Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.
It very much does, unfortunately. In the US, the places with the highest housing shortages are mired with endless red tape, discretionary reviews, parking requirements etc. that substantially increase costs. This leaves little room for anything else, including aesthetics.
Developers have gotten very good at navigating this, but it has also led to them sticking to basic "good enough" designs like the five-over-ones we see when new apartments are built.
I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?
Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.
Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?
It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana. It's just common sense. But if you insist that everyone who does so is secretly motivated by some kind of bigotry, you end up pushing them towards the right wingers anyway.
Ugly is in the right of the beholder when it comes to individuals, but societies also have collective preferences.
Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:
> too ridiculous to be seriously defended
Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.
How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)
In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)
> It's just common sense.
Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:
- First they laugh at you (ridicule you)
- Then they say it's not in the orthodoxy (if ridicule fails,
you go from being ridiculous to being a threat to norms)
- Then they say they knew it all along (you're now within norms)
> societies also have collective preferences
They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.
Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.
If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.
At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)
What if it's almost everyone's preference? Except for the high priests of architecture who have their own agenda. Then we end up living in a world full of buildings they design for themselves that most of us dislike.
> Why is it so important?
Because the rest of us have to live with it at street level, every day.
> A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
But they are the norm and have been for some time. It's time to challenge that norm.
If we go back to (for example) Le Corbusier, we see this sort of thing thrown around in discussions all the time - you just don't accept innovation, you're hung up on traditionalism, get with the way of the future. Only it's not the future, it's one part of the past, and for all there was noble intent behind some of this stuff, we've had adequate time to judge the outcomes as lacking.
1. I think the onus is on you to prove that it's not a minority, in the face of people overwhelmingly favouring older, more ornamented designs.
2. Beauty does not have to feel 'fake' and ugliness can be very authentic indeed, especially when it comes to concrete. I'd take a faux-neogothic revival over another period of brutalism without even blinking.
I used to live near-ish to this eyesore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyndham_Court#/media/File:East...
It's a hideous blot on the landscape, the wind blows through mercilessly and constantly, it feels desolate and dystopian to be around. It smells of piss and depression. It's notorious for drug dealing. But someone managed to get it listed and protected anyway so now the town's stuck with it permanently.
> I do not understand this movement to rob concrete, steel and plywood of it's natural voice and force it to conform to design styles made for different substances and tech.
Perhaps we don't have to force it to be 'traditional' but it's clear that the 'natural voice' afforded by these materials and the current set of design languages in architecture result in ugly buildings that the large majority of people just do not like.
We don't have to look at the overwhelming preference for traditional buildings and take away from that "We must go back to exactly that", but we should at least take away "People don't like what's being made now, we can do better"
And if there is no way for concrete, steel and plywood to express more beauty then perhaps we could think about using other things that might. Either way, ploughing on with creating spaces and edifices that the majority think are ugly and worse than what came before, either because of a professional disdain for what humans actually like to be around, or some high-minded ideas about material expression seems ... well, pretty pig-headed.
Its not about high mindedness. Tell me suppose you took steel started making cuboids out of it and sanding it rough then stacking it with cement. Does that in any way do justice to steel or is it a complete waste and misuse of the substance? What these people are trying to imagine as their ideal are not as extreme as forcing steel to behave like brick but it is on the same spectrum. Neoclassical buildings are another good example. They are completely fake. I would bet they mix wildly different centuries apart greek and roman designs. And we know they are steel and concrete structures internally just facaded over with marble, not structural load bearing all-marble like the original greek stuff. Brutalism is just a more honest form of those massive neoclassical buildgings, the scale and power of it minus the fake marble nonsense. But I am not even saying you have to be brutalist, it's just one example of an honest medium.
If I only have hand tools and solid wood, I would make Colonial furniture for example. If I have stainless steel tubing and plywood I would make bent tube legs and plywood rests.
Plywood is an amazing substance why do people hate it? It uses wood to make large panels that lack the directional weakness of wood and to quite an extent the movement issues of wood are also avoided. Concrete is pourable rock. Steel is a flexible and easy to cut and join structural substance. You may disagree with certain design ideas that use these substances snd cwn say we could try different designs but I think its ridiculous to cargo cult brick and mortar or marble for instance (which are perfectly fine materials for their tooling and design) and wholly reject modern substances.
Brick cuboids don't grown on trees or are found in nature either. I would say the funniest one is people calling structures like hypar shaped halls as unnatural. That's as natural as it gets, nature itself leaves the hypar the only shape that is optimal to be supported atop a grid of columns, not the flat roof. These curves are more natural that flat and square walls. At least people should be wrested of the naturalist argument if they use it against designs like this.
You have a cause and effect backwards IMHO. The brutalist housing monstrosities in the UK, with the notable exception of the Barbican which is more gentrified, create the conditions that encourage this. They create grim liminal spaces, their look of decay doesn't inspire community, care or happiness. The story is repeated across the country.
> Does that in any way do justice to steel
Who cares? Is "justice to steel" a design goal? Why?
> Neoclassical buildings are another good example. They are completely fake.
And?
> Brutalism is just a more honest form of those massive neoclassical buildgings, the scale and power of it minus the fake marble nonsense. But I am not even saying you have to be brutalist, it's just one example of an honest medium.
Yes, and it's honestly ugly.
And again, who cares? Is "honesty" a design goal? Why is that more important than creating human-friendly spaces with a bit of beauty to them?