[HN Gopher] The new architecture wars
___________________________________________________________________
The new architecture wars
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-01-25 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| I haven't even read it yet, but Hatherley is, in my opinion, the
| best architecture critic out there. Will report back with any
| interesting observations.
| alberth wrote:
| https://owenhatherley.co.uk/journalism/
|
| Here's more of what he's written, in case you're curious like
| me.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| Yeah, lots of high quality criticism out there. You don't
| have to agree with what he's written to appreciate his
| ability to ask more fundamentally critical questions of the
| build world. He was first on my radar a LONG time ago (15+
| years I think) through his blog, "Sit Down Man, You're a
| Bloody Tragedy." and he doesn't even list his first book
| Militant Modernism in his Aeon byline anymore. Which was an
| awesome little look at UK brutalism.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| What I lament most about architectural debates is that they focus
| too much on individual buildings. The alienating part of the
| built environment where I live, which is one of the better built
| environments in the US, is the street layout. It's a grid, it's
| repetitive, and it's car-centered.
|
| We have already figured out how to build beautiful buildings in
| any number of styles from many eras. That's because a building is
| a discrete entity whose design is managed by one group of people,
| who can form a relationship with an architect who pours their
| heart and soul into the design.
|
| A street network, on the other hand, is managed by successive
| governments staffed by much more disinterested operators, and
| often by different governments who may be working at cross
| purposes. I'm not saying there should be a master plan (I
| actually don't like those) but rather that the logistics of
| designing a street network are much, much harder than for a
| single building, however you go about it.
|
| I also consider the harmonization of automobile and pedestrian
| traffic to be an open problem. Maximalists on both sides just
| talk past each other. Car-oriented development is bad, but at the
| same time we aren't going back to a pre-car world.
|
| Whether your model is Brasilia (modern) or Cayala (traditional),
| there are just so few opportunities to actually think about the
| design of the street network of a city. Street networks are just
| taken as given and then architects try to make the best of them.
| That's not a criticism of architects or city planners; the street
| network design largely seems to be on autopilot with very few
| opportunities for a change in direction. And for established
| cities, changing the network is nearly impossible.
| crabmusket wrote:
| This is why I'm addicted to Christopher Alexander, who is
| billed as an architect but wrote about the integration of
| architecture, site planning, streets, town planning, etc. As
| did Jane Jacobs. Both champion local decision-making, organic
| growth of places, and emphasize the integration of places on
| the street level.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| I've just recently re-read the Alexander chapter in Molly
| Steenson's book Architectural Intelligence. It's the most
| cogent and useful short reading I've found of Alexander. Well
| worth a look for the unfamiliar. Which you are not of course,
| but this comment is to help other folks find a good onramp.
| crabmusket wrote:
| That book sounds really interesting, thanks for the
| reference!
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| It's great - enjoy!
| bluGill wrote:
| Everywhere I've been in the US the grid was a sign of the old
| part of town. Newer parts don't have a grid. Newer streets are
| very crooked, dead end, otherwise do no go through - to keep
| cars away. There is a nearby highways system, but even that
| doesn't look much like a grid
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| Developing on this - not to keep -cars- away as they're
| usually "suburbs" which would atrophy and collapse without
| the private auto. But to - keep -anyone who doesn't know the
| street layout- away. It's a method to make the locale less
| hospitable to outsiders. This pattern is also due to the fact
| that these individual subdivisions do not connect to a
| distributed grid but to a tree-like branching of streets from
| largest trunk (freeways) through to branches (thoroughfares)
| to twigs (local streets) to leaves (individual properties).
| The subdivisions themselves are the investment of a single
| real estate development entity, and created without the
| requirement to connect to the larger whole except in this
| tree-mimicing organization.
| throwup238 wrote:
| This is especially obvious in Southern California where
| they've been putting up "emergency access roads" that have
| automated gates that respond to IR flashes from emergency
| vehicles so commuters can't use the suburbs as through
| streets but emergency services can still drive through in
| case of fire or other emergency and pedestrians can walk
| through. They're required for developments that want to
| stay isolated.
|
| One of those roads splits my neighborhood into two clear
| halves with each half only access by one artery, so that
| commuters don't go gunning through the neighborhood.
| vlaxx wrote:
| I hate to break it to you but, the city grid plan is ancient.
| The Greeks and Romans used it, even the Pre-Columbian Americans
| had it.
|
| The system is great for directions and general movement of
| people.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Can't wait for 3d printed Instagram histories in stone look on
| every surface. Ornament is wasteful, ornament is unwanted, but to
| the ego the house is ornament.
| resolutebat wrote:
| This article seems to be squarely focused on trends for showcase
| buildings like opera houses, which are highly visible but make up
| only a tiny portion of a city's buildings. But all new
| residential buildings I see are cookie cutter boxes, and all new
| office buildings I see are vertically stretched-out greenhouses
| with acres of glass.
| crabmusket wrote:
| The last three paragraphs, discussing co-operative apartments
| like La Borda in Barcelona, were interesting. Shame the rest of
| the article focused, as you say, on style over substance.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| I also wish he had discussed alternatives like these more. My
| takeaway is the argument - on which you're correct - that
| people have knock-down-drag-out fights about visual style. I
| would say that's not because it's as important but that it is
| what jumps out when browsing the infinite catalog of images
| that is the modern internet. And substance is what really
| matters. I think you mentioned Alexander in another comment
| and more of what he did is necessary - more systematic
| considerations of not just what something looks like, but how
| it works. And not just the single object or space, but
| enmeshed in the network of relationships that extend far
| beyond the formal.
|
| Edited to add: Having read so much Hatherley over the years I
| can almost guarantee that a name drop in the conclusion like
| that means he's currently developing more scholarship /
| criticism on the subject...
| bunderbunder wrote:
| All the old residential buildings in some of the nicer cities
| I've visited are also cookie cutter boxes. Residential areas in
| the older parts of Amsterdam are indeed beautiful and pleasant,
| but, much like the another commenter suggested, I'm pretty sure
| that's almost entirely due to the rest of the environment,
| especially the transportation infrastructure. Sure, they're
| nice well-built 300 year old buildings, but I think that, if
| the city were more car-centric, nobody would spend as much time
| outside, so nobody would be as motivated to take care of the
| exteriors of their buildings. And then it would look a lot more
| like the dingy dirty grimy pile of bricks that you see in
| cities like Chicago that use similar (if newer) architecture
| but haven't made the space between the buildings nearly as
| hospitable to humans.
| berbec wrote:
| Was I the only one tricked, bamboozled and hoodwinked into
| expecting an article about ARM64 vs x64?
| jonhohle wrote:
| I thought it might be about all the flavors of ARM and the
| death of a "compatible" standard.
| maxglute wrote:
| As someone really into architecture and urban design, I feel
| frequently bamboozled by HN articles with the word
| architecture.
| bad_username wrote:
| I was sure it was about monoliths vs microservices.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I thought it was Einsturzende Neubauten announcing a world
| tour!
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Just do 1800s baroque fascades but more classical modern
| internals
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| The Paris style aperment seems good
| maxglute wrote:
| Thesis:
|
| >Traditionalist and modernist architecture are both mass-
| produced, industrial and international. Is there an alternative?
|
| Alternative:
|
| >When the historian Frampton called for a 'Critical Regionalism',
| a modern architecture sensitive to place and materials, he found
| an example in the work of Alvaro Siza in Portugal.
|
| Rebuttle: regional/vernacular designs almost always involves more
| labour, which is expensive in advanced economies. Small
| countries/markets can't rationalize engineering entire regional
| specific building techniques and validate materials. Large
| countries/markets have multiple climate zones. In the end mass
| construction will fall back on value-engineered mass produced
| industrial building components.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The framing of traditional vs modern was distasteful. That is,
| until I went and looked at post-modern architecture, which has
| even less to say than modern architecture.
|
| Architects, we have to admit, are under-performing in the metric
| of "creating new architectural styles and schools of thought" and
| over-performing in "number of uninspiring designs."
|
| I have to conclude that either there are systemic barriers in
| getting out-of-distribution buildings built, or something about
| the pedagogy of architects that filters or hammers out out-of-
| distribution designs. Either way, we're suffering from a lack of
| architectural imagination.
|
| When I see neo-traditional examples[1], I can't help but be
| jealous we, in NA, aren't teaming with our own. Instead we've got
| architects churning out designs that fit squarely in confines of
| The Ten Thousands Buildings of Oatmeal Problem[2]. Taken as a
| whole, the parts and their interactions, are a system for
| producing architectural oatmeal.
|
| 1. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Andean
|
| 2. https://golancourses.net/2018_60212f/wp-
| content/uploads/2018...
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| So one framing for what's happening now is Parametricism, a
| term coined by Patrik Schumacher and associated with the style
| of his business partner and firm: Zaha Hadid.
|
| The basic premise of parametricism is that with fully digital
| design pipelines we have new ways of addressing the flaws in
| modernism while avoiding the aimlessness of postmodernism. In
| this view, architects are no longer designing surfaces or
| volumes, but rather painting parameters which are then utilized
| by algorithms and optimizers. This approach results in a style
| that has both unity and variation, continuous differentiation
| instead of the mechanistic repetition of modernism.
|
| Here's one dry video and two kinda silly ones that introduce
| the perspective:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIcGTBRoKlg
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfg_7ihB0YU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il41AlOBlgk
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It's _interesting_ that people are searching for the escape
| hatch, and I appreciate the videos, but I don 't have much
| hope in parametricism.
|
| The reason I don't have much hope is that parametricism has
| arrived, it just isn't evenly distributed yet. One of the key
| ideas in the videos you mentioned was the digital tooling
| that enables parametricism. I need to point out that the same
| tools and ideas are already put to use in digital
| asset/content creation. We've already experienced the
| negative side of parametricism in digital content,
| specifically games that employ procedural generation.
|
| But shouldn't procedural[parametric] design of digital
| content provide endless variety? The reality is more
| complicated and this is where I have one reason to believe it
| won't, and one reason to believe it will.
|
| The reason parametric design won't provide endless variety is
| the Ten Thousands Bowls of Oatmeal Problem I referenced
| above. Just because each instantiation is different, variety
| must be semantically meaningful. It doesn't matter that each
| bowel of oatmeal has a unique combination of fruit, nuts,
| honey, and spices. It's that at the end of the day they are
| all just bowls of oatmeal. Real variety would be scrambled
| eggs, crepes, or breakfast in bed. I don't have hope that
| architects will be able to create salient variation ie:
| perceptual uniqueness. Adding more variational parameters
| doesn't guarantee any increase in perceptual uniqueness. In
| fact, it's an open question[1] as to what does.
|
| The reason I think parametric design could succeed is that
| the equation for parametric architecture is different than
| that of digital content. Manual curation, for example, is a
| huge cost compared to procedural generation, but a negligible
| cost compared to building a building. Curation may pose an
| effective filter against perceptual sameness.
|
| I'll likely remain a cynic until evidence that parametricism
| indeed offers a way out of the doldrums of the last 80 years
| of architecture.
|
| 1.https://knivesandpaintbrushes.org/projects/why-oatmeal-is-
| ch... (previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35735763)
| scythe wrote:
| I've come to believe that we're too abstract and afraid to say
| what we really mean. There are a few things that could be changed
| that would, IMHO, make a _big_ difference in the aesthetic
| quality of new development without the need for "style"
| arguments.
|
| - Roofs are flat. HVAC equipment is put on the roof. This allows
| a maximum use of zoned floor area.
|
| --> Solution: write a roof/attic allowance into zoning codes.
|
| - Trees are too small. Developers want to avoid maintenance
| difficulties with trees, so they plant dwarf varieties that don't
| provide shade.
|
| --> Solution: fund tree management as a public good. Offer
| incentives for preserving existing trees.
|
| - Buildings are surrounded by Stepfordesque hedges that look
| unnatural. Green space is crammed into noodle-shaped setbacks
| that are too narrow to support anything like a garden. Mulch is
| everywhere.
|
| --> Solution: replace setbacks wherever possible with access
| easements and open space requrements.
|
| I couldn't care less what the big famous buildings look like. I
| don't spend much time near them anyway. That's a high-class
| problem. No wonder it's a duel between the right and the yuppies.
|
| As to why flat roofs are ugly? I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it
| has to do with flat-topped things being uncommon in nature. It's
| a structure made possible only by decently sophisticated
| engineering, what with the stress on corners and the need for
| drainage. It makes the occipital lobe think it's missing
| something.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-01-25 23:00 UTC)