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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

It's remarkable how UI design followed architecture (as in: buildings) down the dark alley - both went on a crusade to expose inner substance of things by cleansing it from "redundant ornamentation", both ended up steamrolling over the ergonomics, the human comfort, in the fight for the inhuman ideal.

This is what I see when I look at the web (+Electron) today: https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+architecture&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=brutalist+architecture&tbm=i... This is what I would prefer to see: https://www.google.com/search?q=victorian+architecture&tbm=i...

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It doesn't even seem specific to UI design but design in general! We've been visiting a newly built indoor pool lately. The male / female shower/toilet signs are stylized so around 50% of people who get there first don't understand which is which! Also, the changing rooms are unisex single cabins that open both sides to let you enter to the bath area - but with no signage on them at all. So if you enter from the clothed side and all cabins are taken you stand in front of a white wall of doors with no idea what you should do next.

Designers! Fcking stop and think what you're doing if you change designs that have worked for many decades!

It's kind of remarkable considering the UI did that decades after it became obvious that modernism is a disaster.

Can you explain why modernism is an "obvious disaster"?

The "machine for living" philosophy is intended to be ergonomic, but is extremely rigid and therefore as soon as there are unanticipated needs it ends up anti-ergonomic.

There is also a great tendency for modern architecture to be selected purely based on looks, which produces all kinds of strange anti-egonomic disasters. Libraries that echo. Office blocks that focus the sun onto random burning spots on the street.

Then there's the effect of anti-ornamentation on the human psyche. I seem to remember that one of the modernist car parks in Britain was demolished partly because too many people were committing suicide from it.

https://i.redd.it/0j0or81mme721.jpg

> redundant ornamentation

except in UIs it was not reduntant because visible contours was a deliberately added functional component to take advantage of our (very fast) depth-perception capabilities. The equivalent in architecture would be to remove handles from doors

You might be surprised.

> Eisenman took his duty to create “disharmony” seriously: one Eisenman-designed house so departed from the normal concept of a house that its owners actually wrote an entire book about the difficulties they experienced trying to live in it. For example, Eisenman split the master bedroom in two so the couple could not sleep together, installed a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. In his violent opposition to the very idea that a real human being might actually attempt to live (and crap, and have sex) in one of his houses, Eisenman recalls the self-important German architect from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, who becomes exasperated the need to include a staircase between floors: “Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? The problem of architecture is the problem of all art: the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”

From: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...

This is a common architecture complaint, but remember that the Victorian architecture you showed was the 1% of buildings; the majority of buildings people lived in during the Victorian era lived in cramped, smelly, and ugly buildings.

There has to be a better approach than to just settle on one of the two extremes: what architecture styles have a mix of moderate ornamentation, but with straightforward and utility-driven design?

Old brick industrial buildings, the sort that get turned into exposed-beam loft style workplaces or condos. The front exteriors often have a bit of ornamental stonework. Nothing baroque, but just enough to make the exterior interesting and attractive.

When designed the architects probably weren't paid to mess about putting in useless impractical things, because these were workplaces.

For example, the buildings on Chicago's Printers Row (From 525 S. Dearborn south)

McMansions.

Oh my.

Pretty sure current architecture (≥2000s) is indebted to modernism for its entire look, but also incorporating ideas of Scandinavian/German/Swiss industrial design (which itself is derived from modernism)—thus mixing utilitarian cleanness with ‘humanist’ shapes. And ‘after-modernist’ design in general builds on modernist ideas for materials but dispenses with pure geometry, returning to more pleasant contours instead.

There's no need to go overboard with ornamentation when you just want to get away from concrete. And notably, modern web and app design turned into a continuation of current publishing design—which played with geometric Swiss layouts for a while back then but left them behind, just borrowing good ideas.

Oh, and by the way, I think lots of 'futuristic' buildings in visual forms of fiction in fact look like brutalism and, I'm even afraid to say, constructivism. All those wacky towers and endless rooftops in cyberpunk films. Video games in particular, and especially Quake, remind a lot of brutalism―probably because individually designed brutalist buildings look interesting from every angle and at the same time are pretty simple (not much to model): https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpt...

Guess some people actually like those forms, if you dress them up properly.

As a Swiss I can tell you - Swiss designers have lost their way IMO. The world should look much more onto Japanese design as an example to combine practicality and eye-pleasing shapes and textures.

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