Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmarschner | Hacker News Reader

People built 1000s of churches and cathedrals which, at face value, was a collossal waste of manpower, materials, and space.

And yet we admire them and keep them around for 100s or 1000s of years, because of their greatness. The same for the pyramids. Of course, the effort served a function as well: to establish and maintain a power structure, to give people whose lives hung on strings far more often than ours do a sense of safety and hope.

Man needs greatness. A glimpse of the divine. Our civilization has lost this, and the hyperfunctionalism has taken over our cities. We have removed even ornament and other signs of beauty from our buildings. And it has made them worse.

But these trends come in waves. 50 years from now and we might again spend extra money on whatever will be the equivalent of neogothic or classicist buildings.

And I‘m looking forward to it.

View on HN

Churches did serve a very practical purpose though. They were gathering places and centers of socio-political power. Unlike the pyramids ordinary people could enter churches at any time. And for most churches were the only places were they were exposed to art and “higher” culture (by medieval standards).

From that perspective they are not particularly less practical than modern museums or most other public buildings.

The Egyptian pyramids lacked all of this.

”and the hyper Functionalism has taken over cities. We have removed even ornament and other sign of beauty” if I recall correctly, the late author Paul Fussell called this ’the prolitarization of society’ or something similar. He pointed at that architecture used to symbolize something greater than the individual, not so much anymore

I'm not advocating bulldozing ancient churches or the pyramids, but to build those things (or modern equivalents in terms of resources as a percentage of resources available to the society at large) today would be supremely stupid and wasteful. Arguably, wasting resources on burial mounds might be part of why Ancient Egyptian civilization collapsed, just like the civilization of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) with their statues.

We still build great things, but today they're functional: skyscrapers, for instance. They're not really the most efficient type of building, but they are functional. And modern buildings are not devoid of ornamentation or signs of beauty, we just don't find gargoyles to be fashionable any more.

We’re still will to dedicate large amounts of resources for building museums, concert halls and other public buildings that fundamentally don’t really have a more practical purpose than medieval churches.

What? This is really dumb. Museums are extremely practical, just like schools: they educate people. Concert halls are for entertainment; they're just as useful as restaurants (after all, you could just eat microwave meals at home). Most public buildings have some kind of valid use that doesn't involve superstitious beliefs. Even medieval churches probably had some non-supernatural uses, I'm guessing, like being used as meeting halls or for public addresses. Egyptian pyramids had none of this: a few pharoahs' dead bodies were sealed away inside them along with lots of treasure, and that was it. Everyone else got dumped in a pit when they died.

Edit: I see your point now, that medieval churches had other functions besides the religious stuff. Still, I see those things as only secondary functions to the buildings; museums and concert halls have those things as their primary functions and are optimized for them. I've been in medieval churches, and there's very little artwork in them, relative to their size, compared to any decent art museum. But I agree, they were a lot more functional for the people of the time than the pyramids.

The function of a thing can be solely "wow, this thing is impressive", and that's fine.

Even if medieval churches had no purpose other than to construct an impressive structure, that isn't something we ought to deem unworthy. Greatness is a fine goal in its own right.

After all, art museums and concert halls overwhelmingly display the things that people find impressive. The things that people don't find impressive don't stand the test of time.

Utilitarian function is certainly a great virtue, but it is not the only virtue.

Pyramids were likely symbols of power and unity[1], for the pharaoh of course, but also for the whole Egyptian civilization. This is a very practical purpose.

[1] In fact the burial aspect might even have been a secondary one.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/11/skyscra...

> keep them around for 100s or 1000s of years

Offtopic, but I love that I read this as "we keep them around for one hundreds to one thousands of years".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com