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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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