A Nordic revolt against 'ugly' modern architecture
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If you walk around Kyoto's Gion district, there are a few streets that give you this feel, but if you stray but a little from the tourist paths it becomes a mish-mash of architectural styles, everything is encrusted in AC units, exposed pipes are everywhere, and a dense web of electrical wiring looms over everything.
If you walk around Gamla Stan at 5 am in the summer, it's a beautiful, relaxing experience. You can go in almost any direction and there's more of it. If you walk around Gion at 5 am, it feels like you're in a theme-park built on the edge of a razor. Fall off the razor's edge and you're in an urban hellscape.
If you built in this nordic neo-traditional style in Kyoto it would just add more chaos to the hellscape. If you build in this style in the appropriate place, however, it blends in. The right style is contextual. The greatest sins of 'ugly' modern architecture happen when it pays no heed to context.
Sometimes buildings should stand out but, most of the time, they should blend in. It's good that architects are starting to become more aware of this.
No reason to look at publicly photos when street view shows what the city actually looks like.
It's really interesting how anti-Zen it all is, and how the disharmony of Japanese cities contrasts with the harmony, balance, and simplicity of Japanese parks and temples.
Again, as an urbanist, I ADORE Japan; the public transportation, the convenience, the dense urban fabric, but you cannot deny how ugly it all is haha
You obviously only lived in Tokyo. I live in the inaka, and it is horrible urban sprawl: a million little houses scattered everywhere, and the random big supermarket or shop here and there. There is no public transportation, and you need the car for everything. I absolutely hate it.
Seeing different architecture styles of different periods of time somehow creating a cohesion is a wonderful experience, but I think it only works if the city is big enough (I have a blast in Tokyo just for that reason!). Toronto is trying out quite a lot of "save facade, build a glass house on top of it", which I'm kind of enjoying when I visit the city. Wondering how it'll look 5-6 years later.
This is more about being cheap and lazy than about architectural style.
> It's good that architects are starting to become more aware of this.
This is like talking about software developers "becoming aware" of application performance. Architects have been aware of these concerns for as long as anybody else, and the language for critiquing buildings that don't fit their context comes straight from the profession. Professional awareness has not and will never stop bad architecture and tasteless development, any more than software developers being aware of performance will prevent companies releasing bloated, sluggish apps. People in it for the money will not give a shit, and they will find professionals to do their bidding. And professionals at companies like Spotify will not always be in a position to simply resign and go elsewhere if they disagree with the design priorities of the people paying for development. That's why pushback against bad architecture happens via local politics and grass-roots organizations.
But what about diversity of food? Industry? Is homogeneity of architecture really something we want? Isn’t it backwards when many say it “feels good” when all the buildings look the same?
edit: Okay now that you've edited your comment this doesn't make much sense anymore.
Self-awareness and contextuality are arguably the key differences between modern and postmodern works. We've been living in postmodernity for over a half century now, but architecture moves a little more slowly than other things because the creatives are at the mercy of financiers who are much more risk-averse.
Any decent architecture from the past few decades pays attention to the surrounding context, and often incorporates local cultural, historical, and environmental elements.
I like this quote and it gets at the heart of the matter especially in some of the more ostentatious modern designs. It seems in some part purposely created to instill in you a disgust response, as if it is in protest of beauty and good taste.
Aside from that there is some boring pseud posturing to "subvert expectations" by calling attention to itself for being different (than what people actually like). Good for these citizens for standing up and saying no. The replacements in the article are so much better than the original modern designs.
What to me is evident that cost-optimization is at least as much to blame for ugliness as is the choice of style. It is striking how in the two norwegian examples in the article the "not ugly" examples have presumably far less floor area, making them less cost effective. Also bulk housing made to cost by bottom of barrel architects isn't a good starting point for having pretty buildings.
That said, I don't see why people keep putting "random block with geometric patterns" everywhere. It is the least imaginative style I can think of and its sheer ubiquity and blandness make them offensive on their own. It gets even worse when the building is begging for attention by contrasting itself with the buildings around it, that just makes it one step more offensive.
There are aspects of aesthetics that are subjective, but there are also centuries-old rules of composition, of proportion, rhythm, space, and texture that transcend styles and objectively make some buildings, old and new, more beautiful than others.
The apartment blocks in the header image: terrible visual rhythm, no sense of proportion. You could slap some neoclassical filigree on those and it wouldn't change the underlying aesthetic shortcomings.
The contemporary value of traditional architectural styles is that because it's largely only the beautiful examples that have survived, they offer a readymade set of templates that have stood the test of time. With modern architecture, the bar is that much higher to get it right.
I think it’s also worth nothing that things that are new are often hailed as ugly. A number of pieces of what we’d identify today as beloved classic architecture were called outrageously offensive to good taste when they were first constructed. For example, from a letter signed by 300 artists and architects published by Le Temps on 14 February 1887:
> We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection ... of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower ... To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years ... we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.
If even “great” modern architecture is met with scorn, middling modern architecture is sure to attract so much more hate!
https://arkitekten.se/nyheter/arkitekturupproret-fem-ar-av-h... (in Swedish)
Of course they are going to say that average people have it wrong, "it's a modern social networking phenomena" etc.
Obviously these elitists know beauty better than the average person /s.
The problem is without a keen eye for aesthetics, it's really easy to use the post(-post?)-modern style in really, really lazy ways, to create absolutely hideous structures. Brutalism runs into the same problem: there are some Brutalist buildings, especially those that pioneered the style, that are absolutely breathtaking. The problem is that Brutalism was also pretty cheap to pull off, so you ended up with a bunch of hacky office buildings that pulled a couple pages out of the design, and built every college campus in North America.
Is there a solution to this? I dunno. Chicago's "it's illegal to build ugly buildings in downtown" seems to have worked alright. But there's always going to be a market pressure to build the cheapest building possible while tipping your hat to whatever architectural style you can get away with, for minimal extra cost.
Not really sure where I was going with all that, but bring back Art Deco.
Most of the homes in my suburb seem to have been built in the 60s or 70s and they could be described as a shed-like box coming in 2 or 3 variations. Most contemporary homes are also boxy, but I find them far more aesthetically pleasing.
But as someone else said it's a matter of context. If you were building in the historic city center of a European town with its own traditional style, contemporary architecture would feel jarring and out of place.
I would prefer the latter because I think 'modern' designs aren't modern at all and are instead cheaply executed clones of what was transgressive architecture 50 years ago. But I appreciate that the city should make decisions based on what everyone wants-- not just me, but also not just developers.
Probably what you are seeing is just a side effect of the slow effect of gentrification. When you have old houses in desirable parts of town, it's often better to level them to ground and build a new one rather than refurbish it. New builds are mostly dominated by contemporary aesthetics because... well, they are what's fashionable now.
If this happened in the 90s, you would have a lot of Mc Mansions with 90s aesthetics, and in 20-30 years you'll get houses with whatever style is popular then.
Structurally, it feels like North American houses have been built the same way since the colonies started (sidings, frames/studs, gabled/shingled roofs). We even try to keep the houses look as close to the colonial styles as possible, with plastic/aluminum sidings and windows imitating wood.
In Europe it seems like they moved completely over to steel-frame, concrete/composite walls. Roofs mostly metal, windows large and not flimsy. I heard one explanation is the trees being all cut down in Europe during the industrial revolution, but I'm not sure that tells the whole story. Dimensional lumber there are easy to buy and not that much more expensive. Ocean shipping is dirty cheap.
If I were to take a wild guess it has more to do with modern fire-safety standards (can't spread to another room), which the lumber/construction industry in NA have probably lobbied against.
Using more wood would make a lot of sense, since it's essentially a long-term carbon sink. Concrete production on the other hand causes massive carbon emissions. After spending some time in a house with lumber from 1800s, I can only admire the quality and craftmanship.
Are the apartments traditional wood-framed or cross-laminated timber? CLT is an entirely different beast that performs more like concrete or heavy timber in fire. I would put them more in the category of composite material.
I think CLT are already popular in parts of Europe, but in NA they are quite rare. They are usually only for very premium apartments or government buildings. Most wooden multi-unit buildings in NA are built the same way as houses and are quite flimsy. Though in the past couple years they tried to mitigate it with heavy stuffing of sound insulation to make everything sound more solid. One major difference is you don't hear footsteps as much. Older wooden buildings are a nightmare if you are sensitive to noise.
Pre-war houses (middle/upper-class ones) in NA are also quite solid. The structural quality difference between pre-war and post-war houses are night and day.
Sound generally isn't an issue if you have polite neighbors, but if somebody upstairs is doing jumping jacks you'll definitely hear it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
In many cities bombs are still routinely found and deactivated. In Berlin, for example, a few blocks of Kreuzberg are now and then emptied (go do sth for the day) by the authorities to deactivate ww2 bombs.
It also sounds a bit insensitive.
Even untouched places like Sweden had to deal with housing masses coming to cities due to postwar urbanization. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme
In the US, this depends a lot on where you are (at least for older buildings). Buildings tended to be built from whatever materials were in the area, so you get lots of brick in the midwest, lots of woodframe in the west, etc. What primary material was used has a pretty large effect on the style of the building.
"A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!"
Would that produce an architectural style run amok? I don't think so. But I believe the view point described there would be described as individualism.
I don't see much individualism in modern architecture, though. All these modern buildings tend to look the same. Ugly and depressing.
Responding to modern needs with modern solutions might be easier without having to match the traditional style.
(Not all of it is successful! And like, it's hard to say Calatrava is about that. But we hear more about the failures than the successes in modern architecture, and conversely less about the failures of classical architecture, b/c survivorship bias.)
It’s possible that _you_ don’t like the resulting aesthetic but that’s not some broader statement about modern architecture, it’s literally your personal preference.
Then they realized that it snows a lot in Finland, and having big flat spaces where snow can accumulate is not a great idea.
I find this hard to believe. I live in a place with tall (not quite floor to ceiling) windows and hot summers and having such large windows gives the house way more ventilation, not less.
Maybe it says something about this design being successful for some reason. Housing around the world has always been dictated by cost and lately about environment.
Of course modern architecture is just going to look bland, generic, and low quality compared to old architecture - there's only about 10% the effort put into it.
> The revised building boasts a far more traditional look.
Seems like early proposal had different FAR which seems like bigger issue than style.
I don't care if architecture is minimalist, traditional, or experimental as long as it's not oppressively uniform or hostile like it should be the headquarters for a reverse mortgage company or the secret police.
Props to local cities to balking at cookie-cutter, modernity-obsessed designs that would harm the aesthetics of their neighborhoods.
Yet people mock Poundbury in the UK, which was a stylistically similar effort.
It was started by the king who wanted to make a new town but with traditional architecture that people would actually like.
New stuff is new....
Why are people even surprised things always go like this? It's like the stages of grief, once you know the trick you just roll your eyes knowing what will eventually happen