> If it’s actually a good design, it should stand up to scrutiny like any other building design does.
Well, define scrutiny?
There's technical criticism from the standpoint of safety, for example. If it's not possible to evacuate this building in the event of a fire, that's an overriding concern.
There's also criticism from the standpoint of tradition or aesthetic. If the building is ugly or nontraditional, then that's a social problem. The university will need to choose between the taste of the donor and its own aesthetic.
The "natural light is necessary for mental health" argument is somewhere in between. A lot of the reaction seems to be a knee-jerk one about tradition and imagining life in a light-free (not just window-free) room, or rooms with poor ventilation. On the other hand, the article here at least alludes to studies on the matter.
> By exempting a design from review and revision
I think you're over-reading things? As I understand it, the building isn't exempt from review and revision, but Munger retains co-final approval with the university. It's not a one-shot "build these exact blueprints or nothing" deal.
To reflect on your earlier example, Frank Gehry gets design-reviewed, but if the clients want him to do something unacceptable he can still walk away.
By those who live in them and by those that visit them.
Those who design them and those who write design critiques don't matter at all, and should not even have a voice (at least not one anybody should care about). The best buildings, people take pride living in, and coming from abroad to admire, were built that people we don't even know their name, many even designed and built by craftsmen (as opposed to university-studied architects).
>If you're into architecture and design you'll care more about the practicality and function of the building than it's exterior appearance
The exterior appearance is part of the practicality and function of the building. A bleak appearance can crush the soul, destroy any community pride, and even make people physically ill. Humans are not cattle (though even cattle deserve better).
> That building was a laughingstock of design when I was a kid, I had family members that worked there.
What did they think about working in that building?
I'll admit it's not the prettiest thing I've seen (and I can appreciate even brutalist buildings) but I don't see what's wrong with it. I imagine there'd be a lot more natural light
> So what exactly did Le Corbusier get right, according to the article? "The very fact that his designs were so easily modified was, arguably, their strength." -- this is what fans of Le Corbusier always praise him for, and it always sounds really bad to me. The main strength of the architecture is that you have to radically change it to make it liveable...?
Some famous architects make/made terribly unusable buildings that were also hard to modify to make usable. Having a famous architect that contemplates that his design may not be correct is amazing progress.
His work tends to be utilitarian and not visually exciting (especially earlier work); but avoiding load bearing walls and having lots of windows was innovative and useful. Although, apparently the occupants found too much light and added shutters.
> The internals of the building were not built to Utzon's design; they were redesigned and built after Utzon resigned in 1966.
My understanding is that Utzon's original design was, basically, impossible. The new design was a compromise made during intense negotiations with physical reality after Utzon had quit.
The further point is that those compromises rule out little things such as the ochestral pit or the tower. Things that are sorta kinda really really useful for ochestras.
If it was up to me I'd build the usual mausoleum somewhere else and turn the "opera house" into something else. A museum perhaps.
> Your remarks are superficially plausible and fit many people's pet theories about architects.
Availability bias. We never hear about the vast majority of architects who stick to designing safe, sensible and non-hideous buildings. We do hear about self-promoting designers of monuments to their own egos, such as Gehry. And naturally this tilts the public view of architecture.
> In short, the designers of these buildings experienced trauma during the wars that changed their brains, in a way that makes human features upsetting. Most buildings reference human features in some way (mouth, eyes), and this modernism avoids that and calms their brains.
How could anyone make a statement about "human features upsetting" someone like Le Corbusier. This is entirely ignoring 1/2 of his career. And the OP throwing in the Unite Habitat system with the rest of the specimens was a bit galling.
That's actually pretty progressive work for 60s and none of your local area housing projects look remotely like Corbusier's buildings, I assure you. (I did some delivery for a charity in NYC and I've seen the inside of those horrid places.) 2 entirely different mindsets and intellectually sloppy to throw in developer driven copycat crap with the works of architects like Corbusier or Mies.
> It's not like you'd ever want to live in his austere glass boxes.
I have had the pleasure (or misfortune?) of working for a number of years in buildings designed by Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, and Norman Foster.
Was the Le Corbusier building I worked in clearly of its time? Yes. But also strangely it was the least clinical of all three. It had a surprising amount of warmth. I can't speak to his residential work, but it was clear that great thought had been given into how people use the building. Unlike when I worked in the Gehry building, where no thought had been given at all.
And if anything, it was the opposite of what you say - Le Corbusier thinks a lot about glass, and is surprisingly restrained in its use (compared to, say, Foster). I remember the concrete stairwells with their frosted glass bricks well.
I'm not saying that we should aspire to build more Le Corbusier-like buildings, but my experience of his buildings was the total opposite of inhuman.
> If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent
You're assuming a certain type of climate. Hundred year old buildings with huge levels of thermal mass in year-round warm climates are exactly what you want, not insulation. The high ceilings are also extremely practical in such environments.
>There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued
Building design: no question that we've got new stuff that in the right conditions is better than what we had 100 years ago. We have some new stuff (e.g. insulated glazing) that is just better always. But there are many aspects of actual building construction that could be argued to have gone backwards in the last 100 years, mostly because of the rise of developer-led construction and the economics that this implies.
> the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot.
Fair point.
> An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it
That assumes that you don't gain anything of value from the expense today. If what you are saying was so simplistically true, there would no point in investing in anything at all. If I put money into blue chip stocks with the expectation of earning profits, I do so with the idea in mind that these profits will exceed any interest I might have earned by saving it. If we collectively put money into a beautiful city hall or park lodge, we do with the idea in mind that what we will gain over the life of the building is worth more to us that the interest we might have earned by saving the cost instead.
> In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money
If you can't differentiate or acknowledge the concept or utility of public investment in public places, then I'm certainly not going to persuade you that this is not what I'm asking for.
> Of course not, but these are not relatively modern.
About as modern as the steel-and-glass/nookless style he criticizes, that gained prominence after the World Wars [1,2].
Ignoring the guilt-by-association/ad-hominem part of your post, what do you find so lacking in his critique? I'll grant that it's a long-winded way to say "it's ugly, sterile, and unpleasant to live in", but I'd say that's a valid (if subjective) complaint. What sort of critiques did Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander make? I'm very curious.
> The most important clues to the mediocrity of his buildings are the facts that a) they aren't widely imitated and b) they don't usually appear in fine books about architecture, trad or otherwise.
Lol @ this standard for what is good. I also trained and practiced as an architect, so take my opinion with the same weight as yours. A home with good craftsmanship beats most of the homes in the 'fine books about architecture'. Yes, he wasn't a great designer, but his contribution was more about looking at the living language that develops in the tradition of building, rather than looking at the insulated self congratulatory world of academic dick measuring contests which is what the Fine Art side of architecture is today.
> A lot of Postmodern architecture is pretty ugly to
Postmodern architecture can sometimes be an eyesore, but that’s kind of the point. If you attempt to never offend anyone’s sensibilities you get modern architecture and nothingness. Even if you changed modern architecture to mean art deco or neoclassical you’d get tired of it.
So yeah, you might get things most consider eyesores
They are not remotely contradictory. Something being beautiful because the architect or a stylist added beautiful decorations is entirely different from something being beautiful because the lines, forms, and overall composition of the functional form, by itself, is beautiful. Much of the material on a brick victorian is purely for decoration. A small cinder block box, unless it was purpose-built to store boxes, was not built carefully to consider how it interacts with its occupants.
I'm not sure if you just skimmed most of my comment, but it was pretty clearly discussing architecture.
> Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design
Why?
Many college campuses in the US are pastiches of medieval european towns. This admiration for older styles in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave this country (and I'd say, even the world) the most wonderful architectural environments, truly beautiful and harmonious environments.
The spiteful iconoclasm of post-WW2 instead gave us the most awful dreck.
> Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power.
I don't think that's it, at least for public buildings like churches, theaters, town halls, museums, and so on. After all, veto power doesn't prevent awful buildings like the Walkie Talkie building[1] from being built, as long as they conform to the bland, in vogue architectural tastes. It's the cult of postmodernism, stripping away visually interesting features, even though humans gravitate to older buildings despite the "form over function" blind cult thinking. This has dominated architecture for the past few decades. Many older buildings are simply built with many intricate visual details that are architectural heresy nowadays. As mentioned, there was a briliant article and HN discussion on this recent-ish, I just cannot dig it up.
EDIT: This is the article, "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture":
> Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.
I suspect that there is considerable survivor bias going into that. There were plenty of bad aesthetic choices in the past, too; we just recognise and remember the good ones.
Similarly, there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today—it's just that, as in any age, there are many more bad ones, and those are the ones that are easier to call to mind. A lot of good modern aesthetic choices borrow from the past, but that, too, is true of any age; the choices of the past we admire were not born ab novo, but were themselves inspired by still older design.
This is not to make the ridiculous claim that nothing changes, only that "we look to the past for cues to good design" is not in and of itself an indictment of some fallen modern age.
I don't think the article makes any sort of objective point.
The author essentially says "I don't like it, it's cheesy."
Well, I can just as easily say "I like some of these facadist buildings." And I do.
If the author spoke with some more concrete reasoning about why these buildings are such abominations, perhaps I could be convinced. Until then, it's hard not to consider this just another example of every design feature having good and bad executions.
There are timeless Brutalist, Modernist, Classical, and Contemporary buildings just like there are ugly, unremarkable, bad examples. The same is probably true of Facadism.
I think the only argument that comes close (which the author didn't get into enough) might be the destruction of historic buildings as an alternative to full restoration. I wish more effort was taken to quantify this concept. In other words, present a particular example of a building project and demonstrate to the reader with real data why it would have worked better as a restoration project, complete tear-down, or otherwise handle the project differently.
There must often be a functional desire to build a modern building, perhaps one that provides more comfort, natural light, safety, accessibility, flexibility, square footage, etc.
Finally, it should be mentioned that buildings are owned by private companies and individuals, who generally have a right to do whatever they want to them!
Well, define scrutiny?
There's technical criticism from the standpoint of safety, for example. If it's not possible to evacuate this building in the event of a fire, that's an overriding concern.
There's also criticism from the standpoint of tradition or aesthetic. If the building is ugly or nontraditional, then that's a social problem. The university will need to choose between the taste of the donor and its own aesthetic.
The "natural light is necessary for mental health" argument is somewhere in between. A lot of the reaction seems to be a knee-jerk one about tradition and imagining life in a light-free (not just window-free) room, or rooms with poor ventilation. On the other hand, the article here at least alludes to studies on the matter.
> By exempting a design from review and revision
I think you're over-reading things? As I understand it, the building isn't exempt from review and revision, but Munger retains co-final approval with the university. It's not a one-shot "build these exact blueprints or nothing" deal.
To reflect on your earlier example, Frank Gehry gets design-reviewed, but if the clients want him to do something unacceptable he can still walk away.
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