Spite buildings: when human grudges get architectural | Hacker News Reader

Spite buildings: when human grudges get architectural

theguardian.com

I don't really see how the second one is a "spite house". He loved his house and its location, and in return for giving it up, he demanded they move the house to a location that was almost as good and pay him for his inconvenience.

I'm sure he was quite happy with the deal in the end, and there's no need for anger on either side.

It sounds like it was political spite. He didn't like the authority and spitefully required them to waste time and money in order for him to comply.

I would actually like to see some investigations of important 'spite' technical architectures. Not sure if some decisions about SOAP weren't done spitefully.

Even more than architectures, there seems to be a tiny little bit of spite in everything IT related from programming language design (C++) to end-user facing software (Windows Update).

> a tiny little bit of spite in everything IT related from programming language design

A mere hour after your comment, a link to the dynamically-typed Gravity language ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17373545 ) appeared on HN. The syntax appears to be based on Apache Groovy's (and its syntactic clones Dart and Swift), and as for the name, well, "Gravity is groovy" ?!

There is (at least one) example of this in Cambridge, UK. King's College built a new building in the 50's that has some windows that overhang the wall into neighboring Queens' College.

When Queens' built a new (one of the very earliest) brutalist building a few years later, it juts out over the same wall back into King's, blocking the views from the Master's lodge.

There are tons of examples like the last one.

https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSA00948 "In 1986 the city renamed St George's Place, the location of the South African consulate, as Nelson Mandela Place in his honour. "

And painting the street crossings outside russian embassies with rainbow colours seems to be a common protest thing now, but I'm sure years ago there was one European country that did that officially.

An old spite building could be the Rocca Paolina in Perugia, Italy, it was ordered by Pope Paul III and it has been built atop the Baglioni family's houses after they revolted against the Pope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocca_Paolina

An example of this in London is the Cornhill Devils.

Supposedly the architect of the building on which they appear fell out with the Vicar of the adjacent St Peter's Church.

http://hidden-london.com/the-guide/cornhill-devils/

A local spite building (well part) is the spite wall the original owner of the Fountainebleau Miami built that overlooks the Eden Roc Hotel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Roc_Miami_Beach_Hotel

Here's another example in Croatia: http://zaklada-brac.hr/zanimljivosti/prica-o-kuci-u-kuci/

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