*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.
“Guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your cat’s are gonna love it.”
You can blame this guy: Adolf Loos, at least in part.
Major influence behind Modernism. He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.
“The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” is the core theme of his essay “Ornamentation and Crime” .
Basically,
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ornamentation causes buildings and useful objects to go out of style.
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Things that go out of style require materials and manpower to update.
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It is the moral imperative of the designer to make useful things, things that need to be redone are less useful and are wasteful.
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Therefore it is the moral imperative of the designer to remove all ornamentation from design.
He saw ornamentation as “degenerate” and equated ornamentlessnes with moral and intellectual development. He also made it a race thing. He used the example of people from Papua New Guinea having tattoos. Paraphrasing: “these primitive savages ornament themselves with tattoos, we enlightened europeans don’t. We smart, they dumb. Therefore ornament = dumb bad, no ornament = good smart. See?”
He was a major inspiration behind the modernist movement. It helped that unadorned buildings are cheaper and easier to construct - especially with the advent of cheap glass and steel construction. So you end up with this sort of soulless architecture that gives no sense of time or place - that tells you nothing about its purpose or the people who built/use it.
He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.
“I think that thing is ugly, so I’m gonna make something even uglier!”
We can pretend he’s the main influence, whilst ignoring the fact that most people prefer square even walls for aesthetic, functional, and - most of all - cost purposes.
I do agree we could do better w.r.t to colour, and millenial grey needs to go. But don’t knock the rectangle. Rectangle is good. Rectangle is steady. You can plan on rectangle.
But consider this:
Hexagons - bestagons
Rectangle good, sure. But rectangle that gives no sense of time or place sad, I think.
I really like some architecture inspired by modernism. Huge FLW fan - fallingwater is my favorite building. But the good modernist or modernist-derived buildings incorporate and emphasize their surroundings and give a sense of time and place by incorporating traditional stylistic elements, local materials, etc.
Also, no pretending needed - this guy was a major progenitor of the style. The style can be a very good fit for the needs of people who commission buildings to be built, and it can look cool in its own right, but regardless of any of that Loos was a pioneering force in the Modernist movement
Unpopular opinion: I never saw the appeal of Frank Lloyd Wright, honestly. I don’t know how anybody can look at Falling Water and not see a bunch of cardboard boxes somebody left at the creek.
Holy shit this is a bad take.
Tell me you’ve never read Buckminster Fuller without telling me
Hmm, tricky but I’ll try.
*Mimes: Five words*:
- 1st word: *Points at self *
- 2nd word: *Crosses arms straight, refusal motion*
- 3rd word: *Folds hands open and holds close to eyes*
- 4th word, 1st syllable: *Cups hand to ear, then makes thrusting motion with hips*
- 4th word, 2nd syllable: *Hold first finger and thumb close together, squints eyes*
- 4th word, 3rd syllable: *Walking motion whilst lowering knees gradually*
- 5th word, 1st syllable: *Pats belly and plumps out cheeks*
- 5th word, 2nd syllable: *Makes a confused gesture, scratches head, looks around*
Like… everything he wrote?
millenial grey
There’s nothing in the construction world that I hate more than the fake gray wood interlocking vinyl floor planks that are in every house now. I guess they’re supposed to be the color of wood on old barns or fences, but I’ve never seen real wood of that color on a floor anywhere. I bought my house a couple of years ago and it had that type of fake flooring in the living room. I deliberately left it uncovered during the renovations, assuming that it would be trashed which would force me to replace it with something I actually like – no such luck, that stuff is actually pretty indestructable, unfortunately.
Relevant YouTube video: how did the world get so ugly?
Man, I really don’t care for this Adolf character…
Just Adolf things
I know it was fairly cheap ornamentation, but the damage his philosophy did to buildings in Germany is profound. They straight up tore the ornamentation off a lot of buildings.
Ayn Rand also writes about this in The Fountainhead
Somebody mentions Ayn Rand in a neutral/positive light and gets only upvotes.
What’s going on here.
Positive? We established here these boxes are ugly and uninspired.
The popularisation of the idea that ornament is inherently bad genuinely did far more damage to the visual environment of the UK than the Luftwaffe managed with years of strategic bombing in my view.
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Funny enough 1921 is when all the houses from the second half of the comic started.
Not fair to equate bland housing with modernism.
Tell me this building is bland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Assembly
It looks like it hasn’t been used since the fall of the soviet union and I’m only half sure it’s not intentional.
Blander than any of the Corbusier buildings you’re responding to, tbh
That’s horrific
The reflecting pool is so funny… What’s there to reflect? The legislative assembly for my province is more breathtaking
I actually enjoy all three styles. Though out of the three, I’d prefer to actually live in the smallest bland box.
If it got more people into houses I wouldn’t give a shit, but sadly, its shitty in both ways
There are a lot of high density housing being built in my city after some planning rule changes to enable it.
It’s unpopular to say the least.
I’m just happy that it means more people get to live in a house.
It’s unpopular to say the least.
Fuck the NiMBYs
the nimbys wouldn’t object to high density housing anywhere nearly as much if there were guarantees that the poor wouldn’t move in.
I think the creative processor for our simulation is failing. This explains a lot of the wacky things that are happening.
It’s just low poly style, easier to render
You’re joking, but a big part of this style of housing’s popularity is that it’s very fast for architects to draw them in CAD programs.
Yes it’s cheap and that’s what it looks like.
Less work to design too. Whoever is working on the simulation might be on strike. Or got layed off…
This is dictated by cost and the desire to insulate. It’s possible to build well insulated buildings that look traditional, but it’s going to cost more and it’s not going to improve the quality of living inside the house.
Flat rectangular insulation panels with plaster on top placed on large flat surfaces -vs- irregularly shaped insulation with a cavity and a bespoke brick façade. Just the bricks alone, so without the labour, is going to cost about the same as the finished plaster. In the long term brick and a sloped roof should require less frequent renovations, but I doubt that it would ever offset the higher initial cost.
I live in the Philadelphia area and a lot of the row houses here dating to a century or more ago have absolutely beautiful brickwork, incredibly creative and interesting stuff, often on houses that these days barely sell for $100K. It would be completely impossible to duplicate this kind of thing today even with a construction budget of millions. The craftsmen who can do that kind of work are nonexistent now – today you’re lucky to find somebody who can lay bricks in a straight line.
Yep, I’ve lived in old buildings most of my life (very german predilection for the “Altbau” I guess) and I’m not sure whether people are aware how much energy it costs.
I love 3.5m ceilings and 2.5m high windows, I love thick walls made from solid stone, that’s how I grew up, in a rented place in a wonderful turn-of the century building. … it’s not even expensive to rent compared to where I live now. But heating alone costs enough that it could pay for a single room somewhere else. And given that the walls are thick, but not insulated, you have to make sure you heat it, make sure you don’t put things too close to the wall, otherwise you might have to battle moisture and moldy walls. In fact, if the windows insulate too well it might even be a drawback because the moisture can’t escape, and you have to air the rooms (the very german habit of “Stoßlüften”) frequently to not get mold.
The rectengular zero-energy buildings of today, you probably don’t need to heat much. Friends of mine used to live in a building like that. Well insulated, three-pane windows, all that. They barely had to turn the heat on in the middle of winter. Body heat, residual heat from cooking and what not, it’s practically enough to keep the place warm.
You can stick a fancy facade on basically any wall construction to make it look like an old-half timbered style, or brick, or stone, etc.
But trying to actually build an old brick/stone/plaster and timber monstrosity today wouldn’t be smart. Insulation, moisture control, energy efficiency, and even creature comforts like wifi signal penetration are all miles better with newer construction methods.
I agree the architecture is boring, but again, it doesn’t have to look this way. However, I think most people would rather have the soulless gray box than have uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter.
In Australia, you can get the soulless grey box with shit insulation and mold problems, so it’s twice as good! /s
Exactly, the vernacular of the past was based on the materials that were available and practical at the time, for the demands of the time. Whatever came out was just the practical way to build under these conditions, not necessarily a choice.
In that sense, the rectangular box IS the vernacular of our time. Practical materials that fulfill the needs people have to present-day homes. Straight walls, insulation, energy efficiency. Of course you can plaster on a fake facade but it’s a choice, not a consequence.
Unless you build the house to last 200 years, with occasional maintenance. No drywall monstrosity will survive that long.
I’d think it was always quite expensive to build like that, and what we see today is what survived. A lot of (european) vernacular architecture is just … not that.
In fact I’d think the “old” houses in the comic, would need constant maintenance. Paint the wooden windows, make sure they don’t distort, a new roof every 20-30 years. The places you see in a deserted italian, french or spanish village might have been uninhabited for a few decades, and are basically ruins.
It’s true. But also could be less true. With our modern tech, we could build like they did back then, but much better. If we built for longevity. But we won’t.
Is that good though? In Japan they build houses with the expectation that they’re only going to last one generation and then will be rebuilt, and the result is that housing is actually affordable because there isn’t nearly as much speculative investing in housing driving up house prices.
That’s a great point. Alternative is that once you build enough housing (admittedly that would take some doing to redo everything, best bet is slow replacement) you wouldn’t really need that large industry to begin with. You just have houses everywhere that are good and you build a few here or there to replace accidental damage or the slow turnover of old ones.
Idk if that’s possible. Humans never did it before.
Yeah, I’m looking into insulating my 100+ year old house, and it might mean the stones on the base need to be flattened and covered up. The windows and some of the doors are now plastic, since the previous ones (that were already not the original) were water damaged, which somehow involved the indoor doors too.
Covering up can’t be avoided unless you want to insulate on the inside. And insulating on the inside is a real pita to do right, so covering up it will be :) It’s a shame to lose the old stone + brick look, but energy wise we must.
Flattening the outside might not be necessary if you’ve got local contractors who can do carpentry + flexible insulation solutions. See the first option for an example: https://www.eurabo.be/nl/updates/buitenmuren-isoleren-langs-buiten In Dutch because I don’t know the terminology to find something like this in English.
A wonderful thing is the regional differences in door casing styles.
Every house everywhere have doors and all of them have trims (door casing), but they’re not the same.
In a lot of old houses/apartments, these are rarely changed. They suck to change because you’ll probably want the same for all the doors in the house or it looks weird. So if you want to change/repair just one, you’d want the same profile again and that’s not available, because every single carpenter had their own design back in the pre-1950s where stuff like this wasn’t mass produced, but made by the carpenter. So you either don’t change it or you get the same again. The design caries over either way.
In old large cities like Copenhagen where they obviously had several carpenters, you can tell to this day which neighborhood you’re in by looking at the door trims if you know how they look.
These days the new ones are all just flat. No profile. Sure, it makes it easier to maintain, but its a real loss in my opinion.
What is the leading character of the older year? Capital 1?
common in France, in handwriting the down-tick part is often bigger than the vertical part.
Is it only if it’s the first number? I was confused why both 1s weren’t written like that, and was wondering if it was a weird way to write a 0 or something (idk if those would be accurate mid-medieval homes, probably not)
Not at all. In France it’s very common to have roughly the same proportions for the upstroke and downstroke. Both the first and second 1s are perfectly valid and legible and variations come with handwriting. However the downstroke should roughly end at least at the same level as the upstroke’s start.
See this quickly made example, 147 written in French style (above) and English style (below) in my shitty phone handwriting.
As you can see, 1 takes a single stroke and 7 two so we can’t mix them.
You also see people tracing the 4 as a zigzag shape, in one lazy stroke. I tend to do that, but I don’t know if it’s a specifically French thing.
Fun fact about the 7: even in France, you don’t cross them when doing chord notation (in classical music at least), because a crossed number means it’s a diminished intervall. That’s not a problem because the digit 1 isn’t used when numbering chords.
That’s funny, my French eye didn’t even notice the difference between the 1s before reading your comment!
Never seen that in my whole life, it must be a mistake.
There are things you haven’t seen.
*Cries in french* Around my hometown I have 4 styles of different houses depending of the microregion they are in. All in a 40 km radius. There is even a continum with hybrids as we move from a place to another.
… That’s for older house of course. They are still here, terribly laking heat isolation and in desperate need of renovation, but still here but for every new family that move in the village of for every second brother that stays as an adult, there is a cookie cutter home terribly laking in hot weather resistance that will be desperate for renovation in just 15 years.
On est voisins ?
Je pense plutôt que le problème est généralisé. Hélas !
Tu es du Grand-Est ?
Je suis au milieu du centre.
On n’est pas voisin alors. Seulement camarades d’infortune.
This is the “light” version. The worst are when they don’t even have street facing windows, only concrete and garage doors facing the street and all around the house nothing but concrete/tiles, no greenery. These houses make me so sad while walking around a neighboorhood :(
the grey and black rocks garden!
People don’t use materials they pick up in the immediate vicinity anymore, with stone being of different colors in different regions and different materials being locally available, forcing the use of different construction techniques. They use manufactured materials that all came out of the same factory and brought over by truck.
Yeah I was gonna say, I appreciate how the building in the Auvergne picture is black, because it’s accurate to the volcanic stone there.
The cathedral in Clermont Ferrand is pretty bad ass
These white boxes are everywhere, as one of my daughters call it, they lack personality as one of a normal house and don’t look practical or especially luxurious beyond looking like an office building.
- People travel way more now. Skills, technologies, material also travel way more. Ideas and styles used to have local variations but now everything goes global. It’s not just architecture, same happens with food, fashion, movies… Traditional restaurants disappear to make root for burger joints and so on.
- Scale. Building 100.000 houses using the same techniques is cheaper than 100.000 custom houses
- Custom solutions are hard to fix and renovate. Simple solutions are cheaper to maintain over time.
- Neutral styles are practical. It’s easy to decorate, find furniture that fits and change some details over time. With very characteristic styles it’s hard to find things that won’t clash with it. If you get bored of if and want to change something you often have to redo the whole thing. With simple styles you can easily find replacements for individual things.
The white box and brushed metal styles are not because someone decide to make everything look sterile. It’s because most people don’t want to completely rebuild their houses/apartments every 10 years. It’s extremely wasteful and expensive to do it.
Found the post modernist.
Is affordable housing post modernist? Then yes, I guess I’m a post modernist.
A post modernist would never argue for neutral styles for efficiency…
Architectural degeneration.
Back then, the builders built homes.
These days builders build houses.
