The Rise of the Architectural Cult | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of the Architectural Cult

inference-review.com

90 pointstintinnabula46 comments

When someone seriously describes architectural styles with words like "an aberration, something alien to the history of humanity, something destructive aesthetically and spiritually, something ugly and unpleasant, something that was inhumane and abnormal", every one should have enough sense to treat the text with caution.

To complement the unreservedly approving review posted by OP, here is a more level headed one, by someone that does not happily accept "secret cult" as the full explanation for shifts in culture: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/modernism-and-the-m...

Finally, for balance, here is a review by someone that clearly thinks "mental manipulation" is such a failure of explanation of a historical process that some liberty can be when reviewing the book: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/modernist-architecture-i...

An upvote doesn’t quite convey what a delight I’m finding that first article. HN at its best- thanks.

The first article seems a rather long winded way of saying:

"He's not entirely wrong, there are lots of extremely ugly modernist buildings, especially those which are done on a budget or are uninspired. The earlier style buildings are usually of consistently good quality or at least non-offensive even when cheaply or formulaically done since they incorporate many elements are are inherently pleasing to human nature. But I disagree with the author's premise that Modernism was forced on society by its creators and believe it is simply an unconventional style originating from a war stricken period that became wildly popular with people seeking a novel architecture."

I still think Curl's point stands that Modernist architecture is founded on rather unnatural patterns and images. I mean unnatural in its most literal sense, not of nature or not incorporating naturally occurring patterns. The pre-modern style gravitates towards the natural and takes inspiration from it. It's no surprise that applying those rules instantly humanizes a structure.

It's the difference between a parking lot and a park. The former is a blank, utilitarian space optimized for storing cars, the latter a landscaped environment optimized for human occupation. Sure you can make a beautifully executed parking lot but it will never be as comfortable a place to be on a sunny day as even the most lack lustre park with a few shade trees and a carpet of grass.

I can't find anything in the text to support the unchecked praise for all pre-modern buildings you claim to be there.

The best the text provides is the assertion that "the pre-modern architectural language could be easily learned" and so even those of modest talents could make good buildings. Hardly the claim of inherent pleasure in the pre-modern form you say is there!

The idea that there is anything straightforwardly natural about any building endowed with architecture is not very well thought throught.

That or the sympthom of astonishingly poor comprehension of geology and ecology.

The trappings of this cult have trickled all the way down to ugly “intersecting cubes” single family homes. They’re ugly, badly colored, and lack a “home” feeling.

The opposite form of bad home architecture (McMansiondom) suffers many similar problems - no actual consideration of real livability and usefulness.

We repainted our house a pale pink with an aqua door and I feel happy every time I come down the street to see it. Bring some fun and whimsy to your home!

Soooo this. Recently bought a place (attached house in a row of 3) that won design awards. It's beautiful to be sure, but it's COLD. I made a garden gate with a village of 4 birdhouses above it. I hung geraniums from the balcony, put a pond and birdfeeder next to the front door. Filled the inside with warm browns and grays and green plants to compensate for the cold white concrete. Both neighbors took the time to express their horror.

I need my house to be a home.

McMansions are actually quite livable for the primary target market: upper middle class suburbanites with small children who like to entertain occasionally. The major home builders literally employ sociologists who research how families actually live in their homes and use that to help their architects design new floorplans.

I grew up in one, my parents currently live in a different one.

Both had major livability issues: - No privacy (too much open plan space) - very expensive to heat and cool due to poor insulation - poor construction (this is both a design issue and a quality issue) - ugly (as the article contends, this is a quality-of-life issue)

James Kunstler (despite being a bit of a kook), has been making this argument compellingly and entertainingly for like, 20 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7oJjWg8_Y

He doesn't seem kooky besides how passionate he is about how bad the architectural landscape is and how powerful a remedy it would be for reinvigorating civic life. He has some good things to say and he really is articulate about how things are and their consequences.

Christopher Alexander original pattern book was motivated by this sad state of contemporary architecture. Unfortunately architecture now is possibly even crappier than it was then but at least we got some new ideas in software development (the GoF book).

Came here to reference Alexander as a reaction against modernist tyranny and say how it was his work that influenced software architects and designers today moreso than any of the modernists. Given buildings are necessarily expressions of economy, it is very difficult to discuss architecture without including moral and political questions.

The post-modernist discussions of architecture go far in one direction, barely even bothing to discuss building, (see Robert Venturi's "Leaving Las Vegas," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Venturi)

When you look at the time and values of the Bauhaus, the architecture was also an expression of values, a rejection of craft, religion, nobility, hierarchy. It was the imposition of form on the landscape, and with it, society. It was without awe, reverence, respect, or recognition of anything greater than material human needs.

Mies van Der Rohe's buildings at least have some nods to the origin of their materials, but today they seem quaint and sentimental for their naive and dated view of progress. Otherwise, both modernism and later brutalism were the expression of ideals we look back on today as abominations.

> Otherwise, both modernism and later brutalism were the expression of ideals we look back on today as abominations.

Well, the resulting buildings are fairly or unfairly ( lots of things built much after the styles died out get mislabelled ) criticized for their looks, nobody really objects to their design principles. Hardly anyone on the brutalism hate-train even know what brutalism was about, and just object to any concrete facade, for example.

> nobody really objects to their design principles.

As a layman, I do not know, nor care, about the design principles involved. What I care about is how a building makes me feel and most modern everyday architecture seems to want me to feel bad.

I read the book. He has a few good ideas but some of the patterns are frankly just stupid and would be miserable to live with in a real home. Don't take it too seriously.

That's why he called it A pattern language. His main idea is to have one, not necessarily identical to the one he presented in the book.

I can't but agree - Mies Van der Rohe and Le Corbusier's archetecture in particular is just so unlovable. Where is the sense of warmth or sensuousness or childlike wonder? A lot of those buildings really seem like they could only be designed and seen as actually desirable and good by a very psychologically warped kind of person. So dominating and overpowering. No play or whimsy, no sense of the delicate or harmonious. Yuck

It's important to understand their context, where people like Mies are coming from. They're coming from a time when there were still very strong expectations regarding how things have to look or behave, independent from their actual utility and function, and they basically took a radical stance against that.

Then later cam people like Zaha Hadid who in turn rebelled against the mid century modernists and their ubiquity with a radically organic approach (avoiding sharp edges and corners).

I live in a house from 1860 with a 2013 remodel of one wall of one room designed by architects that were inspired by Le Corbusier. Respecting the soul of a place, while introducing fresh and exciting lines is delicate, but worth it.

I should also say that this remodel respects also our need to live with the room and the adjoining garden in all seasons.

I've used the word respect in two sentences there. Perhaps there's something to that....

I don't know architecture, but is this the explanation for the increasingly ugly and soul-crushing building designs that have been getting built over the past decade or so? Particularly with apartment buildings.

They try to dress them up in wood and faded pastel colors, but none of that makes anything better. They're still huge, hideous boxes built right up to the edge of the sidewalks.

No, that's a separate thing: you're thinking of "one-plus-five" apartments, which came about because of fire code changes that allow for wood frames on top of concrete bases, and have a limited number of styling options available because wood and concrete have different thermal/rain expansion behavior.

Unfortunately, while they're bland, they're also much cheaper to build than previous apartment styles, and so they're an urgently-needed part of fixing the housing issues in dense cities. Lower housing costs take priority over aesthetic considerations.

Interesting, although none of these buildings are wood-framed. They're all concrete with a wood panel decoration hung on the outside, or with different blocks painted different faded pastel colors.

Edit: I'm talking about stuff like this: http://lookfordesigns.com/modern-apartment-building-architec...

> Lower housing costs take priority over aesthetic considerations.

I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense, but in my (and many other people's) view, these buildings are simply unlivable and reduce the livability of the area they exist in. So, in a sense, they're a kind of "negative housing" in that the more of them exist, the less areas are acceptable for at least some people to exist in.

I try to be optimistic about the future, but the rate at which these buildings are going up makes it hard for me, because it means that I can't actually trust that a given area is a place I can remain in the long term. Now I have to have an escape plan anywhere I decide to be.

I acknowledge that my whining about this may be an "old man yelling at clouds" thing, but it does cause me real distress.

The remark was that you can't just put wood and concrete together in whatever way you'd wish, because they react differently to temperature, so only a limited number of designs are actually available.

The examples you linked to are definitely of the "it's a cheap design to build" variety, and it's the ones that pay that decide what gets built, not really the architects...

These buildings distress me as well. I always called them panel style before I learned of one-plus-five. I often imagine finding the developer, and looking at the building with them saying - look at what you left here! Bad dog!

There are plenty of high priced apartments and condos in my area that are built in the hideous way described. It's not a symptom of low cost housing and there are inexpensive options for decorating or building that reliably produce pleasing facades and living spaces.

This is not a new science, we've been coming up with inexpensive livable structures for thousands of years, if anything it's vastly cheaper to build them now since we have the benefit of modern construction technology and all of the decorative elements can be mass produced from common or synthetic materials.

Basically modern architects are taught in school that any form of symmetry or traditional decoration is un-authentic and un-aceptable. This is why you can't find two aligned windows in a modern "signature" building.

> This paranoid revulsion against classical aesthetics was not so much a school of thought as a command: from now on, the architect had to be concerned solely with the large-scale form of the structure, not with silly trivialities such as gargoyles and grillwork, no matter how much pleasure such things may have given viewers. It’s somewhat stunning just how uniform the rejection of “ornament” became. Since the eclipse of Art Deco at the end of the 1930s, the intricate designs that characterized centuries of building, across civilizations, from India to Persia to the Mayans, have vanished from architecture.

> Life was violent, discordant, and uninterpretable. Art should not aspire to futile goals like transcendence, but should try to express the often ugly, brutal, and difficult facts of human beings’ material existence. To call a building “ugly” was therefore no longer an insult: for one thing, the concept of ugliness had no meaning. But to the extent that it did, art could and should be ugly, because life is ugly, and the highest duty of art is to be honest about who we are rather than deluding us with comforting fables.

Quotes from a long really good (long) article on the issue: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...

Thank you for this. I'll read the article more carefully tonight.

> But to the extent that it did, art could and should be ugly, because life is ugly, and the highest duty of art is to be honest about who we are rather than deluding us with comforting fables.

I don't disagree with this if we're talking about fine art. Architecture, however, isn't a fine art. It's designing buildings that people have to live in and with. As such, I think that the highest duty (once we get past the practical needs a building must address) of architecture is to acknowledge that design has power over people and to use design to improve people's lives. It shouldn't honestly reflect the undesirable aspects of existence, it should seek to elevate people and improve their experiences.

Article makes your point too:

> But architecture is very different from other forms of art: people who hate Beethoven aren’t obligated to listen to it from 9-5 every weekday, and people who hate the Transformers series aren’t obligated to watch it every night before bed. The physical environment in which we live and work, however, is ubiquitous and inescapable; when it comes to architecture, it is nigh-impossible for people to simply avoid the things they hate and seek out the things they like.

Nathan j Robinson misrepresents ideas and people in his articles, his name is a net negative on a piece.

As someone who knows a few architects I think it is more of a melange of aspects like:

- there isn’t really the time/money to iterate to a good design, so they use a goto-method and a goto-aesthetic that works ok - it looked good in AutoCAD/on paper (there is still a surprising amount of architects who work only in 2D) - the first draft looked great then everybody else stared their influence

Someone once said to me the way to understand why buildings look the way they do is to imagine what they look in the concept drawing. Whenever I see an ugly building, I can usually imagine the concept drawing that made it look like a good idea.

The article keeps mentioning that modern architecture is less likely to help with healing, which is a very odd terminology, I would have liked to see some explanation of what it means by that. At first read, it sounds very much like new-age mumbo-jumbo, but the rest of the article doesn't have that vibe, so I was left confused.

“Recent scientific advances have also provided support for the notion that architectural environments influence wellbeing“ Has a reference, healing here isn’t meant as literally healing the sick (necessarily) as making one “feel good” in its presence.

I think it probably does mean healing as in healing our social interactions, relieving the anxiety of modern life, creating a space that is more conducive to human wellbeing. The spaces we occupy can have outsize effects on us, just think of open office floor plans or cube farms as a couple examples.

Like many things, "culture" is a second level manifestation of economic and industrial realities. Old housing typologies and building methods are not viable in the age of concrete, steel, glass mass production. Same commodification + value engineering forces behind everything we manufacture as process matures. It doesn't help that because building are still (relatively) durable objects, changes in the building industry are extremely conservative. Sustainability became an consideration once energy prices and operating costs justified the pivot. Even then it takes decades to validate new methods and processes due to regulations.

There's boutique firms and programs who can still build traditional buildings at exorbitant prices, but they're luxury products, the kind necessarily not viable for mass consumption. What article states about architecture design schools is somewhat true, but building is an extremely complex process now, architects are trained as generalists that specialize in the field. It's akin to small indie game development studio where one person has to design, code, do regulatory and compliance work, some light engineering, while being versed in several software packages and have good presentation skills. It's a little excessive for a 3-4 year masters program, but the alternative is the old journeyman draftsmens system which degree treadmill culture has made non viable in many sought after industries.

It seems odd to blame architects when their clients (often developers) have final say in what their buildings look like? Customers who want an old-fashioned look can certainly find an architect to design it.

Fashion is a key word here. Most customers - especially commercial developers - have a shockingly neutral sense of taste. Here is the budget, build the most fashionable thing you can. I think loads of modern buildings are essentially the same type of creative product as corporate video music. https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI

The article seems a little sensationalist to me, but some interesting points. (I am not an architect)

"The Bauhaus offered young people a complete and simplistic worldview with every detail filled in, and a sacred cause that provided emotional and spiritual fulfillment."

I would argue that rather than nefarious motives guiding cookie-cutter designs its a lot of economics and fear of making a bad decision. This isn't really unique to Architecture, but architecture is much more visible and permanent than say a Dell Laptop.

Also it doesn't really offer a solution...but awareness is always good

The question is: how long until 3D printing allows an architectural renaissance, as cost-prohibitive decorative bits (could) come back into cost scope?

I think decoration was largely removed or left out because it costs much to maintain, not so much for the extra cost at the time you put up the building.

That's an excellent point. I suppose even if duplicating a block is easy, there is still the effort of placing it.

Decoration was removed because modernism was explicitly about rationalisation and abstraction.

You have to understand the movement in context. The preceding decades were dominated by the faux-organic elements in Art Nouveau - which wasn't any less stylised or artificial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau#/media/File:The_Pe...

Meanwhile the working poor were living in slums.

https://i2-prod.birminghammail.co.uk/incoming/article1085739...

So one of the motivations for the Bauhaus was affordable humane mass housing. It wasn't entirely successful - a lot of blocks/projects turned into concrete slums themselves - but it was still better in practical ways than existing slum architecture, which didn't even have indoor bathrooms.

It's easy to point out the mistakes and get lost in nostalgia for some kind of architectural golden age. But that age never existed.

For all its many faults, the Bauhaus succeeded in raising the quality of basic housing, and in pioneering mass market affordable industrial furniture manufacture.

It also had a lingering influence on industrial consumer design of other goods - including computers.

At the corporate scale, critics tend to like this kind of thing:

https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/...

It certainly has its charms compared to a glass wall skyscraper. But copying an 18th century style today would be strange. And it's also a very expensive way to build.

In fact, when modern architects try to aim for that style they get it hopelessly wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury#/media/File:Queen_Mo...

One answer is to move on from 20th century modernism with new techniques, including computer-assisted generative and parametric design to create new ideas about form and decoration.

https://media.wired.com/photos/5927176ff3e2356fd800b6f4/mast...

It's still recognisably rooted in the Bauhaus aesthetic, but it's not slavishly copying the rectangles-and-glass-everywhere look.

Wrongheaded and unhelpful on so many levels

Interesting perspective.

Nassim Taleb also ranted regarding this:

> The problem is architects building structures to impress other architects --but plumbers don't act on impressing other plumbers.

> 2- Ancestral architecture: no Euclidian geometry, high dimensionality. Even pyramids when close show rich micro-patters (Met in NYC). Today's architecture is "smooth", Eucledian, & of low dimensionality.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1073918706663768065

I normally hate everything NNT has to say and especially the way he says it, but on this matter we are in agreement.

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