@diplo the elevations and sections are reminiscent of your stuff
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This is really cool and way beyond anything I’ve ever done (it’s very reminiscent of some City Beautiful elevations, actually, also lovely, colorful, bursting with detail), but I’m flattered that you made the comparison.
Today a talk and tour was being held at the city hall, and I had no other plans, so of course I had to go. We had the rare opportunity to go into the courtyard that’s normally closed. It’s very atmospheric – like a promenade, playground, parking garage, and cloister. Or a Quake map.
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Boston must have been on a tear in the 50s-60s, there’s so much crazy brutalist stuff. I love when its imposition runs into a spoke of Boston’s narrow angled back alleys.
Boston was basically the concrete capital of the world during the 60s and early 70s, and city hall was its epicenter. It was one part of the controversial efforts to revitalize what was a dying city.
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Apologies for dragging down the level of discourse here, but whenever I go through architecture threads I wish I had some capacity for experiencing (let alone discussing) what’s been shared aside from “I like how that looks” and “I don’t like how that looks.”
Are there any books or documentaries or even just ways of thinking about cool buildings when I see them anyone would recommend to someone who knows essentially nothing? Just to get a basic understanding of the field.
Depends on what sorts of architecture you want to get to know better. I haven’t yet found a text that adequately synthesizes global developments into a full, cross-referencing history (and most of the “starters’ guides” that acquaint you with terminology continue to be incredibly limited, culturally). The best books on architecture I’ve read have tended to focus on European/US architecture and/or 20th/21st architecture. Here are some of them:
- The Secret Life of Buildings: An American Mythology for Modern Architecture || Gavin Macrae-Gibson
- The Language of Post-Modern Architecture || Charles Jencks
- Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture || Timothy Brittain-Catlin
- The Classical Language of Architecture || John Summerson
- Architecture in the United States || Dell Upton
- The Gothic Enterprise || Robert A. Scott
The first two books might be the most difficult to read among these, just for a bit of obtuse and over-stretched language, but Gibson’s book especially is recommended for seeing how you can interpret a building and see it in a broader historical context. I think all of these buck the trend of architectural texts being dry and dull.
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I’ve been watching a French/German series called Architectures / Baukunst which does a pretty good job of presenting buildings from round the world. Pretty not-TVy in how it’s put together; doesn’t gush about things, is edited intelligently.
I’ll share it somewhere if you can’t find it (i got it on Karagarga).
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Great recommendations - thank you both.
It actually looks like you can watch the documentary series on Youtube, if anyone else is interested:
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Some guy on twitter posted this
https://twitter.com/sam_kriss/status/878196059301978112
and I posted this in response (which he’ll never read):
[quote]Victorian gothic is pretty cool, though. I think people tend to like it because it has fanciful appeal. It’s not all nefarious preference. I mean, I’m with you in being against generalized appeals to “tradition”, but I also think it’s good to see what people might be lamenting. I often look at 20th century apartment rises and am dispirited by how many of them seem to treat residential living as a factorial affair. It is possible that this is a part of what some self-labeled anti-modernists may be reacting against: a drone-like existence in a mechanism.
If you haven’t, you should read Kunstler’s “The Geography of Nowhere.” In it he talks about Disney World, similar to a photo you posted. He is repulsed by its fakeness and consumerist function, but he also recognizes how its organization might appeal to deeper desires. My point: modernism was a very abrupt displacement of many things and its criticisms can’t be so easily dismissed as a matter of bad taste.
(I do think bad taste is an element at play, but the question should be about what broader effects have led to these sorts of preferences)[/quote]
and then
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I completely agree with you but also remember that Kriss’ comment is directed at alt-righters who explicitly claim violent allegiance to Western Civilization. So like it’s one thing to say that normal people can’t articulate architectural preferences because they’ve never been given any information to, but it’s another thing to say altrighters are being simpletons about stuff they ought to know about by their own lights. It’s an argument about hypocrisy (which, to be fair, is one of the most boring arguments).
If it were just the first image I would agree but all of the other images dilute that point into a generalized gleeful rage against general bad taste and postmodern classical. If he wanted to make a point about vile conservative ideologies manifesting in architectural preference I don’t think the way he went about it served himself well.
Turns out, no one ever knows what they’re talking about
Rereading about Inigo Jones, an early English architect, employed before I think that term was even used (it probably would’ve been something like Surveyor of the King’s Works or plain ol’ Comptroller), and it’s interesting to see palladianism and greek revivalism manifest long before either found a fashionabless among practitioners.
The first is the early 1600s, and the second is around 1630; the former preceding palladian trends by about a century, the latter preceding greek revivalism by… I don’t know, a little less than two-hundred years? I always appreciate the cases that show how trends are just about how alike ideas come together in a span of time, and not about the sheer newness of an idea, especially with how neatly architectural lineages tend to be presented
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More bullshit
Are you in favor of anti-density regulations, diplo? I’m not a fan of regulations of lot set-asides for unused pavilions and height regulations, or, I prefer the cost of a dense shadowy city over the cost of up-bidded real estate if a city refuses to get denser.
I mean balance is key obviously but at some level there must be a backstop of communal control of aesthetics. The city can’t get too ugly.
I don’t have a readymade stance on density or building height. There is, of course, the obvious issue here about how it will affect the greenery it will be casting a shadow on. The negatives there are unquestionable. The real criticism I had in mind is that this is just another case of Boston’s “building boom” existing in a fantasy post-war land where development is implicitly good. This is not Boston’s reality. There are a fuckin ton of condo and apartment complexes up everywhere and they’re barely populated, years in. Nobody knows who these buildings are for. The city just seems to think that a ton of rich people will move here and everything will work itself out (and, if that were to happen, well, lol; Boston is already the most economically stratified city in the US). The real evil here is that laws are being crashed past to erect a $1billion rise and fucking nothing is still being done about the homeless population.
Also yeah almost all (there are one or two exceptions within Boston) of these buildings are sinfully dull and a blight on cities. They are often the products of developer councils, meaning that there is no back-and-forth aesthetically oriented design process going on. It’s about completing the project as fast as possible to keep the developer’s return on investment at a maximum. These buildings cost a lot to put up, but you don’t get an acute sense of how cheap they look until you’re next to them and see the untextured materials and shoddy modular construction.
that’s interesting to me because the main problem in the pnw is 5-over-1s, which are a similar hideous cheaply constructed blight on the landscape but they don’t look cheap if you’re up close and looking at the first floor, which is usually made of brick. Its every other part that looks liable to fall apart after a year’s worth of rain warps all the wood construction of the upper floors and the buildings fill up with black mold.