Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

This argument is ridiculous:

Note: I have set aside for the purposes of this article the fact that our ugly buildings are all capitalistic megaprojects and thus we cannot change our design until we change our economic system.

There are plenty of beautiful buildings being built today. Just because the Pritzker Prize isn't awarded to them because the panel awarding this prize believes in hideous monstrosities doesn't mean that the only buildings being built are ugly.

Here are a few counter-examples, out of literally millions of new buildings being built around the world: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/buildings-redefine..., all of which happen to be "capitalistic megaprojects!"

Also, neither here nor there, but I wonder if Nathan's writing this article because he fired all of his writers after they tried to unionize: "Yes, we were fired by the editor-in-chief of a socialist magazine for trying to start a worker co-op."

https://www.gawker.com/media/the-current-affair-at-current-a...

Your counter-examples appear to be yet more glass behemoths devoid of life or color

"That's just like, your opinion, man"

Better for a building's inhabitants to be free to bring their own life and color, than for the building to try to impose one decade's view of life and color upon every generation for the next century.

How do you propose they do that? For example, take your typical steel-and-glass skyscraper, such as the One World Trade Center. How can the inhabitants make the exterior less hostile? Or affect it at all?

And isn't the complete absence of any kind of style, color, or pleasant features in general, an imposition of a specific view in itself?

And finally, is what you describe even a problem? How many people living in old Art Deco skyscrapers are miserable and trying to leave due to having a century-old style imposed upon them? Or people living in historic neighborhoods? Whereas featureless gray cubes "free them to bring their own life and color"?

The life of a building comes from the way it is used, not the way it is decorated. There is no need to decorate the outside of the WTC, because it's the experience of being inside that matters.

As for gray cubes, you can shine any color or pattern of light on them you want.

The capitalistic megaprojects of, say, 1750-1930 were much more likely to be beautiful than the modern ones. Incredibly ornate banks and rail terminus stations. Beautiful brick, stone, and cast-iron apartment buildings. Towering stone offices. Even factory complexes were usually brick and had some amount of ornamentation [1][2]. I'm aware that there's a lot of survivorship bias supporting this view, but is there even a single modern factory building worth mentioning?

[1]: https://lostnewengland.com/2014/03/smith-wesson-factory-spri... [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/mnvhlc/home/brown-county/augus...

> Even factory complexes were usually brick and had some amount of ornamentation

And these factories are often converted into exclusive apartments these days. Modern factories are instead torn down.

Maybe there’s a more effective argument to be made than ‘capitalism sucks,’ then.

La Louvre Abu Dhabi. Man, that feels gooood. I like it.

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