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You would have to convince the design community that form can follow things other than function.

Until form is no longer synonymous with function, design will eschew ornamentation.

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Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry would like a word.

Taste is subjective, but is there really a more beautiful building in the world than the Heydar Aliyev Center?

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Is that a serious question? Many people would consider Potala palace, the Milan Duomo, Neuschwanstein, etc more beautiful than anything designed by Zaha Hadid and Gehry. Myself included, even as someone who likes their work. Limiting ourselves only to the category of modern event centers, I'd still put the Harbin Grand Theater ahead of it.
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Give me 5 minutes with a pencil. Emperors new clothes all these fancy architects. The worst is Bjarke Ingels.
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Just looked it up, and I find it rather bland. It's not bad, but not great either, and the immediate surroundings are barren and boring.
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It's certainly striking and interesting, but "more beautiful" is going to be subjective and is up against some pretty tough competition.

I don't know about you, but I'd certainly put the Taj Mahal ahead of that, as well as any number of gothic Cathedrals.

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From a quick look at the Wiki page

I prefer Sydney Opera's outside shape.

The wiki pictures of the inside of the Heydar Aliyev Center also look odd to horrible to me.

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Yes. That building is rather ugly, in my opinion. Give me gothic style over that any day of the week.
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that one looks too Calatrava-ish (specifically Oceanografic), I'd prefer the Dongdaemun Design Plaza if we are talking Zaha Hadid - especially once you see it in person.
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The article literally talks about polling people. The disparity between lay people and architects is the point of the piece.

Architectural taste doesn't align with the taste of everyone else. Why should that be the case? Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy?

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> Why shouldn't architects design buildings people enjoy?

In many fields (architecture, art, cooking all come to mind) there seems to be an outright resistance to doing things that people actually enjoy. My hypothesis is that practitioners in those fields have spent so much time studying them, they have become bored of the "normal" stuff which people actually enjoy. In an effort to satisfy themselves, they optimize for novelty, either not knowing or not caring that doing so is making their work something which can only really be appreciated by people as desperate for novelty and steeped in the field as they are.

With food at least it isn't so bad, because there are a ton of not pretentious restaurants you can go to enjoy. Nobody can force you to go to the pretentious restaurants run by chefs bored of normal food. But with architecture, a building is something everyone in that city is forced to experience, whether they like it or not. It would be nice if architects were therefore more mindful that they should try to appeal to a broad range of tastes, not just architecture nerds who are bored of what came before.

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> things that people actually enjoy

No one will care if you build 1000th replica of a nice building. It's just not interesting to anyone and actually becomes boring very fast. People may live in it but no one will come from afar to visit it because of its beauty. It will become another one in a row of the same.

If you build a striking, exceptional building, it can become a big success (like Gehry's in Bilbao which is a success story for the whole city), so people who commission buildings sometimes select for that.

And also there is a sizable group of people who actually enjoy interesting buildings, like people who enjoy haute couture or haute cuisine etc., so it's not like there is no market for that.

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When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
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“Form follows function” is attributed to Louis Sullivan, author of very beautiful buildings. Whatever excuse modernist architects have for inflicting misery upon us laymen, this principle is not one of them.
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Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.
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My kingdom to have RAD developer tools be the norm again. I don't want yet another website as an app, or website bundled in a Chrome fork as an app. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources in the 2000s...
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Fear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
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Or just following the bandwagon. Here's looking at you hamburger menu... the thing that 83% of people don't even realize is a thing that can be clicked on.
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Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
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Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
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Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored
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