Making architecture easy | Hacker News Reader

Making architecture easy

worksinprogress.co

109 pointsdash238 comments

I think that Christopher Alexander (the architect that coined the term 'Design Patterns' which the software industry adopted) solved this issue half a century ago. Buildings used to have a 'pattern language' that made sense in the cultural context and with the technology available of the place where it was built. But in modernism, we developed a machine like approach to building and there was a battle to strip buildings of ALL tradition in order to make way for efficiency, mostly in construction costs. However, many of these inefficiencies in what Christopher Alexander calls 'living' architecture, had developed through generations of knowledge passed down from skilled laborers, and we severed that tie in the last century. To fix this, we have to reignite the focus on craft by the people designing and building, and to adopt the learnings of traditions, which Alexander spent a lifetime documenting. We already have the answers, and while not perfect, it certainly is at least a much better starting point than every building being a complete blank canvas for an artist to paint based solely on their imagination, and judged on how new it is.

Design school claims to have moved past the 1930s mentality, but in my experience, it was mostly about proving to each other who is the smartest person in the room rather than how the architecture produced encourages life.

Christopher Alexander thinks he is the messiah of building. The buildings he has built are not good, though, and not all of the other architects in the world are as stupid as you might want to believe. "A Pattern Language" just isn't the great gift to humanity that some people, eager for prescriptions, want it to be.

Well, he died last year, so presumably he isn’t thinking any more.

But if you’re going to criticize his work (or anyone’s work, for that matter) you’ll need to put in a little more effort. Why are his buildings not good?

I trained as an architectural historian, and let me tell you, architectural quality can't be put into words. Architects and arch. historians have intuitive opinions. There is no science of architectural criticism. Alexander was the kind of person who thought such a science was possible.

The most important clues to the mediocrity of his buildings are the facts that a) they aren't widely imitated and b) they don't usually appear in fine books about architecture, trad or otherwise.

Alexander was more of a mathematician than an architect. It's a long time since any one person did both of those things well.

If it can’t be put into words, how can you call it not good?

The fact that something isn’t imitated or featured in books has almost nothing to do with whether it is “good” or not, merely that it’s not in line with the wants and needs of builders and publishers.

I’m not a huge fan of Alexander and in fact I don’t actually know much of his work, but these aren’t very good criticisms.

Well, tough. This is how art works: a consensus emerges among practitioners that some things are better than other things, even though nobody can articulate in words just what makes the good things so good, or the bad things bad. The discipline of aesthetics is kind of irrelevant to art and architecture: it doesn't have much useful content, and it's not helpful in judging work. Most artists/architects don't use it in any way. It's just windy philosophizing.

The taste of food is similar. If I'm a restaurant critic and I tell you that a certain restaurant is good, you need to have a way of assessing that opinion which doesn't involve requiring it to be written in some kind of positivistic, quantified, apodictic form.

No, that isn’t how art works at all. The actual practitioners often have very little influence on art criticism.

This clearly isn’t a serious discussion and you don’t seem interested in (or capable of) justifying any opinions you have, so I think I’ll end it here.

I agree his buildings weren't very pleasing aesthetically, and The Timeless Way of Building was embarrassing at points for the excuses he makes for poor execution, but his design patterns are very well-grounded IMO. I don't think you could just take them without any architectural sense and produce a decent structure, though all houses that I've found charming fit his ideas pretty neatly. The failure of A Pattern Language (IMO) is that he breaks things down into constituent pieces but fails to articulate a method for putting them into a cohesive (or tasteful) whole again. APL ends up being better viewed as a series of observations of things that generally work, than a system that produces successful buildings. He had inspiring ideas, but failed to achieve what he set out, and claimed, quite loudly, to do.

What he really hits on for me though is his fairly detailed critique of modern architecture. It's a disaster, and he was right to emphasize the impact it has on the people that have to live in and around it. I don't know how to describe it any other way than being psychically oppressive. His human-centric design approach was novel and may be needed more today than when he was writing about it.

Still making my way through his work, but I like him quite a bit, overall. He's not the final answer to architecture, but he has stimulating ideas.

> The most important clues to the mediocrity of his buildings are the facts that a) they aren't widely imitated and b) they don't usually appear in fine books about architecture, trad or otherwise.

Lol @ this standard for what is good. I also trained and practiced as an architect, so take my opinion with the same weight as yours. A home with good craftsmanship beats most of the homes in the 'fine books about architecture'. Yes, he wasn't a great designer, but his contribution was more about looking at the living language that develops in the tradition of building, rather than looking at the insulated self congratulatory world of academic dick measuring contests which is what the Fine Art side of architecture is today.

My old boss said buildings are like baking. We need 95% bread and 5% cake. Problem with architects is they want to make cake almost every time.

I really think we are heading in the right direction with this stuff though. There are more and more good contextual buildings and we are refining our ideas on good design as a society. It is a very different world to most of the 20th C when building technologies, city functions and society at large were advancing so fast it was hard to understand what to aim for.

The main problem with architecture metaphors for software is that software people think buildings and other construction projects are far, far, far more static than they actually are, so software people think they have a unique problem.

As an example, someone saying "but you don't change buildings|bridges|towers|dams|... once they're built" is almost inevitable when you start comparing the discipline of architecture and infrastructure to software.

> "but you don't change buildings|bridges|towers|dams|... once they're built"

Anyone who's played Factorio for any (un)reasonable length of time knows the folly of this assumption. At best, a player did a lot of planning to avoid this specific problem.

Not to criticise parent, but I think the building and construction metaphor doesn't apply to software. The construction happens in the compiler and the interpreter, it's a afterthought, you get it for free. What we do is design, sometimes iterative design. Need a different metaphor.

We needed 95% bread in the 20th century. As society evolves and income rises, we want to consume better quality food. Not cake, though.

I think it's the same with architecture.

For example: artificial lighting at night can be detrimental to human sleep.

How come our houses aren't thought to account for that? We should have dimm yellow lighting below the eyes to avoid messing up with melatonin, for instance.

Buildings have purposes and limitations. They can fail by not accomplishing their purpose sufficiently or by being limited in a way that defeats their purpose.

Limitations are economic, legal, or physical. Two of those can be bent or changed.

You can work around many problems with enough effort and money. For example, if you have a bedroom, you can buy lightproof curtains to block the windows (but this impedes airflow). You can turn off overhead lights and buy lights that go in the places and colors that you want. These are relatively easy and cheap compared to rebuilding.

We're discussing architecture, which comes before building.

Most architects are concerned with the basics, which you mentioned. This is the bread.

What I'm saying is: society is evolving and an increasing portion of the population, especially in rich countries, would appreciate architectures that go beyond that to consider the quality of life in more refined and well-thought ways.

Hummus. The futures market is in Hummus.

Without opening the can-of-worms that is anticontextual architecture, you never have the budget to make cake. I had 1 building in 10+ years - and it was a pool house, an ancillary structure.

To reinforce that notion, bread is not usually flat on top but cake almost always is.

I went through a phase as an avid armchair architect, as someone who really appreciates and enjoys the built environment. But discussion of style, like this post, misses what I think is the most important thing: that a building serves well the needs of the people who inhabit it.

Because this can only really be discussed in reference to specific buildings and the experiences of the specific people who use them, it isn't easy to write about on a blog.

This becomes a question of power. Who is paying for the buildings, and for what purpose? What incentives do the payers have, and are they aligned with the users? And these questions, again, are best asked of specific places, projects and jurisdictions.

And then you go beyond and think about town planning, read Jane Jacobs, and then Christopher Alexander convinces you that good architecture is only possible in an anarchist utopia.

A lot of this analysis is purely about style, not substance. It's a discussion of what font the website uses, not whether it's useful and easy to navigate website. We should be evaluating buildings based on wether they are in the right place in the first place, wether it creates a walkable setting, wether you can find the front door easily, wether you can navigate around the building easily, wether they are energy efficient, wether they provide a healthy internal environment... etc. What decorations you stick on the outside are kind of the last thing to worry about. For example, the main problem with the brutalist building with the caption 'Some people like this building, some do not. But all must experience it' is scale, not style, if you chopped off the top five floors and left only three storeys, it would be much more acceptable in its setting. A lot of the problems with brutalist architecture are less to do with the style of materials and more a failure to address basic design issues like signalling 'where's the front door?'.

I get where you're coming from, but the article is very specifically about the external design of buildings, and the impact that external design has on the area around it.

You're not wrong that the internal design is important (and perhaps, in some cases, given less attention than it should fairly receive) but one of the points the article makes is that for any given building, only a very small people who experience that building will actually be interacting with it directly. Most people will experience it as a background to something else going on in their life:

> Buildings’ exteriors serve as backgrounds to a huge range of activities. In my view, this generates constraints on what we want them to look like. The streets of a city are places of work and play, of sickness and health, of triumph and grief. To all this, buildings owned by strangers form the involuntary backdrop, and for this reason, we often want them to be as we want strangers to be: polite, courteous, friendly and unintrusive.

With this in mind, I don't think it's unreasonable to also evaluate buildings on the basis of how their facade contributes (or doesn't contribute) to the general vibe of the area around it.

Another way, I live in Tokyo and 95% of buildings here are prefab and ugly. But it’s a delightful city to be in nonetheless, because everything about them is functional in a way that creates a great atmosphere. I’ve come to value the physical prettiness of buildings less and their public function far more.

That's a good attitude I'll have to adopt. In America, the 4-over-1 design, of 1, ground floor of commercial, with 4 floors of residential above it, has become a very generic "downtown" look across the whole country. it's boring.

Interesting overview of architectural design history but it doesn't mention the most important modern architectural design trend: ecologically integrated architecture that's built with resilience to stresses (fire, drought, flood) and which has energy-efficiency baked in from the beginning.

For example, termite mounds offer many lessons for human architects who want to minimize air conditioning costs:

https://www.newswise.com/articles/termite-mounds-inspire-ene...

Here's another example of this style:

https://amazingarchitecture.com/mixed-use-buildings/ko-bogen...

Dear lord this blog is tasteful. Beautiful prose and typography. I actually read the whole thing!

The author is head of housing at the Centre for Policy Studies, a UK based right-wing think tank. Therefore we should not be surprised if this article is informed by the wider conservative philosophy (old is good, new is bad).

However, let's take it on its merits. The distinction it makes between architectural competence (what it calls 'goodness') and style is correct and important. But I don't think it successfully makes the argument that it is easier to be competent using old styles. See McMansions for an example of how a vernacular can be twisted into bricks and mortar (and drywall) horror, and there are plenty more examples of modern interventions ruined by hackneyed attempts at traditionalism. Furthermore, I'd argue that bright architects, most likely to produce competent work, are not going to be drawn to cookie cutter trad style starter homes (for example).

It calls out Brutalism specifically, but that style has been out of fashion since before many of us were born - though remains a favourite bug-bear of the reactionary right.

It rightly notes that architecture is a public art - but given that so few buildings are actually designed by architects (as it also notes), those that are should challenge the public. Not always and everytime, but if art does not challenge us, it ceases to be art and becomes merely decoration of culturally barren lives.

A counter-point to the central thesis - that architecture should be easy: Central Lisbon is a wet dream for this idea, trad everything, and very beautiful too. Yet it feels suffocating and sterile - no room for the future. I'd rather it had gleaming tower blocks, full of hopes and dreams, like downtown SF. Crossing the Bay Bridge in SF you feel a sense of excitement, adventure and potential. Whereas every time I cross the '24th Abril' I get depressed - the most notable feature I can see is the cruise ships parked at the terminal.

I don't think re-classifying a widely disliked building as "challenging" is doing anybody any favors. When you build a sidewalk for the public, you don't make it "challenging" by, for example, only making it as wide as a balance beam.

A building must suit its purpose, and part of its purpose is to mesh with its surroundings. You shouldn't build a building that looks like Megatron exploded in the middle of a neighborhood of half-timbered buildings, no matter how challenging it may be to the people who look at it every day.

And let's not forget, a lot of traditionalist design took into account a world without HVAC and other hacks. If you want energy efficiency, looking to solutions that tackled the problem in a more fundamental way is a good thing, rather than papering over the problem with technology.

But you are correct about McMansions twisting the vernacular. The crime I always see is how the garage is, inevitably, front and center. It may be a Neo-Georgian whatever around the front door, but right there next to it is the hallowed automobile temple, like a phylactery to the Saints of petroleum refinery.

>And let's not forget, a lot of traditionalist design took into account a world without HVAC and other hacks. If you want energy efficiency, looking to solutions that tackled the problem in a more fundamental way is a good thing, rather than papering over the problem with technology.

A lot of these houses were heated with a coal fire in every room, they are completely uninsulated and sitting anywhere near the window in the dead of winter would be very cold! There is something to be said for applying modern passive solar design techniques, insulation and airtightness coupled with heat recovery ventilation. Of course, this does mean you can only have big Georgian style windows on south(ish) facing facades.

> the hallowed automobile temple, like a phylactery to the Saints of petroleum refinery

Ha, I'd say this is a completely mixed metaphor, except it is a simile... Phylacteries are used by Jewish men, and contain verses of the Torah inside, which are worn on the head and the arm (following a literal interpretation of "bind these words to your forehead and to your arms"). Jews do not have "saints", they have "tzadikim" (righteous ones). Christian saints, on the other hand, are either venerated with an ikon (an image of the saint) or through a relic (generally a bone of the saint) housed in a reliquary. Although a reliquary is way too small for a garage, so maybe a chapel which houses the reliquary. A "shrine" may also house a reliquary, I'm not sure, I tend to think of "shrine" as being to a non-monotheistic god. Generally Christian houses of worship are not "temples", except for some Pentecostally churches in the 1960s, and Jews only have a "Temple", which would be in Jerusalem if there were one.

"like a shrine to the petroleum industry" would be

I also think that focusing on single buildings, like the author of the article mostly does, is not helping anyone. Exquisite building after exquisite building might end up creating a total non-sense, while on the other hand boring building after boring building can create a really nice and liveable thing.

Back to the exquisite buildings, I'm now on the coast of South-Western Greece and I can see this first hand, as there are lots and lots of villas scattered around the hills here which villas, taken individually, have a decent enough modernist architectural style, but when you look at them as a whole is a cacophony pure and simple (ignoring the habitat destruction, that is).

On the other hand the very boring buildings from the downtown small Greek town where I'm now staying have almost nothing going for them individually and from an architectural pov, if not for some details here and there, but taken together the discourse changes completely.

I wish they at least made it easy on the eyes

Asked GTP4-32k to make an article summary of 10 important points.

And then applied the summary to the software architecture

---

Public and Shared Nature of Software Architecture: Just like physical architecture, software architecture is inherently public and collaborative. A well-designed software system should be intuitive and user-friendly as it is used and experienced by a broad range of people.

Traditionalist vs. Modernist Debate: In software architecture, the debate between traditional monolithic systems and modern microservices architectures echoes the debate in physical architecture. This leaves some developers ideologically homeless as they see the benefits of both approaches.

Misleading Term of 'Traditionalism': The term 'traditionalism' can be misleading. In the context of software, it might suggest sticking to older technologies or methods, even though modern approaches have become traditions in themselves, with their own pioneers and best practices.

'Goodism' and the Value of Good Software Architecture: The concept of 'goodism', favoring good works over bad ones, applies to software architecture. However, the sheer quality of the work is not all that matters; considerations such as scalability, maintainability, and usability are also crucial.

Easy vs. Challenging Architectures: Easy software architectures are those that can be understood and utilized without much effort, whereas challenging architectures require significant work to comprehend and navigate. This distinction is orthogonal to the good/bad dichotomy.

Rise of Complexity in High-Status Software: Just as there's been a rise in difficulty in high-status arts, software systems have become increasingly complex, with architectures like microservices and event-driven architectures challenging to comprehend and implement effectively.

Software Architecture as a Background Art: Software architecture often serves as a 'background art' to the user's primary task. Therefore, it should be designed in a way that enhances user experience without unnecessary complexity.

What Makes an Easy Software Architecture?: An 'easy' software architecture is one that is intuitive, scalable, and maintainable, with clear documentation and well-defined interfaces for interaction. It involves a combination of architectural patterns, use of appropriate technologies, and following best practices.

The Role of Simplicity in Software Architecture: Similar to the concept of 'tonality' in architecture, 'simplicity' plays a crucial role in software architecture. The software system should be as simple as possible to meet its requirements, enhancing usability and maintainability.

Flexibility in Choosing Software Architectural Styles: There's no strict need to choose between traditional monolithic architectures or modern microservices. There are many strands of modern software architectures that are accessible, and there's no general reason why we have to stick to old styles or always adopt new ones.

Keep this autogenerated garbage to yourself, this just pollutes forums. I can't stop you from doing it but damn if I won't call you out for this low effort attempt that contributes nothing.

Cities do not "struggle perennially against decline". Cities grow and grow and grow.

> Cities do not "struggle perennially against decline". Cities grow and grow and grow.

Tell that to Detroit.

Have you ever seen pictures of 1970s New York?

* https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/07/america-in-the-197...

* https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/new-york-photos-1970s-verga...

> Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius.

Why write this garbage?

Architecture is to please those who pay for it. The end.

There's ugly buildings out there, but as long as someone wanted that, who am I to say that they shouldn't have built it? As long as it isn't the government paying for it, I shouldn't get a say. But if it is the government paying for it -one I pay taxes to anyways- then I do get a say.

Where I’m from (Kuwait) we don’t have any building code that defines or limits what can be done with a home or building’s facade and to be honest the clash of tastes is really visible and bothersome to see even when walking in my own neighborhood. However, this summer I travelled to Oman where such a code exists to limit out of place color palettes and facade shapes, so the houses are actually beautiful to look at with the mountain range in the background. Even those buildings near the coast have a separate set of codes and the place is certainly appealing to see and walk through.

Of course, sometimes there is a need for iconic structures and buildings, and there is a place for that, but I believe it is a matter of delicate balance and therefore should be codified as to not ruin the horizon. And thats why I kind of agree with the quoted statement.

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