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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate your point of view, and I find it somewhat persuasive.

But my personal aesthetic compass swings back and still chafes at the "non-functional" functional part. More than any other analogy, it reminds me of fake scoops or vents on some sport cars or sport image cars, which are actually completely non-permeable and definitely don't lead anywhere or do anything. They're aesthetic trim yes, but they're also a... Dunno, pretense? It reveals a slightly "wannabe" attitude.

Though it's possible I'm reading too much into the whole thing - non functional spoilers / wings don't bother me nearly as much on cars. Maybe fake shutters just look cheesier?

So I guess that fake brick feels like non functional spoilers. Fake shutters feel like non functional scoops.

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If you dress up for the opera, take a look at your clothes - almost every aspect will be some “fake aesthetic” that has become standard.

I was hoping for more detailed reasoning beyond “it’s fake and not a great imitation” - but so are many other vestigial fashion items. Ties don’t work well as bibs anymore, after all.

given the argument that good design is functional design fake anything that serves no functional purpose would, if that argument holds sway, be bad.

> If you dress up for the opera, take a look at your clothes - almost every aspect will be some “fake aesthetic” that has become standard.

I agree wholeheartedly and find the idea of dressing up a specific way for anything but practical/safety reasons or costume parties to be silly. Most non-safety dress codes only exist to artificially segment the population.

Now I’m imaging you showing up to the opera in full PPE.

(Of course, if that become standard fake PPE would begin to become common).

I've seen nonfunctional mesh masks worn by people protesting mask mandates.

I don't think most people would actually utilize a handkerchief, especially one of the flimsier pocket squares that comes with a tux. But it looks cool.

Why would you dress up for an opera? You just go there in your regular clothes, it is like going to see a movie.

Indeed. Go there to enjoy it. You'll probably get more out of it than the dressed-to-the-nines people.

Because it's fun to.

Hmm, I see what you are saying, but I don't think most opera-dress-up items are pretending to be highly functional. They have transformed long time ago into purely aesthetic.

To go back to my car analogy comfort zone ;), I don't like 22" rims personally (16" tires are so much cheaper:); but they don't bother me. There's no pretense at functionality, some people just think it looks cool, awesome. Some people think ties look cool, awesome. It's not a "fake" 22" rim, it's not a "fake" tie.

But a non-functional hood scoop, and non-functional shutter, strike me as "fake" in way that other fashion/aesthetic items do not. A hood scoop hugely implies that it's shunting air somewhere important. A shutter hugely implies that you can open or close it, brighten or darken the room. They have not yet transformed far enough from their functional origins. Whereas a modern tie doesn't hugely imply anything functional that I or anybody few generations around me have any cognizance of. Heck, I'm from Croatia, and I have to Google every time what Kravat was actually used for - I honest to gawd cannot even think right now what Tie could have been functionally used for.

Maybe a hundred years from now, when hydrogen and electric cars are all anybody ever remembers, hood scoops will be seen as purely an aesthetic choice; and maybe to people from different climates shutters already seem a purely aesthetic choice. To me, today here now, fixed, wrongly-proportioned ones don't evoke either "pretty" or "ugly", they evoke "cheap ridiculous fake".

My 100 Croatian Lipa :->

> A shutter hugely implies that you can open or close it, brighten or darken the room.

This probably varies by the viewer

What about hood scoops on a die cast model car?

While I also consider the fake shutters silly, when it comes to the broader fake = cheap feeling, I used to think the same way but recently got educated and it changed my outlook a lot.

Please think of a Greek temple, something that probably evokes feelings of monumental, functional beauty to last the ages. But their structures are largely non-functional, and stone is ill-suited to their construction - consider their long, horizontal roof beams. This is widely considered to be a result of faking wood structures with their light frames, and the classical columns we all know were likely meant to imitate bundles of wooden poles that originally served this role. This theory is known as petrification.[1] Modern neoclassicist buildings are fakery all the way down. They usually have steel frames at their hearts and zero need for stone veneers, columns, and arches, but we still enjoy the traditional, trustworthy feel they evoke.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_architecture#Petrifi...

I got educated on something new today. Thank you.

It does shift my outlook, but not enough. Let’s say that the Greek structures were the “fake spoilers” of their day and we mistakenly took it as the pinnacle of engineering and craft. That doesn’t change the fact that marble lasts longer than wood, or that certain designs can objectively hold more weight from a heavy roof, or that some designs keep rain and snow out better than others.

From that perspective, I argue that “fake shutters” are less like Greek columns and more like a fisher-price hammer (especially when a nail needs to be hammered).

I think your description of modern buildings faking classical ones actually meshes with the author's. If the fake shutters were sized correctly such that we could picture them covering the windows when closed, they would be more palatable. And likewise, if a modern steel structure, clad in stone veneer put in false columns that only went up halfway to the roof above and then just left empty space above them, they probably would be irksome to no end.

I don't know what you mean with the opera thing - how so?

A more obvious parallel would be in useless decorative zippers on "cool" clothes, where "cool" is the interpretation of a clueless mom of what their teenager kid will like.

Except that even smart clothes have a functional use: as clothes. Fake shutters have no utility value.

A closer analogy to dressing up for the opera would be artisanal hand-carved decorative (but functional) shutters basic plain shutters. They both have the same utility but one has nicer aesthetic.

> But my personal aesthetic compass swings back and still chafes at the "non-functional" functional part.

My problem is not really that they are not functional. It’s that they do not even try. It’s like they insult my intelligence by being ostensibly worse than useless. These 20 cm wide things are a joke, they’re not even trying. They could have least have the right shape, size, and an overall plausible appearance.

It’s also really ugly. Part of the appeal of the real thing is the harmonious shapes and proportions with the windows they are supposed to protect. Thin bands on either sides of a large window just looks absolutely terrible.

Now people are putting fake handles on their roll-up garage doors to make them look like a door that opens horizontally in the middle. I find it even worse than the fake shutters.

Guilty as charged. To be honest though, my (detached) garage looks much better with them - possibly because a lot of the old garages in my area actually are old carriage houses (or replacements for them)

Reported to the architecture police.

How about fake chimneys with some sort of fake stone/brick veneer on the exterior? Looks convincing from afar, but you can tell they're fake if you saw them under construction with the wood framing and plywood underneath.

> But my personal aesthetic

And there's where it all falls apart. Your (and the author's) personal aesthetic is not the be-all, end-all of design. You may not like how they look, but others do. And that's fine.

(I happen to agree with you; I grew up in houses with fake shutters and thought they were a silly design choice. But I'm not the final word on design, and I suspect the author is not either.)

I mean, not "fall apart" as such. I assumed it was part of the premise from the start that we are sharing subjective preferences here, not laws of nature :).

I am reminded of new building built near me a few years ago. To be "in character" with the buildings around it (which are >100 year old brick industrial buildings) the brick veneer includes several "windows" on one end that were "bricked up" with a different style of brick than the rest of the veneer.

The new building has a significantly different aspect ratio than the surrounding buildings (tall and thin, versus low and wide). It's 3 stories, unlike the 1 or 2 story buildings around it. It also has a roof line completely unlike anything close by. It really sticks out visually.

It's got bricked-up windows, though.

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