Perhaps there’s a difference between what people prefer looking at and what’s actually nicer to inhabit? Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. It’s like if you asked someone to judge a phone based on a photo. Yes there’s some aesthetic judgement but it matters more if the phone is usable.
I know that personally I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower. But I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.
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...
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.
I’ve recently come across a number of websites where the hamburger menu has been eschewed and what is obviously a drop down menu placed at the centre of the page immediately below the page title graphic.
I’m not sure if it’s a particular framework or whatever, I’m just a computer user.
The sites where I’ve seen it have predominantly been for business whose primary activities are not-online.
“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.
There are countless cases of a leader/authority summarizing their thought into an aphorism and followers/practitioners completely misinterpreting it with disasterous results. We find this pattern across time and domains from religion to Agile development. If anything, we're biased toward this social anti-pattern and should deeply consider it likely before makeing a conclusion.
If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts, or whatever it was that preceded the very idea of this thing here is not that thing over there.
I guess that’s why design school graduates had to invent the concept of User Experience in an effort to regress the pursuit of functionality and basic design-consistency to the undifferentiated mess of Un-usability minima we seem to be stuck in.
> If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts
I'm not sure my comment was meant to be that deep, I was suggesting that beauty or at least pleasantness be added to the list of things which come under the category of "function" when buildings are being designed.
Maximising utility without considering that people will be conducting their lives there, or the effects design choices can have on the feel of a place beyond pure utilitarianism, seems inadequate.
Beauty has a function in improving the emotional state of people observing it. Ignoring this function in favor of all other functions can result in getting trapped in a suboptimal local maximum, where a more beautiful design could sacrifice only slightly in other domains and have a greater overall utility.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
It becomes change and following avant garde for the sake of it and a group of people trying to be different in all the same boring ways.
> There's also the issue that the names they're actually disproportionally told and taught about are people who "innovated". Who pushed a marginally new style.
Is Palladio not taught? Christopher Alexander (of A Pattern Language)? The classical order of columns?
Brent Hull (for one) has done a whole bunch of stuff with his restoration work on trying to teach people about proper proportion:
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.
I would argue that the inner spaces are also nicer in traditional architecture. Taller ceilings where those of us who are tall can walk below a hanging lamp without hitting anything, or just stretch, taller windows that let more light in, etc.
Obviously no one likes having a small or no elevator, or poor insulation, but that's related to technological progress, not aesthetic trends. If we kept building in the traditional styles, we would obviously have incorporated this anyway.
In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings (where the scale of facades, windows, etc. is old, but the floor slabs, insulation, elevator, etc. are brand new) are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings.
Yep. Simple, ~20m2-30m2 square boxes, densily packed (with ideally thick walls) is by far the easiest kind of space to use. Then maybe one 50m2 for having a big living room.
> In fact, at least in my (small) city, fully renovated old buildings ... are where the most expensive flats per m2 are. Considerably more than in new buildings.
Isn't that because of location? These places tend to be right next to the rail/bus station in the middle of the city.
A specific example. The very same building developer completed these two buildings and offered the flats for sale more or less simultaneously, in the second half of last year IIRC.
Building 1. Renovated early 20th century building (originally built in 1923).
Google Maps coordinates (the renovation is not yet visible in Google Maps): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3621801,-8.4070271,11a,75y,2...
Photos of the renovated building: https://ammapromocion.com/plaza-de-vigo/
Flats have 117 useful sqm and the middle flats were being offered at between 1.1M-1.2M €, and sold fast (you can still buy the 1st floor flat for 950K. But it's a 1st floor with a bar directly below, which reduces its value rather sharply. This is Spain, bars are noisy and open until late).
The distance between both buildings according to Google Maps is 290 m, a 4-minute walk, so they are basically in the same neighborhood. You can argue that the new one is in a worse location because it has more traffic and the street is uglier, and it's true (although the other is in an area with many bars, so I think not everyone would prefer its location). Anyway, that kind of difference could be worth at most 50K in this market, being generous - and most likely more than fully offset by fact that the newly built flats include garage while the renovated ones don't have it! Anyhow, it definitely doesn't explain a 400K+ price difference.
It's just one concrete example, but I've seen many (I was recently looking for flats... finally I settled from one from the 1940s, building not renovated :)). Of course I don't know the trends outside my city, but at least here, fully renovated old buildings are the apex of the housing market.
I've also actually renovated my old place. I did it because I didn't want to rebuild the place entirely (there was no need, it was woven brick, more solid than most bunkers), and because I would have had to agree with the neigbors, which was ... let's politely call it "not guaranteed".
But very quickly it became clear why that was the right decision: building codes. People legislate building codes, but of course they're unwilling to DO anything. So old buildings, built against old building codes, don't have to change, and that means they effectively get to ignore building codes. If I rebuilt the place I would have had to move the house (as in physically move it, just 4 meters, but it's a house, 4 meters might as well be 400 kilometers, you have to rebuild it). I would have to give up at least 40% of the surface area (the "ground surface") AND one of the floors. Net result: the new house would have been about half the living surface of the old one.em.
So obviously the renovated house is worth a lot more than a new house: for starters it's double the size!
It's even self defeating: the isolation of the old house is better. Yes, people legislate modern isolation materials but if the house MUST be a lot smaller there must be a lot more contact area with the cold air, because it wouldn't be built against the neighbor's house anymore and a LOT less thermal mass (thermal mass = free heating, more or less) so you're starting from a very bad starting position.
Here's a thought. Imagine roughly 5% of available apartments are in renovated old buildings. I don't know what the real figure is, doesn't matter I just assume it's significantly lower than newly built apartments.
Now also imagine that 20% of people prefer those old buildings.
Per apartment then, there's 4 times as many interested buyers than per modern apartment, and the buyers of the old apartments are looking at a much slimmer market so they're willing to pay much more for the right one because they're unlikely to see a comparable one soon.
Also I imagine bringing an old building up to modern standards is quite expensive so that also explains some of the price.
I don't really know anything, I just think what I'm writing makes sense.
Architecture is about optimizing for people inhabiting the city. Cities with detailed human-scale architecture at the lowest few floors are nicer to live in. You can still have a city full of soulless luxury towers, as long as you avoid cheap hostile architecture in places pedestrians can't avoid looking at.
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building
For the most part, it's about optimizing construction cost. Everything else is secondary. The reason you don't see ornate stonework is mostly that skilled labor is a lot more expensive today than it was a century ago. Even if you want to spend 50% more to make an architectural statement, you still do it with prefabricated steel and glass.
This is still in line with his point; presumably, people who live in the building and pay rent will want construction cost to be as low as possible as it will help reduce the rent needed for a builder to break even. An ornate stonework is great for someone looking at it, but if it requires rent to be raised by 100 dollar a month for a tenant, most would rather it not be there.
This is a defense of glass, specifically, and not a class of architecture in general. And "traditional" architecture is not a properly descriptive term; it tells us where the architecture came from, not what it is. Architecture is basically a creative process, and we can't handwave away the complexity by using temporal language like "traditional" and "modern".
The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.
This is probably entirely fixable, but I don't do particularly well in modern homes. When we looked for a house, we specifically didn't want one built after 2000 (or there about). The indoor climate in many modern homes, and hotels as well, triggers something. Maybe it's allergies, maybe I don't do well in dry, recycled air, I don't know, but living in a newly built house would mean having a constant running nose and red eyes.
From a energy conservation point of view I get it, but something in my also tells me that pressure testing houses is a bit off. I don't think I'm meant to live in an airtight box with an HVAC system.
It's not that hard to bring old buildings (altbau in German) up to modern standards via renovation. Here in Berlin, there are lots of buildings from early last century that are very desirable property not just because of their exterior but because of their interiors. You get modern insulation, wiring, bathrooms, kitchens, etc. And high ceilings, wooden floors. When I moved here 18 years ago, there were still a lot of these buildings in their original state with no insulation, coal burners for heating, etc. You could smell the coal in the winter. All that has been renovated at this point. The communists actually attempted to cover up the nice facades by just plastering over it as that was considered decadent. A lot of that property has been restored to its original state at this point.
A challenge with some old construction is that it was (at the time) cheap construction. Which means that after a century there can be lots of structural issues, mold, leaky roofs, problems with foundations, etc. But you should compare that to modern cheap construction, which isn't all that great either and doesn't age well.
A lot of West Berlin post war construction is particularly grim and ugly because it was obviously built on the cheap with little or no attention to how things looked. Surviving, pre-war construction is a lot nicer. Especially if somebody invests in fixing that up. You can see the contrast throughout the city because heavy bombing left a lot of gaps that were later filled in with some typically very bland and sometimes very ugly and now very dated construction. It seems some architects had some weird notions of modern. Especially some seventies and eighties architecture is a combination of cheap and very ugly. Cheap concrete does not age well. And painting it some weird shade of yellow or purple doesn't make it better. More recent construction is a lot less offensive, thankfully. The DDR mostly didn't bother with filling in the gaps and as a result, a lot of recent construction has been addressing that using more premium materials and architects that actually know what they are doing.
Well, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, does it? An old building doesn't have to be run down, and a new one can be both expensive and shoddily built.
It might be subtle but interior and exterior matters. The housing projects (70s, 80s) often had nicer interior design and comfort, but the overall neighborhood felt void, full and worse.
Prewar is such a big range. The surviving tenement-style apartment homes on the Lower East Side are certainly less beautiful than say The Dakota on the Upper West Side.
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building
Not my experience at all. Quite the opposite. I have seen so many "designer buildings" that looked beautiful in pictures but were a nightmare for the people working there.
Often not even that. There's loads of examples of ornamental classical construction being cheaper or the same price than modernist equivalent with even smaller floorspace and that's without economies of scale for a lot of that ornamentation.
Hell the Sears Roebuck houses someone else mentioned had a lot more ornamentation than your average new built
I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
But how would the App be deciding that? Listening for large crowds? Listening for it's own output from high output speakers?
Spotify will keep the entry in a playlist even after they lose the rights to a song, or worse, keep the rights under a different internal database entry. That's how you get songs that they "Can't play right now", which is a horseshit error message for "Spotify doesn't have this song anymore" but they don't want you to recognize just how much their catalog is constantly rotting and rotating.
That seems like a perfectly good use of time for a kid in the 70’s! You’d learn a lot of engineering skills and demonstrate a tenaciousness that most people don’t have. I don’t think the goal is to predict what will be the important technology in 10 years. The goal is to challenge oneself with hard tasks and learn interesting stuff. A lot of the “AI” people today were compilers people yesterday
I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.
Ok but isn’t that true of all software development? It’s not like anybody’s done a rigorous test of writing their entire codebase in Python vs Java. It’s all vibes based there. People create post-hoc justifications for why they use certain technologies but the reality is a lot more vibes than anything else.
When you start getting hate, you’ve made it. Up until then you’re a hypothetical that people like. Maybe they’ve built a side project with you or read the docs. You only get hate when people have used your tool and butted up against limitations. We saw this with Deno too where they went from beloved potential savior to realistic, limited tool. Hate is good. It means people rely on you
Do you know which project gets the most hate? Nodejs, so in that sense, Nodejs has made it and it is widely deployed but this hate was the reason that two seperate alternatives for Node have emerged as Deno and bun.
Recently Bun's latest version had memory leaks which crashed production code from my understanding and their attitude[0] of saying OSS will have no human contribution allowed, now doing these ports of zig to rust, going back for years what the decision making of using zig was and this code basically being vibed as there is no way that they are reviewing the code while being VC funded/bought by anthropic.
These are all genuine issues which cause hate. You can say people are hating because people rely on it but the true thing is that also seems like a bait and switch and that people switched from node.js to bun (maybe even being locked inside bun), only for them to do these highly questionable decisions which is the reason why people are starting to hate on bun.
Atleast that's my interpretation right now reading this whole thread.
Well yeah, it's in Zig, not a memory-safe language, so of course I'd expect memory leaks. That's why I haven't seriously used bun and instead use a runtime that actually is in a memory-safe language, Deno in Rust. It's like wearing roller skates without brakes and wondering why you keep running into things.
Both can be true? You can be doing really well and still have long term risk. Dethroning incumbents takes longer than people think and it’s possible that search growth goes 20%, 10%, -10%, -50%
A fun counter factual: try “proving” that famous scientists are their collaborators based on this methodology. Obviously Hardy and Littlewood are the same person. They’re both British mathematicians who use analysis and number theory and have similar sensibilities in politics and math.
The Hardy-Littlewood comparison cuts the other way. Two collaborators in the same subfield sharing terminology is the baseline, not evidence of anything. What makes the Back case interesting is convergence on things that have nothing to do with cryptography: the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors. Pick any two cypherpunks at random and you won't find that kind of overlap on non-technical quirks.
Then add the negative space. Back was one of the most prolific voices on these lists for a decade, especially on digital cash. Satoshi shows up, Back goes quiet. Satoshi leaves, Back comes back. Hardy and Littlewood never had that problem.
>the same Napster vs Gnutella analogy, the same celebrity email filtering idea, the same obscure FDR gold ban interest, the same weird hyphenation errors
Dunno it assumes their cypherpunk group must always discuss strictly cryptography and never discuss anything else. It could be just some off-topic ideas floating around in their community.
For me, the only solid, damning evidence would be statistical methods of text analysis like they do to prove authenticity of a literary work.
I’ve proposed that someone open a restaurant of invasive species. You could make some decent dishes with lionfish, blackberries, golden oyster mushrooms, venison, etc
Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.
I know that personally I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower. But I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.
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