In general, the prediction "future generations will laugh at X" rarely comes to pass. Better laugh while you can.
First, architecture followed the same trend as modern art where taste and beauty have given way to being original and conceptual. This results in very mediocre constructions. Paris attracts millions of tourists who come to admire its palaces and tasteful haussmanian style. No such enthusiasm for the modern buildings of Frankfurt. Not to mention the concrete-made brutalist horrors and other modern architectural “creations”.
Second, apart from the said brutalist bunkers, all modern constructions are designed for a very limited life (even infrastructures like bridges). I was visiting the Pantheon in Rome last week, a 2000 years old building which interior made of marble and stone looks almost new (after many renovations I am sure). What will be left of our glass and steel buildings? They are merely more durable than a mongol tent. The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really.
There's lots of old architecture that was, once, "original and conceptual" (in the derogatory sense that I think you meant). It's just that these styles are so established that we don't recognize them as innovations anymore, and they're therefore not "weird modernisms".
"We have a street frontage, people like the look of it, keep it." Seems reasonable to me when the alternative is "Can an architect with a cost-minded budget do something people will like better?" Because that answer is usually no. (Why? Is a good question to ask.) If people don't like the street frontage, bring it down, have a go!
There is rather a lot of preciousness in architecture and it would seem a contempt for what people actually like is in evidence more often than it should be. UX testing on architecture, is that even a thing?
So was the Pantheon. Survivor bias invites us to compare the great, high-budget buildings of previous centuries with the average, lowest-bidder constructions of our own.
I'd rather see a worthy older facade than to look at buildings that ever looked good only on paper and whose materials caught dirt after a single year and looked like from Borderlands ever since.
Like my home inspector said when I wanted to convert a gas fireplace in my 1930s house back to wood: "if they had gas when this house was built no one would have chosen wood-burning fireplaces"
Not sure why you think that A) Facebook would last, and B) that we will have the ability to retrieve and display "ancient" file formats even if those selfies survive on disk?
I assume it will be the same with today’s knowledge. It will be cheaper to preserve the storage of our digital life than to preserve the physical monuments we value the most.
File formats in general are fairly straightforward at the bit level. Languages would be a larger issue except they are also stagnating with slower drift over time as population sizes increase.
On top of that we are still producing vast amounts of written material that is likely to survive. Net result future historians are going to have far more to work with than current ones do.
PS: Remember even 1 in 1,000,000 files would still add up to a lot of information. That said, encryption is likely to be a larger issue.
Imagine some future archaelogist making the first discovery of the shell of a old floppy disk. Without context, this would probably become the equivalent of "black ceremonial item".
Existing libraries already have trouble with low-quality books and film that doesn’t survive very well. Only the most important artifacts tend to be copied to archival-quality material.
Why would digital artifacts be any different? And where is the incentive to preserve this stuff? Look at how much bitrot there is on most web pages after just 10 or 20 years. Even setting aside physical bitrot, there’s plenty of semantic data loss that nobody really cares enough about to fix.
Finally, despite all the above, let’s say we do come up with a cheap and practical way to store digital data for very long periods of time. Unless it’s very compact, it will use an appreciable amount of energy and material resources to store stuff. Which tiny fraction of the massive tidal wave of digital content should be archived, and who gets to decide?
To my understanding there are institutions including the library of congress whose main purpose is preserving information. Not all information, of course.
Yes, it's much easier to learn a foreign script than to decipher a forgotten disk format where bytes are nanometers in size - but given the vast utility computing devices provide us, we need to fall pretty deep and far from where the current historical development is taking us to forget computational devices as a civilization entirely.
If we have academia - and there is very little reason to think we won't - I'm sure there will be departments of digital information preservation who specialize in extracting cat videos (and probably digital physical simulacrums of the cutest cats) from the vast array of storage material our generation and the next will store.
The question is this: At which point will youtube seize to exist? If it won't there is no reason to think it cannot forward the data it stores to the future millenia. I mean, catholic church is over a millenia old with archives stretching as far. Is there some reason (barring some hollywoodesque global calamity) youtube could not reach the same age?
Those problems could certainly be avoided or worked around if YT takes sufficient care, but maybe they won’t have the right incentives to care continuously for the next 1000 years. I think it’s a much harder challenge than preserving paper and vellum artifacts.
YouTube already does an encoding pass even with the most "perfect" h264 source. I wouldn't worry about video formats more than I'd worry about when YouTube shuts down.
We're going to need an incredible increase in storage density before we can think of doing a full replica of YouTube (I wonder if we'll ever have the processing power to de-dupe the amount that's uploaded).
I wonder how much longer the symbol will be in use.
Even the Old Testament (specifically the book of Joshua) makes reference to texts which are now lost and you'd think somebody would have cared to preserve those.
And they're doing a terrible job. Look at how fast link-rot makes websites useless. Look at how fast interactive websites built not even 10 years ago using modern technologies at the time (flash) are becoming impossible to run, especially if they depended on a server-side component returning data from a server that no longer exists.
It's already extremely difficult to get data off of a 50 year-old computer. Based on evidence so far, once the people die off that actually used them, it doesn't look good for retrieving information from them in the future if other hard drives are found.
Yet we can easily look at a picture developed 100 years ago and understand it without any special technology. Same with books printed 200 years ago.
The "information age" is only about generating and disseminating information as quickly as possible. Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence].
My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)
Books and printed photos have survived so well because they do not have dependencies or require maintenance to be accessible to future generations.
Imagine if every book had a special bookstand that you needed to have to make the words appear. And books from different years or different countries use different bookstands. Sometimes a new edition of the book will be released, but it needs a new bookstand that can show this new version of the book.
A large number of archivists and librarians (no, they're not the same job) just laughed uproariously.
They've survived so well because there's multiple copies of them. The higher the number of copies, the greater the chances that something will survive. And we live in an era of contents reproduced millions of times in a fully automated way, without any effort and in negligible time. Even if the constant copy and distribution of material over the internet and in data centers should cease at some point in the future, just think of all the copies of books and movies and pictures that are presently sitting in dusty hard drives inside dead laptops or at the back of some drawer.
thanks to projects like archive.org, we are in one of the best documented, most survivable ages of human civilisation. digital data can be copied as many times as you like without degradation, so it won’t be “ravaged by time” like ancient inks and paints.
short of a major worldwide event like a global return to the ages of book burning (though even then there will likely be hobbyists that go against the grain and store TB of data for the future), i can see wikipedia, and huge parts of our current society immaculately preserved.
when you have access like that, reading and displaying our ancient formats won’t be that big of an issue for someone who makes it their life’s work to research and write the text “decoding the 21st century facebook”.
That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.
The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass. I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper.
The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light).
None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand.
Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.
I assume all data would be deleted, unless something like one of those 'crusader' archive teams helped back up everything before it went down, however here it seems unlikely to happen because I doubt everyone's data could be given to an archive team for privacy reasons. It's an interesting problem.
Oh come on, don’t pretend those things are mutually exclusive. Between that and your dismissal of all brutalism as “horrors”, it’s clear that you just don’t have a taste for modern art and architecture, not that it is tasteless.
In the end, I think what matters most is "maintainability": if the interest/ value of the buildings exceeds the costs to maintain it, they can live basically forever - humans will make sure of it. Otherwise, they all degrade eventually.
in many ways having buildings degrade and get rebuilt is a good thing, because you can build them taller to account for city populations that expand enormously over the years, with modern upgrades that are more difficult in old buildings.
To bring in an IT comparison: getting some app to 150% so that is never needs to be changed again, is one way to make software. Getting it to the relevant 65%, getting users on board, and maintaining and upgrading it as needs develop gets you 'live' faster, and saves bucket-loads up-front, and saves bucket-loads if you have to terminate the project at any point.
Lots of nerdlings want to tweak and polish until perceived perfection, costs be damned. Getting things out the door and into production is where value is created, though. It matters if Amazons new HQ is ready in 3 years or 15...
https://cdn.citybeat.com/files/base/scomm/cb/image/2016/06/6...
That said, I had thought they would be talking about the trend I'm seeing to create offset walls in buildings to make them more "interesting" and then painting the different offsets in different colors. I suspect this will be called out as "early 21st century buildings." And like the faux adobe of the 80's will hopefully fade away into something more interesting.
https://images1.apartments.com/i2/kxqVDahEc7Jmxp6e5JSwEuPIJR...
Architects had been preserving parts of buildings by incorporating them into the new since the bronze age. You can see it all over ancient cities. It was organic.
That has been adopted as a formal (well.. semi-formal) ruleset that basically reads: "slice off the front of the building and stick it on the new one." Someone from the council comes to check you for preservation compliance, supposedly. Job done. Urban beauty preserved.
Meanwhile, it's not like they're sculpting Viennas or Oxfords. Urban planning is a jumble of chaos. I'm OK with getting creative with city planning, but either go for cheap, or beautiful, or practical. This is none of those. It's silly.
Just look at New York City, or Philadelphia, or Rochester, NY, or any city with old housing stock. It so happens that everything was made out of brick, so none of those buildings are going anywhere anytime soon, except for the ones that were torn down to build condos, or the ones that caught on fire, were left to rot by slumlords, etc. It just so happens that the majority of those old buildings are (or were) handsome and tastefully designed.
Nobody in the USA is tearing down perfectly good buildings solely because they are ugly or because their style is outdated.
Really? I'd say mocking the styles/beliefs/misconceptions of previous generations is the topic of at least 20% of all snarky comments on the internet.
It's not like it's hard to find widesread mockery and condemnation of even "high" art forms either. Even the architecturally illiterate can deride Brutalist architecture on merit despite not knowing the name of the style.
Large government and commercial buildings tend to stick around. I live in an old city by US standards and many 100-200 year old buildings are present, and a few as old as 400 years are as well.
Even midrange residential construction from >100 years ago is in active use.
Many buildings see the wrecking ball, but old buildings survive neglect. Very few postwar buildings can survive more can a few months of abandonment. They’re fundamentally junk, designed to last through their depreciation cycle and depend on building systems to stay around.
Sustainable architectural styling could be helped a lot if there was some software for approximating how a building would look after a decade or two of minimal maintenance.
I don't think so. That might be true if we were speaking of random events (where the chances of a building being ugly or nice are more or less fixed, but we only get see the beautiful surviving old buildings).
But architecture is also defined by "schools" and has periods where public buildings follow this or that general trend -- and not all trends of all ages are equal. Some ages just have shitty design sense.
There are countries where you can see buildings from 100 and 200 and 500 even years ago, not just the exceptional ones, but rows and rows of them (e.g. the whole historical center of several European cities left mostly intact). And they still come across better than very expensive buildings by famous architects done in the same premium areas.
It's not just statistics, it's also the architectural norms that defined certain eras. An average art deco building will look better to most people's sensitivities than the most expensive (or praised by critics) brutalist or modernist architecture.
For a long time in the 20th century we had architecture design schools that produced monstrosities only critics ever cared about.
One very easy example is the ugly-ass buildings in Soviet St. Peterburg compared to the marvels built even a few decades or years before communism. Not because of lack of funds (some where expensive and were built to be enormous) but because the ideology called for ugly ass utilitarian and boxy designs.
Similarly, most celebrated Le Corbusier buildings are ugly ass affairs.
The average modern architect would rather be caught dead than design a beautiful house, with ornamentation and colors and the like -- it's about minimal or "designy" to appeal to other architects and modern critics.
Most buildings that old were consistently renovated, updated, and added onto over that time, so what we get of them in the modern day is a sort of agglomeration of many periods' styles and sensibilities rather than whatever fad happened to be cool in the decade they were built.
I think one of the reasons modernist and postmodernist architectural styles tend to not age as well is because we just don't let buildings to do that anymore. It's almost always easier to tear something down and rebuild it anew so, that Burkean sense of letting the slow evolution of norms and taste build something up doesn't happen. We just get stuff that's pickled in its time.
It also made another interesting point: modern buildings have no context, if you see just a picture of one, it's impossible to say if it's from London, Madrid or Shanghai.
And a great quote:
> There’s an easy test for whether a building is beautiful or not. Ask yourself: if this building could speak, would it sound like the Rubaiyat or the works of Shakespeare, or would it make a noise like “Blorp”? For nearly 100 years, we have been stuck in the Age of Blorp. It is time to learn to speak again.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
Almost all of the junk built today will end up like a set of cheap Home Depot Cabinets. In the land fill. Because most of this stuff also is extremely susceptible to decay. The moment someone stops maintaining it religiously it quickly becomes unsalvageable.
It similar to clothes fashion. There is nothing stopping us to create 1700s style clothes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700%E2%80%9350_in_Western_fas...). But these clothes are not fashionable anymore. Nothing stops Europeans to dress in traditional Korean clothes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbok) but it is not happening.
Brutalism is a style, it is a choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture).
Official buildings are way uglier nowadays than they used to be. It is probably related to cost and speed. And it is probably a good decision. But that does not mean that the buildings are beautiful.
- https://d134a8ca-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/hi...
Heh. There are certainly design patterns in architecture and elsewhere that make you scratch your head and ask: "What were they thinking?"
Brutalism has also been hurt by the fact that the concrete tends to stain and otherwise become less attractive over time. I always hated the new addition to the Boston Public Library. But I have to admit after its renovation (which also opened up the space and made it generally "airier"), it's still nothing like the original wing but it actually doesn't look half bad.
Except when the staining has been factored into the design from the beginning, then it's awesome. E.g. by consciously composing surfaces with different staining properties.
For some degrees of "awesome". It can be totally factored in, and still look like crap. A lot of modernist/brutalist architecture is like that: entirely deliberate, but still crap.