Comment by kelseyfrog
16 hours ago
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.
16 hours ago
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?
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.
Give me 5 minutes with a pencil. Emperors new clothes all these fancy architects. The worst is Bjarke Ingels.
Wow, that guy’s buildings look like they were built by someone who never made it as a Lego kit designer.
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.
I can see the appeal.
And, it kinda looks like someone dropped a wet handkerchief on the Sydney Opera House.
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.
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.
Yes. That building is rather ugly, in my opinion. Give me gothic style over that any day of the week.
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?
This was specifically in reply to the "convince the design community that form can follow things other than function" parent comment.
I think Hadid and Gehry show that modern architecture doesn't just mean "form follows function".
> 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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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.
When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
“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.
Or you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.
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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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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Look at the buildings. We're already suffering.
Hot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
Words? What are words? We just don’t know.
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.