As someone who’s renovating a historic villa in Italy, I was shocked at how affordable ornamentation is. Take a window, that classical decorative pediment above it is literally a slab of cement that’s cast on site in a mould. Wash and repeat per window. This is how ornamentation has been done in Italy since Roman times. I GUARANTEE it costs less than that silly modern cladding that the put all over buildings now.
The problem is nowadays minimalism is considered art so let's say you want a boring, one color, full of glass, only straight lines building you are paying extra for some easy to mass produce materials just because it's current trend these days and everyone wants to look modern even if it mean you look exactly like everyone else. It's especially easy to see when you go to IKEA, Castorama, OBI and they are charging ridiculous amounts of money for products with easiest and most boring designs. It's not just buildings or home decor but fashion as well. Going into the store it feels like every brand is producing literally the same cloths and just slap different logos on them. No variety whatsoever.
@@StanleyJohnny well minimalism its an art movement, but what is considered minimalism today is something different from the original. Anyway people are already moving out of this trend.
@@StanleyJohnny The minimalism is more expensive than usual style, fact. Because wide glass is expensive, walls without baseboard are MUCH expensive to do, and so on. People are bored with ads and noise everywhere, that's the reason why minimalism is popular.
But when you buy some ornament in hobby market and glue it to your house, it's not ornament, it's just kitsch. I would say that most of south european modern architecture (I mean ordinary people's houses) are really ugly and terribly done. Only people who own amusement parks use those fake antic columns and other fake shits. I have nothing against good art on some building, but it must be real, not some fake from hobby market, that just says that owner doesn't have any taste.
The architecture of tomorrow shouldn't try to imitate old beautiful building styles but try to create new, unique buildings that combine function and aesthetics.
The architecture if yesterday, already imitated the architecture of the yesterday before and so on. It shouldnt plainly copy, it should add upon, like art has always done.
As an architect I can assure it's perfectly possible to build affordable and very nice looking contemporary architecture with modern materials & techniques. There are lots of projects just like that in several countries, especially Europe. That's just not as common as could be due to the factors Adam pointed out, commoditization of buildings and the damn car centric policies that rule our cities. But there are a lot of designers, planners and others battling to change that
What also bothers me is this "grey-trend". In my area (Austrian countryside) almost EVERY new house has either grey windowframes, grey roof, grey facades or at least a grey stripe of colour.... It looks so cold and sad... But of course that's also a question of individual taste, apparently some people like the look of it :///
Ich finde auch das sich die Einfamilienhäuser mittlerweile so gut wie garnicht mehr unterscheiden. Sehr schade, obwohl man da ja eig. noch am meisten mitentscheiden kann.
@@luisahydrangea3783 Most of those houses designs are probably from catalogues and built by general contractors "Schlüsselfertig". No time and money for personalization of even customized architecture.
it's also a big problem in austrian cities in general. i've lived in graz for almost a year, and basically everything outside the centre is incredibly depressing to look at
It's a big problem in poland too, literally every new building is ether white, grey or black or combining those "colours". Those bulidings are usually boring rectangles too.
I think you missed one key point - banks won't lend on properties they don't believe will be viable. Banks are often pushing for more parking, oddly enough. It's hard to fight history and inertia.
I'm living on rent, but hope to someday move to a house of my own, I wouldn't buy house without parking space. Not all cities are big enough to have transit, in most cities you need a car if you ever wanna do anything outside the city. Is not a wise choice to buy a house without a garage, specially considering that buying a house is a long time thing (if bought for housing reasons and not speculation)
Ornaments were mass produced in the past. I live in a part of Nuremberg that was built in the late 1800s to house the workers of the factories and nearly every building has some kind of ornamentation or other decorations. If you look carefully while you walk through the city you will see the same gargoyles, eagles, arches, stone carvings and whatnot over and over again.
They could totally mass-produce gargoyles again. I agree with that meme. A lot of buildings would look a lot better if you just slapped a few gargoyles up there!
Even easier to make them more varied nowadays because of 3d printing and injection molding. Churn out 3d models for the 3d printer to make molds of, injection mold the clay in, pop it out to dry and fire into ceramic.
my mom lives in an old coal mining town and practically everything is made from these small red bricks, from the large housing for the company higher ups, to the apartment buildings for the miners and their families, to all the company buildings around the mine entrance. It's quite nice looking, especially these days where the small technical university and the local old monastery are the main attractions. I imagine when the mine was still going it might have been a bit more grim though, at least where the miners lived. Granted the positively ancient city of Cleve, as in Henry VIII fame, nearby also has a lot of these red brick buildings, entire sections outside the old city are made from these red bricks. It feels almost like the slate tiled roofs of the Rhineland. Took a train along the Rhine coming from Frankfurt and it's wild, everything from the church buildings down is the same dark color roofs from slate tiling. Then again, the sheer amount of sandstone in the buildings of the black forest is also surprising, I guess it really shows just how dominant local building resources used to be. Reckon the Lower Rhine must have had a lot of red clay and effectively no stone, which considering how much used to just be the rhine delta marshlands or halfway in the actual ocean already.
Another, smaller factor is also just plain survivorship bias. The past had its own bland, ugly, decrepit buildings just like today. It's just that those were usually first in line to be torn down and replaced, while the well-built, good-looking ones were more likely to be kept around and continually renovated.
THIS! People in 100 years will be talking about the millionare villas of today which are marble white, have glass and pools and compare it to whatever soulless architecture they'll have.
@@ManiacX1999 also applies to music , there always was Bad music , but the Bad music of the past was forgotten , so in turn we only remember the good ones
survivor bias like what? which style didnt survive? sure some styles are more populair but overal all styles are seen as beautiful before modernism times.
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Ok but in the case of music, old people seemingly openly choose to pretend that old music is better. Especially since nearly 100% of that music still exists. You don't have to remember, just listen to bad old music. But with architecture, everyone who would remember is dead
In my opinion, the bigger problem, at least in the U.S., is when new buildings are built, especially skyscrapers, they're so expensive that the commercial tenants can only be luxury stores or big chains. That's why you don't have "neighborhoody" stores in new development areas, which adds to the sterilized feel. It hits differently when you have a restaurant, niche coffee shop, a pub, and/or a little convenience store vs. new buildings that just have a Starbucks and a Coach store.
The problem with these bloated skyscrapers is how they solve the challenge of meeting the towering stacked floors with the streetlevel. So many modern towers consistently fail to do this. The towers built before the Second World War, accomplished this in a deft, seamless manner. Towers today contain cold, soulless, lobbies, and if they make concessions to retail, it's usually a bank or Starbucks, or an overpriced eatery. This explains one of the reasons NYC has lost so much of its vibrant and colorful street life. Previously one had family owned businesses, with their own respective characteristics. Not corporate chains. The hulking new towers have made it impossible for small businesses to exist in these monsters.
Shopping malls' landlords in my country may also prefer bigger chains as their tenants as they're seen as a safer bet in attracting customers to their shopping malls
Most places that are soulless shops and Starbucks are usually downtowns and downtowns have in general become so expensive that no one could afford it even if the building was cheaper, the area itself (downtown) will always be expensive. It’s always about location
@@NicEeEe843 I think it really depends. I've seen a lot of cities that "revitalize" an area, but it's too much development too fast and ends up driving out or straight up destroying the old tenants and buildings, and replaces it with amenities for the 1%. Hudson Yards is an extreme example of this, but it happens all over, including in old residential neighborhoods. I'm definitely not against building new things, BUT I am against every new construction being for the 1% instead of the middle class - and the commercial properties follow suit.
@@darkwoodmovies Hudson Yards is built over existing rail yards, not neighborhoods. Hence the name. What existed in the other adjoining blocks, was a mixture of walk ups, warehouses, and auto repair shops. The vestiges of which can still be seen.
"We don't mass produce classical ornaments." We used to. Developers would select them from pattern books and stick them on. Often you can see the change from one speculative builder on a plot of land to another on the next by the subtle differences in their choice of ornamentation.
exactly. that's also why artisans used to be a vital part of construction and design. tile-making in the traditional way used to be big in most cultures that use tiles both for function and art.
I once briefly visited a workshop in London around 1985? where they still made plaster ceiling roses architraves and other pieces using the traditional methods, that were used to decorate and refurbish (rich) house interiors
The funny thing is, even those plain blocky buildings could look pretty nice if they just added window boxes and some planters on the terraces. It'd make the building a lot more pleasant to live in, too.
For real, many old building aren't even packed with ornaments. It's just small details that aren't even expensive and can instantly enhance the appearence of the facade. Tho I think architecture became better in the last years compared to like mid-2010s and before with the subtle revival of neo-classicism and neo-post-modernism.
@@Lordpichugraf Aye, I know that I've seen a subtle revival of some of the neo-classical styles in some of the very new buildings in Atlanta. Very refreshing to see, I must say!
Proportions are more important than decor though! Heavy decor on boxy houses would often make it worse. At least without radical redesign of at least window proportions and removal of those enormous concrete+aluminium balconies that has been cluttering facades on appartment buildings since WW2.
@@herrbonk3635 oh you absolutely can do much about it. Windows can be changed for ones with more panes and better framing. Facade can be broken up with colour to form an illusion of multiple buildings built side by side. Balconies often only need a better railing to look stunning. And cornices. Those cheapskate architects cheap out on a good water-diverting feature and buildings have water stains on their facade in no time.
I wouldn't underestimate the first point: Fashion In Germany, before WW1 buildings usually were decorated with stucco. Looks nice nowadays, but back then it was actually quite cheap - as it was mass-produced in factories. After WW2, stucco was out of fashion. It was even common to remove the stucco (in German: "Entstucken"). Nobody would do this today! So if we'd have stucco as a new fashion trend and would start to mass-produce it again, I think we could do it. But we don't want to.
I notice this happened in Buenos Aires as well, many buildings there is up but has lost their adornments. But I once heard it was because of maintenance costs, cleaning and removing pigeons away.
We don't want to yet. Price and availability in the beginning of a new trend is always a problem, only when there is enough up front demand or an investor ready to take a big risk is there a chance for the rise of a trend.
In the Western and South Western parts of the US stucco is quite common here. Mainly in states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico use it quite often although its use is quite limited to single family detached homes. It went through a massive use in the 1980s and is still somewhat popular although much less so than during the 1980s. For an example, the city of Simi Valley has many of these homes with stucco, the film Poltergeist was shot there and if you watch the scenes of the exterior of the home or the surrounding neighborhood you will see a lot of these stucco homes. Sometimes it is used on commercial properties as well but not as much compared to houses.
I would like to point out how important it is for a place to feel alive. This can be achieved in many ways and one of the more noticeable is having a building create shadows. Shadows change the way a building looks over the course of the day and add a natural element.
true. Each tree would add 30,000 dollars of worth to homes in Dallas during the 1980's. They provide shade and light management. Ultimately supporting gables and balconies and more nooks all costs money. The homes in certain markets due to supply and demand cost so much more than they should be worth. This leaves only the rich to afford better architecture or cities and their big wallets.
I once met a man whose father used to fabricate door knobs to Pashas in Egypt during the 30’s n 40s, he said his father would brake the mould in front of the customer after delivery so that he knows his door knobs are absolutely unique!!
Yeah, we need "stuff" to look at. Colours, shapes... things that are stimulating to our eyes. The monotony of modern urban architecture I believe has genuinely hindered my sense of direction and ability to locate landmarks while driving. It all kinda blends together into one blob, with the trees being the most visually interesting and least "aggressive" shapes/colours.
The german-french broadcaster "arte" made a video about the GDR standardized buildings. The author explains how she lived as a kid in the after-war years in Berlin's center, in a building "with ornaments and 3 meter ceilings, which was beautiful but moldy, extremely cold, hard to heat, the toilet was in the courtyard". Therefore, you can absolutely understand her joy when her family was allowed to move to one of those housing projects in Berlin-Marzahn: Fresh, new buildings, modern and exciting. Large rooms, new floors, central heating, fitted kitchen, hot water, bathroom with toilets. Old buildings were simply associated with many negative things. New buildings with much nicer things. Today it's just the other way around again.
Love love love 3m ceilings! When I was refurbishing my 1930s apartment my architect suggested lowering my ceilings artificially. He works mainly on newbuild and was getting agoraphobia from all that headroom in my flat! I stared at him in disbelief, and of course ignored his advice.
But JULIANOS, those older ornate buildings in Berlin you mentioned, were built in the 19th century, a time when flush toilets, central heat, and gas were still fairly new innovations. MANY people didn't have those things, sometimes even the rich living in chateaus. In New York, where I live, City Hall started mandating those features in the early 1900s. During the 1920s and 30s, our new buildings had the best of both worlds. Modern mechanical convieniences, AND old world architecture. I'm talking; high ceilings, thick sound proof plaster walls, heavy doors, heavy metal, ornamentation, and windows in kitch and all bathrooms! The crapificaiton of NY apartment construction got going right after WWII. Except for a few rare notable exceptions, the new buildings were little different than your commie blocks. Except they had gloriously fancy lobbies not unlike hotels on the Las Vegas strip. As soon as all the units were sold, everything started falling apart. Within 5 years they were looking shabby. I think soul crushing modern architectures simply a case of, "Hey, lets all us rich developers agree to never give a sucker an even break".
Art Deco was an era that is severely underappreciated. It's the Gothic architecture of the 20th century and didn't last anywhere near as long as it deserved.
As an architect, I really appreciate this breakdown. I get asked this all the time, and every time I say that architects would love to design better, but the our hands are tied by budgets or in the case of developers, profit margins. Beauty is a public good, but in a society that has no concept of collective ownership, nobody wants to foot the bill for something that benefits everyone.
yes, creating a building that is : -beautiful -durable -practical -confortable come at a bigger cost building boxes of cheap materials that are ugly, deriorate quickly, are energy inefficient, etc come at a lower upfront cost, which make a better investment for short term speculation (altrough it come at a larger cost for society on the long run : ecological damage, etc) But we can't blame either modernism or architects, it's an investors problem. Plenty of well made and beautiful modern architecture, as Adam showed.
Our city keeps wasting money on giant, ugly, ridiculously impractical buildings that no one wanted or asked for. Apparently they are architectural triumphs. I remember people got excited when the local paper announced on April fools that the museum project had gone bankrupt and the land was bought by a water park. Instead we got the 300 million dollar pile of shit on the river.
I spent two years as an architect in a studio that designed shopping malls during the boom years just before the 2008 crisis. Our clients only cared about cost, cost, and speed. They gave almost zero shit about what we do with the facade as long as we keep everything super cheap and extra fast. We were actually free to experiment with the outer looks of the building, but realistically the time constraints and the budget didn't allow for much.
do you think the hypercapitalist developers of the past were any different? No, the only difference is that modernism destroyed any aesthetic standards and made it acceptable to build ugly.
5:52 house is always commodity or consumer products (thing to be consumed) the problem is now people use house as securities (thing to keep value or even increase value)
@@amirattamimi8765 people have been doing that since at least 200 years. Back then they would make those buildings beautiful because the value would appreciate more. Nowadays modernism has destroyed any standards of beauty, allowing unrelenting uglyness everywhere.
@@amirattamimi8765 If governments were to treat housing like a human right, then they could build housing and distribute it at cost rather than for profit. That would decommodify the housing market rather quickly, since no private developer would be able to compete.
Also people stopped building things of lasting value, we don’t think about future generations, or about leaving a legacy. This was a major motivator of making buildings beautiful; to leave your mark and be remembered.
It's a shame stripped classicism isn't more common. Cheap enough, beautiful enough, links past and future, and reminds you're a part of something greater.
I think about this a lot. Elements like the gridded windows are also desirable for potential residents / buyers. I suppose it's *still* not worth the additional cost or we'd be seeing more of this style.
I don’t think it’s very pretty or reminiscent of the ancient past. It’s reminiscent of jails and courthouse and old government offices. Some are beautiful and homely. But definelty not the norm
There are towns like Alexandria and Savannah that have pretty strict building codes that mandate new buildings fit into the style of the neighborhood they're built in. It makes those areas very expensive but I can attest to the fact that you have to look somewhat closely to separate the old and new buildings from each other. You certainly can but the giveaways are the lack of wear on the brick vs. the complete lack of brick.
I honestly hate such mandates. There's a city in my home state where damn near everything looks like a fancy bank. I went to the courthouse to pay a traffic fine and it was *not* the type I was type I was looking for. A gym should not look a municipal building. But seriously, though, what you describe basically just replicates the modern cookie-cutter property development style, but at a higher cost. Everything should not look the same.
We have one in Philippines. In Vigan, Ilocos Sur. It is a World Heritage Site and every new building should adhere to the designs that was done during Spanish colonial period. There is one in the northern most islands of the Philippines as well called Batanes where you can't buy property in that area unless you are a descendant or a local. Even naturalized citizens can't buy property unless he or she has an Ivatan (native of Batanes) for a husbnad/wife/relative. That doesn't even make it easier though. Thats for them to preserve the natural landscape.
@@InfernosReaper I mean, I'm divided, on one hand I completely agree with you, on the other, having codes that preserve the historic neighbourhoods atmosphere and look is also important. So I guess it also comes down to urban planning and proper zoning codes - a gym shouldn't look like a town hall but, think of this more historical neighbourhoods, it probably shouldn't be in the same space to begin with, and that well structured city would naturally guide you to the more administrative section of the city only by the look and atmosphere of each section or block.
Fitting in doesn't necessarily mean imitating or looking the same. I've seen some pretty good examples of modern architecture harmoniously fitting into it's suroundings by repeating elements, colours or volumes of surrounding buildings while still being distinct and unique.
@@gewreid5946 It definitely should not, but *in practice* that's what usually ends up happening. Sometimes ordinances or HOA restrictions ends up being some strict that only a few companies will even bother and they tend to end up doing a lot of the same manner of work.
I don’t even think a lack of ornamentation is the biggest reason we find these buildings ugly, but the lack of beautiful “composition” and color. There are lots of gorgeous old buildings that aren’t highly ornamented.
As he said, a lot of buildings were/are built as a commodity and if you want to sell something you always try to make it attractive to the largest number of people possible. That means you're obviously going to end up with bland looking buildings.
@@thevinisothe problem is that we still build ugly buildings, not that we did during the rapid growth. Ans different places - different stages of development. Building something ugly in germany is dumb, building something ugly in India - necessity (hopefully following the freaking building code, god damn those corrupt governments that don't!!!)
Yes, Bauhaus buildings are often very plain yet also aesthetic, including a middle class subdivision built in Weimar. In the US developers generally care nothing about style or aesthetics, at least in areas with very low vacancy rates. They can sell or rent anything.
Architect here, this video is pretty spot on. One thing I would add is buildings used to take much longer to construct and were more or less hand made by an army of skilled stone masons living on crumbs so adding ornament here and there wasn’t as huge a scheduling or budgetary ask
We also have 8 billion people living on Earth nowadays as opposed to 2 billion just a century ago. Cheaper, easier to construct buildings were an obvious choice for a rapidly growing population.
Construction engineering consultant here. You could just 3D print moulds and cast ornate plaster or concrete ornamentation. It wouldn't need to be expensive. In fact it would probably be a lot cheaper than some of the building materials we do see like titanium cladding and massive sheets of plate glass. There is even modern ornamentation in the form of laser cut steel plates that shade windows. They used to do this in the first half of the 20th century (using carved wood to make moulds rather than 3D printing) before modernism became the only acceptable style. Remember ceiling roses? I think it's a lot more related to a pervasive idea in architecture and interior design that minimalist modernism is timeless and anything else will age poorly. I disagree with this, as looking at a 70's minimalist building the textured concrete render and "popcorn ceilings" are horribly out of style.
@@IOUaUsername modernism is not necessarly devoid of details and ornaments, especially nowadays there is a lot of buildings that use some modern and stylized version of mashrabiya made of metal, French architect Jean Novel used a lot of those. But using ornaments for the sake of ornaments don't necessarly make good buildings : there was a trend that was "neo modernism" that in architecture was supposed to be the revival of classical architecture into modern age, this gave us horrendeous things like architecture in Montpellier that is quite ugly. Sometime minimalism is great. Some of the Mies Van Der Rohe architecture is awesome, and it's as mitimalistic as it could get. Ultimately it's a matter of context, what will make an architecture beautiful depend on a lot of parameters (and ultimately of the taste of the public, for some people anything that is somewhat modern is necessarly bad and the only good style is classical or medieval architecture (i disagree with them, a lof of the modernist architecture look amazing))
@@IOUaUsername You will still be paying man hours to do the plaster which you otherwise wouldnt have to. Besides plaster decorations are a skilled trade even when using moulds and there aren't that many specialized workers left around to do it. On top of that cheaply made plaster ornaments look obvious and horrible, they make buildings look like cheap copies of things that were originaly carved out of stone. The final nail in the coffin is maintenance.
Not only are they not building more, people have to fight like hell to keep what we still have. In my city, we have Union Terminal, a beautiful old art deco building that used to be a train station. It now houses a museum and a few other things, and citizens in the city have had to fight numerous times to prevent it being demolished.
@@vanivari359 Finally another person who says it like it is. I’ve been calling out these “urbanist” channels for this for a while now. Great to see another person sees the bullsh*t too!
Excellent topic. On my travel to Buenos Aires, which is a city in recession but full of elegant architecture, I was entranced by the beauty of ornamental engravings, high ceilings, balconies, stained glass ceilings, almost in every historical building. And people decorate their walls with photos and arts, and graffiti artists make neighbourhoods full of character (even if most of these are protest messages). Upon returning to my prosperous modern home town in Asia, I was strangely feeling depressed -- it was the loss of beautiful scenes, and having only the ugly soulless boxes fill the streets, the exact result of the evil of rapid construction, ignorance of the need for aesthetics, and car-centric urban sprawl.
@@pietrojenkins6901 I'm from BA and got recommended a lot to visit Kiev as well for this reason. That was years before the war though, but I'm still planning to visit in the future.
I'm from Buenos Aires, and i really love these old buildings! They are plain beatiful, but sadly we are losing them too! there are a lot of them usually in downtown, but as soon as you get of them you start to encounter a lot of boxes here too :(
The important thing to realize about architectural history is that while nice buildings were preserved out of love, there were also a lot of crap buildings which were made on the super cheap back in the day as tennements, warehouses, low end shops by people like Scrooge which lived their lives, rotted and were destroyed without comment beyond "glad that eyesore's gone".
The thing is that even areas that were considered slums back in the day, after some renovation actually look much better than many newer developments. Even some minimal ornamentation and well chosen proportions can go a really long way.
Very few buildings from our era will be preserved because very few are worth preserving in contrast to those from past eras. There are whole neighborhoods with building built around same time 100, 150 sometimes even 200 years ago that are still around. I doubt preserving our current "bang for the buck" architecture will have same appeal as preserving beautiful 150 years old house.
No, nice buildings were not preserved out of love. The concept of heritage is relatively new (19h-20th centuries). You're just trying to cope with the fact that the modern world is downright ugly as hell by thinking that we were always bad esthetically blind builders. We weren't. Beauty was the norm, just look at all the small villages in France or Italy that are still stunning. No big architect at play there, just centuries of craftsmanship. Heck, even the entire city of Paris was built in a few decades, there was no "natural selection" going on here. Beauty was produced on a mass scale. Every single city hall, public library, school was stunning (or at least weren't burning your eyeballs) prior to WW2. Now, 99% of public projects are absolutely horrendous.
@@_blank-_ I think your biased thinking is showing a little too strongly here. There were absolutely lower-quality, uglier buildings that weren't as readily preserved, and heritage has always been a concept regardless of perhaps not being as strong in the past.
I think it's also worth pointing out that nowadays the world's population is 8 billion people while just a century ago it barely had 2 billion. That's a whole lot more buildings standing up today compared to the handful of beautiful 100+ year old buildings we decided to keep around. I can't even imagine the amount of money we'd have spent to build and mantain all those new buldings if they were as fancy and decorated as the cathedrals/town halls/museums/train stations/whatever of the past.
As a landscape photographer I can say, that's why I never photograph outside the historical city center and always shoot the same 10-15 landmarks. People come from other countries to see beautiful architecture, but no one will ever do that for another 5-over-1 or any kind of block house...
OK, American here with a question. Why do they call those buildings "5-over-1's"? All the ones I've seen have 5 stories total so shouldn't they be called 4 over 1's?
@@RaptorFromWeegee, no, foundation is below the building, podium is the fire-resistive ground floor, where shops and stuff like that is located, all the living floors above it are combustible.
Ornaments don't have to be made individually, they have never been so cheap to make since stone can be replicated beautifully in moulds out of cheaper materials. Openwork metal is super fast and easy to do too. Stained glass can even be done with vinyl stickers. They can't hide behind the cost excuse. They just don't care.
I agree they make a lot of excuses. Cheap synthetic materials can be worse though. I see buildings that attempt a classical style, but end up looking much worse than modern buildings because they look like plastic crap. Like that fake wood vinyl siding, looks terrible from miles away.
Absolutely correct, but I think I need to add a fifth reason to the list, every bit as important one - you see, "beautiful" buildings built in e.g. 19th century were actually very simple. It was a brick box with nice decor outside, some wooden slabs between floors, a nice stair (I especially love wrought iron ones!) and a roof. They had no plumbing, no electrical installation, no elevators, and even when they started to get all those things in the early 20th century, it was all very simple by modern standards. These days, for example when a modern office building is being built, engineering systems like plumbing, fire suppression, electrical, comms, HVAC etc. can easily cost 30% or 40% of total cost to build a building.
Thank you for your comment. People don’t like to do math or look at how things are built in reality - they want to whine and blame society for how horrible things are.
I wanted to point out something along these lines exactly. In The Netherlands, the overall quality of newly constructed homes is much higher than it used to be. Incredible insulation, all electric, solar panels, etc.
Denver Colorado revived its main train hall a few years ago, but unlike Prague, they tore up a bunch of road and parking lot surface and turned it into pedestrian-friendly space. The city even paid for most of the project directly with sales of the land parcels on site. As far as I know, that was a modernization project done right!
Colorado has a completely unique populace all its own. In 2016 it voted 70% for Bernie in an OPEN Primary yet also still believes in the 2nd amendment, hunting, and the rights of small business owners to refuse compelled artistic expression on religious grounds. It's the ultimate "progressive INDEPENDENT" voting base
Another thing I've heard from planners and architects is that the five-over-one is so popular because it's usually one of the easiest things to get approved by sometimes draconian municipal zoning boards. It's blandness is also inoffensiveness, and similar designs being approved by prior councils or other nearby councils makes current councils more willing to approve the project.
Those at the top know what they approve. They just use printed money. The public has no idea on which levels they influence our society. Ugly architecture affects the mind and spirit of man. It demoralizes and regresses our way of thinking to become more materialized.
What bothers me most about the ugliness of modern buildings is that it's not even that hard to make prettier buildings. I play Minecraft now and then and there are professional Minecrafters who make vids on how to make pretty buildings with very simple rules like: - don't build a building in the shape of a box, - makes sure the facade isn't flat and - avoid large homogenous surfaces. And then I look at modern buildings and they all make these basic mistakes. I don't get how professional architects can all be so incompetent.
The advice my dad gave me (and which he and I follow) is to paint the interior of your house with some neutral color like beige or off-white, so as to make it easier to sell. As Adam points out a lot of these decisions are driven by the need to sell these things to the widest selection of buyers, so they are boring by design. Interesting choices may mean a lot to 10% of people but you need to sell to 90%
Yes, my Dad was a self employed decorator and he detested magnolia with a passion because it was the colour everyone asked for. He refused to use it anywhere in our home! Most people wanted that colour because it would be easy to sell the house, even if they weren’t planning on selling any time soon.
This. It's the same reason why pop music is bland. It appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's not designed to be original, but to be inoffensive.
So they built a lidl right next to my parents house in Dublin, during the pandemic, construction finished up at the end of 2020. Its actually a really cool building, its got solar panels and a green roof, minimal carparking space around it, but it is elevated for parking directly underneath the building. The main structural beams of the of building are glulam timber, which are openly shown and are actually quite beautiful. Its almost got a postmodern cathedral style vibe to it. There's an Aldi built in Cavan (out in the country side in Ireland) that I did a shop just before the pandemic, that was recently built (within the last 5 years) that had a massive tilted 'green' roof, they basically planted a meadow on it. While it had just been planted so everything was only starting to take, I love this integration of environment, of the living into modern architecture, I think this is definitely a solution to this blandness that we're seeing in modern construction, along with more public transportation and the removal of cars in urban environments.
We aren't in the immediate post-war anymore, we don't need cheap, quick housing. I'm betting long term, a nice ornate building is worth more to the public than some minimalist cube. Its time we moved on from minimalism and created a new trend, an in-between compromise where balance ornateness with price. Also when they build housing in a city, especially in older neighborhoods, when they do the bland cubes, it just looks wrong.
Hey Adam, i'm Max from Germany and i studied geography until half a year ago. I was not really sure what direction i wanted to go after my degree besides contributing to something i deem sustainable. You and your Videos about City planning and urban transport Systems really fascinated me and influenced me to go that direction. I have completed a 3 months internship now and beginning my masters soon in that general direction. I just wanted to let you know and give you a little credit. Wish you the best, man! And keep up the good work:)
Hi Max, bin gerade in einer ähnlichen Situation, Geographieabschluss bald hinter mir und suche ein Praktikum in die Richtung. Was war das für ein praktikum und was für einen Master planst du zu machen??
@@maltsday ich habe in einem Kommunalplanungsbüro das Praktikum gemacht, das schwerpunktmäßig Bebauungspläne anfertigt. Da hab ich CAD gelernt, sowie die baurechtlichen Grundlagen und Prozesse der Bauleitplanung, also das grobe Handwerkszeug für alle möglichen planerischen Richtungen. Der Master den ich mir ausgesucht habe ist in Erlangen "Kulturgeographie", der die Spezialisierung "Stadtforschung und Regionalentwicklung" anbietet. Wie er tatsächlich ist kann ich aber natürlich noch nicht sagen.
Your examples of ugly modernist buildings are not remotely the worst ones. I've seen so many that just lack any character at all. It's not that hard to add a few details to make the building feel a bit more pleasant, and fortunately, that's something that seems to be happening more, recently. New buildings in old Dutch city centers used to stand out like a sore thumb, but in recent decades, they've increasingly been trying to build in styles that are still somewhat compatible with classic architecture, just less extravagant. I think that's a good balance to aim for.
@@C0deH0wler I think it's because he spent too much energy trying to show he dislikes conspiracy theories. As some commenters have pointed out, they have elements that are true, so why not include them along with the others on the list?
Yeah, the "modern" builds that he showed as examples actually looked good, but both here in Portugal or in my home country (Brazil) there are tons and tons of super-ugly buildings. If they looked like the examples the author of the video gave us, these cities would be beautiful af
The horrifying thing about that armored car masquerading as an SUV at the end is that they're showing it off outside the Segerstrom center. Which is actually a quite beautiful theater in a modern architectural style. That is hidden inside of a gigantic complex of office buildings. I've been to it many times and it is quite a lovely building. But sadly most people don't even realize it's there :(
I agree with your conclusions. What depresses me is that I don’t see the factors changing any time soon, and I don’t have any faith we’ll see beautiful architecture become normal again any time soon. Tastes change and vary through time and region, but we all see the beauty in a Japanese pagoda, a Byzantine bazaar, and a Greek column even if we have our own preferences. What’s different today is that we aren’t making the modern equivalent. We’re devoid of any architectural opinion or taste at all. It’s all a soulless profit machine where so much property is developed by absent investors who couldn’t care less what is made on the land they will sell and forget about a year down the line, so long as it turns a profit. Add to that incompetent local authorities who are run rings around by corporations with higher-paid, smarter employees, and you get the bland civil engineering of the 21st Century. That was a rant, so apologies if it’s incoherent!
I have basically always lived in a commie block, and while they looked like actual depressing shit prior to the 2000's my city started to renovate the outside of them away from grey to instead colorful facades that give the eyes something to look at. And I have to say it worked. They're still a bit boring looking but they're now closer to colorful big blocks pieces than just a featureless beton cubes. For the areas where a lot of them are in close proximity to each other they've also usually color coded them so you can just tell people what color to look for when you're expecting visitors that might still be allergic to just using google maps.
@@InfernosReaper Maybe? At least where I live the house numbers are always correct on the apartment complexes I had to go to, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse in other cities.
@@RAHelllord It is and worse, in the US, some apartment complexes have multiple buildings that share *one address* with each building having a number or letter to distinguish them from each other... and they located on the premise is *no logical order* Suffice to say, pizza delivery and on-site warranty repair work *both* sucked sometimes.
Are you from Bucharest by any chance? I'm from here and yeah it's mostly as you said, good thing the city hall decided to renovate these matchboxes! But a lot of them have already started to lose colour and they've started to get very dirty. In 5 years or so they'll look the same as they were before the renovation, all a medium shade of grey. This is mostly because they used cheap colour paint that degraded a lot from the sun's UV rays and bad decorative plaster that has a very rough texture that traps dust. Also, there's no cleaning program in place and I bet there won't be any in the next 10 years. The idea was good but the execution was pretty bad. Romania at its finest. 7 years after renovation, my neighbouring block already looks dirty and almost disgusting in some places.
You story reminds me of Poland. I lived for a year in Gdańsk, in the most commieblock neighbourhood you can imagine: Zaspa (look it up on Googlemaps satellite view, its planned hexagonal distribution is really interesting). The good thing is, not only the humongous blocks had been renovated and repainted, but also the council had organised a big-scale mural contest in which artists from all over the world had painted whole 10-story-tall facades in each building with original and colourful murals. Hundreds of m² in each block. As a result, what could have been a depressing urban hellscape, was a beautiful artistic open-air exhibition instead. I loved living there.
The car aspect really resonates with me. I don’t have a car and live in one of those beautiful city cores. For a long time, whenever I visited friends who live in suburbs, I was dumbfounded at the lack of any kind of beauty. I couldn’t understand how people could stand living surrounded by so much ugliness, and I felt bad for my friends, not understanding how they could possibly be content. Then I got a ride in someone’s car and realized what the issue was: I had been biking to all these places. I had been experiencing the audiovisual cacophony of the freeways, the endless cookie-cutter neighborhoods and the artless big box stores at a human scale and pace that they were never supposed to be experienced at. My friends, in their cars, had no idea what a wasteland they lived in, because all they ever saw was a short glimpse in between their cozy homes and the manicured insides of the big box stores.
Also made me realise why all those teen movies had American kids always hanging out at the mall. *there is literally nowhere else to hang out*. No parks, no social clubs, no communal urban areas. Just endless rows of houses and malls.
@@NoJusticeMTG The funny thing is that they get thrown out of modern malls (at leat sometimes) because, you know, they aren't doing what those things are build for: To take your money.
A car is currently for many people the best (cheapest/fastest/most comfortable/clean/on time/healthy) option getting things and people moved. Were I live are a lot of trees so I don't think it is too ugly. While going for a walk I also think that thse trains driving in the area every 5 to 10 minutes are quite loud ... even compared to the cars ( which are only allowed 30 km/h)
So here's a thought experiment that comes up for me whenever the conversation turns to ornamentation on buildings. There *used* to be manufacturers who would churn out standardized ornamental pieces for buildings just like you described, so presumably if we return to pedestrian-focused, ornamented urban designs, there would be a need for something like that in the future. But what if we wanted ornamentation that *wasn't* neo-classical? Like, sure: the basic elements of ornamental designs -- columns, frames around windows, decorative stuff segmenting the vertical space, elements around the roof, etc. -- would still be there, but what if they weren't based on greco-roman designs? For example, columns: we still use basically three types of column design -- Doric, Ionian, Corinthian (or some mix of them) -- for our neoclassical columns. What if the tops of columns weren't either a scroll or a leaf shape? What would be a design that reflected more future-looking æsthetics? Or also: what sort of decorative elements could you make if you were using CNC and 3D printing to design them, that couldn't be made with molds or by hand? What kind of decorations would be possible? I'd very much like to see the return of the basic principles of classical architecture, but I'd also like to see a more modern take on the decorative elements that make it so interesting. Something that could retain all the detail and variety and irregularity of classical buildings, without feeling like being overwhelmed by the past.
In my opinion, modern interpretations of classical architecture fail to capture its elegance and presence. Modern design has consistently trended away from complexity and towards simplicity, meaning that the ornate capitals, pediments, balusters, and finials of classical architecture get simplified into smooth shapes with little visual depth and no soul. I recognize that I am a classical purist when it comes to that style of architecture and design, but I have to say that I also love a lot of modern buildings and have a great appreciation for all architecture. With this in mind, I still feel that there is no tasteful middle ground between classical and modern architecture. Lastly, beauty is subjective; classifying beautiful buildings by whether or not they align with Roman traditions is a stupid idea because there is so much variety of design in the world and everyone has their own take on it.
@@gnarlyhogg I think it would be cool if we could just ditch minimalism and invent new styles that are intricate and awe-inspiring, sort of like what happened in the Middle Ages when gothic architecture became a thing. We don't need to exactly copy the designs of the past but we really need to ditch minimalism and come up with more intricate looking designs again.
You get straight to the point, no useless information, no repeating and fast paced way of talking. It's rare nowadays to find videos with such percentage of useful information. Thank you.
Interestingly, just a few days ago a Czech architect made a video on why there are often houses with empty sides (not sure about the correct term, but it's usually those multistory buildings that have one side without ony windows and it looks like there's another building missing next to it) and it's exactly as you say - it's supposed to have another building there but there isn't enough room for parking spaces so they just leave the lot empty.
@@chicagotypewriter2094 Domihork probably means the video from Adam Gebrian titled "Nesmyslný důvod, proč nemáme ve městech více domů". The video is in Czech and no subs are provided though. Interestingly, there's another, even more recent video from the same guy about a massive brownflied redevelopment project also in Prague close to Smíchov railway station, which also hints at the same issue with parking minimums.
There's also the fact that we kept the good ooking buildings and destroyed the ugly ones ^^ Like, you mention the Eiffel Tower, first a lot of people found it ugly, and it was supposed to last only a handful of years for an universal exposition. It's Eiffel, the architect, that lobbyed for years and transformed it into an attraction to save his materpiece ^^ A lot of buildings back then were ugly but we destroyed them to put new buildings :D
100%! Most of old buildings that survived were built for rich people in the first place. The poor lived in basements, attics, slums, in darkness and without airflow...
This exactly. Survivorship bias is real. I hate when people complain about this, they seem to think everyone back then lived in the buildings that survive today, which for the most part are buildings that were originally built for the noble or ultra wealthy class. It's like expecting everyone today to live in a high-luxury modern house, like the ones you see in movies like Parasite.
@@son_guhun the thing is even regular buildings, poor people houses still look better than most of the stuff built today. there are medieval villages still intact to this day and the people who lives there were very poor.
What's funny is a lot of traditional architecture we have now faced the same criticism when they were first being developed like Brick and mortar shops and buildings for example.
Take a look on the first concrete-panel building in Moscow (1939). It is VERY RICH ornamented and even a concrete was coloured to seem like a marble. Nowadays some developers order outside panels with individual ornaments and, moreover, build stylisations to ArtDeko, but not often.
Yea, too bad Adam has to twist everything under the perspective of a eastern european communist. "commies block good, solves muh homeless problem" actually translates to: "western european elites didn't want to spend too much on housing and therefore imported commie blocks in the 60-70s way after ww2. Eastern Europe, didn't see people "move into" commie blocks, random instances state property were forcefully evicted from their farmland, their way of life, and forced into empty concrete shells so they could be turned into productive city worker droids." What, did you think those communists were buying an upgrade of standard of living?
You know what makes for a great market hall with the lovely tall windows and high ceilings? A closed down train station. Actually the old train station nearby (in Canada, so not that old) got turned into a library instead, and the market is out back. Lovely building.
It's always a little depressing to only be allowed to have nice functional spaces like that only at the cost of another. Unless they've built a new and better train station nearby
@@knightofficer No, the train doesn't go through there anymore, the oil dried up, so if you want to get from that town onto a train, you'd need to take a taxi to the next town over. (Where the train passes by only once a day at 9am and then comes back at 10pm.) Public transit is a very functional *joy* in the less urban areas of Canada, as you can imagine. There's lots of trains through this area though, but it's all industrial going to the plants and over to the States.
Yes they were. At the same time they still required craftsmanship to create and apply. They were not generated by CAD etc. And they linked the buildings to nature, which is a human desire, to always be connected to nature. Thus even the "mass produced" ornamented buildings of the pre-modernist era are usually more attractive to humans, as they still showcase this obvious link to nature and our innate habits of perception and senses.
@@bart_u ironically I've spent hundreds of hours designing ornate buildings in cad programs like SketchUp. It was a massive head ache to figure out but once you get familiar with process a highly detailed ornate building may only have 10 unique pieces on them. Much of it is adding detail where blank space is and adding trim to the tops of walls
Very often the pre-war buildings were not build by contracts for profit but by a cooperation of people who gathered money, got their own architect and of course insisted on esthetics. Which is almost impossible to happen today as you get everything through some agency, retailer, ect.
Modern architecture will always stay modern, because that's just the state of things. What you ment to say was Modernist - which is the architectural style. But even than, that's not really true, as buildings in any style can be beautifull, it just depends on how they are done.
@@milokojjones the problem with modernist architecture is that not every architect can be a Le Corbusier. A great modernist building is a thing of sublime beauty; a mediocre modernist building is .... not. Even the less talented neoclassical architects can hide their mediocrity behind "correct" use of the orders and produce an unobjectionable facade.
In Stockholm Sweden there is a wonderful architectural style that I think strikes the perfect balance of cost/time of construction while being very beautiful. It’s called ‘Swedish Grace’ and the buildings are generally 3-8 stories tall, ornate stonework is kept to the first floor, while all the floors from 2 and above are usually a simple plaster/stucco wall, and if there’s ornamentation on those upper floors it tends to be simple and used sparingly. This architecture style is so simple and beautiful that Studio Ghibli used it as inspiration for the towns and cities in the movie Kiki’s Delivery Service. I think a prefab framework like soviet block housing combined with the extra work of a Swedish Grace facade would be amazing in some sort of Swedish Grace revivalism movement. Sadly I live in America so I will be experiencing unending suburban sprawl.
I'm gonna be honest and say that you do get tired of this style quickly. I live in Århus which really boomed just as this style was popular which means that we have like endless streets of these apartment buildings, stretching on for kms in all directions around the city center. And it just becomes bland really quickly, they aren't necessarily ugly you just end up preferring literally anything else because it just feels like a town was copy pasted. It is definitely preferable to suburban sprawl because when you're there because it feels calmer and more cozy but it's not like you think it is pretty. Your eyes just sorta glaze over and the details become visual noise and you get annoyed every time the style doesn't quite match up or there's some ugly sign. Though I am slightly biased because this area of the city has hills that really suck to cycle on. Growing up here is probably why I love modern architecture much, until recently the majority of the city had either been built in the interwar period or just before the Oil Crisis so there were two fairly similar dominant styles that were basically just copy pastes of different templates. Then recently a building boom happened and now there's a ton of modern buildings with many more still being built. Not all of them are great and there's at least one I hate for blocking the view to another modernist building that's a masterpiece. In general however they're such a breath of fresh air and break up the monotony in really nice ways. They're generally built out of light materials like glass and have white walls which is really nice in contrast to the dark brick buildings and it's so nice to have something with lighter colors during the frequent bad weather and the winter where you often don't even get to see the sun due to your schedule. A lot of them also seem to have been designed more thoughtfully so they look pretty both in good and bad weather, unlike the brick apartments that look so drab and depressing in bad weather. My favourite for this is Dokk1, which is the new central library, sadly you can't find any pictures of it in bad weather online but imo that's where it really shines and in a country where most days are overcast that really matters. Also if you want to take a look and an interesting current Nordic architectural movement there has been a slow trend towards designing buildings so they blend into the surrounding landscape. Moesgaard Museum is a great example of this, from most angles it just looks like the hill hinged open a bit.
@@tj-co9go 70s windows are literally the worst. Unbroken rows of soulless single pane windows. Ok, the 2010s and "make sure none of the windows line up with any other window" is also the worst.
I think we also have to remember that buildings which survived, survived because we chose them to. We built slums and poor quality buildings everywhere in London, but no one thinks of how great the history slums of the city were. To us it’s survivorship bias. In a hundred years perhaps people will reminisce on how some modern buildings were beautiful and how we don’t build them “like the old days”. But it was just those we chose to repair and maintain.
It's already happening, the Brutalist revival is well underway and people are starting to appreciate Brutalist architecture and campaign for it's preserval. Architecture just tends to go through three phases, first you have enthusiasm and hype for it, then shoddy examples of it lead to disillusionment and the style goes through a long period of hatred because it became so common, and then once it has been out of the mainstream for a good few decades people reapproach it and once again learn to appreciate it and start to romanticize it. This has already happened with some modernist styles like Art Deco and Brutalism is clearly the next one up.
This is not true. Survivorship bias doesn't exist in architecture as it does in other fields. Most of those "slums" (victorian rowhomes) are still around and highly prized nowadays. If anything, it's the grand architecture of the past that suffered more demolition because it is typically in high value downtown locarions that made them more attractive for redevelopement.
Add that for some reason Strata Associations for most of these buildings don't allow for ANY individualism. I was repeatedly fined the one time I lived in a condo / apartment complex for having plants on my patio, even though my neighbours constantly commented on how beautiful they were.
True; condominiums & new public housing in my country don't let you change your windows to a different design, whereas older public housing did (so long those that opened into the common corridor didn't swing out too far & block the corridor). Enclosing a balcony meanwhile to turn it into an indoor room in your apartment might violate building codes (since those codes limit the max floor area of each building, whose computation typically excludes balconies though, in an effort to promote more plant planting). Condominiums may also frown on you hanging your clothing to dry at your balcony as it may be regarded as unsightly. Newer apartments are also more likely to use 3/4 or full height instead of 1/2 height windows, & when they need to be changed due to wear & tear, if your house's windows are of the former 2 types, you'll also face more legal bureaucracy - you've to pay a civil engineer to certify the window's safety too (probably to ensure that if you knock into them in an accident, the windows don't shatter & cause you to fall to your death) - but its been reported that these engineers are more reluctant to do such certification unless its part of a complete house renovation, as it may not be deemed to be worth the effort
i also seem to recall that the ornamentation industry was heavily unionised, due to requiring a lot more specialized labour compared to other construction industries, so i wouldn't be surprised that devolpers basically decided to kill it once they had an excuse (the great depression was the final nail in the coffin iirc)
Great video, but I think you might've focused too much on ornamentation. That's probably the first thing to see, but classical architecture is also about proportions and symmetry even without ornaments. Look at Sweden or just Scandinavia overall where ornamentation was much more reserved. Or buildings from the 1920s-30s. This is a huge problem with modern architecture, much greater than the lack of ornaments. But to give credit, this also stems from the causes you pointed out in the video.
Fair point. Also they used the Golden Ratio to get the most beautiful architecture back in the day. Modern architects shit on any beauty and symmetry claiming they're progressive and the old architecture is "boring" and "LaCkS sElf eXpReSsiOn".
you can do proportion and symmetry in the design without overly affecting cost. But ornamentation costs money to produce and attach to buildings, so is more of a bottleneck. There's simply no reason to go back to 'classical architecture' (as if that's one thing) proportions unless you can justify it as a design consideration for a modern building - it doesn't really matter to the cost itself.
Architecture itself is mostly about proportions, (a)symmetry, and (good) materials. There was this idea around the end of the 1900s, that architecture needs to free itself from ornamentation, which drives attention away from the more important stuff, like proportions and elegant spaces. If you walk around estates that were built in the modern era, you can't really state that there was no thought going into the proportion and composition of buildings. Moreover, getting rid of ornaments gives space for people to recognize good materials (like travertine, ceramics and quality concrete) and hard-to-make details (like the ones you can find in the Olivetti showroom in Venice). Overall as an architect for these reasons, I value quality modern architecture very much.
And here I am, sitting in a relatively new bit of Jakarta, surrounded by entire blocks of modern buildings constructed in classicist European style full of ornaments! I’ve seen similar across Asia, they somehow found a way and a will to do it out here. Now if only they could also mass adopt public transport as well…
@@hsgregorius Considering how tacky and fake-ish those are, I kind of understand your sentiment haha, but it's still better than the soulless rukos of Jakarta (you know, the bland, square, ones)
@@B777LR you should definitely check out PIK 2, they have an entire faux Amsterdam over there, complete with a 'canal' of its own haha, but perhaps my favourite of European-style buildings in Indonesia would be the Pullman Hotel Grand Central in Bandung, which incorporates New Indies Style (the architectural movement popular in colonial Indonesia/Dutch East Indies in the early 20th century)
@johnsiahaan3289 hahaha, yes those same ruko styles are also prevalent in my city... i feel like we can only get the extremes here in Indo. Extremely tacky or extremely bland 😅
As someone living in canada, everywhere is so...bland. Its so boring. Every town and even cities feel the same. The "mall" strips, plazas, corporate stores (like walmart), parking lots, residential areas, "tall" buildings, farm land, etc are all the same everywhere (at least in ontario). Every small town, especially in the country, feels the same. And if they feel different, its for the worse, not better. I long to live in europe where visually everything looks nice and sparks creativity.
Makes me glad to live near Philadelphia where the attitude seems to be, "You lay a finger on that historical building, and we'll gut you." As a result, we have a lot of historical buildings from various eras, alongside glass cubes that are rather pretty. It's a nice jumble.
@@arolemaprarath6615 The US, about 90 miles south of NY. One of the large cities that stretch out between Boston and Baltimore on the US northeast coast (about 2 million plus people). It's known for both modern buildings and very old architecture, including the places where independence was declared and the US government was initially drafted up.
I lived in Dublin Ireland recently, which had a huge housing speculation boom a few years back. Coming from Germany, I immediately noticed that all the modern and standardized looking blocks were falling apart on a micro level. Light switches, door frames etc. were falling off the walls, seals were rotting/nonexistant, balcony railings were loose. It was clear that someone had made a fortune on these buidlings, left and now the people actually living in them (and the new owners too, probably) had to deal with the damage.
A few years ago, I was invited to Hamburg. I was living in London at the time. I was shocked at just how solid and well installed every detail was in Germany, from door frames and handles to water taps (I feel like 50% of taps in the UK are installed with hot and cold the wrong way around lol) In France things are much better, but Germany is outstanding
@@Rico-v7r Correct, someone wanted to make even more money from it and skimped on quality. As long as you don't get too close, you can still enjoy Dublin with its stark contrast between old Georgian style buildings and the sleek modern glass-and-steel bond villain HQs :)
As uxch as I love Ireland, its housing quality was abysmal. I've never seen anything like this in any other country: ventilation which is 50 cm wide and about as long, walls made of what appeared to be cardboard painted over, goddamn electric water heaters inside your shower, etc. Everything seemed to just fall apart like cheap decoration. You don't need to compare it to Germany to see how awful it was. (I'm Polish BTW)
A friend is an architect and can tell what application was used to design a building based on the pre-sets. It’s probably linked to reducing costs but it would be interesting to see if anyone has done any research on that side of design.
That's actually depressing that people don't even try to come up with their own designs just so they can fulfill their quota, capitalism is the bane of authentic artistic expression.
Till I saw your comment, I was trying to make up a joke about unreal engine asset packs, and how those look like they could be from any number of urban zombie shooters. If it's really possible to figure out the software behind the building designs, we aren't actually that far off from fleshing out cities using predesigned asset packs like building a video game level.
As a retired architect let me shit on the laziness of the field. You are partially correct. Revit is a huge culprit to the boring looking exteriors you see. Especially in apartment complexes. Essentially, you create a lot of blocks for the units in the building. You copy and paste for about 3-4 stories then try to make it look “interesting” by throwing all the materials you can get away with onto the facade. Which is the antithesis to how we are taught to design but whatever. When you’re letting the software dictate your design decisions you’ve lost your architect card. Also programs like revit HATE anything that isn’t orthogonal. One of the main issues I always found ridiculous was that designers were always in floor plan view. That’s an abstract view considering we exist in 3d and advance through time. I wouldn’t say it makes things cheaper tho. It makes things faster but even then if you copy and paste a whole ass building, that is also time consuming considering that terrain, entrances, local regulations like setbacks and the like can all be different and they have to be updated before you submit that to be constructed. The fact that these people don’t think about the spaces they design is ridiculous and happens way too much. I’ll stop before I get triggered even further. It’s a shit show and def a contributing factor. Maybe I should make more videos shitting on the field I left. 😂
All of the interesting beautiful buildings here in Ohio were built before 1950. And you are absolutely correct in that it's become about making money and nothing else.
Time is a factor... Most post WW2 architecture in the UK was unpopular until recently.. Now much of the 50`sand 60's stuff is appreciated and even has "preservation orders"... The "Barbican" is one such example albeit much post WW2 architecture was always bad.. Nevertheless, the rush to destroy many post WW2 buildings has been to hasty...Delicate, modest post WW2 office blocks around St Paul's Cathedral that I felt epitomised an English reserved fineness akin to early Georgian were swept away in favour of ulgly glass 1990 monstrosities. Personally I hate most post 1980 architecture but I guess my opinion might mellow with time...
Hate to burst your bubble but before the 1950s it was already about making money. Developer’s desire to make money didn’t magically change in 1950, that’s silly.
The problem is: Ever since the financial crisis in 2008 most people can't even afford to buy a place to live in anymore. Not even a flat or an appartment. We've become a society of renters and homeless. It's exactly what the capitalist elite, like Thiel, wanted. "You will own NOTHING, and you'll be happy."
Even worse is the low quality of houses even in earthquake prone areas like much of Turkey. Many if not most of the youngest earthquake's victims are actually murder victims: The construction companies who built their houses knowingly doomed them to death for the base motive of greed.
When I went to Budapest, I was surprised to find they still build historic buildings from scratch around the city center. Just a couple hundred miles west, in Vienna, we have long abandoned that philosophy and let our historic districts be defaced by ugly, ornament-less post-war boxes.
i was wondering if we can build "cheap" neoclassical buildings, built on the soviet style pre-builts and then you engrave the neoclassical characteristics on styrofoam and slapped as external insulation
@@ristekostadinov2820 engraved or "sclupted" styrofoam is the worst and it's better to not have ornaments at all than to paste fake styrofoam shit and then have it rot and fall off after 5 years.
Thats only because Orban hates modern buildings, and insists on renovating to original condition. Even if that original condition only existed on paper, because it was prohibitivly expensive to build. It is highly contested by architects, because it uses modern material, so its not renovation in the classical sense, only a facade.
I've seen a lot of modern clothes that closely IMITATE old styles, like an echo or facsimile in shape and design without the complexity, while keeping it in this era. I fully believe the same can be done with architecture someday. ❤
There's this beautiful skyscraper in the middle east, don't remember where but it was absolutely stunning. It's not impossible to get the best of new and old. (It wasn't in Dubai)
@@gwened Germany, Poland, and Hungary are in a building spree lately. Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Gdansk, Budapest, all have been building new housing developments styled to what it looked like before the destruction of WW2.
I think there's also a degree of survivor's bias. The ugly or trash buildings from back then aren't around anymore. If you read the book Oliver Twist you'll read about disgusting decrepit mass built buildings with the same degree of ugliness as we see now. Only they're in Victorian England. They used different materials but the business people were just making cheap houses as quickly as they could same as we are now. However, when you spend a lot of money and effort making buildings to last, they may be around for thousands of years to come.
Another huge reason large stores like Walmart don't customize their stores is for consistency. Having stores be bland and more or less the same is an intentional feel. You know when you're in Walmart and you (more or less) know where to find the things you're looking for regardless of which store you're at. These stores are interchangeable, because it makes it easier for Walmart control variables around product placement, and they're boring so you don't spend time looking at architecture and instead look at products. Walmart isn't supposed to be a place you want to spend time in, it's designed to put as many products between you and the stuff you want, with the goal of getting you to buy as much as possible as efficiently as possible. Stores that don't do this are usually out-competed by stores that do. Not just because they make more money, but because stores with inconsistent layout's are annoying and confusing to customers. In Canada, The Bay is one of the worst for this. I've probably been to a dozen stores across the country, and the lack of consistency is infuriating. You end up needlessly exploring the store or asking for help because nothing is labeled or grouped consistently. If I need to buy luggage in Walmart (no matter the store), I know it's probably going to be in the back right of the store, across the main aisle from the shoes, and I need to pass through the clothing section to get there.
"stores that don't do this are usually out competed by stores that do" Depends on the area. In Germany, the big stores are always customised to some extent. The rough layout is the same, but basically out of necessity the specifics are always different depending on the space available
@@anna-flora999 Its the same everywhere i'd assume. Consistency doesn't mean carbon copy. However generally they maintain the same consistent layout across all stores, and adapt that layout as much as possible for older locations that are still profitable and predate the policy.
@@lilpwnige not really, every store has its own quirks, because the layouts are way too different across stores. The only consistent things I can think of are produce comes first and the fresh meat section is like somewhere approaching halfway through the store. Everything else is inconsistent between stores. At least for kaufland. Not sure how Real does it, those are rarer in my area
In Helsinki Finland many of the newer buildings are built with brick facades. It looks pretty nice but most importantly it's miles ahead of what we built in the 70's or 80's.
Yeah, I live in Valby district of Copenhagen and they are building quite a lot of brick facade buildings. They are actually blending well with the old factory buildings from the 1930's
The "luxury" homes (price point well over $1M) built around Toronto today all have interesting architectural elements added to them, all the time. Individual houses need individualistic elements. It's only the large institutional and mass-housing buildings (apartments, row housing, and especially schools and government buildings) that look like f*cking prisons. And that trend began, in Canada, in the 1950s, not during any age of "neoliberal capitalism". That kinda disproves this video's thesis. There's nothing "neoliberal" and "capitalist" about cheap minimalist functionalism - unless someone wants to argue that the Soviet Bloc were "neoliberal" "capitalists". "Neoliberal" is basically a term that is just used as a swear-word to put other people down, it has no inherent meaning. I tend to ignore anyone who uses the word.
Walmart will always build ugly buildings, because shoppers equate the ugly facade with "getting a deal." It's also why Walmart is less "nice" inside than Target or other stores. Shoppers assume that anything too nice looking results in inflated costs to the consumer, and Walmart's brand is based on being perceived as cheaper than their competitors. That likely plays a role in apartment buildings as well. Why pay for a facade that you can't see? That's just a way for the developer to overcharge you!
Only tangentially related, but I'm super jealous of you having those amazing, fluffy cats! Our landlord has rejected our request to have pets so we're looking to move, and houses being a commodity has never rang more true (especially pet-friendly ones).
Honest question: Why is ornamentation so expensive when we have modern techniques to cheaply mass-produce them? After all, repeating motifs brings harmony to the overall effect. We can easily make molds for stucco, laser-cut wood according to a programmed design, even pour a house into a creative pattern through the new digitally printed homes. As for the lousy street views, apartment complexes and shopping malls have plenty of inner courts and corridors. Why not have something nice there?
I'm in my last year of high school in Italy and we have to study Art History in my school. We're currently studying Dadaism (1916-1924), so I know a little bit about the subject. While it is true that the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building were made with the new materials of the time to try something new, they aren't the same kind of modernist art that you described. For many, modernism meant using new materials to build better ornaments. On the other hand, figures like Adolf Loos (who essentially foresaw the Rationalist movement of 1925) saw modernism as something purely functional. In his famous book "Ornament and Crime" (published in 1912), he stated architecture wasn't art because architecture had to follow functionality. That's why he designed his buildings with big white cubes and massive windows. The Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower were modernist because of their materials but there was absolutely no functional reason for their architectural style. You also mentioned other modernist buildings as beautiful, like the fallingwater, but quite frankly, they're still ugly. They still only have generic cubic shapes. It's just that one of them has a waterfall that goes through it. The need to mass produce and create new housing is somewhat of an acceptable reason. However, there are many architectural companies and art schools (like the Bauhaus) who want more minimalism and are pushing to destroy our cities. Quite frankly, I absolutely hate modernist architecture and I wish there were laws against these bland buildings. German cities are incredibly ugly nowadays because of modernist architecture. Kassel is a good example. It was a dense beautiful city. Nowadays, it's a car infested city that's way less dense and way more ugly. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they used cheap materials and such to rebuild it after WW2. However, they also made sure it was rebuilt with the car in mind. There is no way that the new infrastructure they built was gonna be any less expensive than rebuilding the city the way it was before
I think in germany by 1945, ornamentation was heavily associated (rightly or wrongly) with imperialism, the right, Wilhimine era, WWI, poverty, violence, authotarianism, patriarchy etc. At least by "moderates", leftists who had power after ww2 The modernist style is bland and uninspiring. It doesnt recall pride, or love of the fatherland. Its not unique. Its the same everywhere even outside germany. Its identity-less. Purely functional. Like a hunter gatherer or stone age cave our ancestors lived in. Perhaps if ww2 bombing never happened modernism would not of replaced as much as it did, but the destruction of german cities gave modernists a blank canvas whose momentum became so strong people even started to demolish buildings in places that were not bombed for aestetic, health or plain corruption reasons. In ireland, never bombed heavily in ww2 , the 2nd half of 20th century saw whole scale destructiom of old buildings and replacement by modernist type buildings. Some were slums some were intentionally left to decay, others were actually good buildings but demolished for "economic" or selfish reasons.
You are ABSOLUTELY spot on! I couldn't have said it better, thank you. If this was a speech you'd deserve a standing ovation! I believe modern technology has greatly benefited us. But modern architecture has gone over about as well as modern communism. Problem is, although communism was largely banished in a generation, modern buildings weren't so easily dispensed with. I also hasten to assert that the flaws in communism were glaringly obvious when put into practice. The flaws in modern architecture weren't as obvious. Most people don't think past fashionable conformity. They're easily duped by a powerful media "teaching" them what they should like. Inhabitants of modern environments get depressed and lobotomized yet nobody understands why. Their house or apartment gets shabby and fixtures break after only a few years and they just accept it. Their investment requires complete renovation when its time to sell and they just accept that too I believe todays architecture is undemocratic. High level intellectuals telling the masses how they should live, or perhaps collusion by developers. Perhaps longer term planning is needed. With healthy democratic deliberation. Robust debate by the common people.
@@RaptorFromWeegee And I think your comment deserves an ovation as well. I agree with you here, and the word I think that describes the planning and architecture that serves the people is 'vernacular.' That is the kind of architecture that evolves based on the place and the needs of the people in the place, without the intrusion of 'celebrity' architects. If it were just about updating things, and not greedier and more controlling influences, it is simple to update and keep the best of the rest. There are still villages and towns with fully functioning buildings from the 1400s in France, for example, and people love spending time in them.
@@simonestreeter1518 Thank you very much. Glad to hear you mention vernacular architecture. Just so happens, our family vacation home is a vernacular house from the turn of the century. We don't think it even had an architect, just one of numerous local carpenters who built houses on the side. Very plain, simple study house. I think in that area, vernacular house construction faded away as kit built houses came on the scene. They even sold them in the Sears catalogue! Probably took up a RR box car. Once it arrived on your land, you could hire a guy to assemble it or you could summon your neighbors to help you do it yourself. Cheaper and faster to set up than the older situation. Of course, I think the house kits were done away with by the mass produced suburban developments of the 1940s and 50s. Again cheaper but much lower quality. Cheers!
Those older buildings were also designed by people, not a rough design but in fine detail. Where I live there was an architect called Watson Fothergill, you can tell which buildings he designed by their unique quarks. In comparison, we are now getting what I call sliding block buildings pooping up, which are square buildings with large tiles. They make them as they don't require an masonry's to be built, but they are not built to last.
Some commie blocks can be beautiful. The neighborhood in Finland where most of my family live is gorgeous these days. What they did to spruce it up was changing the balconies and adding greenery that climbs up the walls and some walls got a new color so the buildings aren't so samey anymore. With a little creativity and will even a gray old concrete box can become beautiful. I've seen this in parts of East Germany too. I believe we failed so hard on urbanism and it's so sad because we could have done so much better.
@@markuserikssen Finnish side of the family mostly live in Turku some of the old concrete boxes still look like shit but slowly getting better. In Germany Plattenbau is the most famous renovation but also parts of Dresden and Leipzig
Here in Paris the best buildings are those built 150-200 years ago in the "Haussmanian" style, built out of thick blocks of lutenian limestone dug up from underneath the city, absolutely beautiful, and nice to live in, also: they haven't moved in literal centuries, whilst concrete buildings from the 70's are already full of cockroaches and falling apart (talking from experience here). Now I live in a building finished in 1894 with walls that are over a foot thick and for some reason those have a lot less humidity and pest problems. Back then people took pride in making things that would last, not in the car they bought with the money they made doing the work. IMO Haussmanian style buildings are perfect for dense cities, they are not too tall and thus don't deprive you of sunlight, and allow for some plants on the balcony at least. There are also a lot of green areas and parks in Paris which really helps (talking about the old Paris of course).
Self-righteous comparison. Maybe some people prefer to take pride in their car than in a house. Again, I am opposed to injustice above all else, such as the USA and Canada forcing car-centric dependency onto everyone who doesn't want it. Nevertheless, it is still just a matter of subjective opinion what human-made object people want to take pride in building.
@@theultimatereductionist7592 You didn't understand me, I was saying that in my opinion back when those buildings were built people took a lot more pride in the work they did for others and in doing it right rather than in their personal wealth and possessions. In France there used to be guilds of artisans, for masons, bakers, wood workers, etc... And you had to prove your worth before you could be part of the guild which would help your business in hard times and expand your clientele. This was all based on being proud of yourself not for owning stuff but for doing good things. We can see the results today, old tools, old buildings, always beat newer ones in build quality, you can even measure it on older tools and implements the safety factor was as good in consumer products back then as it is in military and professional grade stuff today sometimes higher. Things were made to last and be repaired not thrown away and bought again a few years later, same for buildings.
@@kacperwoch4368 Yes I'm not used to the imperial system of measurement in my mind a foot is bigger than in reality, the outside walls between me and the streets look to be about 60 cm thick, but what you need to see is that those are solid stone, what is your house's wall structure ? Is it stone with Lime mortar in between them ? Because sometimes walls appear thick but it's actually just the insulation, I'm talking about the actual load bearing structure here. Where is this house by the way ? If I ever go to the US I always pictured a nice house either in a desert area like New Mexico or Nevada, or in the lush south like Tenesse Florida Louisiana, somewhere in the Appalachia. I bet you can grow anything there provided you have good soil.
Perhaps an additional factor in bland modernity is the increased scale of corporations and the attendant isolation of the building design from individualistic taste. Personal vanity, local pride and boosterism, esthetic conviction - these probably don't influence building design like they used to.
But "modernism" (way too general a word for the variety of architectural styles included in it due to the vast cultural influences and development over time), is greatly inspired by classical architecture. These are architects that have analysed and studied every aspect of classical architecture, especially Greek, but this is completely ignored by the uneducated eye. Mies Van Der Rohe for example, designed the Seagram skyscraper in New York with great inspiration from classical Greek mathematical proportions, which is the main appeal of Greek architecure. The ornaments on the Parthenon are purely surface-level, depicting Greek historical and mythological scenes because that was the CONTEXT of the building (a temple to venerate the goddess Athena). What is truly impressive about the Parthenon are its mathematical proportions and the building techniques used to create it, for something built thousands of years ago. I agree that there are a lot of (most) modern buildings nowadays that are very ugly to look at and live in, but this does not mean that architects need to stop innovating and start blatantly copying classical architecture. Our lifestyles have completely changed, and we need to respect that context. A Roman temple-style building built in 2023 makes no sense in the center of Madrid, for example. We need to keep innovating to make beautiful buildings that evolve, respect context, environment, urban planning, and most of all, the consumer.
@@elisaroccheggiani6714 Thats the same tired old defense that proponents of modern architecture have always offered up, "You don't like this architecture because you aren't educated enough". Then they try to argue that this ghastly architecture is rooted in ancient Greek buildings like the Parthenon. So now we're supposed to take that all in and figure, "Welp, don't wanna seem stupid so I guess I'll just shut up and let the smart kids have their way". Next thing you know the gorgeous and brilliant 19th century railway terminal has been replaced with some neo-brutalist concrete monstrosity, sitting there in all its marxist, anti-bourgeois splendor. I, for one, would LOVE to see a Roman temple erected in the middle of Madrid! Don't mean it can't have modern steam heat, plumbing, efficient infrastructure, etc. They were building stuff like that here in the USA right up until WWII.
@@geroutathat What would make an area look colonial? What does "look colonial" even mean? Whats barca? What are "Zadid type buildings"? Define your terms please, sir.
As an architecture student I would absolutely love to design ornamented buildings, if it meant I can take time to be intricate and I don’t die because you get paid by project.
I also find it funny we talk about the craftsmanship when many buildings in the past were put up 'on the cheap'. I think of how old Penn Station had plaster columns and not solid marble or granite ones. This isn't to say that they didn't put in work then, but they still had to build with a budget in mind.
In ten minutes you've explained something I never understood before and now I know. Ten minutes well spent, your videos are always time well spent. Thanks Adam!
A church in my town renovated recently. They actually built a pretty kickass Romanesque Revival church building. It really fits well with some of the other buildings in my town which are all white limestone like the church. So I took my camera and loaded it with some expensive film and went out to photograph the new church. I spent like half an hour running around the block trying to find a good vantage point to photograph it, but it just doesn't exist. The building itself is gorgeous, but its surroundings are a car-centric hellscape. There's no angle where you can't see the road or the stop lights. All that architecture wasted on such a lousy location. I went home without snapping a single shot. Not gonna waste good film on the church built next to a stroad. So needless to say, this video was really cathartic for me. Thank you.
I love how every episode of Adam something always somehow ends up back at the car problem or the train problem. It feels almost like a parody. Not to say these problems are real or prevalent just funny how they always end up here.
beauty is definitely a necessity of life and unlike what many people may realise, actually a big draw for tourism and a surplus of people moving in the city. One reason I moved from a fairly boring city that was somewhat car-centric (by the standards of Europe mind) was because of the beauty and the ease of moving around. I still every year take some time to just go places and see what I can find, and every time I find something cool of beautiful or unexpected or just a random place in the city just full of people. That would never really happen where I used to live, but here, there's just beauty everywhere, and I bet if it weren't for that, this would be a much smaller city
Good for you. You are lucky to make a massive decision such as moving based in part on aesthetics. The vast majority of people do not have the luxury to care about how a place looks. In fact, there choices are limited to 1 house/apartment (constrained by location, job, cost) versus homelessness.
@@theultimatereductionist7592 There are a ton of people in North America still buying massive 2000+ sq. ft. McHouses, so clearly not everyone is in dire poverty these days.
It would be fun to hear you talk about (bland) Brazilian architecture away from the tourist areas and Brasilia. Ornamentation is a very rare thing outside rich countries. There are many places in Brazil that look much worse than the Soviet blocs. Newly built housing for the wealthy here is just like the bland modern style of developed countries (though even blander), and they stand out as much better than the usual.
It's not about ornamentation but more about style. You can build great looking buildings without any ornaments that still have a classy, warm feeling. For example the old country side villas in Spain. made of regional stones and plain walls, basically without ornamentation, they look absolutely stunning just because of their nice cozy shapes and warm colors. Why do they look good? Because those buildings don't try to look modern. But as soon as you try to make something look "modern" and there's no super huge budget, you end up with ugly buildings.
Isso é bem comum em São Paulo, mas ontem estava passeando pela cidade e eu vi um condomínio com as laterais em vertical e as cercas da sacada do condomínio eram onduladas e brancas, igual macarrão parafuso. Não era exatamente um estilo clássico como arquitetura de antigamente, mas achei diferente e criativo. Acho que o problema mesmo é tudo ser construído no estilo de arquitetura moderno, que é bem sem graça e não tem criatividade nenhuma, parecem caixas uma em cima da outra. Se fugir ao menos um pouco disso, o resultado fica com muito mais personalidade, igual o prédio que eu vi ontem.
Dude doesn't actually think about his opinions. He takes his opinions from others and then regurgitates it and is inflexible because he treats his received knowledge like it was from his religion. He also like fitting in with the current zeitgeist and feeling like he is a better person than you are he routinely mischaracterizes and demonizes anybody that isnt in lock step with him. He shows a lot of cultish behavior.
My mother was born in 1948 in Frankfurt, Germany. She grew up for about 10 years in a four room apartment, together with her family and three others, so each family (of around 4) occupied a room. They also used curtains to split larger rooms into two to house more people. Despite from the fact that this was very stressfull at times (as families received letters of their deceased fathers, sons etc. due to the war, so there was usually a lot of drama going on which she didn't understand at her age and nobody really explained to her), she also had to walk through the destroyed city and over huge piles of rubble to go to school or go to the public swimming pool. Over the years the situation slowly got better as people were relocated to new houses and the damage in the city was repaired. She still keeps pictures of that time, the damage was really immense.
When I watch videos of random buildings being planned in the Middle East, I’m reminded of the channel. This time, it’s ‘The Mukaab’ in Riyadh which is a huge cube.
There is also another reason, at least where I live. When a developer does end up proposing something that's a little more daring in its design, it's met with a lot more community backlash than these unattractive, but also relatively unoffensive building styles. And in San Francisco, where it's hard to get any project underway, developers choose to go with the design that's not going to get them hung up by even more NIMBY groups protesting the project because of it "destroying the character of the neighborhood" Even when the building it's going to replace is something that maybe had a massive fire in it 7 years ago and has been sitting abandoned and falling apart ever since.
There's an essay by Karel Kosik on architecture and modernism "The city and the poetic". It's in a book called Antediluvian reflexions (Reflexiones antediluvianas, in spanish). I think you can get it in your language. If you haven't read it, you must, it's a beautiful and very philosophical essay just about what you're saying in your video. Cheers!
You should visit Japan, they still have some sense for aesthetic buildings. Some of the highway stations are designed to look like medieval Japanese Edo and they always have decent quality local specialties (food) for take away. Traveling long distances (like Tokyo -> Kyoto) with bus is much cheaper than the bullet train too and the stops are really nice
As someone who’s renovating a historic villa in Italy, I was shocked at how affordable ornamentation is. Take a window, that classical decorative pediment above it is literally a slab of cement that’s cast on site in a mould. Wash and repeat per window. This is how ornamentation has been done in Italy since Roman times. I GUARANTEE it costs less than that silly modern cladding that the put all over buildings now.
The problem is nowadays minimalism is considered art so let's say you want a boring, one color, full of glass, only straight lines building you are paying extra for some easy to mass produce materials just because it's current trend these days and everyone wants to look modern even if it mean you look exactly like everyone else. It's especially easy to see when you go to IKEA, Castorama, OBI and they are charging ridiculous amounts of money for products with easiest and most boring designs. It's not just buildings or home decor but fashion as well. Going into the store it feels like every brand is producing literally the same cloths and just slap different logos on them. No variety whatsoever.
@@StanleyJohnny well minimalism its an art movement, but what is considered minimalism today is something different from the original. Anyway people are already moving out of this trend.
@@StanleyJohnny The minimalism is more expensive than usual style, fact. Because wide glass is expensive, walls without baseboard are MUCH expensive to do, and so on. People are bored with ads and noise everywhere, that's the reason why minimalism is popular.
But when you buy some ornament in hobby market and glue it to your house, it's not ornament, it's just kitsch. I would say that most of south european modern architecture (I mean ordinary people's houses) are really ugly and terribly done. Only people who own amusement parks use those fake antic columns and other fake shits. I have nothing against good art on some building, but it must be real, not some fake from hobby market, that just says that owner doesn't have any taste.
Exactly. And many times a different color can change everything. This video didn't teach me anything. I got ever more questions now 😆
The architecture of tomorrow shouldn't try to imitate old beautiful building styles but try to create new, unique buildings that combine function and aesthetics.
Then they should do that.
True but any would be better than cultural dead building?
Nah
Nah new buildings are puke ugly. We tried now go back
The architecture if yesterday, already imitated the architecture of the yesterday before and so on. It shouldnt plainly copy, it should add upon, like art has always done.
As an architect I can assure it's perfectly possible to build affordable and very nice looking contemporary architecture with modern materials & techniques. There are lots of projects just like that in several countries, especially Europe.
That's just not as common as could be due to the factors Adam pointed out, commoditization of buildings and the damn car centric policies that rule our cities.
But there are a lot of designers, planners and others battling to change that
I hope they win
Could you any examples of such? i only know of hungary trying to revive some older architectural designs currently
I wish we began making gothic architecture again
I love the mix of the old and new.
@@ArkBlanc i did something on a small scale. I fixed a section of a old picture frame. Used the silicone for a mould. It was fun
What also bothers me is this "grey-trend". In my area (Austrian countryside) almost EVERY new house has either grey windowframes, grey roof, grey facades or at least a grey stripe of colour.... It looks so cold and sad... But of course that's also a question of individual taste, apparently some people like the look of it :///
Ich finde auch das sich die Einfamilienhäuser mittlerweile so gut wie garnicht mehr unterscheiden. Sehr schade, obwohl man da ja eig. noch am meisten mitentscheiden kann.
@@luisahydrangea3783 Most of those houses designs are probably from catalogues and built by general contractors "Schlüsselfertig".
No time and money for personalization of even customized architecture.
it's also a big problem in austrian cities in general. i've lived in graz for almost a year, and basically everything outside the centre is incredibly depressing to look at
It's a big problem in poland too, literally every new building is ether white, grey or black or combining those "colours". Those bulidings are usually boring rectangles too.
I think you missed one key point - banks won't lend on properties they don't believe will be viable. Banks are often pushing for more parking, oddly enough. It's hard to fight history and inertia.
No way never expected you on a Adam something vid lmao nice
Usury isn't 'history and inertia'
Debunk this Adam Something 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖
In cahoots with the automobile industry?
I'm living on rent, but hope to someday move to a house of my own, I wouldn't buy house without parking space. Not all cities are big enough to have transit, in most cities you need a car if you ever wanna do anything outside the city. Is not a wise choice to buy a house without a garage, specially considering that buying a house is a long time thing (if bought for housing reasons and not speculation)
Ornaments were mass produced in the past. I live in a part of Nuremberg that was built in the late 1800s to house the workers of the factories and nearly every building has some kind of ornamentation or other decorations. If you look carefully while you walk through the city you will see the same gargoyles, eagles, arches, stone carvings and whatnot over and over again.
They could totally mass-produce gargoyles again. I agree with that meme. A lot of buildings would look a lot better if you just slapped a few gargoyles up there!
Even easier to make them more varied nowadays because of 3d printing and injection molding.
Churn out 3d models for the 3d printer to make molds of, injection mold the clay in, pop it out to dry and fire into ceramic.
@@tombrown407 also we have advanced CNC machining which could make a sculpture in less than few days too
Mass-produced eagle ornament and a mass-produced concrete wall are not really comparable entites, other than sharing a label of being "mass-produced".
my mom lives in an old coal mining town and practically everything is made from these small red bricks, from the large housing for the company higher ups, to the apartment buildings for the miners and their families, to all the company buildings around the mine entrance. It's quite nice looking, especially these days where the small technical university and the local old monastery are the main attractions. I imagine when the mine was still going it might have been a bit more grim though, at least where the miners lived. Granted the positively ancient city of Cleve, as in Henry VIII fame, nearby also has a lot of these red brick buildings, entire sections outside the old city are made from these red bricks. It feels almost like the slate tiled roofs of the Rhineland. Took a train along the Rhine coming from Frankfurt and it's wild, everything from the church buildings down is the same dark color roofs from slate tiling. Then again, the sheer amount of sandstone in the buildings of the black forest is also surprising, I guess it really shows just how dominant local building resources used to be. Reckon the Lower Rhine must have had a lot of red clay and effectively no stone, which considering how much used to just be the rhine delta marshlands or halfway in the actual ocean already.
Another, smaller factor is also just plain survivorship bias. The past had its own bland, ugly, decrepit buildings just like today. It's just that those were usually first in line to be torn down and replaced, while the well-built, good-looking ones were more likely to be kept around and continually renovated.
That's a good argument that I use for movies and TV shows, we're all ready to forget the garbage so the past looks that much better
THIS! People in 100 years will be talking about the millionare villas of today which are marble white, have glass and pools and compare it to whatever soulless architecture they'll have.
@@ManiacX1999 also applies to music , there always was Bad music , but the Bad music of the past was forgotten , so in turn we only remember the good ones
survivor bias like what? which style didnt survive? sure some styles are more populair but overal all styles are seen as beautiful before modernism times.
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Ok but in the case of music, old people seemingly openly choose to pretend that old music is better. Especially since nearly 100% of that music still exists. You don't have to remember, just listen to bad old music. But with architecture, everyone who would remember is dead
In my opinion, the bigger problem, at least in the U.S., is when new buildings are built, especially skyscrapers, they're so expensive that the commercial tenants can only be luxury stores or big chains. That's why you don't have "neighborhoody" stores in new development areas, which adds to the sterilized feel. It hits differently when you have a restaurant, niche coffee shop, a pub, and/or a little convenience store vs. new buildings that just have a Starbucks and a Coach store.
The problem with these bloated skyscrapers is how they solve the challenge of meeting the towering stacked floors with the streetlevel. So many modern towers consistently fail to do this. The towers built before the Second World War, accomplished this in a deft, seamless manner. Towers today contain cold, soulless, lobbies, and if they make concessions to retail, it's usually a bank or Starbucks, or an overpriced eatery. This explains one of the reasons NYC has lost so much of its vibrant and colorful street life. Previously one had family owned businesses, with their own respective characteristics. Not corporate chains. The hulking new towers have made it impossible for small businesses to exist in these monsters.
Shopping malls' landlords in my country may also prefer bigger chains as their tenants as they're seen as a safer bet in attracting customers to their shopping malls
Most places that are soulless shops and Starbucks are usually downtowns and downtowns have in general become so expensive that no one could afford it even if the building was cheaper, the area itself (downtown) will always be expensive. It’s always about location
@@NicEeEe843 I think it really depends. I've seen a lot of cities that "revitalize" an area, but it's too much development too fast and ends up driving out or straight up destroying the old tenants and buildings, and replaces it with amenities for the 1%. Hudson Yards is an extreme example of this, but it happens all over, including in old residential neighborhoods.
I'm definitely not against building new things, BUT I am against every new construction being for the 1% instead of the middle class - and the commercial properties follow suit.
@@darkwoodmovies Hudson Yards is built over existing rail yards, not neighborhoods. Hence the name. What existed in the other adjoining blocks, was a mixture of walk ups, warehouses, and auto repair shops. The vestiges of which can still be seen.
"We don't mass produce classical ornaments." We used to. Developers would select them from pattern books and stick them on. Often you can see the change from one speculative builder on a plot of land to another on the next by the subtle differences in their choice of ornamentation.
exactly. that's also why artisans used to be a vital part of construction and design. tile-making in the traditional way used to be big in most cultures that use tiles both for function and art.
And in theory you can make even more of them today with modern tools.
I once briefly visited a workshop in London around 1985? where they still made plaster ceiling roses architraves and other pieces using the traditional methods, that were used to decorate and refurbish (rich) house interiors
we are less human and we no longer need aesthetics to nourish our poetic soul, because most people are lucky to have a soul.
The funny thing is, even those plain blocky buildings could look pretty nice if they just added window boxes and some planters on the terraces. It'd make the building a lot more pleasant to live in, too.
For real, many old building aren't even packed with ornaments. It's just small details that aren't even expensive and can instantly enhance the appearence of the facade. Tho I think architecture became better in the last years compared to like mid-2010s and before with the subtle revival of neo-classicism and neo-post-modernism.
@@Lordpichugraf Aye, I know that I've seen a subtle revival of some of the neo-classical styles in some of the very new buildings in Atlanta. Very refreshing to see, I must say!
Proportions are more important than decor though! Heavy decor on boxy houses would often make it worse. At least without radical redesign of at least window proportions and removal of those enormous concrete+aluminium balconies that has been cluttering facades on appartment buildings since WW2.
@@herrbonk3635 oh you absolutely can do much about it. Windows can be changed for ones with more panes and better framing. Facade can be broken up with colour to form an illusion of multiple buildings built side by side. Balconies often only need a better railing to look stunning.
And cornices. Those cheapskate architects cheap out on a good water-diverting feature and buildings have water stains on their facade in no time.
Debunk this Adam Something 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖
I wouldn't underestimate the first point: Fashion
In Germany, before WW1 buildings usually were decorated with stucco. Looks nice nowadays, but back then it was actually quite cheap - as it was mass-produced in factories.
After WW2, stucco was out of fashion. It was even common to remove the stucco (in German: "Entstucken"). Nobody would do this today!
So if we'd have stucco as a new fashion trend and would start to mass-produce it again, I think we could do it. But we don't want to.
I notice this happened in Buenos Aires as well, many buildings there is up but has lost their adornments.
But I once heard it was because of maintenance costs, cleaning and removing pigeons away.
Yup, especially in Eastern Germany, because ornamented buildings 'weren't very socialist' and didn't fit the SED's vision
We don't want to yet. Price and availability in the beginning of a new trend is always a problem, only when there is enough up front demand or an investor ready to take a big risk is there a chance for the rise of a trend.
In the Western and South Western parts of the US stucco is quite common here. Mainly in states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico use it quite often although its use is quite limited to single family detached homes. It went through a massive use in the 1980s and is still somewhat popular although much less so than during the 1980s. For an example, the city of Simi Valley has many of these homes with stucco, the film Poltergeist was shot there and if you watch the scenes of the exterior of the home or the surrounding neighborhood you will see a lot of these stucco homes. Sometimes it is used on commercial properties as well but not as much compared to houses.
@@gabrielgarcia7554 and in Utah, adding to this, stucco was fashionable to use on houses at least up into the early 2000s
I would like to point out how important it is for a place to feel alive. This can be achieved in many ways and one of the more noticeable is having a building create shadows. Shadows change the way a building looks over the course of the day and add a natural element.
true. Each tree would add 30,000 dollars of worth to homes in Dallas during the 1980's. They provide shade and light management.
Ultimately supporting gables and balconies and more nooks all costs money. The homes in certain markets due to supply and demand cost so much more than they should be worth. This leaves only the rich to afford better architecture or cities and their big wallets.
I once met a man whose father used to fabricate door knobs to Pashas in Egypt during the 30’s n 40s, he said his father would brake the mould in front of the customer after delivery so that he knows his door knobs are absolutely unique!!
Thats classy posh, I like that!
This is something way underappreciated in modern society. Humans _need_ beautiful spaces, just like they need nature.
Modern buildings are fucking depressing, especially flashy stores and soviet panel buildings.
You are overestimating our need for "beautiful spaces"
Yeah, we need "stuff" to look at. Colours, shapes... things that are stimulating to our eyes. The monotony of modern urban architecture I believe has genuinely hindered my sense of direction and ability to locate landmarks while driving. It all kinda blends together into one blob, with the trees being the most visually interesting and least "aggressive" shapes/colours.
Exactly
@@arjyabirhazra1135 Then why people spending their money to travel to beautiful places?
The german-french broadcaster "arte" made a video about the GDR standardized buildings. The author explains how she lived as a kid in the after-war years in Berlin's center, in a building "with ornaments and 3 meter ceilings, which was beautiful but moldy, extremely cold, hard to heat, the toilet was in the courtyard". Therefore, you can absolutely understand her joy when her family was allowed to move to one of those housing projects in Berlin-Marzahn: Fresh, new buildings, modern and exciting. Large rooms, new floors, central heating, fitted kitchen, hot water, bathroom with toilets. Old buildings were simply associated with many negative things. New buildings with much nicer things. Today it's just the other way around again.
comment s'appelle le reportage ?
Could you please share a link?
Can you please share the link?
Love love love 3m ceilings! When I was refurbishing my 1930s apartment my architect suggested lowering my ceilings artificially. He works mainly on newbuild and was getting agoraphobia from all that headroom in my flat!
I stared at him in disbelief, and of course ignored his advice.
But JULIANOS, those older ornate buildings in Berlin you mentioned, were built in the 19th century, a time when flush toilets, central heat, and gas were still fairly new innovations. MANY people didn't have those things, sometimes even the rich living in chateaus.
In New York, where I live, City Hall started mandating those features in the early 1900s. During the 1920s and 30s, our new buildings had the best of both worlds. Modern mechanical convieniences, AND old world architecture. I'm talking; high ceilings, thick sound proof plaster walls, heavy doors, heavy metal, ornamentation, and windows in kitch and all bathrooms!
The crapificaiton of NY apartment construction got going right after WWII. Except for a few rare notable exceptions, the new buildings were little different than your commie blocks. Except they had gloriously fancy lobbies not unlike hotels on the Las Vegas strip. As soon as all the units were sold, everything started falling apart. Within 5 years they were looking shabby.
I think soul crushing modern architectures simply a case of, "Hey, lets all us rich developers agree to never give a sucker an even break".
Art Deco was an era that is severely underappreciated. It's the Gothic architecture of the 20th century and didn't last anywhere near as long as it deserved.
As an architect, I really appreciate this breakdown. I get asked this all the time, and every time I say that architects would love to design better, but the our hands are tied by budgets or in the case of developers, profit margins. Beauty is a public good, but in a society that has no concept of collective ownership, nobody wants to foot the bill for something that benefits everyone.
Like Adam? Try Some More News, Creaky Blinder, and Hbomberguy
w.. what..? but but that sounds… COMMUNIST!1!!1 AAAAH COMMIE AAAAAAAA
god I hate USA
yes, creating a building that is :
-beautiful
-durable
-practical
-confortable
come at a bigger cost
building boxes of cheap materials that are ugly, deriorate quickly, are energy inefficient, etc come at a lower upfront cost, which make a better investment for short term speculation (altrough it come at a larger cost for society on the long run : ecological damage, etc)
But we can't blame either modernism or architects, it's an investors problem.
Plenty of well made and beautiful modern architecture, as Adam showed.
Our city keeps wasting money on giant, ugly, ridiculously impractical buildings that no one wanted or asked for. Apparently they are architectural triumphs. I remember people got excited when the local paper announced on April fools that the museum project had gone bankrupt and the land was bought by a water park. Instead we got the 300 million dollar pile of shit on the river.
Beauty is also subjective. This is a lot more important when you're an architect.
I spent two years as an architect in a studio that designed shopping malls during the boom years just before the 2008 crisis. Our clients only cared about cost, cost, and speed. They gave almost zero shit about what we do with the facade as long as we keep everything super cheap and extra fast. We were actually free to experiment with the outer looks of the building, but realistically the time constraints and the budget didn't allow for much.
I think cost cutting to make money is the number 1,2 and 3 reason. And we the people put in power representatives that allow that to happen.
do you think the hypercapitalist developers of the past were any different? No, the only difference is that modernism destroyed any aesthetic standards and made it acceptable to build ugly.
5:52 house is always commodity or consumer products (thing to be consumed) the problem is now people use house as securities (thing to keep value or even increase value)
@@amirattamimi8765 people have been doing that since at least 200 years. Back then they would make those buildings beautiful because the value would appreciate more. Nowadays modernism has destroyed any standards of beauty, allowing unrelenting uglyness everywhere.
@@amirattamimi8765 If governments were to treat housing like a human right, then they could build housing and distribute it at cost rather than for profit. That would decommodify the housing market rather quickly, since no private developer would be able to compete.
In the UK we like to cover our new cubes in flammable panels to make sure it self destructs properly.
And that's why I have to write an exam about heating, insulation, plumbing, pipes, wires and fire hazards.
Ah, isn't that one of those mythical Brexit advantages - Getting rid of those pesky EU fire regulations?
I never saw the point of sprinkler systems after all humans are 90% water and readily available.
@@jeroenstrompf5064 That was there whilst we were inside
Also people stopped building things of lasting value, we don’t think about future generations, or about leaving a legacy. This was a major motivator of making buildings beautiful; to leave your mark and be remembered.
It's a shame stripped classicism isn't more common.
Cheap enough, beautiful enough, links past and future, and reminds you're a part of something greater.
I too love the look of it, but a lot of people find it intimidating
@@AllonKirtchik Another advantage.
Here in Berlin, Germany this style has somewhat of a small revival.
Also, if mass produced, like before 1914, ornaments are very cheap.
I think about this a lot. Elements like the gridded windows are also desirable for potential residents / buyers. I suppose it's *still* not worth the additional cost or we'd be seeing more of this style.
I don’t think it’s very pretty or reminiscent of the ancient past. It’s reminiscent of jails and courthouse and old government offices.
Some are beautiful and homely. But definelty not the norm
There are towns like Alexandria and Savannah that have pretty strict building codes that mandate new buildings fit into the style of the neighborhood they're built in. It makes those areas very expensive but I can attest to the fact that you have to look somewhat closely to separate the old and new buildings from each other. You certainly can but the giveaways are the lack of wear on the brick vs. the complete lack of brick.
I honestly hate such mandates. There's a city in my home state where damn near everything looks like a fancy bank. I went to the courthouse to pay a traffic fine and it was *not* the type I was type I was looking for. A gym should not look a municipal building.
But seriously, though, what you describe basically just replicates the modern cookie-cutter property development style, but at a higher cost. Everything should not look the same.
We have one in Philippines. In Vigan, Ilocos Sur. It is a World Heritage Site and every new building should adhere to the designs that was done during Spanish colonial period. There is one in the northern most islands of the Philippines as well called Batanes where you can't buy property in that area unless you are a descendant or a local. Even naturalized citizens can't buy property unless he or she has an Ivatan (native of Batanes) for a husbnad/wife/relative. That doesn't even make it easier though. Thats for them to preserve the natural landscape.
@@InfernosReaper I mean, I'm divided, on one hand I completely agree with you, on the other, having codes that preserve the historic neighbourhoods atmosphere and look is also important. So I guess it also comes down to urban planning and proper zoning codes - a gym shouldn't look like a town hall but, think of this more historical neighbourhoods, it probably shouldn't be in the same space to begin with, and that well structured city would naturally guide you to the more administrative section of the city only by the look and atmosphere of each section or block.
Fitting in doesn't necessarily mean imitating or looking the same.
I've seen some pretty good examples of modern architecture harmoniously fitting into it's suroundings by repeating elements, colours or volumes of surrounding buildings while still being distinct and unique.
@@gewreid5946 It definitely should not, but *in practice* that's what usually ends up happening.
Sometimes ordinances or HOA restrictions ends up being some strict that only a few companies will even bother and they tend to end up doing a lot of the same manner of work.
I don’t even think a lack of ornamentation is the biggest reason we find these buildings ugly, but the lack of beautiful “composition” and color. There are lots of gorgeous old buildings that aren’t highly ornamented.
As he said, a lot of buildings were/are built as a commodity and if you want to sell something you always try to make it attractive to the largest number of people possible. That means you're obviously going to end up with bland looking buildings.
@@thevinisothe problem is that we still build ugly buildings, not that we did during the rapid growth.
Ans different places - different stages of development. Building something ugly in germany is dumb, building something ugly in India - necessity (hopefully following the freaking building code, god damn those corrupt governments that don't!!!)
@@liliyaversus4051 Most buildings are still being built as a commodity, this problem isn't going anywhere.
Yes, Bauhaus buildings are often very plain yet also aesthetic, including a middle class subdivision built in Weimar. In the US developers generally care nothing about style or aesthetics, at least in areas with very low vacancy rates. They can sell or rent anything.
It’s so weird that a building keeps being called “building” even after being built.
Architect here, this video is pretty spot on. One thing I would add is buildings used to take much longer to construct and were more or less hand made by an army of skilled stone masons living on crumbs so adding ornament here and there wasn’t as huge a scheduling or budgetary ask
Skilled masons lived on crumbs? Is this after the 500 years of guild power? There's literally an elitist organization today called the "masons".
We also have 8 billion people living on Earth nowadays as opposed to 2 billion just a century ago. Cheaper, easier to construct buildings were an obvious choice for a rapidly growing population.
Construction engineering consultant here. You could just 3D print moulds and cast ornate plaster or concrete ornamentation. It wouldn't need to be expensive. In fact it would probably be a lot cheaper than some of the building materials we do see like titanium cladding and massive sheets of plate glass. There is even modern ornamentation in the form of laser cut steel plates that shade windows. They used to do this in the first half of the 20th century (using carved wood to make moulds rather than 3D printing) before modernism became the only acceptable style. Remember ceiling roses? I think it's a lot more related to a pervasive idea in architecture and interior design that minimalist modernism is timeless and anything else will age poorly. I disagree with this, as looking at a 70's minimalist building the textured concrete render and "popcorn ceilings" are horribly out of style.
@@IOUaUsername modernism is not necessarly devoid of details and ornaments, especially nowadays there is a lot of buildings that use some modern and stylized version of mashrabiya made of metal, French architect Jean Novel used a lot of those.
But using ornaments for the sake of ornaments don't necessarly make good buildings : there was a trend that was "neo modernism" that in architecture was supposed to be the revival of classical architecture into modern age, this gave us horrendeous things like architecture in Montpellier that is quite ugly.
Sometime minimalism is great.
Some of the Mies Van Der Rohe architecture is awesome, and it's as mitimalistic as it could get.
Ultimately it's a matter of context, what will make an architecture beautiful depend on a lot of parameters (and ultimately of the taste of the public, for some people anything that is somewhat modern is necessarly bad and the only good style is classical or medieval architecture (i disagree with them, a lof of the modernist architecture look amazing))
@@IOUaUsername You will still be paying man hours to do the plaster which you otherwise wouldnt have to. Besides plaster decorations are a skilled trade even when using moulds and there aren't that many specialized workers left around to do it. On top of that cheaply made plaster ornaments look obvious and horrible, they make buildings look like cheap copies of things that were originaly carved out of stone. The final nail in the coffin is maintenance.
Not only are they not building more, people have to fight like hell to keep what we still have. In my city, we have Union Terminal, a beautiful old art deco building that used to be a train station. It now houses a museum and a few other things, and citizens in the city have had to fight numerous times to prevent it being demolished.
I was worried we weren’t going to insult car-centric city planning here. Thanks Adam!
❄️
@@LordHoward GOTTEM!!! OWNED!!! SNOWFLAKE LIB DETECTED BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP
@@vanivari359 Actually, there is no parking lot near the train station façade, but some square for walking =) So cars are garbage, that's true.
@@vanivari359 Finally another person who says it like it is. I’ve been calling out these “urbanist” channels for this for a while now. Great to see another person sees the bullsh*t too!
Well I mean insulting car-centric infrastructure is true and good and based, so it should be done very time you see and opportunity.
i would 100% go to a job interview in 17th century clothing, that shit was drippy as hell
Excellent topic. On my travel to Buenos Aires, which is a city in recession but full of elegant architecture, I was entranced by the beauty of ornamental engravings, high ceilings, balconies, stained glass ceilings, almost in every historical building. And people decorate their walls with photos and arts, and graffiti artists make neighbourhoods full of character (even if most of these are protest messages). Upon returning to my prosperous modern home town in Asia, I was strangely feeling depressed -- it was the loss of beautiful scenes, and having only the ugly soulless boxes fill the streets, the exact result of the evil of rapid construction, ignorance of the need for aesthetics, and car-centric urban sprawl.
I'm not sure wich Asian country you are from but do you not think that it might be because of population growth and a housing shortage?
BA is excellent, it pulls at your heart like no other city.
Buenos Aires has nothing on Kiev Ukraine.
@@pietrojenkins6901 I'm from BA and got recommended a lot to visit Kiev as well for this reason. That was years before the war though, but I'm still planning to visit in the future.
I'm from Buenos Aires, and i really love these old buildings! They are plain beatiful, but sadly we are losing them too! there are a lot of them usually in downtown, but as soon as you get of them you start to encounter a lot of boxes here too :(
The important thing to realize about architectural history is that while nice buildings were preserved out of love, there were also a lot of crap buildings which were made on the super cheap back in the day as tennements, warehouses, low end shops by people like Scrooge which lived their lives, rotted and were destroyed without comment beyond "glad that eyesore's gone".
The thing is that even areas that were considered slums back in the day, after some renovation actually look much better than many newer developments. Even some minimal ornamentation and well chosen proportions can go a really long way.
Very few buildings from our era will be preserved because very few are worth preserving in contrast to those from past eras. There are whole neighborhoods with building built around same time 100, 150 sometimes even 200 years ago that are still around. I doubt preserving our current "bang for the buck" architecture will have same appeal as preserving beautiful 150 years old house.
No, nice buildings were not preserved out of love. The concept of heritage is relatively new (19h-20th centuries). You're just trying to cope with the fact that the modern world is downright ugly as hell by thinking that we were always bad esthetically blind builders. We weren't. Beauty was the norm, just look at all the small villages in France or Italy that are still stunning. No big architect at play there, just centuries of craftsmanship. Heck, even the entire city of Paris was built in a few decades, there was no "natural selection" going on here. Beauty was produced on a mass scale. Every single city hall, public library, school was stunning (or at least weren't burning your eyeballs) prior to WW2. Now, 99% of public projects are absolutely horrendous.
@@_blank-_
I think your biased thinking is showing a little too strongly here. There were absolutely lower-quality, uglier buildings that weren't as readily preserved, and heritage has always been a concept regardless of perhaps not being as strong in the past.
I think it's also worth pointing out that nowadays the world's population is 8 billion people while just a century ago it barely had 2 billion. That's a whole lot more buildings standing up today compared to the handful of beautiful 100+ year old buildings we decided to keep around. I can't even imagine the amount of money we'd have spent to build and mantain all those new buldings if they were as fancy and decorated as the cathedrals/town halls/museums/train stations/whatever of the past.
As a landscape photographer I can say, that's why I never photograph outside the historical city center and always shoot the same 10-15 landmarks. People come from other countries to see beautiful architecture, but no one will ever do that for another 5-over-1 or any kind of block house...
OK, American here with a question. Why do they call those buildings "5-over-1's"? All the ones I've seen have 5 stories total so shouldn't they be called 4 over 1's?
@@RaptorFromWeegee, well, it's because 5 is the maximum permissible amount of floors over 1 podium, not the actual number.
@@bshthrasher Whats the podium? Is that the same thing as a foundation?
@@RaptorFromWeegee, no, foundation is below the building, podium is the fire-resistive ground floor, where shops and stuff like that is located, all the living floors above it are combustible.
Darn, you're missing out artistically.
Ornaments don't have to be made individually, they have never been so cheap to make since stone can be replicated beautifully in moulds out of cheaper materials. Openwork metal is super fast and easy to do too. Stained glass can even be done with vinyl stickers. They can't hide behind the cost excuse. They just don't care.
I agree they make a lot of excuses. Cheap synthetic materials can be worse though. I see buildings that attempt a classical style, but end up looking much worse than modern buildings because they look like plastic crap. Like that fake wood vinyl siding, looks terrible from miles away.
Absolutely correct, but I think I need to add a fifth reason to the list, every bit as important one - you see, "beautiful" buildings built in e.g. 19th century were actually very simple. It was a brick box with nice decor outside, some wooden slabs between floors, a nice stair (I especially love wrought iron ones!) and a roof. They had no plumbing, no electrical installation, no elevators, and even when they started to get all those things in the early 20th century, it was all very simple by modern standards.
These days, for example when a modern office building is being built, engineering systems like plumbing, fire suppression, electrical, comms, HVAC etc. can easily cost 30% or 40% of total cost to build a building.
Thank you for your comment. People don’t like to do math or look at how things are built in reality - they want to whine and blame society for how horrible things are.
I wanted to point out something along these lines exactly. In The Netherlands, the overall quality of newly constructed homes is much higher than it used to be. Incredible insulation, all electric, solar panels, etc.
That is certainly true, but that doesn't change the fact that you could still build new buildings in a more pleasant looking way.
"actually"
@@martijnlafeber i mean most building hete are still build by brick they could easly make something more beautiful
Denver Colorado revived its main train hall a few years ago, but unlike Prague, they tore up a bunch of road and parking lot surface and turned it into pedestrian-friendly space. The city even paid for most of the project directly with sales of the land parcels on site. As far as I know, that was a modernization project done right!
Wow. Thank you for the post. The restoration is done beautifuly!
Colorado has a completely unique populace all its own. In 2016 it voted 70% for Bernie in an OPEN Primary yet also still believes in the 2nd amendment, hunting, and the rights of small business owners to refuse compelled artistic expression on religious grounds. It's the ultimate "progressive INDEPENDENT" voting base
@@iller3 Bernie is pro-2nd
Just moved to Colorado recently and I'm enjoying it.
@@iller3 most of the people supporting those things are the conservative majority in rural areas.
Another thing I've heard from planners and architects is that the five-over-one is so popular because it's usually one of the easiest things to get approved by sometimes draconian municipal zoning boards. It's blandness is also inoffensiveness, and similar designs being approved by prior councils or other nearby councils makes current councils more willing to approve the project.
Those at the top know what they approve. They just use printed money. The public has no idea on which levels they influence our society. Ugly architecture affects the mind and spirit of man. It demoralizes and regresses our way of thinking to become more materialized.
@@YouSuprised Nah it's literally just because it's cheap and simple lol
i would assert that they download their designs from free gif images.
What bothers me most about the ugliness of modern buildings is that it's not even that hard to make prettier buildings. I play Minecraft now and then and there are professional Minecrafters who make vids on how to make pretty buildings with very simple rules like:
- don't build a building in the shape of a box,
- makes sure the facade isn't flat and
- avoid large homogenous surfaces.
And then I look at modern buildings and they all make these basic mistakes. I don't get how professional architects can all be so incompetent.
I think they just don't care about anything and just want quick money.
Can't believe Adam brought it back to cars. This guy is a legend.
I saw that one coming but the bonus point is that he somehow managed to bring trains into this. Incredible
Everything bad in this world is the cars fault.
And we all know how to solve this! Pods!
the word would be "predictable"
@@wraldpyk6698 you mean American suburbs
The advice my dad gave me (and which he and I follow) is to paint the interior of your house with some neutral color like beige or off-white, so as to make it easier to sell. As Adam points out a lot of these decisions are driven by the need to sell these things to the widest selection of buyers, so they are boring by design. Interesting choices may mean a lot to 10% of people but you need to sell to 90%
Yes, my Dad was a self employed decorator and he detested magnolia with a passion because it was the colour everyone asked for. He refused to use it anywhere in our home! Most people wanted that colour because it would be easy to sell the house, even if they weren’t planning on selling any time soon.
commodification is everywhere
This. It's the same reason why pop music is bland. It appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's not designed to be original, but to be inoffensive.
@@AlexWohlbruck The price of progress I'm afraid.
A house should be a home for you, not for an imaginary potential buyer.
So they built a lidl right next to my parents house in Dublin, during the pandemic, construction finished up at the end of 2020. Its actually a really cool building, its got solar panels and a green roof, minimal carparking space around it, but it is elevated for parking directly underneath the building. The main structural beams of the of building are glulam timber, which are openly shown and are actually quite beautiful. Its almost got a postmodern cathedral style vibe to it.
There's an Aldi built in Cavan (out in the country side in Ireland) that I did a shop just before the pandemic, that was recently built (within the last 5 years) that had a massive tilted 'green' roof, they basically planted a meadow on it. While it had just been planted so everything was only starting to take, I love this integration of environment, of the living into modern architecture, I think this is definitely a solution to this blandness that we're seeing in modern construction, along with more public transportation and the removal of cars in urban environments.
@@aturchomicz821 sure do help.
We aren't in the immediate post-war anymore, we don't need cheap, quick housing. I'm betting long term, a nice ornate building is worth more to the public than some minimalist cube. Its time we moved on from minimalism and created a new trend, an in-between compromise where balance ornateness with price. Also when they build housing in a city, especially in older neighborhoods, when they do the bland cubes, it just looks wrong.
Hey Adam, i'm Max from Germany and i studied geography until half a year ago. I was not really sure what direction i wanted to go after my degree besides contributing to something i deem sustainable. You and your Videos about City planning and urban transport Systems really fascinated me and influenced me to go that direction. I have completed a 3 months internship now and beginning my masters soon in that general direction. I just wanted to let you know and give you a little credit. Wish you the best, man! And keep up the good work:)
Oh that's cool to hear, I'm also studying geography for all its sustainability aspects and it's just such an interesting course!!
Hi Max, bin gerade in einer ähnlichen Situation, Geographieabschluss bald hinter mir und suche ein Praktikum in die Richtung. Was war das für ein praktikum und was für einen Master planst du zu machen??
@@maltsday ich habe in einem Kommunalplanungsbüro das Praktikum gemacht, das schwerpunktmäßig Bebauungspläne anfertigt. Da hab ich CAD gelernt, sowie die baurechtlichen Grundlagen und Prozesse der Bauleitplanung, also das grobe Handwerkszeug für alle möglichen planerischen Richtungen.
Der Master den ich mir ausgesucht habe ist in Erlangen "Kulturgeographie", der die Spezialisierung "Stadtforschung und Regionalentwicklung" anbietet. Wie er tatsächlich ist kann ich aber natürlich noch nicht sagen.
Debunk this Adam Something 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖
@@maxklein4272 im wid vielen Bachelor Semster bist du derzeitig und wie lange ging dein Praktikum?
Your examples of ugly modernist buildings are not remotely the worst ones. I've seen so many that just lack any character at all. It's not that hard to add a few details to make the building feel a bit more pleasant, and fortunately, that's something that seems to be happening more, recently. New buildings in old Dutch city centers used to stand out like a sore thumb, but in recent decades, they've increasingly been trying to build in styles that are still somewhat compatible with classic architecture, just less extravagant. I think that's a good balance to aim for.
This video is convoluted. Lost a bit of respect for him. Hopefully he makes a response video.
@@C0deH0wler I think it's because he spent too much energy trying to show he dislikes conspiracy theories. As some commenters have pointed out, they have elements that are true, so why not include them along with the others on the list?
@@simonestreeter1518 What elements are true?
@@simonestreeter1518 Dude, I’m pretty sure that’s a bot
Yeah, the "modern" builds that he showed as examples actually looked good, but both here in Portugal or in my home country (Brazil) there are tons and tons of super-ugly buildings. If they looked like the examples the author of the video gave us, these cities would be beautiful af
The horrifying thing about that armored car masquerading as an SUV at the end is that they're showing it off outside the Segerstrom center. Which is actually a quite beautiful theater in a modern architectural style. That is hidden inside of a gigantic complex of office buildings.
I've been to it many times and it is quite a lovely building. But sadly most people don't even realize it's there :(
That rezvani belongs to Mars
if i saw that armored car pulling up in any public space i would assume it was a police response to a violent crime and wonder where's the danger
@@LckeStudios no, it would likely be because someone said "hey, can we have better... " * bang - body drops to floor *
Just looked it up, looks quite nice, but that might also have to do with the fact that it is designed for arts.
@@LckeStudios My brother in christ you can litterally buy a MRAP off the us army.
I agree with your conclusions. What depresses me is that I don’t see the factors changing any time soon, and I don’t have any faith we’ll see beautiful architecture become normal again any time soon. Tastes change and vary through time and region, but we all see the beauty in a Japanese pagoda, a Byzantine bazaar, and a Greek column even if we have our own preferences. What’s different today is that we aren’t making the modern equivalent. We’re devoid of any architectural opinion or taste at all. It’s all a soulless profit machine where so much property is developed by absent investors who couldn’t care less what is made on the land they will sell and forget about a year down the line, so long as it turns a profit. Add to that incompetent local authorities who are run rings around by corporations with higher-paid, smarter employees, and you get the bland civil engineering of the 21st Century. That was a rant, so apologies if it’s incoherent!
I have basically always lived in a commie block, and while they looked like actual depressing shit prior to the 2000's my city started to renovate the outside of them away from grey to instead colorful facades that give the eyes something to look at. And I have to say it worked. They're still a bit boring looking but they're now closer to colorful big blocks pieces than just a featureless beton cubes.
For the areas where a lot of them are in close proximity to each other they've also usually color coded them so you can just tell people what color to look for when you're expecting visitors that might still be allergic to just using google maps.
To be fair, Google maps isn't 100% reliable, even today. It's even worse for apartment complexes, since it often doesn't map out individual buildings.
@@InfernosReaper Maybe? At least where I live the house numbers are always correct on the apartment complexes I had to go to, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse in other cities.
@@RAHelllord It is and worse, in the US, some apartment complexes have multiple buildings that share *one address* with each building having a number or letter to distinguish them from each other... and they located on the premise is *no logical order*
Suffice to say, pizza delivery and on-site warranty repair work *both* sucked sometimes.
Are you from Bucharest by any chance? I'm from here and yeah it's mostly as you said, good thing the city hall decided to renovate these matchboxes! But a lot of them have already started to lose colour and they've started to get very dirty. In 5 years or so they'll look the same as they were before the renovation, all a medium shade of grey. This is mostly because they used cheap colour paint that degraded a lot from the sun's UV rays and bad decorative plaster that has a very rough texture that traps dust. Also, there's no cleaning program in place and I bet there won't be any in the next 10 years. The idea was good but the execution was pretty bad. Romania at its finest. 7 years after renovation, my neighbouring block already looks dirty and almost disgusting in some places.
You story reminds me of Poland. I lived for a year in Gdańsk, in the most commieblock neighbourhood you can imagine: Zaspa (look it up on Googlemaps satellite view, its planned hexagonal distribution is really interesting).
The good thing is, not only the humongous blocks had been renovated and repainted, but also the council had organised a big-scale mural contest in which artists from all over the world had painted whole 10-story-tall facades in each building with original and colourful murals. Hundreds of m² in each block.
As a result, what could have been a depressing urban hellscape, was a beautiful artistic open-air exhibition instead.
I loved living there.
The car aspect really resonates with me. I don’t have a car and live in one of those beautiful city cores. For a long time, whenever I visited friends who live in suburbs, I was dumbfounded at the lack of any kind of beauty. I couldn’t understand how people could stand living surrounded by so much ugliness, and I felt bad for my friends, not understanding how they could possibly be content. Then I got a ride in someone’s car and realized what the issue was: I had been biking to all these places. I had been experiencing the audiovisual cacophony of the freeways, the endless cookie-cutter neighborhoods and the artless big box stores at a human scale and pace that they were never supposed to be experienced at. My friends, in their cars, had no idea what a wasteland they lived in, because all they ever saw was a short glimpse in between their cozy homes and the manicured insides of the big box stores.
😭😭
Also made me realise why all those teen movies had American kids always hanging out at the mall. *there is literally nowhere else to hang out*. No parks, no social clubs, no communal urban areas. Just endless rows of houses and malls.
@@NoJusticeMTG The funny thing is that they get thrown out of modern malls (at leat sometimes) because, you know, they aren't doing what those things are build for: To take your money.
This, so much.
A car is currently for many people the best (cheapest/fastest/most comfortable/clean/on time/healthy) option getting things and people moved.
Were I live are a lot of trees so I don't think it is too ugly.
While going for a walk I also think that thse trains driving in the area every 5 to 10 minutes are quite loud ... even compared to the cars ( which are only allowed 30 km/h)
So here's a thought experiment that comes up for me whenever the conversation turns to ornamentation on buildings. There *used* to be manufacturers who would churn out standardized ornamental pieces for buildings just like you described, so presumably if we return to pedestrian-focused, ornamented urban designs, there would be a need for something like that in the future. But what if we wanted ornamentation that *wasn't* neo-classical? Like, sure: the basic elements of ornamental designs -- columns, frames around windows, decorative stuff segmenting the vertical space, elements around the roof, etc. -- would still be there, but what if they weren't based on greco-roman designs?
For example, columns: we still use basically three types of column design -- Doric, Ionian, Corinthian (or some mix of them) -- for our neoclassical columns. What if the tops of columns weren't either a scroll or a leaf shape? What would be a design that reflected more future-looking æsthetics? Or also: what sort of decorative elements could you make if you were using CNC and 3D printing to design them, that couldn't be made with molds or by hand? What kind of decorations would be possible?
I'd very much like to see the return of the basic principles of classical architecture, but I'd also like to see a more modern take on the decorative elements that make it so interesting. Something that could retain all the detail and variety and irregularity of classical buildings, without feeling like being overwhelmed by the past.
In my opinion, modern interpretations of classical architecture fail to capture its elegance and presence. Modern design has consistently trended away from complexity and towards simplicity, meaning that the ornate capitals, pediments, balusters, and finials of classical architecture get simplified into smooth shapes with little visual depth and no soul. I recognize that I am a classical purist when it comes to that style of architecture and design, but I have to say that I also love a lot of modern buildings and have a great appreciation for all architecture. With this in mind, I still feel that there is no tasteful middle ground between classical and modern architecture. Lastly, beauty is subjective; classifying beautiful buildings by whether or not they align with Roman traditions is a stupid idea because there is so much variety of design in the world and everyone has their own take on it.
Um, art nouveau?
Indian, Buddhist, Mesoamerican, Gothic, Babylonian
Sounds like post-modern architecture
@@gnarlyhogg I think it would be cool if we could just ditch minimalism and invent new styles that are intricate and awe-inspiring, sort of like what happened in the Middle Ages when gothic architecture became a thing. We don't need to exactly copy the designs of the past but we really need to ditch minimalism and come up with more intricate looking designs again.
You get straight to the point, no useless information, no repeating and fast paced way of talking. It's rare nowadays to find videos with such percentage of useful information. Thank you.
Interestingly, just a few days ago a Czech architect made a video on why there are often houses with empty sides (not sure about the correct term, but it's usually those multistory buildings that have one side without ony windows and it looks like there's another building missing next to it) and it's exactly as you say - it's supposed to have another building there but there isn't enough room for parking spaces so they just leave the lot empty.
Do you have a link to it?
@@chicagotypewriter2094 yeah that would be interesting
@@chicagotypewriter2094 Domihork probably means the video from Adam Gebrian titled "Nesmyslný důvod, proč nemáme ve městech více domů". The video is in Czech and no subs are provided though. Interestingly, there's another, even more recent video from the same guy about a massive brownflied redevelopment project also in Prague close to Smíchov railway station, which also hints at the same issue with parking minimums.
@@karoljesko9917 Thanks! Wish I knew Czech so there wasn't a language barrier
There's also the fact that we kept the good ooking buildings and destroyed the ugly ones ^^
Like, you mention the Eiffel Tower, first a lot of people found it ugly, and it was supposed to last only a handful of years for an universal exposition. It's Eiffel, the architect, that lobbyed for years and transformed it into an attraction to save his materpiece ^^
A lot of buildings back then were ugly but we destroyed them to put new buildings :D
100%! Most of old buildings that survived were built for rich people in the first place. The poor lived in basements, attics, slums, in darkness and without airflow...
This exactly. Survivorship bias is real. I hate when people complain about this, they seem to think everyone back then lived in the buildings that survive today, which for the most part are buildings that were originally built for the noble or ultra wealthy class. It's like expecting everyone today to live in a high-luxury modern house, like the ones you see in movies like Parasite.
Eiffel Tower is still fucking ugly
@@son_guhun the thing is even regular buildings, poor people houses still look better than most of the stuff built today. there are medieval villages still intact to this day and the people who lives there were very poor.
@@son_guhun Many old train stations and factories are quite beautiful. One of my favorite buildings in Madrid is the old slaughterhouse.
What's funny is a lot of traditional architecture we have now faced the same criticism when they were first being developed like Brick and mortar shops and buildings for example.
It's cyclical. People usually dislike change and prefer the old ways to the new ones.
@@theviniso nah there's buildings from the 20s - 50s that are very ugly and that people don't like
@@theviniso it's somewhat cyclical but modernism completely broke the wheel.
Take a look on the first concrete-panel building in Moscow (1939). It is VERY RICH ornamented and even a concrete was coloured to seem like a marble. Nowadays some developers order outside panels with individual ornaments and, moreover, build stylisations to ArtDeko, but not often.
It's interesting to know the history begin these buildings. They've made a significant cultural impact over the years.
Yea, too bad Adam has to twist everything under the perspective of a eastern european communist. "commies block good, solves muh homeless problem" actually translates to:
"western european elites didn't want to spend too much on housing and therefore imported commie blocks in the 60-70s way after ww2. Eastern Europe, didn't see people "move into" commie blocks, random instances state property were forcefully evicted from their farmland, their way of life, and forced into empty concrete shells so they could be turned into productive city worker droids."
What, did you think those communists were buying an upgrade of standard of living?
You know what makes for a great market hall with the lovely tall windows and high ceilings? A closed down train station. Actually the old train station nearby (in Canada, so not that old) got turned into a library instead, and the market is out back. Lovely building.
It's always a little depressing to only be allowed to have nice functional spaces like that only at the cost of another. Unless they've built a new and better train station nearby
I'm not sure this channel is the right one to discuss about the positive sides of closed down train stations..
Converting old/unused spaces is always more sustainable. It’s helps from demolishing and gives the work more history for future generations.
@@knightofficer No, the train doesn't go through there anymore, the oil dried up, so if you want to get from that town onto a train, you'd need to take a taxi to the next town over. (Where the train passes by only once a day at 9am and then comes back at 10pm.) Public transit is a very functional *joy* in the less urban areas of Canada, as you can imagine.
There's lots of trains through this area though, but it's all industrial going to the plants and over to the States.
@@PradedaCech Hehe, I only thought about it because some of the example market pictures looked very suspiciously like old train stations.
Many of the decorative elements seen on Victorian buildings were actually mass produced, usually from stamped metal or cast Iron.
Or were just clocks....
Yes hence the arts and crafts movement killed it. Shame as we have now is blandness
Yes they were. At the same time they still required craftsmanship to create and apply. They were not generated by CAD etc. And they linked the buildings to nature, which is a human desire, to always be connected to nature. Thus even the "mass produced" ornamented buildings of the pre-modernist era are usually more attractive to humans, as they still showcase this obvious link to nature and our innate habits of perception and senses.
@@bart_u ironically I've spent hundreds of hours designing ornate buildings in cad programs like SketchUp. It was a massive head ache to figure out but once you get familiar with process a highly detailed ornate building may only have 10 unique pieces on them. Much of it is adding detail where blank space is and adding trim to the tops of walls
Very often the pre-war buildings were not build by contracts for profit but by a cooperation of people who gathered money, got their own architect and of course insisted on esthetics. Which is almost impossible to happen today as you get everything through some agency, retailer, ect.
I hope one day we will look back on “modern” architecture as that weird interim period between beautiful architecture
The next design looks like a cave
Modern architecture will stay until the fall of civilization
Modern architecture will always stay modern, because that's just the state of things. What you ment to say was Modernist - which is the architectural style. But even than, that's not really true, as buildings in any style can be beautifull, it just depends on how they are done.
@@dv9239 It definitely will with that defeatist attitude.
@@milokojjones the problem with modernist architecture is that not every architect can be a Le Corbusier. A great modernist building is a thing of sublime beauty; a mediocre modernist building is .... not. Even the less talented neoclassical architects can hide their mediocrity behind "correct" use of the orders and produce an unobjectionable facade.
@@sarbe6625 me hoping for better architecture will change nothing
Function over form is the new norm
In Stockholm Sweden there is a wonderful architectural style that I think strikes the perfect balance of cost/time of construction while being very beautiful. It’s called ‘Swedish Grace’ and the buildings are generally 3-8 stories tall, ornate stonework is kept to the first floor, while all the floors from 2 and above are usually a simple plaster/stucco wall, and if there’s ornamentation on those upper floors it tends to be simple and used sparingly. This architecture style is so simple and beautiful that Studio Ghibli used it as inspiration for the towns and cities in the movie Kiki’s Delivery Service. I think a prefab framework like soviet block housing combined with the extra work of a Swedish Grace facade would be amazing in some sort of Swedish Grace revivalism movement. Sadly I live in America so I will be experiencing unending suburban sprawl.
I'm gonna be honest and say that you do get tired of this style quickly. I live in Århus which really boomed just as this style was popular which means that we have like endless streets of these apartment buildings, stretching on for kms in all directions around the city center. And it just becomes bland really quickly, they aren't necessarily ugly you just end up preferring literally anything else because it just feels like a town was copy pasted. It is definitely preferable to suburban sprawl because when you're there because it feels calmer and more cozy but it's not like you think it is pretty. Your eyes just sorta glaze over and the details become visual noise and you get annoyed every time the style doesn't quite match up or there's some ugly sign. Though I am slightly biased because this area of the city has hills that really suck to cycle on.
Growing up here is probably why I love modern architecture much, until recently the majority of the city had either been built in the interwar period or just before the Oil Crisis so there were two fairly similar dominant styles that were basically just copy pastes of different templates. Then recently a building boom happened and now there's a ton of modern buildings with many more still being built. Not all of them are great and there's at least one I hate for blocking the view to another modernist building that's a masterpiece. In general however they're such a breath of fresh air and break up the monotony in really nice ways. They're generally built out of light materials like glass and have white walls which is really nice in contrast to the dark brick buildings and it's so nice to have something with lighter colors during the frequent bad weather and the winter where you often don't even get to see the sun due to your schedule. A lot of them also seem to have been designed more thoughtfully so they look pretty both in good and bad weather, unlike the brick apartments that look so drab and depressing in bad weather. My favourite for this is Dokk1, which is the new central library, sadly you can't find any pictures of it in bad weather online but imo that's where it really shines and in a country where most days are overcast that really matters.
Also if you want to take a look and an interesting current Nordic architectural movement there has been a slow trend towards designing buildings so they blend into the surrounding landscape. Moesgaard Museum is a great example of this, from most angles it just looks like the hill hinged open a bit.
@@tj-co9go Would be a classic Swedish thing to try to take sole credit for something that was actually shared by all the Nordics.
You sure it's not ugly and you're not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
I love this. Keep the mass production easy part. But allow for individual different façades.
@@tj-co9go 70s windows are literally the worst. Unbroken rows of soulless single pane windows. Ok, the 2010s and "make sure none of the windows line up with any other window" is also the worst.
I think we also have to remember that buildings which survived, survived because we chose them to. We built slums and poor quality buildings everywhere in London, but no one thinks of how great the history slums of the city were. To us it’s survivorship bias. In a hundred years perhaps people will reminisce on how some modern buildings were beautiful and how we don’t build them “like the old days”. But it was just those we chose to repair and maintain.
It's already happening, the Brutalist revival is well underway and people are starting to appreciate Brutalist architecture and campaign for it's preserval. Architecture just tends to go through three phases, first you have enthusiasm and hype for it, then shoddy examples of it lead to disillusionment and the style goes through a long period of hatred because it became so common, and then once it has been out of the mainstream for a good few decades people reapproach it and once again learn to appreciate it and start to romanticize it. This has already happened with some modernist styles like Art Deco and Brutalism is clearly the next one up.
Brutalism better stay dead, it's uninspired fascist architecture.
Y
E
This is not true. Survivorship bias doesn't exist in architecture as it does in other fields. Most of those "slums" (victorian rowhomes) are still around and highly prized nowadays. If anything, it's the grand architecture of the past that suffered more demolition because it is typically in high value downtown locarions that made them more attractive for redevelopement.
Add that for some reason Strata Associations for most of these buildings don't allow for ANY individualism. I was repeatedly fined the one time I lived in a condo / apartment complex for having plants on my patio, even though my neighbours constantly commented on how beautiful they were.
True; condominiums & new public housing in my country don't let you change your windows to a different design, whereas older public housing did (so long those that opened into the common corridor didn't swing out too far & block the corridor). Enclosing a balcony meanwhile to turn it into an indoor room in your apartment might violate building codes (since those codes limit the max floor area of each building, whose computation typically excludes balconies though, in an effort to promote more plant planting). Condominiums may also frown on you hanging your clothing to dry at your balcony as it may be regarded as unsightly. Newer apartments are also more likely to use 3/4 or full height instead of 1/2 height windows, & when they need to be changed due to wear & tear, if your house's windows are of the former 2 types, you'll also face more legal bureaucracy - you've to pay a civil engineer to certify the window's safety too (probably to ensure that if you knock into them in an accident, the windows don't shatter & cause you to fall to your death) - but its been reported that these engineers are more reluctant to do such certification unless its part of a complete house renovation, as it may not be deemed to be worth the effort
Stratas are basically HOAs but in vertical format.
whaaaa
i also seem to recall that the ornamentation industry was heavily unionised, due to requiring a lot more specialized labour compared to other construction industries, so i wouldn't be surprised that devolpers basically decided to kill it once they had an excuse (the great depression was the final nail in the coffin iirc)
Great video, but I think you might've focused too much on ornamentation. That's probably the first thing to see, but classical architecture is also about proportions and symmetry even without ornaments. Look at Sweden or just Scandinavia overall where ornamentation was much more reserved. Or buildings from the 1920s-30s.
This is a huge problem with modern architecture, much greater than the lack of ornaments.
But to give credit, this also stems from the causes you pointed out in the video.
Yes, that was a video made by an modernist stan clearly
Fair point. Also they used the Golden Ratio to get the most beautiful architecture back in the day. Modern architects shit on any beauty and symmetry claiming they're progressive and the old architecture is "boring" and "LaCkS sElf eXpReSsiOn".
you can do proportion and symmetry in the design without overly affecting cost. But ornamentation costs money to produce and attach to buildings, so is more of a bottleneck. There's simply no reason to go back to 'classical architecture' (as if that's one thing) proportions unless you can justify it as a design consideration for a modern building - it doesn't really matter to the cost itself.
@@mishynaofficial Most modernist buildings are symmetrical, though.
Architecture itself is mostly about proportions, (a)symmetry, and (good) materials.
There was this idea around the end of the 1900s, that architecture needs to free itself from ornamentation, which drives attention away from the more important stuff, like proportions and elegant spaces.
If you walk around estates that were built in the modern era, you can't really state that there was no thought going into the proportion and composition of buildings. Moreover, getting rid of ornaments gives space for people to recognize good materials (like travertine, ceramics and quality concrete) and hard-to-make details (like the ones you can find in the Olivetti showroom in Venice).
Overall as an architect for these reasons, I value quality modern architecture very much.
And here I am, sitting in a relatively new bit of Jakarta, surrounded by entire blocks of modern buildings constructed in classicist European style full of ornaments! I’ve seen similar across Asia, they somehow found a way and a will to do it out here. Now if only they could also mass adopt public transport as well…
As an Indonesian, i find those new classical style buildings kind of out of place in our landscape 😅.
@@hsgregorius As a Dane, it also humours me! Regardless, it provides a pleasant change from the dreary box architecture at home!
@@hsgregorius Considering how tacky and fake-ish those are, I kind of understand your sentiment haha, but it's still better than the soulless rukos of Jakarta (you know, the bland, square, ones)
@@B777LR you should definitely check out PIK 2, they have an entire faux Amsterdam over there, complete with a 'canal' of its own haha, but perhaps my favourite of European-style buildings in Indonesia would be the Pullman Hotel Grand Central in Bandung, which incorporates New Indies Style (the architectural movement popular in colonial Indonesia/Dutch East Indies in the early 20th century)
@johnsiahaan3289 hahaha, yes those same ruko styles are also prevalent in my city... i feel like we can only get the extremes here in Indo. Extremely tacky or extremely bland 😅
As someone living in canada, everywhere is so...bland. Its so boring. Every town and even cities feel the same. The "mall" strips, plazas, corporate stores (like walmart), parking lots, residential areas, "tall" buildings, farm land, etc are all the same everywhere (at least in ontario). Every small town, especially in the country, feels the same. And if they feel different, its for the worse, not better. I long to live in europe where visually everything looks nice and sparks creativity.
Makes me glad to live near Philadelphia where the attitude seems to be, "You lay a finger on that historical building, and we'll gut you." As a result, we have a lot of historical buildings from various eras, alongside glass cubes that are rather pretty. It's a nice jumble.
Where is Philadelphia?
@@arolemaprarath6615 The US, about 90 miles south of NY. One of the large cities that stretch out between Boston and Baltimore on the US northeast coast (about 2 million plus people). It's known for both modern buildings and very old architecture, including the places where independence was declared and the US government was initially drafted up.
@@jcortese3300 is miles a currency?
@@arolemaprarath6615 it's an American form of measuring distance
As a Philadelphian, we also have a lot of signs that say “ used to be here.”
I lived in Dublin Ireland recently, which had a huge housing speculation boom a few years back. Coming from Germany, I immediately noticed that all the modern and standardized looking blocks were falling apart on a micro level. Light switches, door frames etc. were falling off the walls, seals were rotting/nonexistant, balcony railings were loose. It was clear that someone had made a fortune on these buidlings, left and now the people actually living in them (and the new owners too, probably) had to deal with the damage.
Has nothing to do with modern architecture, it was a cheap developer.
A few years ago, I was invited to Hamburg. I was living in London at the time. I was shocked at just how solid and well installed every detail was in Germany, from door frames and handles to water taps (I feel like 50% of taps in the UK are installed with hot and cold the wrong way around lol)
In France things are much better, but Germany is outstanding
@@Rico-v7r Correct, someone wanted to make even more money from it and skimped on quality. As long as you don't get too close, you can still enjoy Dublin with its stark contrast between old Georgian style buildings and the sleek modern glass-and-steel bond villain HQs :)
@@Rico-v7r So if you can build crappy modern looking buildings, maybe you can also build pleasant looking buildings with high quality.
As uxch as I love Ireland, its housing quality was abysmal. I've never seen anything like this in any other country: ventilation which is 50 cm wide and about as long, walls made of what appeared to be cardboard painted over, goddamn electric water heaters inside your shower, etc. Everything seemed to just fall apart like cheap decoration.
You don't need to compare it to Germany to see how awful it was. (I'm Polish BTW)
A friend is an architect and can tell what application was used to design a building based on the pre-sets. It’s probably linked to reducing costs but it would be interesting to see if anyone has done any research on that side of design.
lmao, that is fucking funny 😂 that explains why they are so soulless.
@@gergogaal568 soulless? Depressing.
That's actually depressing that people don't even try to come up with their own designs just so they can fulfill their quota, capitalism is the bane of authentic artistic expression.
Till I saw your comment, I was trying to make up a joke about unreal engine asset packs, and how those look like they could be from any number of urban zombie shooters. If it's really possible to figure out the software behind the building designs, we aren't actually that far off from fleshing out cities using predesigned asset packs like building a video game level.
As a retired architect let me shit on the laziness of the field. You are partially correct. Revit is a huge culprit to the boring looking exteriors you see. Especially in apartment complexes. Essentially, you create a lot of blocks for the units in the building. You copy and paste for about 3-4 stories then try to make it look “interesting” by throwing all the materials you can get away with onto the facade. Which is the antithesis to how we are taught to design but whatever. When you’re letting the software dictate your design decisions you’ve lost your architect card. Also programs like revit HATE anything that isn’t orthogonal.
One of the main issues I always found ridiculous was that designers were always in floor plan view. That’s an abstract view considering we exist in 3d and advance through time.
I wouldn’t say it makes things cheaper tho. It makes things faster but even then if you copy and paste a whole ass building, that is also time consuming considering that terrain, entrances, local regulations like setbacks and the like can all be different and they have to be updated before you submit that to be constructed.
The fact that these people don’t think about the spaces they design is ridiculous and happens way too much. I’ll stop before I get triggered even further. It’s a shit show and def a contributing factor. Maybe I should make more videos shitting on the field I left. 😂
All of the interesting beautiful buildings here in Ohio were built before 1950. And you are absolutely correct in that it's become about making money and nothing else.
Time is a factor... Most post WW2 architecture in the UK was unpopular until recently.. Now much of the 50`sand 60's stuff is appreciated and even has "preservation orders"... The "Barbican" is one such example albeit much post WW2 architecture was always bad.. Nevertheless, the rush to destroy many post WW2 buildings has been to hasty...Delicate, modest post WW2 office blocks around St Paul's Cathedral that I felt epitomised an English reserved fineness akin to early Georgian were swept away in favour of ulgly glass 1990 monstrosities. Personally I hate most post 1980 architecture but I guess my opinion might mellow with time...
Hmmm, wonder why that would be? What changed in the 1940s? 🤔🤔🤔
Hate to burst your bubble but before the 1950s it was already about making money. Developer’s desire to make money didn’t magically change in 1950, that’s silly.
@@Brigasimon not interested in leftist politics, just talking about why buildings have sucked for the last 70+ years
"Housing became not a place to live, but a Commodity to be bought and sold." This hurts so much.
The problem is: Ever since the financial crisis in 2008 most people can't even afford to buy a place to live in anymore. Not even a flat or an appartment. We've become a society of renters and homeless. It's exactly what the capitalist elite, like Thiel, wanted. "You will own NOTHING, and you'll be happy."
That's why a lot of new housing in Estonia is ugly black or grey overpriced boxes._
Even worse is the low quality of houses even in earthquake prone areas like much of Turkey.
Many if not most of the youngest earthquake's victims are actually murder victims: The construction companies who built their houses knowingly doomed them to death for the base motive of greed.
a shoe box is always made for sale.
Thank the banks and central banks for that. They need a vehicle to push money into the economy and mortgages are perfect for that.
When I went to Budapest, I was surprised to find they still build historic buildings from scratch around the city center. Just a couple hundred miles west, in Vienna, we have long abandoned that philosophy and let our historic districts be defaced by ugly, ornament-less post-war boxes.
i was wondering if we can build "cheap" neoclassical buildings, built on the soviet style pre-builts and then you engrave the neoclassical characteristics on styrofoam and slapped as external insulation
@@ristekostadinov2820 engraved or "sclupted" styrofoam is the worst and it's better to not have ornaments at all than to paste fake styrofoam shit and then have it rot and fall off after 5 years.
Thats only because Orban hates modern buildings, and insists on renovating to original condition. Even if that original condition only existed on paper, because it was prohibitivly expensive to build. It is highly contested by architects, because it uses modern material, so its not renovation in the classical sense, only a facade.
@@abacaba5348 i mean good quality building insulation can last at least 15-20 years.
Considering living standard... I would rather have my tax spent elsewhere and not some random church
I've seen a lot of modern clothes that closely IMITATE old styles, like an echo or facsimile in shape and design without the complexity, while keeping it in this era. I fully believe the same can be done with architecture someday. ❤
There's this beautiful skyscraper in the middle east, don't remember where but it was absolutely stunning. It's not impossible to get the best of new and old. (It wasn't in Dubai)
@@Leanflare Al Hamra Tower in Kuwait? Central Market in Abu Dhabi?
there is an architect in the uk that does the same, and a few in germany and poland.
I live in a 1986-built neoclassical building, actually the whole neighbourhood was designed by famous architect Ricardo Bofill. We need more of that!
@@gwened Germany, Poland, and Hungary are in a building spree lately. Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Gdansk, Budapest, all have been building new housing developments styled to what it looked like before the destruction of WW2.
I think there's also a degree of survivor's bias. The ugly or trash buildings from back then aren't around anymore. If you read the book Oliver Twist you'll read about disgusting decrepit mass built buildings with the same degree of ugliness as we see now. Only they're in Victorian England. They used different materials but the business people were just making cheap houses as quickly as they could same as we are now. However, when you spend a lot of money and effort making buildings to last, they may be around for thousands of years to come.
I really love rustic architecture. Wood and stone can be just gorgeous
same its my favorite
Pretty but usually sucks to live in.
Another huge reason large stores like Walmart don't customize their stores is for consistency. Having stores be bland and more or less the same is an intentional feel. You know when you're in Walmart and you (more or less) know where to find the things you're looking for regardless of which store you're at. These stores are interchangeable, because it makes it easier for Walmart control variables around product placement, and they're boring so you don't spend time looking at architecture and instead look at products. Walmart isn't supposed to be a place you want to spend time in, it's designed to put as many products between you and the stuff you want, with the goal of getting you to buy as much as possible as efficiently as possible.
Stores that don't do this are usually out-competed by stores that do. Not just because they make more money, but because stores with inconsistent layout's are annoying and confusing to customers. In Canada, The Bay is one of the worst for this. I've probably been to a dozen stores across the country, and the lack of consistency is infuriating. You end up needlessly exploring the store or asking for help because nothing is labeled or grouped consistently. If I need to buy luggage in Walmart (no matter the store), I know it's probably going to be in the back right of the store, across the main aisle from the shoes, and I need to pass through the clothing section to get there.
"stores that don't do this are usually out competed by stores that do"
Depends on the area. In Germany, the big stores are always customised to some extent. The rough layout is the same, but basically out of necessity the specifics are always different depending on the space available
@@anna-flora999 Its the same everywhere i'd assume. Consistency doesn't mean carbon copy. However generally they maintain the same consistent layout across all stores, and adapt that layout as much as possible for older locations that are still profitable and predate the policy.
@@lilpwnige not really, every store has its own quirks, because the layouts are way too different across stores. The only consistent things I can think of are produce comes first and the fresh meat section is like somewhere approaching halfway through the store. Everything else is inconsistent between stores. At least for kaufland. Not sure how Real does it, those are rarer in my area
In Helsinki Finland many of the newer buildings are built with brick facades. It looks pretty nice but most importantly it's miles ahead of what we built in the 70's or 80's.
Your buildings are still weird but the brick facades are definitely a step in the right direction
Yeah, I live in Valby district of Copenhagen and they are building quite a lot of brick facade buildings. They are actually blending well with the old factory buildings from the 1930's
The "luxury" homes (price point well over $1M) built around Toronto today all have interesting architectural elements added to them, all the time. Individual houses need individualistic elements. It's only the large institutional and mass-housing buildings (apartments, row housing, and especially schools and government buildings) that look like f*cking prisons. And that trend began, in Canada, in the 1950s, not during any age of "neoliberal capitalism". That kinda disproves this video's thesis.
There's nothing "neoliberal" and "capitalist" about cheap minimalist functionalism - unless someone wants to argue that the Soviet Bloc were "neoliberal" "capitalists". "Neoliberal" is basically a term that is just used as a swear-word to put other people down, it has no inherent meaning. I tend to ignore anyone who uses the word.
Walmart will always build ugly buildings, because shoppers equate the ugly facade with "getting a deal." It's also why Walmart is less "nice" inside than Target or other stores. Shoppers assume that anything too nice looking results in inflated costs to the consumer, and Walmart's brand is based on being perceived as cheaper than their competitors. That likely plays a role in apartment buildings as well. Why pay for a facade that you can't see? That's just a way for the developer to overcharge you!
Only tangentially related, but I'm super jealous of you having those amazing, fluffy cats! Our landlord has rejected our request to have pets so we're looking to move, and houses being a commodity has never rang more true (especially pet-friendly ones).
Honest question: Why is ornamentation so expensive when we have modern techniques to cheaply mass-produce them? After all, repeating motifs brings harmony to the overall effect. We can easily make molds for stucco, laser-cut wood according to a programmed design, even pour a house into a creative pattern through the new digitally printed homes.
As for the lousy street views, apartment complexes and shopping malls have plenty of inner courts and corridors. Why not have something nice there?
I'm in my last year of high school in Italy and we have to study Art History in my school. We're currently studying Dadaism (1916-1924), so I know a little bit about the subject. While it is true that the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building were made with the new materials of the time to try something new, they aren't the same kind of modernist art that you described. For many, modernism meant using new materials to build better ornaments. On the other hand, figures like Adolf Loos (who essentially foresaw the Rationalist movement of 1925) saw modernism as something purely functional. In his famous book "Ornament and Crime" (published in 1912), he stated architecture wasn't art because architecture had to follow functionality. That's why he designed his buildings with big white cubes and massive windows. The Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower were modernist because of their materials but there was absolutely no functional reason for their architectural style. You also mentioned other modernist buildings as beautiful, like the fallingwater, but quite frankly, they're still ugly. They still only have generic cubic shapes. It's just that one of them has a waterfall that goes through it. The need to mass produce and create new housing is somewhat of an acceptable reason. However, there are many architectural companies and art schools (like the Bauhaus) who want more minimalism and are pushing to destroy our cities. Quite frankly, I absolutely hate modernist architecture and I wish there were laws against these bland buildings. German cities are incredibly ugly nowadays because of modernist architecture. Kassel is a good example. It was a dense beautiful city. Nowadays, it's a car infested city that's way less dense and way more ugly. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they used cheap materials and such to rebuild it after WW2. However, they also made sure it was rebuilt with the car in mind. There is no way that the new infrastructure they built was gonna be any less expensive than rebuilding the city the way it was before
I think in germany by 1945, ornamentation was heavily associated (rightly or wrongly) with imperialism, the right, Wilhimine era, WWI, poverty, violence, authotarianism, patriarchy etc. At least by "moderates", leftists who had power after ww2 The modernist style is bland and uninspiring. It doesnt recall pride, or love of the fatherland. Its not unique. Its the same everywhere even outside germany. Its identity-less. Purely functional. Like a hunter gatherer or stone age cave our ancestors lived in. Perhaps if ww2 bombing never happened modernism would not of replaced as much as it did, but the destruction of german cities gave modernists a blank canvas whose momentum became so strong people even started to demolish buildings in places that were not bombed for aestetic, health or plain corruption reasons. In ireland, never bombed heavily in ww2 , the 2nd half of 20th century saw whole scale destructiom of old buildings and replacement by modernist type buildings. Some were slums some were intentionally left to decay, others were actually good buildings but demolished for "economic" or selfish reasons.
Very true
You are ABSOLUTELY spot on! I couldn't have said it better, thank you. If this was a speech you'd deserve a standing ovation!
I believe modern technology has greatly benefited us. But modern architecture has gone over about as well as modern communism. Problem is, although communism was largely banished in a generation, modern buildings weren't so easily dispensed with.
I also hasten to assert that the flaws in communism were glaringly obvious when put into practice. The flaws in modern architecture weren't as obvious. Most people don't think past fashionable conformity. They're easily duped by a powerful media "teaching" them what they should like.
Inhabitants of modern environments get depressed and lobotomized yet nobody understands why. Their house or apartment gets shabby and fixtures break after only a few years and they just accept it. Their investment requires complete renovation when its time to sell and they just accept that too
I believe todays architecture is undemocratic. High level intellectuals telling the masses how they should live, or perhaps collusion by developers. Perhaps longer term planning is needed. With healthy democratic deliberation. Robust debate by the common people.
@@RaptorFromWeegee And I think your comment deserves an ovation as well. I agree with you here, and the word I think that describes the planning and architecture that serves the people is 'vernacular.' That is the kind of architecture that evolves based on the place and the needs of the people in the place, without the intrusion of 'celebrity' architects.
If it were just about updating things, and not greedier and more controlling influences, it is simple to update and keep the best of the rest. There are still villages and towns with fully functioning buildings from the 1400s in France, for example, and people love spending time in them.
@@simonestreeter1518 Thank you very much. Glad to hear you mention vernacular architecture. Just so happens, our family vacation home is a vernacular house from the turn of the century. We don't think it even had an architect, just one of numerous local carpenters who built houses on the side. Very plain, simple study house.
I think in that area, vernacular house construction faded away as kit built houses came on the scene. They even sold them in the Sears catalogue! Probably took up a RR box car. Once it arrived on your land, you could hire a guy to assemble it or you could summon your neighbors to help you do it yourself.
Cheaper and faster to set up than the older situation. Of course, I think the house kits were done away with by the mass produced suburban developments of the 1940s and 50s. Again cheaper but much lower quality. Cheers!
Those older buildings were also designed by people, not a rough design but in fine detail. Where I live there was an architect called Watson Fothergill, you can tell which buildings he designed by their unique quarks. In comparison, we are now getting what I call sliding block buildings pooping up, which are square buildings with large tiles. They make them as they don't require an masonry's to be built, but they are not built to last.
Some commie blocks can be beautiful. The neighborhood in Finland where most of my family live is gorgeous these days. What they did to spruce it up was changing the balconies and adding greenery that climbs up the walls and some walls got a new color so the buildings aren't so samey anymore. With a little creativity and will even a gray old concrete box can become beautiful. I've seen this in parts of East Germany too. I believe we failed so hard on urbanism and it's so sad because we could have done so much better.
Vienna also has (not commie blocks but) very aesthetically pleasing social housing.
You can take your commie blocks if you like... I want a house
@@DukeofTxtspeak A house? Then move to the countryside. Houses are shit in an urban enviorment.
What is the area called? Would love to see some examples of this.
@@markuserikssen Finnish side of the family mostly live in Turku some of the old concrete boxes still look like shit but slowly getting better. In Germany Plattenbau is the most famous renovation but also parts of Dresden and Leipzig
Here in Paris the best buildings are those built 150-200 years ago in the "Haussmanian" style,
built out of thick blocks of lutenian limestone dug up from underneath the city, absolutely beautiful, and nice to live in, also: they haven't moved in literal centuries, whilst concrete buildings from the 70's are already full of cockroaches and falling apart (talking from experience here). Now I live in a building finished in 1894 with walls that are over a foot thick and for some reason those have a lot less humidity and pest problems. Back then people took pride in making things that would last, not in the car they bought with the money they made doing the work. IMO Haussmanian style buildings are perfect for dense cities, they are not too tall and thus don't deprive you of sunlight, and allow for some plants on the balcony at least. There are also a lot of green areas and parks in Paris which really helps (talking about the old Paris of course).
In NYC the equivalent to an Haussmann building is usually called a “pre-war building,” and they’re the most sought-after structures.
Self-righteous comparison. Maybe some people prefer to take pride in their car than in a house.
Again, I am opposed to injustice above all else, such as the USA and Canada forcing car-centric dependency onto everyone who doesn't want it. Nevertheless, it is still just a matter of subjective opinion what human-made object people want to take pride in building.
A foot thick wall is not that much. My 1920s house's outer walls are more than 2 feet or 70cm thick.
@@theultimatereductionist7592 You didn't understand me, I was saying that in my opinion back when those buildings were built people took a lot more pride in the work they did for others and in doing it right rather than in their personal wealth and possessions. In France there used to be guilds of artisans, for masons, bakers, wood workers, etc... And you had to prove your worth before you could be part of the guild which would help your business in hard times and expand your clientele. This was all based on being proud of yourself not for owning stuff but for doing good things. We can see the results today, old tools, old buildings, always beat newer ones in build quality, you can even measure it on older tools and implements the safety factor was as good in consumer products back then as it is in military and professional grade stuff today sometimes higher. Things were made to last and be repaired not thrown away and bought again a few years later, same for buildings.
@@kacperwoch4368 Yes I'm not used to the imperial system of measurement in my mind a foot is bigger than in reality, the outside walls between me and the streets look to be about 60 cm thick, but what you need to see is that those are solid stone, what is your house's wall structure ? Is it stone with Lime mortar in between them ?
Because sometimes walls appear thick but it's actually just the insulation, I'm talking about the actual load bearing structure here.
Where is this house by the way ? If I ever go to the US I always pictured a nice house either in a desert area like New Mexico or Nevada, or in the lush south like Tenesse Florida Louisiana, somewhere in the Appalachia. I bet you can grow anything there provided you have good soil.
Perhaps an additional factor in bland modernity is the increased scale of corporations and the attendant isolation of the building design from individualistic taste. Personal vanity, local pride and boosterism, esthetic conviction - these probably don't influence building design like they used to.
We should prioritise the beautification of city centres through classical architecture, as that is what’s most feasible and noticeable
You're right. And we've second guessed the lessons and wisdom of the past far too often.
How exactly do you propose to achieve such goal?
But "modernism" (way too general a word for the variety of architectural styles included in it due to the vast cultural influences and development over time), is greatly inspired by classical architecture. These are architects that have analysed and studied every aspect of classical architecture, especially Greek, but this is completely ignored by the uneducated eye. Mies Van Der Rohe for example, designed the Seagram skyscraper in New York with great inspiration from classical Greek mathematical proportions, which is the main appeal of Greek architecure. The ornaments on the Parthenon are purely surface-level, depicting Greek historical and mythological scenes because that was the CONTEXT of the building (a temple to venerate the goddess Athena). What is truly impressive about the Parthenon are its mathematical proportions and the building techniques used to create it, for something built thousands of years ago.
I agree that there are a lot of (most) modern buildings nowadays that are very ugly to look at and live in, but this does not mean that architects need to stop innovating and start blatantly copying classical architecture. Our lifestyles have completely changed, and we need to respect that context. A Roman temple-style building built in 2023 makes no sense in the center of Madrid, for example. We need to keep innovating to make beautiful buildings that evolve, respect context, environment, urban planning, and most of all, the consumer.
@@elisaroccheggiani6714 Thats the same tired old defense that proponents of modern architecture have always offered up, "You don't like this architecture because you aren't educated enough".
Then they try to argue that this ghastly architecture is rooted in ancient Greek buildings like the Parthenon. So now we're supposed to take that all in and figure, "Welp, don't wanna seem stupid so I guess I'll just shut up and let the smart kids have their way".
Next thing you know the gorgeous and brilliant 19th century railway terminal has been replaced with some neo-brutalist concrete monstrosity, sitting there in all its marxist, anti-bourgeois splendor.
I, for one, would LOVE to see a Roman temple erected in the middle of Madrid! Don't mean it can't have modern steam heat, plumbing, efficient infrastructure, etc. They were building stuff like that here in the USA right up until WWII.
@@geroutathat What would make an area look colonial? What does "look colonial" even mean? Whats barca? What are "Zadid type buildings"? Define your terms please, sir.
As an architecture student I would absolutely love to design ornamented buildings, if it meant I can take time to be intricate and I don’t die because you get paid by project.
I also find it funny we talk about the craftsmanship when many buildings in the past were put up 'on the cheap'. I think of how old Penn Station had plaster columns and not solid marble or granite ones. This isn't to say that they didn't put in work then, but they still had to build with a budget in mind.
I blame corporate, they want everything to be as basic as possible
In ten minutes you've explained something I never understood before and now I know. Ten minutes well spent, your videos are always time well spent. Thanks Adam!
A church in my town renovated recently. They actually built a pretty kickass Romanesque Revival church building. It really fits well with some of the other buildings in my town which are all white limestone like the church. So I took my camera and loaded it with some expensive film and went out to photograph the new church. I spent like half an hour running around the block trying to find a good vantage point to photograph it, but it just doesn't exist. The building itself is gorgeous, but its surroundings are a car-centric hellscape. There's no angle where you can't see the road or the stop lights. All that architecture wasted on such a lousy location. I went home without snapping a single shot. Not gonna waste good film on the church built next to a stroad.
So needless to say, this video was really cathartic for me. Thank you.
"film"?
@@emjayay yes a lot of photographers still use film for its superior aesthetic properties
I love how every episode of Adam something always somehow ends up back at the car problem or the train problem. It feels almost like a parody. Not to say these problems are real or prevalent just funny how they always end up here.
I know, right?
Maybe because he is a trainiac 🤣
Huge problems affect a lot of things
Why is ugly architectural style popular? Cars! Source: jsut trust me bro
@@michaelkulakov9716 Yes. Tokyo has a very good public transportation infrastructure but is still building very ugly new buildings...must be cars...
beauty is definitely a necessity of life and unlike what many people may realise, actually a big draw for tourism and a surplus of people moving in the city. One reason I moved from a fairly boring city that was somewhat car-centric (by the standards of Europe mind) was because of the beauty and the ease of moving around. I still every year take some time to just go places and see what I can find, and every time I find something cool of beautiful or unexpected or just a random place in the city just full of people. That would never really happen where I used to live, but here, there's just beauty everywhere, and I bet if it weren't for that, this would be a much smaller city
Good for you. You are lucky to make a massive decision such as moving based in part on aesthetics.
The vast majority of people do not have the luxury to care about how a place looks. In fact, there choices are limited to 1 house/apartment (constrained by location, job, cost) versus homelessness.
@@theultimatereductionist7592 username checks out 🤣
@@theultimatereductionist7592 There are a ton of people in North America still buying massive 2000+ sq. ft. McHouses, so clearly not everyone is in dire poverty these days.
As an architect who once designed this stuff you are 100% correct.
7:37 Hell nahhhh 💀💀Is that a McDonalds pharmacy?💀💀
It would be fun to hear you talk about (bland) Brazilian architecture away from the tourist areas and Brasilia. Ornamentation is a very rare thing outside rich countries. There are many places in Brazil that look much worse than the Soviet blocs. Newly built housing for the wealthy here is just like the bland modern style of developed countries (though even blander), and they stand out as much better than the usual.
Verdade (Yeah that's true)
It's not about ornamentation but more about style. You can build great looking buildings without any ornaments that still have a classy, warm feeling. For example the old country side villas in Spain. made of regional stones and plain walls, basically without ornamentation, they look absolutely stunning just because of their nice cozy shapes and warm colors. Why do they look good? Because those buildings don't try to look modern. But as soon as you try to make something look "modern" and there's no super huge budget, you end up with ugly buildings.
Isso é bem comum em São Paulo, mas ontem estava passeando pela cidade e eu vi um condomínio com as laterais em vertical e as cercas da sacada do condomínio eram onduladas e brancas, igual macarrão parafuso. Não era exatamente um estilo clássico como arquitetura de antigamente, mas achei diferente e criativo.
Acho que o problema mesmo é tudo ser construído no estilo de arquitetura moderno, que é bem sem graça e não tem criatividade nenhuma, parecem caixas uma em cima da outra. Se fugir ao menos um pouco disso, o resultado fica com muito mais personalidade, igual o prédio que eu vi ontem.
Dude doesn't actually think about his opinions. He takes his opinions from others and then regurgitates it and is inflexible because he treats his received knowledge like it was from his religion. He also like fitting in with the current zeitgeist and feeling like he is a better person than you are he routinely mischaracterizes and demonizes anybody that isnt in lock step with him. He shows a lot of cultish behavior.
@@thomgizziz expose him then.
My mother was born in 1948 in Frankfurt, Germany. She grew up for about 10 years in a four room apartment, together with her family and three others, so each family (of around 4) occupied a room. They also used curtains to split larger rooms into two to house more people. Despite from the fact that this was very stressfull at times (as families received letters of their deceased fathers, sons etc. due to the war, so there was usually a lot of drama going on which she didn't understand at her age and nobody really explained to her), she also had to walk through the destroyed city and over huge piles of rubble to go to school or go to the public swimming pool. Over the years the situation slowly got better as people were relocated to new houses and the damage in the city was repaired. She still keeps pictures of that time, the damage was really immense.
Objection relevance
Summing it up:
Sheer necessity to house people
Housing becoming a commodity
Integrated housing and car planning
Tastes changing with the times
When I watch videos of random buildings being planned in the Middle East, I’m reminded of the channel. This time, it’s ‘The Mukaab’ in Riyadh which is a huge cube.
There is also another reason, at least where I live. When a developer does end up proposing something that's a little more daring in its design, it's met with a lot more community backlash than these unattractive, but also relatively unoffensive building styles. And in San Francisco, where it's hard to get any project underway, developers choose to go with the design that's not going to get them hung up by even more NIMBY groups protesting the project because of it "destroying the character of the neighborhood" Even when the building it's going to replace is something that maybe had a massive fire in it 7 years ago and has been sitting abandoned and falling apart ever since.
There's an essay by Karel Kosik on architecture and modernism "The city and the poetic". It's in a book called Antediluvian reflexions (Reflexiones antediluvianas, in spanish). I think you can get it in your language. If you haven't read it, you must, it's a beautiful and very philosophical essay just about what you're saying in your video. Cheers!
You should visit Japan, they still have some sense for aesthetic buildings. Some of the highway stations are designed to look like medieval Japanese Edo and they always have decent quality local specialties (food) for take away. Traveling long distances (like Tokyo -> Kyoto) with bus is much cheaper than the bullet train too and the stops are really nice