Hacker News Reader

Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

> Even though the builders didn't have the advantage of modern tools and science they sculpted statues and gargoyles and domes and columns and flying buttresses and trusses and everything inside and out was covered in intricate carvings and gilding and mosaic and fresco and ornament.

> We're lucky if builders bother to do even a half-assed job slapping together thin sheets of drywall and formaldehyde-soaked plywood.

You are comparing cathedrals with regular living/working places. Cathedrals concentrated a huge amount of resources in them for ideological reasons. Regular living/working places are produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now. Prestige buildings get lavished with ornamentation and pomp. Both then and now.

The article talks about something different. It is comparing regular folks homes then and now, and describes how a particular art form is disappearing.

View on HN

This is not really true, my 100 year old house in the UK is one of hundreds in my suburb/village. Each house is slightly different though, in terms of the layout. The fireplace is hardwood and has some columns on it that are handmade on a lathe, each side is slightly different. The doors are clearly handmade as they have slightly different features on each. This obviously doesn't happen anymore unless you are paying a massive premium. This required a much higher element of skill obviously, analogous to the difference between writing low level code and wiring library code together with a modern web framework, or even a low code saas product.

At the time, it already costed a huge premium. If you get to the basic cost in terms of ressources, it is probably less expensive to do elaborate work like this today due to better knowledge and tools. But maybe today, most of (new) homebuyers prefer allocating more resources to less durable goods like tech or entertainment. Edit : Plus, cheap 100 year old homes do not exist anymore.

At that time labour was cheap, now labour is a major part of the build. Housing was also cheap due to land being more plentiful.

100 year homes are pretty common in older cities of the UK and in the countryside. New homes are similar in price in a lot of cases. They have advantages such as better insulation, less to go wrong (in theory) but also disadvantages such as lack of parking, garden and "character".

> At that time labour was cheap

I was curious about this, but also a bit lazy, and the easiest figures to find were for the US. A carpenter in 1921 in Boston MA (which is upper-end of the range given, but not outlandish) earned $1/hour or $40/week. According to this[1], that's $17/hour or $680 a week. That's just over half of what they get paid now, at ~$30/hour.

As to:

> At that time labour was cheap

For the random example I picked, in the US, labour was about 50% the cost it is now.

0: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-hours-...

1: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

2: https://www.indeed.com/career/carpenter/salaries/Boston--MA

Thanks for posting that, ironically probably the biggest driver of inflation in the UK is increases in house/land prices!

Just a note that this is true for "cathedrals" in the figurative sense as well as the literal sense that you seem to mean it - there are plenty of attractive historical buildings that weren't religious but still represented displays of prestige and power by governments or just individuals.

There's also heavy survivorship bias going on here. The Dickensian slums of London weren't worth preserving so were wiped away, whereas more impressive buildings were much more likely to be preserved. A naive assessment of historical buildings in London might be that the whole place was much more impressive than today, whereas it may be that, on average, the reverse is true.

Europe is filled with old buildings with decorative elements. Some of this is survivorship bias, but fire and bombs destroyed buildings fairly indiscriminately. Instead the cost of labor was relatively low so adding these elements was simply more affordable and therefore they ended up on more buildings.

This shows up for even iconic modern buildings. The Sidney Opera house is a perfect example, from a mile away it looks interesting but get close and there’s few small scale details that look interesting. By small scale I mean fit within a 3 foot by 3 foot cube the way a gargoyle head might.

In Spain you can even spot an astronaut on an really old building in Salamanca, older than the US itself. But that's made as a hint/norm/law? among Historicians/Restorers in order to say 'hey, this chunk is not the original, it had been restored recently because of maintenance'.

>You are comparing cathedrals with regular living/working places.

The house i'm renovating was built by lower class people now dead. The fireplace has some marvelous emaile work. My grandparents on one side were factory workers (glass cutter and cigar roller specifically) and are still ridiculously frugal beyond belief due to their experiences in the world wars. Their living room has lovely cornishes, etc. Their fire places have art of goats and nature on em. The modern equivalent of that fireplace is a comparatively ridiculously expensive box with 0 ornamentation.

On the other hand the expensive new builts now go 2 ways with some harking back to old pastoral styles but with less detail and the other ones are cubic featureless boxes inspired by american flat roofed villas but without the wealth to take it much further.

I could go on and on about the death of detail in design and elsewhere and i know it's just annecdotes but it's to be found absolutely everywhere. Not just the cathedrals and major buildings of the state and the rich.

I remember one small town post office we frequented wasn’t much to look at outside—brick, but not fancy—but was gorgeous inside. Marble everywhere, including floors, brass everything including solid wood brass-clad exterior doors and fine, ornate brass PO Box doors, et c. Probably built at the tail end of the 19th century.

Just a sleepy little town post office, but they built it like it’d be there 300 years. I can’t imagine what those nice, serious-feeling doors alone would cost to get today. I know no small town post office would ever get them, that’s for sure.

All the ones near me now are much newer and are the same sort of disposable stripmall-type construction as everything else. They don’t feel nice to be in. They don’t feel serious. They will not be here in 100 years, probably not even 50.

Cathedrals? Bah, nonsense. Go into google street view and slap down a marker in any random town with buildings built a few decades ago on in the American east coast. Downtown in a random town, not in a modern suburb or commercial park. You'll see humble regular buildings, built for regular people to live or work in, with decorative trims and fancy brickwork.

Here's one I found in seconds: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2537582,-73.7922474,3a,30.7y...

Look at the brickwork around the windows on the house with the blue door. It's no cathedral, just some random building in a random small town nobody has ever heard of. The builders obviously cared to make it look nice anyway. If you go down the street you'll see many other buildings like that. Not all of them by any means, many of the others are plainer, more utilitarian, and many of those are obviously newer. But to say that "Regular living/working places are produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now." obviously isn't true. Some were built as cheap as possible then. Many are now. But many then were deliberately built to be nicer than was required.

> Cathedrals? Bah, nonsense.

The comment I responded to said this: "sculpted statues and gargoyles and domes and columns and flying buttresses and trusses and everything inside and out was covered in intricate carvings and gilding and mosaic and fresco and ornament."

That's a cathedral. You won't find that in a "humble regular building". It does not fit the image you linked.

> But many then were deliberately built to be nicer than was required.

Sure. Same as many are deliberately built nicer today. In the city centre where I live they built a new hotel, and they have amazing Ionic order columns on the facade. And they look freshly carved and beautiful.

There is just little point in comparing prestige architecture (the one with the gargoyles, and domes and flying buttresses and carvings and mosaic and fresco and ornament) with regular buildings. Instead we should do exactly what you did in your comment. Compare a regular building from then, with a regular building now.

Checkout this map of outdoor art in Amsterdam.

https://amsterdam.kunstwacht.nl/plattegrond

A lot of them are small adornments to housing, one large area of which (Apollobuurt) was built as social housing 100 years ago.

> Regular living/working places are produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now.

Yeah, a trip to an open-air museum (we call such a place a "skansen" in Poland) will show you that for most of history, people lived in places that even homeless of today would scoff at. Right angles are a luxury.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com