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Joker_vD 26 minutes ago [-]
Well then. The solution is obvious: we need to educate the public so that it attains the correct tastes. It's doable: after all, the architecture students do manage to obtain the taste for the modernist architecture during their time in the college/university.
Or maybe do nothing, it's not like the public opinion really matters in the technocratic settings.
beachy 10 hours ago [-]
> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.
I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
rdwrrr 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps counter intuitive but beauty standards are not simply just sentiment.
bad_username 6 hours ago [-]
> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
7bit 5 hours ago [-]
Because the commenter you're replying to has no idea what brutalism is, and is confusing a ugly concrete block with holes in it with brutalism.
IslandRebel 2 hours ago [-]
I've seen plenty of examples of Brutalism in architecture (in the UK) first hand and to most people it looks like ugly concrete blocks with hole in it.
dxdm 2 hours ago [-]
Why, indeed.
fangspire 2 hours ago [-]
>In the old days, buildings were made to impress
Google "survivorship bias".
like_any_other 1 hours ago [-]
If survivorship bias had anything to do with it, you would not have old villages where every house is in the same style, and they're all beautiful. There's simply no evidence that old buildings were randomly ugly or beautiful, and only the beautiful ones survived.
That's not survivorship bias, that's going from near-uniformly beautiful to uniformly-ugly.
like_any_other 1 hours ago [-]
> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
Or maybe do nothing, it's not like the public opinion really matters in the technocratic settings.
I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
Google "survivorship bias".
Look at 1950s New York - almost every building is beautiful, and every building is more beautiful than modern ones: https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2020/01/31/new-york-city-i...
That's not survivorship bias, that's going from near-uniformly beautiful to uniformly-ugly.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me...
This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG...
> Not remotely cost effective.
This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC...
Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/