Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of opportunities to make functional structures attractive (even attractions in themselves) but this approach seems to have fallen into abeyance, in particular in the USA and the UK, for some reasons over the past 50 years.

For example instead of brutalist bollards and jersey barriers, pedestrian ways could be set aside via grade elevation or attractive, gapped structures that invite walking instead of looking threatening. Water plants could have "water temples" again.

It seems like some theory that doing anything beyond the functional minimum is a waste of the taxpayer's money. But isn't a crude structure also a tax on the psyche?

View on HN

I think in US culture there isn't generally much regard for taste or aesthetics for some reason. You can see in cities, public places, transport, offices, people's homes, clothing, packaging. Aesthetics or function is either not considered at all, or done with a horrible taste (think most airports, government offices).

In general, at least in Northern Europe, we have beautiful well kept and functioning cities, libraries and I think it's some kind pride or attitude in the culture, that while things are necessary, they can be also be beautiful, it doesn't necessarily have to cost more.

This is so wrong. America is full of beauty, and many have great taste.

Maybe America is not to your taste.

He didn’t say that America wasn’t beautiful, he was talking specifically about American cities. There are some beautiful parts of some American cities, but I think the general criticism is fair. I think it just so happens that the same is true of most cities around the world too. There are beautiful parts of Paris, London, Athens, St. Petersburg etc, but also large gray, dirty, ugly parts. It’s right to point out that large parts of many cities are dirty and ugly, but unfair to single out America as being uniquely culpable in creating such spaces.

It’s also unfair to compare the the nicest parts of Amsterdam with the worst parts of SF, just as it’s unfair to compare the nicest parts of Boston with the worst of Mumbai. What America is full of is natural beauty, but generally outside of the cities. From sweeping desserts to warm beaches and deep forests, they have it all, and it really is beautiful. Northern Europe is lovely too, but it’s also small, far from densely populated, and homogenous. America is vast and varied, and if we’re talking about the whole continent it has everything from glaciers to rainforests.

I don't think it's America specifically, I think it's just all newer parts of cities. Old parts of cities are nice because the ugly parts have been torn down and only the nice buildings remain. The ugly parts of otherwise nice cities tend to be the stuff from the past century that hasn't died off yet.

America is pretty young and grew a ton in the past century, so there's still a ton of 50's era mass-produced architecture and car-centric civic designs. They're not old enough to need replacing yet. I don't think those will stand the test of time, but there's still some gems in there that I hope to see persist. I think we just need more time for the cities to evolve.

There is something to be said about beauty being exclusively secondary to a place’s purpose in the US though. This is evidenced by the fact that when American cities champion creative efforts, it’s seen as special. For example, street art in Chicago is seen as something positive but different. All of America’s buildings aren’t brutalist and ugly, but clearly aren’t looking at aesthetics as a primary concern.

I've yet to find any street art in Chicago that is beautiful. This is obviously subjective, but I just think it looks trashy.

Of the three explanations:

1) you’re in the wrong neighborhoods

2) you have bad taste

3) there is no good street art in Chicago

... I don’t think #3 is the most likely.

brutalist != ugly

At least not necessarily.

Many are. Frank Lloyd Wright was an American designer who embraced beauty. There have been many others.

American architecture is certainly not the center of brutalism.

I have no idea what you are alluding to. Can you name a city you would consider aesthetically bankrupt so I can understand what you’re refer maxing?

Only thanks to the taste of pre-XX architecture. For anything built since the 50s, it's another matter.

I'm not American (and don't live in the US), but this is a ridiculous over-generalisation. The US is a massive country of over 320 million. It attracts architects and designers from around the world, as well as producing many influential and world-leading figures of it's own. The country is so vast, that making such sweeping generalisations like this can never capture the enormous quality and scope of design (good and bad) that must stretch from one side of the country to another.

>> You can see in cities, public places, transport, offices, people's homes, clothing, packaging.

Yes. Art and beauty happen where private money is funding the construction. There are some great corporate buildings, private houses and churches. But public structures, things funded by governments spending tax dollars, lack heart. Compare US manhole covers to those in Japan, or even Germany. The cost difference is negligible, but US cities just lack the whimsy. Or compare US coinage to Canadian. American money is covered in symbols, crests and dead guys. Canada went with polar bears, beavers and loons.

> It seems like some theory that doing anything beyond the functional minimum is a waste of the taxpayer's money

No, I don’t think that’s the cause.

The cause is that we are in a period of financial intermediation. Every sip of coffee, every home construction, every dentists office needs to be a financial instrument, easily tracked so that the markets can be made.

Essentially: as long as every endeavor is a private money-making endeavor, we can only do one thing at a time.

How would you even do the accounting on some sort of pedestrian walkway that both covered your liability and provided a public right of way? That’s some sort of public/private partnership... how would you short something like that?

Integrated systems are not amenable to finance so we have to wait.

In a few years we might have software that could efficiently underwrite multi-purpose projects like that, but it’s just not possible on today’s markets.

Agreed, it's not as impressive as in person but I've always liked seeing the Cushman Powerhouse #2[1] when I drive 101. I feel like we should take pride in our infrastructure and making them architecturally attractive is a great way to do that.

[1] https://olympicaerialsolutions.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/20...

The link isn’t working for me—I get a Cloudflare error saying the site doesn’t allow hotlinking

Copy the URL and paste into a new empty tab.

I opened in incognito and then it worked

Remember that barriers to protect pedestrians work two ways: to protect them from cars, but also to restrain them from getting into car territory. Gapped barriers have a place but do not stop drunks from wandering into traffic. Some gaps, if they obstruct sight lines for either car or pedestrian, can be worse than having no barrier.

Bollards (wide gap structures) are not for protecting pedestrians. They are very dangerous for fast-moving vehicles. Bollards are to stop slow stuff like cars trying to park. They are for keeping drivers from driving into defined areas, not for shielding pedestrians from car accidents. Bollards are placed to stop cars entering city parks, not between a sidewalk and the highway.

Source? Bollards are used extensively in the US to protect from either ram-raiding burglaries or car-ramming terrorist attacks.

For example, bollards stopped the vehicle from the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack from entering the terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack

Glasgow is in Scotland, not the USA.

An example in New York: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/05/18/what-stopped-...

The point is that if people are going to insinuate that bollards are not intended for protecting pedestrians, there had better be some evidence to the contrary. (They may not actually do so in the same way that guardrails don't actually help, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/business/highway-guardrai...)

> not for shielding pedestrians from car accidents

I think you're making two separate distinctions here. Bollards are not appropriate as a first defense on motorways because they present a great risk to motorists. Bollards are however often built to shield pedestrians from car accidents (and other situations where cars enter pedestrian space inappropriately, like ram raids and vehicular terror attacks), they're just not good for protecting motorists when they do so. The most common bollards in major American and Canadian cities are explicitly specified and built to protect against fast-moving vehicles of a certain weight and center of gravity).

A truck crashing into a series of bollards (a glancing blow, not a direct terror attack) turns into a meat grinder. The first bollard impact, say to the right of the front bumper, initiates a rotation. The vehicle then turns sideways to its direction of travel, becomes unstable, rolls, then impacts the next bollard. Anyone inside or anywhere near this chaos is injured. The bulk of the vehicle will eventually stop beyond the line of bollards, in pedestrian territory. This never happens, and there are no videos, because no idiot builds roads this way. The closest we have to bollards beside roads are telephone poles and trees. See this vid at 2m15s. Watch the car rotate, roll, become airborne and land on the sidewalk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMBimrlAauA

More rotation after impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3DC-Ryx7RA And more rotation->roll->stop off the road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY7xo61drg4

At the 2010 winter olympics a luge slider also illustrated this as he left the track and hit a series of uprights/bollards. He died, his body landing outside the track. Anyone standing there could have also been killed.

Modern traffic safety is about keeping cars away from pedestrians during a crash. Smooth barriers without gaps keep the crashing vehicle on the road. Many are designed to redirect front wheels, literally stearing the vehicle back into the road and away from people. The goal is to slow everything gradually while keeping the crashing vehicle away from pedestrians. Barriers are even tied together in a big chain so that they can gain strength from each other, allowing very small/low barriers to redirect enormous vehicles. They might not look pretty, but they work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22mzoAkJJBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-HevN1bzbA

But you can't use ungapped barriers in town centres or other areas of arbitrary pedestrian flows. Hence, bollards will always have a niche.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com