Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture

Hugh Johnson

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This is a long article about modern architecture being opposed to beauty, and I would say life itself. I am reminded of some literary award show where I saw these young intellectual types. The winner was reading his book, having chosen a passage where the girls find a smelly mushroom shaped like a ****, And started performing fellatio on it. It was a disgusting performance, and it was not like normal people act. All the people there were clearly living in their heads, caught up in these ideas. Beauty is not some intellectual idea, it is experienced in the body.

In the same way the architects are caught up in ideas, a way of living that is anti-life and they reproduce that philosophy in their work. IMHO.

 

Gustav3Y

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This is a highly subjective matter, since mostly anything it is built today has certain factors that it has to meet.

Now of course some of the buildings are function before form, at least so they were claimed in the 50s and 60s, like large brutal blocks with many apartments.
Quick prefabricated building for people to live after the WW2 and for the peasant to get to form cities rather live in adobe houses
Which the ex communist countries have with the ton.

For example I even like how certain old houses had their external walls done with cement and small gravel splashed on the walls.
Today this is considered technically hard to do, time consuming, impossible to repair once damaged and easy to get filled with tons of cobwebs that get dirty.


There are some reasons why certain buildings look how they look today, have to be done fast, quick from parts already available, workers have to be without experience so they can be quickly retrained to the most simple means of construction, building have to meet certain thermal and seismic requirements, which often can brutalize proportions even of the buildings that could be done better.
 

johnwester130

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This is a long article about modern architecture being opposed to beauty, and I would say life itself. I am reminded of some literary award show where I saw these young intellectual types. The winner was reading his book, having chosen a passage where the girls find a smelly mushroom shaped like a ****, And started performing fellatio on it. It was a disgusting performance, and it was not like normal people act. All the people there were clearly living in their heads, caught up in these ideas. Beauty is not some intellectual idea, it is experienced in the body.

In the same way the architects are caught up in ideas, a way of living that is anti-life and they reproduce that philosophy in their work. IMHO.


Who built all those grand buildings during the 1800s?

 

Quelsatron

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I'm not some traditionalist dullard, but we've obviously lost an innate human tradition with modern architecture. It's not so much about specific styles as it is about proportion and detail on all scales, plus certain differences in materials due to technology, and this applies from the egyptians to the romans to the chinese to the 19th century to the mesoamericans to eskimo war clubs. It makes me sad that nobody seems to be able to manage to apply the advances in technology and engineering to this innate human sense of aesthetics.
Who built all those grand buildings during the 1800s?

probably people without significant brain damage unlike that guy
 

Gustav3Y

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It makes me sad that nobody seems to be able to manage to apply the advances in technology and engineering to this innate human sense of aesthetics.
What are you considering advances in technology to be put into buildings and what would you consider humans sense of aesthetics?
 

Quelsatron

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What are you considering advances in technology to be put into buildings and what would you consider humans sense of aesthetics?
I mean we have glass, steel, indoor heating, lamps, etc, which would have made a medieval architect burst into prayer if he found them, I see no reason to sticking to 19th century architecture like a lot of traditionalists want. The human sense of aesthetic involve this fractal kind of detail, with reasonable proportion. Take for example the US capitol, which isn't architecturally remarkable but it's a good demonstration:
D2F5EA00-C5B7-F538-0D33DD9DB13B2BBF.jpg

It's in a sense an arrangement of various squares, pillars, and the dome. There is no naked flat wall in sight, every window is surrounded with pediments and other framing devices, the dome is not just a naked half circle but is on a layer cake type structure, even the repetitive segments with the pillars on the side wings are emphasized in such a way that it does not become robotic. Almost all impressive works of nonmodern architectural art and decorated objects throughout the world follows similar principles of elegant order with fractal levels of detail.
Postcard-World-Trade-Center_01.jpg

Just look at this picture of the WTC, it's a block that looks more at home inside a computer than as a symbol of architectural prowess. It has basically only two levels of scale: the entire box, and the almost invisible from far windows, which unlike the pillars of the capitol are repeated in such numbers that your eye glazes over trying to come to grips with them. Contrast with the gothic cathedral in the foreground makes my point more obvious.
 

Gustav3Y

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I mean we have glass, steel, indoor heating, lamps, etc, which would have made a medieval architect burst into prayer if he found them, I see no reason to sticking to 19th century architecture like a lot of traditionalists want.


The medieval architecture was not really beautiful because they had a high sense of aesthetic.
The most emblematic elements of the Gothic period for example the the pointed arch and flying buttress exist because of necessity to make tall buildings that support a ton of heavy weight material. so those beautiful shapes and elements exist because of a struggle with the materials that existed at the time.
If the people then which often were dead before they saw the construction done would have had 19th century materials and techniques they may have done something else entirely


Just like how regular houses many had straw roofs which do look nice and rustic, but they used to easily catch fire, needed constant skilled maintenance, beams were rotting, infects damage, fungi, etc.
And in the olden days if the city was not rich they could import material that were not available around them, if your area was a marsh like Ukraine was in the olden days you had no stone to build like in Rome.


Cathedrals were built very slowly often in centuries, which is the reason some of them have mixed styles and because it was all done by workers that had to teach other works how to work, this is a slow process and often due to health issues work could not be resumed.

This is fact is highly important, today we as a society rely on unskilled workers that can be trained into doing something else next year, thus the construction methods have to be highly simplistic and highly effective, meaning you have to not lose heat, not pay huge bills on heating, cooling, electricity, complex AC systems that a ton of room on the roof of the buildings.
 

Gustav3Y

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What is going on today is basically what the society has reached to be today and up until
this point shaped by human struggles and environmental events, not what an architect wants in a vacuum,
architects are being commissioned, told what to do and ultimately most importantly approved by someone or a group.
It is not the architects that actually shape the world it is the ones that approve and pay for any building or urban plan.
 

Quelsatron

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The medieval architecture was not really beautiful because they had a high sense of aesthetic.
The most emblematic elements of the Gothic period for example the the pointed arch and flying buttress exist because of necessity to make tall buildings that support a ton of heavy weight material. so those beautiful shapes and elements exist because of a struggle with the materials that existed at the time.
If the people then which often were dead before they saw the construction done would have had 19th century materials and techniques they may have done something else entirely


Just like how regular houses many had straw roofs which do look nice and rustic, but they used to easily catch fire, needed constant skilled maintenance, beams were rotting, infects damage, fungi, etc.
And in the olden days if the city was not rich they could import material that were not available around them, if your area was a marsh like Ukraine was in the olden days you had no stone to build like in Rome.


Cathedrals were built very slowly often in centuries, which is the reason some of them have mixed styles and because it was all done by workers that had to teach other works how to work, this is a slow process and often due to health issues work could not be resumed.

This is fact is highly important, today we as a society rely on unskilled workers that can be trained into doing something else next year, thus the construction methods have to be highly simplistic and highly effective, meaning you have to not lose heat, not pay huge bills on heating, cooling, electricity, complex AC systems that a ton of room on the roof of the buildings.
Flying buttresses were built for structural reasons, so were pillars and windows and walls, but there are many ways to arrange these elements into something which is aesthetically appealing. Egyptians didn't need to base their pillars on the plants of the nile, but they did so because it looked good.
 

Gustav3Y

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Egypt had rich religious culture, the gods and their particularities and spheres of influence, attempt to praise nature which is attached to religion, there is nothing built in Egypt without meaning, this is why people are fascinated with Egypt because of meaning and effort put into remaining alive long after the people were dead.
People back then weren't making dung beetle pendant like today because of feeling whimsical, there is powerful meaning behind it like most in Egypt, same how columns had been inspired by surroundings vegetation and stylized, like bundles of reeds, papyrus, etc, it may seem pure aesthetics if ignoring their symbolic meaning because today we lively mainly without the notion that everything has a meaning or a concept of afterlife.
It was important for the constructions to last well past the death of the ones that build them, if you got the knowledge and slaves, it can be done.
 

yerrag

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This is a long article about modern architecture being opposed to beauty, and I would say life itself. I am reminded of some literary award show where I saw these young intellectual types. The winner was reading his book, having chosen a passage where the girls find a smelly mushroom shaped like a ****, And started performing fellatio on it. It was a disgusting performance, and it was not like normal people act. All the people there were clearly living in their heads, caught up in these ideas. Beauty is not some intellectual idea, it is experienced in the body.

In the same way the architects are caught up in ideas, a way of living that is anti-life and they reproduce that philosophy in their work. IMHO.

I'm not sure I'd call their work anti-life, but certainly when you talk about Corbusier, his designs were alienating and he made high rise ghettos that surround Paris with alienated and displaced immigrants.

But a lot of modern architecture was basically snobbish. Their sense of beauty is that if the common man cannot appreciate it, then it is beauty because it cannot be appreciated if it has to be explained. But it is the same kind of snobbery that exists in other fields such as physics, astronomy, and medicine. How can you understand quantum physics, black holes, and imaginary pumps to explain physiology? You don't need to, as long as you're willing to leave it to the high priests of science to build their monstrous Rube Goldberg contraptions. The proof of brilliance is just as strong as that of Barack Obama given the Nobel Peace Prize barely after he began a presidency marked by mass murders by drones.

This is why when I truly want to enjoy travel, it's either going to the majestic vistas of mountains or the inspiring growth of Sequoia trees or the architecture seen in places such as Alhambra, where you see the fusion of great classical ideas in the melting pot of Islam and Christianity and the influences of Grecian and Roman architecture. They are a feast for the senses, and they truly inspire awe.

But when I look at the latest works of Frank Gehry, I only feel sadness, for what filth can come out from the mind of one who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao?

Thankfully, many of the ugly structures are built only in universities in the US. It would be a good time capsule in later times, when the ruins of the universities are held as examples by future anthropologists of the social and artistic decay of Western civilization, brought down by woke aesthetics and ideas.
 

Atman

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I think there is an objective element to the observation that modern architecture tends to be ugly.
You cannot explain all of it by the "function over aesthetics" argument.
There are many examples of grotesque buildings which are very asymmetrical and have elements and ornaments which do not serve any practical function.
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JudiBlueHen

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This is a long article about modern architecture being opposed to beauty, and I would say life itself. I am reminded of some literary award show where I saw these young intellectual types. The winner was reading his book, having chosen a passage where the girls find a smelly mushroom shaped like a ****, And started performing fellatio on it. It was a disgusting performance, and it was not like normal people act. All the people there were clearly living in their heads, caught up in these ideas. Beauty is not some intellectual idea, it is experienced in the body.

In the same way the architects are caught up in ideas, a way of living that is anti-life and they reproduce that philosophy in their work. IMHO.

100% agree. Anti-life is anti-spirit, oddly materialistic. Also those blob buildings do not age well - the mildew builds up and discolors the edifice and they look abandoned.
 

yerrag

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It is like the sculpted and manicured gardens that pair well with the drab straight lines, boxes, triangles, and circles of modern architecture. Shapes that are sterile because you don't find them in nature (except for the circle).

Easily imaged by algorithms and just as easily approved by the architect. Not imagined nor mimicking nature. Existing in these structures, one cannot feel safe and nurtured as in a cocoon, or underneath a tree, nor inside the majestic hall in a cave.

There is no flower, nor a hummingbird. Not even a crow can grace these structures.

No mole that accentuates a face like that of Cindy Crawford. Just a cosmetic implant that scars the horizon and clashes with the dawn and destroys the panorama.

In all its metal claddings that doesn't appreciate over time. Decaying. Hurting the senses.

But a welcome sight to see. Demolished. Imploding.
 

Gustav3Y

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Nature is everything we don't see also, nature is not only what we personally have been exposed to or what we personally fancy because of cultural reasons.
Mathematical shapes do exist in nature, squares, hexagons, pyramids, cones again even if we do not witness them they exist and are not man made.

Not a proponent of pruning trees into shapes, however trees are shaped by humans even if one cannot recognize a certain bounding shape by the pruning has been done to it or because of the persistent propagation of humans of certain trees to isolate certain traits like shape, fruit, disease resistance.

We are also highly subjective and I believe the analogy with nature never works because we do have choices and we are humans, spirals that shrink are present a lot in nature and also easily to witness (plants, gastropods) yet this sort of shape never impressed cultures around the world to make architecture like that.
Hexagons are pretty common from basalt rock formations to honeycombs, which are also easy to witness, but no culture favor this sort of aesthetic on large scale.
 

Jamesu

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I'm an Architect and have once thought the same. You're confusing the development of non architecturally incentive based design with actual modern style and practice. These mega cooperate style buildings are functionally or aesthetically simplified for industry. That's not architecture, that's industrialisation and corporatism. Good modern contemporary architecture exist but you need to know how to see it, and from which perspective you're expected to view it from. Check out the Nowness channel as they have good examples of contemporary Architecture.

Don't buy into this guys thread simply cause you hate ugly cities.
 

Jamesu

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This is post modern architecture, it isn't even considered contemporary anymore and it's a critique on the formalism of modernism...
I think there is an objective element to the observation that modern architecture tends to be ugly.
You cannot explain all of it by the "function over aesthetics" argument.
There are many examples of grotesque buildings which are very asymmetrical and have elements and ornaments which do not serve any practical function.
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Hugh Johnson

Hugh Johnson

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Good modern contemporary architecture exist but you need to know how to see it, and from which perspective you're expected to view it from.
See actually good architecture does not require me to study theory so that I can do intellectual gymnastics to justify it. If I go to the older cities around here I can enjoy the beautiful buildings because they are actually beautiful. Beauty is a real thing that is recognized by the body. I don't need learn to see it and find a perspective I am expected to view it from.
 

Jamesu

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See actually good architecture does not require me to study theory so that I can do intellectual gymnastics to justify it. If I go to the older cities around here I can enjoy the beautiful buildings because they are actually beautiful. Beauty is a real thing that is recognized by the body. I don't need learn to see it and find a perspective I am expected to view it from.

I'm not denying that old cities are more beautiful than new cities, nor am I performing mental gymnastics. It's simply that there are more than Just architects now designing and building our cities, and they're not by any means favorable by those in architecture who take it seriously. We have a problem with uninhabitable and sterile environment for a panoply of reasons that bare no relationship with architecture.
 
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