Nearly Three-Quarters Of Americans Are Sick Of Modern Architecture

The Federalist ^ | October 17, 2020 | Evita Duffy

[Beowulf9]

My favorite scene from Hannah and her sisters is Woody Allen’s comment on the architecture in New York with an obvious statement regarding modern architecture:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VPzGI26Sivw#searching

[Dr. Sivana]

The photos are mostly of buildings in the concrete "brutalist" style.

Modern is being used in a broader sense, just as many composers are called classical who are technically calssical composers, but are easily distinguished from rock, hip-hop, blue grass and jazz.

[backwoods-engineer]

why do government agencies force ugly buildings on the American people?

Because it is a Communist goal to replace all aesthetic beauty with ugliness. It is all part of a plan to demoralize the American people.

[x]

When graduate school a professor said: “Institutions need buildings, but architects want monuments “. There is the crux of the problem.

Sort of. But in comparison to what today's post-modernist "starchitects" are doing, the brutalism of the 1960s and 1970s seems drab and functional. Architects then may have thought that they were being daring and path-breaking, but their stuff doesn't impress at all now.

[Varda]

I think so as well. I saw a documentary on FLW which said he thought his building was better than anything hung on it’s walls.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Brutalist concrete structures from the Sixties/Seventies are not modern architecture.

[mewzilla]

It wouldn’t take much.

[left that other site]

Boston City Hall

The brutalest of the Brutalists.

[dfwgator]

On the other hand London is still full of those awful 60s buildings, no imagination at all, just square blocks.

[Varda]

I think “Modern” is just a style that succeeded more classic architecture. I’ve noticed the segmenting of modern into sub periods and styles (ie. mid-century modern).

[PGR88]

I see it most obviously on college campuses.

Some time between the early 1930s and the late 1940s, Americans went from building strong, beautiful buildings of stone and slate on the exterior, with wood finishings and interiors, to ugly cement / steel boxes with nondescript and ugly interiors.

It is like a switch was flipped. No doubt the ideology and morality of the country began to flip at that time as well.

[DIRTYSECRET]

Construction quality went down when slavery ended.

[Chode]

it's not architecture, it has no esthetic value, it is simply construction

[AFreeBird]

Frank wanted his buildings to be part of it’s surroundings, and make use of the native, local materials as much as possible.

Falling Water is a good example of that philosophy.

[Impala64ssa]

Speaking of brutalism,

This architectural "gem", the Orange County Gov't Center in Goshen, NY. One of Paul Rudolph's, ahem, masterpieces. It was plagued with leaks and mold from the day it was completed in 1971, 87 roofs, what could possibly go wrong? It was finally demolished 8 yrs ago over the objections of the World Monument Fund and artsy fartsy types who thought the building was beautiful.
The town of Goshen is for all intents and purposes an historical site, many houses built before the Civil War and it's home to the oldest horse race track in N America. To say this monstrousity was out of place is an understatement.

[dfwgator]

We did the tour there a few years back, it’s...different.

[PGR88]

I would guess the driving force for “ugly” architecture is cost. Straight unadorned walls are faster and cheaper than moldings, carvings and columns.

I have nothing against Canada, but I find this to an extreme there. I was in Montreal recently. Anything outside the city center is cheap box architecture, with a few cheesy “modern" adornments. Its soviet architecture softened slightly for a mass-marketing and commercial purpose. America has the same, but they are further down the soul-destroying path of post-modernism and phony collectivist- materialism than we are.

[mewzilla]

One of my colonial ancestors built a house in New England that is still standing, in great shape, and sadly not for sale. It’s beautiful. I’d live in that in a heartbeat.

[sphinx]

A disclaimer: I am not a fan of modernist architecture. It is ok in some settings; if you have an Architectural Digest-worthy house cantilevered off a cliff overlooking the ocean, or perched on a bluff with miles of mountain or desert vistas stretching in all directions, a modernist structure might work: simplicity of line; expanses of glass to admit the out-of-doors; a structure that depends on its setting for effect. But modernism usually seems barren in more ordinary settings, and it tends not to play well with other styles. Most of us have neighbors next door and across the street, and I would be embarrassed to trash their view with a sterile modernist structure.

That said, I will still put in a plug for my favorite movie discovery of recent years: Columbus (Kogonada, 2017). The film is not "about" architecture, exactly, but it uses the modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana to great effect. An architectural exploration becomes an important narrative prop in an unlikely emergent friendship (John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, both excellent), and modernism becomes a metaphor. It is very well done. The film itself is an exploration of family, loss, loneliness, relationships and moving on. It is contemplative; there are no zombies, aliens, explosions, terrorists, sex scenes or car chases, and nobody dies. It is brilliantly acted and beautifully shot. It starts very quietly and builds; give it 15 minutes for the story to come to you, and you will be hooked.

The Columbus architecture story is worth knowing. J. Irwin Miller was for many years president and then chairman of Cummins, a big company that stayed home in Columbus, Indiana. Somewhere along the line, Miller got interested in modernist architecture. Under his guidance, the Cummins Foundation offered to pay the architectural fees for any Columbus institution willing to invest in a prestige building designed by an architect drawn from an approved list. As a result, Columbus has an astonishing collection of buildings designed by the top modernist architects of the mid-20th century. I had the opportunity to drive through Columbus earlier this year. The modernist buildings there are moderately scaled, in a way that is appropriate for a smaller, low-density midwestern city. At this scale, good landscaping makes a big difference and they blend very nicely with their more traditionist neighbors. (The biggest and ugliest modernist building, not surprisingly, is a school, which the film mocks as "brutal.") Anyone who wants to hate on modernist architecture should visit Columbus and see what can be achieved if done right. At larger scales, however, massive concrete, steel and glass buildings that can't be balanced by landscaping turn me off.

[Albion Wilde]

That building, the Guggenheim, is not only hideous, its interior is vertigo-inducing as you walk the tilted corridors, and the curves were made without benefit of modern computer imaging and have gross imperfections. It is a blot on the landscape outside as well.