Hacker News Reader

Comment by donkeybeer | Hacker News Reader

You are seriously mistaking your personal preference for a universal human trait. Many of these buildings are very homely feeling.

You probably might also come from a country where houses are built of wood. Wood isn't a common building material outside Europe and North America. Concrete and brick are most common.

View on HN

> You are seriously mistaking your personal preference for a universal human trait. Many of these buildings are very homely feeling.

Which you determined how exactly? Or are your tastes universal?

I don't think it's super fruitful to fight opinions with opinions at least.

By most common factors of homeliness: greenery, shade, cool concrete/stone walls (concrete hatred might even be the minority viewpoint worldwide. Wood is not a common building material outside USA/Canada and Europe). Its not like those large glass walled open plan structures. The interior is secluded and hidden and so on.

So you picked traits you feel are associated with that label and checked how much they apply?

... so still subjectively?

Yes as are all artistic opinions. But in fact I can have hard objective data in this, if you look up the normalcy of concrete as a building material worldwide. By this standard wood is weird and concrete is the normal thing. In any case there is no knee jerk aversion to the material. Perhaps its a thing in former communist countries and countries which defined themselves as hating these countries to see concrete as "cold".

... which then matters only to the extent that any given characterization makes it so (which is again subjective). It makes the discussion more sophisticated, but nonetheless still just a clashing of personal preferences.

I really don't see value in this. If it wasn't treated as a debate but as an exploration, an open ended discussion, then sure. But as it stands, this is just pointless. Literally "I don't like it vs. I do", just more elaborate, with a hint of mutual mislead of the other into thinking it's winnable.

My comment is much less dismissive and ridiculous than the top comment I am replying to. I didn't say I hate wood or find it impossible people would like wood. If you wanted to look at it from the point of view of a debate vs exploration mine was closer to the exploration end.

It was, true. Oh well, let's see how they and others respond to it all.

In architecture I almost never find anything really "objectionable" to the point of disgust. So to me I find it difficult to understand how some people can find themselves to get so worked up over architecture. At most the examples of "ugly" architecture cited by various people make me feel bland/unfeeling not disgusted.

I think it's not really the architecture they got ticked off about, but the praise vs. the architecture.

To be more specific, it's not the "designs" that are their issue I don't think, but the extremeness of the gap between what they regard as their own taste or think of as common sense taste vs. what they can see here, and the extreme praise (an award) the latter is receiving despite that. It must be a baffling, cold shower like experience to them.

I've had this with some TV shows, where I'd find them obnoxiously overrated, and their sheer mention would get pretty intense reactions out of me. Even though the shows were alright, just nowhere near what people represented them as.

This can be generalized a bit, where if we concede that taste is subjective, then recognitions like these as a whole will come across as weird, if not counterproductive. I don't think that's the angle they were going for though. An analog I can think of from my own experiences is my distaste towards praising historical figures in literature (of all kinds, so incl. science and philosophy literature). It robs people of their own ambitions, I think.

It could be but I was also speaking in a more general sense about having seen some people who seem literally disgusted about some architecture completely outside of any awards.

Ah I see. I do think some designs (architecture or otherwise) look pretty bad, even offensive (not in the culture war sense, but in the this hurts to look at sense), but there are some subject matters where my lowest is also just indifference. So I'd say this is a "to each their own" type of thing too.

Regardless of material, these examples are hideous.

Today I learned that in British English, "homely" is a positive trait when referring to a place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com