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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

As I saw someone say, "In all its years modernism has failed to produce beautiful cities".

Tourists still flock to old parts of towns and 19th-century factories are refurbished into elite apartments.

I'm currently reading Suburban Nation by Duany et al, and they talk about this exact thing - how the most desirable neighborhoods in old US cities like Boston or Washington are the old, dense, mixed-use parts of town. The book is twenty years old but it is still a good introduction to some of the problems of American-style suburbia.

The 19th-century warehouses that are so trendy these days were abominations back in the day. I think it’s very difficult to predict with any king of accuracy what people will like 100 years from now.

Modernism has been around for almost 100 years already. "Le Coubousier's Toward an Architecture" is 1920–1923.

This does not really change the fact that we are applying current ideas about how a building should look like in a future we don’t know. For all we know refurbished brutalist buildings will be all the rage in 2070.

Well, I lived in a converted warehouse. Then I lived in a new-build next door. The converted warehouse had an aesthetic, but the new build? Fucking gorgeous, man. Look out over the Thames, massive panes of glass. The thing those warehouses have that you can't beat is location. They're all right on the river for obvious reasons.

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