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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing stopping localities from forcing developers to make these buildings nice looking. I've been to villages where the mcdonalds is in a tutor style building because that's what code requires. Most of these buildings are the same 5-over-1 design with retail on the bottom, but with a fancy looking facade that makes it look nicer.

But developers aren't going to pay for design unless they are forced to.

That being said, a lot of styles we appreciate now were the cheap designs of their day. Those mid-century storefronts in towns that grew up the 50-60s were all cheap to produce.

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> There's nothing stopping localities from forcing developers to make these buildings nice looking. I've been to villages where the mcdonalds is in a tutor style building because that's what code requires.

That's homogeneity, not attractiveness. I think there are a very small number of places where this works, as a cool marker of identity and difference, like (maybe) Santa Fe. Even there I'm not sure if residents like it, or if it's just the tourists who think it's historic and cute. But for most places it just makes things bland and depressing. At first glance it's kinda cool when a university enforces a style guide that visually distinguishes its campus from its environs, but it quickly turns sad when you realize the art museum looks exactly like the biology building, which looks exactly like the business school, which looks exactly like the campus health services.

the reality is that most of these 5-over-1 buildings are the result of bylaws meant to do exactly that, by forbidding anything deemed "ugly". When you throw up barriers to building so that developers have to make the least offensive, blandest buildings possible to satisfy every quirk of the building code, the design review board, the community engagement process, etc, you get bland buildings.

good design doesn't come through legislation. it comes through allowing people the freedom to take risks and do interesting things in their designs, and to have the confidence that the work they put into designing something won't be thrown out at a community meeting because it doesn't fit the neighbourhood character.

I actually live in an area where a major apartment building collapsed with fatalities that included a coworker, so we should qualify risk.

If a building is unsafe and beyond cost-effective rehabilitation, it should come down. Undoubtedly, this new generation of buildings will grow old and follow this path, as has everything before.

Risk in style and ornamentation is a different matter, and of secondary concern.

I would far prefer to reside in a stylistically hideous but structurally sound building than anything that places my safety at risk, no matter how elegant.

Structural safety standards is pretty much independent of style and design and rarely if ever is the reason why buildings get delayed by process. The standards are well known, widespread, often rational, evaluated by experts and almost never aesthetic beyond "you need railings for stairs" and such. Even countries where building is effectively unrestricted, like Japan, has no problem in enforcing safety standards.

The general safety issues of buildings tend to increase as they age, as new safety standards come into place, so making it hard to replace old buildings actually tends to decrease safety!

Also they tend to be hidden so anybody at a neighborhood review meeting is not even going to understand what was done unsafely.

yes, i definitely meant risk in aesthetic design, not risk in safety or structural design. building codes to specify safety standards are unquestionably a good thing.

How about we don’t add hurdles to building housing in a housing crisis

What this leads to is the joke of guidelines like in Victoria, Canada, where the city basically is trying to mandate that buildings look "interesting", where interesting is defined as "the developer built it out of Jenga blocks that didn't quite line up right" and "used as many different colors as you would get fonts in a school newsletter".

This often results in "silly" rather than "nice". The architect knows what it takes to get the project accepted and so they do THAT and not one penny more. The city staff and council are (somewhat) bound to accept what meets the rules and they do (after begging for park, low income housing, stores, sidewalk extra width, free wifi, parking, not parking, cash, cash-in-lieu, no gas stove, transit passes, police donation (I jest?), etc). And predictably the result is cliché and repetitive. There is probably even some kind of curtain wall system off the shelf for it too. Off course, there is, obviously.

Around here (and likely across america) you see the same facade features again and again -probably because they are off the shelf and picked out of a catalog. (of course they are, but the degree to which they are is the silly part of it. There is ZERO creativity in them.)

Actually this is to the point where one naive building here went so faaaaar out of their way to look different (while within budget) that it looks absurd. Absurdly, deliberately, gratuitously different - in a way that makes little technical sense.)

Similarly another one a partner lived in, was so well thought out, it attacked your eye. I could not walk through it without seeing the attention to detail. Outstanding designers. Interesting how "interesting" is now so obvious. In a neighborhood that was otherwise boring as hell.

It's like how every interior in suburban American homes is made out of the same stuff from home depot.

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