Ikea should be out of business and every mid-mod house and piece of furniture out there would have been left for the dustbins. The contemporariness of Scandinavian design would be less appreciated than it is.
The focus of this discussion and Scott's premise is that it seems all works of art and architecture are to be made to please the aesthetic choices of the mass laymen and not the elites (I mean who qualifies as an elite or laymen?)
To your other points about literature and movies. I suspect there are many laymen who forsake reading Moby Dick or Don Quixote because they've heard they were classics (and thus dense tomes of symbolism) or were forced to read them in school under duress without allowing themselves to just read them for fun.
I didn't much enjoy Moby Dick in HS but later after university, I re-read it for fun and enjoyed it immensely.
"To get back to Scott's overarching question, modern architecture is unappealing to the masses because it isn't really made for them." What do mean by this? That the normies can't use/function/appreciate a contemporary building or that architects design buildings to be misunderstood? I think the disconnect is that good Modern architecture has been degraded by crappy mundane office park architecture. Just as crappy mcmansions have given rise to a nation of ticky tacky sameness that people live in and think are great until they've lived in enough crappy ticky tacky houses to realize bad design can be wrapped in a Traditional aesthetic. Robert A.M. Stern is decidedly a classical-style architect doing great work and he's very much an elite working for the elite.
I will agree with you that there are gatekeepers in the higher echelons of architecture, just as there are in art, literature, movies and business. But there are plenty of normie architects that do great work that are not in any particular style nor were they inculcated in "Modernism or else" pedagogy that ruled Architecture programs 30+ years ago. I suspect you could drive around your city and find examples of new architecture that you can appreciate but just haven't noticed because they blend in as part of the fabric but aren't classical or traditional. I think we sometimes forget as well that all of these buildings are built by skilled laypeople and without their hands putting the buildings together we wouldn't have something to talk about.
"Excellent Modern architecture requires a different mindset when decoding the design as well as an understanding of the design intent by the architect."
So what are the adjectives that I should use for the sort of architecture where, when people visit my new corporate headquarters and have maybe two minutes to look at it on their way in from the parking lot, 80% of their brain pondering the great work we are going to do together, they nonetheless walk into the lobby with a sense of "man, this a really neat place"?
Obviously not "Excellent" or "Modern", so what do I put in the solicitation?
This may be just me exhibiting some stockholm syndrome, but I think the Amazon owed office building nail that experience, far better than my experiences visiting the other hypers (Microsoft, Google, and Facebook).
My experience with the rest of them is lots of weird glass, bent angle pipes holding it up, trying to find the entrance, and the hosts getting lost taking me back to the conference rooms.
Whereas when you walk into Amazon Day One, Amazon ReInvent, or Amazon Dopplr, you have a whole ascending "entry experience" that channels the natural flow up stairs or escalators towards the visitor desk and then the turnstile gates, while clearly signaling "this is an absolutely massive company full of very busy people", with lots of interesting ornaments, and some interesting art.
My personal favorite is the entry to Doppler, where the escalators carry you past multistory wood panels engraved with the text of "exploration logs", including the Lewis&Clark journals and the Apollo mission log transcripts.
And from my very first day of the company, I've never gotten lost in an Amazon building. As soon as you know the desk id or conference room id, just pay a minor amount of attention to the signage, and you get routed right to where you want to go.
Yes, that is also ugly, but that doesn't excuse the Federal building. That thing looks like it was made by something who hates humans specifically to punish them.
Hahaha...I can't expend the energy to defend the aesthetic merits of the Federal building. Morphosis has always been aesthetically challenging and sometimes I don't find their work appealing. Other times I do. But then I like the challenge.
That's exactly my impression of Thom Mayne from walking around his famous but misanthropic CalTrans building in Los Angeles: he hates the people who have to work there and wants them to suffer. For example, he constructed a dead-end staircase that makes two turns and then runs into the ceiling without connecting to anything, so the poor fool who walked up it has no choice but to go back the way he came. "Ha, ha, burn on you, sucker," seems to be Mayne's attitude toward the public. And the outside of the Caltrans building, like most Mayne designs, looks like a cardboard IBM punchcard from 1965 with the windows randomly distributed. I'm sure Mayne, who identifies as a Sixties Radical, came up with the idea of building buildings in 1968 that look like IBM punchcards as his way of sticking it to The Man.
But the problem with ideological architecture is that bad ideas endure for decades, afflicting people who have barely ever even heard of IBM and have never seen a punchcard.
Wow... even the building itself looks sad and anxious, like a dinosaur that wants to cry over its place in the world. Even if every side of the building looks thousands of times better, someone in the design process really should have said "Stop... this side looks like a nightmare of grey depression and angst given concrete form. We need to fix that."
Starchitect Thom Mayne wants the average person to experience dysphoria when they have to deal with one of his government buildings. I don't sense that in other fashionable architects like Frank Gehry. Most of Gehry's buildings are bad, too (but not all, such as Bilbao and even the Walt Disney), but those are due to Gehry's failures of imagination, which, all things being equal, he wishes he'd done better, while Mayne strikes me as a misanthropic sadist.
Speaking of architects that want you to experience dysphoria, have you visited Libeskind's Jewish museum in Berlin?
Gehry...few of his buildings do I care for. The Bilbao is one and the other is his DG Bank building in Berlin. The former a masterpiece of flamboyance (that kicked off a decade + of international museum expansion) and the later an example of him doing a restrained exterior with his signature sculptural elements contained within.
It's part of a tweet thread I did that compares government buildings (such as city halls) before and after 1945 using as a standard of beauty: How many girls would like to get married there?
I don't think Thom Mayne's SF federal building ranks in the wedding photography sweepstakes with SF's 1915 City Hall, which Tom Wolfe described as:
"this Golden Whore’s Dream of Paradise...it’s like some Central American opera house ... a veritable angels’ choir of gold … and all kept polished as if for the commemoration of the Generalissimo’s birthday."
Is 'how many wedding receptions can we hold in the main hall' the measure by which government buildings should be measured? Of course Tom Wolfe likes conspicuous consumption in architecture because he's a socialite and attention whore which is why he likes the Baroqueness of the past.
So what are your thoughts on FLW's Marin County Civic Center?
My vague impression is that older couples will at least consider getting married at Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center, which looks like the Capitol of an advanced but obscurely trouble planet in a science fiction epic.
The thread this comment started is actually a very valuable insight into what, I believe, is the core of the problem. Let me explain.
The situation is always the same: someone starts to argue for the obvious case that modern literature/art/architecture/etc. is weird and actually not very pretty. Then someone from the profession comes along, and it starts.
They always have a very knowledgeable understanding of the history of their particular field. Then someone asks the obvious: "why do you guys like this ugly thing so much?" And the response is, invariably, always the same: "Well, *that's your opinion*, for one. [It's not, it's most people's. It also implies there is no such thing as objective beauty, but that's another topic.] And, for two, *you need to understand the point of view/the process/the history of the artist/architect/composer/etc.*" No, in fact I don't need to. In fact I never needed to learn anything about Chopin to appreciate his music. I never needed to learn anything about Yoshitaka Amano to appreciate his drawings. I never needed to learn anything about Russian ballerinas to enjoy the spectacle. Not even once.
What can also happens is they start decrying the aesthetics of the building/piece/etc. as secondary to its design or something, which is a tacit admission that it's... kind of ugly actually. They try to put the focus on the creation process or the design or the history of the work, etc. They say that it actually references the old masters if you think about it in this or that way, etc. I couldn't help but notice that the architect in this thread does precisely all of that.
So, no, I don't need to understand the process. Sir Thomas Beecham famously argued that "The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought."
And this may be where the culprit lies: it is, essentially, an over-rationalization. They are not doing it for the result, but for the process. Rationalizing your creation certainly gives you a lot more incentive to defend it later, especially among other high-status people whose jobs consist in the same kind of over-rationalization all day long. The 1 million Pepsi logo rebrand is the typical modern art project: as the artist intellectualize his every moves and aesthetic decisions, he justifies for himself his own creation. When I read the Pepsi logo draft, that's what I understood: it was not about the aesthetics, it was really all about the idea. And actually, it's what a lot of "creators" have left today, not because they've got particularly brilliant ideas, but because the craftsmanship is not there anymore. Either they chose not to develop it, or it's not valued culturally anymore.
Thus, in the end, whether the resulting building/painting/piece is actually considered beautiful or not is not the point -- and it's actually kind of gauche and low-class to bring that up or even just consider the aesthetic quality of "the work" as primary. What used to be the "work of art" is now just "the work".
The modern artifact is positively defended by the professionals of the field because it exhibits the interesting challenges that make their lives a little less boring. The only tools they have in their craft, as they are today mostly just intermediaries, are intellectual tools -- ideas. That's what they all front, except the ones who happened to develop actual crafting expertise (who are often shunned by modernists as "kitsch").
Ideas are just simpler. Modern architects don't draw ornaments. Modern painters don't draw human figures. Lots of modern singers don't even sing (they use autotunes). Skills are expensive but, most important, skills are passé.
I disagree on the "technological regress" comment. In reality we're living in a world where we have amazing technological capabilities that are hampered by useless rules and regulations such as the requirement to conduct "environmental studies" before building anything larger than a single family home. If you allowed an engineering firm to just build a bridge without worrying about any regulations whatsoever and shielded them from anyone who dares to oppose the construction locally, I'm sure they could build a working, durable bridge for a price far lower than during the 19th century. Of course... the complete disregard for rules might result in more accidents than usual, tons of noise, construction garbage being dumped into a random hole, etc. It would also require the government to arrest a few dozen people who will inevitably try to sabotage the construction for various reasons. But it could definitely be done.
I think there is a lot to this. The example of the South Norfolk Southern Bridge is instructive. It was originally built in the 1920's then in the 2000's repairs were estimated at around 373$ million and the city was going to just decommission it. A private company convinced the city to let them tear down the old bridge and build anew, and did so for around 143$ million. Still strangely high I would think, but a hell of a lot cheaper than the city's expectations. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Bridge and oddly enough one of my papers https://ericjhammer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/How-advances-in-technology-keep-reducing-interventionist-policy.pdf ) One might wonder why the new bridge cost 100 times what it cost to make originally when it had mechanical lifting bits and everything, but the more obvious question is why the city couldn't see a way to fix or replace the bridge for less than ~2.5 what private builders could do. I don't think the answer has much of anything to do with the city planning to tart up the bridge and really make it amazing and ornamental to look at, and a lot more to do with bureaucrats bickering back and forth about whose empire was more important and whose buddies would get how much money funneled into their pockets.
I think the mechanical reproduction argument (that reproducibility leads to weird non-mass taste taking over the elite) is pretty persuasive, when you consider that in fields which have always had perfect reproducibility (e.g. literature and film), there hasn't been any shift of the sort you describe -- I'm no expert on avant garde film, but I'm pretty sure that the films that are considered good today by serious critics are no less coherent or "representational" than Un Chien Andalou or whatever. And in literature, the shift since WWII has been towards SFF and postmodern techniques, none of which is any clear sense less "ornamented" or populist in its appeal than Tolstoy or Henry James. The closest thing in literature is that rhyming metrical poetry has gone somewhat out of fashion since WWII, but that hardly seems like the same kind of epochal shift as represented by abstract/conceptual visual art -- contemporary poets still try to write meaningful things that sound nice, and I don't think critics are particularly impressed with "Tender Buttons" style non-semantic stuff or typewriter-bashing anymore. So it's really just the fields in which there was a major shift of reproducibility that this change has been pronounced. That indicates a signaling explanation pretty clearly to me.
(Of course, in the case of architecture there are all kinds of complicated economic and regulatory factors, which make it an especially unilluminating case study of the purely cultural question imo)
How about the CIA? "By promoting modern art movements such as abstract expressionism – and artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as showcases of America’s creativity and freedom of expression, foreign intelligence services ended up shaping the modern world’s aestheticsensibilities."
The complaints about McMansions always remind me of the quip "Oh, nobody goes to X anymore — it's too crowded!"
There are a lot of McMansions in America... and almost all of them have (presumably happy) families living in them. The owners just don't bother posting online about how OK they are with the design.
The McMansionHell.com critique suggests that the difference between bad taste nouveau riche McMansions and good taste old money mansions are fairly small but subtle and that Americans upwardly mobile classes could learn the lessons without intense effort.
For example, here in North Hollywood, a lot of increasingly rich clans from Iran and the like try to build the biggest box possible on the lot to accommodate all their various cousins. So, they will try to build shoebox-shaped houses out to the lot lines. In response, the Americans demand that they have more "articulation" in their designs for tear-downs.
My impression of McMansions is that, the buyers being good Americans, they tend to assume that the more articulation the better and thus get carried away with huge numbers of dormers and the like.
This is a good point. The Burj Khalifa is certainly pretty, but I don't think anyone would say it's *ornate.* If it wasn't the tallest building in the world I bet someone in these comments would be criticizing it as yet another soulless glass and steel box. (Well, collection of cylinders)
"I bet someone in these comments would be criticizing it as yet another soulless glass and steel box. (Well, collection of cylinders)"
I'm happy to step up to be that someone, because it looks ugly to me and I don't care if it's the tallest, shortest, widest, flattest or most likely to be yeeted into space building.
I think the big thing that explains why those weren't built in the US is that they aren't particularly functional buildings, and it's only worth spending that much on a building if you feel the need to put yourself on the map.
This may sound a bit silly, but I think it reinforces Scott's argument that modern architecture isn't most people's preference: what styles are people building in Minecraft?
There's a subreddit we can look at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraftbuilds. Sorting by all-time top, the first modern style build comes in at post 25, and that one isn't external architecture; it's a kitchen. Looking around the subreddit and on Google Images, two of the most popular styles seem to be medieval (especially stone castle-like structures) and rustic (with lots of wood and nature incorporated). Classical and East Asian are also popular. Modern style is much rarer.
Minecraft is interesting because people are free to design buildings however they like, unconstrained by cost, regulations or other practical considerations. And anyone can play Minecraft, so we get to see designs by people who aren't architects or otherwise associated with the modern art elite.
One possible counter-argument is that people prefer modern style in real life, but in Minecraft modern plain box buildings aren't impressive enough to get upvoted. This may be part of it, but you certainly can find modern-style Minecraft builds that are impressive and creative. It's just less common than other styles. Another possibility is the blocks Minecraft offers may favour certain styles (eg, they have a large selection of wood blocks). However, it has a lot of block types and you can find examples of every architectural style in Minecraft.
That doesn't mean anything. Minecraft users aren't really free to build whatever they want. The game expects you to, er, mine the building materials they use. Which, because it's set in a naturalistic world, is mostly stone and timber in the beginning. Yes if you play it for a long time or in certain modes you can unlock many other kinds of block, but that requires a lot more effort, just like in the real world.
Did you forget about creative mode? People who build impressive architectural works generally take that option instead of mining the materials by hand.
No, I mentioned "certain modes". But isn't it kind of a big assumption that anything impressive is built in creative mode? The fun of the game is in large part the way you have to work up from scratch and build up your little in-game 'economy'. You can certainly use it as a 3D paint tool too, but I'd be surprised if nobody played the game for real anymore. Back when I used to play it, creative mode wasn't used much. Albeit I'm not a 10 year old.
Almost all the builds on that subreddit are creative mode, often with additional mods that make building faster. The survival mode builds are usually labeled as such.
And the top builds you see there almost certainly aren't made by 10 year olds. They're made mostly by adults.
Both modes have always been popular, just with different people/communities. I'm not sure what the ratio is, but for our purposes, it doesn't matter. The creative mode builder community is sufficiently massive. Wikipedia says there are 600 million Minecraft players. We can safely assume the number of creative mode players is largely than the population of most countries.
It's an extremely small assumption because it's true >80% of the time that creative mode is what's used. Creative mode is standard for large-scale construction because it completely cuts out the time spent acquiring all the blocks in the first place.
Every once in a while people do large builds in survival mode just to go "this was made in survival mode" and everyone else goes "ooh" and "aah" and "damn, how long did it take?!"
In particular, impressive survival builds are more common on large servers, where people can work in groups, and devote long chunks of time to one build. Here's a particularly extraordinary instance of a solo survival build. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PdYm2EWyh4&ab_channel=FitMC
You're being extremely confident proclaiming something that is, in my experience, completely false.
Other people mentioned creative mode (which is hardly niche; a ton of people build ambitious projects in creative mode), but I just want to show this: https://imgur.com/gallery/CW4Rv2p
This is a screenshot I just took from my friends' minecraft server. On it we can see:
- A giant freaking sword made of obsidian, various types of nether stone, and a giant portal.
- A giant empty fortress made of quartz blocks.
- A tower made of various nether blocks with a laser beacon obtained by building and killing the game's final boss (sort of).
- In the top-right corner, a giant floating teapot filled with gold blocks for some reason.
And this server has existed for less than a month.
The idea that the most upvoted constructions on a reddit server will be small wooden houses because Minecraft players are limited in materials doesn't really hold water.
Speaking as someone who does Minecraft architecture, there are never enough decorative blocks to satisfy us. I use mod packs to have a wider selection and have even messed with the textures when I just can't get what I want. I'm half considering commissioning textures for a large build I'm working on because I just can't find a few I want, and I'm hopeless at pixel art myself.
Oh, and at a tangent, one interesting thing about architecture in Minecraft (and in similar games) is that people who are really into it appreciate builds on a different level from people who aren't. I first experienced this as a Lego fan, when I would see creators use blocks in unusual and creative ways. Indeed, there was a monthly contest in the Classic Castle space called the Seed Part Challenge—a random part like the whip was used to make a windmill, of all things: http://classic-castle.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=26053 We revel in that sort of thing.
Minecraft has some obvious constraints: one cubic meter blocks, with some exceptions, nothing angled or curved outside of mods, and you've only got so many blocks to work with. But there are subtler constraints: the way stone brick textures change according orientation means buildings look different depending on what direction they face. The way textures are fixed, and no mod can simply shift them around on a block. The way half blocks or stairs can only be oriented certain ways, or wood planks are oriented horizontally but never vertically. We learn to accept the obvious constraints and see the Minecraft world in terms of them. The less obvious constraints, well, people like me care, but most people don't have to worry about them.
It's pretty good! Anyone who has played Minecraft would say so, I hope. But someone who has never seen Minecraft before would not be impressed. Why is everything so blocky, especially in the windows? Why don't I just use an angle for the parapet? The brick texture is awfully repetitive. And the shadows on all the little details look wrong.
Someone who has spent a lot of time building in Minecraft sees this in a very different way. Anyone who has used the mod Chisels and Bits knows the fine details took a while. The choice of blocks was also pretty good, if I may say so. There are little details you don't see elsewhere: the sill and lintel on each window are a little wider, I added string courses, and everything is carefully proportioned while still being exactly 6 meters wide. And there's one small thing which I'm very proud of: the quoins. With most stone brick blocks, even using Chisels and Bits, if you try what I did you get something like this: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/812023026026807316/894938427869524028/2021-04-29_00.00.32.png (Behold iteration 1. Ugh!) Notice how they don't look like one stone brick stacked on top of one another, but like one, and then two *halves* of one, and then one, and so on? It looks just plain wrong. But the mod which adds the block I'm using, dacite stone bricks, has a plain dacite block. It's the same exact texture without the mortar lines. So I used Chisels and Bits to chisel out the parts of this block I didn't like and fill it in with, effectively, the base texture. Neat trick, huh?
Craftsmen can appreciate this, the general public less so. It reminds me of what someone said above about the impressive features of modern architecture being hidden. You don't know from looking at the building how expensive the materials are or how delicately the whole thing holds together. This should not be the mark of good architecture, though. I'm not here to impress the fellow craftsmen; the point is to build a good building. Unlike the modern starchitect, what I did specifically made the end result look better.
The sad fact when it comes to Minecraft is that, even accounting for that, it's a voxel-based game with 16x16 textures. There will always be people who just don't see the appeal. But what's unique here is the middle category: people who unconsciously accept Minecraft's fundamental constraints but don't need to know the fussy details of how I got around them. They're my audience, and are, I hope, suitably impressed with my work.
I'd like to use a custom, higher-res texture pack, like the folks at Conquest Reforged do. The problem is that I rely a lot on a couple of mods, and there's just no texture pack that's going to cover them. So I'd still need to get my own textures for them. I don't have a good solution for this.
You might be surprised. I occasionally work on Dokucraft, which has Chisels and Bits support along with about 80 other mods. However, unlike the vanilla textures, few mod texture packs are actively maintained, so you might find that there's only support for an older version than the one you're using, but that's better than nothing. For anything missing you can also use the texture repository for something that would suit your purpose.
I like Dokucraft because it looks prettier and more detailed at 32x, but it's stylized enough that it doesn't clash with the blockiness of Minecraft, which bothers me on the higher-res 'realistic' texture packs. I recommend giving it a look.
Yeah, I've used Dokucraft. And I'll give you this, it has some of the best mod support of any texture pack I've ever seen. But when I went looking through the list, it was missing something critical to me. I'm afraid I don't remember which mod. =/
It's neat you've come by, actually, because I've been coming around to the view in recent years that being able to make textures is a superpower, basically. Bad textures can hurt a good build, while good textures can really elevate a mediocre one. I have Conquest Reforged in mind here, but the same could be said for doing steampunk builds with Glimmar's pack. And being able to add whatever textures you need as you need them... it seems to me like that would revolutionize building in Minecraft. The problem with this idea I guess is, why aren't any of the great Minecraft builders also texture artists? I dunno. What do you think?
Let me know if you think of the mod. As for your question, it takes substantially different skillsets. You could ask why so few master architects are also skilled painters.
Tiling pixel art also isn't something you can just whip up on the fly. It needs to blend at the edges properly, and it should look reasonably uniform when tiled, without any glaring repetitive elements. There are art programs that assist with this but there are no shortcuts to making it look good.
I too don't believe in the cost argument. There are plenty of new beautiful buildings in classical styles. Also, "classical styles" doesn't mean tons of ornaments or detailed stonework.
Below is an interview (in Swedish) with Eric Norin, a young architect who campaigns for the classical style. He tells some stories from his six years at one of the most prestigious schools of architecture in Sweden. A hundred years ago, the first assignment for new students was to draw a classical Greek temple. His first assignment was to dissect a fruit. There was zero exams during the entire education. The word "beautiful" was never mentioned. If you want to learn traditional styles, you have to leave Sweden. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nCmrlepV0TAq39umRx0Dy?si=Lr8q3IIYQGejSif5sVBwsg&dl_branch=1
My take is that architecture is ideologically captured by modernism. Most architects today don't know or care for the traditional styles, and since society has a general over-reliance on "experts" which is further worsened by regulatory issues (that are worse in building and in the education of new architects than in many other areas), this becomes self-perpetuating as the old modernist architects gets to decide what new buildings gets built and how new architects are educated.
The neo-romanesque Raleigh Cathedral cost $46 million, as opposed to the modernist Los Angeles Cathedrals' $190 million, so yes, it is very much possible to build traditional-style buildings for less than modern-style ones.
It is - however, the Raleigh Cathedral looks kind of like a jumped-up high school or civic center. Perhaps built using the same kind of techniques, maybe by architects that built a lot of high schools or something. Plus some stonework and some unusual-looking windows. The LA Cathedral looks *expensive*, if not necessarily good.
The only tools the architects have left are abstract ideas, because somewhere in the chain of transmission of knowledge we thought that sharpening our eyes and our hands was just a waste of time. The aesthetics of the stuff they build and that everybody sees is secondary, as nonsensical as it sounds.
The comment by Phil Getz is great. I had always thought that the primitive style of medieval art vs the naturalistic sculptures of the classics was some vague side effect of the dark ages, rather than an explicit choice made for ideological reasons. It'd be interesting to read more about this, if there's good evidence for it.
Seconded. The idea that art cycles between styles based on the material circumstances of society is the sort of unexpected insight that you could write a book about. It also has predictive power - ie, that art should be becoming more naturalistic now, but will return to a strong emphasis on abstract designs in, say, a generation's time when the breakdown of the current world economic and trade system of the 2020s has had time to percolate through society.
Because my brain is slow - I'd love to see someone take this idea and run alongside Scheidel's theories about inequality.
From memory, one of the side effects of the sort of cyclical build-up of inequality that his theory describes is that a lot of the grand, over-elaborated art and architecture known to history comes from the terminal phase of the cycle, where the foundations are rotting but the elites who have captured all of the wealth of their society are both at their most hubristic and in the most competition with each other.
So you should be able to construct a timeline of naturalistic versus abstract art, plot it against the material circumstances of a society (including inequality) and then use the resulting data to check against both these theories.
Regarding the hope that CAD software will bring back ornamentation: my (amateur) experience has been the opposite, in that most CAD software is very good at handling simple forms (simple geometric forms, simple repeating forms) and very bad at handling organic forms (complex smooth shapes, fractal repetition and so on). The end result is that it's an order of magnitude harder to model a complex, ornamented and organic-looking shape in CAD software than it is to produce a simple, abstract, geometric shape. This is also true of some common manufacturing processes (such as CNC machining and even FDM 3D printing), which struggle to produce involuted and organic shapes.
As an semi-random example of this in action: in pro-gun circles, there seems to be a near-universal appreciation of late-19th and early-20th century firearms (especially pistols) as looking smooth or attractive, but also a general recognition that such weapons would be un-economical to produce today compared to the square steel-and-plastic bricks that dominate the market.
> The end result is that it's an order of magnitude harder to model a complex, ornamented and organic-looking shape in CAD software than it is to produce a simple, abstract, geometric shape.
Firstly, isn't this true of traditional drafting as well ? Secondly, video games are producing organic (and often tentacled) shapes left and right, and they are using similar software. The same goes for 3D-printed miniatures, e.g.:
It's a lot easier (for me, at least) to get out a French curve and draft complex curved surfaces than it is to do the same in CAD. In terms of using, say, blender for 3D models - remember that this isn't generally how engineering CAD software is setup. These are two different processes, with largely different workflows. This doesn't stop you from using 3D modelling software to make real objects, just as you can make very curved, organic-looking stuff in Solidworks if you know what you're doing. It just takes more time and skill.
The 3D printing that you're looking at there is resin printing, which uses a different process to FDM and only became available at a hobbyist level in the last few years. Resin is also (big generalisation) a bit worse at making functional objects, as the resin itself needs to be light-cured to work and such resins are generally rather weak and brittle. If powder sintering ever becomes as cheap and common as FDM and resin have, then we might see more organic forms becoming common.
Just to clarify, I was talking about modeling software that is used to create resin figurines, not the resin itself specifically. Clearly, people are able to use it to create some pretty organic-looking models; the one I linked above is just a random example, and might have been printed in some other material -- I'm not sure.
Also, I couldn't use a french curve to save my life, so for me, Blender is definitely easier :-(
Regarding the guns, I'm not a gun guy by any means, but I've recently visited a shooting range, and tried out various firearms that they had available for rent. I was struck by how easy to use and lightweight modern firearms were, compared to the more traditional designs. Granted, it is entirely possible that the older designs would be superior in the hands of a trained professional, as opposed to my butter-fingers and noodly arms; but still, I'll take an AR-15 over a musket any day.
Fully agreed, but we're talking aesthetics here rather than function. You can literally go and find a list of pistols (eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pistols), sort by time and watch them become steadily more blocky and angular.
Right, but pistols are arguably one of those items where function must absolutely trump form -- since your life will most likely depend on it. It's the same reason why ceremonial swords looked like this:
I don't think that looking like a brick adds much to the function of something that's supposed to come out of a holster (or even, in extremis, a bag or pocket) snag-free. It's the internals that generally make a gun more reliable anyway, which are obviously not subject to the same aesthetic considerations as the externals.
Again, from what I've been told it's just easier to design and make a blocky pistol than it is to make a smooth space-gun when your runs are comparatively small and you're using a lot of CNC machining and laser cutting rather than stamping and/or casting.
Well, just from my naive personal experience, there might be some advantages to the flat shape. For example, the flat surface on top makes it easier to mount utility rails; other people had all kinds of sights attached to their guns. The flat shapes on the sides made it very convenient for my fingers/thumbs to find the textured grip surfaces.
But ultimately, you're probably right; the gun I held was probably a lot easier to manufacture than a curvy space-gun. Just like the arming sword I linked above would've been cheap and easy to manufacture, compared to some lord's show-piece. When you need to equip every soldier with a weapon by using limited resources, the weapons tend to be reduced to their cheapest, simplest essential forms; this is just a law of nature.
> If Pinterest is any kind of representative window into the soul of the modern furniture-enthusiast, people really like Art Nouveau.
I don't know much about architecture, but I wouldn't buy any of the items in the bottom row, even if they cost $9.99. They are all completely impractical, and look a bit kitchy to me on top of that. Yes, I understand that e.g. the tea set pictured in the bottom-left required orders of magnitude more labor than my own humble set of ordinary circular plates and cups; but the one advantage I have is I that I can actually eat off of my tea set. Without having a prehensile proboscis of some kind, that is.
> Architectural ornament is much cheaper than it used to be, so it is less important.
This doesn't sound like opposite to cost disease. On one hand, the "flat" cost of labour to raise a building goes up because of Baumol, and so does the "flat" cost of land. On the other, additional unnecessary _ornaments_ that would display wealth go down in price because of industrialization and improved technology. So the (effective signal / (cost of signals + flat costs)) ratio goes down, and traditional architecture is not very efficient at signalling.
So you either:
A) pay astronomical contracts to a scarce set of elite-approved architects, so that they build crazy structures that make engineers cry. Because that will _actually_ rise the costs of construction unnecessarily by an order of magnitude or two.
B) make concrete, cubic, efficient and borderline functional buildings for the general populace to be in.
That seems right, and there's another compounding factor -- expectation of future economic growth. These beautiful historic buildings took enormous amounts of capital and enormously long times to build. If you don't expect much future growth, then that's logical--just build whatever is best, and it takes as long as it takes. But when you expect a lot of growth, then anything you build now will be much less good than what you could build in the future, and in the future will represent a poor use of scarce land. So you get in an equilibrium where it never makes sense to spend much now, because you can get more later and you'll want to knock down the present thing. Better to make the current thing cheap on the lower end of the market, or intentionally faddish on the high end.
Just think about the exemplars--the Church that built Stephansdom and is building Sagrada Familia expects to be around in much the same form in another thousand years, with a religious ritual that has very similar space requirements and still-meaningful symbols. Google does not think this about itself. Cities building modern public housing do not think this about residential housing. Exurbs building McMansions expect future waves of redevelopment.
Hm I hadn't thought of that. It shares a feeling with the "cars used to last a lifetime, now you replace them as soon as new electronic-based equipment is available" story.
I guess the time factor is really key. There's even some signalling intrinsic to "look how long this took to build". It can't be offset by dumping money. But such signalling made sense for dynasties of feudal lords, and not for VC and 4-year-term representatives.
PS, since you mention Stephansdom: I also visited the Votivkirche, and I did like it!
>> i think the most famous and esteemed architecture of the last 50 years is *extremely* diverse. frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid look like they come from different planets.
> In case you don’t immediately recognize all those names, here’s one top building from each
Regarding beauty in art, I was told by at least one art professor that true art is indeed *supposed* to be ugly. Beauty (according to the professor) is a kind of fast food for the mind: it makes your brain go "wow" so it glosses over everything else. By making art deliberately ugly, artists are bypassing this quick and easy satisfaction, thus forcing the viewer to engage with the artwork on a deeper intellectual/philosophical level.
And yet, I've never heard a physics or math professor shy away from "beautiful theories" because they're fast food for the mind. I'm not just talking about the supersymmetry fandom - I recall an intro mechanics professor going on about the beauty of Newton's explanation of Kepler's laws and so on and so on.
Yeah, that's my behind. There is indeed the slick, soulless, 'chocolate box' type beauty where a trend in art gets popular and workmen churn it out. Botticelli was in danger of falling into this same trap, as it was so *easy* for him to paint beautifully and to paint beauty, so the paintings from the latter part of his life (1490s onward) are a change in style, a return to a more archaic style, and this type of experimentation is necessary for a great artist to grow:
Artists can use deliberate ugliness for various reasons, and once viewers get accustomed to it, they see it as less ugly and even find beauty in it. But art is not 'meant' to be ugly because beauty is too easy, and the whole clap-trap about 'engaging on a deeper level' is why you need to read the little labels or the catalogues to find out what the heck the overturned dustbin on the floor is meant to be all about.
Indeed, once you go the "art is meant to be Deep and Philosophical" route, it becomes just as easy to churn out workmanlike, slick, soulless ugly works.
(You knew this was coming) G.K. Chesterton, from his collection of essays "The Thing", an excerpt from the essay "The Sceptic as Critic":
"Many moderns will be heard scoffing at what they would call "chocolate-box art"; meaning an insipid and sickly art. And it is easy to call up the sort of picture that might well make anybody ill. I will suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are looking sadly at the outside of a chocolate-box (now, I need hardly say, empty) and that we see painted on it in rather pallid colours a young woman with golden ringlets gazing from a balcony and holding a rose in the spot-light caused by a convenient ray of moonlight.
Any similar touches may be added to the taste or distaste of the critic; she may be convulsively clasping a letter or conspicuously wearing an engagement ring or languidly waving farewell to a distant gentleman in a gondola; or anything else I can think of, calculated to cause pain to the sensitive critic. I sympathise with the critic's feeling; but I think he goes quite wrong in his thinking.
Now, what do we mean when we say that this is a silly picture, or a stale subject, or something very difficult to bear, even when we are fortified by chocolates to endure it? We mean it is possible to have too much of a good thing; to have too many chocolate-boxes, as to have too many chocolates. We mean that it is not a picture, but a picture of a picture.
Ultimately it is a picture of innumerable pictures; not a real picture of a rose or a girl or a beam of moonlight. In other words, artists have copied artists, right away back to the first sentimental pictures of the Romantic Movement.
But roses have not copied roses. Moonbeams have not imitated each other. And though a woman may copy women in externals, it is only in externals and not in existence; her womanhood was not copied from any other woman. Considered as realities, the rose and the moon and the woman are simply themselves.
Suppose that scene to be a real one, and there is nothing particularly imitative about it. The flower is unquestionably fresh as the young woman is unquestionably young. The rose is a real object, which would smell as sweet by any other name, or by no name. The girl is a particular person, whose personality is entirely new to the world and whose experiences are entirely new to herself.
If she does indeed choose to stand in that attitude on that balcony holding that botanical specimen (which seems improbable) , we have no right to doubt that she has her own reasons for doing so. In short, when once we conceive the thing as reality, we have no reason whatever to dismiss it as mere repetition.
So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament, we naturally feel that the flower is in a special sense an artificial flower and that the moonlight is all moonshine. We feel inclined to welcome even wild variations in the decorative style and to admire the new artist who will paint the rose black, lest we should forget that it is a deep red, or the moonshine green, that we may realise it is something more subtle than white.
But the moon is the moon and the rose is the rose; and we do not expect the real things to alter. Nor is there any reason to expect the rules about them to alter. Nor is there any reason, so far as this question is concerned, to expect the woman to alter her attitude either about the beauty of the rose or the obligations of the engagement-ring. These things, considered as real things, are quite unaffected by the variation of artistic attack in fictitious things. The moon will continue to affect the tides, whether we paint it blue or green or pink with purple spots."
I mean, yes, I personally agree, but I'm a Philistine -- so my opinion isn't worth much. I am so uneducated that I'd argue that e.g. one of Kinkade's paintings would be perfectly acceptable on its own; the problem with Kinkade is not anything intrinsic to his art (even his loose relationship with perspective can be chalked up to artistic license), but merely the fact that he painted 10^17 of them seemingly on autopilot.
You can apply the same analogy to food here. No one would eat gourmet cuisine if it was actually disgusting, just for the sake of being able to engage with it on a deeper level. A chef may decide to create tastes that are subtle rather than overpowering, but it is absolutely ridiculous to say that something being superficially enjoyable precludes it from being profoundly enjoyable.
From what I've seen, ugly art is often exhibited in public, or owned by private individuals, but is rarely displayed in one's home. I could be wrong, though.
Hmm. I think the closest analogy to that would be to serve gross food at fancy cocktail parties to show how much you are above the plebeian notion that food should be tasty.
Any cost-based theory that aims to cover fashion has to contend with children's dressing-up clothes. You can buy a princess dress for about £15 that has layers of iridescent shimmery silky fabric, heavy velvet in rich colours, and intricate embroidery with beads sewn into it.
Especially the early stations. Later stations are either suffering from cost-savings because of the economic collapse (we call them "centipede stations" because of the abundance of columns) or devolve into the same modern architecture style.
I'm not sure if this is directly relevant, but Buckminster Fuller was an architectural engineer whose biography, At Home in Universe, discusses the lag between technological innovation and its use in architecture. (About 40 years.)
The notion of an increased lag in one field relative to another might be relevant to timeframes.
As something of an iconoclast, the obstacles he faced might be relevant?
Modern Russian (and possible Chinese, but I know nothing about it) architecture might be an interesting case to check out. 90's brought a great upheaval to society, and a lot of people suddenly had lots of money - which they spent building houses, of course. Literally none of them were "old money", because there were no old money in USSR, but a lot of them romanticised and adored pre-Revolution Russia, and old estates of aristocracy, which they tried their best to imitate. So now we have a lot of pseudo-classical houses in various gated suburban communities, with varying degrees of ornamentation.
In less elite architecture, the much-maligned Commie Blocks and Brutalism gave way to "Luzhkov's Empire" style in 90's, so named after the famous long-time mayor of Moscow. They were much more decorative than the old Soviet apartment buildings - and of course, universally hated by people with art degrees (here's the best set of photos I could find quickly, along with an article by a defender of this style, who renames it "Capitalistic Romanticism": https://daily.afisha.ru/cities/20759-bodipozitiv-ot-arhitektury-kak-i-zachem-polyubit-urodlivye-zdaniya-90-h-i-00-h/). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what that style was about - mostly, it was "anything, but concrete blocks". It included low-budget high-rises with decorative turrets build on the outskirts of the city for those who couldn't afford a more stylish apartment in the center of the city, but didn't want to live in a Soviet-era building. It also included attempts to re-create much-beloved by late Soviet generation Stalin's Empire style (I absolutely love it, by the way!). AND it also included pseudo-classical buildings with cheap-ish decorations. And a rebuild Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, of course.
Today, Luzhkov's Empire mostly gave way to boring Western trends, but you still can see a stealthy, sneaky, very-very high-end new apartment complexes built in the back of historical buildings that tries to imitate them with all success of a nouveau riche trying to blend into Old Money gathering. Still better than most Twisted Concrete that people call "stylish" now, IMO, but what do I know, I also prefer George Thorogood to any rap artist ever.
I don’t know about architecture, but as a hand bookbinder and woodworker (examples: https://stevenhales.org/home/hobbies/) I can attest that Baumol is a big reason that books are seldom bound in goatskin with elaborate gilt tooling any more, or that people buy IKEA furniture instead of handcrafted pieces in cherry and purpleheart. The labor to make those things is very high and can’t be automated. Materials costs are also considerable (I was out $1000 in wood to build a four-door bookcase). But I don’t know if those costs exceed inflation over costs of the past.
> How come we don’t have rich [entities] saying “screw the price, I really want this one thing to look nice”?
I nominate Yale University's two new residential colleges (glorified dorms!) as a counterexample to that. Franklin College and Pauli Murray College were built in only a few years (2014-2017). The university probably had a strong desire to meet the standard of its original 10 colleges (constructed 1930-1940) and not repeat the mistake of the modern architecture of the two built in the early 1960s. The latter (Morse and Stiles Colleges) are near universally disliked by students, who hope not to be assigned to them, to the point where it probably affects Yale's admissions process and image.
I think architects generally agree - there are a few buildings from the 1950s and 1960s that are considered classics of International Style or Brutalism, but much more 1920s and 1930s construction is considered good than 1950s or 1960s construction, particularly in single family residential.
Another thing not mentioned is that buildings made for us plebs seem to be designed to be functional and bare bones.
Airports used to be beautiful, this was when only the top 10% flew. I assume the revenue the airports get from mass travel is greater than before but there’s often no desire to create anything but the most functional additions to airports.
It may have been because it was just after being built but I remember when Bristol airport added on new gates. The previous gates were (and are) arranged in a semi circle around a circular concourse. There are shops, cafes and bars at two levels, plenty of seating in the centre including some sofas etc.
The new gates are down a corrugated white painted walkway with no paintings or furnishings. The gates are below this walkway so it never widens out to facilitate shops between gates. When I did the trip last, we were called an hour before boarding. Arriving at the stairs to the gate, after a ten minute walk through the featureless metal tube, the airline checked our identity and let us down to a medium sized room with no furnishings or seats, Instead we basically stayed in line in those Disney type queuing systems. An hour later we boarded.
Recently in Hamburg as I went to the passport control to the gates for travel outside the Schengen zone, whereupon you are stuck, there was also no cafes, food or even a vending machine.
It’s hard to see who this benefits. The airport loses revenue from the cafes or shops they could have built along the way, passengers get a much worse experience. The airlines don’t gain much either. It’s just punishment for air travel being common.
I can’t help but think that if airports were still posh, they would have added the new gates in a similar fashion
Total revenue from travel is higher, but revenue per passenger, and marginal revenue per marginal passenger, are much lower. At least in the United States, before the 1970s, the government set the prices on routes, so airlines had to compete on amenities, and flew fewer people. But once it became possible to compete on price, that turned out to be what actually got large numbers of people to fly.
That said, in the United States, I think the newest airports are some of the most pleasant. DFW is much more spacious and usable than LAX or the New York airports, and my favorite small airport is the recently totally redone Long Beach airport (the old one felt like a bus stop in a corporate office park, but the new one takes advantage of the California climate to give you beautiful indoor-outdoor spaces to eat while waiting for your flight).
> Okay, this ought to be an empirical question. Does architectural ornament cost more or less than it used to? If somebody does a deep dive into this, I will absolutely link them. If you think you could do exceptionally good research in exchange for money, please contact me.
I'm not an architect, but I am a mechanical engineer and I worked for 7 years in a machine shop that served a variety of industries (including on occasion making jigs, molds, etc. for creating mass-produced architectural ornamentation and on *very* few occasions making custom-designed small-batch or one-off ornate items as gifts.)
From my experience, metal, plastic, wood, foam and concrete ornamentation is QUITE cheap now when you can use mass-produced pieces. You're looking at a few dollars for a single piece of ornamentation (or perhaps 10s of dollars if it's large with more significant material costs, etc.) Much cheaper than any pre-industrial architect would have access to.
On the other hand, our custom ornate work was far too expensive for any of our customers to afford. An ornate aluminum pencil-holder we made for one of our long-time customers that we had an excellent relationship with would have easily cost $2000 at our standard rates. Custom work is still extremely expensive, and if you're making an architectural show piece you'll need a lot of custom one-offs and small batches.
That's probably most of the difference in perspective here. Want to mass produce townhouses with a particular set of architectural flourishes? Much more affordable now than 100 years ago! Want to create a unique one-off building on your campus with a set of ornamentation to match its surroundings and your personal aesthetic? No more affordable than it was 100 years ago, and probably more expensive due to Baumol's.
The one other aspect that's worth mentioning is *stone*. When you can make do with concrete or brick of some variety, colored to look like your limestone or whatever, you can easily benefit from technology on mass produced bits. We can cast concrete blocks en masse (even with some ornate features) quite cheaply. If, on the other hand, you're not able to fake your stone with concrete (say, marble or obsidian, or you just really want authentic limestone) then you're looking at a tiny industry which has not benefited nearly as much from automation and is hitting Baumol's head-on.
I don't think so Nancy. First, it was personalized with CNC-engraved script on the outside of the barrel, so it would probably break someone else's anonymity. And secondly it was 15 years ago and I'm not 100% sure I still have a picture.
Imagine a straight-walled aluminum cup a bit taller and a bit narrower than a coffee mug, and without a handle. Add buttresses top and bottom, with a 3/4 inch high heavy rim at the top so there's room for text along the top edge. Our company's name was engraved up there around the outside of the cup in austere double-stroke lettering. Along the straight barrel there's a lot of engraved scroll work, a dedication to the recipient of the gift, and a bible verse, all done with flowery flourishes and serifs.
Should-be-an-edit: And then the cup was lightly electropolished to be shiny (but without completely smoothing out the faint tiny spiral from turning it so it was still grippable), and anodized a tan color to protect the surface from scratches.
My impression is that Art Nouveau and Art Deco were motivated by the idea that the new mass production techniques of, say, 1851-1929 allowed decorative work to be done cheaper than in the more austere neo-classical age of, say 1750-1850.
But then people got carried away with decoration (e.g., how much did the crown for the Chrysler Building cost?), so the cost savings from industrialization were blown on, admittedly, glorious decorations.
Let's kick "omniscient narration" around a little.
Experimental fiction does *something* drastic to narration, but omniscient narrator isn't the opposite of it.
The extremely popular ASoIaF doesn't do omniscient narration. GRRM is philosophically opposed to it, so everything comes from characters' points of view. This has turned around and bitten him because he has to get someone whose point of view he wants to offer into place for all the events he wants to show.
A very high proportion of paranormal romances/urban fantasies are first person narration, frequently one person for the whole book.
Regarding cost diseases of traditional architectures, it might be interesting to study the Japanese sengū practice:
"In Japan there is a shrine [the Grand Shrine of Ise] that is rebuilt every twenty years. A new shrine, identical to the old one, is built on a site next to it. The sacred objects are transferred from old to new and the old shrine is razed to the ground. The main building of the shrine thus moves back and forth between two adjacent sites. The practice dates back to the late seventh century. ... Although the structures are simple, rebuilding the entire shrine complex and replacing all of the implements of worship every twenty years cost extravagant sums.3 The same practice of periodic renewal was seen at several other major shrines in Japan before the Meiji Restoration [late 19th century], when the new imperial government limited it to Ise, primarily for financial reasons." (from "Japan’s Monument Problem: Ise Shrine as Metaphor" by Jordan Sand, https://www.academia.edu/15221926/Ise_Shrine_as_Metaphor )
> The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions and their stringent design reviews, but it never occurs to them that if new developments looked more like the historic districts they degrade, people might actually support them more.
Like most "my opponents never consider X" claims, this is false - it's commonly brought up by yimbys, but consensus is that changing the style of building never helps get it approved, so this is at best a very marginal factor and, more likely, a completely fabricated excuse against general opposition to change or density.
In its audacity and its use of blank geometric shapes, its quite similar, but nothing of it was ever built.
Concerning the Adorno quote and the question of "No beautiful architecture after the Nazis", there is a link between the Nazi atrocities and modern architecture, but it's very counterintuitive. In Germany, in the early Wiederaufbau years, architecture continued just as under the Nazis, which means unoffensive traditionalism for residential and commercial buildings. Then, in the early 50s, when there was a civil society again, the architects, who of course where also architects under the Nazis, noticed that maybe they should distance themselves from the Nazis in some form.
So what they did is they identified traditional architecture with National Socialism and condemned both, while praising Modernism as the architecture for democracy. The reason why this is so pervasive is because this movement immediately swept through the universities, so the generation studying after the war learned nothing else. The German hippies also bought into those ideas, so now you have two whole decades only trained in modernist ideas, holding all the positions in universities. In Germany, any person I know who studied architecture is filled to the brim with modernist talking points, and has no idea of architectural history before 1930.
"Everyone who drew something reasonable was despatched. To my designs the old professor said: 'We did things like that in the Third Reich.' I said: 'That sound's interesting, tell us about it.' But he stormed away red with rage. "
Also, that Leon Krier article is good (I'm surprised how well Google translate works these days, I was able to read the whole thing without much trouble parsing it). When I read your comment my first reaction was "How silly, not making buildings a certain way because the Nazi's did it that way." But reading through the article I realize now it was very understandable: these were all people who suffered through the war and the Nazis were, well, Nazis. They were really, really bad people. It makes sense that, particularly in Germany and continental Europe in general, people wanted to get as far away from Nazi aesthetics as possible.
One major problem I see with the "our civilization doesn't deserve nice things after WWII" perspective is that in the unlikely event I were to ever find myself in a similar position to Curtis LeMay or Bomber Harris, I'm pretty sure I'd have fewer qualms about bombing cities filled with brutalist and mid-century modernist architecture. Sure, the industrial capacity being targeted and the potential civilian casualties are paramount, but if, for example, there's a Frank Gehry near a ball bearing factory I'm eager to take out....that just might push me toward giving the "go" order. In that sense, this entire line of thinking is self-defeating. It simply makes another Dresden more likely.
This encapsulates the problem with much of this thread: too many people want to turn "I don't like it" into "it's not good," and then work to justify why it's bad instead of looking for why things changed.
When I say "I don't like it," that's synonymous with "it's not good." That's a privilege I earned over the years. I can't tell you how; it just kinda happened.
The Gehry structure depicted in the post could be amusing if you're in the right frame of mind, and it is certainly *technically* difficult to build - it requires a lot of skills, and I have a feeling the construction foreman cursed the day he was born when he first saw the blueprints - but it's also too easy to do "big startling things just because we can", like that 'melted' building. I think there is a tendency for a lot of things that look great in the plans, win awards left right and centre, and then are depressing once built because reality is not the permanent sunny blue skies and clear spaces of the model.
Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim is a massive tourist attraction. I agree there there is an element of "look at these new tools, let's see what we can do" to these buildings, but they're built for solid economic and civic pride reasons.
Frank Gehry has built about two really good buildings: Bilbao and the Disney concert hall in the downtown L.A., with the latter being designed first but constructed second. On the inside, the L.A. version is a basic box building (with admirably good acoustics). But on the outside, form doesn't follow function. Instead, it is surrounded by a gigantic metal sculpture inspired by Gehry's love of sailboats. Sailboats look nice, so so does Gehry big silver sculpture.
I would encourage architects to take up sailing, since sailboats are beautiful.
Calatrava has a lot of sea influences that make for stunning work. But if you like Bilbao and Disney, I don't know why you wouldn't like Gehry's work in Millennium Park, the Weisman, the Museum of Pop Culture, etc.
Bilbao and Disney are great. I also quite like MIT's State Center, and the Weisman looks similar. But I really did not like the Experience Music Project building somehow.
Bilbao and Disney are great. I also quite like MIT's State Center, and the Weisman looks similar. But I really did not like the Experience Music Project building somehow.
The question at hand isn't whether modern/post-modern/contemporary architecture appeals to an individual, but if why does it only appeal to the elite, and not the masses. Which is based on a false assumption. Gehry keeps getting commissions because his work is broadly popular with critics and the public.
On the last quote from Corentin about the evils of serialist dominance of music departments: At least one historians claims that when you do careful empirical analysis you'll see there never was a period of 'serial' dominance, and that even if you extend to all kinds of atonal avant-garde music, there was always at least as much traditional stuff around:
'I will show that whether one is inquiring about academic positions, performances, publications, recordings, prizes and awards, or attention in the press, serial composers were represented roughly 15 percent of the time, hardly a position of dominance. Between half and two-thirds of
composers, throughout the period and in all corners of the musical marketplace, wrote in a relatively conservative idiom, with a style that maintained strong ties to traditional tonality. The other significant groups of composers worked either in a free atonal style or in a more experimental idiom.'
Only someone who actually likes atonal music would give a shit about the distinction between serialism and free atonality (spoiler: to any normal human being, even a fairly musical one who likes earlier classical music they sound effectively identical (unless the serialism is total anyway, in which case it just makes even less sense): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AQx0V2lZs8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq2gwuKDPnY). But this does seem like it might show that actually, there was always at least as much *fairly* traditional pieces about.
I say fairly, because it is possible to be quite modernist and difficult whilst remaining tonal. I.e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_XNfKk-Qbs (At least, I *think* this is tonal (in the sense of having some notes that appear more often than others, and hence are kind of 'home', not in the sense of being in a major/minor key.) I'm not expert and I couldn't find anything definitive by googling.)
I recall buying a Schoenberg album around 1981. I have a distinct memory of putting the needle on the vinyl and then about 20 minutes later saying, "Oh, wow, it's over" and lifting the needle off the vinyl. But I have zero recollection of the interim 20 minutes of music. I didn't dislike serial music, I just didn't particularly notice it.
> The Great Male Renunciation began in the mid-18th century, inspired by the ideals of the The Enlightenment; clothing that signaled aristocratic status fell out of style in favor of functional, utilitarian garments
Maybe this is just a detail and doesn't meaningfully distract from the point, but isn't a tie the least utilitarian thing ever?
The tie evolved from the cravat, just as the maniple evolved from something like a handkerchief, and in the same way both pieces of vesture left their original functions behind:
Would folks consider this a building built recently in a classical style done right? I am not sure how much more it cost vs what a modernist cathedral would have cost. It was quite expensive. I find it quite beautiful particularly inside.
It's not bad at all, they went for a Romanesque rather than Gothic style (I am open to correction on this by the better-informed), and compared with the kind of modern church architecture that was inflicted on us during the 50s-80s, it's a miracle.
You're right about the interior, it's done right in accordance with the modern rubrics but without throwing all the old elements out the window. It *looks* like a church, not a warehouse or office building.
For contrast here's the "Cardboard Cathedral" of Christchurch, which cost a mere $NZ5 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_Cathedral -- to be fair it's intended only as a temporary cathedral while the real cathedral is being rebuilt after the 2011 earthquake, and it's a lot smaller than the Raleigh or Los Angeles examples.
Actually, the rebuilding of the permanent Christchurch cathedral is an interesting case study too. Back in 2013 the public were presented with two options --https://www.anglicanjournal.com/christchurch-cathedral-options-weighed/ -- an expensive "Traditional" rebuild with the original shape of the cathedral expressed in modern lightweight materials (including a bell tower that dissolves into nothingness at the top) and a cheaper "Contemporary" option which actually looks pretty good to me. In the end, though, public pressure demanded that they simply rebuild the original cathedral in its original building materials, which will wind up costing two or three times the cost of the whole Raleigh cathedral for a much smaller church.
The Los Angeles Cathedral hired the world's most famous photographer of Catholic churches to photograph it. The nonagenarian sage said the exterior was "abrasive," but the interior was okay, assuming they got rid of the intrusive lamps (which they since have).
At first I thought, "That Raleigh cathedral looks rather austere. Still, it's a pleasant building to look at."
Then I looked at the LA cathedral and thought "Heaven forgive us! What is this mess? It's not even cross shaped! I can't tell head from tails! Put it away, I don't want to see it anymore!"
The Los Angeles Cathedral is in an unfortunate location, where the 101 cuts through downtown LA and get snarled in traffic between the interchanges with the 110 and the 10 and the 5. I've always thought it's a perfectly fine building to appreciate from inside a traffic jam on the freeway, but it's an unfortunate way to end Grand Ave when you come up on foot (especially given that Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall is just a few blocks away, and beautiful).
This is totally off-topic, but a long time ago, I recall driving down some street, I think in LA, and saw a church modeled around Jesus as an engineer. He was embedded in a giant gear, and holding massive calipers, IIRC. It was absolutely awesome, but I didn't own a camera at the time (and this was before cellphones), so I couldn't snap a picture. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, or did I dream the whole thing ?
It feels weird to see those kinds of domes on a building that is called a "Cathedral", but other than that, the Raleigh one looks perfectly fine to me -- if a bit unimaginative. That said, I'm not a Christian, so there could be lots of subtleties that I'm missing.
In Christianity, the term cathedral refers to a function, not an architectural style. Regardless, lots of old cathedrals have domes! St. Paul's in London and the Hagia Sophia might be the most famous examples.
I'll agree that the Raleigh cathedral strikes me as more "tasteful" than inspired, just from looking at a few pictures anyway. But as a Catholic who's been in too many flying saucer churches, I'll take what I can get!
The dome means it is built in basilica style (even if it's not a basilica as such in the technical sense) and the architects explain briefly why they built it like that:
"The building design for the new cathedral will address the needs of the area’s growing Catholic community by seating two thousand congregants, replacing the current Sacred Heart Cathedral. The new Catholic church design includes a cruciform structure and a prominent dome, which visually connects the church with downtown Raleigh, and draws on the heritage of traditional Catholic church architecture. Our firm’s design also includes custom marble liturgical furnishings, rendered in Bianco Carrara and Giallo Siena, and crafted to express and reinforce the design themes and narrative."
Needs a 2nd colour of brick for some decorative brickwork. Otherwise there's not enough detail on the scale of a metre or so (a lot of neo-gothic cathedrals make the opposite mistake). Though it will look better in a century or so when lichen has grown and the bricks have weathered at varying rates.
I have found this discussion extremely interesting, not least because I'm in the process of developing two new buildings and so am very deep into discussions of design/ornament/cost.
I'm going to ask some builders what kind of costs we'd be looking at to do something traditional. My expectation is that it will be far beyond my budget, but it should be interesting.
I was planning to ask how much it'd be to build in the Victorian style with a brick structure (not facade.) I like Victorians enough that I'd build it if it was affordable.
I don't know where you're building, but in a lot of places, actual structural brick isn't allowed for anything at all large any more because of seismic concerns.
Indiana. Brick and mortar structure is definitely allowed here. In practice, most brick buildings here are built around either CMU or a wood/steel frame.
The 1930s streamlined Works Progress Administration style is a pretty nice compromise between 1920s Gatsbyesque Ornateness and postwar You-Don't-Deserve-Nice-Thingsness. For example, here's the old San Diego City Hall, which the county of San Diego snapped up when the city moved instead into a high rise that looks like Sao Paulo worker's housing:
That's a perfectly fine, functional building which is pared-down compared to the big Neo-Classical predecessors but which isn't totally bare of all ornamentation, and which fits in with the environment in a particular vernacular style. As you say, a good compromise between the old and the (then) new.
The WPA constructed Santa Monica City Hall of 1938 is another elegant streamlined moderne government building. It's more tasteful but less glorious than Roaring Twenties city halls like Pasadena and Beverly Hills, but nicer than boring postwar city halls like Palm Springs and Malibu.
I take the point people have made, that modern buildings have much better/nicer *interiors* for work and general environmental control, but there must be some way of compromising as those buildings did on the journey from pre-Depression excess to today's concrete boxes.
I suppose the concrete boxes win for general government and business use as they're familiar, relatively cheap to construct, and you're more interested on what is going on inside. But I think there must also be some ideological adherence to a theoretical notion of Modernity or Equality or Democracy or some such, as I remember the fuss made when Trump tried to mandate that new government buildings should be in (Neo)Classical style - you would think he had suggested slaughtering cute baby goats instead of "hey, ditch the concrete box look".
"Buildings should be beautiful" versus "freedom of design". Good job they quashed that fascist ideology!
"Trump’s order to “make federal buildings beautiful again”—a move that many believed echoed mandates by fascist leaders of the 20th century—is no more, thanks to President Biden."
The Great Male Renunciation is a wonderful title, but it seems to ignore that the Puritans got there first in the 17th century; if you like, it was taken to the extreme in Cavaliers versus Roundheads: long, curled hair (or wigs), slashed sleeves and bright colours on the one hand, short-cut hair, sober colours and modesty on the other, though there was a general reaction for both Catholics and Protestants towards less extravagance in dress, until the Restoration of Charles II brought sumptuousness back into fashion.
There are definitely these swings between high style and soberness, with the effects of post-war etc. on fashion and taste. Of course, if you are a rising new generation and you are going to rebel against your elders, then if the elders go in for furbelow, you will go in for austere minimalism.
I think the McMansions show the trouble with trying to build old styles today; it is very easy to topple over into kitsch, as someone in another comment noted. Lack of understanding of what the elements are meant to do and how they are meant to go together gets the result of things crammed in together in too small a space and without knowledge of what fits with what. You end up with Las Vegas style recreations that strike a note of vulgarism and of simultaneously being cheap (because they look tacky and low-class) and expensive (because even bad buildings are expensive to build).
You need sympathetic handling of the material in the space and an understanding of what works, combined with tactful updating and change to suit modern tastes. You don't get that easily, particularly when the patrons who are the ones paying for big modern projects want 'star' buildings that break records as World's Tallest or look different in some startling way - the Dubai idea of trying to build new attractions to be the New Seven Wonders of the World as tourist attractions in order to diversify their economy from its reliance on oil to a reliance on tourism and the very, very rich being willing to buy apartments and indulge in luxury retail experiences there.
I think under-explored is the link between Nazism and Communism and the birth of the sort of modern architecture most people hate.
Le Corbusier, the patron-saint of modern architecture, had the same vison as these totalitarian philosophies. It is no coincidence that the three of them rose to prominence in the interbellum, after the devastations of World War I. Their shared philosophy: ”The world that we inherited is rotten to the core and we will raze it to the ground and build a new world that will bring happiness and prosperity to all (my words).”
Le Corbusier was the Stalin of architecture. He thought he knew which architecture would create this ideal world and wanted to impose it on everyone, whether they wanted or not (and most people didn't want it, but who cares). In his Plan Voisin he proposed to literally raze Paris to the ground and replace it with sixty enormous buildings (a kind of enormous Projects or Banlieu). In this respect he was like Hitler, who wanted to do the same to Berlin. Also he worked in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1932.
Apart from that he was a nazi-apologist. In a letter to his mother he wrote:
“If he is serious in his declarations, Hitler can crown his life with a magnificent work, the remaking of Europe.” At the height of the war two years later, he described Hitler as “glimmer of good”, welcoming the great “clean- up” that was about to happen. “Money, the Jews, Freemasonry, everything will be subject to the law. These shameful fortresses will be dismantled.”
There are so many good parts, it's hard to pick one. Trying to equate the experience of standing in an grocery store aisle that has Pepsi with the "Relativity of Space and Time" is definitely a highlight.
I once rented a room to a LWer named komponisto. (Don't rent to him; he still owes me thousands of dollars in back rent.) He was trained as a modern composer, but I never heard any of his music. He showed me a score once from his portfolio. It was in something like 2173 / 3481 time, obviously unplayable by any human, and I think not meant to be listened to. He explained that music composition had evolved to a new stage, and was all mathematics now..
I asked him if he thought his music was objectively better than Beethoven's, and he said yes. I asked him, If we could rewind the clock back to 1850, and get a do-over on the past 150 years, would we inevitably end up where we are now, musically, with music in 1472 / 2188 time like his? He said, yes, he thought so.
Don't let your problems with this person turn you off from listening to the music for player piano written by Conlon Nancarrow, who does some really amazing stuff in humanly-unplayable tempos. Canon X is the best, where the "left hand" and the "right hand" play identical music a few octaves apart, but one "hand" starts at an unplayably fast tempo and gradually slows down, while the other "hand" starts at an extremely slow tempo and gradually speeds up. But there's a pretty good one where the two "hands" play in square root of 2 time to each other, and a bunch of other interesting ones.
(I wouldn't say it's objectively better than Beethoven, but it's objectively good, and in a very similar spirit to Haydn.)
I went and listened and I don't get why we should appreciate that. I see the technique in Canon X, but I feel like Mozart(?) did equally fun techniques (what's that piece of music with a score that looks the same when you turn it upside down?) *and* made it beautiful at the same time. Or Philip Glass, who does the same thing: combine strict formal experimentation with real beauty and emotional impact.
I don't have any problem with very modern stuff or weird time signatures, but if there isn't a performative, affective, or communicative payoff, then it seems more like a technical exercise than an artwork.
Perhaps I'm just not getting the message that Nancarrow was sending.
I like Schnittke as a sort of leapfrog over modernism to postmodernism, that somehow managed to sneak through.
Yeah that was my thought, too. XD
Theoretically though, under capitalism, capitalists exploit *workers* not (necessarily) consumers, right? Did Marx analyze the capitalist/consumer relationship as well as the capitalist/worker one? The claim here is that it's elite taste *among* architects and architecture critics that is dominating, not the taste of the capitalists who own shares in the companies making the buildings. Maybe that's just false, but if it's false, there can't be an obvious Marxist answer for why it's the case. Or maybe it's true, but then it's not really capitalist taste per se that is dominant: an architecture prof is a wage laborer more than a capitalist (though she might be the latter a bit too through her pension.)
Maybe your objection is to Scott calling architects and architecture profs and critics elite? That might make more sense.
I think what Scott's assuming is two things (neither of which I have a strong opinion of the truth-value of): firstly that modernist architecture is distinctly a minority taste even among super-rich people who purchase large buildings and secondly that houses bought by the average buyer, who is not a captain of industry, are also more modernist than those buyers would ideally like.
Insofar as the first thing is true-and again, I emphasize I don't really have an opinion on this, and I think Scott is assuming it without much evidence-my guess is that the explanation is that whatever the personal taste of their owners, big companies value having architecture that 'experts' (i.e. architects, critics, profs) think is good/cutting edge/interesting.
"The market will *do* XYZ" is a poorly-defined claim, as the market is not itself an actor. Instead, you need an account that describes (or better yet - predicts!) the actions of the agents within the system.
If there are more people who want to buy American shingle-style houses than currently exist, it does no good to talk about elite pressure without mentioning how that actually translates into incentives on potential homebuilders. Declining to include the latter leaves a hole in the core of what the argument is attempting to answer.
(It also leaves you in the situation of having to explain how elite taste and ideology has apparently centered around Japanese econoboxes and the Ford F-150 for the past half-century, but I digress.)
The elite (i.e. owners of companies) have at least *some* incentive to produce products people want since that is one way to make money. Obviously this is not the only incentive they have (for example, they also have an incentive to *create* wants) and other incentives could clash with this (i.e. they have a competing incentive not to produce and market a book expressing communist ideology even if people want such books. for obvious reasons, though nonetheless, publishing firms do sometimes do this to make money!). I've not read Marx, but I'd be *surprised* if he would have denied this.
I like this point. Are we using the appropriate reference class?
Your example of a McMansion isn't really one, which might be why you don't find it so objectionable. https://mcmansionhell.com/ is the, uh, canonical source on this; in particular try this article: https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion .
More cynically, I've always thought the definition of McMansion was "A house larger than mine, built by someone of lower social class than me".
Yeah. There are people who just can't be happy unless anyone lower than them is miserable. It's really sad, but the evidence supports this.
Anyone higher than them must be made miserable.
That's been my experience with the use of the term as well.
Mostly true. But the odds of the term being applied seem to be inversely proportional to the number of old trees in the yard. Anything in a subdivision that was razed with bulldozers before construction is automatically a McMansion.
Partially, but it's also fairly universally a house where the contractor tries to give the appearance of MONEY while cutting enough corners to pad their margin.
Thus, it's a kind of class thing where its: "This fucking prole doesn't even know what a well build building looks like; he payed all this money for the house equivalent of big mac coated in 15 cents worth of gold leaf for 200$"
Few things inspire more contempt than low-budget ostentation.
And McMansions are tied to the whole suburbia thing, which has all sorts of destructive social side effects. So they tend to catch flak they only half deserve for (admittedly bad) things like unwalkable neighbourhoods and economic segregation.
Yep.
Two somewhat-objective definitions.
1. "Mass produced large home" -- such homes, by nature of their mass production, were built in close proximity to other such homes, generally on smaller lots than would have been used for homes of that size in previous decades. A building that might have been appreciated standing by itself is diminished when crowded by its peers. Give it fifty years for the trees to grow in, and this will improve.
2. "Asymmetric large home" -- certain homes were designed from the inside out. That is, a floor plan was carefully chosen, then enclosed by exterior walls without regard for whether the building exterior expresses symmetry or other generally appreciated elements of aesthetics. Preferences that the interior contain certain large spaces (the great room, the three car garage, anything with vaulted ceilings), coupled with budgetary constraints that preclude anything of balancing size on the other half of the structure, lead to floor plans that could not be made symmetric even if the architect had been so included. Although the roof lines of some 00s construction imply that frequently the architect was not so inclined and was literally enclosing the predetermined interior space with the required structural elements at minimized materials cost.
Of course if you want to start pointing fingers, MOST of those design elements are a consequence of zoning laws...
What you REALLY start with is a set of laws -- setbacks, maximum height, maximum floorspace, along with certain aesthetic elements that are known to be safe (ie you won't have to risk the plan being turned down on vague "looks wrong" reasons, and having to delay six months).
So, within those constraints, you can either build a small house that looks "balanced" (according to the lights of commenters on this blog) or you can try to get as close to your ideals as possible. This leads to a lot of elements that people are mocking, like high ceilings, because mostly you are allowed a lot more height than you are allowed floor space, so you can grow upward each floor by a foot or two more, making it feel larger.
It feels like most of the people commenting here have never actually been through the process of building a house, either in terms of the planning/architecture aspects or the budgeting aspects -- or are imagining that the entire country is controlled by whatever is important in their local experience.
In a place like LA, land is phenomenally expensive. Which means that, once you have paid $600K for a small suburban lot, just the land, WHY NOT put up the most, nicest, house you can? The cost of many aspects of building is just not that high once the land cost is figured in. This is a totally different calculation from if you're building in some small town somewhere, where the lot cost you $30K.
Finally
- stone facing is not nearly as cheap as some people here seem to think. Cheap is stucco. Slightly more expensive is (many different varieties) siding. Brick is usually cheaper than the nicest stone facing.
So much of this ultimately boils down to "people should want the things I [claim to] want". All that supposed tolerance for other lifestyles goes out the window when it comes to judging houses. WHO ARE YOU to insist that the most important feature of a house is a balanced floor plan, rather than a large master bedroom or a 3-car garage or a vast kitchen?
Almost every time I post, I try to point out the discrepancy between what Woke claim they believe about the world, and the way people actually behave in any circumstance that doesn't meet a Woke template. If I made fun of someone's hairstyle, you'd be all over that with "right to self-expression, individuality, blah blah". But housing is, apparently, not a protected class, so that same ignorant mockery is considered just fine -- bring on all the stereotypes you like, feel free to mock other just because they have different values and beliefs from you.
Beat me to it! Was going to link to that exact post.
It is, look at the side of the building. Only having stone as a facade is a clear indication of a McMansion and cost cutting. It is however a far above average McMansion.
It's not.. mansion enough, though. No crazy extra houses worth of rooms popping out somewhere unnecessary.
That's just a consequence of being modern. It's not like this building has mismatched windows, or unnecessary gables, or dormers peeking out of nowhere, which I think of as many of the hallmarks of a McMansion.
Only one of those mcmansions actually looks bad to me though, all of them look substantially better than the more modernist white concrete cube thing on my street. Now that building *is* more space efficient than a mcmansion, but I would prefer a schizophrenic re-interpretation of a victorian rowhouse to almost any cubic concrete modernist building.
Which is sort of the point, even a *bad* example of older styles of architecture looks better than a relatively well done example of more modernist styles.
On the other hand, I think the colourful facades on most 5 over 1 style buildings are perfectly fine, and think they look at least as good as the more monotonous british georgian stuff. Similarly the glass towers also look fine, they're not beautiful or anything, but they're practical and not an eyesore.
It's specifically the concrete heavy brutalist/modernist stuff that I think people really dislike, the glass towers and colourful facades are a good trade off between aesthetics, space and natural light
Am I the only one who likes brutalist architecture? What can I say I like about it... simplicity maybe. Here stands a tower. Done.
I like concrete. Brutalist, no.
I fucking LOVE brutalism; even the ostentatiously ugly examples.
I like how it draws your attention to lines and form, it's great.
I think it’s a learned taste. Or maybe not even that. I remember reading that not one architect of brutalism built themselves a brutalist house.
I did see a concrete house being built on grand designs once, the excellent British (ITV) house building program. The house was pretty ugly at the end, the long suffering wife was still long suffering.
Channel 4. There's more than a few episodes where the overly enthusiastic hubby gets A Look.
There's at least one where the concrete supplier turns up on site to see what he's being asked to do, and promptly refuses to get involved. Cut to structural engineer going through the plans, who basically announces that the building will not stand up.
I actually don't mind it, occasionally. But it only works when it is contrasted against other things that are more colourful or ornamented, in my view (e.g. fallingwater). It's broadly bad without that caveat imo.
Brutalism is okay when it's disappearing behind encroaching tropical jungle: for example, concrete buildings often look adequate on a sunny day in verdant Brazil.
But brutalism looks bad on a cloudy day in downtown Boston with a big windy square in front of it and no greenery to hide behind.
Boston City Hall is a notable example because of how dead of a public space it created. When the only people that want to use your space are skateboarders, and you are determined to ban them from using it because it's intended for other people who don't want to use it anyway, then that's a bad sign.
I suspect a lot of mid-century modernism gets a bad wrap because it was the transition point away from pedestrian-centric urbanism to car-centric. That plus people without the talent to do it well emulating it in context it wasn't intended for clients whose primary concern is cost per square foot.
This isn't bad as a house. Wouldn't be my first choice, but I could live with it.
https://www.californiahomedesign.com/property/2017/01/24/first-look-spectacular-1978-brutalist-house-buff-hensman-pasadena-2m/
Then you have something like this
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Pasadena/1881-Pasadena-Glen-Rd-91107/home/7224164
which, if it were 300 years old would be rhapsodized as "example of traditional, simple, pre-mechanical building, the asymmetric lines and not quite right angles showing the human element of the construction"...
$2 mil is pretty cheap for a ridgetop Pasadena house with an infinity pool a million dollar view. A non-brutalist house there would probably go for $2.5 mil.
OK, the write-up of the brutalist house says there's no pool ... right above a photo of an infinity pool, which I'm now guessing is part of a different house.
That is something of my point! You are paying essentially that price for the land, not for the house. Most buyers would, I expect knock down the house and build something they preferred.
People who do not live in these large cities like LA are totally clueless as to land costs. Once the land costs so much, a very different set of calculations about the actual house are in play than when the land is much much cheaper...
There are other, much nicer, brutalist buildings in the LA area -- my point was that brutalist homes, like everything else, come in both attractive (IMHO) and horrible (IMHO) varieties.
What about Fallingwater, or other Frank Lloyd Wright houses? I love those. They just need taller doorways, screen windows, and in the case of Fallingwater, more buckets.
Yeah, Fallingwater is fine (though personally I think if the concrete had sandstone brick styling (with say facades), I think it would look better). It only works because of the greenery around it though, it suits the environment it's in. This is not true for the average thing people see, which is just this misshapen concrete cube house
An unfair comparison of Fallingwater to something that's not brutalist:
http://images1.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Waterfall-City-dinotopia-818008_700_352.jpg
'It's not as obviously ugly when trees hide it and a pretty waterfall distracts you' is not high praise.
Fallingwater's big problem is that it's a shit building in practical terms, not that it's ugly (although it also is grotesquely ugly). Due to the stunningly idiotic location directly over a stream, it's apparently very damp and mold-prone, and whoever's responsible had to spend over ten million dollars to renovate the structure in the early oughts (more than six times the original construction cost adjusted for inflation, although presumably there's a great deal of cost disease involved there as well) due to the... "audacious" design gradually collapsing.
It has a lot of leaks inside--there are buckets in many of the rooms to catch the water. But I think that's due more to it being Wright's first experiment with concrete, and to the cantilevered design, which puts too much stress on the concrete. (The water leaks in from above, through the cracks in the concrete, not from the stream.) I'm not a fan of cantilevers, nor of the general aesthetic criterion "appears to defy gravity", though I like the building otherwise. The location is very beautiful, and I admire the ambition if not the execution.
Fallingwater also suffers excessively from the restrictions Wright put into the contract, even more so, I think, than most of his houses, in terms of requiring the owners to keep the same decor, the same furniture in the same places, and so on. He was a great architect, but a total control freak.
The most interesting thing to me about the mansion vs. McMansion article is that the author specifically compares to the New Traditionalist style - which seems to be exactly the thing that Scott laments not existing! Quality, expensive homes built in skillful emulation of traditional styles.
Yeah that was my thought too. :/
I'm not surprised Scott hasn't heard of New Traditional style houses; they seem pretty rare. Which is a shame.
I've not-very-seriously considered building my home just so I can make sure it's done right. But I don't think I make enough money for that. ;)
The distinction between mansion and mcmansion, as far as I can actually tell from that link is just that mcmansion owners are poorer and can't afford big expensive lots. This is one of the most classist documents I've read in a long time.
The website goes into quite a lot of detail on what differentiates the two. Some examples include imitation materials, poor craftsmanship (like windows that don't really fit in the space), mixing of distinct styles or elements, and disproportionate features. I don't know how you read the whole thing or anything else on MMH and got "small lots."
It explicitly calls out "the house is too big for the space" as a major consideration for calling something a McMansion.
> A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot.
Also, why is mixing styles bad? We do that all the time, with every kind of art. These aren't being designed as canonical showpieces for a specific style in architectural school, they're designed to be somebody's house. There's no particular reason they have to be a perfect example of some pre-existing style.
> It explicitly calls out "the house is too big for the space" as a major consideration for calling something a McMansion.
As one factor among several, yes. But also, what you said above is a complete misrepresentation. Many McMansions are on quite large lots, but the house is proportionally very large. I grew up near many McMansions; they aren't being built by poor people. The author, as far as I can tell, is certainly not an heiress snobbishly looking down on the upper middle class.
> Also, why is mixing styles bad?
You should read the actual blog instead of my exceedingly brief summary. The older styles have thought put into them so that elements go together for a particular reason. Mixing styles isn't necessarily bad, but taking a handful of elements you like and throwing them together without rhyme or reason is very likely to be unattractive, like orange juice and milk are both good but disgusting together.
“ they aren't being built by poor people”
No, they are being built by the merely upper middle class who fancy themselves rich - which, from the perspective of the sort of people who can afford New Traditionalist mansions built by “serious” architects (or who fancy themselves serious architects), is even worse.
Disagree, McMansions are built for lower-middle-class but wealthy people. The sort of people who somehow got rich despite going to an unprestigious college or (shock, gasp) not even going to college at all.
Upper middle class people _really_ hate it when they see lower-middle class people with more money than them.
I read your "in particular, try this article" link, which seemed like enough research to make comments. I didn't get the impression of conscious classist bias, but it's a lot like the different covid policies for planes versus cars crossing borders - it's de facto pretty classist, even so.
I didn't post a link, I'm just familiar with MMH. A big part of the distinction is that McMansions are cheaply trying to imitate high quality stuff. However, that doesn't mean it's classism. Some things you just can't fake easily for cheap. Some things are different--for a post about how real diamonds are better just because they're real even though they look identical to the naked eye, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But even to my untrained eye when I was 10, these houses looked kind of ridiculous.
I agree; but then why is mixing styles considered good if you do it ironically and call it "postmodern"?
I'm not aware of many such houses.
Well, the kind of person who like traditional old styles and dislikes the bastardisation done by McMansions might very well hate post-modernism too.
You can make an equally big building that doesn't look too big for its space, if you're willing to change the style. But if you've chosen a style that has big eaves and high ceilings, and then compressed it onto a small lot, you're going to tighten up all the angles in ways that just make it look crowded. You'd be better off building a modernist cube of the same square footage (and perhaps even larger cubic footage) that will fit well with that smaller lot.
What is WRONG with it "looking crowded"? I personally love that look.
If someone wants a garden, great. But if they don't want a garden, just some strips of greenery around the house to meet local ordinances and provide some slight framing, so what?
My region of LA is full of houses like that, and while I may dislike some design elements of some of them, I basically love the way they fill the lot for every single one of them.
This is no different from complaining that skyscrapers are too tall, should be less vertical!
I suspect that "modernist styles more effectively use the same space" is true, and an element of Moloch. That said, some people don't like it, some people prefer inefficient traditionalist styles. So then it comes down to a style trade-off, would you rather have a not-great implementation of a style you like (crowded traditional) or a good implementation of a style you don't like (not-crowded modern) to arrive at the same usable space?
Some people are going to make the crowded traditional choice, and I think shaming them as McMansions moves us away from solving the housing crisis.
The first paragraph seems right to me. Different people have different taste, and might as a result be better off with different houses. I do think they'd be better off if they learned to like the style that works better for their situation, but not everyone can do that with every single feature of their life, so some amount of compromises will be essential.
I don't see how "shaming" McMansions causes any problems with the housing crisis though. There is no legal bite to any of this shame, and if the shame leads them to live in houses that make more efficient use of our limited land, that could even help the housing crisis. It would only be a problem if somehow McMansion shaming meant that less housing got constructed, or if it got constructed more expensively, rather than more cheaply because people start eschewing the ostentatious decorations that add cost without function.
"A house too big for its lot" describes a lot of the houses on my street, including mine, where the distance from one side wall to the property line is less than my arm span on one side, and I don't have any greenery on the other side because the driveway runs from the wall to the property line. In front I have perhaps 15 feet from the front wall to the sidewalk. My house occupies (proportionately) more of its lot that the house I grew up in.
One of the houses was built in the twenties, and one in the eighties.
It's the one built in the twenties that is less well-fitted to its lot; having 2/3 the floorspace but less than half the lot of the one built in the eighties.
If I had the money and could do it in compliance with code, I'd both raise the roof on my house AND put an extension out the back that would eat up a good third of the remaining back yard.
My dad, a property developer, pointed out just that. "Look how smashed together those houses are. My lots are a half acre."
And it's not a new observation that elites (and wannabe elites) heartily enjoy punching down and abusing the poors. You can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you've picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying.
The actual dynamics of McMansion sneering are all about people with higher social class + little money punching people of low social class + a lot of money.
Whether that's seen as punching "up" or "down" rather depends on whether you're more conscious of economic or social class; I think that on the whole Americans tend to be shockingly blind to social class (much more so than in other countries) which is why the likes of McMansion Hell seem to think that they're actually behaving virtuously rather than merely seething with outrage that the peasants have money.
The "outrage" is that they're ugly. It has nothing to do with class.
The attitude and language of the critique is very elitist. It’s not just that they are ugly (lots of high art is ugly, often intentionally so), it’s that they are ugly in the way a cheap unlearned person would create. That is, they are gauche.
I don't see that they are ugly, probably because I am socially lower-class and lack the refinement to notice you never mix taupe with exposed moulding.
People don't exhibit this level of public and social outrage just because things are ugly, there's always something else going on.
Buses are ugly but you don't see whole websites of people nodding furiously about how ugly buses are. But look at this one! https://nextcity.org/images/made/CTA-articulated-bus_920_368_80.jpg -- no aesthetic merit whatsoever!
I love the way you claim "they are ugly", as though that's some objective fact.
Nevermind that not only do plenty of people want a house like this, but many people involved, from the architect to the buyer to the town planners all did NOT think they were ugly.
I personally dislike the elites (whoever they are) punching at lowers; I come from a society that never had their own aristocracy and I don't know which social class I'm supposed to be in, but anyway, I'd never insult anyone for having an un-developed taste.
But I can somehow see a difference between McMansions and mansions and I dislike the first aesthetically. Having not studied art, I don't know what the relevant aspects are that irritate me when looking at McMansions, but the intuition is strong. I also dislike most of the modern architecture though, so my only way to be satisfied is to buy an actual old house in frail condition and try to fix it up. (Old houses in good condition are far too expensive).
You don't need to be educated to spot a house with three unnecessary roof lines, or 6 different window sizes subtly out of square and go "Eugh."
While I LOVE a decent amount of modern architecture (not you calatrava, fuck off. Ghery, you're on the watch list.), the things you don't like in it are probably replicated in mcmansions, but without the intentionality.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I am sure this is occasionally true but in my mind when I see a McMansion I think, "It is unfortunate that you could have had a nicer house but instead you chose to show off what you think people will see as a nice house."
It is purchasing for show. I suppose I do view this differently, depending on the wealth of the culprit. I view the behavior much more harshly when done by the rich.
It reminds me a lot of MySpace pages. You give people a lot of freedom to express themselves in a medium, but you give them no training in that medium, and they choose a bunch of things that may individually look nice, but just fail horribly when they go together.
It’s about more than that, though. There are a lot of places in the US where it’s illegal to build almost anything *but* a McMansion. And the size and shape of many of those homes isn’t being driven by consumer demand based on lifestyle preferences, but on ticking certain boxes in terms of square footage and arrangement to get the house valued as high as possible as an investment. Or at least that’s how a lot of McMansions got built. It’s not all sneering at “poor people with money”, because it’s not clear what percentage of their actual tastes or desires is being represented in these houses. They’re products of perverse legal and economic incentives, too, and thus objects of scorn.
Are modernist cubes banned in these places? My understanding is that it's common for zoning laws to force people into modernist cubes, but nothing forces you to have mismatched eaves and gables, and different styles of window in every room.
But shouldn't one make do with a small lot if one has no intention of ever /using/ the lot? Mansions originally had vast lands, on which to graze sheep, ride horses, construct hedge mazes, and hold garden parties; and I suspect the purpose of a lawn was to show you were so wealthy that you could afford to maintain a lawn (which was fabulously expensive in the days before lawnmowers, fertilizers, weedkiller, rubber hoses, and so on). The lawn no longer proves anything, parties are held indoors, and horses are zoned out; big lawns are useless even to the old money.
I think gardens (not lawns) are beautiful, and one of the things most lacking in cities is more greenery. Put a bunch of big old trees around a McMansion and it goes from eyesore to quirky - around an actually well0designed mansion, they bring it up from "nice" to "stunningly beautiful". Unfortunately, big trees make construction complicated, so developers cut down everything to save money, and people wonder why the suburbs are soulless. The only solution is to build things that last, plant trees, and wait - truly magnificent trees take decades to grow, which is why it's such a travesty when they get cut down
Trees also cause long term issues when they get too large and are a risk to the house (and any surrounding houses). But yes if you have tons of open space that is not being used for anything then putting a big tree there is nice.
Yes, but the way to design a house to look good on a smaller lot involves different edges and roof lines than the way to design a house to look good from a distance on a larger lot.
Why do you think that's objectively correct, rather than a social convention among a particular social class?
Yes, you're right about the distinction, but the conclusion is incorrect.
A lot of design and material choices simply do not work unless they're expensive. A good example is fake wood panelling on car interiors or really cheap emerald colored cars.
Like wearing purple, it requires a certain minimum level of style, quality and care before it is something that can be pulled off. Opulence without care is tacky, and that general assessment has little to do with class.
McMansions show a desperate attempt at wanting to look 'rich' rather than look 'good'. It shows a lack of understanding of why mansions are special. I don't mean this in a 'subjective absence of taste', but a ubiquitous absence of taste, veering on consensus across location and time. That's as close as objective as you get in the art world.
Afterall, no one wants to be a 'wannabe'
I don't really think the mcmansions are meant to be aping the "specialness" of mansions. I think they're for people who have several children and want lots of space for them and entertaining guests. And maybe make it look decent as an after thought if it isn't too pricey. Everything else follows from that, the lot size, cheaper exterior finishes, oversized car ports because you need an suv for the kids and a commute car for both parents, maybe some extra space for projects. Size isn't a style.
Yes, this. They have a vague idea of what a “big house” should look like, and a big house they can afford is going to be built like a McMansion. Many of the problems with McMansion design come from having a big thing you don’t want to look like an unbroken featureless slab, but lacking the design experience (or the budget) to do that “right”.
They give the game away with the first criterion. Age? Am I supposed to live on the street while my home decants? Have they priced 'time' recently?
My neighborhood is in the process of converting all of the two-flats (buildings with a unit above a main residence on the bottom: aka, medium density housing) to large, 5,000+ sqft homes. None of which would be called McMansions, but still much larger than is traditional for the neighborhood. So far as I can tell, almost none of them are bought by large families. Often, they have enough bedrooms for each child to have two.
My theory is that people want to put their money into homes, but the older sized homes don't sell for as much money as the 1% want to invest, so they buy homes much larger than they need and then leave the doors closed on half the space. I'd expect McMansions are just the suburban equivalent, combined with inelegant architecture.
(I don't buy the idea that anyone wants houses with random features; but I can imagine many people want houses with elements they like and, lacking examples of the mashup being done well, are pleased with it being done less well. I've seen this with my own experiences in design. I see something that looks good to me until somebody comes up with something better. Then the old thing is revealed as being sub-par.)
You don't need to be a large family to have a use for lots of rooms, especially with the shift to working from home. Just because something is marked "bedroom" on the plans doesn't mean it's being used that way. It might be a home office, a playroom (or school room!) for the kids, a crafting/sewing room or home gym, etc. Also having a dedicated guest room is really important if you like having friends and family come visit you regularly. My partner and I have zero kids, but still live in a "three-bedroom" house; one bedroom is ours, one doubles as the guest room and my sewing room, and the smallest one is the home office my partner uses 3-4 days/week. I'd love to have a dedicated sewing room, but unfortunately it wasn't feasible for this round of house-buying.
People like having space to do things. There's not really anything more complicated about it.
Agree, not a McMansion. Doesn't have a car-hole.
Yeah, I'm with Scott on this. The only ugly thing about most of those McMansion pictures is the slew of whiny arrows somebody scattered across a picture of a perfectly nice house.
Agreed. I really like most of them. And "mixing styles" is usually considered good and creative, like in fusion cooking, or creating new sub-genres of literature or film.
(Although I don't personally like mixing architerctural styles when it involves a traditional-looking house with a concrete block bolted onto the side -- which I see too much of in my hometown and on Facebook home renovation groups -- but I don't think that's what McMansion Hell is complaining about.)
"fusion cooking" is an incredibly deprecated term, right now.
Most foodie types think of it as "Taking two great things, and combining them in a way that makes them worse".
The thing is, they're totally right. Most fusion cooking is garbage; thoughtless combinations that produce inferior results once you strip away the theater and fancy menu descriptions.
All the good "fusion" food these days doesn't conspicuously market itself that way.
Involving elements of multiple styles can work great. But just checking off the boxes of including one window from each of six different styles, with no thought about what contexts work better with one style or another, doesn't.
because you can't upvote on substack, I want to add this comment purely to add my strong agreement to your statement.
This is a completely incorrect example of a McMansion.
The marketeers have their finger on the pulse. Almost upscale McMansion cul d sac i used to pass by; "Chairman's Row".
That example of a McMansion is still better than most if not all of the award winning modern architecture Scott has posted.
It's bad, but it's not aggressively hostile to aesthetics.
It's interesting how the McMansion is nice from the outside but hell on the inside, while Valerio Olgiati's house looks a bit hellish on the outside but actually really nice on the inside https://www.kaleidoscope.media/article/valerio-olgiati.
I'm just registering my disagreement here - bare concrete looks industrial and very uncomfortable, and this effect is magnified for interior walls. Nice furniture and an excellent garden doesn't make up for shit walls everywhere you look
Fair points, I should have clarified that this was my own opinion.
How is that really nice on the inside? It looks like an abandoned factory, and wildly uncomfortable. Meanwhile most McMansions are very comfortable to live, with modern insulation and HVAC, convenient layouts, stuff like plenty of conveniently-placed electrical outlets and easy-to-find light switches, ample counter space and practical if boring kitchen layouts, etc. Not exciting stuff, but the things that make living in a house pleasant.
It's a matter of taste I think. The example I replied to (https://mcmansionhell.com/) does look like hell to me, but to each their own. I don't know if it's representative or not of what goes on in these houses.
My point is that I'm not talking about taste. I find the current top example on the McMansion website equally *ugly*, if in a different way (admittedly a way that I find hilarious and somewhat charming, rather than just depressing). But the McMansion looks like a place where I would not be *physically uncomfortable*. Mostly it's just badly decorated and could be perfectly inoffensive with a good redecorating.
4 different styels of windows, palladian windows on a French eclectic style building, stone veneer in the front and hardieboard on the sides, no headers above the top floor windows (headers are structural elements required to not crack windows, unless it's a McMansion of course and the wall is made of plywood).
So while it's not a disaster, this building does carry quite a few big McMansion warning signs.
What the fuck kind of building code doesn't require headers?
Headers only need to be able to withstand the load of the wall, and when you build a cheaper house and the wall is made of wood and cosmetic stone tile, the header is integrated in the wood. A good McMansion adds a fake non-load bearing header on the outside of the stone tile but not all. So when the visible header is missing you know it's not real stone, and that's how you know it's a McMansion.
I'm gonna throw my support in here that the example is very tame by McMansion standards. The stone siding (real stone or fake?) is a bit McMansion since it's obviously a facade, but the only really McMansion element is the shutters that I'm *pretty* sure are non functional.
I'd also like to point out that a lot of people are posting about how the hallmark of a McMansion is attempting to appear wealthy without understanding why the wealthy choose those design elements, and then a bunch of other people post about how 'this is elitist and why can't you just let these people enjoy their pretty things?', but I think the *Real* hallmark of a McMansion is not just misunderstanding the aesthetic purpose of a design element, but the Functional Purpose.
To me it always significantly detracts from a design when I notice it is replicating what is normally a part of practical, functional design, but without actually using or understanding that function. (see again the shutters)
McMansionHell represents a simplistic architectural prescriptivist view. The blog doesn't even get the McWord snowclone right, as it implies a set of largely similar things. Your average row of townhomes is more of a McHouse than what shows up there.
Formatting note, looks like a paragraph of commentary ended up mixed into the quotation of The Great Male Renunciation wikipedia: (beginning with "I see no reason to disagree")
Yep was just coming here to point this out
"In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions"
This made me suddenly wonder-- is it possible that architects all prefer the modern style because the constant exposure to the current trends in architecture and studying thousands of buildings often results in liking that style more, like an acquired taste? I ask this because I listen to a lot of music, probably more than most people, and some of the music I really enjoy is experimental and sometimes dissonant. But I genuinely enjoy it a lot. Could some architects have experienced a similar effect?
I tend to agree with this explanation. I think there may be more coincidence involved here than real intention on the parts of the participants.
"I guess I’m willing to accept “some people did this originally, and those people were cool, and then that became the cool thing, and then we ended up in a vicious cycle where everyone has to pretend to like it”, but if that were true it would still be pretty astonishing."
I think this is genuinely less unlikely than Scott thinks; furthermore, while I understand that that statement was intentionally a little flippant, to suggest that everyone is just *pretending* to like modern art and architecture is probably inaccurate. N=1, but I genuinely enjoy modern visual art specifically, and that enjoyment, at least in part, came from exposure. Many architects, I'm sure, went through the same process with modern architecture, especially if they had profs in school who were able to passionately explain the style to them until they "got it".
There's an XKCD for that!
https://xkcd.com/915/
This XKCD is about how being exposed to lots of Brutalism can make you like it. Cal asks whether exposure to lots of traditional architecture can make you like Brutalism.
In music it happens all the time. But the opposite happens too - learning a lot of music theory can make one appreciate Pop music again (as evidenced by the numerous music theory Youtube videos dedicated to it, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-XSTSnqXxo). And there are quite a few contemporary composers who apply their vast knowledge of music to writing film soundtracks that are both pleasant to listen to for laymen and are interesting to dive into for professionals. Why can composers bridge the gap between academic and popular tastes and architects can't?
Because fancy buildings cost WILD amounts of money; and have to be located on wildly expensive land to mean anything. You only get one shot at the building; you can't get reviews and go in for a second pass without spending another couple mil.
You can listen to music in the burbs, but you can't build a statement building in bumfuck, NoWhere and have it be a statement.
You can if you're Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan and have burned through all of your career earnings and are desperate for commissions and your name recognition inspires people in small towns/cities to hire you and let you do your thing in their downtowns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._W._Lindholm_Service_Station
https://susietrexler.com/2019/03/04/louis-sullivans-architectural-jewel-boxes/
OK, but even with a limit on a public building's budget you can choose whether to optimize for popularity in the public or among architects. And there are ways of taking the public opinion into consideration - survey the opinions about existing buildings in the area, show various proposed models online and read the comments etc. These days you may even create a VR tour inside and around the proposed building.
This is true of novels, as well. There's a whole genre of experimental fiction that (as far as I can tell) only people who read a ton of all kinds of novels, and/or write novels themselves, appreciate. Most of these books seem like nonsense to most readers; only after education and exposure and having read lots and lots of other books do they start to seem genuinely beautiful.
I've never paid much attention to buildings, and I don't like modernist / brutalist architecture. I much prefer fancy, ornate traditional architecture. But maybe if I really studied architecture, I would learn to appreciate a vast concrete cube, the way I appreciate some novels that my friends think are total nonsense.
I have made that taste transition myself.
I remember the first time I saw the Salk institute after the ... I don't know, aesthetic paradigm shift, and went from 'Why the fuck is it like that' to 'Holy shit, this is amazing!'.
Okay, I'll bite :). Why the fuck is it like that? What makes it amazing? It clearly photographs well from one particular location that everybody photographs it from, but it doesn't seem especially appealing as a place to go to work every day, and the huge unshaded central plaza seems like it would be miserable on a hot summer day.
It's the personality trait of Openness. People with high Openness constantly desire *novelty*. They always want something new, and are easily bored. They are the ones who change software interfaces for no good reason.
Dissonant and atonal are quite importantly different, as far as I can tell. (Though I'm not expert and this is coming from wikipedia exploration rather than a music degree!). *Dissonant* just means 'lots of note combinations that sound harsh/wrong' (perhaps entirely for reasons of them being unusual, or perhaps because of inherent properties of how some combos interact with the human auditory system too in some cases: I'm not sure.) But atonal means something much stronger than this: it means that no notes of whatever scale your using appear more often than any others: this is a unique feature of Western modernism not found in any other pitched music (as far as I know), and it turns out this makes it super-hard to heard the music as having phrasing and structure, especially large scale structure. In comparison, music can be quite dissonant but still fairly easy to parse, even if it sounds harsh and nasty: some extreme metal I think is quite dissonant but not *that* difficult to make sense of.
Consonance and dissonance are just how close the frequency intervals are to low integer ratios, like 1:2 or 3:4, which our auditory systems like to hear. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_ratio
Thanks: so they are natural/innate then? I'm sure I'd read though that how harsh certain chords and intervals sound is *partly* a matter of what the ear is used to?
I think there's a natural and innate basis, which is always partially modified by culture and personal history. Like most things. And I think people argue about which aspects of this are natural and which are cultural, because it's so hard to tell something that's cultural but universal from something that's natural.
But I think with consonance, it's closer to natural. Like, if you have a tone, and you remove every other sound wave from it, you end up with the octave below. So, whenever you hear a tone, you're also hearing that lower octave. Hearing a tone and hearing the other consonant tones that comprise it are the same thing. Tones are always in numeric relationships with each other, and the closer those numeric relationships are to small integer ratios, the more often the sound waves hitting your ear literally sync up with each other. If the sound waves hitting your ear almost never sync up, it sounds like a crazy dissonant mess. If they sync up perfectly, you can't even tell that there are two different tones (because there aren't; perfectly consonant tones *are* each other) (you can hear this if you play around with very pure tones, like from a synthesizer).
I don’t pretend to be an expert, but this is my writeup of the innate argument I was taught in the class I took on sound and sound perception: https://observablehq.com/d/a4998192c14c618f
I was originally going to write 4 more parts, still plan to in fact, just haven’t gotten around to it. Also it doesn’t work too good on mobile
Well, sort of. Whether an interval is interpreted as dissonant is highly context-dependent. A tritone might be considered a dissonant interval, but there is a tritone in any dominant seventh chord, and these chords appear in traditional music.
Rootless chords are kind of interesting. They don’t sound like much on their own, but in the right context it just sounds kind of jazzy because you understand that the missing root is implied.
A major seventh chord has an obvious beating effect, sometimes considered dissonant, but in context it’s understood as kind of clean and peaceful.
Learning to recognize intervals (ear training) is challenging in part because it’s hard to avoid being influenced by context. The same interval often doesn’t sound like the same thing in different contexts.
Can't dissonance also describe rhythmically unnatural seeming progressions? (beyond syncopation) I find melodic music with (what I think of as) dissonant rhythms very appealing. (e.g. Lamb - Cotton Wool (1min-2min))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF4hFfDcV7I
There's traditionally two different conceptions of dissonance.
One is an intrinsic feature of the interval, that is as you say - smaller integer ratios are considered consonant, and larger integer (or even irrational) ratios are considered dissonant.
The other is a relational feature that depends on the position in functional harmony. In any particular musical tradition, certain combinations of pitches are "stable" and others are "unstable", and feel a "need" to "resolve" to a "stable" combination of pitches. The "unstable" ones are called "dissonant" and the "stable" ones are called "consonant".
In classical western music, there is a strong correlation between these two things. But by the time you get to jazz, there often isn't. Major sevenths, or even 9ths or 11ths, can often be considered consonant, despite the 15 to 16 ratios. I'm not sure exactly what it depends on, but you can hear it if you're familiar with jazz, whether a particular harmony is stable or unstable, even if both are full of dissonances in the ratio sense.
That might be true, but maybe there's more to it. About music, specifically, I've observed something like what happened with architecture, but on the last 5/10 years. I listen to a lot of stuff, most of which is usually seen as weird by most people. But I have no problem with most music that used to be on the radio 10/15 years ago. These days however? I feel like most of what """zoomers""" listen to is shitty trap-style music. But I don't mind experimental music at all, or mass-produced nice music. What I mind is mass-produced shitty music. That's probably suggestive, but I wonder if other people feel the same.
An amazing roundup of comments, one of the best I've seen on your blog. Kudos to the commenters and to Scott for stimulating the discussion!
I just wanted to say that the buildings in the photos to illustrate works by "frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid" are more attractive to me than any older building illustrated in any photo on this post or the previous.
The Frank Lloyd Wright building (I assume that's the one with the water) is brilliant. Would love to live in that, or even just near it with a good view.
The FLW building is nice, but man, it is built for hobbits. I visited it in highschool, and even being 5'10" at the time everything seemed tiny. Many of features, mostly the windows, also seemed really expensive to maintain/insulate for the western PA winters as well, but just nitpicking there.
Overall it would be a really nice basis for a modern house design, although I don't know if you could build a house that straddles a fair sized stream these days due to the immense environmental regulations around that.
Flooding would also be a major issue, as there is literally no space between the house and the water. Anything you could do about it would certainly run into more environmental issues.
I lived for some years in Oak Park IL and met some homeowners who lived in Wright houses. They overwhelmingly found that actually living in the houses was a giant pain in the ass due to maintenance headaches, insane repair costs, in some ways just literal physical discomfort. That's why Wright houses change hands pretty regularly.
(And the furniture Wright designed, which he tried to force his clients to buy and use, was just hilariously uncomfortable and awkward. Beautiful to look at just like the houses but not useful to actual human beings as furniture.)
I'd be interested in reading candid interviews with people who used to live in famous design homes like that. You know, after they sold the place and don't need to act like it was the best thing ever to make back their money. I'd bet there would be a lot of interesting bits, both good and bad. So many things must seem really great on paper but just turn out miserable, while other things I bet just click in a way you would never expect. It'd be neat to get some insight there, so long as I didn't have to buy and maintain one of the places to get it :D
My dad experienced Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the best manner: from living next-door to one. He grew up from 1917-1930 on Superior Street in Oak Park next to the Moore House:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_G._Moore_House
The Moore House burned down on Christmas 1923 (before electric Christmas lights, people put candles in their Christmas tree, which looked great but were absurdly dangerous) and then Wright came back from Tokyo and rebuilt it to be a combination Tudor Cottage with sinister samurai overtones.
...I think this technically qualifies as a McMansion based on McMansion Hell's criteria. It is at minimum perilously close. This amuses me.
As I recall with Falling Waters the house was up over the stream enough that the water would have to go pretty high before it came into serious contact.
Not like 2-3 feet high, but it had to rise something like a foot high and 25 feet wide, or something to that effect according to the tour guide. I guess the lower parts were really well waterproofed? I don't recall there being a basement.
Granted, no one has lived there for a long time, so who knows... if I had an expensive house where the bottom half flooded every spring and fall, I would try to get it made an UNESCO site too, just to get it off my hands. :D
Never say you'd want to live in a house because you like the way it looks from the outside. Doubly so if it's a Frank Lloyd Wright house. I mean, unless you like leaky roofs, drafts, cracked foundations, low ceilings, inadequate storage space, minimal flexibility for interior design and furnishing, poor lighting, and all the rest. The one thing it's got going for it, is the one thing you won't be able to enjoy once you've moved in. But the architect will have cashed the check by then, so what does he care?
That photo depicted a place where I'd love to live, yes, but the garden, river especially, was doing all the work and the house seemed "fine". It is of course possible that FLW was responsible for the landscaping too, in which case he deserves serious kudos.
That's Fallingwater, which is literally cantilevered out over the river, so I think the architecture deserves some of the credit.
The architecture of the original architect, or the impromptu architecture of the contractor who quietly doubled the reinforcement of the cantilever, or the architecture of the subsequent architects called in when even the double-strength cantilever started to sag noticeably?
When you see an impressive cantilever, there's a structural engineer that deserves the credit. Some architects double as de facto engineers, and some just envision very pretty structures that they don't actually know how to build.
As usual, we can partly blame Ayn Rand. She made the idea of ugly concrete geometry puzzles and hyperstylized sculptures sound romantic by describing them, but not needing to show them.
Re: furniture, I have found that the furniture at "cheap, lower class" furniture stores like, for example, American Furniture Warehouse, have very appealing offerings. Their furniture, often in the $500 range for large book shelves or furniture items, has character and uniqueness, and is made of appealing materials. Your local "high class" furniture store, in contrast, will sell bookshelves that look like you could probably make them yourself in an afternoon, and they'll never cost less than $3000.
I seriously doubt Ayn Rand had any significant influence on the architecture profession, or on the public perception of architecture. And as for not showing them, she was clearly inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright when writing The Fountainhead and admitted as much.
I believe it was Richard Neutra too who was an influence, at least he thought so and rand lived in one of his houses.
I worked for a famous architect-engineer. Most of the architects had read the Fountainhead and were fond of the book, and thought it illustrated the difficulties of artistic integrity within architecture quite well, I think. If you are a young architect and want to read a novel about an architect, there is nothing else to read that I can think of.
As far as Rand's influence on the public is concerned, it's enormous, more than any other American novelist that I can think of. Then again, I can't think of any novelist aside from S. King who has had a broad influence on contemporary American society.
"Appealing materials" is not the word I'd use for particle board with stick-on veneer.
There's definitely one class of cheap-ass furniture but the affordable furniture that I have purchased from AFW is made out of real wood. Maybe AFW is some kind of outlier, I don't know. My point is more that the high-end stores seem to have only ugly, "minimalist" offerings.
My guess is that most modernist architects would have sneered at Rand, for what it's worth.
A big problem with the furniture argument is that while OLD furniture is quite expensive, new furniture is actually very, very affordable; it cost about as much to furnish a house in 2011 as it did in 1980. Obviously you can buy expensive new furniture; I remember once seeing dining chairs for a thousand dollars plus. But if you want something good, affordable and comfortable, you really won't break the bank at all.
Only if you are okay with furniture that is either: made of plastic or metal. or: Will melt if it gets wet.
Hardwood costs hella cash, you have to say hella, that's how cash it is.
I think you'd be quite surprised by the quality of some cheap furniture now. Sites like Wayfarer have made commodity furniture from overseas very accessible. Much of it is solid wood (though not exactly hardwoods) and will last very long. The kitchen table I have is solid pine (I assume) and is just four legs and a top. It is a mid century style and I don't see any reason it will fall apart any time soon (I have had it for 4 years so far). I think it was less than $200.
My parents still have the set of dresser drawers I used as a child. They are well over 30 years old and have a cardboard back. No solid wood, but they do hold up.
It is worth noting that the discounts come from mass production: I'm quite tall and getting a table and chairs that weren't too low for me was a bit of an ordeal, ended up getting the table custom made. It looks fantastic, but it was *quite* pricey
>Did Google think about the horrors of WWII before deciding to build a kind of ugly headquarters?
The generalization of this that the people at Google may have though was "I'm not good enough to deserve nice things", and plenty of people in the West feel that way. Or is it just me, that I feel guilty when I indulge in nice things?
Looking at the new new google building, I don't get the impression that it was built by someone who thinks they don't deserve nice things:
http://www.archtalent.com/projects/google-north-bayshore
It looks amazing to me. I don't see how you can look at that and say that 21st architecture is just a bunch of boring glass boxes.
I'm no architect, but this looks a lot like rich people or nobles signaling that they can afford expensive stuff. The first thing that jumped out at me was that this is basically a greenhouse. In California. It must cost a lot to keep the place cool, if not in A/C units then in technical expertise. Those curved glass panels don't seem like you can order them at Home Depot or have your general contractor uncle build for you, either. Nope. This is basically a modernist palace or a rich merchant's headquarters.
Yeah, that's very true. But that's a very different criticism than the one above.
I'm not an architect, but as I understand it, the canonical solution to this problem is to put a reflective layer on the glass, so your building looks like a mirror. That way 90% of the sunlight reflects back into the environment and doesn't heat up your building, and you still have lots of natural light and a wide field of view. This gets dangerous when you have concave surfaces; you have to be careful you're not melting the asphalt or setting the neighbor's building on fire.
But I think the envelope you're seeing in these drawings isn't intended to be airtight; it's just a webwork of cables that supports the swooping walkways, suspending them from the towers.
Much traditional architecture that everyone (allegedly) likes was also built to enable rich people to show off their wealth.
Many of the most famous buildings in history were so expensive that they they caused civil unrest or wars. E.g., to pay for the Parthenon, Pericles hijacked the treasury of the Delian League, which eventually led to the Athens losing the Peloponnesian War. The construction of Santa Sophia had something to do with the famous Green vs. Blue chariot racing fans uprising. Selling indulgences for St. Peter's brought about the Reformation. The sultan who built the Taj Mahal as his wife's tomb was overthrown by his son when he wanted to build a matching black one for his tomb.
Google cares quite a bit about energy efficiency so it seems likely that the architects figured something out.
That looks like simulation images - massive amounts of glass can be a lot more obnoxious in real life, with reflections cooking things. One building in London famously focused the light enough that cars parked across the street would have their dashboards melt
Especially because, as I pointed out last time in the comments, Google did NOT build its own headquarters. All the buildings in the Mountain View campus were acquired, and the centrepiece is a building originally constructed by SGI that does in fact have an 'interesting' design. The part Scott chose to show was one of the many generic office buildings that were acquired from other firms over the years as the company grew.
When tech firms do finally get around to building their own head quarters, they often do have quite interesting buildings in the middle. But then because they keep growing those buildings end up surrounded by generic office blocks again. Apple's HQ is I think an example of this: a lovely glass donut designed by a famed industrial designer, but I don't think all their employees get to work in it, even when they are in Cupertino.
The google example is/was such a red herring/straw man, I am surprised Scott didn't walk it back.
Maybe I should clarify that my point was not about Google's headquarters specifically, but about the fact that "I'm not good enough to deserve nice things" is more relatable than "we can't have nice thing after WW2".
The prices of antique furniture have collapsed.
“ Since the turn of the 21st century, the value of much 18th and 19th century furniture has plummeted….
Compared with the heyday of antiques collecting, prices for average pieces are now “80 percent off,” said Colin Stair, the owner of Stair Galleries auction house in Hudson, N.Y. “Your typical Georgian 18th century furniture, chests of drawers, tripod tables, Pembroke tables,” he noted, can all be had for a fraction of what they cost 15 to 20 years ago.
In 2002, Mr. Stair sold a set of eight George III-style carved mahogany chairs for $8,000; in 2016, he sold a similar set of eight chairs for $350.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/style/how-low-will-market-for-antiques-actually-go.html
Great roundup. On the matter of certain styles "all looking the same," I feel like again and again in my life, I've encountered certain genres - whether it's music (punk, reggae, house), art (abstract impressionism, japanese printing), or literature (science fiction, mysteries) - that I thought all looked/sounded/read the same. And again and again, when I became more interested and involved and knowledgeable about those styles, I had an "a-ha!" moment where the subtle differences became clear, and I suddenly enjoyed the form in a deeper and more rewarding way.
I think there's a bit of a chasm between not paying attention to something like buildings or chairs (and music, food, clothing, etc, etc) and having the attention to detail to tell the subtle differences that can make a thing exemplary *within* its style. But there's a leap of faith - usually backed by aesthetic interest and a lot of exposure - before you can enjoy things that "all look the same"
Fantastic point. I got the sense Scott used Valerio Olgiati as a "Look at this ugly thing" moment, but when I looked at his work, it's magisterial in its subtle use of color and scale to convey age and a sense of place. I've not visited the Pearling Path Visitors Center, but it must be an incredible experience if you're willing to invest in it.
I had the thought after your initial post that some of the kitsch in new buildings in old style comes from the fact that merely aping the older style with new materials just...may not work due to subtle differences.
A Twitter thread at about that same time discussed the new Netflix Cowboy Bebop in live action. They deliberately recreate the original Cowboy Bebop opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2N-9EmedA
For example, when Jet is running in the first ~15 seconds, it looks cool and stylized in the original opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL-D9LrFJd4
But in the live action version, it looks uncanny-valley weird for a human being to be moving that way. Something that worked well in animation just looks *off* in live-action, because people don't move that way naturally. I think the stylization of an animated character can work with that, but an actual human in front of a camera may not be able to.
Similarly, if you try to recreate, say colonnades with modern curtain-wall materials, it just comes off as fake. We might also be in the interim where people are finding beautiful ways to work with what's widely available. I dunno, just a hypothesis from that show opening that happened to get pointed out to me the same day as your OP.
I dunno, I actually loved the intro. It makes a lot of sense too. The intro song is legendary and a huge part of the 'first adopters' are going to be returning fans. Starting the show with a high effort faithful homage to the original feels great.
As for those who don't like, they can do what they do for every netflix show. IE. skip the intro.
It is a 'win - no lose' situation. I love that it is off, highlighting how much effort goes into making animations feel natural despite the much lower 'frame rate' in anime.
I also liked the intro but the brief running *specifically* looks off compared to the stylishness of the same sequence in the animation.
At the Dublin meetup recently, one of the attendees used to work in architecture and construction, and we talked for a while about your last post on this.
He brought up the interesting fact that apparently very large sheets of glass, as are used in a lot of glass-fronted buildings and "fancy" boxy architecture, are actually absurdly expensive. Apparently the cost of the equipment involved goes up exponentially with the width of the glass sheet. He estimated that it would be considerably cheaper to just have smaller windows surrounded by decorative stonework - the exact opposite of the "cost disease" hypothesis.
This raised the interesting idea that these designs ARE driven by signaling wealth ... but it only works on fellow architects who know how expensive the "minimalist" materials are!
In art, as well, where you can get incredible representational artwork that puts the Old Masters to shame quite cheap from freelance artists online, there is definitely no cost disease at work.
People love big windows. It's something missing from the architecture discussion. An architect friend of mine loves the way old buildings used thermal mass around a central chimney for efficient heating pointed out that that kind of design—as most of these older styles—only work with the whole package. If you try to make a house in a style designed for thermal mass chimneys, but then want big windows and open rooms, you've just created a really poor building.
Likewise, if you decide to save money on your office tower, you have to justify to renters why they're getting less light.
There’s your explanation, which seems almost absurdly obvious. Buildings today are designed for the maximum comfort of the people *inside* the building, and that requires aesthetic compromises on the outside. Modern office buildings may look boring on the outside, but large windows, elevators, HVAC, carpeting, open floor plans, etc. make them a lot more pleasant than most 19th century buildings. I used to work in an office in a beautiful 19th century Viennese building and it was not very convenient. In that sense maybe architecture is like clothing - we prize individual comfort over looking attractive.
Open plan offices make a good first impression, but they are often disliked by office workers who would prefer fewer distractions and more privacy. So this might be more a matter of designing impressive interiors rather than comfortable ones?
But you’re right, this whole discussion seems rather biased towards aesthetics - how it looks from the curb, how it looks to the tourist. It’s difficult to avoid judging architecture by appearance when looking at images, but ideally we would have the informed imagination to judge the more practical aspects of a design.
I would really like for everyone to have their own damn office. It might not look as impressive, but it's certainly more productive.
My impression is that open plan offices are hated by workers and appreciated by managers; of course, the people choosing which office design to use are usually the higher-ups who benefit from the panopticon, and thus it is "preferred" despite the opinions of the lower level workers
I think this definitely underpins most "boring" new builds - a combination of cost and comfort gives you rectangular skyscrapers with lots of lots of window (in smallish pieces, of course, to keep the steel frame affordable).
This doesn't explain why the high concept designs that win art awards are so ugly, though, but if the arty space and the mass market space are different then there isn't much pressure for the internal fashions of the designer world to match common aesthetic preferences.
Most houses have windows set in brick/wood/whatever walls, and I've never heard anyone say that they'd rather have huge wall-sized glass panels instead.
I wouldn't want one in most rooms of my house for privacy reasons (and you need to stick with one style of windows for aesthetic reasons), but I absolutely would replace the current window in my office with a wall-size one if I could.
You can definitely mix windows for aesthetic reasons. For example a huge multi story central window and smaller ones elsewhere. Now sticking a random room sized window in whichever room happens to be the office, that won't work.
I've seen lots of offices with full-wall windows and they're pleasant to be in.
On many homes the door to the back patio is a large, mostly glass sliding door or French door
Giant bay windows are a feature on many McMansions They are usually at the back of the house.
Because 1) thats were the lawn is, 2) where the kids' outdoors playspace is, and 3) where the kids are when they are not inside or not in school.
Why would I want giant bay windows in the *front*? For J Random Driveup to look inside the house?
I live in a 2 bed apartment where 1 wall of both bedrooms and 2 walls of the living room/kitchen are all glass, and everything else is pretty minimalist. I love it.
Huge walls of glass is fantastic, it's just expensive. My new-build house has an entire wall that's all glass, looking out onto the back garden, and it makes the relatively small house feel really spacious and open, while also letting lots of natural light in which helps with mood, since I'm a nerd who doesn't spend enough time outside.
The deciding factor in buying the house I live in right now was the oversized french doors that form one wall of the living room and the two sets of french doors that form the external corner of the kitchen. I'd like to eventually replace the master bedroom windows with a large set of french doors as well.
TBH I wouldn't classify French doors with the sort of wall-sized glass panels we see in modernist skyscrapers. Regardless, my point wasn't that people dislike wall-sized glass panels where they exist (at least as long as they don't have to look at them from the outside), but rather that people don't generally seem to miss them all that much when living or working in buildings with normal walls and windows. Whatever the reason for so many modernist buildings being constructed with giant glass panes instead of walls, therefore, I don't think it's because people would complain to the architect.
I wouldn't want a huge wall-sized glass panel. If it gets broken by tree branches/errant lawnmower rocks/neighbor kids' baseballs, I want to be able to drive to the local hardware store, buy another panel, and put it in. Or hire someone to do that for me. Not spend tens of thousands of dollars on giant panel replacement.
People say they love a lot of things which go against their actual feelings in the presence of those things. For a long time I was in the Big Plate Glass camp myself. Most of my early apartments right out of college were contemporary luxury spaces with floor to ceiling living room windows, and they were nice to look at for a while, but eventually you come to understand that these windows are alienating and cold. That’s what a “picture window” is – the world outside becomes an image to look at instead of a lived experience that enriches one’s life. Small windows and small panes often make the space they open on more beautiful, counterintuitive as that may seem.
———
“Take the use of enormous plate windows...they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.” — Luis Barragán
"You can get incredible representational artwork that puts the Old Masters to shame quite cheap from freelance artists online."
For example?
One of my current favorite examples is Anna Marinova. I found her on instagram, and purchased a signed copy of her latest art book "Nuance", direct from St Petersberg. She's won a stack of awards. She's as good as any of the 19C masters, and better than most.
Once you find her on Instagram and follow her, it will start recommending lots of high skill high craft new representationlists who use instagram to show their work.
One thing that bothers me about this post and its precursor is the monolithic presentation of 'traditional' styles. Classical, baroque, folk, Arts and Crafts, Georgian, etc. are different, and many were in response to perceived flaws with others. The practitioners of each did not see themselves as aesthetically aligned (though of course they did not have modern styles as a point of comparison). It may be true that there are lines of similarity between all of these that separate them from 'modern' forms, but I think the point needs to be developed further.
I've now been put on blast by three whole rationalist celebrities! I guess that's what I deserve for running my mouth about Tartaria without doing more research. (Though, have *you* seen Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin in the same room at the same time? I thought not.
About the window thing, I don't know about basements specifically, but England and Wales, France, and Scotland assessed property taxes by number of windows in a building. Square footage or other measures were difficult to assess and would require intrusion by assessors into the building, but windows could be counted from the street. Since taxing something is a good way to make things go away, a lot of people bricked up their windows. Seeing Like A State talks about this, IIRC, because lack of sunlight and ventilation supposedly caused some long-term health effects. I'm going to be daring again and keep that in the post without independently confirming it.
Anyway, I don't know about basement windows specifically, but that might be what they're referring to? As far as I know, no mud floods were involved. Also, what kind of measly empire gets taken out by a merely great mud flood? You can't claim first-rate geopolitical power status unless your empire is rated for at least Excellent Mud Floods and most superpowers would require full-blown Ultra Mud Floods to be destroyed!
Bricked up basement windows are common in Rome, because the ground level of Rome is gradually rising around the buildings as the seven hills erode into the streets. There may be a few other cities with this sort of erosional structure.
I saw (not in person) a Roman building where, in the middle ages, they cut a new doorway at the new ground level. Then in modern times they excavated the building so now the medieval doorway is at least a story above the ground.
Gah. Yuri Gagarin died in 1968, before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; since Yuri (as far as I can tell) never toured the US, it would have been almost impossible for the two men to have ever been in the same room.
And yes, I suspect you're joking, but my God, the level of historical illiteracy these days is absolutely appalling.
Of course Yuri died before Armstrong walked on the moon! He had to go to America to pretend to be Neil Armstrong, and his absence needed to be explained.
To be clear, I was, in fact, joking. But also what Gwern said.
>Tartaria was destroyed by a “Great Mud Flood” which explains why so many buildings have basements with bricked-up windows (I have never seen this - is it true? If so, what is the explanation?)
If I had to guess, it's likely related to the installation of sewers in American cities during the 1800s. In several cities the streets were actually raised up to allow proper drainage for newly installed sewages systems: Chicago was raised about 14 feet: they actually put jacks under buildings and raised them up to the new street level but it wouldn't suprise me if in some buildings they just build another story on top and turned the first story into a basement. That's what happened in Seattle after the fire of 1889. The city planners decided that since they were rebuilding a big chunk of the city anyway they would regrade many of the roads to be much higher while they were at it. The new buildings that were constructed were built one story higher than they needed to be so that the first story could be buried once the streets were rebuilt higher.
I think many other cities of the same time period went through similar situations during the "sanitary revolution" where better sewer systems and clean water systems were introduced across Europe and America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
You see this a lot in Europe. New streets and other city infrastructure is frequently built on-top of the existing structures, and so old buildings often find themselves slipping below 'ground' level over time.
Re: fifty capitalisms, I propose a vending machine that dispenses bits of clay that the general public can use to attach ornamentation onto the building, and I guess also crowbar things that can be used to remove bits of clay that are unattractive. That way, hobbyists that are good at ornamentation will make good ornamentation and it will stay attached to the building if everyone likes it. This idea is good because it is also democracy.
Isn't that called chewing gum?
Gum ornamentation is always bad.
I recommend spray paint instead of clay.
I think spray paint is modern, pop-culture ornamentation.
doesn't mean the principle doesn't apply - here in Melbourne there are alleys that are actively tourist destinations because of the quality of the "graffiti", of which the bigger pieces are often commissioned by either building owners or the city council.
I imagine you're joking, but I would deeply love to see someone try this experiment, ideally on an existing faceless generic downtown cube <3
Maybe instead of crowbar things, it would be more elegant to let people veto unattractive ornamentation by covering it with their own bits of clay? That way one purchase equals one small change in either direction.
That just gives you clayflation.
This guy, who writes with smoke coming from his ears and a gun on his blotter, has a lot of receipts on the intellectual trends in architecture that intentionally condemned traditional, human-scale architecture as wicked and, in taking over architecture-school faculties, put a stranglehold on the built environment:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198753691/
'Wicked' in what way and on what grounds?
>Great Mud Flood”
> that (among other things) that Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin were the same person, but scientists have covered this up. It also includes the truly excellent sentence “Researchers concluded that history and science are probably a set of lies".
I thought the whole bit about technological regress was quite obviously bonkers, but this strikes me as obviously true.
No doubt history and science include some lies, but I wouldn't say they're so dishonest as to be "a set of lies".
Also, Armstrong and Gagarin don't look like the same guy at all.
It sounds obviously self-contradictory to me. Are these "researchers" not doing science or history?
Maybe, but if they are doing science and history, aren't they proving themselves correct?
> “Researchers concluded that history and science are probably a set of lies"
I mean... they're not wrong. Although I wouldn't have thought it was a grand revelation, both groups are pretty up front about the fact that they don't have all the answers and are just making their best guess from what they have.
I generally like Santiago Calatrava, but his Oculus at the World Trade Center transit hub was absolutely not worth the $4 billion spent on it. It does have many of the advantages of the old Penn Station or current Grand Central Station, but the WTC station just doesn't have the same purpose as a waiting area for intercity travel, and you can get much of this functional benefit for much less:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/santiago-calatrava-wtc-transport-turkey-445541
Some people might classify Calatrava as "modernist", but I would classify it as relatively baroque and ornate, and thus put it on the "aesthetic" side rather than "functionalist".
It’s very weird that they describe the place as “Trumpist” when Trump’s own penthouses are the exact opposite - exactly the sort of busy, gilded, highly ornamented spaces overstuffed with ostentatious displays of wealth. Not a huge but spartan, empty stone hall.
When going around Europe, there is quick rule of thumb to see if you are in a Calatraba building:
If you find yourself in a in a place that is, very obviously, not fulfilling one of the main purposes it should in some uncomfortable way (say, a completely open train station in the cold Belgian winter without any kind of protection from the wind, or a dangerously slippery bridge with a glass floor in a place known for it's rain), and the thing is completely white and looks modern, welp, you got yourself a Calatrava.
I think you hit on something that is missing in Scott's discussion, modernism does not always mean minimalist, minimalism a strain of thought within modernist architecture and art (as well as within certain veins of traditionalist architecture and art, like traditional Japanese art (at least the traditional Japanese art that's usually associated with Japan)), but it is not the only straight of thought in modernist architecture
You might find the architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser to be an interesting anomaly, with bright colors and ornate designs, in a maybe-kitschy, maybe-traditionalist, or maybe-modernist style, depending on how your eye parses these things:
https://artsandculture.google.com/theme/explore-the-inventive-architecture-of-friedensreich-hundertwasser/7QKy7Wb_9jLzJw?hl=en
As soon as I saw the first picture on that article I felt dizzy and disoriented. My first reaction was that the picture was low-res and full of artifacts: it took my brain a bit to accept that it was a picture of a real place.
I think it's cool that somebody did it but on first viewing it evokes a very unpleasant experience.
Hundertwasser's art does not photograph well at all, but in life it tends to evoke childlike emotions of wonder and glee.
I'd just like to add a link to the "world famous in NZ" Kawakawa Public Toilets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundertwasser_Toilets
A little off-topic, but I think the concept that some of this stuff "doesn't photograph well" is actually really important to these conversations. I've heard this not just about architecture but about some art as well (specifically Rothko). If a building or piece of art mainly works because of the physical context around it, or because it has subtle details that are hard to display on a screen, or because its sheer scale is awe-inspiring, then of course it's going to look ugly or pointless to someone who's only seen it through a Google image search.
Of course, I understand why it doesn't come up a lot, because it's kind of a conversation-ender. If someone claims that a piece of art might look really ugly, but you'd totally understand how amazing it is if only you saw it in person, then the only way to really verify that is... to see it in person. So practically speaking, you end up needing to (a) blindly trust someone who claims to have seen it in person, (b) blindly call the person making the claim a liar, or (c) retreat into uncertainty until you've flown out to whatever exotic location you're discussing because you really want to settle the argument. But something being difficult to falsify doesn't mean it's false.
Most well done painted flat art does not photograph well. When I started going to museums and seeing with my own eyes paintings that I had loved in art books, I discovered that. It's even more true looking at things in sRGB glowing displays. Its the difference between artificial fruit flavoring vs real sunripe heirloom organic fruit.
My grudging concession to mid20C modern paint "art" was discovering that the same was true for may of them, that they were playing with texture, brushwork, and reflectivity, and something that looks like a flat field of white can have a "there" there, that you can only see in person under good lighting. That's mid20C tho. By late20C and early21C, their successors were putting stuff on with a paint roller. Or an inkjet printer.
+1
I think the pictures are actually low res and full of artifacts - look at the people or the tree leaves, they're all pixelated too
I love each and every one of those.
I am surprised that the confusion about Google persists. I don't recognise the building you call "Google HQ". The Googleplex looks like this: https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/12/googleplex-experience-center-construction/ But Google didn't build it; SGI did, between 1994 and 1997. In the stairways you can find fire risers that still say SGI on them.
I think that's some random building elsewhere in Google's Mountain View campus, but not the Googleplex proper.
I initially thought it was the northwest corner of Building 40, but I just checked on Street View and while that's boring and blocky, it's got a lot more glass and less concrete in the facade.
The "Googleplex" isn't really a specific thing, it's just the name for the whole enormous campus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex
But the building we keep pointing to as "the" HQ is the one in the park because it's the most interesting, where the company first moved in to, where Charlies (the first cafe) was built and where TGIF was held. So that interestingly designed building was the central hub for the company for many years.
"The ASLA noted that the SGI project was a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space and awarded the project the ASLA Centennial Medallion in 1999."
"The former SGI facilities were leased by Google beginning in 2003"
But you can't really characterize the Googleplex as being anything in particular:
"Google in its 2012-year-end annual report said it had 3.5 million square feet of office space in Mountain View"
Although the interiors have or had a somewhat consistent design, at least when I worked there, the exteriors were just whatever other people built. Which was normally low-rise boxes because they were just normal companies that Google wrote big cheques to, to convince them to give up their space.
I've heard "Googleplex" used to refer both to the whole MTV campus, and specifically to buildings 40/41/42/43 (and sometimes including 1900/1950/2000).
It's been a while since I worked at Google (left in late 2013) so I may be misremembering or usage may have shifted, but I remember more or less the same as @Paul: "Googleplex" sometimes used loosely to refer to the whole MTV campus (excluding the Crittendon and Rengstorff buildings, which are also in Mountain View but are 0.5-1 mile away from the main cluster of buildings in either direction and have their own separate building number prefixes), but I primarily associated it with the core block of buildings (40/41/42/43) containing Charlie's, the T-Rex skeleton, and the main corporate lobby.
Yeah, it was the same when I was there. Someone using the term could mean the entire campus or just the "good" bits, which is why it's not really a precise term to use when discussing architecture.
Editing error: "they just because more expensive"
because -> become
The McMansion you posted is far above average. Typical McMansions look much worse.
An additional point: survivorship bias is a major factor warping our perception of old buildings. There were many shoddily built or non-beautiful buildings in the past, designed around strict functionality or just badly designed. They have not survived, and the damage they suffered (unlike valued buildings) has not been restored. Again, this may not defeat the fundamental point, but it should be acknowledge and accounted for in the analysis.
A lot of people say this as a kneejerk reaction to criticism of architectural modernism in toto, but I've never seen any actual evidence for it. It's always just posited as a bald assertion, as if it must obviously true, but is it? A lot of the townhouses and cottages that we consider charming residences for the wealthy today were simple working class accomodation or even straight up tenements back when they were built. Granted they have undergone a lot of renovation and improvement since then, but they still very much look the same way that they did back then.
I guess a systematic way would be to look at the original construction date on a sample of property records. In lieu of the actual research, take a look at the buildings in the background of these views of DC from the 19th century:
1852: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/view-of-washington-dc-edward-sachse.html
c. 1870: https://www.etsy.com/listing/234838841/panoramic-view-of-washington-dc-old-maps
1892: https://www.vintage-maps-prints.com/collections/panoramic-views/products/old-washington-city-panoramic-view-1892
Or even 1923:
https://www.vintage-maps-prints.com/collections/vintage-city-maps/products/old-map-of-washington-dc-1923-vintage-map
Compare to downtown DC today - my quick, eyeballed guess is that the vast majority of these are gone now. And the old background buildings look more functional than beautiful to me, though of course that's in the eye of the beholder.
Those buildings all look nicer than modern concrete tower blocks, IMHO.
And, if they were still standing, they'd likely be considered "charming residences for the wealthy", as Mabuse7 says.
>"A lot of people say this as a kneejerk reaction to criticism of architectural modernism in toto, but I've never seen any actual evidence for it. It's always just posited as a bald assertion, as if it must obviously true, but is it? A lot of the townhouses and cottages that we consider charming residences for the wealthy today were simple working class accomodation or even straight up tenements back when they were built. Granted they have undergone a lot of renovation and improvement since then, but they still very much look the same way that they did back then."
And on the other side of the equation, where are the modern-day Parthenons or Notre Dames? It's all very well saying that, five hundred years from now, people will think 21st-architecture was great because only the beautiful buildings will have survived, but it would be a stronger argument if people could actually point to some examples.
How can we provide examples to you that won't be examples for another few hundred years? We can only speculate on which buildings will last. If you just want buildings that people think look good, that comes down to aesthetic preferences.
If the only reason we think traditional architecture looks better than modern architecture is that the ugly traditional buildings have been pulled down, then the best modern buildings ought to look as good as the best traditional buildings. So my question is, where are these modern buildings that look just as good as the best traditional buildings? Which modern buildings are considered as beautiful as the Parthenon, or Notre Dame, or the White House, or the Taj Mahal?
Just off the top of my head:
Sydney Opera House
Dulles Airport
The old TWA terminal at JFK which was preserved and is now a TWA themed hotel
The original WTC towers (though they are not standing any longer so they probably don't count)
The "Birds Nest" stadium built for the 2008 olympics
Changi Airport
Many would point to Frank Ghery buildings, though I am not a fan.
Habitat 67
The Guggenheim
The Seagrams Building
Thats just off the top of my head, I am surely missing dozens more especially outside the US.
For residential there is Falling Water, Farnsworth House, the case study houses in LA, the Barcelona pavilion and many more. I actually think the best examples of modern architecture have been on the residential side but they are not as noticeable because they are private residence. Here is an article that is about 2020 only and has a lot of examples of private homes: https://www.archdaily.com/953193/best-architectural-projects-of-2020
I would say that modern, especially mid century modern, excelled with private homes because the new designs started being built around how people actually live in the 20th and 21st century. Colonials, tudors, victorians, etc. were designed around different patterns of living where moderately wealthy families would have servants to cook and clean, heating was done by fire places, cooling was non existent, and lighting came from candles or gas.
Modern families didn't and don't live that way. The center hall colonial built in 1950 that I grew up in is basically the same layout as a Denver four square built at the same time. The facade determined the style. This is even more pronounced on McMansions and other new developments where the inner layout and design are completely detached from the facade which is usually nothing more than a thin veneer of "stone" or "brick" or wood siding or stucco.
Midcentury residential homes started to incorporate the living and dining and cooking spaces within the same area. Creating open areas that fostered communication and flow through the home. They also preserved private spaces where people could retreat too. Now, a lot of the build quality wasn't great so the homes have needed lot of repairs. however, in the article linked above you can see the evolution of this thinking. Open spaces to create public living, private spaces to preserve the family and the exterior of the building flows from this interior. A Machine for Living as Le Corbusier put it.
>Just off the top of my head:
If those are really the best that modern architecture can offer, I think that rather proves my point. Several of them are literally just nondescript glass cuboids.
I recall a comedy sci-fi setting that listed the prized historical buildings preserved from the city once known as London; among such classics as St Pauls, and Buckingham palace was listed The Gherkin :D
I'm not sure how much I agree with this... For example, I live in an old home that's considered very charming, but it was hardly a working class residence - it was built by one of the wealthiest residents of the town at the time (1890.)
No-one said that *every* charming old building was originally a working-class residence.
Have people seen the latest article on survivorship bias? https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest/
I wonder, how elite is "modern" art really?
For comparison, is Bose home audio equipment elite? They make a lot of money, and they sell to customers with money.
For paintings, modern art is hardly the only sort of thing to hang on walls, stuff visually pleasing for the average person is in fact quite popular.
Buildings have many more complications with materials and labor, but the actual homes of people (including the wealthy) are hardly only in avant-garde modern styles either.
There is a market for selling weird novel stuff to rich people at high prices in New York etc. But how would you charge high prices for not-novel stuff, which has an unlimited supply? And certainly the limited-supply stuff in the old styles still goes for high prices.
Being an artist or studying art is not particularly lucrative, in general. Maybe being a modern artist is not in fact high status. Maybe it's just a subculture like being a furry. And the marketing at rich people is just a separate thing where novelty is required to justify the high prices.
Bose is definitely not elite.
In home audio, "elite" starts with the likes of the Bowers and Wilkins 800 speakers, or the KEF Reference, and goes up from there. OK, maybe the B&W 700 series. Extra points for obscure Danish (not Bang & Olufsen!), French, or German manufacturers.
Actually in amplifiers, the modernist aesthetic is on full display. You buy a preamp which has only a volume control and a power button, and two "monoblock" power amplifiers, one per channel, all of which look like bland slabs of aluminum. See the Plinius Reference A-150 for the general style, although that particular amp happens to have two channels.
I don't think that novelty (of appearance) plays a role here. It's more about signaling status to your peers.
Many of these elite components are both objectively and subjectively worse in terms of sound reproduction than more reasonably priced alternatives. Some of them expect you to modify your room, adding to their cachet.
That's true, in terms of audio equipment there are probably better analogs (and of course for home speakers I don't actually think Bose is the peak of sound quality or a great value).
I guess my point was questioning what elite means here and if certain big dollar artwork sales might make the artistic elite seem more important or influential than they actually are. The culture around marketing art as investments for wealthy people is probably a pretty small % of the total art produced and consumed, and the rest is probably a lot more 'normal' on average. So the analogy basically was: if we decided what was important in the audio world only based on money Bose might come out on top. But that seems kind of ridiculous, and it seems worth questioning if the high-end art scene is actually that influential in society as a whole either (and personally I don't know anyone outside of that scene that relies on them for their own opinion on art).
We have the rather unnerving possibility that "modern" art used to be an elite taste, and we haven't gotten a new elite since then.
The "horrors of WWII" argument doesn't fit the timeline. Modernism, as an avant-garde movement, predates WWII by several decades. Le Corbusier presented his infamous Plan Voisin for Paris in 1925.
The argument is superficially plausible because economic factors- first due to the Depression and then to the war- limited the amount of the non-military construction that occurred for 15 years or so. But the theory kept spreading during those years, which became apparent to the average person when the post-war building boom commenced.
Yes. My father was an architect, a follower of "De Stijl", modernism with Dutch characteristics. De Stijl started as a reaction to late 19th century styles. Opposition reflex rules us all.
The architects (Oud & co.) were a few years behind the visual arts artists.
One factor not really explicit in Scott's exposition is the timing of innovations in materials.
Pre-stressed concrete was invented about the end of the 19th century and came into modest popularity between WWI and WWII. It really took off after WWII, when there was in Europe a need to rebuild and to build very rapidly and cheaply.
Prestressed concrete is so much cheaper (because faster and lower mass) than older methods, even reinforced concrete, that it was difficult for companies or governments to justify using any other material to their stakeholders.
Pouring concrete around stretched steel tendons just naturally gives you rectangular prisms. The later, even cheaper post-tensioned concrete material doesn't get away from this constraint.
So there was a coincidence of fashion and material choice. A counterfactual to ponder: posit a cheap, quick-to-use material that naturally leads to highly colored, ornate buildings. Would that have taken off after WWII? Would buildings have been built with it and then hidden in gray, flat cladding?
Well, before the advent of pre-stressed concrete you had the advent of structural steel which provided an almost completely bare structural canvas on which to place whatever facade you wished. And people did, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries you see a proliferation of new materials designed to produce highly ornamented and textural exteriors in an affordable, capital-intensive way. Cast iron, glazed and terracotta tiles and paneling, moulded and dyed concrete, all were used for making lavish beaux arts, neo-gothic, art nouveau, and other highly ornamented styles cheaply and less labour-intensively than in the past.
Yes, those glazed tiles and other decorations could be done more cheaply than they could before (_pace_ Baumol), but not as cheaply nor as quickly as not doing them at all. They were still extra time and expense over the bare shell.
When an aesthetic of "burn _all_ the Chesterton's Fences" became dominant, they went.
I'm trying to imagine a structural material (for floors as well as walls) that has those decorations built in, and is cheaper than tensioned concrete, and what would have happened then. My gut feel is that shades-of-gray cladding would have been added for a decade or two, but after a while that Fence would also have been torn down.
Yes, I think that aesthetic and philosophical nihilism ("Life is confusing, meaningless, and hellish, so all our art and architecture should be as well") predates even WW1. People may have taken the horrors of the World Wars as proof of nihilism, particularly if they already had tendencies in that direction, but the trend itself predates the wars.
How about “horrors of WWI.” That war had trench warfare and mustard gas among other miseries. It’s been used to explain the transition in philosophy and poetry.
Clearly, lots of people like McMansions or there would not be so many of them. The criticism of them is strictly elitist, namely that they are huge but built cheaply on small parcels of land, with faux finishes “slapped on like wallpaper”. Designs plucked from a catalog rather than designed custom for the lot by “real” architects. In short, the biggest problem with McMansions is that they are the sort of place a gauche, upjumped poor person with money might aspire to.
People don't ask for a McMansion. They ask for Traditional, and a McMansion is what they get.
It's always been true that the top architects don't design houses for average people. The elite architects get the high profile commissions. Their employees go off and start less prominent firms and get decent commissions. And so on down the ladder...until a few rungs down you have carpenters doing design-build houses. That was true in 1920 and it's still true.
With each step down the ladder comes a reduction in design quality. If the top isn't so great, a few rungs down will be terrible. But if the top is really, really good, a few rungs down will still be pretty good. That's the difference between a McMansion and a house built in a nice New Jersey suburb in 1920.
My rebuttal is the magazine "Fine Homebuilding".
It's basically porn (literally printed on the same presses, bright pictures of beautiful things you will never be allowed to touch yourself), but what it showcases is what *builders* (not architects) build for *themselves* after they get prosperous to build their own dream home. As builders, they know where the shortcuts are, and don't do them to their own homes. These people are general contractors for custom home construction, basically the "carperters" you describe poorly.
My "if I am ever rich" dream is to have a house like a house in that magazine.
Fine Homebuilding is a great magazine, but the median general contractor is probably only vaguely aware that it even exists. If that.
And if you look at the design articles in there, you'll often find that what they correctly describe as the right way to do things is little or no more expensive than the wrong way. The traditional design knowledge is just less widely disseminated among homebuilders than it was in 1925. That's due to ideology at the top rungs of the profession, which leads to a simple lack of knowledge on the lower rungs.
I work in this business, so I'm well aware of what GCs for custom home construction are like, and what they generally know and don't know.
Do you live in a custom home?
Honestly, the reason I dislike them is that I live in Australia and the lack of eaves/verandah seems foolish (it also jars because they're so common).
They don't have eaves? That's really strange.
At least, the things I think of as McMansions (typically found on new suburban developments) don't have eaves of any use (the roof goes basically straight into the walls like with Scott's example).
I should also clarify my confusing pronoun above - the look of the things I'm referring to as McMansions jars, to me, because *eaves* are so common here.
In an Australian context, this is the kind of thing that I tend to think of as a McMansion: https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-mount+waverley-136332650
It does have eaves, but it looks ridiculous thanks to the mismatch between the Versailles-style grandeur of the style and the suburban naffness of the block and location, combined with the obvious cheapness of every part of the house that isn't important for showing off (check out the contrast between the front and back facades, or the fact that the bedrooms are quite small to make room for that enormous staircase).
I note that it doesn't actually have any of the properties that the mcmansionhell site likes to sneer at. It's not asymmetric, and the windows are all the same size, whoop de freaking doo. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the design, except that it was built on the wrong side of the world, in the wrong century, and in a dull middle-middle-class suburb instead of on its own palatial grounds.
Having said that, I am well aware that there's a strong element of classism in my sneering at this sort of house. But at least I'm open about my classism rather than trying to pass it off as actual virtue (unlike the mcmansion hell guy).
Those "quite small" bedrooms are about the size of our master bedroom, in a not-especially-small house.
And I really cannot understand why it's bad to have something awesome in an environment that is typically not as awesome as it. Isn't that just an improvement to the area?
I agree with you about the back facade, though. They could have done better there.
If it actually were awesome then yes, but it's not awesome, it's just garish, and out of harmony with its surroundings.
It's a six year old's idea of what a fancy house would look like. It's a collection of random architectural elements pasted together with the only criterion being "Does it look _fancy_?" The house next door is no great beauty either, but doesn't try to attract attention.
It's much better executed than most of the McMansion Hell examples. On the other hand, the neighbors must feel low class just from its existence. On the other other hand, it's raising property values on the block and maybe in 40 years all the houses on the block will look like that.
My aunt resented that her perfectly nice but nothing special suburban block in Arcadia, CA was targeted by millionaires from the other side of the world who bought up her neighbors houses and tore them down and replaced them with giant buildings filling up the entire lot. On the other hand, when she died, her kids sold her house for a tidy sum because of this bizarre predilection of foreign millionaires.
I think that house looks great. Oh no, maybe I'm a prole!
Verandas seem to have been replaced by back patios / decks. Probably a car culture thing? Also, air conditioning leads to a preference for more fully enclosed space instead of the indoor/outdoor space of a veranda or large porch.
That's half the story. As someone living in a stuccoed manufactured home (so no great aesthetics), I also make fun of McMansions, but admire actual mansions, and enjoy modest houses, both old and new, in the local traditional style. Both actual mansions and modest traditional houses make the area more beautiful in a way that isn't only for the house owner, but also for neighbors and visitors. They're enjoyable to walk or drive by. Mcmansions come across as selfish -- they're (presumably) roomier and more comfortable inside, at the expense of everyone else who has to endure the eyesore.
That isn't necessarily true of Scott's example, though I saw a house like that plopped into the middle of a city that's otherwise full of adobe and Spanish colonial architecture, and they had lawn rumbas clipping an even green lawn in a desert, which earned scorn instead of envy even from the plebes.
Are McMansions actually plucked from a catalog? Do you mean instead that the builders let the lot owners pick features at random? Because it seems to me like a home coming out of a catalog would obviously be designed by an architect, and taking, say, Sears Modern Homes as a comparison, would be nicer than the median McMansion.
I’m not sure - the lower end of McMansions probably are (the mcmansionhell website says they start at 3000 feet) and many of the homes I see in that range are still fundamentally the product of big builders of the sort that build subdivisions where every house is one of maybe a dozen designs, with some minor customization.
This is my experience in my neck of the woods. In fact, my parents live in such a neighborhood where some of the models are just your typical large suburban fare and others are very much McMansions, all prebuilt from a handful of different model homes. This undercuts the claims that the "McMansion" bashing is classist (this is a pretty homogenous neighborhood class-wise, yet some homes are McMansions and others are just houses), although some people definitely do end up using it that way.
Many are, yes. Builders will offer a set of core floorplans in their development, then you can add parts and pieces as the buyer. It often leads to the silly many-angled roofs you see on McMansions, because they don't revise the overall design to return it to symmetry and a sensible roofline after changes.
I've been talking about this with someone on discord, and my basic question is this: how much customization typically is there? If you really are just picking a house out of a catalog, there's really no excuse for it to look bad. (And conversely, if there's basically nothing wrong with it, then sure, lob those accusations of class snobbery!) But if buyers are customizing the house, and there's no architect overseeing it, so builders are just kind of doing whatever... well, you can see how questionable decisions are made and the house ends up with problems anyone with a critical eye would notice, no snobbery necessary.
There are definitely non-elitist criticisms of McMansions.
- They are designed very poorly in non-aesthetic terms - because of the way they're designed, they create a lot of waste in terms of construction cost, conditioned volume, and material use.
- They are built poorly - they don't last, and what seems "nice" when built quickly reveals itself as underbuilt and prone to damage or decay.
- They're hideously bad for the climate.
- They're bad for the mental health of the people who live in them.
- They're terrible for cities - they are ultra-low density and produce excess traffic.
I don't understand your last point. Wouldn't ultra-low density ameliorate traffic? It seems to me that higher density residential areas have more cars per street than lower density residential areas. What's the mechanism here I am missing?
Low-density means everything's spread out more, meaning that you probably have to drive to get anywhere because the shops, civic centre, friends' houses, etc., are all outside of walking distance.
Because they're not built into the fabric of a city, every trip must be done by car. Their neighborhoods are also often designed to prevent through traffic, which means all traffic into and out of the neighborhoods flows through only a couple of bottlenecks.
Lower density also requires more infrastructure per household - more streets, sewers, power, etc.
That is still confusing, however, as higher density areas always have more traffic congestion than lower density areas. Maybe it is just a US thing, or an Northern East Coast and Midwest thing, but usually people are driving cars everywhere, and the more people the more cars. NYC is a nightmare to drive through, as is DC and its suburbs, and Philly, Baltimore, Minneapolis, St Paul... I can't think of a high density area I have lived in that didn't have bad traffic. Compared to the low density and rural areas where traffic is "3 cars at a 4 way stop intersection and a buggy", well, there is no comparison.
That's exactly it, actually - where did all that traffic in Manhattan or DC come from? Unwalkable suburbs, mostly. Building *for* density and with walkability in mind reduces traffic.
I can see that to an extent, but as cities grow residents need to get from one side to the other and won't want to walk. Walking longer than a mile is out of the question for most people when it comes to getting groceries or really anything other than exercise. To achieve total walkability you need to have everything people want to do in a very small space, and everything includes different employers for the hundreds of people in that space.
The desirability of being in cities is largely due to working there, and that is difficult to make walkable when you have multiple working adults in a home who might change jobs a few dozen times over their life.
From another angle, given a designated lot with infrastructure built around it, the decision to build a large single family home vs a large multi family home is going to alter your traffic congestion only one way: single family will be less traffic, multi family more. If your option set includes tearing up and redesigning a large chunk of city from scratch there is probably more room to tweak that outcome, but so long as there is weather and all the jobs are not in a very small radius it is going to be very hard to have high residential density with low traffic.
You say "built into the fabric of a city" and I hear "walkup tenements for the plebs, brownstones for the lucky professionals, and penthouses with doormen for the elites". Screw that.
What do you think the plebs get today, beautiful well-built mansions in the countryside? They get shoddily built houses far from work, school, and activities and are then forced to commute.
"they are ultra-low density and produce excess traffic."
Actually, because McMansions are big houses crammed onto small lots, they reduce traffic and commute times versus building a Mansion on an aesthetically pleasing large lot even further out in the exurbs.
Probably a lot of buyers will wind up renting out one wing of their McMansion on Air-BnB or whatever, so they might ultimately accommodate more people than a more modest 4 bedroom house on the same lot.
They're higher density than some suburban housing, but much lower density than most city housing. It would take some detail I haven't got to compare density for where McMansions are usually built.
"Actually, because McMansions are big houses crammed onto small lots, they reduce traffic and commute times versus building a Mansion on an aesthetically pleasing large lot even further out in the exurbs."
This is just saying that very low density is better for traffic than incredibly low density. The choice isn't between suburban McMansions and exurban/rural mansions - McMansion buyers can't afford mansions, which have prices commensurate with actual quality - it's between McMansions in car-mandatory suburban cul-de-sacs and reasonable-size houses, duplexes, townhouses etc built in actual neighborhoods.
By the way, people love to put down cul-de-sacs, but living on a cul-de-sac is wonderful, especially if you have kids. It reduces your worries about them being run over by thru-traffic immensely.
While preference does play a part, there are other factors that have pushed this style to become so dominant. Some of it is regulatory - certain approved building products or techniques are easier to get inspector sign off for. Some if economic - certain products or techniques are cheaper. And some is that these are the least offensive to the people who make the most noise about such projects. Least offensive does not necessarily mean good.
Also people may not really care what the house looks like they just need somewhere to live that is in their budget.
In Russia, they have tried to reverse some of the architectural damage of 20th Century History. For example, in Moscow they rebuilt the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Originally built in the 19th Century. Stalin tore it down. The land was used for a municipal swimming pool for a while. after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Cathedral was rebuilt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour
Near St. Petersburg, the palaces of Peter and of Catherine created during their respective reigns were destroyed by the Nazis during their investment of Leningrad. Both the Soviet and Russian regimes worked to recreate both, including recreating the Amber room at the Catherine Palace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Palace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Room
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterhof_Palace
Its possible, but motivation has to be there.
Several countries in Eastern Europe have rebuilt grand buildings of their national past that were destroyed in WWII. It's quite heartening.
@Sailer: Yes,thank you.
I believe that several Korean and Japanese palaces are the same - destroyed during one of the wars in the first half of the 20th century, and later rebuilt in identical style.
Good point. I think there are some buildings, mostly temples, in East Asia that are made out of wood. They must be rebuilt periodically with new timbers.
I don't know that this explains the aesthetic issues, but I think it goes a way towards explaing the state of the institutional foundation of our society.
"The People and Their Rulers Increasingly Loathe Each Other" By Michael Brendan Dougherty | October 4, 2021
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-people-and-their-rulers-increasingly-loathe-each-other/
"A democracy cannot long put up with such a glaring mismatch between the people — broadly conceived — and their ruling institutions. One writer tried, in his own age, to descry “the cause of the present discontents.” He is something of a model for me in these times. “I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong,” he wrote. “They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people.” That was the inveterate populist Edmund Burke.
"The next decade is going to see a fantastic contest. One the one side are nearly uniformly liberal governing institutions. They will claim to defend liberalism — our inalienable rights, as mediated to us by the media, Silicon Valley, and NGOs — from the predations of populist demagogues. And they will often be caught merely defending their present privileges. They will demand respect for institutions in which their opponents have no voice or share. On the other side will be the ragged populists, democratic in spirit, but prone to wild misstatement and intemperate promises of violence and cataclysm.
"It’s going to get nastier."
A problem with the Baumol cost disease explanation is that modern architecture is nowhere near any sort of efficient frontier of cost versus beauty. They seem to be willing to pay extra to make a building uglier than a simple glass box. Three out of four of your examples of top works by modern architects fit that description.
Frank Gehry -- looks like the nuke-blasted twisted remains of a glass and steel skyscraper
Moshe Safdie -- That irregular collection of concrete boxes seems like the most inefficient form of brutalism I've ever seen.
Zaha Hadid -- Really? What the world needs is a standard glass and steel box, but crooked?
+1
+ 2
I think all of them are pretty. The curved metal looks cool. The irregular boxes avoid the "oppressive concrete monolith" problem. The crooked glass box is probably the most boring, but it's still not *bad.*
(I'm very annoyed by how "airy glass box," "weird curvy metal designs" and "ugly concrete cube" all get described as "modernist" as if they have any similarity beyond the basic building materials.)
+3
For another example: Raleigh Cathedral in North Carolina cost $46 million to make; Los Angeles Cathedral cost $190 million. "Ugly and modernist" does not by any means equate to "cheap".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Name_of_Jesus_Cathedral_(Raleigh,_North_Carolina)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Our_Lady_of_the_Angels
Right across the Hollywood Freeway from the L.A. Cathedral is the Ramon Cortines High School, which looks like a Japanese Robot from Outer Space trying to destroy the Cathedral with its flamethrower:
https://www.alamy.com/los-angeles-ca-aug-2020-cathedral-of-our-lady-of-the-angels-overlooking-the-ca-101-freeway-with-part-of-ramon-c-cortines-school-of-visual-arts-and-performing-arts-on-the-right-at-sunset-image311884050.html
Do people not like the LA cathedral? I always thought that, if you're going to put something on a freeway, that's a pretty nice looking building for the job, with the appropriate sort of scale and grandeur. As is the school across the way.
It's hideously ugly, yes. As is the Oakland Cathedral, seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Light_(Oakland,_California)
Rebuilt after the Loma Prieta earthquake, replacing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Francis_de_Sales_(Oakland,_California)
Or compare to the Cathedral I occasionally attended church in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Archdiocese_of_St._Louis#/media/File:IMG_20180502_131802823_HDR.jpg
Among other things, cathedrals are intended to be for worshiping, and beautiful things help with that.
Much of modern architecture is the result of the career dynamics of what it takes to become a famous starchitect. You don't get to be as famous as, say, Thom Mayne by designing buildings in time-tested good looking styles. You need a signature look: in Mayne's case, his government buildings look like IBM punchcards from 1965 with windows placed randomly. Nobody ever did that before! (Nobody ever wanted to do that before either, but now a lot of people want to do that because doing it made Mayne famous: he's the punchcard architect.)
I suppose his buildings must loom large in the field...
I think these are still a lot cheaper than building something out of hand-carved stone blocks.
Luckily, with modern machinery, we don't need to hand-carve our stone blocks.
On the architecture piece, I'm going to keep screaming into the void that you have to consider the whole built environment and not just the building itself, and a huge reason the built environment is ugly is that a lot of it is dedicated to car infrastructure.
If we are entertaining the idea that people won't build nice buildings because of Auschwitz, then we should entertain the idea that people have less reason to build nice buildings because it'll still be ugly anyway when it's between a parking lot and a highway.
Cities used to have more human-scale stuff in them, more trees, more space for people. It's not surprising to me that as the car infrastructure tends to result in lots of huge plain-concrete structure, the buildings tend towards that too. Taking your Google HQ example - is it in a place where anyone ever walks by for any reason other than they're going to work? People mostly probably drive by at like 50 mph. Why would you invest time in making it nice to walk around?
I'm not sure that Google hq is very meaningful since it was built before Google existed and Google bought it before they were anything like the behemoth of today.
But having said that, googlers get around campus mostly by walking or biking, so it's really set up to be walkable, with lots of investment to build bridges, pathways, etc.
Source: am googler.
I mean other people than workers at Google ... I don't think Google's HQ is similar to, like, the Chrysler building in this respect.
Google may be making a nice attempt to retrofit its campus to be walkable, but it's still incredibly pedestrian-hostile suburbia. They spend a fortune on a private bus system to try to fight the nature of that region, but the cities won't let anyone build anything like an actual walkable neighborhood.
Sed contra, ugly modern buildings are being built even in areas whose layout predates the automobile.
True, I don't think this is the only cause. Though it also seems like even in places whose layout predates cars, new development is often built around cars. Lots of older cities have lots of buildings that were built before changes in zoning laws towards more sprawl-oriented development, and couldn't be built today.
It's usually illegal to build something bigger than the surrounding parking lot, even in places that didn't used to have parking lots. There's a few parts of a few urban cores where they've fixed that, but the car still has to come first in most cities.
Eh, I find Albert Kahn’s Detroit to be quite lovely (it’s current semi-abandoned decrepitude notwithstanding) and it was built around the car both figuratively and literally.
Meanwhile I find “human scale” cities to be nice places to visit, but the thought of actually living there makes me puke. Walkable is great - if you never want to leave! For me, I’ll live with car infrastructure if it means I can get the hell out of dodge on my day off and seek some actual natural, secluded spaces, not the manicured faux-nature of a park or garden. Living my whole life inside a few blocks sounds like hell.
Actually, that’s why I hate LA. Not that it is car-optimized, but that even with a car it’s just too damn huge and takes far too long to escape.
This might come as a shock to you, but people in walkable cities do actually own cars, and do leave their cities to visit other places.
And without all the suburban sprawl, nature can be a lot closer by.
Well, are we talking about new build walkable cities where the apartments all have parking garages and the streets are pedestrian friendly but still handle decent traffic, or the old “human scale” pre-car cities where car ownership is much more challenging?
This is what trains are for: faster than a car in city traffic, plus you can read a book while you travel.
Don’t usually see too many train stations at trailheads.
Indeed. In my line of work (ecological restoration and open space) this is a big-ass problem. We're doing amazing restored natural spaces/trails in or near major metros having plenty of handy commuter rail (I personally live and work in Chicago) but the rail networks are mostly useless as ways for people to get out and enjoy our stuff.
Even in the rare cases where the rail-transit infrastructure happens to almost align with a bunch of beautiful natural areas and trail networks (e.g. in our region the Indiana Dunes), that "almost" is a killer. On the map the train stop is a nice convenient walk to the lovely dunes and beaches....but speaking from experience nobody with small children will ever try it a second time. Let alone anyone whose family group includes grandparents, or someone in a wheelchair, etc.
When I moved from Santa Monica to lakefront yuppie Chicago in the fall of 1982, I vowed to do it without a car. I got through my first Midwestern winter fine by taking public transit in the big city. But when spring came and I wanted to go hiking and play golf outside of the city, it turned out I needed my car, so my parents drove my Datsun out from L.A. in June 1983.
Well taste is subjective, but I'll just point out that more dense development means it's faster to get to nature. The fact that LA takes forever to escape is a natural result of car dependence, and is increasingly happening in other places.
Here is an example: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/09/03/wowza-scale-maps-of-barcelona-and-atlanta-show-the-waste-of-sprawl/
Mass transit and hiking don't go together. Virtually every serious hiker owns a vehicle.
Well there's a difference between "serious hikers" and people who want to sometimes hike (presumably a much larger group). Also more than 90% of households have a car, hikers or not. So I'm not sure what this proves exactly.
But if your main desire is to have a car and access to nature, then you could also have something like "missing middle" development, ability to have a car but not necessarily practical to drive for every trip, with mass transit, perhaps on the outskirts of an urban area that's more transit/walking/dense housing. Take transit to your job downtown, and other destinations are a mix of walking/driving/transit.
What we mostly seem to build now is single family housing and strip malls built next to roads that are practically highways. Not only bad for walking, but so much sprawl that in order to be near where you want to go as a "serious hiker" you also have to be pretty far from job centers.
One does not need to own a car personally for the occasional hike. Even if you're planning on driving out of the city every single weekend, it can still make more sense to take advantage of car-sharing solutions like Zipcar, rather than own a few tons of metal that sits idle 90% of the time. So walkable cities can indeed be combined with its denizens getting out an about. Just rather than 2 cars per household, the number could be more like 0.3-0.5 cars per household.
It's not impossible to merge a great walking street with ample parking. For example, State Street in Santa Barbara is a a beautiful street of boutiques and restaurants all in the California Mission style as rebuilt in the late 1920s after the 1923 earthquake. As a tourist attraction, it brings in many motorists, whose parking needs are accommodated in multistory garages. But rather than be eyesores, the parking structures are hidden, with the outer edges of the structures are commercial space such as shops. So you can walk for a couple of miles on State Street window-shopping the whole way without ever having to pass by a boring parking lot. But you can still park a 3 minute walk from State Street.
I think we should separate out discussions of (i) your standard "podium building" from (ii) a bespoke "starchitect" building that's supposed to be cutting edge but everyone hates.
Podium building example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/One-by-five_Apartments_Austin%2C_TX.jpg
The podium buildings are designed to be as cheap as possible while fitting into all the various zoning/etc rules, and the "starchitect" buildings are less concerned with cost and more with, I guess, making a statement?
Your argument is complicated by an important facet of commercial buildings: how well the building works for its actual the tenants.
I can tell you having worked as a process server / temp in many skyscrapers in NYC the difference between modern glass boxes and art deco skyscrapers on the INSIDE is night and day. A glass rectangle is actually very efficient, people love windows, natural light, and corner offices, and the amenities of having large floors is much nicer than the cramped higher floors of skiny pencil art deco skyscrapers. Take the old RCA Victor building[New York Architecture Images- General Electric Building](https://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID017.htm) (unquestionably beautiful on the outisde) or even the Chrysler building. The lobby to the Chrysler building is pretty but tiny compared to modern skyscrapers. And the upper floors on both are very cramped (I’ve been to offices in both of these buildings).
Modern glass and steel skyscrapers can be dazzling, but they also maximize utility for the tenants, who love floor to ceiling windows and (for commercial tenants) large floors. These design constrainst limit how a building can look from the outside, though some skyscrapers have been built in “postmodern” retro style, like Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building. [550 Madison Avenue - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/550_Madison_Avenue) Many newer buildings have grand lobbies much larger than the lobbies in art deco buildings.
My problem with historical preservation is that often only the merits of the building from the outside to a passing tourist are taken into consideration. A glass box skyscraper is much more functional in actual use.
Also, I know you said you were trying not to cherry pick, but the modern buildings were from unflattering angles. How about this for a comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Pyramid
I like my floor to ceiling window looking out on my backyard in my suburban ranch house. I don't like floor to ceiling windows in high rises because I fear tripping and smashing through the window to my doom. When I lived on the 23rd floor in Chicago, I was very happy with a window that started hip high.
I worked in the Chrysler Building and absolutely loved my office there.
I mixed up the Chrysler building and the Woolworth, my bad. Never actually been to an office in the Chrysler.
If natural light is desired, I don't see why we can't build more buildings like Hardwick Hall ("more glass than wall"), which has large windows to let in plenty of light whilst also being quite nice to look at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwick_Hall
“We should find these same architects and ask them to coordinate us into only building environmentally-sound buildings in order to prevent climate change, or whatever.”
I’m confused by the flippant tone…? This is happening. The American Institute of Architects has a program called the 2030 Commitment to push the design of all new buildings as carbon neutral (https://www.aia.org/resources/202041-the-2030-commitment). Something like half of all US architecture firms are part of the program and almost all the big ones.
Yeah, but do you actually expect that to dominate architectural style for the next three generations?
Carbon neutral buildings are not a style. They can look like anything. We may not not see think pieces about it, but I am a professional engineer in architecture and yes, I do think carbon neutral buildings will be the norm in a generation. Not three. Laws adopting stringent energy codes (see IECC and ASHRAE 90.1) are forcing everyone’s hand and renewed with stricter guidelines every 3 years. Increasingly it matters less and less what an architect or developer or homeowner personally believes when it comes to climate change. The government mandates it, and it is happening. (But a majority of architects are on board.)
My (delusional) hope is that video games, and especially VR, will save us. Enough people will see From Software's mega-cathedrals and demand better from real-world buildings.
On a moderately related tangent, the section on artistic rebellion reminded me of the UI design of Persona 5. It's done in a "ransom-note" style that I'm sure breaks all sorts of design principles, but even a philistine like me can tell that the designer understood the rules and chose to break them in a calculated manner.
When you think about it, it's actually true with most of what the video games world touches on. Take video game soundtrack. Jeremy Soule, one of the vg's world most famous composer, has been producing amazing neoclassical music to great success. I've never met anyone who described Guild Wars 1 soundtrack as kitsch, even the professional musicians I know admit it's beautiful and subtle.
I recently realize that, exactly as you say, my aesthetic preferences have clearly been shaped by the period of my youth when I played video games. I remember how marvelous it felt to discover hidden dungeons of Final Fantasy XII, or the tremendous design of airships in FF X.
And it really illustrate what our aesthetics could be if we didn't stop making art. It always felt to me that Art Nouveau was where we left off. Everybody loves it. And this mix of japanese designs, modern forms yet art nouveau ornaments feel novel in ways we haven't seen before.
Some examples from the aforementioned video games:
https://fantitecture.tumblr.com/image/142453171640
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpzlwkEI331r1z7lpo1_640.jpg
https://phoboslab.org/files/grid-solver/demo/images/38_Castle2_Color.jpg
https://fantitecture.tumblr.com/image/8962014990
Perhaps modern architecture's problem is credentialing.
I have a friend who studied architecture in college, in one of the leading programs in America. He's a bit quirky, a bit of a recluse, wickedly funny, and a superb architect. He showed our whole fraternity his big senior design project, which was a stunning - and practical! - building to revitalize the fishing economy of his home state. He'd worked closely with the state government, including scientists, fishery experts, economists, conservationists ... he had chosen three sites to build these facilities, and he and his team felt that there was a solid chance that if they managed to build two of them it could rescue his state's economy and a few key native species for decades.
His plan out of college? Go apprentice himself for five years so he would be legally certifiable to lead the project he had already designed.
It's not like this credentialing came from nowhere! Those regulations were written in blood. But they have costs that mere capitalism can't overcome. As one of the highlights noted, it doesn't matter how cheap yellow or dragon patterns are if they're illegal.
-------------------------------
But also, I know a number of people who lament the death of classical music. At the same time, most of the big-orchestra classical music I own was written in my lifetime for games and movies. Now, maybe I'm just a rube and this filtering has worked on me, but I think that for many arts we don't live in an era of want. In fact, we live in an era of such bewildering wealth that we've lost sight of it all. The art and artistry of movies and video games - which runs bills comparable to buildings and can take years to produce - is nothing short of astonishing, and getting better all the time.
Sure, the particular ways that people used to make art aren't in vogue right now. I don't know anyone who builds palace anymore, but battleships and aircraft carriers sure feel crenelated enough for my tastes. Plato had a lot to say about shadows on a cave wall, but everyone you know has seen high resolution pictures of Pluto. If someone tells you art is dying, ask them for Monet's goddamn renders.
"for many arts we don't live in an era of want. In fact, we live in an era of such bewildering wealth that we've lost sight of it all."
BINGO, that's well-said and I am likely to plagiarize this line in future conversations.
I'll give my own personal-knowledge example which is jazz. Most people who self-identify as jazz fans consider it to be just obvious truth that the music's heyday was decades ago. (_which_ decade, which means which stylistic wave in jazz history, then becomes a thing to performatively argue about.)
And when I was younger I shared that presumption, in part because it is baked into the world of jazz fans that I grew up into. But in fact that view is completely wrong: we live today in a golden age of virtuosic and enjoyable and creative new jazz. But there is so much of it, so many jazz musicians younger than me who are absurdly brilliant, that even within the relatively tiny world of "jazz fans" we can't possibly find and absorb it all. It's way easier, and of course comfier in some ways, to cue back up our favorite Mingus or Miles albums one more time.
Got a playlist?
Well just off the top of my head, some regulars in my current MP3 rotation would include,
Omar Avital
Cecile McLoren Salvant
Either/Orchestra
Joey DeFrancesca
Bela Fleck (yea I'm serious, and have successfully converted some of my fellow jazzheads-of-a-certain-age) (though I'm also cheating because Bela is older than anyone else listed here)
Michel Camilo
Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band
Victor Wooten
Grant Geissman
Nueva Manteca
Robert Glasper
Barbara Dennerlein
Miguel Zenon
Monty Alexander
Trio Globo
To be clear this is just one guy's semi-random list and in no special order at all. There are many more, too many nowadays to even keep up with let alone try to rank.
>I might be the only person in the world who likes McMansions. They just look like nice, pleasant buildings made by people who want to vaguely enjoy the place where they live. Probably the least offensive thing people are making these days.
I totally agree with this, there are some examples of ugly modern big houses that people trot out but on the whole big modern houses are comfortable and tend to look alright.
As a YIMB-ish guy living in Boston, I think I have a relevant data point for your "maybe opposition to housing is because the buildings now suck" point. We have a style here (like most older cities do) that characterizes the mass housing that was built ~80-120 years ago. Here it's the triple decker; you can name your other-city equivalents (Philly/Baltimore row house, etc). People love them. I've lived in a couple, and owned a condo in one, and I too love them.
That said, one of our local YIMBY guys did some research on how people felt about these things when they were being built. No great shock: they fucking hated them. They were destroying neighborhoods, they were hideous, they were a threat to the moral fiber of society.
I don't particularly like the look of the new stuff they build these days. I very strongly suspect that this is because some primeval wiring in my brain associates older with classier and recognizes the new stuff as some sort of nouveaux riche thing it oughta think poorly of.
So whatever's going on with architecture, I very much doubt that it's to blame for our housing crisis; finger pointing there has to stick squarely with "people hate when their immediate neighborhood changes and we decided to give everyone immense asymmetric power to prevent their immediate neighborhood from changing."
Okay, well, we got used to triple deckers and now we love them, right? So why can't we keep building them, instead of trying really, really hard to build things people really, really hate?
Triple-deckers are one of those small multifamily styles that used to be common, but the legal and financial systems have made them a lot harder now. When they were built, it was assumed that the owner would live on the first floor, and the second and third floors would be occupied by tenants that rent from the owner. But with the legalization of condominium ownership, many of these buildings were converted so that each resident owns their own floor, or else different floors are owned by different investors who rent them out separately. Since the 1930s, most mortgages have been backed by the FHA through Sallie Mae and the like, but they are only willing to back certain sorts of mortgages. They won't back mortgages in buildings that have retail on the ground floor for instance. I don't know if they have rules directly preventing them from backing mortgages on condos in three unit buildings, but regardless, the legal and financial structures of today are different enough that most builders won't go through the hurdles of setting up condominium titles while building something, unless it's a much bigger building.
On top of that, many of the areas where triple deckers would make sense are already built out with triple deckers, and you can't increase density unless you go for a bigger condo or apartment building.
But Wikipedia adds: "Recently, a new wave of triple-decker apartment houses has been built in areas of Boston as an alternative to the townhouse style condominium or apartment buildings more typically associated with suburban areas. Boston's zoning regulations allow new three-family houses to be constructed in areas with existing triple-deckers. However, building codes for the new buildings are far more stringent today, with requirements for fire sprinkler systems and handicap access."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-decker_(house)
It's not that hard to set up condo association for a three-family. I've done it for very similar buildings. You need an engineer to draw a simple plot plan and as-built floor plans, and a lawyer to draft a master deed and a declaration of trust. It might cost $5,000 per building or so. Maybe less if you do more than one building.
And I don't think lending practices are any barrier to the creation of new three-deckers. There are tons of condo units in three-deckers with normal mortgages on them.
The Wikipedia quote is accurate. It's illegal to build a new three-decker exactly like the ones from 100+ years ago. The codes were extremely simple to nonexistent back then. Now you would need sprinklers, much bigger staircases, fire-rated assemblies, possibly some accessibility features, etc.
I owned part of a triple-decker in the Boston area. Having ownership split is a big hassle, because one person can decide to sit there and not do any regular maintenance, playing a game of chicken, that the other owners have to then do on their own. I've seen it at least twice.
Legally, units can force the condo association to fix things. But having to sue for regular maintenance to happen is a giant hassle and basically removes the concept of sweat equity from a house.
I wouldn't mind living in a triple-decker owned by one person, whether I was the owner or a tenant, because ownership is clear and the owner will take care of it.
"That said, one of our local YIMBY guys did some research on how people felt about these things when they were being built."
If you or he happen to still have those first-hand accounts, I'd be very interested to read them.
I meant to look it before and couldn't find his twitter thread, but you prompted me to actually track it down.
https://twitter.com/crschmidt/status/1409505618617155598
That was a very interesting read, thank you.
The simple explanation is that existing residents don't like their neighborhoods to change, which is true. Another possible explanation is that previous generations hated three-deckers because they're uglier than what they replaced, but people now like them because they're less ugly than what modern developers want to replace them with. I think there is some truth in that too.
Anyway, it's overstating the case to say that design is THE reason for development restrictions. It's one reason among a number of reasons. But I have found that it matters. Probably it makes a bigger difference in convincing the various boards- historic, zoning, etc- than it does your direct abutters. But the board members are the people you most need to convince.
Re. this: "Remember, the Baumol effect happens when new technology makes some industries more productive. Since the high-tech industries are so lucrative, wages go up. Then low-tech industries have to raise their wages so that their workers don’t all desert them for the high-tech industries. But since low-tech industries aren’t improving their productivity, they just become more expensive, full stop."
This might explain why wages in low-tech industries don't fall as much as you'd expect them to, but I'm not convinced this makes sense as a complete explanation of why some low-tech things cost /more/, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they did before.
Suppose in the year 2000 we have a population consisting of nothing but widget-makers and tuba players, who make widgets and tuba music for each other. Tech increases, widget-makers make 10 times as many widgets, and by 2010, their salaries increase by a factor of 3. The salary of tuba players also increases by a factor of 3, via Baumol. But the Baumol effect can't drive a tuba-player's salary above that of a widget-maker, or else the effect would switch directions, driving up the salary of widget-makers as they quit to become tuba players.
So, in the best-possible scenario for tuba players, everyone in 2010 is making 3 times as much money as before, and tuba music costs 3 times as much as before. /The amount of hours that anyone has to work to hear tuba music has remained the same. /
It seems to me that the Baumol effect can never raise the wages of tuba players above that of widget-makers, nor make the inflation-adjusted price of tuba music rise. If so, then it can't explain bridges costing more /in inflation-adjusted dollars/ to build, let alone costing hundreds of times more.
I suspect the effect is more due to all those widget-makers having to spend less of their income on widgets, and having lots more left over to spend on tuba-music, so that absolute demand for tuba music goes up. Tuba-player wages then do go up because band directors have to pay them more, but that's not to keep TP salary in line with WM salary (mediated by the decisions of existing tuba players); it's to convert more widget-makers to tuba players, to try (and fail) to keep up with the increasing demand.
BUT, there are many, MANY fewer professional musicians today than there were 200 years ago, even without adjusting for population. So this hasn't happened, at least not with tuba players. In this case, I'd say that technology has amplified the productivity of tuba players more than that of widget-makers--they can make recordings, and fill not just opera houses but entire stadiums and cable TV channels with paying audiences. (That's not even mentioning iTubas and YouTuba.) Tuba player salaries go up not because bosses are trying to return tuba players--they aren't; they've been firing them like mad since John Philip Sousa died. Salaries go up for the opposite reason: we don't need all those tuba players; we just need a few tuba superstars. A single tuba player could provide literally all of the tuba music for the entire world, as Chuck Mangione did with the flugelhorn and Zamfir did with the pan flute.
But then we have to invest millions of dollars in marketing each of those superstars, putting them in a position to demand a lot of money. Like EL James, or the cast of Seinfeld.
Stone masons are probably different. Maybe something is happening on the other end of the demand curve, with a greatly diminished demand for fine masonry, resulting in the kind of job where customers have to pay higher prices because demand isn't evened out by large numbers--each mason will sometimes be unemployed (and must charge more when he works because of that), and will sometimes have multiple job offers at the same time (and can charge even more when that happens).
The second part of your claim about Baumol doesn't follow. Yes, the wage of tuba players can't exceed widget makers, and probably lags it a little because labor substitution is imperfect. But that doesn't mean that the price of tuba play doesn't rise faster than inflation! You're right that the amount of hours of work to pay for tuba play doesn't change. But in your example there's massive deflation on the (widget, tuba) consumption basket, because widgets got 3x cheaper (10x increase in production, 3x increase in wages). If the price of tuba play stays the same in terms of hours worked, then the price of tuba play increases at a rate wildly faster than inflation.
I obviously don't understand inflation as well as I thought I did. But the effects Scott described above are ones in which the price of handiwork has increased so much that people who would have been able to afford it earlier, now can't nearly afford it. My example showed that THAT can't happen in the 2-job <widget, tuba> economy, so I still don't think Baumol can explain that effect--the rising cost of low-tech goods in terms of hours worked per unit bought.
The feedback loops involved make even my 2-good economy too difficult to analyze just in words. I'd probably need to see an example worked out mathematically to convince me.
I just wanted to add another contrasting example; the new entrance lobby to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario. Daniel Libeskind's "The Crystal" opened in 2007 and elicits either admiration or hatred. https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5706ec8d3c6ec36d75349d57/master/pass/daniel-libeskind-architecture-05.jpg
It looks awesome, but it also looks like that other building somehow has cancer now?
That region of Toronto is one of my architecturally favorite places in the world. So many beautiful historic buildings with big modernist neighbors or additions - often from very different decades and styles.
The business school at U of T: https://2u.com/static/22e5516281bd8e80afe89ecd187cd935/2e860/Rotman_Campus_Image.max-2880x1800.jpg
The juxtaposition of the brutalist Robarts library and the 19th century Romanesque Newman Center: https://www.alamy.com/university-of-toronto-robarts-library-image233552478.html
I'm glad you found my last comment interesting !
I heard of the Great Masculine Renunciation through the Beau Brummel controversy, but didn't check or remember most of the details. This was a "I heard a relevant phrase once" moment.
On music: There is still plenty of classical/baroque/romantic music being written - for movie soundtracks. The Lord of the Rings soundtrack is 13 hours long, involves 400 musicians, and has over 100 leitmotifs. [1] This is comparable to Mahler's Ring cycle, although perhaps lower quality. [2] Other movie series - Marvel, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc also use operatic music, usually performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.
On drawing / painting: we certainly still do know how to produce high quality artwork, and quickly. This is perhaps best seen in webcomics, some of which update 3-4 times a week. (!!!) Painting an entire story is not prohibitively difficult: it is given away for free online. Two particular ones worth mentioning are Stand Still Stay Silent [3] and Unsounded [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_The_Lord_of_the_Rings_film_series
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Ring_des_Nibelungen
[3] http://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=687 This is the chapter cover for Ch. 15. I think that this is a particularly good chapter cover, bad it does drop you in the middle of a sad part of the story.
[4] http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch14/ch14_01.html This is the chapter cover for Ch. 14. This is a side story, so you don't need to have read the rest of the story to follow it. I'm not linking to the first page (although it's easy to find) because the art was simpler then.
Talking about comics, I feel like pointing out here is / was a line between the high art and illustration. Professional illustrators have always been required to create something that is popular enough to sell. Think about likes of Norman Rockwell, he worked and mostly gained recognition as a popular illustrator, doing illustration jobs for magazines. Go get an old Andrew Loomis [1] textbook: he is all about how a successful professional is the one who knows how to draw and paint about any kind of illustration that is requested, often for an advertisement, usually human figures who look like human figures, on deadline, and get it sold.
Comics are traditionally an illustrator discipline. For the creators who have made it a job, it has been viewed as a trade / a job / a business (in the old bad good days, often the kind where the creator gets the short end of the stick in matters of contracts).
Slightly unrelated, for all art deco lovers, here is Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, the Sunday comic strip of New York Herald (1900s-1920s): [2] [3].
Then here is random covers and pages of award-winning Monstress, written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda, published by Image (2010s-2020s): [4]
So yes, the skill of creating pretty pictures is still with us, for those who want to pay for it.
(SSSS updates are free on the web, but the author seems to able to raise 300 000+ USD per 300-page book in Kickstarter.)
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=andrew+loomis&ia=images&iax=images
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Nemo_1906-10-14.jpg#/media/File:Little_Nemo_1906-10-14.jpg
[3] https://imgur.com/a/zfBHChU
[4] https://imgur.com/a/EQmGuiO
Webcomics show that we could still have beautiful, custom made images covering the insides of important buildings - whether they're high art or illustrations.
Our society somehow does not connect people who make these illustrations with public places. Minna Lundberg makes her art available for free online and paid in print. But she is not being hired to paid the counsel rooms of city halls or the ceilings of churches.
She is far from the only person capable of producing intricate illustrations. Progress in art education results in a lot of talented artists. But many artists remain unemployed or employed where they don't use their talents, while many of the walls of public spaces, businesses, and homes go unadorned.
Not disagreeing about your main point. I wanted to point out that there is a long-standing difference between illustration / high art subcultures: traditionally art snobs have had a habit of looking down upon illustrations (IIRC Norman Rockwell was considered kitsch until he started doing politically relevant art), and professional illustration has been always around, with defining characteristic that it needs to be commercially viable with the public who buys the illustrated things.
For this reason I picked McCay: His whole career reads like an archetype of the American dream-chasing, with lots of attempts to capitalize on his art skills and innovations in both sales methods (vaudeville, comics) and new technologies (experimenting in animation before Disney but less successfully).
On the other hand, there are commercially viable projects with modernist or experimental looks, too, so it is not like public wants art nouveau and art nouveau only, but the market won't provide.
> homes go unadorned
Public spaces and businesses I understand, because there the decision about decorations are done by someone else (usually a committee). But only person to blame for a plain-looking home is the individual themself (or not, if that's how the individual likes their house).
Minor correction - it's Wagner's Ring Cycle (which of course was also a major inspiration for Tolkien), which are themselves a major inspiration for Mahler's symphonies. But the music is more based on Wagner than Mahler, even though it does use some of the more modern sounds that Mahler (and later Puccini) adapted into their Romanticist styles.
I guess that's as good a reason as any for why all my favorite bands list King Crimson as one of their top influences, but all their songs sound terrible to me.
Unless it's some sort of joke. If I ever make it big as a musician I think I'll list Green Jelly as my top influence, to see if it catches on. Who's coming with me!?
King Crimson is great (particularly the incarnation that did Larks' Tongues in Aspic through Red), it's modern music that has gotten bad. I will admit though, I don't think their live improvisations are as good as the stuff they composed in studio.
Is there a connection between my disliking King Crimson and my disliking all the jazz I've ever heard? It just sounds excessively odd, like they left behind the thing that makes music a shared bonding experience.
Yeah, jazz and prog are related. Jazz fusion also emerged around that time. Older jazz was popular music to dance to, but rock dethroned it and jazz became musicians' music.
I have a mellow King Crimson playlist that I still enjoy. The Night Watch, Matte Kudasai, Walking on Air, and some others. And I still enjoy "Red" and "Starless." Most of their improvs are junk, to be honest. I read an interview where one of the band members himself said that he considers the improvs to be evil at times, and that they often grew out of intense hostility among the band members. Frak actually sounded evil. Fripp's bizarre attempt to make himself into a psychological guru is a strange story.
I guess I could give them another shot. It's probably been 10 years and my tastes have evolved.
I don't think many rationalists would like "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction". Benjamin seems almost aggressively uninterested in convincing anybody that he's right; it's like he's just writing down his conclusions without even much of a gesture toward how he got there or why it must be so. That's how it struck me, at least. I think it's the style in a certain branch of Continental philosophy, which is also marked by a general distrust of rationality. Still, I'd be very interested to read a rationalist review / analysis of it.
I have.
I was noting a general tendency in Continental philosophy, not attributing any specific position to Benjamin, which is clear from what I wrote. I thought that rationalist readers of the Benjamin essay might be frustrated by his writing style, and I wanted them to know that within its proper milieu, that style isn't out of the ordinary. My remark about rationality was a hint at why I suspect the style exists. As I thought would be apparent from language like, "That's how it struck me, at least," nothing I was saying was meant to be taken as a definitive statement of fact, but rather as my own general impression, which might or might not be helpful.
However! If this article (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/) from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is to be trusted, Benjamin's attitude toward rationality does seem to fit within the trend I meant to highlight with the phrase "general distrust of rationality". I think it vindicates my general impression pretty well. Your mileage may vary.
Walter Benjamin is best known for his prophetic style of poetic prose:
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Based on your reading, you would consider Benjamin to have a strong commitment to the Enlightenment-era principle of rationality? Would you say that Continental philosophers generally hold a similar commitment?
'The Work of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction' is a great title, but when I read it I thought he ran out of puff immediately after the title.
For modernist architecture, as well as fashion and some art, much of the genre seems to evoke a quality of distinctive neutrality. It has to be unique, yet have a "clean" look in order to be able to fade into the background. That's an attribute that's hard, but not impossible, to appreciate. Look at that Frank Lloyd Wright house. Part of its charm is that it's interesting to look at, but doesn't take away from the beauty of the natural surroundings.
Modernism also has a different failure mode from traditional aesthetics. Modernist aesthetics, when it fails, just looks bland, impossible to tell apart from lazy utilitarianism or alienating hellscapery. If you're a designer of a bad building, maybe trying to frame it as "modernist" is a way to salvage your reputation by pretending you did it intentionally. That would explain part of the persistence of modernism. It's a way to cover up sheer bad design or lack of inspiration, and the trick works often enough that people keep coming back to it.
Why do we need art and architecture that can "fade into the background," you ask? Perhaps it's population growth and mobility. When people are moving around all the time, you don't know who's going to be buying your house next, or wanting to rent your office space, or are designing a building for a diverse public (about half of whom just hate government spending in general), you need a structure that's appealing yet neutral.
Even for our fashion, we don't know what sort of aesthetic standards we'll be judged on by the strangers we'll be meeting every day. Even if we are high status in a particular institution or social scene, we'll meet people every day who are totally outside of that, and might enjoy making fun of us for trying to display our high status with exaggerated ornamentation.
So think of modernism, for the most part, as a way to "gussy up neutrality." If you view it as the highest yearning of a nice safe rectangle, rather than the sad decay of an extravagent gothic cathedral, I think the aesthetic will start to make more sense in its own right.
FWIW, Yale just recently built two new residential colleges that are in the “old style” of trying to look like Cambridge. So occasionally, hugely wealthy institutions do indeed spend money like this.
When I arrived at Rice U. in 1976, they had just put up a new building on the main quad that was identical on the outside to the beloved 1920s art deco Romanesque chemistry building across the quad from it, but on the inside the new Sewell Hall had All Mod Cons. All the professors loved it and wanted to have an office in it.
A lot of campus architecture from, say, 1985-2008 was to replicate the general look of the beloved pre-1929 buildings on the campus quad, just with bigger windows. I haven't spent much time on campuses in the last decade, so I can't say what the most recent trend is, but the turn of the century college fashion was pretty retro.
Oh, has anyone mentioned Kincaid? His art seems relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYnbCRrZn54
*Kinkade, spelled his name wrong.
Egalitarianism was also the reason for the Mao suit. Everyone dressed the same; everyone was equal. I'm honestly surprised today's wokies haven't adopted a similar garment. It would place a barrier between them and the rest of the country and make it clear who are the anti-racists and who are the racists.
Antifa has their uniform, but it's designed to provoke terror, much like other violent organizations.
Black bloc outfits were originally designed to make it more difficult for the police to identify individuals. Separately, it's also a way to for people who are OK with black bloc tactics to distinguish themselves from other protestors.
I think that each art form that we've discussed here has different dynamics, which makes picking out a single cause that has led to all of them tricky. I'd go so far as to say that all the plausible mechanisms that has been suggested is partially true.
Fashion: Notable in that there's no real difference between elite and mass opinion. Everyone can watch the latest James Bond movie and agree that everyone in it is wearing very nice clothes. As already noted it got simplified and de-ornamented some decades earlier than the other art forms. More recently we seem to have undergone a second great reunciation, as men have collectively decided that actually even a plain suit is too fancy and they'd rather just wear shirt sleeves, then t-shirts and jeans... and over the past couple of years suddenly it's okay to wear sweat pants. Men didn't need much persuasion to do this, we just needed an excuse, which leads me to suspect that the first great renunciation was also just about comfort and convenience.
Architecture: worth noting there's several streams of architecture going on. In residential architecture, where middle class people get to call the shots, there's plenty of building in traditional styles still going on. In office and apartment buildings and shopping centres, where property developers call the shots, you'll see a lot of fairly boring towers and boxes because that's a sensible way to get bang for your buck. It's only in public architecture (public buildings, museums, universities) that the elites get to call the shots based on the tastes that they have (or want to be seen as having) and this is where you'll see the biggest gap between what people want and what they get. Still, I think architecture is slowly recovering from its 20th century experiment with high modernism, and I'll take a 2010s public building over a 1970s one any day.
Music: really complicated, defies simple analysis. "Art" music drove itself off a cliff sometime around 1930, but "popular" music has gone from a bunch of "Hey nonny nonny" to a vast array of genres with varying levels of complexity.
Painting, sculpture, poetry: these are dead art forms in search of purpose, calmly floating away unmoored from the laws of supply and demand.
Prose: notable for being the only major art form that _hasn't_ undergone a major simplification. If this one had followed the same trajectory as the others then the top-selling novels of 2020 would look more like See Spot Run.
Great comment, but prose has been subject to these trends, compare the winners of literary prizes like Don DeLilo or whatever to Stephen King / other bestseller (see https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/) also I think that “elite taste” is a misnomer, it’s more people who formally study and really care about something vs the vast majority who don’t really care. Rich people aren’t listening to atonal music, it’s just classical music nerds.
' Rich people aren’t listening to atonal music, it’s just classical music nerds.' Yes (although, actually plenty of them hate it too!), but it's not a coincidence that people who are classical music nerds *tend* to be from well-off families ( though not necessarily elite in the Bezos sense!).
Hemingway in the late 1920s was hugely influential on subsequent writers, such as Waugh and Stoppard, for finally, definitively, laying rest to Victorian (e.g., Dickens) ornateness and sentimentality.
Subsequently, various high brow authors created complex prose styles rooted in, say, Joyce. But in general, nobody anymore expects, say, the President to deliver the State of the Union address in the convoluted prose of the 19th Century.
> Fashion: Notable in that there's no real difference between elite and mass opinion. Everyone can watch the latest James Bond movie and agree that everyone in it is wearing very nice clothes.
Well yes, it'd be anachronistic to wear anything else than suits. And, as you accurately pointed out, people no longer wear suits, except James Bond (and even...) and it has been the object of much lamenting, just like in architecture. Certainly a lot of people would like it if men and women started wearing suits and dresses again. That's the first thing anybody notices when they watch Mad Men.
Thank you for the quotation, and the honour of taking the biggest hit!
I don't disagree. I felt I addressed your point that there's clearly beauty out there in referring lone genius. They're not necessarily uncommon, just evidently not common enough that we can rely on them alone. My claim is that the general and systemic capacity to produce beauty, once lost, is difficult to recapture.
If it isn't obvious I see beauty in 19th century terms, it's a phenomenological object that emerges from free and healthy life. But I think my points hold for a broader and more subjective view that fits this comments section. Are we not here grappling with the failure to make things that please people, in the most general sense? In a box that big surely, whatever you make of beauty, it can fit.
I think my point is worth reiterating because we're doomed to miss the truth in this discussion if we don't contemplate the possibility of a singularness to beauty. Modern manners and habits keeps us from declaring the taste of modernists basically wrong, but it could be. These people could be aesthetically sick.
I don't know, but it's a view we shouldn't avoid considering. It's incredibly problematic if true, so we should be suspicious of a desire to just stamp beauty as subjective and move along.
'Modernist' is super-broad, right? There isn't *that* much in common between Virginia Woolf (who I think is worthwhile) and Pierre Boulez (who I think is garbage, although I admit I haven't tried very hard.) Obviously music is different from the novel, but what I mean is that something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W56pQqEVetA is a MUCH bigger departure from the techniques of music in 1870, than To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway are from 1870 novel writing. Different art forms also arrived at modernism quite differently: i.e. in music, the most avant-garde modernists (Schoenberg, and those whose music derives from him) got there by extending a line of technical development (more and more chromaticism, less and less clear what key the music is in) that goes way way back as a trend into Romantic music that sounds "traditional". In poetry, on the other hand, they got their in English at least by (officially) anyway trying to reject Romanticism. But unlike in music, where the most avant-garde composers were all about pushing forward, the two most influential English-language modernist poets in their own time are probably Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, who were fascinated by poetry of the Medieval and Renaissance past, and Eliot sometimes claimed to be reclaiming the 'real' tradition of English poetry of people like Donne and Shakespeare that the Enlightenment and Romanticism had interrupted/corrupted. In the novel meanwhile, they arrived at modernism not via either rejecting Romanticism or extending Romantic techniques but out of a Realist period that there isn't really a poetry or music equivalent to. (Both extending and rejecting realism.) This difference is marked by the fact that some major modernist novelists like Woolf and Proust are actually pretty rational and comprehensible (well, if you can take Proust's sentence-length!). Even within music there is quite a lot of variation. No one is going to say Stravinsky wasn't a modernist, but compare neo-classical Stravinsky to Boulez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmnfwnfnKBA Modernism is cool, calm anti-Romantic objectivity as well as shock the bourgeios incomprehensible nihilism.
Given this diversity, I am a bit suspicious of the view that modernism can be good or bad in total. I have a highly positive opinion of some modernist novels for example (In Search of Lost Time, To the Lighthouse, *large parts* of Ulysses, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Late_It_Was%2C_How_Late, but definitely not Finnegans Wake, though I admit I've only read a few pages*), but I think atonal music is generally trash. On the other hand it does feel like there is *something* *most* modernism has in common, that you could be for or against overall without that being totally weird. But it's a little hard to say what. Something something death of God? (But Stravinsky remained an Orthodox Christian and wrote several religious works, at least one of which is supposed to be 'major': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUSfrgPQjRM).
*Have some doubt about how many people have *actually* read more, even among English profs who work on modernism. I mean *just look at the thing*: http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm
I'm entrapped by my own words again! I can't claim to know enough about what is called "Modernism" in literature or music to comment. From a vague familiarity with the works you cite I'm surprised that's called Modernism.
Modernism to me is a catch-all for the aesthetic manifestations of top down technocratic power, elite power in the globalised homogeneous world. To make a firm point in the web of observation and feeling I'm drawing from, Modernism tends to remove detail and the living emergent quality of systems. In politics this is the mindset that drove the Soviet union and the urban planners, treating man as a machine to be striped of finery and made pure. It is the removal of the rainforest for the monocrop. In architecture this is the stripping of ornamental detail for monolithic concrete. It is rationalism ordering life where faith has protected customs that are wiser than ourselves.
In all these cases there's a steel man to be made. I've seen brutalist buildings that impressed me as a work of art. But I make a harsh distinction where the architect decided an entire patch of the earth should be claimed and blighted as the gallery for this art work. The world is a commons, and architecture ought to strive towards beauty, harmony, repose, as it once did, because it makes up the human contribution to our environment that belongs to everyone.
So I suppose I'm really talking of architecture, inasmuch as there's no rightful way to denounce a person's taste, where it departs from functional ideals, except where they impose that taste on others.
I wish I had likes to give for your comments.
Thank you friend
'Modernism to me is a catch-all for the aesthetic manifestations of top down technocratic power, elite power in the globalised homogeneous world.' Hmmm. I get what you mean now, but I feel this use of the term can be a bit confusing. (Though I get that it is *one* already current way people use the term and you haven't just made it up.) The problem is that 'modernism' is a standard term used as a fairly neutral descriptor for all of the broadly avant-garde or innovative art in the Western world in roughly the first half of the 20th century, plus other stuff that resembles the paradigm cases. (See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_modernism) It's like 'Baroque' or 'Romantic' in that respect. (I've even see a pop music critic describe *The Beatles* as 'modernists', which I think is false generally, but true of A Day in the Life and perhaps a few other things.) It's kind of begging the question against that art to say that *by definition* it's always a 'manifestation of top down technocratic power, elite power in the globalised homogeneous world.' Read To the Lighthouse or The Sound and the Fury nd tell me if you think that's what's going on! (And I don't even particularly like the latter!) Particularly since, whilst modernism was certainly intensely elitist, the attitude of modernist artists and writers in the standard sense of 'modernism' I'm talking about to 'technocracy' probably varied a great deal. On the other hand, as I say, your use of the term is standard too, so it's not clear what to do about this.
On the substantive point about architecture: I agree that architects have a greater duty to produce artworks that the public at the very least doesn't actively hate, given that, uniquely, people are forced to encounter their art in their adult daily lives, whether they like it or not.
It's a very interesting impasse.
I'm comfortable saying that there are many traditions in different domains about "Modernism", and when you're talking of modernism in literature, for instance, we're talking about something particular. As long as you avoid confusion it's fine. But I'm also comfortable with there being a debate over whether there could be an overriding and most legitimate definition. This probably isn't true of every word with many meanings. What I think distinguishes modernism here is it's political dimension, to use another word that could get me in trouble.
Specifically I think "Modernism" has been an anchoring word marking the emergence of a politico-social phenomena. It's a "quality that cannot be named" in Christopher Alexander's sense that the most complete images of living things are necessarily as deep as the thing itself, and so contain the irreducibility of life and the universe. The more you try to be exact the more it slips away. I was self conscious of missing the mark in referring to "technocratic power, elite power", because of course reality doesn't conform to language, it's more complicated, but it would've been foolish to try and be more exact.
In context, I am claiming there's a world-historic force that is discovered over and again individually, and we discover others have seen this "quality" in a sort of orbit of ideas around "Modernism". It is the mantle claimed by the technocratic elite leviathan, and the word by which it is seen by it's adversaries. For this reason I think there is a contingent case for bearing through inevitable confusion around the use of "Modernism", to preserve the recognition of this political force. More, an insistence on a more bland apolitical definition demands scrutiny as to the sensibilities and aims it protects. Confusion of language is easily a confusion of historical memory.
We should keeping in mind, for the sake of clarity, that people are actors in an emergent system, and we needn't be talking about intentional conspiracy to speculate on class interests. I do not mean to suggest that individuals who do see Modernism in apolitical terms have more or less conscious ulterior motives. But I do personally believe that their opinion is consequent of a larger power struggle playing out as much in language as in the world.
Good point about Modernism as an anchoring word. When I look back over the last 130 years of cultural production in the “West,” the term modernism has definitely been used to refer to different things over time. Goalpost shifts around the definition of “modern.” When it was just starting out it was in opposition to classical, expressionist, Victorian, impressionist and the beginnings of Soviet style. James Joyce was a “modernist” and his work is quite ornate.
Then existentialism and increasing abstraction post-war and “mid-century modern” arrived (orange and green, mirrors, suburbs.) Then “postmodernism” including certainly Foucault, Philip Glass, Derrida, etc. Then 1970s-1980s a bit like how the name “new left” had been used for political movements for 100 years and no longer made sense (fourth wave!) same with “modernist.” By 2000 I would say the term had rolled up everything since 1900 and meant “recent.” Now in 2021 some of that’s forgotten and it means “recent” being the last 20 years- “contemporary” and “post-modern” became disfavored.
Having a conversation about it becomes quite difficult when one has to find out which part of “modern” one is referring to, as you said. The literary versus paint vs image/graphic vs digital vs architectural vs urban planning vs orchestral music vs experimental music vs jazz vs philosophy (British, continental, American, et cetera) vs poetry vs novel vs experimental form vs comic/graphic novel versus finally architecture and fashion and on and on. And I forgot cubism and surrealism and abstract expressionism. All collapsed into “modernism”. And various folk revivals.
When modernism is the word for all of it the mechanism of discussion is lost.
It can really really seems like the anchor is too small for the ship. "Modernism" has had a rough ride.
'I do not mean to suggest that individuals who do see Modernism in apolitical terms have more or less conscious ulterior motives. But I do personally believe that their opinion is consequent of a larger power struggle playing out as much in language as in the world.'
This seems odd to me, because there are other very similar terms like Baroque' and 'Romantic', that do the same job of picking out a sort of period of work with unifying aesthetic characteristics. It seems like exactly the kind of thing that people who are interested in the history of art and culture like to have words for that are fairly neutral anyway. So I don't really see a need to posit sinister socio-political forces to explain why we have 'modernism' specifically.
Every generation has a few vastly talented artists and they will tend to create in the style of their age, but also sometime they will alter the zeitgeist.
I've really enjoyed these posts, and hope it may continue into a longer series.
I got a degree in art education, and despite liking both making and teaching art, constantly wanted to give up over all the rubbish "art is intentionality" conversations, and find aesthetics very difficult to think or talk about. This is a problem professionally, because I'm supposed to lead aesthetic conversations, but mostly just paint and sculpt and run kilns and such things. Students mostly don't want to talk about aesthetics beyond things like "I want to draw this musician because I connect with his music" or "I like this galaxy painting because it's beautiful" either.
For the most part, we seem to be living in parallel artistic universes that hardly overlap. Maybe three of them.
The popular universe, full of graphic novels, fantasy, sci-fi, and generally highly detailed story worlds with realism, attention to detail, classical sound tracks, and so on. That's the conceptual world Burning Man installation art inhabits. There are fun art spaces in this sphere, like Meow Wolf, no expanded into Omega Mart and a new franchise.
Then there's a local and traditional art scene. My suburb holds an annual studio tour, and while a portion of it is scammy crystal stuff, much of it is quite technical and traditional, describing itself with labels like "Hudson River School" and local metalworking or pottery traditions.
Then there's the "high art" world. Which I've studied a bit, and sometimes understand where people are coming from, but it's more intuitively foreign than traditional architecture from anywhere in the world. There's a lot going on about material innovation -- photography, tube paints, acrylics, screen printing, and so on. Much of which is quite interesting. But it's interesting historically, rather than aesthetically. I keep encountering people trying to teach pop art lessons, because it's bright and simple, but am not convinced that either they or I particularly understand pop art. There seems to be an interesting personality and story there, but it's more historical than artistic, in a way that neoclassical sculptures aren't. Some 21st Century art does connect on a more intuitive level -- I feel that say about the Harlem Renaissance, for instance; probably because it's outsider art more than establishment, and the iconography mostly isn't obscure. The current planting style, especially the work of Piet Oudolf, is rather romantic and very attractive -- especially the seasonality of how it's planned out to grow and decay through late summer and fall. I'm especially a fan of the Lurie Garden in Chicago.
Both in making and teaching art, I mostly inhabit that second space, and there's a lot there, though it's fairly regionally specific. While it might not be feasible to find Art Deco furniture in places without an Art Deco tradition, there are very attractive regional styles still in production, as well as conventionally popular murals on plenty of neighborhood buildings. In an otherwise basic mobile home, I have hand carved wooden posts on the carport in the local style. A neighbor has wooden architectural accents, as well as an attractive, traditional hand carved wooden bench. They can be had from roadside sellers at a working class salary (for people who want to invest in that sort of thing). Our wrought iron isn't Art Deco, but it's common and attractive, with some especially nice gates and courtyards. I think New Orleans might also still have an active tradition in this. People are still building lovely small churches, as well, with charming domes and lovely traditional frescoes. But religiosity is down, so it's not surprising less money has been going into this lately (Russia excepted). Anyway, my current city isn't rich and international enough to need towers of glass and steel.
We have our share of ugly subdivisions, but I think that really is a budget constraint. There's strong demand for single family homes with yards, new appliances, and updated heating and cooling, and the fastest way to get this done is in the form of boring subdivisions. Alas.
In any event, I've come to the conclusion that, as interesting as it might be to find out the specifics of why organizations in New York or other big cities make the choices they do, it mostly doesn't affect me very much. The subdivisions do affect me, and I would strongly prefer they take the form of villages with a plaza and shops in the center, but the incentives to make that happen aren't there. I'm not sure why capitalism seems to be failing there, but it seems to be something to do with zoning, but more to do with people already committing the most they're able to for a house and yard, with nothing left over to pay extra for aesthetically appealing small walkable shopping areas -- or not more than a couple such areas per city. I certainly don't shop at my local market, and go to the big ugly warehouse stores instead.
As a busy architect living in New Orleans, I'm coming late to the discussion but I thought I would add my thoughts to the highlight reel instead of trying to say something in the 1000+ comments of the original post. The post and resulting discussion were a great read and within the comments, some were good, some bad, and a few that have a misunderstanding of architecture as both an art and science and that somehow Modern Architecture really just started appearing post-WW2.
Taking a step back, the idea that all old/classical architecture was supremely ornamental, solid, and stately is because for many of the surviving buildings they were intended to be signifiers of the dominant culture, ruling classes or thriving capitalists. The important buildings were built with narrative decoration but also narrative & symbolic floor plans. This applied mainly to government buildings, religious buildings, palaces, then the later mansions, museums, libraries & courthouses.
But a deeper study of the mundane buildings surrounding those architectural gems, most were not highly decorative nor constructed to last centuries. Many were made of low-quality brick, stone and/or wood timber (later replaced with cast iron & steel framing.)
There have been stylistic shifts even within classical architecture that swung from the austerity of the Romanesque to the highly decorative aesthetics of the Baroque. The classical buildings that make up our Nation's Capital are modernist interpretations of Roman & Greek architecture that were never crisply detailed nor marble white. Those are modern steel structures with stone skins. The last traditional stone building constructed in D.C. (that I'm aware of) is the National Cathedral, which took 83 years to complete.
Historically, the building arts in the early U.S., with regards to stone construction, lag compared to Europe because we had an abundance of timber and a dearth of cathedral stonemasons for decades. This is why early American & Colonial architecture is much more austere and less decorative than the later classical buildings we admire that came along. Yes, we had some brick buildings back then but early brick buildings back then sucked. I've worked on them - low quality brick that had to be covered in plaster to keep it from melting. Even Washington's Mt. Vernon is all-wood construction w/ wood siding cut to look like stone block.
Burnham and Root's Monadnock Building in Chicago appeared in 1891 and was lambasted for being too austere because it lacked decoration. It's also the tallest load-bearing brick wall building at 16 stories. Burnam and Root ushered in the Chicago style that was less decorative than previous buildings but decidedly more decorative than today's buildings.
But the modern architecture we're focusing on is the style that has its roots in the early 1900s. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos helped kick off the movement with his polemic 'Ornament and Crime' and while he eschewed the overt ornamentalism that prevailed in his city of Vienna, Loos designed several buildings that are examples of rational ornamentalism where the elements of building and craft become the decoration vs. the filigree of the then classical architecture. Japanese architecture was becoming known in the West as well and its minimalism had profound effects on many architects that would become pioneers of 20th C modernism. WW1 had a huge impact on bringing about modernism in architecture, art, music, and literature and the rejection of Imperialism and the Belle Époque era. Between WW1 and WW2, modernist architecture was seen as utilitarian and egalitarian and less ostentatious than the Art Deco & Moderne Movements. The Mid 20s & 30s saw early Modernist works by Aalto, Mies, Corbusier, and other European architects and the new methods for building as a way to create affordable aesthetically modener buildings for everyone, this was true of the original Bauhaus school and its founders. IN the U.S., FLW, R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and others were pushing modernism especially in California
But it wasn't until after WW2, did the efficiencies and minimalism of Modernism collide with the reconstruction demands of the markets and, in the U.S., an exuberance and embrace of the New. When Mies Van der Rohe completed his Lake Shore towers and Seagram buildings in 1951, and SOM's Lever House in 1952, the International Style (Mid Century Modernism) became the de facto style for corporate America. These early Modernist towers were not cheap nor unornamented. The ornamentation was expressed through tectonics, materiality, and massing vs. applied ornament (we'll skip PoMo for now.) Once Corporate America attached itself to the International Style. we soon started to see lesser quality iterations of the Seagram and Lever buildings being built across America and we get the crap that Facebook inhabits.
At the same time, we had a shift in how construction was done, buildings became more complex to build, maintain and operate. Skilled labor was still unionized, you had trade schools that taught building trades, so you still had craftsmen to create classical elements when needed or commissioned. Today we have stricter building codes that dictate the life-safety, health, and welfare of building occupants, accessibility codes, energy codes, hurricane and earthquake criteria to design against which all impact the overall cost of a building. Not to mention the complexity of the operation and the building automation systems.
And while it seems absurd that architecture can't operate like a car factory, it's because literally, almost every building is a one-off structure that is never duplicated again (office parks not withstanding.) Prefabrication is utilized and can save on some labor costs, the construction industry is also heavily dependent on global supply chains and impacted by mother nature in a way other industries are not. The U.S. is facing a poly-iso insulation shortage due to a TX factory shutting down during their big freeze (broken sprinkler pipes flooded the factory) and a 1/3 of the U.S. supply chain disappeared. These impacts cause delays & rising costs that no one can plan for. Again, a client's budget is the biggest driver in what a building gets constructed out of and its resulting aesthetics.
Another big reason we don't see more classical architecture being built for public buildings and institutions is that that style of architecture is too expensive to replicate with traditional stone cladding and ornamentation and taxpayers balk at any public building that has the whiff of being ostentatious. For private developers, investors, and Wall Street, there exists the same issues but now you have to factor in an ROI of 5-10yrs on a building before it is sold.
The commoditization of architecture, both commercial and residential, has had a huge impact on the investment of capital one puts into commissioning a building. If you're building a spec office building to cash in on a hot market, you can't afford to spend 10 years building a stone edifice so you build a contemporary building that costs $200/SF and you can build it in 12months and lease it out to WeWorks until you clear your note, make money and then sell the building.
The residential arena is the inverse of the commercial arena where most homebuilders throw up cheaply constructed schlock houses using 5 different floor plans & finished with cultured stone trim, foam columns, and some vinyl siding, then call it Traditional or Transitional Premium Custom Homes. Whereas most modernist-style homes are custom-built one-offs that are often times bespoke construction.
Architecture and construction are complicated and complex which is why it befuddles so many, including the architects and contractors. As for why can't modern architecture be colorful, it is can be. Check out Legoretta's work. Dezeen the website as plenty of examples of colorful, playful, and ornamented modern buildings. They may not have Corinthian columns and a marble entablature telling the story of Eros but they're decidedly not boring or ugly. Despite the protestations of the National Civic Art Society and their push poll on "traditional" architecture.
"Another big reason we don't see more classical architecture being built for public buildings and institutions is that that style of architecture is too expensive to replicate with traditional stone cladding and ornamentation and taxpayers balk at any public building that has the whiff of being ostentatious. For private developers, investors, and Wall Street, there exists the same issues but now you have to factor in an ROI of 5-10yrs on a building before it is sold."
But the government commissions starchitects like Thom Mayne to design federal buildings like the one in San Francisco. It seems like you're saying the public would never pay extra for a building they like, but would pay extra for a building they hate.
Not necessarily. The courthouse that Thom Mayne did, and that people love to hate, wasn't designed in a vacuum though. It would be easy to think so. But Thom Mayne and judges met over a long period of time visiting old and new courthouses, the results are as much about responding to contemporary demands and programmatic needs as it is the aesthetic end result. His SF tower is also a result of a long design process with the client. Whether or not the Owner's reps took a poll to see if the average employee wanted a cloistered office or a light filled office, I don't know. That period of Federal buildings designed from the early 2000s was a conscience decision by the Federal government to modernize and update their buildings.
Federal office buildings have strict programmatic and security requirements and building a stone clad tower can be expensive whether done in a classical motif or modernist aesthetic. But again, the detailing required to be a properly designed Classical style building is far more expensive to craft.
I like classical architecture but I also don't think every new Federal office buildings need to look like insular Roman temples. Is there bad modern architecture? Sure. There's also bad classical and traditional architecture. I like Mayne's SF tower more than his Oregon courthouse but Morphosis has always designed aesthetically challenging buildings. You don't choose Mayne if you want a traditional design.
One of the best Modern buildings is the Salk Institute. If you haven't visited, I suggest checking it out.
There is plenty of great contemporary architecture that takes cues from classical design through massing, composition, color, materials and scale but dispenses with the overt decorative motifs. I'm less concerned about the aesthetics of Federal or public buildings as long as they're done well and built to last. What we should be pressing for are better quality 'everyday' buildings and houses that are designed and built well - regardless of the aesthetics. We've done a great job with the historic preservation of classical and traditionally designed buildings, but now that many Modern buildings from the 60s & 70s are approaching the 50yr mark & qualify for historic preservation, it will be interesting to how we treat these buildings.
I haven't been to the Salk Institute, but looking at pictures online, presumably the beauty shots... is that really one of the best Modern buildings? If that is the case, then there really is a huge disconnect between people's tastes, because to me that looks half done at best, and like the remnants of an abandoned WW2 era bunker system, or perhaps a nuked city. I am not trying to be mean or pick a fight, but I honestly recoil from the design, although it looks neat the way it lines up with the sunset. If the Salk Institute is considered excellent in the realm of Modern architecture, the gulf is a lot bigger than I would have thought, something akin to the difference between Earth architecture and Martian, and I think that supports the elites vs laymen hypothesis.
I think this is where the disconnect occurs between experiencing a building vs. looking at just pictures and understanding the design intent of Louis Kahn and Jonas Salk. Having been there, I can attest that trying to photograph the spaces adequately is difficult because the craftsmanship and precision is remarkable and the central plaza provides openness for contemplation and collaboration that cannot be experienced via a screen. It's like looking at a picture of a mountain vs being on the mountain. The entire design intent was for scientists to collaborate while also offering space for cloistered thinking. It's decidedly not a bunker. The material contrasts between the teak and concrete is very refined. The concrete mix was based off of Roman techniques. The plaza is cut travertine.
I think the issue that many people have with Modern architecture is that, at first observation, there appears to be no 'there' there but many of the exemplary Modern buildings require time to understand and dissect what the building is doing. Louis Kahn's use of concrete, light, and shadow are masterful. He drew upon classical architecture and monuments and distilled them. His Kimbell Art Museum is another great work of contemporary and contemplative architecture.
Excellent Modern architecture requires a different mindset when decoding the design as well as an understanding of the design intent by the architect.
Walking through a Peter Zumthor building is a unique experience, as is appreciating the detail and craftsmanship of a Williams & Tsien building.
I think it helps to understand the history and symbology of certain classical buildings and why they have certain ornamentation (beyond just aesthetics) but most people won't make that effort beyond the front door pamphlet they grabbed at the start of the tour. The Chartres cathedral has greater meaning to me knowing the history of the structure and why it has 2 different towers and the historical symbology used throughout than simply walking in and admiring the visuals.
That's what makes architecture an art and not simply a building - regardless of the style.
I think you might have nailed the gulf: Modern architecture is for architects to enjoy, not humans in general. Architects can appreciate the concrete mix, humans in general just see giant flat concrete panels. Architects' design intent is for collaboration; as a non-architect all I can see is a complete lack of places to sit outside to enjoy the air, zero shade, and really hardly even a place to plan to meet.
I think this all really supports the elite vs layman hypothesis. I am thinking of it in the same vein as movies or books. Imagine that there are two main levels of appreciation and quality in a book. Level 1 is explicit, the solid story, narration, characters with story arcs, etc. Level 2 is esoteric, the references, subtle inversions and nods to what has come before that only people really plugged into things will get.
Truly great works will excel both in Levels 1 and 2: the kinds of books and movies where lots of people enjoy them, but they really reward going back to them again and again because you always find something new, and serious nerds can really find some subtle gems. Tolkien or Lewis hit those notes often, or Pratchett, along with your Shakespeares of the world etc. These often form the core of X Appreciation classes.
If you only can do Level 1 well you have those books and movies that are good or fun, but not really something you go back to a lot. Very popular with the young who don't have the background to get the references or lack thereof. To the extent there is reflections and interactions with past work it is unintentional or kind of awkward, copying or mashing things together mixed with breaking convention just for the sake of it in an awkward way. Most popular cultural goods seem to fall here.
Level 2 only goes in the opposite direction: a book or movie than only a serious nerd could love. Not because the story or characters are good, interesting or even likable, but because it is entirely about other books or movies, and so is a sort of inside joke or secret conversation between author and audience. In fact, having likable characters or other good story elements would make it worse from this perspective, because it would be letting outsiders in on the secret conversation. Good becomes defined as "things only people who really know everything about the subject can enjoy". As an example... every Rotten Tomatoes movie with 90%+ critics score and under 20% audience? A better example might be older movies that make laymen say "Oh, this is just like X" but people who know film say "That's because this did it first and X ripped it off!" Those films notable for being ground breaking, but not really enjoyable for most people. Books I was made to read in high school English but never wanted to touch again fall into this space for me, but to be more fair things like listening to pod casts of people dissecting game play is probably more charitable.
To get back to Scott's overarching question, modern architecture is unappealing to the masses because it isn't really made for them. The elites, those who can appreciate Level 2 are in control of the schools and are the big expert names that get called into design big important buildings, and they are aiming for Level 2 types to show off to other elites. Not many are talented enough to master both Levels 1 and 2, and even those who are are looked at askance for mixing the popular with the elite, so the system selects hard for Level 2. After all, the populace doesn't have a lot of say in the design of the building the same way they can throw money at books and movies that appeal to them and not to critics. It isn't elite if it isn't stylish, and it isn't stylish if it isn't just uncomfortable that it doesn't keep out the riffraff.
I get where you're coming from but I don't think it's supportive of the laymen vs. elite hyphothesis. Again, your impressions of what you think is lacking at the Salk Institute are from the photos you're looking at. The places to site for shade and meet are along the edges. But again, one would have to visit the space to better understand it. And I encourage you, the next time you're in a building you like, to actually touch the materials.
I think that it is lazy elitism to think that only elites can or do enjoy Modern architecture or art. I've worked with plenty of craftsmen and tradespeople (laymen) who appreciate modern design as well as people who aren't architects that enjoy Modern architecture. I mean if the laymen are incapable or don't appreciate modern design, Ikea should be out of business and every mid-mod house and piece of furniture out there would have been left for the dustbins. The contemporariness of Scandinavian design would be less appreciated than it is.
The focus of this discussion and Scott's premise is that it seems all works of art and architecture are to be made to please the aesthetic choices of the mass laymen and not the elites (I mean who qualifies as an elite or laymen?)
To your other points about literature and movies. I suspect there are many laymen who forsake reading Moby Dick or Don Quixote because they've heard they were classics (and thus dense tomes of symbolism) or were forced to read them in school under duress without allowing themselves to just read them for fun.
I didn't much enjoy Moby Dick in HS but later after university, I re-read it for fun and enjoyed it immensely.
"To get back to Scott's overarching question, modern architecture is unappealing to the masses because it isn't really made for them." What do mean by this? That the normies can't use/function/appreciate a contemporary building or that architects design buildings to be misunderstood? I think the disconnect is that good Modern architecture has been degraded by crappy mundane office park architecture. Just as crappy mcmansions have given rise to a nation of ticky tacky sameness that people live in and think are great until they've lived in enough crappy ticky tacky houses to realize bad design can be wrapped in a Traditional aesthetic. Robert A.M. Stern is decidedly a classical-style architect doing great work and he's very much an elite working for the elite.
I will agree with you that there are gatekeepers in the higher echelons of architecture, just as there are in art, literature, movies and business. But there are plenty of normie architects that do great work that are not in any particular style nor were they inculcated in "Modernism or else" pedagogy that ruled Architecture programs 30+ years ago. I suspect you could drive around your city and find examples of new architecture that you can appreciate but just haven't noticed because they blend in as part of the fabric but aren't classical or traditional. I think we sometimes forget as well that all of these buildings are built by skilled laypeople and without their hands putting the buildings together we wouldn't have something to talk about.
"Excellent Modern architecture requires a different mindset when decoding the design as well as an understanding of the design intent by the architect."
So what are the adjectives that I should use for the sort of architecture where, when people visit my new corporate headquarters and have maybe two minutes to look at it on their way in from the parking lot, 80% of their brain pondering the great work we are going to do together, they nonetheless walk into the lobby with a sense of "man, this a really neat place"?
Obviously not "Excellent" or "Modern", so what do I put in the solicitation?
Is that an ironic 'neat' or a sincere 'neat' before the word place?
This may be just me exhibiting some stockholm syndrome, but I think the Amazon owed office building nail that experience, far better than my experiences visiting the other hypers (Microsoft, Google, and Facebook).
My experience with the rest of them is lots of weird glass, bent angle pipes holding it up, trying to find the entrance, and the hosts getting lost taking me back to the conference rooms.
Whereas when you walk into Amazon Day One, Amazon ReInvent, or Amazon Dopplr, you have a whole ascending "entry experience" that channels the natural flow up stairs or escalators towards the visitor desk and then the turnstile gates, while clearly signaling "this is an absolutely massive company full of very busy people", with lots of interesting ornaments, and some interesting art.
My personal favorite is the entry to Doppler, where the escalators carry you past multistory wood panels engraved with the text of "exploration logs", including the Lewis&Clark journals and the Apollo mission log transcripts.
And from my very first day of the company, I've never gotten lost in an Amazon building. As soon as you know the desk id or conference room id, just pay a minor amount of attention to the signage, and you get routed right to where you want to go.
Louis Kahn and Mark Rothko strike me as the two High Modernist artists where their admirers most often say, sincerely, "You had to be there."
I would add Jame Turell to that list as well.
Sweet Sacrament Divine, is this the building you are talking about?
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2007/03/14/arts/14mayn_CA1.650.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
Yeah, I think they got the notion of "this is a grim place dedicated to punishment and woe" over very well.
Ha. Like that's your opinion man. Or you could read why it's designed that way. https://www.morphosis.com/architecture/12/
I mean maybe he should have made it look like this crappy piece of PoMo that Michael Graves did for Portland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Building#/media/File:Portland_Building_1982.jpg
Yes, that is also ugly, but that doesn't excuse the Federal building. That thing looks like it was made by something who hates humans specifically to punish them.
Hahaha...I can't expend the energy to defend the aesthetic merits of the Federal building. Morphosis has always been aesthetically challenging and sometimes I don't find their work appealing. Other times I do. But then I like the challenge.
That's exactly my impression of Thom Mayne from walking around his famous but misanthropic CalTrans building in Los Angeles: he hates the people who have to work there and wants them to suffer. For example, he constructed a dead-end staircase that makes two turns and then runs into the ceiling without connecting to anything, so the poor fool who walked up it has no choice but to go back the way he came. "Ha, ha, burn on you, sucker," seems to be Mayne's attitude toward the public. And the outside of the Caltrans building, like most Mayne designs, looks like a cardboard IBM punchcard from 1965 with the windows randomly distributed. I'm sure Mayne, who identifies as a Sixties Radical, came up with the idea of building buildings in 1968 that look like IBM punchcards as his way of sticking it to The Man.
But the problem with ideological architecture is that bad ideas endure for decades, afflicting people who have barely ever even heard of IBM and have never seen a punchcard.
Wow... even the building itself looks sad and anxious, like a dinosaur that wants to cry over its place in the world. Even if every side of the building looks thousands of times better, someone in the design process really should have said "Stop... this side looks like a nightmare of grey depression and angst given concrete form. We need to fix that."
Starchitect Thom Mayne wants the average person to experience dysphoria when they have to deal with one of his government buildings. I don't sense that in other fashionable architects like Frank Gehry. Most of Gehry's buildings are bad, too (but not all, such as Bilbao and even the Walt Disney), but those are due to Gehry's failures of imagination, which, all things being equal, he wishes he'd done better, while Mayne strikes me as a misanthropic sadist.
Speaking of architects that want you to experience dysphoria, have you visited Libeskind's Jewish museum in Berlin?
Gehry...few of his buildings do I care for. The Bilbao is one and the other is his DG Bank building in Berlin. The former a masterpiece of flamboyance (that kicked off a decade + of international museum expansion) and the later an example of him doing a restrained exterior with his signature sculptural elements contained within.
Here's Thom Mayne's 2005 San Francisco federal building:
https://twitter.com/steve_sailer/status/1341205010340691970?lang=en
It's part of a tweet thread I did that compares government buildings (such as city halls) before and after 1945 using as a standard of beauty: How many girls would like to get married there?
I don't think Thom Mayne's SF federal building ranks in the wedding photography sweepstakes with SF's 1915 City Hall, which Tom Wolfe described as:
"this Golden Whore’s Dream of Paradise...it’s like some Central American opera house ... a veritable angels’ choir of gold … and all kept polished as if for the commemoration of the Generalissimo’s birthday."
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1341207168951799808
Is 'how many wedding receptions can we hold in the main hall' the measure by which government buildings should be measured? Of course Tom Wolfe likes conspicuous consumption in architecture because he's a socialite and attention whore which is why he likes the Baroqueness of the past.
So what are your thoughts on FLW's Marin County Civic Center?
My vague impression is that older couples will at least consider getting married at Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center, which looks like the Capitol of an advanced but obscurely trouble planet in a science fiction epic.
+ 10
The thread this comment started is actually a very valuable insight into what, I believe, is the core of the problem. Let me explain.
The situation is always the same: someone starts to argue for the obvious case that modern literature/art/architecture/etc. is weird and actually not very pretty. Then someone from the profession comes along, and it starts.
They always have a very knowledgeable understanding of the history of their particular field. Then someone asks the obvious: "why do you guys like this ugly thing so much?" And the response is, invariably, always the same: "Well, *that's your opinion*, for one. [It's not, it's most people's. It also implies there is no such thing as objective beauty, but that's another topic.] And, for two, *you need to understand the point of view/the process/the history of the artist/architect/composer/etc.*" No, in fact I don't need to. In fact I never needed to learn anything about Chopin to appreciate his music. I never needed to learn anything about Yoshitaka Amano to appreciate his drawings. I never needed to learn anything about Russian ballerinas to enjoy the spectacle. Not even once.
What can also happens is they start decrying the aesthetics of the building/piece/etc. as secondary to its design or something, which is a tacit admission that it's... kind of ugly actually. They try to put the focus on the creation process or the design or the history of the work, etc. They say that it actually references the old masters if you think about it in this or that way, etc. I couldn't help but notice that the architect in this thread does precisely all of that.
So, no, I don't need to understand the process. Sir Thomas Beecham famously argued that "The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought."
And this may be where the culprit lies: it is, essentially, an over-rationalization. They are not doing it for the result, but for the process. Rationalizing your creation certainly gives you a lot more incentive to defend it later, especially among other high-status people whose jobs consist in the same kind of over-rationalization all day long. The 1 million Pepsi logo rebrand is the typical modern art project: as the artist intellectualize his every moves and aesthetic decisions, he justifies for himself his own creation. When I read the Pepsi logo draft, that's what I understood: it was not about the aesthetics, it was really all about the idea. And actually, it's what a lot of "creators" have left today, not because they've got particularly brilliant ideas, but because the craftsmanship is not there anymore. Either they chose not to develop it, or it's not valued culturally anymore.
Thus, in the end, whether the resulting building/painting/piece is actually considered beautiful or not is not the point -- and it's actually kind of gauche and low-class to bring that up or even just consider the aesthetic quality of "the work" as primary. What used to be the "work of art" is now just "the work".
The modern artifact is positively defended by the professionals of the field because it exhibits the interesting challenges that make their lives a little less boring. The only tools they have in their craft, as they are today mostly just intermediaries, are intellectual tools -- ideas. That's what they all front, except the ones who happened to develop actual crafting expertise (who are often shunned by modernists as "kitsch").
Ideas are just simpler. Modern architects don't draw ornaments. Modern painters don't draw human figures. Lots of modern singers don't even sing (they use autotunes). Skills are expensive but, most important, skills are passé.
Ideas are just simpler.
I disagree on the "technological regress" comment. In reality we're living in a world where we have amazing technological capabilities that are hampered by useless rules and regulations such as the requirement to conduct "environmental studies" before building anything larger than a single family home. If you allowed an engineering firm to just build a bridge without worrying about any regulations whatsoever and shielded them from anyone who dares to oppose the construction locally, I'm sure they could build a working, durable bridge for a price far lower than during the 19th century. Of course... the complete disregard for rules might result in more accidents than usual, tons of noise, construction garbage being dumped into a random hole, etc. It would also require the government to arrest a few dozen people who will inevitably try to sabotage the construction for various reasons. But it could definitely be done.
I think there is a lot to this. The example of the South Norfolk Southern Bridge is instructive. It was originally built in the 1920's then in the 2000's repairs were estimated at around 373$ million and the city was going to just decommission it. A private company convinced the city to let them tear down the old bridge and build anew, and did so for around 143$ million. Still strangely high I would think, but a hell of a lot cheaper than the city's expectations. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Bridge and oddly enough one of my papers https://ericjhammer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/How-advances-in-technology-keep-reducing-interventionist-policy.pdf ) One might wonder why the new bridge cost 100 times what it cost to make originally when it had mechanical lifting bits and everything, but the more obvious question is why the city couldn't see a way to fix or replace the bridge for less than ~2.5 what private builders could do. I don't think the answer has much of anything to do with the city planning to tart up the bridge and really make it amazing and ornamental to look at, and a lot more to do with bureaucrats bickering back and forth about whose empire was more important and whose buddies would get how much money funneled into their pockets.
I think the mechanical reproduction argument (that reproducibility leads to weird non-mass taste taking over the elite) is pretty persuasive, when you consider that in fields which have always had perfect reproducibility (e.g. literature and film), there hasn't been any shift of the sort you describe -- I'm no expert on avant garde film, but I'm pretty sure that the films that are considered good today by serious critics are no less coherent or "representational" than Un Chien Andalou or whatever. And in literature, the shift since WWII has been towards SFF and postmodern techniques, none of which is any clear sense less "ornamented" or populist in its appeal than Tolstoy or Henry James. The closest thing in literature is that rhyming metrical poetry has gone somewhat out of fashion since WWII, but that hardly seems like the same kind of epochal shift as represented by abstract/conceptual visual art -- contemporary poets still try to write meaningful things that sound nice, and I don't think critics are particularly impressed with "Tender Buttons" style non-semantic stuff or typewriter-bashing anymore. So it's really just the fields in which there was a major shift of reproducibility that this change has been pronounced. That indicates a signaling explanation pretty clearly to me.
(Of course, in the case of architecture there are all kinds of complicated economic and regulatory factors, which make it an especially unilluminating case study of the purely cultural question imo)
How about the CIA? "By promoting modern art movements such as abstract expressionism – and artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as showcases of America’s creativity and freedom of expression, foreign intelligence services ended up shaping the modern world’s aestheticsensibilities."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/04/berlin-exhibition-questions-cias-influence-on-global-art-scene
The complaints about McMansions always remind me of the quip "Oh, nobody goes to X anymore — it's too crowded!"
There are a lot of McMansions in America... and almost all of them have (presumably happy) families living in them. The owners just don't bother posting online about how OK they are with the design.
The McMansionHell.com critique suggests that the difference between bad taste nouveau riche McMansions and good taste old money mansions are fairly small but subtle and that Americans upwardly mobile classes could learn the lessons without intense effort.
For example, here in North Hollywood, a lot of increasingly rich clans from Iran and the like try to build the biggest box possible on the lot to accommodate all their various cousins. So, they will try to build shoebox-shaped houses out to the lot lines. In response, the Americans demand that they have more "articulation" in their designs for tear-downs.
My impression of McMansions is that, the buyers being good Americans, they tend to assume that the more articulation the better and thus get carried away with huge numbers of dormers and the like.
I am sure somebody's said this already, but I think we shouldn't conflate ornateness, beauty and being magnificent/astonishing/awe-inspiring.
For example, the labor cost and regulations probably explain why the Burj Khalifa or the Shanghai Tower weren't built in the US.
In short, this not a single issue and various suggested explanations all work to explain some of the aspects of the current situation.
This is a good point. The Burj Khalifa is certainly pretty, but I don't think anyone would say it's *ornate.* If it wasn't the tallest building in the world I bet someone in these comments would be criticizing it as yet another soulless glass and steel box. (Well, collection of cylinders)
"I bet someone in these comments would be criticizing it as yet another soulless glass and steel box. (Well, collection of cylinders)"
I'm happy to step up to be that someone, because it looks ugly to me and I don't care if it's the tallest, shortest, widest, flattest or most likely to be yeeted into space building.
I think the big thing that explains why those weren't built in the US is that they aren't particularly functional buildings, and it's only worth spending that much on a building if you feel the need to put yourself on the map.
This may sound a bit silly, but I think it reinforces Scott's argument that modern architecture isn't most people's preference: what styles are people building in Minecraft?
There's a subreddit we can look at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraftbuilds. Sorting by all-time top, the first modern style build comes in at post 25, and that one isn't external architecture; it's a kitchen. Looking around the subreddit and on Google Images, two of the most popular styles seem to be medieval (especially stone castle-like structures) and rustic (with lots of wood and nature incorporated). Classical and East Asian are also popular. Modern style is much rarer.
Minecraft is interesting because people are free to design buildings however they like, unconstrained by cost, regulations or other practical considerations. And anyone can play Minecraft, so we get to see designs by people who aren't architects or otherwise associated with the modern art elite.
One possible counter-argument is that people prefer modern style in real life, but in Minecraft modern plain box buildings aren't impressive enough to get upvoted. This may be part of it, but you certainly can find modern-style Minecraft builds that are impressive and creative. It's just less common than other styles. Another possibility is the blocks Minecraft offers may favour certain styles (eg, they have a large selection of wood blocks). However, it has a lot of block types and you can find examples of every architectural style in Minecraft.
That doesn't mean anything. Minecraft users aren't really free to build whatever they want. The game expects you to, er, mine the building materials they use. Which, because it's set in a naturalistic world, is mostly stone and timber in the beginning. Yes if you play it for a long time or in certain modes you can unlock many other kinds of block, but that requires a lot more effort, just like in the real world.
Did you forget about creative mode? People who build impressive architectural works generally take that option instead of mining the materials by hand.
No, I mentioned "certain modes". But isn't it kind of a big assumption that anything impressive is built in creative mode? The fun of the game is in large part the way you have to work up from scratch and build up your little in-game 'economy'. You can certainly use it as a 3D paint tool too, but I'd be surprised if nobody played the game for real anymore. Back when I used to play it, creative mode wasn't used much. Albeit I'm not a 10 year old.
Almost all the builds on that subreddit are creative mode, often with additional mods that make building faster. The survival mode builds are usually labeled as such.
And the top builds you see there almost certainly aren't made by 10 year olds. They're made mostly by adults.
Both modes have always been popular, just with different people/communities. I'm not sure what the ratio is, but for our purposes, it doesn't matter. The creative mode builder community is sufficiently massive. Wikipedia says there are 600 million Minecraft players. We can safely assume the number of creative mode players is largely than the population of most countries.
I guess that makes sense. Fair enough then.
It's an extremely small assumption because it's true >80% of the time that creative mode is what's used. Creative mode is standard for large-scale construction because it completely cuts out the time spent acquiring all the blocks in the first place.
Every once in a while people do large builds in survival mode just to go "this was made in survival mode" and everyone else goes "ooh" and "aah" and "damn, how long did it take?!"
In particular, impressive survival builds are more common on large servers, where people can work in groups, and devote long chunks of time to one build. Here's a particularly extraordinary instance of a solo survival build. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PdYm2EWyh4&ab_channel=FitMC
And here's another especially glorious one, a 15-member survival-mode underwater base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN1r7zJ0nYM&ab_channel=FitMC
You're being extremely confident proclaiming something that is, in my experience, completely false.
Other people mentioned creative mode (which is hardly niche; a ton of people build ambitious projects in creative mode), but I just want to show this: https://imgur.com/gallery/CW4Rv2p
This is a screenshot I just took from my friends' minecraft server. On it we can see:
- A giant freaking sword made of obsidian, various types of nether stone, and a giant portal.
- A giant empty fortress made of quartz blocks.
- A tower made of various nether blocks with a laser beacon obtained by building and killing the game's final boss (sort of).
- In the top-right corner, a giant floating teapot filled with gold blocks for some reason.
And this server has existed for less than a month.
The idea that the most upvoted constructions on a reddit server will be small wooden houses because Minecraft players are limited in materials doesn't really hold water.
Speaking as someone who does Minecraft architecture, there are never enough decorative blocks to satisfy us. I use mod packs to have a wider selection and have even messed with the textures when I just can't get what I want. I'm half considering commissioning textures for a large build I'm working on because I just can't find a few I want, and I'm hopeless at pixel art myself.
Oh, and at a tangent, one interesting thing about architecture in Minecraft (and in similar games) is that people who are really into it appreciate builds on a different level from people who aren't. I first experienced this as a Lego fan, when I would see creators use blocks in unusual and creative ways. Indeed, there was a monthly contest in the Classic Castle space called the Seed Part Challenge—a random part like the whip was used to make a windmill, of all things: http://classic-castle.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=26053 We revel in that sort of thing.
Minecraft has some obvious constraints: one cubic meter blocks, with some exceptions, nothing angled or curved outside of mods, and you've only got so many blocks to work with. But there are subtler constraints: the way stone brick textures change according orientation means buildings look different depending on what direction they face. The way textures are fixed, and no mod can simply shift them around on a block. The way half blocks or stairs can only be oriented certain ways, or wood planks are oriented horizontally but never vertically. We learn to accept the obvious constraints and see the Minecraft world in terms of them. The less obvious constraints, well, people like me care, but most people don't have to worry about them.
I recently played around with Tudor architecture, and after a few iterations I got this: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/467702644518158357/894700631208656946/2021-10-04_17.40.24.png
It's pretty good! Anyone who has played Minecraft would say so, I hope. But someone who has never seen Minecraft before would not be impressed. Why is everything so blocky, especially in the windows? Why don't I just use an angle for the parapet? The brick texture is awfully repetitive. And the shadows on all the little details look wrong.
Someone who has spent a lot of time building in Minecraft sees this in a very different way. Anyone who has used the mod Chisels and Bits knows the fine details took a while. The choice of blocks was also pretty good, if I may say so. There are little details you don't see elsewhere: the sill and lintel on each window are a little wider, I added string courses, and everything is carefully proportioned while still being exactly 6 meters wide. And there's one small thing which I'm very proud of: the quoins. With most stone brick blocks, even using Chisels and Bits, if you try what I did you get something like this: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/812023026026807316/894938427869524028/2021-04-29_00.00.32.png (Behold iteration 1. Ugh!) Notice how they don't look like one stone brick stacked on top of one another, but like one, and then two *halves* of one, and then one, and so on? It looks just plain wrong. But the mod which adds the block I'm using, dacite stone bricks, has a plain dacite block. It's the same exact texture without the mortar lines. So I used Chisels and Bits to chisel out the parts of this block I didn't like and fill it in with, effectively, the base texture. Neat trick, huh?
Craftsmen can appreciate this, the general public less so. It reminds me of what someone said above about the impressive features of modern architecture being hidden. You don't know from looking at the building how expensive the materials are or how delicately the whole thing holds together. This should not be the mark of good architecture, though. I'm not here to impress the fellow craftsmen; the point is to build a good building. Unlike the modern starchitect, what I did specifically made the end result look better.
The sad fact when it comes to Minecraft is that, even accounting for that, it's a voxel-based game with 16x16 textures. There will always be people who just don't see the appeal. But what's unique here is the middle category: people who unconsciously accept Minecraft's fundamental constraints but don't need to know the fussy details of how I got around them. They're my audience, and are, I hope, suitably impressed with my work.
Do you use vanilla, or custom textures?
Mostly vanilla.
I'd like to use a custom, higher-res texture pack, like the folks at Conquest Reforged do. The problem is that I rely a lot on a couple of mods, and there's just no texture pack that's going to cover them. So I'd still need to get my own textures for them. I don't have a good solution for this.
You might be surprised. I occasionally work on Dokucraft, which has Chisels and Bits support along with about 80 other mods. However, unlike the vanilla textures, few mod texture packs are actively maintained, so you might find that there's only support for an older version than the one you're using, but that's better than nothing. For anything missing you can also use the texture repository for something that would suit your purpose.
I like Dokucraft because it looks prettier and more detailed at 32x, but it's stylized enough that it doesn't clash with the blockiness of Minecraft, which bothers me on the higher-res 'realistic' texture packs. I recommend giving it a look.
Yeah, I've used Dokucraft. And I'll give you this, it has some of the best mod support of any texture pack I've ever seen. But when I went looking through the list, it was missing something critical to me. I'm afraid I don't remember which mod. =/
It's neat you've come by, actually, because I've been coming around to the view in recent years that being able to make textures is a superpower, basically. Bad textures can hurt a good build, while good textures can really elevate a mediocre one. I have Conquest Reforged in mind here, but the same could be said for doing steampunk builds with Glimmar's pack. And being able to add whatever textures you need as you need them... it seems to me like that would revolutionize building in Minecraft. The problem with this idea I guess is, why aren't any of the great Minecraft builders also texture artists? I dunno. What do you think?
Let me know if you think of the mod. As for your question, it takes substantially different skillsets. You could ask why so few master architects are also skilled painters.
Tiling pixel art also isn't something you can just whip up on the fly. It needs to blend at the edges properly, and it should look reasonably uniform when tiled, without any glaring repetitive elements. There are art programs that assist with this but there are no shortcuts to making it look good.
I too don't believe in the cost argument. There are plenty of new beautiful buildings in classical styles. Also, "classical styles" doesn't mean tons of ornaments or detailed stonework.
Here's a competition for "Most beautiful new building in 2020" by a Swedish association for classical architecture. There's zero statues and it doesn't look that expensive, but still lots of beautiful classical buildings: http://www.arkitekturupproret.se/2021/02/04/rosta-fram-sveriges-vackraste-nyproduktion-2021/
Below is an interview (in Swedish) with Eric Norin, a young architect who campaigns for the classical style. He tells some stories from his six years at one of the most prestigious schools of architecture in Sweden. A hundred years ago, the first assignment for new students was to draw a classical Greek temple. His first assignment was to dissect a fruit. There was zero exams during the entire education. The word "beautiful" was never mentioned. If you want to learn traditional styles, you have to leave Sweden. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nCmrlepV0TAq39umRx0Dy?si=Lr8q3IIYQGejSif5sVBwsg&dl_branch=1
My take is that architecture is ideologically captured by modernism. Most architects today don't know or care for the traditional styles, and since society has a general over-reliance on "experts" which is further worsened by regulatory issues (that are worse in building and in the education of new architects than in many other areas), this becomes self-perpetuating as the old modernist architects gets to decide what new buildings gets built and how new architects are educated.
The neo-romanesque Raleigh Cathedral cost $46 million, as opposed to the modernist Los Angeles Cathedrals' $190 million, so yes, it is very much possible to build traditional-style buildings for less than modern-style ones.
It is - however, the Raleigh Cathedral looks kind of like a jumped-up high school or civic center. Perhaps built using the same kind of techniques, maybe by architects that built a lot of high schools or something. Plus some stonework and some unusual-looking windows. The LA Cathedral looks *expensive*, if not necessarily good.
> My take is that architecture is ideologically captured by modernism.
Your excellent example is the kind of things I alluded to in a previous comment I've made here responding to BGP2, who is himself an architect: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern/comment/10754918
The only tools the architects have left are abstract ideas, because somewhere in the chain of transmission of knowledge we thought that sharpening our eyes and our hands was just a waste of time. The aesthetics of the stuff they build and that everybody sees is secondary, as nonsensical as it sounds.
The comment by Phil Getz is great. I had always thought that the primitive style of medieval art vs the naturalistic sculptures of the classics was some vague side effect of the dark ages, rather than an explicit choice made for ideological reasons. It'd be interesting to read more about this, if there's good evidence for it.
Seconded. The idea that art cycles between styles based on the material circumstances of society is the sort of unexpected insight that you could write a book about. It also has predictive power - ie, that art should be becoming more naturalistic now, but will return to a strong emphasis on abstract designs in, say, a generation's time when the breakdown of the current world economic and trade system of the 2020s has had time to percolate through society.
Because my brain is slow - I'd love to see someone take this idea and run alongside Scheidel's theories about inequality.
From memory, one of the side effects of the sort of cyclical build-up of inequality that his theory describes is that a lot of the grand, over-elaborated art and architecture known to history comes from the terminal phase of the cycle, where the foundations are rotting but the elites who have captured all of the wealth of their society are both at their most hubristic and in the most competition with each other.
So you should be able to construct a timeline of naturalistic versus abstract art, plot it against the material circumstances of a society (including inequality) and then use the resulting data to check against both these theories.
Regarding the hope that CAD software will bring back ornamentation: my (amateur) experience has been the opposite, in that most CAD software is very good at handling simple forms (simple geometric forms, simple repeating forms) and very bad at handling organic forms (complex smooth shapes, fractal repetition and so on). The end result is that it's an order of magnitude harder to model a complex, ornamented and organic-looking shape in CAD software than it is to produce a simple, abstract, geometric shape. This is also true of some common manufacturing processes (such as CNC machining and even FDM 3D printing), which struggle to produce involuted and organic shapes.
As an semi-random example of this in action: in pro-gun circles, there seems to be a near-universal appreciation of late-19th and early-20th century firearms (especially pistols) as looking smooth or attractive, but also a general recognition that such weapons would be un-economical to produce today compared to the square steel-and-plastic bricks that dominate the market.
> The end result is that it's an order of magnitude harder to model a complex, ornamented and organic-looking shape in CAD software than it is to produce a simple, abstract, geometric shape.
Firstly, isn't this true of traditional drafting as well ? Secondly, video games are producing organic (and often tentacled) shapes left and right, and they are using similar software. The same goes for 3D-printed miniatures, e.g.:
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/021/832/032/4k/ben-frazier-demonprincemodel1.jpg?1573107937
It's a lot easier (for me, at least) to get out a French curve and draft complex curved surfaces than it is to do the same in CAD. In terms of using, say, blender for 3D models - remember that this isn't generally how engineering CAD software is setup. These are two different processes, with largely different workflows. This doesn't stop you from using 3D modelling software to make real objects, just as you can make very curved, organic-looking stuff in Solidworks if you know what you're doing. It just takes more time and skill.
The 3D printing that you're looking at there is resin printing, which uses a different process to FDM and only became available at a hobbyist level in the last few years. Resin is also (big generalisation) a bit worse at making functional objects, as the resin itself needs to be light-cured to work and such resins are generally rather weak and brittle. If powder sintering ever becomes as cheap and common as FDM and resin have, then we might see more organic forms becoming common.
Just to clarify, I was talking about modeling software that is used to create resin figurines, not the resin itself specifically. Clearly, people are able to use it to create some pretty organic-looking models; the one I linked above is just a random example, and might have been printed in some other material -- I'm not sure.
Also, I couldn't use a french curve to save my life, so for me, Blender is definitely easier :-(
Regarding the guns, I'm not a gun guy by any means, but I've recently visited a shooting range, and tried out various firearms that they had available for rent. I was struck by how easy to use and lightweight modern firearms were, compared to the more traditional designs. Granted, it is entirely possible that the older designs would be superior in the hands of a trained professional, as opposed to my butter-fingers and noodly arms; but still, I'll take an AR-15 over a musket any day.
Fully agreed, but we're talking aesthetics here rather than function. You can literally go and find a list of pistols (eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pistols), sort by time and watch them become steadily more blocky and angular.
Right, but pistols are arguably one of those items where function must absolutely trump form -- since your life will most likely depend on it. It's the same reason why ceremonial swords looked like this:
https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/458819/1372737/restricted
Whereas actual swords used by soldiers looked like this (minus the decay):
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/czdTX5xaLvAUDDcsC9kfhM-320-80.png
I don't think that looking like a brick adds much to the function of something that's supposed to come out of a holster (or even, in extremis, a bag or pocket) snag-free. It's the internals that generally make a gun more reliable anyway, which are obviously not subject to the same aesthetic considerations as the externals.
Again, from what I've been told it's just easier to design and make a blocky pistol than it is to make a smooth space-gun when your runs are comparatively small and you're using a lot of CNC machining and laser cutting rather than stamping and/or casting.
Well, just from my naive personal experience, there might be some advantages to the flat shape. For example, the flat surface on top makes it easier to mount utility rails; other people had all kinds of sights attached to their guns. The flat shapes on the sides made it very convenient for my fingers/thumbs to find the textured grip surfaces.
But ultimately, you're probably right; the gun I held was probably a lot easier to manufacture than a curvy space-gun. Just like the arming sword I linked above would've been cheap and easy to manufacture, compared to some lord's show-piece. When you need to equip every soldier with a weapon by using limited resources, the weapons tend to be reduced to their cheapest, simplest essential forms; this is just a law of nature.
> If Pinterest is any kind of representative window into the soul of the modern furniture-enthusiast, people really like Art Nouveau.
I don't know much about architecture, but I wouldn't buy any of the items in the bottom row, even if they cost $9.99. They are all completely impractical, and look a bit kitchy to me on top of that. Yes, I understand that e.g. the tea set pictured in the bottom-left required orders of magnitude more labor than my own humble set of ordinary circular plates and cups; but the one advantage I have is I that I can actually eat off of my tea set. Without having a prehensile proboscis of some kind, that is.
>But Kaleberg argues the exact opposite point:
> Architectural ornament is much cheaper than it used to be, so it is less important.
This doesn't sound like opposite to cost disease. On one hand, the "flat" cost of labour to raise a building goes up because of Baumol, and so does the "flat" cost of land. On the other, additional unnecessary _ornaments_ that would display wealth go down in price because of industrialization and improved technology. So the (effective signal / (cost of signals + flat costs)) ratio goes down, and traditional architecture is not very efficient at signalling.
So you either:
A) pay astronomical contracts to a scarce set of elite-approved architects, so that they build crazy structures that make engineers cry. Because that will _actually_ rise the costs of construction unnecessarily by an order of magnitude or two.
B) make concrete, cubic, efficient and borderline functional buildings for the general populace to be in.
That seems right, and there's another compounding factor -- expectation of future economic growth. These beautiful historic buildings took enormous amounts of capital and enormously long times to build. If you don't expect much future growth, then that's logical--just build whatever is best, and it takes as long as it takes. But when you expect a lot of growth, then anything you build now will be much less good than what you could build in the future, and in the future will represent a poor use of scarce land. So you get in an equilibrium where it never makes sense to spend much now, because you can get more later and you'll want to knock down the present thing. Better to make the current thing cheap on the lower end of the market, or intentionally faddish on the high end.
Just think about the exemplars--the Church that built Stephansdom and is building Sagrada Familia expects to be around in much the same form in another thousand years, with a religious ritual that has very similar space requirements and still-meaningful symbols. Google does not think this about itself. Cities building modern public housing do not think this about residential housing. Exurbs building McMansions expect future waves of redevelopment.
Hm I hadn't thought of that. It shares a feeling with the "cars used to last a lifetime, now you replace them as soon as new electronic-based equipment is available" story.
I guess the time factor is really key. There's even some signalling intrinsic to "look how long this took to build". It can't be offset by dumping money. But such signalling made sense for dynasties of feudal lords, and not for VC and 4-year-term representatives.
PS, since you mention Stephansdom: I also visited the Votivkirche, and I did like it!
>> i think the most famous and esteemed architecture of the last 50 years is *extremely* diverse. frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid look like they come from different planets.
> In case you don’t immediately recognize all those names, here’s one top building from each
One of these things is not like the others.
I noticed it was weird to put Frank Lloyd Wright in the list with those others, but I didn't notice that he explicitly said "the last 50 years".
On a related note:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUmXNq2smrZ/?utm_medium=copy_link
Regarding beauty in art, I was told by at least one art professor that true art is indeed *supposed* to be ugly. Beauty (according to the professor) is a kind of fast food for the mind: it makes your brain go "wow" so it glosses over everything else. By making art deliberately ugly, artists are bypassing this quick and easy satisfaction, thus forcing the viewer to engage with the artwork on a deeper intellectual/philosophical level.
And yet, I've never heard a physics or math professor shy away from "beautiful theories" because they're fast food for the mind. I'm not just talking about the supersymmetry fandom - I recall an intro mechanics professor going on about the beauty of Newton's explanation of Kepler's laws and so on and so on.
I mostly sounds as an excuse to be "edgy".
Yeah, that's my behind. There is indeed the slick, soulless, 'chocolate box' type beauty where a trend in art gets popular and workmen churn it out. Botticelli was in danger of falling into this same trap, as it was so *easy* for him to paint beautifully and to paint beauty, so the paintings from the latter part of his life (1490s onward) are a change in style, a return to a more archaic style, and this type of experimentation is necessary for a great artist to grow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamentation_over_the_Dead_Christ_(Botticelli,_Milan)
Artists can use deliberate ugliness for various reasons, and once viewers get accustomed to it, they see it as less ugly and even find beauty in it. But art is not 'meant' to be ugly because beauty is too easy, and the whole clap-trap about 'engaging on a deeper level' is why you need to read the little labels or the catalogues to find out what the heck the overturned dustbin on the floor is meant to be all about.
Indeed, once you go the "art is meant to be Deep and Philosophical" route, it becomes just as easy to churn out workmanlike, slick, soulless ugly works.
(You knew this was coming) G.K. Chesterton, from his collection of essays "The Thing", an excerpt from the essay "The Sceptic as Critic":
"Many moderns will be heard scoffing at what they would call "chocolate-box art"; meaning an insipid and sickly art. And it is easy to call up the sort of picture that might well make anybody ill. I will suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are looking sadly at the outside of a chocolate-box (now, I need hardly say, empty) and that we see painted on it in rather pallid colours a young woman with golden ringlets gazing from a balcony and holding a rose in the spot-light caused by a convenient ray of moonlight.
Any similar touches may be added to the taste or distaste of the critic; she may be convulsively clasping a letter or conspicuously wearing an engagement ring or languidly waving farewell to a distant gentleman in a gondola; or anything else I can think of, calculated to cause pain to the sensitive critic. I sympathise with the critic's feeling; but I think he goes quite wrong in his thinking.
Now, what do we mean when we say that this is a silly picture, or a stale subject, or something very difficult to bear, even when we are fortified by chocolates to endure it? We mean it is possible to have too much of a good thing; to have too many chocolate-boxes, as to have too many chocolates. We mean that it is not a picture, but a picture of a picture.
Ultimately it is a picture of innumerable pictures; not a real picture of a rose or a girl or a beam of moonlight. In other words, artists have copied artists, right away back to the first sentimental pictures of the Romantic Movement.
But roses have not copied roses. Moonbeams have not imitated each other. And though a woman may copy women in externals, it is only in externals and not in existence; her womanhood was not copied from any other woman. Considered as realities, the rose and the moon and the woman are simply themselves.
Suppose that scene to be a real one, and there is nothing particularly imitative about it. The flower is unquestionably fresh as the young woman is unquestionably young. The rose is a real object, which would smell as sweet by any other name, or by no name. The girl is a particular person, whose personality is entirely new to the world and whose experiences are entirely new to herself.
If she does indeed choose to stand in that attitude on that balcony holding that botanical specimen (which seems improbable) , we have no right to doubt that she has her own reasons for doing so. In short, when once we conceive the thing as reality, we have no reason whatever to dismiss it as mere repetition.
So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament, we naturally feel that the flower is in a special sense an artificial flower and that the moonlight is all moonshine. We feel inclined to welcome even wild variations in the decorative style and to admire the new artist who will paint the rose black, lest we should forget that it is a deep red, or the moonshine green, that we may realise it is something more subtle than white.
But the moon is the moon and the rose is the rose; and we do not expect the real things to alter. Nor is there any reason to expect the rules about them to alter. Nor is there any reason, so far as this question is concerned, to expect the woman to alter her attitude either about the beauty of the rose or the obligations of the engagement-ring. These things, considered as real things, are quite unaffected by the variation of artistic attack in fictitious things. The moon will continue to affect the tides, whether we paint it blue or green or pink with purple spots."
> So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament
Which is, circling back to the original point, how most "modernist" architecture is made.
I really miss the like button sometimes.
I mean, yes, I personally agree, but I'm a Philistine -- so my opinion isn't worth much. I am so uneducated that I'd argue that e.g. one of Kinkade's paintings would be perfectly acceptable on its own; the problem with Kinkade is not anything intrinsic to his art (even his loose relationship with perspective can be chalked up to artistic license), but merely the fact that he painted 10^17 of them seemingly on autopilot.
You can apply the same analogy to food here. No one would eat gourmet cuisine if it was actually disgusting, just for the sake of being able to engage with it on a deeper level. A chef may decide to create tastes that are subtle rather than overpowering, but it is absolutely ridiculous to say that something being superficially enjoyable precludes it from being profoundly enjoyable.
No one would *eat* disgusting cuisine, but I bet people have photos of it on their coffee tables...
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Is it that art is displayed, and not consumed? If so, you could replace food with, I dunno, perfume.
From what I've seen, ugly art is often exhibited in public, or owned by private individuals, but is rarely displayed in one's home. I could be wrong, though.
Hmm. I think the closest analogy to that would be to serve gross food at fancy cocktail parties to show how much you are above the plebeian notion that food should be tasty.
Fair point, and I think some of that does occur. I've seen a fair share of ultra-fancy food that tasted like cardboard, yet looked very impressive.
Have you ever been to a wedding? Wedding cakes are infamous for this.
Any cost-based theory that aims to cover fashion has to contend with children's dressing-up clothes. You can buy a princess dress for about £15 that has layers of iridescent shimmery silky fabric, heavy velvet in rich colours, and intricate embroidery with beads sewn into it.
People usually think of communist art as ugly Brutalist stuff, but Moscow metro is better-looking to me than many museums.
https://iamaileen.com/moscow-metro-stations/
Especially the early stations. Later stations are either suffering from cost-savings because of the economic collapse (we call them "centipede stations" because of the abundance of columns) or devolve into the same modern architecture style.
The Moscow Subway is immediately impressive.
I'm not sure if this is directly relevant, but Buckminster Fuller was an architectural engineer whose biography, At Home in Universe, discusses the lag between technological innovation and its use in architecture. (About 40 years.)
The notion of an increased lag in one field relative to another might be relevant to timeframes.
As something of an iconoclast, the obstacles he faced might be relevant?
Have you seen Taipei 101?
It's very art deco - if art deco were done with reference to Chinese architectural forms.
Modern Russian (and possible Chinese, but I know nothing about it) architecture might be an interesting case to check out. 90's brought a great upheaval to society, and a lot of people suddenly had lots of money - which they spent building houses, of course. Literally none of them were "old money", because there were no old money in USSR, but a lot of them romanticised and adored pre-Revolution Russia, and old estates of aristocracy, which they tried their best to imitate. So now we have a lot of pseudo-classical houses in various gated suburban communities, with varying degrees of ornamentation.
In less elite architecture, the much-maligned Commie Blocks and Brutalism gave way to "Luzhkov's Empire" style in 90's, so named after the famous long-time mayor of Moscow. They were much more decorative than the old Soviet apartment buildings - and of course, universally hated by people with art degrees (here's the best set of photos I could find quickly, along with an article by a defender of this style, who renames it "Capitalistic Romanticism": https://daily.afisha.ru/cities/20759-bodipozitiv-ot-arhitektury-kak-i-zachem-polyubit-urodlivye-zdaniya-90-h-i-00-h/). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what that style was about - mostly, it was "anything, but concrete blocks". It included low-budget high-rises with decorative turrets build on the outskirts of the city for those who couldn't afford a more stylish apartment in the center of the city, but didn't want to live in a Soviet-era building. It also included attempts to re-create much-beloved by late Soviet generation Stalin's Empire style (I absolutely love it, by the way!). AND it also included pseudo-classical buildings with cheap-ish decorations. And a rebuild Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, of course.
Today, Luzhkov's Empire mostly gave way to boring Western trends, but you still can see a stealthy, sneaky, very-very high-end new apartment complexes built in the back of historical buildings that tries to imitate them with all success of a nouveau riche trying to blend into Old Money gathering. Still better than most Twisted Concrete that people call "stylish" now, IMO, but what do I know, I also prefer George Thorogood to any rap artist ever.
Stalin's wedding cake buildings like the Moscow State University were pretty awesome, actually.
I don’t know about architecture, but as a hand bookbinder and woodworker (examples: https://stevenhales.org/home/hobbies/) I can attest that Baumol is a big reason that books are seldom bound in goatskin with elaborate gilt tooling any more, or that people buy IKEA furniture instead of handcrafted pieces in cherry and purpleheart. The labor to make those things is very high and can’t be automated. Materials costs are also considerable (I was out $1000 in wood to build a four-door bookcase). But I don’t know if those costs exceed inflation over costs of the past.
> How come we don’t have rich [entities] saying “screw the price, I really want this one thing to look nice”?
I nominate Yale University's two new residential colleges (glorified dorms!) as a counterexample to that. Franklin College and Pauli Murray College were built in only a few years (2014-2017). The university probably had a strong desire to meet the standard of its original 10 colleges (constructed 1930-1940) and not repeat the mistake of the modern architecture of the two built in the early 1960s. The latter (Morse and Stiles Colleges) are near universally disliked by students, who hope not to be assigned to them, to the point where it probably affects Yale's admissions process and image.
In general, my impression is that colleges want to reproduce their pre-WWII buildings rather than their post-war buildings.
I think architects generally agree - there are a few buildings from the 1950s and 1960s that are considered classics of International Style or Brutalism, but much more 1920s and 1930s construction is considered good than 1950s or 1960s construction, particularly in single family residential.
Another thing not mentioned is that buildings made for us plebs seem to be designed to be functional and bare bones.
Airports used to be beautiful, this was when only the top 10% flew. I assume the revenue the airports get from mass travel is greater than before but there’s often no desire to create anything but the most functional additions to airports.
It may have been because it was just after being built but I remember when Bristol airport added on new gates. The previous gates were (and are) arranged in a semi circle around a circular concourse. There are shops, cafes and bars at two levels, plenty of seating in the centre including some sofas etc.
The new gates are down a corrugated white painted walkway with no paintings or furnishings. The gates are below this walkway so it never widens out to facilitate shops between gates. When I did the trip last, we were called an hour before boarding. Arriving at the stairs to the gate, after a ten minute walk through the featureless metal tube, the airline checked our identity and let us down to a medium sized room with no furnishings or seats, Instead we basically stayed in line in those Disney type queuing systems. An hour later we boarded.
Recently in Hamburg as I went to the passport control to the gates for travel outside the Schengen zone, whereupon you are stuck, there was also no cafes, food or even a vending machine.
It’s hard to see who this benefits. The airport loses revenue from the cafes or shops they could have built along the way, passengers get a much worse experience. The airlines don’t gain much either. It’s just punishment for air travel being common.
I can’t help but think that if airports were still posh, they would have added the new gates in a similar fashion
.. similar fashion to the original gates in Bristol.
(I hit post too early).
Total revenue from travel is higher, but revenue per passenger, and marginal revenue per marginal passenger, are much lower. At least in the United States, before the 1970s, the government set the prices on routes, so airlines had to compete on amenities, and flew fewer people. But once it became possible to compete on price, that turned out to be what actually got large numbers of people to fly.
That said, in the United States, I think the newest airports are some of the most pleasant. DFW is much more spacious and usable than LAX or the New York airports, and my favorite small airport is the recently totally redone Long Beach airport (the old one felt like a bus stop in a corporate office park, but the new one takes advantage of the California climate to give you beautiful indoor-outdoor spaces to eat while waiting for your flight).
> Okay, this ought to be an empirical question. Does architectural ornament cost more or less than it used to? If somebody does a deep dive into this, I will absolutely link them. If you think you could do exceptionally good research in exchange for money, please contact me.
I'm not an architect, but I am a mechanical engineer and I worked for 7 years in a machine shop that served a variety of industries (including on occasion making jigs, molds, etc. for creating mass-produced architectural ornamentation and on *very* few occasions making custom-designed small-batch or one-off ornate items as gifts.)
From my experience, metal, plastic, wood, foam and concrete ornamentation is QUITE cheap now when you can use mass-produced pieces. You're looking at a few dollars for a single piece of ornamentation (or perhaps 10s of dollars if it's large with more significant material costs, etc.) Much cheaper than any pre-industrial architect would have access to.
On the other hand, our custom ornate work was far too expensive for any of our customers to afford. An ornate aluminum pencil-holder we made for one of our long-time customers that we had an excellent relationship with would have easily cost $2000 at our standard rates. Custom work is still extremely expensive, and if you're making an architectural show piece you'll need a lot of custom one-offs and small batches.
That's probably most of the difference in perspective here. Want to mass produce townhouses with a particular set of architectural flourishes? Much more affordable now than 100 years ago! Want to create a unique one-off building on your campus with a set of ornamentation to match its surroundings and your personal aesthetic? No more affordable than it was 100 years ago, and probably more expensive due to Baumol's.
The one other aspect that's worth mentioning is *stone*. When you can make do with concrete or brick of some variety, colored to look like your limestone or whatever, you can easily benefit from technology on mass produced bits. We can cast concrete blocks en masse (even with some ornate features) quite cheaply. If, on the other hand, you're not able to fake your stone with concrete (say, marble or obsidian, or you just really want authentic limestone) then you're looking at a tiny industry which has not benefited nearly as much from automation and is hitting Baumol's head-on.
Any hope of a picture of the pencil holder?
I don't think so Nancy. First, it was personalized with CNC-engraved script on the outside of the barrel, so it would probably break someone else's anonymity. And secondly it was 15 years ago and I'm not 100% sure I still have a picture.
Imagine a straight-walled aluminum cup a bit taller and a bit narrower than a coffee mug, and without a handle. Add buttresses top and bottom, with a 3/4 inch high heavy rim at the top so there's room for text along the top edge. Our company's name was engraved up there around the outside of the cup in austere double-stroke lettering. Along the straight barrel there's a lot of engraved scroll work, a dedication to the recipient of the gift, and a bible verse, all done with flowery flourishes and serifs.
Should-be-an-edit: And then the cup was lightly electropolished to be shiny (but without completely smoothing out the faint tiny spiral from turning it so it was still grippable), and anodized a tan color to protect the surface from scratches.
My impression is that Art Nouveau and Art Deco were motivated by the idea that the new mass production techniques of, say, 1851-1929 allowed decorative work to be done cheaper than in the more austere neo-classical age of, say 1750-1850.
But then people got carried away with decoration (e.g., how much did the crown for the Chrysler Building cost?), so the cost savings from industrialization were blown on, admittedly, glorious decorations.
Let's kick "omniscient narration" around a little.
Experimental fiction does *something* drastic to narration, but omniscient narrator isn't the opposite of it.
The extremely popular ASoIaF doesn't do omniscient narration. GRRM is philosophically opposed to it, so everything comes from characters' points of view. This has turned around and bitten him because he has to get someone whose point of view he wants to offer into place for all the events he wants to show.
A very high proportion of paranormal romances/urban fantasies are first person narration, frequently one person for the whole book.
Regarding cost diseases of traditional architectures, it might be interesting to study the Japanese sengū practice:
"In Japan there is a shrine [the Grand Shrine of Ise] that is rebuilt every twenty years. A new shrine, identical to the old one, is built on a site next to it. The sacred objects are transferred from old to new and the old shrine is razed to the ground. The main building of the shrine thus moves back and forth between two adjacent sites. The practice dates back to the late seventh century. ... Although the structures are simple, rebuilding the entire shrine complex and replacing all of the implements of worship every twenty years cost extravagant sums.3 The same practice of periodic renewal was seen at several other major shrines in Japan before the Meiji Restoration [late 19th century], when the new imperial government limited it to Ise, primarily for financial reasons." (from "Japan’s Monument Problem: Ise Shrine as Metaphor" by Jordan Sand, https://www.academia.edu/15221926/Ise_Shrine_as_Metaphor )
"expenses for the vicennial reconstruction of the shrines [were] 300,000 yen in 1889; 1,500,000 yen in 1909, and nearly 10,000,000 yen in 1929"
("Ise Jingū and modern emperorship" by Rosemarie Bernard, https://books.google.com/books?id=OO55DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq="expenses+for+the+vicennial"&source=bl ).
The most recent sengū at Ise, in 2013, reportedly cost 55,000,000,000 yen, around half a billion US dollars.
The Japanese don't expect their buildings to last very long.
> The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions and their stringent design reviews, but it never occurs to them that if new developments looked more like the historic districts they degrade, people might actually support them more.
Like most "my opponents never consider X" claims, this is false - it's commonly brought up by yimbys, but consensus is that changing the style of building never helps get it approved, so this is at best a very marginal factor and, more likely, a completely fabricated excuse against general opposition to change or density.
I have some comments on the comments:
There actually was a parallel to modernist architecture in Revolutionary France. It's called French Revolutionary Architecture, and it had a branch, the Utopian Revolutionary Architecture, which consisted of building designs like this memorial for Isaac Newton: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionsarchitektur#/media/Datei:%C3%89tienne-Louis_Boull%C3%A9e_Memorial_Newton_Night.jpg
In its audacity and its use of blank geometric shapes, its quite similar, but nothing of it was ever built.
Concerning the Adorno quote and the question of "No beautiful architecture after the Nazis", there is a link between the Nazi atrocities and modern architecture, but it's very counterintuitive. In Germany, in the early Wiederaufbau years, architecture continued just as under the Nazis, which means unoffensive traditionalism for residential and commercial buildings. Then, in the early 50s, when there was a civil society again, the architects, who of course where also architects under the Nazis, noticed that maybe they should distance themselves from the Nazis in some form.
So what they did is they identified traditional architecture with National Socialism and condemned both, while praising Modernism as the architecture for democracy. The reason why this is so pervasive is because this movement immediately swept through the universities, so the generation studying after the war learned nothing else. The German hippies also bought into those ideas, so now you have two whole decades only trained in modernist ideas, holding all the positions in universities. In Germany, any person I know who studied architecture is filled to the brim with modernist talking points, and has no idea of architectural history before 1930.
Leon Krier (who studied architecture in the 50s in Germany, and who built Poundbury) tells this story in a Welt interview ( https://www.welt.de/kultur/kunst-und-architektur/article154083485/Albert-Speer-Das-war-gute-Architektur.html):
"Everyone who drew something reasonable was despatched. To my designs the old professor said: 'We did things like that in the Third Reich.' I said: 'That sound's interesting, tell us about it.' But he stormed away red with rage. "
Concerning the Berliner Stadtschloß: The stones of the facade where produced by the German company Bamberger Natursteinwerke, which specialises in producing stone ornaments with industrial robots. (https://www.bamberger-natursteinwerk.de/en/innovation/robots-3d-facades)
Thank you for sharing that planned memorial for Isaac Newton: what a beautiful idea!
Also, that Leon Krier article is good (I'm surprised how well Google translate works these days, I was able to read the whole thing without much trouble parsing it). When I read your comment my first reaction was "How silly, not making buildings a certain way because the Nazi's did it that way." But reading through the article I realize now it was very understandable: these were all people who suffered through the war and the Nazis were, well, Nazis. They were really, really bad people. It makes sense that, particularly in Germany and continental Europe in general, people wanted to get as far away from Nazi aesthetics as possible.
One major problem I see with the "our civilization doesn't deserve nice things after WWII" perspective is that in the unlikely event I were to ever find myself in a similar position to Curtis LeMay or Bomber Harris, I'm pretty sure I'd have fewer qualms about bombing cities filled with brutalist and mid-century modernist architecture. Sure, the industrial capacity being targeted and the potential civilian casualties are paramount, but if, for example, there's a Frank Gehry near a ball bearing factory I'm eager to take out....that just might push me toward giving the "go" order. In that sense, this entire line of thinking is self-defeating. It simply makes another Dresden more likely.
This encapsulates the problem with much of this thread: too many people want to turn "I don't like it" into "it's not good," and then work to justify why it's bad instead of looking for why things changed.
When I say "I don't like it," that's synonymous with "it's not good." That's a privilege I earned over the years. I can't tell you how; it just kinda happened.
Ha. I imagine the person granting that privilege is you.
The Gehry structure depicted in the post could be amusing if you're in the right frame of mind, and it is certainly *technically* difficult to build - it requires a lot of skills, and I have a feeling the construction foreman cursed the day he was born when he first saw the blueprints - but it's also too easy to do "big startling things just because we can", like that 'melted' building. I think there is a tendency for a lot of things that look great in the plans, win awards left right and centre, and then are depressing once built because reality is not the permanent sunny blue skies and clear spaces of the model.
Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim is a massive tourist attraction. I agree there there is an element of "look at these new tools, let's see what we can do" to these buildings, but they're built for solid economic and civic pride reasons.
Frank Gehry has built about two really good buildings: Bilbao and the Disney concert hall in the downtown L.A., with the latter being designed first but constructed second. On the inside, the L.A. version is a basic box building (with admirably good acoustics). But on the outside, form doesn't follow function. Instead, it is surrounded by a gigantic metal sculpture inspired by Gehry's love of sailboats. Sailboats look nice, so so does Gehry big silver sculpture.
I would encourage architects to take up sailing, since sailboats are beautiful.
Calatrava has a lot of sea influences that make for stunning work. But if you like Bilbao and Disney, I don't know why you wouldn't like Gehry's work in Millennium Park, the Weisman, the Museum of Pop Culture, etc.
Bilbao and Disney are great. I also quite like MIT's State Center, and the Weisman looks similar. But I really did not like the Experience Music Project building somehow.
Bilbao and Disney are great. I also quite like MIT's State Center, and the Weisman looks similar. But I really did not like the Experience Music Project building somehow.
I note that the Bilbao Guggenheim has a sculpture of a giant spider outside, and that sums up my reaction to it.
It's not terrible, it just is that kind of clever-clever that doesn't appeal to me.
The question at hand isn't whether modern/post-modern/contemporary architecture appeals to an individual, but if why does it only appeal to the elite, and not the masses. Which is based on a false assumption. Gehry keeps getting commissions because his work is broadly popular with critics and the public.
On the last quote from Corentin about the evils of serialist dominance of music departments: At least one historians claims that when you do careful empirical analysis you'll see there never was a period of 'serial' dominance, and that even if you extend to all kinds of atonal avant-garde music, there was always at least as much traditional stuff around:
'I will show that whether one is inquiring about academic positions, performances, publications, recordings, prizes and awards, or attention in the press, serial composers were represented roughly 15 percent of the time, hardly a position of dominance. Between half and two-thirds of
composers, throughout the period and in all corners of the musical marketplace, wrote in a relatively conservative idiom, with a style that maintained strong ties to traditional tonality. The other significant groups of composers worked either in a free atonal style or in a more experimental idiom.'
Only someone who actually likes atonal music would give a shit about the distinction between serialism and free atonality (spoiler: to any normal human being, even a fairly musical one who likes earlier classical music they sound effectively identical (unless the serialism is total anyway, in which case it just makes even less sense): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AQx0V2lZs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq2gwuKDPnY). But this does seem like it might show that actually, there was always at least as much *fairly* traditional pieces about.
I say fairly, because it is possible to be quite modernist and difficult whilst remaining tonal. I.e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_XNfKk-Qbs (At least, I *think* this is tonal (in the sense of having some notes that appear more often than others, and hence are kind of 'home', not in the sense of being in a major/minor key.) I'm not expert and I couldn't find anything definitive by googling.)
I recall buying a Schoenberg album around 1981. I have a distinct memory of putting the needle on the vinyl and then about 20 minutes later saying, "Oh, wow, it's over" and lifting the needle off the vinyl. But I have zero recollection of the interim 20 minutes of music. I didn't dislike serial music, I just didn't particularly notice it.
> The Great Male Renunciation began in the mid-18th century, inspired by the ideals of the The Enlightenment; clothing that signaled aristocratic status fell out of style in favor of functional, utilitarian garments
Maybe this is just a detail and doesn't meaningfully distract from the point, but isn't a tie the least utilitarian thing ever?
The tie evolved from the cravat, just as the maniple evolved from something like a handkerchief, and in the same way both pieces of vesture left their original functions behind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniple_(vestment)
Would folks consider this a building built recently in a classical style done right? I am not sure how much more it cost vs what a modernist cathedral would have cost. It was quite expensive. I find it quite beautiful particularly inside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Name_of_Jesus_Cathedral_(Raleigh,_North_Carolina)
https://www.google.com/search?q=holy+name+of+jesus+cathedral&safe=active&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS852US852&sxsrf=AOaemvLxQX5RzCvjnCxNkhwvU_8JJNh2LA:1633445233320&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjU25DXwbPzAhV-nWoFHZXnB7wQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1406&bih=769&dpr=1
It's not bad at all, they went for a Romanesque rather than Gothic style (I am open to correction on this by the better-informed), and compared with the kind of modern church architecture that was inflicted on us during the 50s-80s, it's a miracle.
You're right about the interior, it's done right in accordance with the modern rubrics but without throwing all the old elements out the window. It *looks* like a church, not a warehouse or office building.
According to Wikipedia, Raleigh cathedral cost $46 million, whereas the modernist Los Angeles Cathedral came in at just shy of $190.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Our_Lady_of_the_Angels
Fr. Zuhlsdorf has an amusing story about the architecture of the Los Angeles Cathedral: https://wdtprs.com/2017/05/wherein-fr-z-relates-a-brutal-tale-of-sudden-realization-and-horror/
For contrast here's the "Cardboard Cathedral" of Christchurch, which cost a mere $NZ5 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_Cathedral -- to be fair it's intended only as a temporary cathedral while the real cathedral is being rebuilt after the 2011 earthquake, and it's a lot smaller than the Raleigh or Los Angeles examples.
Actually, the rebuilding of the permanent Christchurch cathedral is an interesting case study too. Back in 2013 the public were presented with two options --https://www.anglicanjournal.com/christchurch-cathedral-options-weighed/ -- an expensive "Traditional" rebuild with the original shape of the cathedral expressed in modern lightweight materials (including a bell tower that dissolves into nothingness at the top) and a cheaper "Contemporary" option which actually looks pretty good to me. In the end, though, public pressure demanded that they simply rebuild the original cathedral in its original building materials, which will wind up costing two or three times the cost of the whole Raleigh cathedral for a much smaller church.
The Los Angeles Cathedral hired the world's most famous photographer of Catholic churches to photograph it. The nonagenarian sage said the exterior was "abrasive," but the interior was okay, assuming they got rid of the intrusive lamps (which they since have).
At first I thought, "That Raleigh cathedral looks rather austere. Still, it's a pleasant building to look at."
Then I looked at the LA cathedral and thought "Heaven forgive us! What is this mess? It's not even cross shaped! I can't tell head from tails! Put it away, I don't want to see it anymore!"
So that's a win for Raleigh.
The Los Angeles Cathedral is in an unfortunate location, where the 101 cuts through downtown LA and get snarled in traffic between the interchanges with the 110 and the 10 and the 5. I've always thought it's a perfectly fine building to appreciate from inside a traffic jam on the freeway, but it's an unfortunate way to end Grand Ave when you come up on foot (especially given that Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall is just a few blocks away, and beautiful).
This is totally off-topic, but a long time ago, I recall driving down some street, I think in LA, and saw a church modeled around Jesus as an engineer. He was embedded in a giant gear, and holding massive calipers, IIRC. It was absolutely awesome, but I didn't own a camera at the time (and this was before cellphones), so I couldn't snap a picture. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, or did I dream the whole thing ?
It feels weird to see those kinds of domes on a building that is called a "Cathedral", but other than that, the Raleigh one looks perfectly fine to me -- if a bit unimaginative. That said, I'm not a Christian, so there could be lots of subtleties that I'm missing.
In Christianity, the term cathedral refers to a function, not an architectural style. Regardless, lots of old cathedrals have domes! St. Paul's in London and the Hagia Sophia might be the most famous examples.
I'll agree that the Raleigh cathedral strikes me as more "tasteful" than inspired, just from looking at a few pictures anyway. But as a Catholic who's been in too many flying saucer churches, I'll take what I can get!
The dome means it is built in basilica style (even if it's not a basilica as such in the technical sense) and the architects explain briefly why they built it like that:
http://www.obrienandkeane.com/holy-name-of-jesus-cathedral-church
"The building design for the new cathedral will address the needs of the area’s growing Catholic community by seating two thousand congregants, replacing the current Sacred Heart Cathedral. The new Catholic church design includes a cruciform structure and a prominent dome, which visually connects the church with downtown Raleigh, and draws on the heritage of traditional Catholic church architecture. Our firm’s design also includes custom marble liturgical furnishings, rendered in Bianco Carrara and Giallo Siena, and crafted to express and reinforce the design themes and narrative."
https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Basilica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica
Needs a 2nd colour of brick for some decorative brickwork. Otherwise there's not enough detail on the scale of a metre or so (a lot of neo-gothic cathedrals make the opposite mistake). Though it will look better in a century or so when lichen has grown and the bricks have weathered at varying rates.
I have found this discussion extremely interesting, not least because I'm in the process of developing two new buildings and so am very deep into discussions of design/ornament/cost.
I'm going to ask some builders what kind of costs we'd be looking at to do something traditional. My expectation is that it will be far beyond my budget, but it should be interesting.
You don't have to go absolutely crazy with ornamentation, subtle details add charm. Anything is better than the bare poured concrete look.
I was planning to ask how much it'd be to build in the Victorian style with a brick structure (not facade.) I like Victorians enough that I'd build it if it was affordable.
I don't know where you're building, but in a lot of places, actual structural brick isn't allowed for anything at all large any more because of seismic concerns.
Indiana. Brick and mortar structure is definitely allowed here. In practice, most brick buildings here are built around either CMU or a wood/steel frame.
The 1930s streamlined Works Progress Administration style is a pretty nice compromise between 1920s Gatsbyesque Ornateness and postwar You-Don't-Deserve-Nice-Thingsness. For example, here's the old San Diego City Hall, which the county of San Diego snapped up when the city moved instead into a high rise that looks like Sao Paulo worker's housing:
https://i0.wp.com/inewsource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SDcountybuilding-1.jpg?fit=2000%2C1000&ssl=1
That's a perfectly fine, functional building which is pared-down compared to the big Neo-Classical predecessors but which isn't totally bare of all ornamentation, and which fits in with the environment in a particular vernacular style. As you say, a good compromise between the old and the (then) new.
The WPA constructed Santa Monica City Hall of 1938 is another elegant streamlined moderne government building. It's more tasteful but less glorious than Roaring Twenties city halls like Pasadena and Beverly Hills, but nicer than boring postwar city halls like Palm Springs and Malibu.
I take the point people have made, that modern buildings have much better/nicer *interiors* for work and general environmental control, but there must be some way of compromising as those buildings did on the journey from pre-Depression excess to today's concrete boxes.
I suppose the concrete boxes win for general government and business use as they're familiar, relatively cheap to construct, and you're more interested on what is going on inside. But I think there must also be some ideological adherence to a theoretical notion of Modernity or Equality or Democracy or some such, as I remember the fuss made when Trump tried to mandate that new government buildings should be in (Neo)Classical style - you would think he had suggested slaughtering cute baby goats instead of "hey, ditch the concrete box look".
https://www.npr.org/2020/02/13/805256707/just-plain-ugly-proposed-executive-order-takes-aim-at-modern-architecture
Luckily, Joe Biden got right on it to save the concrete boxes!
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/biden-revokes-trump-classical-architectural-mandate-1947351
"Buildings should be beautiful" versus "freedom of design". Good job they quashed that fascist ideology!
"Trump’s order to “make federal buildings beautiful again”—a move that many believed echoed mandates by fascist leaders of the 20th century—is no more, thanks to President Biden."
The Great Male Renunciation is a wonderful title, but it seems to ignore that the Puritans got there first in the 17th century; if you like, it was taken to the extreme in Cavaliers versus Roundheads: long, curled hair (or wigs), slashed sleeves and bright colours on the one hand, short-cut hair, sober colours and modesty on the other, though there was a general reaction for both Catholics and Protestants towards less extravagance in dress, until the Restoration of Charles II brought sumptuousness back into fashion.
There are definitely these swings between high style and soberness, with the effects of post-war etc. on fashion and taste. Of course, if you are a rising new generation and you are going to rebel against your elders, then if the elders go in for furbelow, you will go in for austere minimalism.
I think the McMansions show the trouble with trying to build old styles today; it is very easy to topple over into kitsch, as someone in another comment noted. Lack of understanding of what the elements are meant to do and how they are meant to go together gets the result of things crammed in together in too small a space and without knowledge of what fits with what. You end up with Las Vegas style recreations that strike a note of vulgarism and of simultaneously being cheap (because they look tacky and low-class) and expensive (because even bad buildings are expensive to build).
You need sympathetic handling of the material in the space and an understanding of what works, combined with tactful updating and change to suit modern tastes. You don't get that easily, particularly when the patrons who are the ones paying for big modern projects want 'star' buildings that break records as World's Tallest or look different in some startling way - the Dubai idea of trying to build new attractions to be the New Seven Wonders of the World as tourist attractions in order to diversify their economy from its reliance on oil to a reliance on tourism and the very, very rich being willing to buy apartments and indulge in luxury retail experiences there.
I think under-explored is the link between Nazism and Communism and the birth of the sort of modern architecture most people hate.
Le Corbusier, the patron-saint of modern architecture, had the same vison as these totalitarian philosophies. It is no coincidence that the three of them rose to prominence in the interbellum, after the devastations of World War I. Their shared philosophy: ”The world that we inherited is rotten to the core and we will raze it to the ground and build a new world that will bring happiness and prosperity to all (my words).”
Le Corbusier was the Stalin of architecture. He thought he knew which architecture would create this ideal world and wanted to impose it on everyone, whether they wanted or not (and most people didn't want it, but who cares). In his Plan Voisin he proposed to literally raze Paris to the ground and replace it with sixty enormous buildings (a kind of enormous Projects or Banlieu). In this respect he was like Hitler, who wanted to do the same to Berlin. Also he worked in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1932.
Apart from that he was a nazi-apologist. In a letter to his mother he wrote:
“If he is serious in his declarations, Hitler can crown his life with a magnificent work, the remaking of Europe.” At the height of the war two years later, he described Hitler as “glimmer of good”, welcoming the great “clean- up” that was about to happen. “Money, the Jews, Freemasonry, everything will be subject to the law. These shameful fortresses will be dismantled.”
(source: https://nationalvanguard.org/2015/03/le-corbusier-shown-to-be-a-hitler-sympathizer/ )
Not to mention that the buildings and cities (Chandigarch) he created are terrible to live in.
It is incredible that he is still held in such veneration by most architects and critics and historians of architecture today.
I always wonder:”Do these people really believe what they write or not?” It is hard to believe they do...
Your post inspired this article on neighborhoods architecture (it’s linked there in the end): https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-05/urban-design-why-can-t-we-build-nice-neighborhoods-anymore?sref=ojq9DljU
The page linked on the Pepsi logo had a bunch of broken links and images, but if anyone didn't click through to the actual PDF document, (https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_gravitational_field.pdf), it's a work of art. ... quite possibly in genre of parody, but I really can't tell.
There are so many good parts, it's hard to pick one. Trying to equate the experience of standing in an grocery store aisle that has Pepsi with the "Relativity of Space and Time" is definitely a highlight.
This is wonderful, thanks for linking.
I started to chuckle when I got to page 21 and the diagram of "Pepsi energy fields"
Many substances were consumed while that was being produced, one of which was probably not Pepsi.
I once rented a room to a LWer named komponisto. (Don't rent to him; he still owes me thousands of dollars in back rent.) He was trained as a modern composer, but I never heard any of his music. He showed me a score once from his portfolio. It was in something like 2173 / 3481 time, obviously unplayable by any human, and I think not meant to be listened to. He explained that music composition had evolved to a new stage, and was all mathematics now..
I asked him if he thought his music was objectively better than Beethoven's, and he said yes. I asked him, If we could rewind the clock back to 1850, and get a do-over on the past 150 years, would we inevitably end up where we are now, musically, with music in 1472 / 2188 time like his? He said, yes, he thought so.
Don't let your problems with this person turn you off from listening to the music for player piano written by Conlon Nancarrow, who does some really amazing stuff in humanly-unplayable tempos. Canon X is the best, where the "left hand" and the "right hand" play identical music a few octaves apart, but one "hand" starts at an unplayably fast tempo and gradually slows down, while the other "hand" starts at an extremely slow tempo and gradually speeds up. But there's a pretty good one where the two "hands" play in square root of 2 time to each other, and a bunch of other interesting ones.
(I wouldn't say it's objectively better than Beethoven, but it's objectively good, and in a very similar spirit to Haydn.)
I went and listened and I don't get why we should appreciate that. I see the technique in Canon X, but I feel like Mozart(?) did equally fun techniques (what's that piece of music with a score that looks the same when you turn it upside down?) *and* made it beautiful at the same time. Or Philip Glass, who does the same thing: combine strict formal experimentation with real beauty and emotional impact.
I don't have any problem with very modern stuff or weird time signatures, but if there isn't a performative, affective, or communicative payoff, then it seems more like a technical exercise than an artwork.
Perhaps I'm just not getting the message that Nancarrow was sending.