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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Be careful to avoid survivorship bias here. Only the "best" buildings from Medieval and Renaissance times (or even later into the 1800s) are still around. Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.

Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.

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You must not travel a lot. There are huge numbers of historic villages and towns with original or very old architecture. If we were dealing with survivorship bias, we should expect essentially random buildings scattered around cities, not entire towns or contiguous historic districts.

I was thinking of iconic buildings - cathedrals, etc.

Thinking of old towsn in the UK, many are picturesque, but those old cottages tend to have limited windows and low ceilings make them far less functional by modern standards.

You may want to double check that the historic buildings you see in historic districts are actually, uhh, historic. Historic building codes have been around for hundreds of years in some areas and many of the buildings are rebuilds and ones that didn’t fit the mold have been rebuilt.

Not that modern concrete architecture is not a blight on our cities, but not all historic buildings were originally as charming as we may see them today.

People give Brutalism a lot of shit but I think the buildings have a certain utilitarian charm. I have heard that concrete can be very unsustainable and counterintuitivly actually hard to maintain though, so I suppose it's a good thing it's going out of style.

And these were only for the very rich. The poor had wooden shacks that deteriorated quickly.

There are lot's of city centres in Europe in France, Italy, Belgium etc. where entire neighborhoods survived, and they look great.

new york city's brownstones are considered beautiful and iconic now, but when they were built they were described as cheap eye-sores and a blight upon the beautiful city.

i imagine a similar trend must exist for most of the European cities. people's aesthetic usually rejects the new, but recognizes the beauty once it is seen as old and classic

The reason they were thought of ugly at the timewas because the brown house houses were relatively monotone, one type of building compared to richer streets where every house was different & build by the vision of the owner. See every house on the Amsterdam on the Canals: https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/Mkr3pQQInOjO4a3UJUP2EzBpywU=/...

The same complaint was made when the "pijp" was build, al buildings are the same. It was originally meant for poor people, now one of the hotspots: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Revoluti...

But stil the brownstone building have way more ornaments, arches & other details intended to make it pretty then any modern flat. I have a real hard time believing we will every think of the grey Paris banlieus as pretty: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/05/15/business/GHETTO-1...

I think the ultimate city if you like old European architecture is probably Prague. It's a big city and most of it is amazing.

You're totally right that France/Italy/Belgium all have amazing towns to visit. But in case someone is looking for a random tip elsewhere: Český Krumlov (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD_Krumlov), which is in today Czechia (handy in case you happen to visit Prague), but used to have a large German population before WWII. It looks wonderful, perhaps the most perfect Medieval town I've seen.

Yeah Prague is awesome; although same as Amsterdam, and other bigger cities the chaos of the cities at times is a distraction. Cesky looks lovely, France also has amazing places. I do think this is the most perfect Medieval town though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel

Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.

"hideous blobs of steel and glass" were originally known as glorious and beautiful modern architecture. oversaturation makes the creative into the tired and boring

I am not sure - I can see why Empire State or Chrysler are majestic, but WTC was hideous. And I saw them simultaneously for the first time. The shard is probably nice, shanghai tower is not too ugly, burj khalifa is ok - but almost everything else is eyesore.

Everything about building in the US is either forbidden or mandatory; "liking" doesn't come into it, there generally isn't a choice in the matter.

The main aesthetic reason new buildings don't look like old ones is Baumol's cost disease, i.e. nobody can hire that many laborers anymore. The second is fire codes and accessibility requirements.

Nope, visit ANY old german village that wasn't bombed during ww2. Most of the old houses still stand and every single one is prettier than what is being build today.

And how much would that same house cost to build now?

Again, this is survivorship bias at best.

Are you saying medieval Germany was richer than present-day Germany or USA? That's of course not true. And it's also not clear why you call it a survivorship bias - these villages were probably above-the-median in their days, but it's not some singular building like Pyramids that is not representative of overall building of that era/territory. It was just how the houses were built there and then.

An average pre-WW2 house in a German village may be prettier than an average house from the 1950s, but certainly not than an average house being built today. Your perception is presumably clouded by the touristy "villages", which in fact have been at least locally important towns at some point in the past.

haven't seen much tourists in my village so far...

"Survivorship bias" isn't an excuse to build things that look like shit.

If anything, we should be emulating the things that survived because on some level we all collectively thought they were worth keeping.

>Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.

It's actually much less than 100 years - more like 30 - but this is actually the problem, the whole "intentionally build things that don't last" thing.

Regarding the Louvre, I think that pyramid looks like a fractal cancer, growing out of what is an otherwise stunning and breathtaking scene. If it were destroyed somehow (perhaps the anti-oil protestors can train their gaze on something other than actual art), no one would care except those who wish to look sophisticated by cheering "modern" "art".

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