The Urban Theory Thread

pop_scientist · PostAug 16, 2022#9262022-08-16T13:22+00:00

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑
Aug 16, 2022
^I think that misses out badly on early modernism, like the Chicago School and Art Deco, which was in no way historicist and is now almost universally revered. No offense, but I feel like the meme is basically complaining about things recently out of style without giving them time to come back in style. Which is every style since style was invented. The new in thing is modern and lovely. The antique is classic. The out of style thing is horrid, was always horrid, and will always be horrid. There's a part of me that honestly believes this about 80s cars, but . . . maybe I'll be proved wrong yet. (In which case the larger point will be proved correct.) Don't get me wrong. There are definitely buildings I want to hate on. But I'm skeptical that any entire style movement has ever been or ever will be bad. That just seems . . . silly. But the belief in its truth is a part of what drives fashion, so it's a silliness that will always be with us. We have to fight it. Notre Dame de melty Haut only looks like it's on drugs. (While also looking like the drugs. Slick move, really.)

architecture (much like art) is in the eye of the beholder.

diversity and differences bring life & discussion.

quincunx · PostAug 16, 2022#9272022-08-16T13:51+00:00

I disagree, there are objectively horrible ways to design a buildings that is an affront to humanity.

STLEnginerd · PostAug 16, 2022#9282022-08-16T14:55+00:00

Sure but can you define them... realistically whatever design principal you posit i suspect there is an example that would be broadly accepted as good despite violating that principal.

quincunx · PostAug 16, 2022#9292022-08-16T17:58+00:00

I'm sure you can. I'll say symmetry-

“Researchers have also learned that looking at symmetrical objects subconsciously activates our smiling muscles more than looking at random patterns. And when we smile, we are more likely to feel calm or reassured.”

and you can find loads of beautiful churches with a single steeple at the corner. Or Union Station with the tower near the corner. But both have symmetry at smaller scales.

Strong Towns - The Spooky Wisdom of Pompeii

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/202 ... of-pompeii

I'll add auto-oriented and large blank walls especially at ground level. And you can surely find some that work, but why risk the small chance that despite violating these it might work especially for places like a city hall or surrounding a gathering place for humans when we know better?

More
Strong Towns Podcast - Why We Should Build Cities for Our Unconscious Brains

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/201 ... st-sussman

Common Home - The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture

https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disor ... hitecture/

STLEnginerd · PostAug 16, 2022#9302022-08-16T18:52+00:00

I'm not 100% sure what auto oriented means in terms of architectural design since you could build the Burj Dubai and plop it into the middle of a see of parking and i fully admit it would detract from the overall impression, but fundamentally you didn't change the architecture.

You acknowledge that asymmetry & blank walls at ground level can work so i guess i don't need to argue those points. Also the houses my daughter draws are symmetric so...

The point remains you can't define a principal that makes architecture good or bad.

I tried as well btw, but every time i thought of one i thought of a contradiction. So I'll admit it comes down to subjective opinion.

You had one point that is worth highlighting. "...why risk the small chance that despite violating these it might work...?" Well yes of course. There are times to take risks and times to play it safe. Not everything can be avante garde or nothing is. The safe stuff makes the risky stuff stand out. Without the risky stuff the safe stuff is endless monotony.

So in the end it come down to people just doing what they like and hoping other like it too and giving the community a say in whether to reject proposals prior to them being built.

_nomad_ · PostAug 16, 2022#9312022-08-16T20:41+00:00

STLEnginerd wrote: ↑
Aug 16, 2022
I'm not 100% sure what auto oriented means in terms of architectural design since you could build the Burj Dubai and plop it into the middle of a see of parking and i fully admit it would detract from the overall impression, but fundamentally you didn't change the architecture.

You acknowledge that asymmetry & blank walls at ground level can work so i guess i don't need to argue those points. Also the houses my daughter draws are symmetric so...

The point remains you can't define a principal that makes architecture good or bad.

I tried as well btw, but every time i thought of one i thought of a contradiction. So I'll admit it comes down to subjective opinion.

You had one point that is worth highlighting. "...why risk the small chance that despite violating these it might work...?" Well yes of course. There are times to take risks and times to play it safe. Not everything can be avante garde or nothing is. The safe stuff makes the risky stuff stand out. Without the risky stuff the safe stuff is endless monotony.

So in the end it come down to people just doing what they like and hoping other like it too and giving the community a say in whether to reject proposals prior to them being built.

Not to intrude on the back and forth debate here, which I find interesting, but I would argue that site and context is part of the architecture and that plopping a building into a different site is changing the architecture.

STLEnginerd · PostAug 16, 2022#9322022-08-16T21:00+00:00

If you say that then by definition the reverse is true, that the architecture changes as the environment around it changes. Think, the little house in the PIXAR movie 'Up'. The city grew around it. It changes its relationship to the environment around it but nothing about the house actually changed. And so by that reasoning what was once good can become bad and i suppose good again eventually.

Which.. maybe.

imran · PostAug 16, 2022#9332022-08-16T23:05+00:00

“On creating structures that foster life

Architecture was getting worse, not better. That was Christopher Alexander's conclusion in the mid-20th century.

Much modern architecture is inert and makes people feel dead inside. It may be sleek and intellectual—it may even win awards—but it does not help generate a feeling of life within its occupants. What went wrong, and how might architecture correct its course?

Motivated by this question, Alexander conducted numerous experiments throughout his career, going deeper and deeper. Beginning with his design patterns, he discovered that the designs that stirred up the most feeling in people, what he called living structure, shared certain qualities. This wasn't just a hunch, but a testable empirical theory, one that he validated and refined from the late 1970s until the turn of the century. He identified 15 qualities, each with a technical definition and many examples.

The qualities are:

Levels of scale
Strong centers
Boundaries
Alternating repetition
Positive space
Good shape
Local symmetries
Deep interlocking and ambiguity
Contrast gradients
Roughness
Echoes
The void
Simplicity and inner calm
Notseparateness
As Alexander writes, living structure is not just pleasant and energizing, though it is also those. Living structure reaches into humans at a transcendent level—connecting people with themselves and with one another—with all humans across centuries and cultures and climates.

Yet modern architecture, as Alexander showed, has very few of the qualities that make living structure. In other words, over the 20th century architects taught one another to do it all wrong. Worse, these errors were crystallized in building codes, zoning laws, awards criteria and education.”

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-arc ... uture.html

PostAug 16, 2022#9342022-08-16T23:37+00:00

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑
Aug 16, 2022
^I think that misses out badly on early modernism, like the Chicago School and Art Deco, which was in no way historicist and is now almost universally revered. No offense, but I feel like the meme is basically complaining about things recently out of style without giving them time to come back in style. Which is every style since style was invented. The new in thing is modern and lovely. The antique is classic. The out of style thing is horrid, was always horrid, and will always be horrid. There's a part of me that honestly believes this about 80s cars, but . . . maybe I'll be proved wrong yet. (In which case the larger point will be proved correct.) Don't get me wrong. There are definitely buildings I want to hate on. But I'm skeptical that any entire style movement has ever been or ever will be bad. That just seems . . . silly. But the belief in its truth is a part of what drives fashion, so it's a silliness that will always be with us. We have to fight it. Notre Dame de melty Haut only looks like it's on drugs. (While also looking like the drugs. Slick move, really.)

I don’t know about that, Art Deco borrowed heavily from historic patterns of Egypt, India, Persia, China etc.
rooted in humanity as it were…

symphonicpoet · PostAug 17, 2022#9352022-08-17T03:59+00:00

imran wrote:I don’t know about that, Art Deco borrowed heavily from historic patterns of Egypt, India, Persia, China etc.
rooted in humanity as it were…

It isn't fundamentally a recreation of any historical style. New art can lean on the historic (and it usually does), but there's a difference between historically informed art and revivalist architecture. And context is everything. When you look at Art Deco next to the neoclassicism coming out of the Ecole de Beaux Arts in the late nineteenth century it's a pretty clear rejection of all of that. Moreover, it replaces many of the pastoral and floral forms of ornamentation with geometric and even industrial ideas. Further, turning to Egypt, India, Persia, and China rather than the west is one of the true hallmarks of early modernism. And it's also a feature artistic conservatives began to attack. I'm not as familiar with the history of architectural criticism as musical criticism, but it sounds to me like Schenker is a thing there as well. (Mind you, he got some things right and his technique is quite useful for understanding the tonal music of the common practice period. But his attacks on everything else are sheer bollocks.)

Some of our most clearly awful contemporary designs borrow heavily on historical styles: half mansards, broken pediments, fluted columns. None of that makes them any good. And all the sphynxes in the world don't make a deco tower historicist. You might, at a glance, confuse St. Francis Xavier with a European church from the middle ages, but no one will ever believe even the very conservative Civil Courts Building is Egyptian, let alone something more typical like Southwestern Bell.

quincunx wrote:I disagree, there are objectively horrible ways to design a buildings that is an affront to humanity.

I won't disagree with that, but I don't think there are objectively horrible styles. There are obviously many objectively horrible contemporary buildings, but I wouldn't take that to be a repudiation of contemporary design in total.

STLEnginerd · PostAug 17, 2022#9362022-08-17T13:56+00:00

imran wrote: ↑
Aug 16, 2022
“On creating structures that foster life

Architecture was getting worse, not better. That was Christopher Alexander's conclusion in the mid-20th century.

Much modern architecture is inert and makes people feel dead inside. It may be sleek and intellectual—it may even win awards—but it does not help generate a feeling of life within its occupants. What went wrong, and how might architecture correct its course?

Motivated by this question, Alexander conducted numerous experiments throughout his career, going deeper and deeper. Beginning with his design patterns, he discovered that the designs that stirred up the most feeling in people, what he called living structure, shared certain qualities. This wasn't just a hunch, but a testable empirical theory, one that he validated and refined from the late 1970s until the turn of the century. He identified 15 qualities, each with a technical definition and many examples.

The qualities are:

Levels of scale
Strong centers
Boundaries
Alternating repetition
Positive space
Good shape
Local symmetries
Deep interlocking and ambiguity
Contrast gradients
Roughness
Echoes
The void
Simplicity and inner calm
Notseparateness
As Alexander writes, living structure is not just pleasant and energizing, though it is also those. Living structure reaches into humans at a transcendent level—connecting people with themselves and with one another—with all humans across centuries and cultures and climates.

Yet modern architecture, as Alexander showed, has very few of the qualities that make living structure. In other words, over the 20th century architects taught one another to do it all wrong. Worse, these errors were crystallized in building codes, zoning laws, awards criteria and education.”

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-arc ... uture.html

Do people actually find this stuff helpful in designing buildings. If anything, its a philosophy, but its not a play book.

To me it seems like great architecture is just inspired. Studio Gang reference Limestone bluffs on the shores of the Great Lakes as their inspiration for the undulating terraces on Aqua in Chicago. I'm not sure what the actual inspiration for One Hundred was, though i have often thought it evokes a chafe of wheat. The Beaux arts style drew inspiration from classical styles which developed over time, probably similarly each architect drawing inspiration from a previous one.

Good architecture is usually inspired by GREAT architecture with cost and functional constraints.

Bad architecture is just a failure to achieve goodness. Much like pornography, you know it when you see it. But there is room for personal preference when it comes to style. Modern architecture is usually not to my taste. I find it a little jarring. Particularly the very rectilinear examples. I have a soft spot for arches. But why in the world must they be wrong and i be right, or vice versa. Why try an diagnose mental disorder based on architectural preferences. I can accept differences of taste. If anything i think the goal should be 'harmonized diversity'. Meaning a diversity of styles which complement each other.

I feel like the way you achieve this is by allowing significant diversity of style while constraining land use policy toward equivalent or incrementally higher productivity uses and density.

Of course there are exceptions even to this. The primary one is in historic districts where it makes sense to preserve the overall character of the neighborhood. Best local example is Soulard, which is a time capsule of sorts. It can be stagnating but selectively i think its worth doing.

imran · PostAug 17, 2022#9372022-08-17T17:19+00:00

^ if I was designing a public facing building, this list would be useful to run through to see if I’m building a place or just a sculptural statement.

Looked up buildings designed by Christopher Alexander and you can see the intentional character he sought to create.

For those who cannot discern between well and poorly designed places, the list could help as a more objective approach.

symphonicpoet · PostAug 18, 2022#9382022-08-18T02:41+00:00

^^Harmonized diversity is a wonderful turn of phrase. I do think any good building should seek to be in harmony with its surroundings.

framer · PostAug 18, 2022#9392022-08-18T12:39+00:00

To me, such things as maintaining a common building line, floor heights, materials, and general massing are much more important than style, as far as mixing the old with the new.

quincunx · PostAug 18, 2022#9402022-08-18T14:05+00:00

STLEnginerd wrote: ↑
Aug 17, 2022
Bad architecture is just a failure to achieve goodness. Much like pornography, you know it when you see it. But there is room for personal preference when it comes to style. Modern architecture is usually not to my taste. I find it a little jarring. Particularly the very rectilinear examples. I have a soft spot for arches. But why in the world must they be wrong and i be right, or vice versa. Why try an diagnose mental disorder based on architectural preferences. I can accept differences of taste. If anything i think the goal should be 'harmonized diversity'. Meaning a diversity of styles which complement each other.

Because it's important to understand why mistakes and failures happened, their origins, and why they failed so they are less likely to happen again.

If you find out lead in paint and gasoline is bad for people, shouldn't we try to get lead out of in paint and gas?
If we find out a way of building places and designing buildings is bad for people, shouldn't we stop doing it, especially when we already knew how to build in a life-affirming way?
Or should we not even investigate?

STLEnginerd · PostAug 18, 2022#9412022-08-18T21:27+00:00

Sure investigate away, the topic is worthy of study, but I am unconvinced that modern architecture by its nature is making us all depressed. Even if it was i am not sure it always has been making us depressed or that it always will. I am also not sure we KNOW how to build in a 'life affirming way', or whether that is even something static that remains constant through your life and is common to everyone around you. I certainly don't think all architects of the modern school are autistic or that they are deliberately trying to suffocate your soul.

I am pretty sure they are just trying to make something nice that meets the function and cost of the project the have be hired to produce.

gary kreie · PostAug 18, 2022#9422022-08-18T23:26+00:00

How zoning reform has helped turn Buffalo around.

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2022/0 ... alo-around

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

quincunx · PostAug 18, 2022#9432022-08-18T23:56+00:00

Spread out places are expensive

KSDK - Residents plea for help as potholes cause huge problems in Jefferson County subdivision

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local ... cbad681c2b

imran · PostAug 20, 2022#9442022-08-20T00:59+00:00

‘Everything we see in our surroundings raises our spirits a bit or lowers them a bit’

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/arts ... -dead.html

Going to have to geek out & get his book - A pattern of language.

I am able to read the article by search but the above link is taking me to a subscription page - if anyone is able to work-around

quincunx · PostAug 22, 2022#9452022-08-22T22:49+00:00

imran · PostAug 24, 2022#9462022-08-24T11:52+00:00

While these are not the most amazing project posted, his tweets are highlighting the fact that todays architects and contractors are still capable of thoughtful and impactful infill. No blank/dead spaces, No excuses.

I will try to post more of these here. It has been eye opening and affirming for me. While I will always prefer we don’t waste the historic gems we already have, at least there is hope that those empty lots could still be brought back with graceful architecture.

symphonicpoet · PostAug 25, 2022#9472022-08-25T05:03+00:00

^They can be. And I think some of the infill in Soulard, for instance, is every bit the equal of that. (Sometimes even better.)

(And yes, those are lovely.)

imran · PostAug 25, 2022#9482022-08-25T15:13+00:00

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑
Aug 25, 2022
^They can be. And I think some of the infill in Soulard, for instance, is every bit the equal of that. (Sometimes even better.)

(And yes, those are lovely.)

Have to admit I don’t know soulard too well. Do you have pics of the infill you’re referring to?

PostAug 25, 2022#9492022-08-25T16:44+00:00

sc4mayor · PostAug 25, 2022#9502022-08-25T20:16+00:00

imran wrote: ↑
Aug 25, 2022
symphonicpoet wrote: ↑
Aug 25, 2022
^They can be. And I think some of the infill in Soulard, for instance, is every bit the equal of that. (Sometimes even better.)

(And yes, those are lovely.)
Have to admit I don’t know soulard too well. Do you have pics of the infill you’re referring to?

There's actually a lot of pretty great infill around the SE side that can be easy to miss.

Much of Dolman in Lafayette Square has essentially had its turn of the century streetscape recreated. There's more on Carol and around Mississippi and Lafayette on the NE corner.

Lasalle Park:

These were built in the '80s:

Soulard:

Benton Park:

I've always liked these modern infills in the Grove:

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