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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> I just googled him. He's super famous. So he probably has that Frank Lloyd Wright thing going for him, where his buildings have glaring flaws but they are let off the hook because their work is so acclaimed.

Architecture as a discipline has a real problem with this. Far too little attention is given to usability and the prosaic question of how a building turns out in practice; there's far too much back-slapping about "vision".

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I remember reading back in 2004 a suggestion that MIT should force its architecture students to study in the building designed for the CS students and let the CS students have the nice architects' building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center vs https://foursquare.com/v/mit-building-7-rogers-building/4ab9... (Amusingly MIT sued Frank Gehry over the building later due to flaws, but it's been settled.)

Yeah, that Stata Center building is such a joke. It makes me mad, and I haven't even set foot in the building. Such a waste of resources and yet another example of what happens when you try to push form over function.

I'd say they've successfully deconstructed what it means to be a building though.

If I remember correctly, my university constructed a new building for the architecture department but it was so impractical they gave it to computer science instead.

My university had a building for the architecture department that was originally designed to be completely covered in vines so as to "hide" the actual architecture of it, to clear the students minds of preconceived notations, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, this was in the late 60s, so the concrete they used turned out to be poisonous to plant life, so no vines ever covered the building, there were some sad scrawny things in a corner, but that's it. And the underlying building was of course really ugly, so, yeah, that was a pretty big fail:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkitekturskolans_byggnad,_%C3...

That building singlehandedly represents everything that's wrong with the profession that used to be architecture.

Fact: the building was so ugly that it self-ignited.

I did computer science, almost all our lectures and classes were around the gorgeous castle courtyard. We pitied the architecture students... :-)

There's a great BBC TV series (and book) which covers exactly this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvEqfg2sIH0

Same with the Sydney Opera House. The original design had shells flatter to the ground. They were brought more upright for engineering reasons.

I think the result actually looks a lot better.

FWIW, all these points can apply to IT architects :-(

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