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Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

There's more to architecture than just the façade, which is what people are rating when they are just looking at photos of the exterior. The interiors, structure, and services, etc. of modern building are often far superior to older ones, and i suspect many 'ordinary' people would agree.

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Yes, every time people get grumpy about modern architecture and look over to see if I agree I tell the story about how I used to work at a company in Boston which moved from a beautiful 19th century building to a soulless Modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper. And thank fucking god: the old building was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, had too little natural light, and was too cramped. The Modernist building was better to actually be in in every way. Buildings are there to be used, not just looked at in pictures.

Le Corbusier: "A house is a machine for living in."

I'm pretty sure that some kind of hybrid can be found where the exterior could look nice and the interior would be very nice as well.

Now, not every modern building has to look like a glass and steel colorless brick.

For example, I really like the look of Oodi [0], Helsinki's new library: it reminds me of wood covered with snow, and the interior is exactly what you would expect from a modern building (built in 2018).

[0]: https://oodihelsinki.fi/en/

Oodi is very much modern architecture. Nordics are full of pretty modern architecture.

The article reads like the author picked a conclusion and made things fit his opinion.

It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities. I have a 1920s home and with like a few days of work it lives like a modern place. This is not some dichotomy.

> It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities

In my experience, the biggest issue is natural light - it's hard to beat glass walls when you need a structural skin with some windows where possible.

Ultramodernist glass-skinned skyscrapers have to cover their glass walls with mirror-reflective film to keep out the majority of the natural light. Otherwise, they are solar ovens. A 2.6 m × 3 m office outside wall facing east or west becomes √2 × 2.6 × 3 ≈ 11 square meters of sunlight when the sun is 45° away from its normal, and sunlight is 1000W/m², so it's like an 11000-watt space heater. Without aggressive air conditioning, the temperature in that office rises even faster than the temperature in a parked car with the windows rolled up. You could be dead in minutes if the air conditioning failed.

The standard passive solar rule of thumb, for traditional windows without those coatings, is to keep glazing to 20% of the floor area to prevent overheating: https://sustainableengineering.co.nz/glazing-percentage-hand...

The ultramodernist alternative is to build the entire wall out of windows coated to reflect 80% of the light, a "g-value" of 0.2, or a little bit more light if the windows open onto a larger interior space. You can let in slightly more visible light than the traditional approach by using coatings that have even higher reflectance in the infrared, but the vast majority of solar radiation is visible light, so the improvement is small.

Those walls of glass do give you a wider view, which can be nice, but in order to keep from killing you, they don't give you more natural light, except marginally.

That doesn’t explain why the architecture students in the article prefer facades that the general public generally dislike.

Right but that's not because modern architectural style has made the interiors better. It's mainly technological improvements that allow larger windows, bigger space, better insulation, etc.

You can totally have a traditional style building with a modern interior without a hint of brutalism or concrete.

Large windows are part of the modern aesthetic.

~1580, large windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollaton_Hall

If it's my building, e.g. the building that I live in - I care more about the ease of maintenance and repair than any facade.

Because I spend 80% of my time indoors, and 20% working in the garden, so frankly don't even care what the building looks like.

Maybe only care that the property looks neat when it's time to sell.

As it stands, these studies are just cherry-picked navel gazing with extra steps. You can't design a study like this well. There are hundreds of thousands of buildings, and tens of thousands of variations of subjective preference. And all of those go out of the window as soon as practical concerns (like affordability) arise.

Am I hot or not architecture edition?

Nonetheless, I think it is a failure of architecture that modern design is ugly. It shouldn't be impossible to make good looking, practical, cost-effective buildings with all the options of materials and engineering that is available.

So let's start as the baseline of these 77 to 23 blowout victories by traditional architecture.

Now gradually substitute other modern designs until you can get more of a 50/50 agreement at least, and hopefully 60/40 in favor of modernism.

You could be right. Some of these might be cherry picked bad modern designs. From the article one of them looked like it should have the wicked witch of the West telling her pretties to fly out from their caves to go attack Dorothy. Another one looks like a massive collection of missile launch tubes.

Some designs I almost have to laugh at, when almost similarly disjointed mcmansion hell type monstrosities are snootily dismissed.

we only care about facades because architecture, in California, where I live, is co-opted by NIMBYs.

when it's a twee victorian, they say it's part of the unique appearance of the neighborhood. when it's a hideous laundromat, they say it's historical. they don't actually care about any of it. normal people and their preferences for "traditional architecture" (whatever that means? i guess, "old") are just collateral damage.

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