Leading Architects Defend Hated Buildings | Hacker News Reader

Leading Architects Defend Hated Buildings

nytimes.com

43 pointsc-slice52 comments

From the article: "It’s legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It’s not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be."

I can't help but mentally find & replace Paris -> San Francisco.

I just wish there was some neighborhood like La Défense where 'all future high rises' in the Bay Area are exiled, where people prefer a vital, living, high-density, sustainable city to the preservation of the aesthetic of their sentimental notions of the city.

Even better, the non-high rises in Paris are five or six stories tall. Most of SF is zoned for max 40 feet.

For reference the height restriction in Paris between 1977 and 2008 was 102 feet for the center and 121 feet further out.

Also, it's a false dichotomy that we must have either no development, or a building everyone (other than the architect himself) hates.

For most of history, architects sought a graceful balance between art and practical considerations. It seems to be a recent development that they have split into separate groups, one of which focuses solely on cutting costs, and the other of which focuses solely on building monuments to their own genius.

I wish I could find a link, but I recall years ago an interview on NPR with an architect that designed some building in LA (for paying parking tickets or something). Anyway, during the interview he accidentally admitted to not actually caring about the people that would end up using the space.

He then followed up by back-pedaling of course, but I've always remembered that as a moment when my cynicism about "modern" architecture felt validated.

I'm struck by the parallel between architecture in your example and software engineering. You could say the same about the engineers who don't ever consider the humans who will be using their software.

I don't really see the parallel. There's a big difference between not understanding the end user (which I'd say is usually the case with bad software interfaces), and actively no caring about the end user or even intentionally creating a negative experience.

I don't recall ever using software where I thought the creator intentionally made things difficult.

You may be interested in the Alexander/Eisenman debate[1], if you've not encountered it before.

On the one side, an architect who believes in designing buildings largely as a means of communicating artistic messages—even, and perhaps especially, designing the building to make people uncomfortable[2], because to make a building that comforts and reassures is a bit like lying about the state of the world, or doing a broader disservice by reinforcing the status quo. Buildings as statements, buildings as jokes[3], even.

On the other, an architect who finds this view practically psychopathic, since, after all, people will live their lives in these places. Buildings, in his view, should serve people over communicating a message and, above all, should please the humans who will look at them and crawl around in them.

[1] http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm

[2] http://socks-studio.com/img/blog/eisenman-alexander-01-800x6...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eisenman#/media/File:Grea...

Architects who purposefully design buildings to be uncomfortable seem like people who I would find extremely annoying or even infuriating to deal with. Except in very special cases, an architect's job is "design buildings for people to use", not just "design buildings".

>On the one side, an architect who believes in designing buildings largely as a means of communicating artistic messages—even, and perhaps especially, designing the building to make people uncomfortable, because to make a building that comforts and reassures is a bit like lying about the state of the world, or doing a broader disservice by reinforcing the status quo. Buildings as statements, buildings as jokes, even.

Yeah, that's pretty much the premise of brutalism [1]. Actually I think there's a place for that kind of thing and some of the best examples in London are really awe-inspiring and interesting places to hang out (e.g. the National Theatre, the Barbican). But of course there are some 'concrete monstrosities' as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

I don't think that brutalism goes as far as that. It does try to be 'honest' but it does not deliberately try to be uncomfortable.

FWIW, I'm not making the argument that high-rises have to be hated. I'm saying that categorically hating high-rises is bad for everyone who wants to live in that city and can't.

> vital, living, high-density, sustainable city

I get what you mean, but La Défense is more or less the opposite of that. The people responsible should be shot, as it taints the ideals of what you mentioned. Tour Montparnasse should be loaded from cellar to attic with excessive amounts of explosives and be put out of its misery.

Isn't that what SoMa is? No (or significantly lesser) height restrictions, where the Salesforce tower is going up, and bordered by Bart, Caltrain, and the Embarcadero line.

Isn't Mission Bay and Hunter's Point less regulated? I know they are building a few high rises and hospital buildings that are quite tall. No NIMBYs live there to shoot down development plans yet.

> they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city

Paris is very dense. All of the places in the top 30 mentioned below are actually neighborhoods of Paris:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...

That's the point. Paris is the second-lowest on that list. The other places listed are all Parisian suburbs.

"Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth."

But the only Anglo city in the list is Union City. Nowhere in the UK is listed.

That's just an inevitable result of regression to the mean. Paris is 40 square miles while the largest of the denser French cities is less than 1 square mile. Paris has areas with much higher density, but it's impossible to sustain that level of density over the whole city. For instance, the 11th arrondissement of Paris has more than 50% higher population density of any of the other French cities (while still having a larger area than any of them). In fact, 9 of the 20 arrondissements have a higher population density than any of the other French cities[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris

London is 2 to 3 times more expensive than Paris at the moment. And Paris is denser than London. Kinda kills the argument.

It's more expensive because it was successful and people moved there.

Paris density is far less than London. Paris has fewer people in a larger metro area.

  London: 13,614,409 people in 8,382.00 km2
  Paris: 12,161,542 people in 17,174.4 km2

These comparisons are rarely informative, because they're based on arbitrary municipal lines in the sand, rather than at a steady place on the CBD -> Urban -> Inner Suburban -> Outer Suburban -> Exurban -> Rural spectrum

A more informative 1-dimensional 1-variable consideration, though imperfect, might be to take every person in the municipality and ask 'How many other people live within 1km of this person?', and take the median of that distribution.

We finally managed to get rid of this monstrosity last year in Chicago: http://www.landmarks.org/images/ten_most_2011_press/Prentice....

Also relevant: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ug... ("There are many gorgeous buildings in D.C. Unfortunately for us, in the ’60s and ’70s, the federal government only hired architects with early onset glaucoma.")

some more images of brutalist buildings in chicago (including the prentice hospital):

http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/5667743710/campbell...

http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8260917974/prentice...

http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/2935927750/laborato...

http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8300999834/raymond-...

A few years ago, two bank robbers managed to escape from the MCC (your first picture) by climbing down a rope made from sheets. The building (across the street from our old office) is, if anything, even more forbidding in person. Still blows me away.

Yeah, that would take some stones for sure

Not an American and have never seen it live, but in the picture I see a beautiful building and not a monstrosity.

I used to live in Chicago and I was quite sad to see it go, personally...

I think it really says something impressive that the F.B.I. is preparing to abandon the Hoover building. Opened in 1975, pretty universally reviled, and has become such a maintenance nightmare that the government is finding it cheaper to site a new location, build an all new headquarters and then move the Bureau out of D.C. than to just maintain it.

That's correct, it's only 40 years old.

Actually, it was determined the building was already in a dreadful state 15 years ago, when the building was only 25 years old, and it was literally starting to fall apart by 2006. The review that came after that determined that the cost to repair the building and get it back up to usable was not justifiable.

In 2008 the building was appraised and it was determined that even if all $660 million in repairs and renovations were made, the quality of the original building was so poor it would still not be classified as "Class A" space.

By 2011, the renovation estimate increased to $1.7 billion. It would be cheaper, at $850m to simply demolish the building and put up a new one.

I think it's one thing to experiment a bit with architecture, it's totally another to keep building poorly designed ugly garbage piles. The world will be a slightly better place when that building is demolished. Even if it was replaced with an empty lot.

People actively dislike these kinds of urban spaces. They don't visit them, photograph them, enjoy them. They avoid them. But that isn't the only hideous building in D.C. [2]

Here's one of the best talks on this issue [3]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building

2 - http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ug...

3 - http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...

I know people hate Centre Pompidou but I do not share that hate. As a child my parents took me there many times and for years I would have wild, beautiful architectural dreams about it. It's what made me realize that architecture is not just a historical thing but something that people who are living in the present can do as well, and that it is something that can be shocking and beautiful at the same time.

> I know people hate Centre Pompidou but I do not share that hate.

I had no idea. I absolutely adore the Pompidou. I've only visited once, a few years back, but I remember it vividly. Colourful and full of joy.

There is a great story I heard about the architects winning the competition. The jury had to do an inspection of their offices to ensure the architects were established enough to take on the project. So Rogers & Piano hired out a floor of an office building and got all their friends to 'staff' it for the week the jury was visiting.

I can't understand why anyone would hate this building, I would love to visit it. But beyond personal preference, the success of the building is not merely about beauty but in how it functions both practically and phenomenologically. Judging architecture on looks alone is like judging, i don't know, twitter for its logo.. The pompidou centre made a large plaza based on classical proportions ie.the same size as the façade—in an area of paris without public space. And with the symbolism of the inner workings being exposed—transparency was a strong political statement to which the public responded.

Rogers:"The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe."

I remember when Melbourne wanted to build a new 'city square' sort of area, which required knocking down an existing building. The building was the Gas & Fuel Corporation Towers, which was a pretty boring orange-brick high-rise[1]. A Melburnian all my life, I'd never heard anyone posit an opinion on the building, good or bad, in person or in media. It was boring. It wasn't pretty, but it was just there.

But then they wanted to knock it down, and out came a media campaign where all the newspapers were talking about how ugly it was and what a blight, and suddenly people were ferociously hateful towards it. "Don't you just hate that building?" Well, no. And neither did you until you read about it in the paper. The weird thing was that the campaign was unnecessary (IMO) because people didn't care one way or another. It's not like people treasured the aesthetics or it had some historical tie...

They replaced it with a building that looks like a pile of glass at the recyclers [2]. Admittedly it's not boring, but neither is it attractive.

[1]http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-cor... [2]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federatio... [2a]http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federat...

As a non-Melbournian, I felt like this was one of the most unwelcoming parts of the city, especially for someone pushing a stroller with all the different levels and a pub closing the passage way with bouncers even for passers by. Apparently there are some events happening there, but it feels very esoteric and not compelling.

I think the plaza is an awful public space, building aesthetics aside. Rough cobbles on a sloped surface? I was wondering if it was perhaps intended to keep skateboarders out, however the cost is that infirm people have less access. If the development wasn't right outside the central train station, I reckon it would be a wasteland that wouldn't attract (enough) people.

Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and opposition rarely gets called to account, so it's a magnet for the cowardly self-righteous.

I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. Preventing building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.

It's hard to think that the people would have loved those buildings (two local iconic landmarks were less than 100m away), but you raise a good point in that perhaps it was about drumming up support for the replacement, as in "anything but that!".

Also, I wonder if there wasn't a high-level political interest in keeping the buildings around, and drumming up public discord over them might have helped seal the backroom deals?

Having grown up just down the road from the second building on this list and having tried to navigate its dilapidated, maze-like corridors and awkwardly arranged "open" spaces, I can testify to its horrendous design. It routinely shows up on these types of "most hated" lists both nationally and globally for good reason.

I wish I could understand the mindset of the original architect or, better yet, the local bureaucrats back in the day who thought it was a great idea to build something so large seemingly modeled on a random stack of toddler's play toys.

Now it just serves to suck the county coffers dry due to ludicrously exorbitant maintenance costs (I mean, come on, "80 roofs?"). A soon-to-be-demolished, barely-used monument to bad government decisions and a complete lack of foresight of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

What you're describing reminds me a lot of Padelford Hall at University of Washington, another product of the late 60s.

(http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/june07/content/view...)

It was awful, actually several "wings" in one building. It was possible to get locked out of the building on a walkway between two wings, with no other exits. You would sometimes have to go through one person's office to get to another office.

The theory when I was a student there was that university construction in the late 60s was obsessed with dealing with civil unrest - psych buildings with riot-proof windows, admin buildings with confusing layouts, an open square covered in bricks that get slippery when hosed down, etc.

Nobody defending the brutalist city hall building in Boston, I see...

> I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile.

Seems eerily familiar to the sentiment surrounding the plaza by the city hall in Boston.

For some reason, people seem to be opposed to brutalism. Personally, I love it... the powerful, stark lines, clean geometry, abstract shapes. (http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/). It sounds like this building is disliked more for its painful layout though.

It's almost always because they're almost all expensive maintenance nightmares decaying and crumbling to dust and rubble after just a few years of use resulting in unpleasant, dirty looking buildings and public spaces around them.

I would be highly surprised if even 10% of brutalist era buildings survive their first 50 years without being torn down.

They're almost universally poorly designed and built, feeling more like a parking garage or a public restroom, with interior floor layouts based on mental hospitals or mazes.

There are beautiful brutalist buildings. But I'd argue that even only a small percentage of those on the fuckyeahbrutalism blog would be considered so by the public. FYB even calls out City Hall in Boston as an example of great architecture, but it's pretty much reviled by anybody who's even come in cursory contact with it and the surrounding square. There's lots of terrible public spaces on that blog to be honest, clever photography is what makes most of them passable.

That's the point. The buildings are aesthetically interesting (at least, the first one you see is), but they are horrible environments to spend your time in

I was very surprised Albany's plaza was on the list. Having grown up there I have many memories of staring in awe at its monolithic towers as they soar up from the plaza. I always really liked it and the plaza's great. They put shows on there and small festivals I believe.

I visited Albany two years ago, and very much enjoyed the Plaza.

I like it to.

I would much more expect to see Boston's Government Center on the list.

The Zaha Hadid, Ada Tolla, and Norman Foster seem to have the connecting thread of visibly stained concrete, making them look dirty on top of any other aesthetic flaws.

What legacy will we pass on, what heritage will we build if all we do is imitating the past? Why don't we go and burn old books in our libraries and paintings in our museums because we think they're 'ugly'? Heritage is more that today's sense of prettiness.

Apparently no one wanted to defend 432 Park.

Ugh. Is anyone going to live there, or is it a money-laundering/storage machine for investors?

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