Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Personally, not a huge fan of the overly-ornamented stuff, but I do think that the current architectural trends are overly... generic. Case in point; Fitzwilton House, in Dublin, a Brutalist office block recently demolished and replaced with a modern one. The original was, well, a lot of people didn't like it, but it was utterly unique. The replacement is a completely generic glass thing, almost indistinguishable from the next one down the canal, or literally thousands of others worldwide.

Before and after shots: https://www.archiseek.com/2016/permission-demolish-fitzwilto...

Pictures don't really do justice to just how startling the thing looked; it was completely unignoreable. Now, from a practical point of view, it probably needed replacing; it was a pretty inefficient use of land, if nothing else. But they could at least have replaced it with something interesting.

(Fun fact: it used to contain the Australian embassy, amongst other things, which always felt vaguely inappropriate; Australia just doesn't have the appropriate sinister vibes for such a building.)

They're the same picture. Someone drew a rectangle in AutoCAD, then did some repeating offsets, handed it to the engineers: "make it work". All I see is rectangles in rectangles ad infinitum.

Yeah, nobody is the winner in this debate, regardless of who won.

I hate both buildings, enough that I’m having negative feelings about both architects.

They are both so godawfully ugly that I would probably walk a different route rather than get angry again every time I walk past. Gross.

I used to kind of like the old one when I walked past it. The new one is just very, very generic; you don't notice it at all.

I think Theatre Royal vs Hawkins House is better example in Dublin:

https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/then-now/hawkins-st-theatr...

Almost seems criminal.

If anyone remembers the Kingdome in Seattle, surfing the lead up to demolition someone ran pictures of the original proposal. The artist rendering was a white building, that looked okay, maybe even good.

What Seattle got was raw concrete. Pseudo brutalist. That building was an ugly piece of shit the day it opened, and it just got uglier every day after. To paraphrase Office Space, every time you saw the Kingdome, it was the ugliest it had ever been.

What they replaced it with has changed names a couple times but is a decent building. And the Mariner’s stadium has actual brick on it, but due to budget problems only on the side that faces away from most commuters.

It seems like the artists’ drawings for some buildings, especially the simple ones, can end up lying quite a bit. I get the same vibe from the building in the parent comment. I bet the proposal was exactly the same shape as what they build but the facade was rendered much differently.

The Kingdome was an engineering catastrophe on top of an architectural one. It was physically falling apart and deemed unsafe for use years before it was even paid off.

You'll be glad to hear that it's gone now, though the replacement isn't particularly inspiring. That sort of thing was definitely the low-point of Dublin's architecture, though; awful building.

I initially thought the before/after pictures were just two different views of the "before". I was looking for the after.

Both buildings are conceptually very similar. I do like both.

You can tell how ugly a building is by how many trees are obscuring it in photos.

The replacement is definitely boring and generic. Still far less ugly than the brutalist building it replaced. I think this photo gives a better impression of it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/turgidson/7570053250

Yeah looking at the pictures I am slightly dissapointed. For comparison, I am looking from my window at this (Slovak National Archive): https://www.flickr.com/photos/80942841@N08/8352212537/in/pho...

I think the minimalist design trend came from the necessity of making mass production simpler and it still is lauded as “ultra modern” and futuristic because it makes good looking design easier and in turn faster and cheaper. It’s easier to throw away all the furniture and just put 4 white cubes on a white-paited room and call it minimalist interior design than actually choosing different pieces and colors that work together.

The main problem I see is that modern architecture robs cities and countries of their character.

Yet another soulless amalgamation of concrete and glass (that invariably wins prestigious awards and is praised for its uniqueness or something) can be plopped anywhere, Dubai, Stockholm, New York, or Cape Town, and it wouldn't make a shred of difference.

You are absolutely right there.

But personally, instead of lamenting it, I see it as a sign of our march towards the “Earth” culture. We are watching the development of the first global civilisation unfold.

It’s exciting, even if it has none of the charm of older architectural styles.

But is it exciting? Why? Personally I find the idea of a uniform “Earth” culture with no local identities as exciting as the idea of never being able to travel away my own local culture to experience a different one, that is, not exciting at all.

It might be kind of exciting if it stopped people from traveling around so damn much. But of course everyone will still take 2-4 weeks every year to fly to one of the same generic vacation destinations and double or quadruple their lifetime energy footprint.

I'm reminded of the last page of "Orbitsville" (Bob Shaw, 1975).

"In time even the flickering ships ceased to ply the trade lanes between the entrance portals, because there can be no reward for the traveller when departure point cannot be distinguished from destination."

It's not "the development of the first global civilisation". It's the death of imagination and creativity.

You'd think that for a place as varied and interesting as Earth, you'd emerge with something that is as varied and interesting.

It also seems like you would expect the practical considerations from environment and material availability to result in different looking buildings. For example pitched roofs and large windows in climates with lots of snow, or windcatchers, flat roofs, white paint and small windows in warmer places.

Much like the original post, the construction industry has an intimate understanding of the pricing of the plain box as a 'standard' and the non-plain box as a 'premium / luxury'. The resulting environment expresses bland uniformity as a standard cost and unqiueness as high-specialty luxury.

We can have a global civilisation without the buildings being so bloody boring.

The “global civilization” spent 20 years trying to assimilate Afghanistan before just giving up and allowing a rebuilt Kabul and all of its bland contemporary architecture get overrun by a gang of medieval goat herders. I suspect the world has already reached peak homogenization and will increasingly splinter on cultural lines in the future.

This is exactly the problem with Hudson Yards in NYC. Even now, the most likely image you'll see when searching for Hudson yards is of the rather terrible "Vessel" sculpture they plopped down in the middle. This is because all the surrounding buildings are so devoid of character that they're near impossible to photograph in an interesting manner.

Is The Vessel still closed because too many people were committing sudoku by jumping off it?

To be clear on terminology--this isn't "Modern" architecture; it's "contemporary". Modern refers to a very specific set of movements. The demolished brutalist building the OP mentions is an offshoot of Modern. The replacement is not.

Common definition of the term "modern" is "relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past.".

I'd rather call architectural styles from 100 years ago "modernist" to avoid confusion.

What you, I, and everybody else here hates and is responding to here is the design choices of major corporations who are larger than many governments and have the ability and incentive to push and use an anodyne and inoffensively bland style that fits in anywhere in the world of the modern global economy. The awards are part of the same system, trying to give legitimacy to itself.

That said - the International Style, which started over a hundred years ago at this point (back when style "movements" were still a thing) was actually a universalist project, trying to argue FOR the ideal architecture whose express purpose was that it COULD BE plopped down anywhere.

Needless to say that approach has some... issues. But it has to be understood that the world they were reacting to was VASTLY different from today. Tenement slums without indoor plumbing were still a thing for example. These guys were massively egotistical, paternalistic, etc. So of course their approach was going to have certain flaws. But they were trying to do what -they thought- was in the universal good.

More recently people like Frampton argued for "critical regionalism" that tries to reconcile local character and culture with contemporary standardized building practices. Then postmodernism happened and history and local culture were allowed back in the academy (cf: Washington Library). Since deconstructivism collapsed under the weight of self-parody it's been a kind of no limits return to regionally responsive architecture.

But the awards that are being given out for that aren't the ones that get all the press. Except the Pritzker, which has really changed its tune in the past 15 years in recognizing architecture with more character and sensitivity to its culture.

You can find neoclassical buildings in Boston, Havana, Paris, Oslo, Moscow.

They all look the same, just like skyscrapers.

"soullessness" and "lack of character" go back a long way, and people only mentioning it when talking about brutalism or glass buildings is just evidence they know nothing about the history and culture they are trying to preserve

The problem with brutalism or glass buildings isn’t that it all looks the same or lacks local character. The problem is that they are ugly. It’s only when we are asking the second “why”—“why are they ugly?”—that we find out that, at least in part, these styles are specifically designed to avoid any sort of local or cultural flavor. Neoclassical architecture doesn’t have this problem because it intentionally calls back to Greece and Rome, reflecting a cultural heritage that is, in fact, shared all the way from Moscow to Boston.

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