Fantastic piece. An anecdote: You are probably familiar with the very modern Koolhaas Seattle library that was built about 15 years ago and universally lauded, including by the NYT. As a fan of both architecture and libraries, I was super excited by the project and went back just to check it out a year after I'd moved away to San Francisco. What a huge disappointment. First, from the outside it looked like just a boxy grey building with only slightly elevated design elements, and the only thing that would have helped it was strategic landscaping, which was unfortunately not kept up and added to the overall dismal feeling with their sad, brown clumps of grass. Inside, I felt like I was in a modern museum and not a library, and that's when I realized that there's such a thing as cultural expectations of a space, and to deviate from it might be edgy and creative but will ultimately leave the users dissatisfied. A library connotates cozy, studious, warm, welcoming. This was none of these things. Lastly, I remember stepping off the elevator in a dark and secluded area which I thought would be a perfect place for a crime to be committed, then promptly became momentarily disoriented by the lack of clear pathway towards the main area. All in all, not good at all.
In SF, every single day I lived there I was saddened by the wealth of beautiful architecture that had fallen into disrepair or surrounded by crime and the homeless. SF is an architectural jewel located in one of the most beautiful pieces of land anywhere in Earth and we've let it go to where it is now...
I agree with you completely, the classical lines and decorative elements of a building evoke something in our soul, and that is something that is dismissed entirely in modern architecture.
It needed to be said! And then the rest of us have to live with these monstrousities as they increasingly cover downtown areas. It's almost as if architects get infected in school with some bizarre unconscious hope that in the future people with evolve into insect-type creatures, and therefore feel the need to design buildings that look like futuristic hives.
When they're designing homes, rather than public or commercial buildings this way, they also have a habit of placing huge floor to ceiling windows in places that no sane person would ever want, for privacy. Unless there are people who actually WANT the neighbors and passers-by to be able to watch them?
Do you have any psychological theory on why these architects are like this?? Why do they hate everything that isn't minimalist with harsh angles? Do they suffer from insecurity and feel they won't live up to the standards from previous times? Are they hoping that strange angles and shapes will obscure what might otherwise be too plainly mediocre or (gasp) boring?
Very enjoyable essay. Modern architecture and art are a reflection of the meaninglessness of existence in modern society. I studied some years at a university that looks like a soviet gulag. It was utterly soul crushing to be there every day. May thats one of the uncouscious reasons (there were more couscious ones) i dropped out. I just remember those lifeless buildings opressing my soul. Yet somehow the modern man or woman doesnt reac to it. They seem to conform to it so easily it is downright scary.
That building at the top of the page looks cool. I love it. Why? Because it looks like something out of a science fiction movie about a desolate outpost planet, where colonists from Earth might have landed. Very fitting archetecture for a world of late-stage capitalism, where climate change threatens to kill off all life on the planet. Oh, and I love the Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School (PEGS) Music House too. I am not a fan of 19th and early 20th Century archetechture, styled along classical Greco-Roman lines. Bleh :P BOOOORING!!!!
Fantastic piece. An anecdote: You are probably familiar with the very modern Koolhaas Seattle library that was built about 15 years ago and universally lauded, including by the NYT. As a fan of both architecture and libraries, I was super excited by the project and went back just to check it out a year after I'd moved away to San Francisco. What a huge disappointment. First, from the outside it looked like just a boxy grey building with only slightly elevated design elements, and the only thing that would have helped it was strategic landscaping, which was unfortunately not kept up and added to the overall dismal feeling with their sad, brown clumps of grass. Inside, I felt like I was in a modern museum and not a library, and that's when I realized that there's such a thing as cultural expectations of a space, and to deviate from it might be edgy and creative but will ultimately leave the users dissatisfied. A library connotates cozy, studious, warm, welcoming. This was none of these things. Lastly, I remember stepping off the elevator in a dark and secluded area which I thought would be a perfect place for a crime to be committed, then promptly became momentarily disoriented by the lack of clear pathway towards the main area. All in all, not good at all.
In SF, every single day I lived there I was saddened by the wealth of beautiful architecture that had fallen into disrepair or surrounded by crime and the homeless. SF is an architectural jewel located in one of the most beautiful pieces of land anywhere in Earth and we've let it go to where it is now...
I agree with you completely, the classical lines and decorative elements of a building evoke something in our soul, and that is something that is dismissed entirely in modern architecture.
It needed to be said! And then the rest of us have to live with these monstrousities as they increasingly cover downtown areas. It's almost as if architects get infected in school with some bizarre unconscious hope that in the future people with evolve into insect-type creatures, and therefore feel the need to design buildings that look like futuristic hives.
When they're designing homes, rather than public or commercial buildings this way, they also have a habit of placing huge floor to ceiling windows in places that no sane person would ever want, for privacy. Unless there are people who actually WANT the neighbors and passers-by to be able to watch them?
Do you have any psychological theory on why these architects are like this?? Why do they hate everything that isn't minimalist with harsh angles? Do they suffer from insecurity and feel they won't live up to the standards from previous times? Are they hoping that strange angles and shapes will obscure what might otherwise be too plainly mediocre or (gasp) boring?
Very enjoyable essay. Modern architecture and art are a reflection of the meaninglessness of existence in modern society. I studied some years at a university that looks like a soviet gulag. It was utterly soul crushing to be there every day. May thats one of the uncouscious reasons (there were more couscious ones) i dropped out. I just remember those lifeless buildings opressing my soul. Yet somehow the modern man or woman doesnt reac to it. They seem to conform to it so easily it is downright scary.
That building at the top of the page looks cool. I love it. Why? Because it looks like something out of a science fiction movie about a desolate outpost planet, where colonists from Earth might have landed. Very fitting archetecture for a world of late-stage capitalism, where climate change threatens to kill off all life on the planet. Oh, and I love the Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School (PEGS) Music House too. I am not a fan of 19th and early 20th Century archetechture, styled along classical Greco-Roman lines. Bleh :P BOOOORING!!!!
Lol you and Ridley freakin Scott!