Sunday, November 12, 2017

Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture

From Current Affairs:
The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.” Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture.

Take the Tour Montparnasse, a black, slickly glass-panelled skyscraper, looming over the beautiful Paris cityscape like a giant domino waiting to fall. Parisians hated it so much that the city was subsequently forced to enact an ordinance forbidding any further skyscrapers higher than 36 meters.
Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs. The John F. Kennedy Building, for example—featurelessly grim on the outside, infuriatingly unnavigable on the inside—is where, among other things, terrified immigrants attend their deportation hearings, and where traumatized veterans come to apply for benefits. Such an inhospitable building sends a very clear message, which is: the government wants its lowly supplicants to feel confused, alienated, and afraid. (Read more.)
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6 comments:

The North Coast said...

How I love this linked essay and couldn't agree more! I live in Chicago, a city with the greatest architecture in the world, both modern and "traditional", in a magnificent old courtyard condominium with the most dazzling terra-cotta embellishment of almost any building in a city stuffed with gorgeous old buildings, but which has sadly been defaced by too much blocky, dreary, featureless Mid Century Modern drek. What you will notice, is that, whether it's in prime downtown neighborhoods or the more modestly priced outer nabes, people will pay substantial premiums for houses and condos built before 1935, because they are just plain very beautiful and replete with charm and comfort.

And you know what? Even the people who design this crud hate these buildings in their secret hearts. For proof, look no further than the building where Mies Van Der Rohe lived out the last years of his life- not the charmless glass-and-steel buildings at 800 - 910 N Lake Shore Drive, that were so celebrated, but a few blocks away in an early 20th Century neoclassical cooperative, replete with traditional cove moldings, wainscotting, and crystal chandeliers. Even HE couldn't stand his bare and spare buildings. https://chicago.curbed.com/2012/10/24/10314342/200-e-pearson

elena maria vidal said...

Fascinating! Because such hideous architecture is a form of psychological warfare to depress people and make them slaves of the state.

The North Coast said...

I believe that developers were major drivers in the uglification of our cities, in their desire to cut costs to the bone. Cove moldings, fine millwork, inlaid marble or intricate parquet floors, intricate plaster ceilings, and ornate terra cotta cladding are expensive and must be done by hand. Modernist buildings are not built so much as they are machined, and the parts are, as much as possible, dropped into place and screwed in, usually not tightly enough. You really have to hand it to the architects and marketers for being able to con the more pretentious and socially anxious members of the public into believing that bare concrete ceilings, pipe rails, concrete floors, bare light bulbs, exposed furnace ducts. and "open" kitchens in the middle of tiny living rooms, are "luxury".

elena maria vidal said...

good points!

The North Coast said...

For a great, funny, entertaining commentary on today's "edgy" design, go to a blog called Unhappy Hipsters, at http://unhappyhipsters.com/ The blogger hasn't posted in a couple of years since her book was released, but there are a hundred or so hilarious posts spoofing our awful modern architecture and decor, and the people who believe they like living with it. These people are like, "Do we REALLY like living like this?" or "are we enjoying ourselves yet?"

elena maria vidal said...

Oh, that sounds hilarious! Thanks, North! I'll check it out!