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Comment by ReleaseCandidat | Hacker News Reader

> beautiful things

My first association is "fake" - which _is_ appropriate to describe (especially the roman catholic) churches (organisations, not buildings). But I guess that that's not their intention ;)

> Hopefully they're entitled to spend their money the way they like.

I don't know about the US, but in Europe spending money in such a way would be heavily criticised.

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They're relying on donations and money they make selling stuff (roasted coffee, I think) and they're spending the money to praise God, which is pretty much what a religious organization does. Hard to criticize them in any meaningful way.

I feel like you're generalizing "Europe" a bit. Look at the Orthodox church, they are deep-pocketed and heavily funding the construction of monasteries, an example being Romania. It's a common thing to see in Romania actually - a lot of churches being built, to a point where it's become a running joke that there are more churches than hospitals in Romania. It's a sad thing to see, but there's plenty of that in "Europe".

I had the privilege of attending a school with a hundred year old building and back in those days it was copying an even older architectural style and it was beautiful. Meanwhile most modern university buildings were plain ugly. The old brick and mortar buildings were my favourite even though the interior was comically out of date. I.e. creaky wooden floods and seating that looks like it had a 40 year history.

> My first association is "fake"

Better fake than the the latest fad in architecture.

At least fake gothic could never have resulted in brutalist buildings.

Gothic Revival (aka Victorian Gothic) was the original "fake gothic" (gothic-style building built with "modern" Victorian tech) and tbh it's absolutely delightful. The same can't be said for Brutalism, which originated much later (1950-1960s) but generated frankly ugly and non-maintenable buildings.

Not sure if it counts as Victorian Gothic, but The Natural History Museum in London is one of the most delightful building I've seen.

Not only the general architecture, but all the natural history theme that applies to all the Gothic design elements. Animals replacing Gargoyles, etc.

A beautiful building.

Just down the road was the Imperial Institute [1], built in the 1880s. It was demolished in 1957 and now it looks like this [2] and this [3].

[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_Institute.j...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building_over_Q...

[3]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_Bus...

You sometime have to wonder what they hell they were thinking. Who in their right mind would replace [1] by [2] and [3]?

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