65 replies
4h26m
Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture.
Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood. Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe.
In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build, they've not been able to build anything even close to pretty. The best they do is a bad copy of old style.
The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures.
That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more.
This is called "survivorship bias". Don't base your opinions of the past exclusively on the things that survived til now. The things that survived til now are, by definition, the exception to the norm from the time. Not every european building is a work of art, not every Lancaster Bomber avoided being shot in the engines, not all the dinosaurs were animated skeletons.
What do you think Barcelona is?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA.
No. [https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/construction-costs-hit-hig...]
I know the economics must somehow make sense, but it's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that even with quite literally once-unimaginable computing power, semi-magical modern materials, structural theory, decades of recorded research and testing, international standardisation, leaps in simulations, optimisation, robotics, pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, networking, transmission, logistics and supply chain engineering, economies of scale that dwarf the imagination of the most ardent technologist of yesteryear....humans still can't stack bricks or nail frames cheaply enough to reliably put roofs over heads.
It's a hell of a Red Queen thing.
We can do that. But we can't make new space.
If the footprint is so expensive, you'd expect more investment in building quality, not less.
bricks and wood are unable to maximize the quality of a limited footprint. an expensive plot of land in a city needs to be built to certain quality standards to make sure it is affordable and safe. this is only possible with steel and concrete.
brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories
Much of American cities and outer areas of are 0 stories (big lots, wide roads, etc), or maybe 1-2. Building technology is not the limiting factor.
Of course depending on the definition, but light-framed wood is good for around 5 stories. And mass timber (eg. CLT - cross-laminated timber) is good up to ~20. And for the foundation concrete is still needed. But a lighter one.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-...
Because the footprint is so expensive, you don't have the cash to invest in quality without making the building too expensive for the people who are going to be using it.
And the footprint isn't the only thing that's more expensive, all the cool new technologies that your grandparent comment brought up are all more expensive to implement than structures without them. The existence of those technologies implies the existence of skilled professionals to plan and install them. It used to be that you just needed to pay your architect and engineer and builders, now you gotta also pay your crane operators and electricians and plumbers and acoustic consultants, and fire protection experts, and geologists, and network engineers, and energy consultants, and accessibility consultants too and they all want to be paid well for their expertise.
The proliferation of skilled professionals reduces the appetite in the population in general for unskilled manual labor, so that gets more scarce and expensive too. Gotta pay the builders well or else they'll quit and change careers to be one of those professional types.
Add to that the regulatory and compliance requirements that raises the floor of acceptable quality (building MUST be energy efficient, accessible, fire-safe, earthquake-safe, minimally ecologically impactful, etc etc etc) and your wiggle room for where to focus your "quality" budget is pretty tiny and exterior aesthetics rapidly sinks to the bottom of that list.
[disclaimer: I actually disagree with the people who say that new buildings are ugly. I actually like the modernist and international style aesthetics that are artistic declarations of raw functionality. My town has a brutalist city hall where the council chamber juts out in an overhang, so when you walk by you can look at it and say "that funky structural appendix is the exact room where people are making important decisions at this very moment" which I think is cool. This post-modern concert hall just opened a few blocks from me and I think it's pretty sexy: https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11... ]
Short answer to the riddle is: not enough demand to warrant investment (because you would need a long string of a few magnitudes bigger projects). Basically, the same structural problem that plagues nuclear power plant construction.
All those fancy technological advancements did almost nothing to the typical housing construction, it's still a lot of manual work, a lot of specialized tasks (site prep, foundation, frame/structural stuff, roof, insulation, plumbing, sewage, wiring, HVAC, connecting utilities), a ton of waiting, lots of logistics. An enormous amount of babysitting (project management) of the builders, because everything is basically custom/one-off.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innov...
There's a lot of costs that go into construction, the actual expense of putting together the parts to make the thing was at one time the biggest one, but not any more.
With all those new technologies that increase the efficiency of buildings and construction come technicians who expect to be paid well for their expertise, so for every manual job removed there's an expert who needs to be paid about as much or more to operate or plan the labor-saving technology so implementing the technology may not actually reduce the cost to the builder at all.
For the parts that do still require manual labor, that's been getting a lot more expensive and hard to find, because hand-in-hand with people specializing in all these fancy new technologies, the appetite for manual labor employment in developed economies has fallen, which pushes up the cost of the parts of construction that technologies hasn't changed.
Regulations and requirements have also massively proliferated in the last century. The number of inspections and approvals that any piece of construction needs is pretty crazy compared to the prewar era, plus new requirements and design limitations set by law that, while good for society (anti-fire, disability access), can sometimes drive up costs or limit design choices because ramps take more space than stairs and fire sprinklers represent a doubling of the amount of plumbing work you need to do.
Land has gotten progressively more expensive as it has become more scarce. Sprawl kinda reached the limit of what commuters are willing to tolerate in the 90s, so nobody can do cheap greenfill development anymore (anecdote, my parents had a new house built on the outskirts of Phoenix in 2006, with a 70 minute minimum driving commute, which I would absofuckinglutely never tolerate for myself): you need to buy more expensive interior land to redevelop. God help you if your local land use regulations require you to provide free parking, in which case you may be forbidden from building on as much as 2/3 of that very expensive land you just bought.
"Won't", not "can't".
The interior of the small apartments in Pompeii are beautifully decorated, and at the very least more skillfully so than most medieval churches, and we are talking about a small run of the mill rural Italian town.
The reason Roman architecture is gone, is that the christians scrapped them for building materials to build churches, something that still happened until relatively recently (see the Temple of Ceasar pillaged in the late 15th century).
The Colosseum itself is a pretty bad example of architecture left intact, it's literally sawn-off in half.
Architecture is the only art where you're forced to participate. So we could pretty much say the opposite, buildings should, among other things, contribute to make a place nice. Or at least not make it more miserable.
Most of Spanish cities are built with crap buildings dating above the 60s. Just concrete blocks, in some cities even with just plain grey and humidity stains. It doesn't matter how historic the city is, because the "historic center" it's just a small spot surrounded by uglyness.
Not historic. Well some of it is, there is a tiny small town core that dates back to Roman times. The vast majority of the city only dates back to the 1900s. They were just lucky that Gaudi and other great architects practiced then and built landmarks that really should be preserved for as long as we can. Don't make a mistake though, Gaudi and peers built the city we know in the 1900s which isn't very old.
> The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures.
I'd say that's their stated purpose, not their inherent one. Beauty is only useless to those who choose to believe so.
If you're not convinced, I recommend Roger Scruton's "Why Beauty Matters"
https://vimeo.com/549715999
Be careful to avoid survivorship bias here. Only the "best" buildings from Medieval and Renaissance times (or even later into the 1800s) are still around. Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.
Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.
There are lot's of city centres in Europe in France, Italy, Belgium etc. where entire neighborhoods survived, and they look great.
I think the ultimate city if you like old European architecture is probably Prague. It's a big city and most of it is amazing.
You're totally right that France/Italy/Belgium all have amazing towns to visit. But in case someone is looking for a random tip elsewhere: Český Krumlov (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD_Krumlov), which is in today Czechia (handy in case you happen to visit Prague), but used to have a large German population before WWII. It looks wonderful, perhaps the most perfect Medieval town I've seen.
Yeah Prague is awesome; although same as Amsterdam, and other bigger cities the chaos of the cities at times is a distraction. Cesky looks lovely, France also has amazing places. I do think this is the most perfect Medieval town though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel
new york city's brownstones are considered beautiful and iconic now, but when they were built they were described as cheap eye-sores and a blight upon the beautiful city.
i imagine a similar trend must exist for most of the European cities. people's aesthetic usually rejects the new, but recognizes the beauty once it is seen as old and classic
You must not travel a lot. There are huge numbers of historic villages and towns with original or very old architecture. If we were dealing with survivorship bias, we should expect essentially random buildings scattered around cities, not entire towns or contiguous historic districts.
You may want to double check that the historic buildings you see in historic districts are actually, uhh, historic. Historic building codes have been around for hundreds of years in some areas and many of the buildings are rebuilds and ones that didn’t fit the mold have been rebuilt.
Not that modern concrete architecture is not a blight on our cities, but not all historic buildings were originally as charming as we may see them today.
I was thinking of iconic buildings - cathedrals, etc.
Thinking of old towsn in the UK, many are picturesque, but those old cottages tend to have limited windows and low ceilings make them far less functional by modern standards.
Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.
"hideous blobs of steel and glass" were originally known as glorious and beautiful modern architecture. oversaturation makes the creative into the tired and boring
I am not sure - I can see why Empire State or Chrysler are majestic, but WTC was hideous. And I saw them simultaneously for the first time. The shard is probably nice, shanghai tower is not too ugly, burj khalifa is ok - but almost everything else is eyesore.
Nope, visit ANY old german village that wasn't bombed during ww2. Most of the old houses still stand and every single one is prettier than what is being build today.
The thing is, most of the 60's/70's building look like shit from outside but are pretty nice and super funcional from the inside while some older ones were made for an era where people had huge hotel particuliers with servants and stuff and the current appartments have been build by splitting those in parts. Those appartments that aren't as well made/functionnal despite being nice to look at and having lots of vertical space, nice carved/moulded ceiling, etc.
In Spain it's not only 60s/70s, pretty much everything build between the 60s and the 90s is not only ugly AF, but very low quality. And Barcelona is not even the worst offender. In northern spanish cities there's a lot of grey in the buildings, with basically no insulation in a humid and cold climate. My GF used to joke it was colder inside her home than outside.
After the new construction code in the early 00s the quality has improved a lot but we still build very ugly buildings.
No wonder why people chose to gather and spend their time where the historial centers are.
Seems architects really refuse to extract some lessons from this.
And half the Barcelona buildings from the 60s/70s were made with concrete that turns to sand when it gets wet (aluminosis). People have died in buildings that suddenly collapsed.
Well I hate to say it as I am also living in Spain, in the south, but there is definitely a culture of making stuff with the minimum effort and a lack of focus on quality.
And I too do joke that it feels colder inside than outside from mid november to mid february.
Do you mean that being habitable without air conditioning is a negative feature?
I didn't say that. Maybe I haven't phrased it correctly but it was meant to be understood like "despite lots of vertical space, nice ceilings, etc". These are nice things but it doesn't really matter if the floor space is illogical, the kitchen is barely larger than a small wardrobe and you have a piece of corridor that barely has any purpose, is difficult to organize and is only wasting space.
"Do you mean that being habitable without air conditioning is a negative feature?"
in a specific climate, sure. but in other climates high ceilings might just be a burden on the air conditioning system
Le Courbousier is what happened. He actually wanted to demolish Paris and put up a huge office park. But I love modern architecture. Try going to the Salk institute or even the Marin County Civic Center. It’s pretty mystical.
Try going to Palma, Salk institute looks like a depressive lifeless concrete mess OCD creation.
https://www.spain.info/en/destination/palma/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biologica...
is a picture of the named building. Your link, for me, puts up a beautiful (sandstone?) cathedral.
It really does look depressing, even in the best photos
Brazilia (the city) is pretty nice. Getting rid of roads and keeping/extending parks is much easier there than, in either a suburban sprawl or in Barcelona.
The "towers in the park" concept works, if the park is not just an artificial green desert. (And the towers are not the underfunded "projects"), for example Hong Kong (the island), with the green mountain and the walkable seaside promenades felt much more livable than even Barcelona.
Le Corbusier*
We underestimate the pressure the world has been under in the last century. In 1950, we had about 2.5 billion people. Today, we have 8 billion. We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people who all expected to have a greater standard of living with electricity and living space; something had to give.
We had to be more parsimonious with the materials at our disposal.
"We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people" is irrelevant to a discussion of one city in Spain that did not grow quickly: Spain has its own architects that haven't been influenced much by architects in countries like Nigeria and India where the population grew very fast.
Population of Barcelona grew from 500K to more than 1.7M in 70 years.
OK (that is much faster growth than Spain as a whole) but the 5.5 billion new people is still irrelevant.
It’s not irrelevant as a ratio. 2.5 billion to 8 billion is very comparable to 500k to 1.7 million. The population tripled in 70 years and, in the current times, you also have to deal with all the existing architecture and infrastructure in the city that wasn’t built for anywhere near that population level.
Check out Brent Hull on YouTube who is answering this very question. His basic premise is that post WWII the focus on efficiency and mass production ruined the craftsmanship that went into older buildings.
Meh, we're still very very far from mass-production. We got rich and spend a lot of that on inefficiently building higher quality houses.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale
I love Brent and his redesigns of existing buildings are really eye opening. It really shows how bad people fail at building traditional buildings today. He makes a compelling argument for why his redesign makes more sense and to my eye the buildings tend to look much better and simpler too. It's based around some basic theory that had served builders well for a long time and has been thrown out to build gaudy things that imitate very poorly.
One of my favorite observations of his is that a modern cheap door isn't even really a door - it's more a simulation of a door than an actual door. It is made of plastic and filled with foam but is made to look like wood and has stiles and rails and fake paneling pressed into the moulding to look like what people think a door looks like. And it comes in a pre-fabricated frame and is installed, not crafted. But it doesn't feel like a door or sound like a door. Just a flimsy thing that closes a passage off. And we admire installers today, not craftsmen.
One thing about him, and I think he acknowledges it, is that efficiency and mass production are why so many more people can live in relatively nice homes today. Not everyone (in fact most people can't) can live in a well crafted home made from the best materials, etc. But I do agree with him that developers could at least try and make things that are rooted in some sense of design principal.
I used to work in a Georgian building.
I'll take the ugly 70s concrete block I work in nowadays any day. It's _extremely_ difficult to adapt a lot of these old forms to functional, comfortable housing and offices. There are exceptions, but practicality is a big part of the change.
You're also seeing a certain amount of survivor bias in many cities; the old buildings that are still around are the ones that someone thought it would be worthwhile to keep around.
We don't have to go that far back in time, European cities have loads of beautiful buildings still from early 1900s. For example whole neighborhoods of Jugendstil apartment buildings that mainly housed working class people moving to cities. New construction in these same neighborhoods simply do not match the beauty of the existing housing stock. And early 1900s housing is usually quite nice if it's been at least slightly renovated (double glazing etc).
It is much cheaper to build McMansions, etc
McMansions are also functional. They may not look good, but they do what people need in a house well (obviously with thousands of different McMansions there will be thousands of different things). I have a house in 1970 - it is okay, but modern houses of a similar size are a lot more functional because space is used differently. I've been in houses built in 1920 which were really bad - they looked nice but as an engineer I see a lot of things that are just wrong.
What happened is that a vast quantity of people moved into and around the cities. We also have more strict building codes that take into account light, air quality, longevity, energy effiency etc.
You’re looking at an old city built for a relatively small elite over many hundreds of years, and you’re surprised why cities built for many millions of people over a few decade look a bit basic in comparison?
I came across some pre-WW2 photographs of a European city I know, of the more poor districts that don’t often get photographed. You think they looked nice? A modern apartment building looks much better than those cheap wooden shacks and lasts 100 times longer.
I think there’s hope in the long term. My grandmas apartment building was built quickly and cheaply and looked like trash when I was a child. It has since been renovated with a nicer brick facade. Could be better, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Give it a hundred years and compounding refurbishment and survivorship bias will make most cities look great.
I just came back from San Francisco and plenty of post WW2 buildings there (mostly high rises) look nice.
Buildings used to be made by rich people or institutions who built what they wanted.
Now it's controlled by bureaucrats and regulations.
old buildings used to also be death traps, we only know of the survivors, but lots of old construction would burn down, collapse in a minor earthquake, or rot from water.
we only have the survivors to admire now
To a certain extent: economics.
Beauty generally does not show up on a spreadsheet, and when it does it often adds cost. Glass costs less than steel, concrete, or stone, so it's lower CapEx to have glass towers. (Of course glass sucks as a thermal insulator, so your OpEx for heating/cooling may be higher.)
You might enjoy the Tom Wolfe book, From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tries to explain the observations you make. Very lively, funny writing and you know he is on the right track because he was universally panned by modern architects.
A few things. first off, we have code now. Until the 1950s you could do whatever you wanted. But nowadays there a bunch of things that need to be "up to code" and it's not just internals like electrical, etc. Stairways, railings, heights, room sizes, construction technique, etc are all affected by this. And we continue to add more and more code for things like efficiency, etc. And this isn't a bad thing - code means we have safer buildings and when someone buys a building there's at least a minimum standard that has been met.
So this means you are going to build in ways that are proven and will be up to code. Which leads to the second thing.
Construction materials have become standardized over the last 100 years or so. We went from a world where things were crafted to a world where things are manufactured and installed. Buildings are made mainly of commoditized parts and materials today which makes a lot of things look simplistic and similar. This is good in many ways because when a craftsman was hand carving things they were not very productive and it cost a lot of money. Today, a worker is amazingly productive since their tools are powered and their materials are pre-fabricated and just need to be cut to size.
Lastly, buildings are far more complex today than 100+ years ago. Lots more electrical and plumbing, complex HVAC, insulation requirements, etc. These things were not considered long ago. You had carpentry and maybe a bit of plumbing and some basic electrical.
You can still get really nice custom work done and it's unbelievable expensive.
I agree. Kids watch Harry Potter and dream about Hogwarts and their school pretty much looks like a prison without the barbwire and guard towers. They don't play in the woods but on a asphalt blacktop or a square of grass. Sad.
Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;)
A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.
People de-risk their asset by building it as easy to not offend as possible so if they have to sell it they can find a buyer with relative ease.
"modern architecture" is a following the same pricniples of most architecture, engineer it to be strong enough, for as cheap as possible, if you are very very lucky somebody may be willing to pay extra to make it look good.
usually the church was more than willing to pay extra for beauty, but the average apartment building or urban mixed-use building built in the last few decades is likely focused on being affordable and efficient.
You are understating cheaper to build. A lot of the beautiful buildings took decades if not centuries to construct. Cost hundreds of millions of dollars inflation-adjusted. They are also extremely expensive to maintain, as stone is expensive in so many ways.