The Unbearable Burden of Invention | Hacker News Reader

The Unbearable Burden of Invention

hedgehogreview.com

17 pointssnee6 comments

The unbearable tedium of reading "architects" who have never built anything other than a career with words:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Rybczynski#Works

My views on what has been happening in the field in the past 3 decades or so: the field to an extent, but not entirely, has degenerated into form making.

This is simply due to 2 technological advancements: material science (and related structural engineering) has made leaps in the recent decades. This permits actual construction of flights of fancy. These flights existed on paper long before 20th century but they remained on paper.

More critically, CAD permitted what are effectively lesser architects to trivially create complex forms. Before CAD, these purely form-making architects in their 'reaction' against absurdly reductionist Modernism were themeselves reduced to making hodgepodges of "classic vocabulary". Post-Modernism (shudder) was the result.

Then came CAD. CAD is like crack for form-makers. Poster child for this sort of lesser architect is the august Frank Gehry. This is what Gehry was capable off sans CAD:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Gehry_Ho...

This is what he started making when he got his hands on Maya [0]:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Barcelon...

Now, if the OP was actually capable of designing the equivalent of FizzBuzz with a T-Square, this matter would be entirely clear to him. But alas, he is "distinguished architect" who likely has never touched a brick and is now dissing actual architectural minds, such as Mies, Corbu, Wright, Saarinen, who did in fact build and were not merely inventive form makers.

p.s. Today's is Frank L. Wright's birthday. Happy birthday, Frank!

[0]: https://priceonomics.com/the-software-behind-frank-gehrys-ge...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(software)

He designed his own house apparently

For concrete buildings that matter, stainless steel rebar is the way to go. Epoxy covered mild steel rebar turned out not to hold up. But it took several decades to figure that out. Stainless coated mild steel does not work, either.

Yep, but last time I was involved in a project that used stainless steel rebar (admittedly several years ago), it costed 4-6 time "normal" rebar steel (I believe nowadays it is more like 3-4 times, but I don't know for sure), and even the (now thankfully not used anymore) resinated/epoxy covered steel was (besides more costly than normal one, I seem to remember something like 150-180%) a nightmare to bend, move and place (properly). Never heard about stainless coated steel, maybe you are thinking of zinc coated (that has been a common enough material, , particularly in bridge and viaducts slabs, costing something like 120-130% of normal rebar steel).

Yes, stainless steel is about 4x more expensive, but that ends up being about 2% of project cost. This is a big win long term, if the owner is looking that far ahead.

Right now, the main use seems to be concrete bridge replacements of bridges over saltwater in climates that use salt for de-icing. Oregon built one 20 years ago, Montreal built one last year. When you're replacing a bridge because corrosion destroyed it, it's not hard to justify stainless.

The price is coming down as the volume goes up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com