The Humanise Campaign call for an end to boring buildings
humanise.org
humanise.org
Sunlight is the single best thing that a building can have in my opinion.
That’s not to say that we cannot make them look nice. You can probably do the same thing with elegant buildings, but if you try to build one of those now your costs rise by 400%.
And by “covering with windows” I mean actual wall to wall floor to ceiling windows like modern personality-free skyscrapers.
This could be done better with wood paneling or painting it. But even as architecture from the outside it just looks sad, cold, depressing.
They're clearly either mentally unstable, or on drugs, or both.
They made a name for themselves by designing a modernist not-quite-brutalist-yet school - plenty of concrete, glass and rectangles, which turned it into a greenhouse in summer, a fridge in winter, and an echo chamber for shrieking kids all year round.
Some architects are very strange people, far more interested in building huge sculptures that happen to have rooms in them than creating inspiring usable spaces.
There you go, your campaign makes no economical sense
Unfortunately, developers literally only want one thing and it's disgusting (most money for cheapest possible build).
Imagine CAD is first invented and your world class creative shop is like, “Let’s make a poop doodle.”
Then there are comments here noting some of these buildings are pretty nice looking. Sarcastic is 200% the wrong approach. And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism.
But people who have to live around brutalism tend to suffer because of it. It's like abstract contemporary art made into your living space. But you're not abstract and so you don't fit in.
This makes it much more organic, surprisingly, than most modern developments. It's not just the same thing copypasted over and over, Barbican has a very human, natural variety to it, despite the superficially harsh appearance.
Sometimes this variety can even backfire, because Barbican can feel like a maze. But that's a consequence of it not being the standard street grid. I wish we had more architecture like that.