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Comment by engineer_22 | Hacker News Reader

Yea... What we need is communist style housing blocks. Standardized, modular, monotonous.

To me, at least, those adjectives are all associated with American suburbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tract_housing#/media/File:Sout...

Little boxes, on a hillside

little boxes made of ticky-tacky

Little boxes, on a hillside

and they all look just the same...

- Malvina Reynolds (1962)

and massively inefficient. the roads, the driveways, the garages, garage doors, the walkways, the easements, roofs, the eases, hvac systems, water heaters, the plumbing, the extra windows, the extra walls, the extra electrical/phone/cable/internet, and more... all done over and over. might as well have built one huge building and shared all those redundancies and infrastructure costs, while maximizing space and energy efficiency.

Haha, well now we know how The Matrix came to be.

But we don't exist to be "efficient".

I’m sure your being sarcastic but Soviet housing at least incorporated parks and shops in efficient distances to walk to from housing blocks.

Whenever I visit Prague, I can't help but notice the stark (pun accidental) difference between the Communist-era concrete boxes and the beautiful architecture of the periods pre-dating it.

Same in Kyiv/Kiev. Very striking.

Also productive to consider the fate of Gaudi's housing projects in Barcelona, notably Casa Mila aka La Pedrera.

It's not that bad when you employ a competent architect. Much of Lisbon was built under Salazar in the 1960s, it doesn't look half bad and 50 years later it's holding up extremely well.

> Much of Lisbon was built under Salazar in the 1960s, it doesn't look half bad and 50 years later it's holding up extremely well.

Lisbon has construction spanning from Roman times all the way to today. Most of the downtown was rebuilt after an earthquake in the 18th century.

Besides public buildings, there were a few residencial neighbourhoods and social housing built by Salazar's regime, implying that 'much of Lisbon' is his legacy is factually wrong.

Moreover the "Estado Novo" architectural style promoted by the fascist regime was meant to bring back themes from traditional portuguese construction, with a lot of masonry embellishments. This is the opposite of the monotone pragmatism of the soviet blocks.

Lisbon almost doubled between 1950 and 1975. The neighbourhoods from the Zoo going east are all from that era, it's a lot of the city.

Sure the both Lisbon and Porto grew and Salazar enforced a de facto architectural style, but the regime only built public buildings and some social housing.

Perhaps this is an English-as-a-foreign-language thing but to me "under Salazar" implies that the regime ordered, and payed for, most of the construction in that era which is not true.

Not a native speaker either, but to me "under Salazar" would mean during his era and expressing the era's spirit. As you say, the city planning and architecture certainly bears the stamp of the Estado Novo, even though the government didn't pay for most of it.

There's a conversation about quality versus quantity to be had but neither side wants to admit the other has reason to exist.

Given just how hard I’m having to work to keep any roof over my head, I really don’t care for the ‘quality’ argument. Australia has become so overpriced that literally nobody in the next generation is likely to own a home. Try building a successful country when most of your citizens are serfs.

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