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Comment by allturtles | Hacker News Reader

> I would recognize this place as distinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biological_...

It's distinctly... hideous. It looks like a prison block, not a place to encourage human happiness.

> I guess this is a good as place as any to mention that Corbusier railed against the metric system as anti-human. The reasoning was that human spaces should be defined through human proportions not power of 10 proportioning.

That is a silly argument, nothing about the metric system requires you to have power-of-10 proportions in your construction, any more than we have power-of-12 proportions in U.S. construction just because we use feet and inches.

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I can tell you haven't been there, which is okay, but I have to try to explain it.

The Salk Institute is inarguably one of the most beautiful man made places in southern California. It was built with the explicit intent to attract and cluster the best and brightest minds in the world so they could work together to eliminate human disease. It's all human scale, calm, focused ... the concrete is somehow warm. It masterfully directs the sunlight around it and creates contrasting shadowy nooks where people can chat and take refuge from the heat on hot days. It's inspiring. You can feel the creative power within its walls.

Brilliant people from every corner of the globe still uproot their lives just to work there. There are many awful examples of brutalist architecture, but this building isn't one.

Cube is cube.

Shapes can support skilled expressions of beauty. The least effort spent on drawing a curve, by hand or mathematically, has more beauty than cube.

You know what else provides shade in hot days? Trees. Shade cloth. Umbrellas. Sails. Statues. Market stalls. Extrusions. ext.

Cube is cube.

You can feel anything when it's written. If it's a cold day and your dog just died (or whatever is enough in your personal life to make you slightly unhappy), I'd prefer to be anywhere else in the world than huddled for warmth behind a grey Cube, with the ever present discomfort of infectious disease protocols in the back of my mind.

Cube is completely submitted to the purpose of the building, it has no relation to the human body or experience.

Cube is cube.

A cell is as Robert Hooke noticed is also a cube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)#/media/File:Wil...

Okay yes true. Cube shapes are everywhere. And reductionism, minimalism and brutalism have their virtues. I am content to die on the hill that Cube is ugly, if my concession is pleasing.

You're entitled to your opinion.

As you with your opinion that it is a beautiful construction in the first place. Difference is the Parent’s opinion was suppressed in modern architecture and yours was imposed.

I thought that might be your reaction to the Salk Institute. I have a feeling prisoners would prefer the Salk institute to their current conditions. I don't think you are giving any Creedence to the personality types that might want to work at the Salk Institute.

I'm glad we agree it is distinct.

I guess I didn't make my silly argument articulate enough. Let me try again. I was trying to point on the Modernist architect's obsession with the individual over the industrial age. I was trying to point out that he thought the measurement should be in reference to the form which gets lost if people start trying to have even decimal numbers.

I have to agree here. I'm all for different architectural styles, so they can embody the local environment, culture, history. Yet that style is the embodiment of an idea more than anything. I know it is linked to a zeitgeist of somewhere in the not distant past, and to ideas of funcionalism, maybe minimalism etc but I fail to see local/regional culture there. I fail to see any interaction with nature there. Looking at it... oh man, does it look hideous to me. Maybe it's because I lived for many years in Brasília, the most car centric city I've ever been to, the butt of many jokes to people who went to live there. "The city with no street corners." Also no sidewalks, a city where blocks have names such as "Entertainment Sector South", "Hotel Sector North", etc. Ugh...

But... hey, I have some friends who still live there and enjoy it. I know people who really enjoy life there, so that's why I'm all for different architectural/urbanism styles. Too bad I also know some people who would love to move from there but can't. Life is complicated.

I would love to visit Brasilia. I understand that the planning stage was a little too utopian. I think that they have been working to mold it into a functional city. What is interesting is the thought of a city needing to be worn in like blue jeans.

That is certainly a post industrialization idea. Life is complicated I only know what works for me.

That Salk space reminds me of the Karnak template in Luxor.

https://lonelyplanetimages.imgix.net/a/g/hi/t/a19a8469295279...

That reference is interesting because we only know that location absent the original inhabitants. What we understand as that structure is a view unique to a point in time. I think the timeless was a major design goal.

To me, a lot of the better International (Bauhaus) style architecture seems to evoke that timelessness.

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