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Comment by ollifi | Hacker News Reader

I find it amazing that most commenters find nothing good in contemporary architecture but at the same time seem to believe that if only somebody did the right thing things would be better. I think it is pretty obvious that there are hard constraints at play here. If it would be possible to do different kind of new buildings, somebody in the world surely would be doing them. It’s really hard to find anyone who doesn’t love great historical buildings I don’t think this is a case of wrong people designing structures.

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People do occasionally order buildings to be done in an older style that most enjoy. You know what happens afterwards? The architect involved gets ostracised. It’s “grotesque” apparently.

The problem is absolutely the architects and their profession. They are no longer producing buildings that people enjoy but rather caters to their own perverted aesthetical sense of pride.

How do we get a government referendum on aesthetics?

Why would you need one? Do we need referendums in software for usability?

No, we do not. We test with users and accommodate their needs and wants. That architects have strayed away from this is crazy.

So the theory is that the entire profession of architects is against constructing buildings people actually want? Or that times have changed and we lack the environment and infrastructure to achieve what we once could do.

It's not a theory in EU at least. It's a fact.

You think it's some arcane knowledge to make buildings beautiful? It's not. They're still occasionally made this way like I said.

They just don't want to do it.

It's not that nothing's good. Obviously, lots of great stuff out there. Just, if you look at what gets built at scale, you get this:

https://uk.tourisme93.com/rosa-parks-paris.html

This is one of the 2 "revamped" neighborhoods in Paris. The other is that one:

https://www.batiactu.com/edito/paris-rive-gauche-balade-au-c...

And then most of the really expensive buildings go to the same 50 architecture firms.

>It’s really hard to find anyone who doesn’t love great historical buildings

Good luck getting the average modern architect to even consider to design anything like that...

Well actualy it is. In my own wery oldtown, there is a piece of palace remaining next to parking lot. All the submitions were nothing of rebuild, although plenty of historical data. Only glass, concrete and boxy shapes. Something is broken with architects in general.

It's complex.

Imagine you inherit a COBOL codebase, would you expand it further or would you try to add a functional microservice in the language of the day?

Ok, you can say: the codebase is not COBOL, is C and is beautifully done. However all architects studied Art History and Aesthetics, so, at least, they have a more informed opinion on what defines a good codebase than a layman. Probably we could give them the benefit of the doubt.

>All architects studied Art History and Aesthetics, so at least they have an informed opinion

More like a hive-mind indoctrination on the legacy of tired modernism and its contemporary varieties.

Seeing an old building as COBOL - something not to be inspired from and immitate and continue to build similarly, but to rewrite and replace with something entirely else - is an example of that.

Better to see a Le Corbusier building as Brainfuck:

  ++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++
   ..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

No architect would dare to touch a Brainfuck codebase :)

I’m not in architecture, but I am a painter and I took university courses on it (my degree is in advertising, but I was good enough at drawing that the art profs let me run with the seniors in a couple upper level classes).

They are not teaching aesthetics any more. They threw away the casts and teach ‘concept’. Students aren’t taught how to approach Michelangelo’s David, they’re taught how to approach Duchamp’s fountain. I heard a professor espouse that Twombly was some enormous departure from Pollock, an artistic revolution as great a distance as Picasso from Velasquez.

Twombly: https://www.google.com/search?q=cy+twombly&client=safari&hl=...

Pollock: https://www.google.com/search?q=jackson+pollock&client=safar...

The emperor has no clothes.

It's the slow march of the "business" mindset taking over all decision-making. Buildings are paid for by businessmen, businessmen want to be cheap and follow the crowd, and you end up with the same cheaply built building over and over.

Yet many 19th century warehouses had more ornamentation that today's Pritzker winners. At some point, there were businessmen backing beautiful buildings.

I do think Apple's Ring campus is minimalist while also trying to be beautiful. But Ive and Jobs weren't architects by training.

Having visited several times for meetings, the main thing that stands out to me is how the interior has the decorative sense and aesthetics of a shopping mall. It’s pretty awful.

That's partly because most of the majority that were ugly death traps have been torn down, but yes, there were once businessmen who backed beautiful buildings and didn't meddle too much with their idea of either beauty or good-for-business-ness.

I believe that at least part of the problem is that buildings aren't built to last, they are built to be torn down in a few decades - so the people building them have no sense of making something lasting, or pride in making something beautiful. Instead they just want the cheapest space they can get, resulting in using the cheapest materials and maximizing internal space - meaning the outside will almost certainly be some kind of cube. So it's a question of both cost and attitude.

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