"Why aren't more buildings built how I want them to be?" There are plenty of architects doing the kind of thing the author of that piece wants, they just seem to have missed them. Much of Zaha...
"Why aren't more buildings built how I want them to be?"
There are plenty of architects doing the kind of thing the author of that piece wants, they just seem to have missed them. Much of Zaha Hadid's work was nothing if not a hypermodernist take on Gaudi's cathedral-like spaces. Bjarke Ingels is doing the exact sort of "put trees in it though" thing the author wants. Sadie Morgan won the Stirling Prize for making a mostly empty space to put humans in. The article mentions Jeyifous's hypothetical projects without acknowledging Elizabeth Diller's very real ones. I could go on. Is a lot of corporate architecture dull? Yes. That's not news. But that's not the fault of architects, it's the fault of the clients who want boring buildings.
The author clearly likes bright colours and big child-like shapes. Cool! I like those things too. But I can also enjoy the monumental slabs of neobrutalist buildings, the disconnected shards of postmodern ones and so on. That some styles of architecture aren't to my taste doesn't mean architecture is broken any more than the fact I don't like jazz means music is.
I'm surprised to find myself on such a defensive side in this but here I am, I guess. Zaha Hadid does exactly the kind of sterile, anti-human CAD-shapes that I am about as sick of as the author....
Exemplary
I'm surprised to find myself on such a defensive side in this but here I am, I guess.
Zaha Hadid does exactly the kind of sterile, anti-human CAD-shapes that I am about as sick of as the author. Warm light can do wonders but looking at the building at perfectly average daylight reveals an agoraphobic nightmare in concrete. The Bjarke Ingels building is a power plant that looks like this from the outside, i.e., what people actually see of it when not in a helicopter. The Hastings pier... I guess you could have a party up there or something but I don't see how it's a place that humans would particularly enjoy standing on since, again, it's a big, gray polygon devoid of life.
The High Line Park is cool. But it's IMO harder to find examples like it than you make it out to be.
I'm not an architect, either, but I'm in design and recognize the issue as pretty prevailing just about everywhere. Adding any elements whose main purpose is to please visually is considered a rather controversial stance in high quality design. And that's just nuts. Looking at a wall that's a dominant visual backdrop for potentially thousands of people everyday and saying, "no, we can't add any embellishments because that wouldn't be pure" is just... cruel. Beauty itself serves a function and we can't just continue to define beauty as some kind of ascetic, quasi-masochist high-concept theory about space efficiency that only architects can appreciate after years of study and self-discipline. I genuinely believe there's an emperor's new clothes situation going on.
Despite all of that, there's some brutalist architecture I actually like. It can develop a mountain-like quality, giving cave-dwelling vibes of stability and security. But it has to be done exceptionally well and fit its purpose. Frank Loyd Wright did the Guggenheim Museum, which consists of clean shapes very comparable to what I dismissed above. But he built that place for non-objective art in a big city and it was quite unlike anything before. He also made Fallingwater and the motherfucking Ennis House. It's okay to do bold, clean shapes here and there but it now seems like every apartment complex is a variety of this. Architects are patting themselves on the back for taking off every possible element of joy or playfulness and expect people to be thrilled to look at the result. And whenever they state they are not, they're called uneducated. I don't think that's right.
If anything I think the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center looks better and more naturalistic in sunlight than at night, I think it looks like a scarf in the wind - but there you go. The BIG power...
If anything I think the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center looks better and more naturalistic in sunlight than at night, I think it looks like a scarf in the wind - but there you go. The BIG power plant I used as an example because a power plant is necessarily a large block of building, yet Ingels still managed to squeeze nature in there. He's done plenty of other work on a similar theme. Also I'm not sure how many power stations you've seen up close but BIG's is beautiful compared to every other one I've seen.
That picture of the Hastings pier you link to is a render, fwiw. I have a friend who lives there and absolutely loves the rebuilt pier precisely because it's space, space where things happen. It's a busy place full of people, when it's not raining. It's smart, sympathetic architecture, designed for humans. Another great example of that is Helsinki's wonderful Oodi library (part of the design of that included space for people to skate in the plaza outside, a thing aggressive corporate architecture often designs specifically against)
That significant amounts of corporate architecture is boring and soulless is a valid complaint. Those buildings were designed by committees and accountants. To blame the field of architecture for that is like trying to blame Radiohead for... um.. I don't know the names of any bland, manufactured pop acts. But imagine I do.
Adding any elements whose main purpose is to please visually is considered a rather controversial stance in high quality design.
That's absolutely not the case though. Just ask Frank Gehry (I mean seriously what the hell is that?!). Good design prioritises function because things should be designed to actually work, but it's also very concerned with aesthetics. Just because there's a current (arguably 1950-now) trend for relatively minimal design (both industrial and architectural) that doesn't mean design is against looking nice. The whole point of design is to make things look nice. Otherwise we'd just have engineers making everything and that really would be boring.
I would argue that plenty of modern architects are having fun, using colours, "pointlessly" embellishing things or generally being playful. Architecture is like any creative pursuit - there's lots of it and it's all different and you're not going to like all of it. Also like music, the bland corporate-made stuff is usually dreadfully uninspiring. But if you really think all modern architecture is pure machines-for-living/working no-frills modernist I think you might have missed a lot of really great buildings. I don't think you're uneducated but - and this is where my main problem with architecture comes - you're just not exposed to it. Even in our biggest cities there simply isn't enough good, challenging architecture around for most people to see. You have to go and read magazines and specialist websites to see the great stuff, because most buildings are paid for by people who don't want to take risks on things being exciting.
Zaha Hadid, whether you personally like her work or not, was unarguably one of the UK's greatest architects, yet she has barely any buildings in this country. Not because she didn't want to work here, but because the people building buildings here were too conservative to employ her. You say every other apartment looks like X and I don't disagree, in fact I'm furious about it - but that's the fault of the investors building them, not the architects.
The bad examples are photos of exteriors, often with lots of concrete. This is a shallow critique, as if you could tell whether a building is good or bad at first glance. I wonder what they look...
The bad examples are photos of exteriors, often with lots of concrete. This is a shallow critique, as if you could tell whether a building is good or bad at first glance. I wonder what they look like inside, and how people like working there? What are these buildings for? How well do they fulfill their purposes?
That’s still a shallow critique, but with more energy. It’s giving a lot of importance to exterior appearances, and none at all to anything else. Design is about complicated tradeoffs between lots...
That’s still a shallow critique, but with more energy. It’s giving a lot of importance to exterior appearances, and none at all to anything else. Design is about complicated tradeoffs between lots of different considerations.
One other consideration is money. Buildings are expensive. Spending a lot of money on a building means less money on other things. Fancy architecture is, among other things, a luxury and a way to show off wealth.
To get beyond shallow criticism, we would need to take the time study particular buildings.
I doubt that's how these buildings get built. Someone would have to research the history. We aren't going to do that. Maybe it would be better to just to be shallow about it? We can say which...
I doubt that's how these buildings get built. Someone would have to research the history. We aren't going to do that.
Maybe it would be better to just to be shallow about it? We can say which buildings look beautiful or ugly (in our opinions) without implying we know anything else about them.
Some of the good examples are also impossibly tacky (this certainly is an outsider's perspective and he acknowledges a lot of horrible examples of this same argument) but that doesn't change the...
Some of the good examples are also impossibly tacky (this certainly is an outsider's perspective and he acknowledges a lot of horrible examples of this same argument) but that doesn't change the point, which I believe is deep enough and certainly true: Modern architecture worships gray cubes to an unhealthy extend.
As for interiors, I believe the one, central example does its job. Compare this to this and tell me which one is a more pleasant place to be for the average human being.
As for a more nuanced and professional version of this same critique (aimed more at design in general), I can reference Stefan Sagmeister's project "Beauty". It's probably best experienced in person but it is based on very sound arguments, IMO. Modern design (and architecture) is kept hostage by a school of thought that basically denies emotion.
"Why aren't more buildings built how I want them to be?"
There are plenty of architects doing the kind of thing the author of that piece wants, they just seem to have missed them. Much of Zaha Hadid's work was nothing if not a hypermodernist take on Gaudi's cathedral-like spaces. Bjarke Ingels is doing the exact sort of "put trees in it though" thing the author wants. Sadie Morgan won the Stirling Prize for making a mostly empty space to put humans in. The article mentions Jeyifous's hypothetical projects without acknowledging Elizabeth Diller's very real ones. I could go on. Is a lot of corporate architecture dull? Yes. That's not news. But that's not the fault of architects, it's the fault of the clients who want boring buildings.
The author clearly likes bright colours and big child-like shapes. Cool! I like those things too. But I can also enjoy the monumental slabs of neobrutalist buildings, the disconnected shards of postmodern ones and so on. That some styles of architecture aren't to my taste doesn't mean architecture is broken any more than the fact I don't like jazz means music is.
I'm surprised to find myself on such a defensive side in this but here I am, I guess.
Zaha Hadid does exactly the kind of sterile, anti-human CAD-shapes that I am about as sick of as the author. Warm light can do wonders but looking at the building at perfectly average daylight reveals an agoraphobic nightmare in concrete. The Bjarke Ingels building is a power plant that looks like this from the outside, i.e., what people actually see of it when not in a helicopter. The Hastings pier... I guess you could have a party up there or something but I don't see how it's a place that humans would particularly enjoy standing on since, again, it's a big, gray polygon devoid of life.
The High Line Park is cool. But it's IMO harder to find examples like it than you make it out to be.
I'm not an architect, either, but I'm in design and recognize the issue as pretty prevailing just about everywhere. Adding any elements whose main purpose is to please visually is considered a rather controversial stance in high quality design. And that's just nuts. Looking at a wall that's a dominant visual backdrop for potentially thousands of people everyday and saying, "no, we can't add any embellishments because that wouldn't be pure" is just... cruel. Beauty itself serves a function and we can't just continue to define beauty as some kind of ascetic, quasi-masochist high-concept theory about space efficiency that only architects can appreciate after years of study and self-discipline. I genuinely believe there's an emperor's new clothes situation going on.
Despite all of that, there's some brutalist architecture I actually like. It can develop a mountain-like quality, giving cave-dwelling vibes of stability and security. But it has to be done exceptionally well and fit its purpose. Frank Loyd Wright did the Guggenheim Museum, which consists of clean shapes very comparable to what I dismissed above. But he built that place for non-objective art in a big city and it was quite unlike anything before. He also made Fallingwater and the motherfucking Ennis House. It's okay to do bold, clean shapes here and there but it now seems like every apartment complex is a variety of this. Architects are patting themselves on the back for taking off every possible element of joy or playfulness and expect people to be thrilled to look at the result. And whenever they state they are not, they're called uneducated. I don't think that's right.
If anything I think the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center looks better and more naturalistic in sunlight than at night, I think it looks like a scarf in the wind - but there you go. The BIG power plant I used as an example because a power plant is necessarily a large block of building, yet Ingels still managed to squeeze nature in there. He's done plenty of other work on a similar theme. Also I'm not sure how many power stations you've seen up close but BIG's is beautiful compared to every other one I've seen.
That picture of the Hastings pier you link to is a render, fwiw. I have a friend who lives there and absolutely loves the rebuilt pier precisely because it's space, space where things happen. It's a busy place full of people, when it's not raining. It's smart, sympathetic architecture, designed for humans. Another great example of that is Helsinki's wonderful Oodi library (part of the design of that included space for people to skate in the plaza outside, a thing aggressive corporate architecture often designs specifically against)
That significant amounts of corporate architecture is boring and soulless is a valid complaint. Those buildings were designed by committees and accountants. To blame the field of architecture for that is like trying to blame Radiohead for... um.. I don't know the names of any bland, manufactured pop acts. But imagine I do.
That's absolutely not the case though. Just ask Frank Gehry (I mean seriously what the hell is that?!). Good design prioritises function because things should be designed to actually work, but it's also very concerned with aesthetics. Just because there's a current (arguably 1950-now) trend for relatively minimal design (both industrial and architectural) that doesn't mean design is against looking nice. The whole point of design is to make things look nice. Otherwise we'd just have engineers making everything and that really would be boring.
I would argue that plenty of modern architects are having fun, using colours, "pointlessly" embellishing things or generally being playful. Architecture is like any creative pursuit - there's lots of it and it's all different and you're not going to like all of it. Also like music, the bland corporate-made stuff is usually dreadfully uninspiring. But if you really think all modern architecture is pure machines-for-living/working no-frills modernist I think you might have missed a lot of really great buildings. I don't think you're uneducated but - and this is where my main problem with architecture comes - you're just not exposed to it. Even in our biggest cities there simply isn't enough good, challenging architecture around for most people to see. You have to go and read magazines and specialist websites to see the great stuff, because most buildings are paid for by people who don't want to take risks on things being exciting.
Zaha Hadid, whether you personally like her work or not, was unarguably one of the UK's greatest architects, yet she has barely any buildings in this country. Not because she didn't want to work here, but because the people building buildings here were too conservative to employ her. You say every other apartment looks like X and I don't disagree, in fact I'm furious about it - but that's the fault of the investors building them, not the architects.
The bad examples are photos of exteriors, often with lots of concrete. This is a shallow critique, as if you could tell whether a building is good or bad at first glance. I wonder what they look like inside, and how people like working there? What are these buildings for? How well do they fulfill their purposes?
That’s still a shallow critique, but with more energy. It’s giving a lot of importance to exterior appearances, and none at all to anything else. Design is about complicated tradeoffs between lots of different considerations.
One other consideration is money. Buildings are expensive. Spending a lot of money on a building means less money on other things. Fancy architecture is, among other things, a luxury and a way to show off wealth.
To get beyond shallow criticism, we would need to take the time study particular buildings.
I doubt that's how these buildings get built. Someone would have to research the history. We aren't going to do that.
Maybe it would be better to just to be shallow about it? We can say which buildings look beautiful or ugly (in our opinions) without implying we know anything else about them.
Some of the good examples are also impossibly tacky (this certainly is an outsider's perspective and he acknowledges a lot of horrible examples of this same argument) but that doesn't change the point, which I believe is deep enough and certainly true: Modern architecture worships gray cubes to an unhealthy extend.
As for interiors, I believe the one, central example does its job. Compare this to this and tell me which one is a more pleasant place to be for the average human being.
As for a more nuanced and professional version of this same critique (aimed more at design in general), I can reference Stefan Sagmeister's project "Beauty". It's probably best experienced in person but it is based on very sound arguments, IMO. Modern design (and architecture) is kept hostage by a school of thought that basically denies emotion.