Comment by hardwaregeek
15 hours ago
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.
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.
No, I mean controlling for location.
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).
Building 2. Newly built. Google Maps coordinates (again, finished building not visible yet in Google Maps): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3599669,-8.4061383,23a,75y,2... Photos of the finished building: https://ammapromocion.com/promocion-juan-florez/ Flats are different sizes, but some are only slightly smaller than in the other building - around 110 useful sqm. They were being offered for around 700K. They also sold fast.
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.
1 reply →
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph
With modern materials and structural design you can absolutely have both.
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.
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?
11 replies →
When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
7 replies →
Bingo! We can more than have both and this is a critical point. We have a lot of options, yet unexplored
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.
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'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.
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.
> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph.
Entertainment is a non-productive activity. But people need entertainment.
People like to live comfortably. But people also like beauty.
It's that simple. People do care about the looks of buildings. Aesthetics matters.
The people outside the building aren't paying rent.
People actively spend lots of money to make the outside of their houses look aesthetically pleasing.
They also do this with cars, clothes, wives, phones, and their own faces.
But the people in the building go outside too you know. Few like the brutalist style.
Architecture built today is mostly optimizing for the developers’ budget and the local regulations.
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.
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.
It just so happens that humans inhabit the outside world too? And that the outside is shared by everybody?
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.
> I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower
There might be some survivorship bias there.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the...
Not according to this article, which looks into it.
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.
Living in a tower will always be soulless, IMO. If an able bodied person needs an elevator to get in and out of their house, it's game over.
Why not both?
Part of inhabiting somewhere is how nice it is to look at.
And it's is a false dichotomy, both can be done.
> I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.
Now imagine if it had looked good as well! It could have really lit up the area of the city it was in.