The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings | Hacker News Reader

The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings

nymag.com

83 pointswhocansay56 comments

"So the trick, it seems, is to design a world that excites but doesn’t overly assault our faculties with a constant barrage of information"

I just got back from my first trip to Chicago. I've been to quite a few cities, but the variety of architecture and juxtoposition of certain styles throughout the city made for a very enjoyable experience. Not every single building in the city is pretty either. But taken as a whole and hearing how history, art, architecture, and engineering shaped the city was fascinating. I actually did the architectural river tour, which I found to be one of the most enthralling guided tours I've ever been on. Highly recommended.

This is one of the "secret" reasons I left the Bay Area to return to Chicago - downtown Chicago (aka The Loop) is beautiful. Please help keep it a secret so everyone doesn't move here and drive the price of everything up. ;)

You're joking, I know, but just to point out: Chicago is gigantic. Bring it on, Google and Facebook and Apple. We've got more than enough space. :)

The bay area has more than enough space too. It spreads over 100 kilometers south of San Francisco. It covers more than the surface area of NYC in total. The real issue is that the bay area refuses to grow. The population is only about 5 millions IIRC. The density is really low.

IMO, in order to accomodate more people, and deal with the insane rents, the bay area needs to start growing vertically. Every other urban area I've been to has towers, apartment complexes. Here everything is flat. Most apartment buildings are only two floors high, rarely more than three.

I won't get into the politics of all of this, but politics are the real problem. Many of the suburbanites around here want their suburbs to remain suburbs. The law of offer and demand should mean that apartment towers are getting built and rents go down as competition increase, but the regulations in place prevent this. Many swanky new condos are being built, but these are still flat buildings, not making efficient use of the available space.

Chicago has a dense transit infrastructure that spreads across the whole city, and pretty decent transit throughout the whole metro area.

Obviously, San Francisco is hemmed in by geography, but even if you compare the metro areas, Chicago is better suited to hosting large-scale companies than SFBA.

I do like the architectural diversity in the Loop, but it goes beyond just downtown. One of the things that I love about my neighborhood is how you'll find 2, 3, or 4 floor walkups built anywhere from 100 to 1 year ago right next to each other. Some of the modern architecture from the 60s and 70s doesn't look great in isolation and I wouldn't want an entire street of it, but when its sandwiched between a building built in 1920 and one built in the last few years it gives the neighborhood a lot of character.

edit: an example: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8970249,-87.6709707,3a,75y,9...

That architectural river tour makes me proud to be an engineer. Buildings hung up by their own bootstraps, floating foundations, and oh, by the way the river used to flow in the other direction.

I read an interesting study a while back about architecture in London, taken with a sample of professional architects and a sample of general population, all based in London. All the architects in the study hated the old Edwardian terraces, and pitied people who lived in them. All the non-architects loved the old Edwardian terraces, and hated the majority of the buildings the architects loved.

You could easily make an argument from the point of view of the architects in that study that a row of Edwardian terraces are dull and boring, but most Londoners would love to live in them.

With that in mind, I'm a bit wary of this - there are certainly plenty of horrible buildings around - 60's brutalist concrete would be an example of a style I particularly dislike - but how do we decide what's bland and what's attractive?

Possibly by doing representative sampling of the user population and finding what works for them.

Architects are encouraged to be outrageous, individualistic, capricious, even dictatorial. A generic Edwardian terrace is the opposite of everything creative architecture is supposed to stand for. So a divergence of opinion is not a surprise.

But I think it's interesting that you can estimate the health of an environment by measuring the effects it has on people. That's not quite a new idea in architecture, but it's certainly not central to architectural teaching.

"Objective architecture", assessed by measurable effects instead of subjective whimsy, would revolutionise the profession.

I think it is rather that since the early XX, architects, like painters, stopped caring about doing "beautiful" and only cared about doing "original". But the difference between painters and architects is that painters can only offend the visitors of the Tate Modern, who are presumably consenting. Architects will offend anyone who happen to live in a city where they exercise their creativity.

It's actually a reversal of previous eras where people didn't want "beautiful" but wanted to ape the classics.

Today originality is seen as a boon, but for a long time you were only seen as a true master if first you could replicate old works.

""Objective architecture", assessed by measurable effects instead of subjective whimsy, would revolutionise the profession."

Agreed. It could also put money back to architecture. Let's say your company revenue of 70k$ per year per employee, there is 300 of them in a factory. You move your company to new factory, but you meet architect who can promise you 5% increase in employee productivity. That's 70X300X0,05= 1050k$/year more in revenue. You can probably spend some money to hire that archi-rainmaker.

Architects are in the same bind that the craftsmen whose work they now despise were.

With modern materials, the scut work and routine labor that master masons and carpenters cut their teeth on is gone -- they mostly assemble. So there's no skilled tradesmen at the level that you could find 100 years ago. When my local cathedral did a rehab, they shipped in Italian stonemasons and paid them $150/hr.

Enter the architect. With prefabrication and computerization, tens of thousands of man-hours of architect time has been vaporized. So at the low end, they pay the bills with cheap templated crap that wins bids and looks bland. At the high end, they produce stuff that is "unique" and often completely non-functional and/or visually offensive. (But looks good in the portfolio)

In the meantime, most lay people are attracted to more classic architecture that has been perfected over centuries.

There are many low cost options for making big Efficent buildings distinctive. The real issue is arcatects are judged more like sculptors than people who create useful spaces.

My hypothesis is that increasingly complex building codes makes it increasingly economic to rebuild the same stock of housing multiple times.

It's a bit unusual, what could have increased the workload of architects as design requirements became more complex instead lead to their downfall.

As an example of your point: I love 60s brutalist concrete.

I really enjoyed the book 'A Pattern Language' by Christopher Alexander. It looks at architecture from the level of the ordinary person and has some brilliant insight into what makes a building pleasant to live in. I applied some ideas from the book when I renovated my house and it has been a huge success.

What specific ideas did you apply?

One that I got from that book and have found to be rock solid is that a room feels more alive when it has a window on more than one side.

This is something I have thought about often, living in Norway. Seemed like there must have been some period in the 50s-60s when building the most mind-crushing office buildings / hospitals / apartment blocks was the goal. Maybe the psychological effect of buildings vary over years? I.e. in the 50s-60s boring, 'efficient' buildings were seen as modern and progressive, and thus, gave a morale boost?

Exhibit A: http://borghoytrykk.no/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Vaskhøyblo...

There was a period of modernist architecture up through maybe the mid-70s--including but not limited to Brutalism--that has aged particularly badly for the most part. Even examples that were presumably designed to stand out, like Boston City Hall and the Boston Public Library addition (to the original beautiful Beaux Arts structure) look simply awful today.

I think one problem is that concrete literally ages terribly. The Watergate wasn't supposed to be a dirty, stained, dark gray.

Unsealed concrete does. The problem is that the surface of concrete is still fairly porous without sealing, so it readily stains.

Boston City Hall is quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen. The soot-belching, ash-caked, grease-grimed, wood-burning power plant that I worked in summers in college was more beautiful.

It really is hideous. I grew up in the Boston area, and even as a little kid I distinctly remember thinking, "This has got to be the ugliest building in the world". Then when I got older I thought, "Well, the world is a big place and I haven't seen much of it, so I don't have much of a frame of reference. I'm sure there are uglier buildings somewhere." And then when I got a little older still, it was kind of satisfying to see multiple articles and polls saying that no, it is indeed one of the ugliest buildings in the entire world.

It's not even that I think Brutalism is inherently bad. I think there are some really nice examples, like the AT&T building in NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A.... But Boston City Hall is Brutalism at its absolute worst.

I once read a humorous column that described it as an attempt to give any visiting Soviets an inferiority complex by out Soviet-ing Soviet architecture.

There are some decent brutalist buildings on the MIT campus including the MIT Student Center--which has a lot of interesting funky angles and is a rather useful space--and a number of IM Pei buildings (at least I think the latter are considered brutalist). There's also the Christian Science Plaza that I'd go so far as to call quite attractive.

99pi , which loves architecture and looks for the beauty in everything, tried really hard to say something nice about Brutalism and all the got was:

1) it's really hard to design and build well with concrete (you get one shot to build, and you can't elegantly patch mistakes or change your design), so architects love to try for the challenge, and they usually fail.

2) concrete is impossible to maintain; the buildings we hate today weren't as bad when they were new.

3) concrete is a really nice background for outdoor fashion photography.

4) concrete had a humble look and cost-effective nature that embodies the working class spirit.

Theae are true facts, none of which make me want to live or work in a concrete building. Maybe #4 when I am feeling camaraderie with my fellow worker.

This also puzzles me often. I live in a Spanish city full of apartment buildings of a variety of periods. Often, one can see beautiful art deco buildings (edit: I meant art nouveau, although art deco is nice as well) from the early 20th century right near horrible blocks from the 60s-70s (50s architecture was not that awful here IMO) that took the place of other beautiful buildings of yore.

http://www.turismo.gal/imaxes/mdaw/mtyy/~edisp/~extract/TURG...

Doing a bit of research, one can uncover true atrocities made in the 60s and 70s... for example, in the 70s, this building (which was fully functional at the time):

https://antiguaprisionprovincialcoruna.files.wordpress.com/2...

Was replaced with this:

http://www.elidealgallego.com/media/idealgallego/images/2015...

And I wonder, what were the people of the 60s and 70s thinking? Did they really think that was a sensible change? Did they really think any of the horrible soulless masses of concrete that they gave us were actually nice? People from that period were not savages, that time gave us the Beatles, some awesome movies, the first more or less useful computers, computer networks... So why, dammit, why did they do this?

I honestly would like to go there for an hour or two and ask people in the streets, to see if there was a collective hallucination or something.

It does seem mad doesn't it. I guess its just the madness of fashion where quality is defined more by novelty and contrast so it does not remain static.

I imagine that at the time, art-deco looked like a man dressed in lace and velvet - an eye-sore of ornamentation and in contrast, the office building was the clean modern lines of a Hugo Boss suit with the authenticity of function. Too many clean lines and you get bored and you swing into something new.

Ironically lace and velvet was back-in fashion for men in the 50's... briefly.

This was a worldwide phenomenon. The ugliest most boring buildings are all from the 60s and 70s in NYC too. Same in Australia I've seen. My high school in TX was built in the 70s and intentionally modeled after a prison: they thought eliminating all windows and keeping students in a contained, dark environment would be best for their learning and development. What were people thinking in the 70s?!

I don't know, but I find it interesting that the 70s, when buildings looked horrible and so did cars (at least American ones), were also the time that produced some of the greatest music, such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Contrast that to today, where we rightfully recognize that 70s architecture was crap and cars look pretty good in general, yet all music made since 2000 is utter crap and there's definitely nothing coming out as seminal as Led Zeppelin IV or Dark Side of the Moon.

Are you referring to Westwood High School?

I think it was about building a lot, fast, since much was destroyed during the wars. At least that was the case in Germany, I don't know how much was down in Norway.

I live in a house from the 50s, and it shows - you never know what you'll find in the walls (stone, wood, straw, mud..) since they built it with whatever they had. Some cables go diagonal within the walls to save material.

I also thought it was a Lutheran thing. Kinda matches the cold depressing churches the Lutherans build

While there's room for improvement, I don't think the building looks bad. All the glass makes it seem airy and full of light. The windows probably make it a nice place to be inside as well. Its only problem is being too big, so that it becomes monotonous. But how would you fix that? Design parts of the building in different styles?

Expose something nice in those windows instead of making them blind mirrors.

There's too much sunlight coming in. Your options are to cook/blind everyone inside, put something opaque (and visible to the street) inside the windows while blocking the view, or dim the windows and let the occupants see the street.

You can put something interesting behind the window, then erect a wall, then your regular space goes. Some stores do that.

Is this different from the second option I mentioned? The wall would still block the view of the people inside, right?

You can make inner wall translucent perhaps?

Boston's John Hancock tower recently got such a mural, visible from miles away: http://bcheights.com/metro/2015/mural-hancock-tower-public-a...

You don't need to block much light to do something like this. Blocking with a bright matte paint an amount of light equal to that which is normally reflected would be quite visible, and would not significantly impact the light entering the building.

(This is because you don't normally see reflections of the sun off a glass building, but rather reflections of other buildings, which are matte surfaces. So e.g. a translucent matte mural which blocks 10% of sunlight would be nearly twice as bright as 10% reflections of matte buildings that reflect/scatter 50% of sunlight, while only reducing transmitted light by 10%, from 90% to 81%.)

Yes, it's a nice space and I like walking by it. It's a welcome respite on that hellish stretch of Houston St. The inside is also very nice, and one of the best grocery stores in Manhattan. Outside of WF and TJ's, grocery stores in NYC are horrendous, so I'm not complaining.

As an example of how even the most pedestrian industrial function can be in a beautiful building, here is a waste incineration plant in Vienna: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C3%BCllverbren...

The problem with "beautiful" is that it is very subjective. This picture is my definition of ugly. Unless you were sarcastic.

Here too. It's using a boring building and adding make-up. Very kitschy make-up. That's not architecture, it's just decoration.

Maybe that's what modern buildings are lacking? Are we to surmise that architecture is dead if the proposed positive effects of architecture are better accomplished with decoration? The issue with architecture (edit: as practiced) is the resulting abundance of boring, dull or plain ugly buildings. If all it takes is some decoration, away we go, problem solved.

They are definitely lacking a human "scale" and something we can relate to (in my view). But it is also not solved with decoration. Architecture decoration is like putting lipstick on a pig. A dead pig.

Seconded.

There are these avant-gardes who wouldn't think twice about turning any public building project they could lay their hands into massive brutist absurdist sea of concrete gray from their dreams [1], if given a chance.

Add to that a couple of behemoth art pieces [2] strewn somewhere on the premises that will no doubt one day pulverize some poor souls.

Alas, the tyranny of the stroppy and vengeful minority.

[1]

https://lebbeuswoods.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fic-2.jpg

http://www.artspace.com/filip_dujardin/untitled_2007_boxes

[2]

http://art-nerd.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/...

http://art-nerd.com/sanfrancisco/ballast-by-richard-serra/

I actually really love the look of your first link. Though I think it only works as a piece of art, the Escher-esque impossible shape as well as the empty naturalness of the surroundings. You'd never see such a dense building all by itself in isolation.

I was interested in a print until I found out it was $3,500 for an Inkjet print.

And here in Copenhagen our new waste-to-energy plant will look stunning, double as a ski slope and blow smoke rings:

http://www.big.dk/#projects-arc

I very recently saw this building for the first time from the hills overlooking Vienna. I didn't know what it was but thought an interesting looking building that fit in with the relatively progressive feel of the city.

FEMA's Brooke Road Facility (BRF - "the barf") is quite the eye sore [1]. Luckily it's not in a super visible/residential area, but I always found it depressing that people actually work there.

The outside is bad enough, but the inside is even worse. They're all stuffed into cubicles, no windows that I recall, dirty/decrepit bathroom, just a depressing place overall, hard to explain.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1989182,-78.1524764,3a,75y,1...

It looks like someone welded some shipping containers together in a car park.

That's doing shipping containers a disservice --- you can make some quite interesting structures by welding shipping containers together: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02210/CONTAINERC...

Making something as awful as the Brooke Road Facility takes real skill and a lot of work.

It's tilt-wall construction, made with pre-stressed concrete slabs. Pretty common for heavy commercial/light industrial construction and all function, no form.

I live in a newly constructed apartment building in a neighborhood in queens that's mostly houses.

I typically guide the taxi driver to it by saying "it's the big, ugly building on the corner"

These boring buildings are a micro aggression against my highly evolved and sensitive sense of aesthetics.

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