In the video I posted, a Chinese company has taken the franchising model and manufactured homes to skyscrapers, to build McSkyscrapers. Think of how much construction is going on in Asia to drive that innovation. . Architects will have to take a step back and let software worry about where every little electrical outlet goes, and concentrate on the bigger picture.
Hundreds of years ago, people got together and built things like this cathedral:
Most everyone who was involved in building this cathedral could not read. None of them had electricity, or a more powerful machine than a horse, and they lived in houses with no heat or plumbing. Yet they could build this.
Then we went crazy with modernism. With electricity, computers, wealth unimaginable hundreds of years earlier, this is what we build:
But when I write about a renaissance in architecture, it is because I see a true rejection of this dehumanizing modernism, and both a return to the aesthetically pleasing forms, and the willingness to go further, with new designs, new materials, to create something functional and yet beautiful and inspiring again.
hey, McSkyscraper have their place. they are the most compact way to accomodate humans on a given plot of land.
support all their human needs so to speak.
i did visit the cathedral at Salisbury back in 1989.
What efforts were expended to create all that majesty!
They were skilled artisans whomever they were.
Part of the reason that skyscrapers are so homogenous in appearance is the value of real estate. A builder is trying to maximize the space available for an expensive piece of property. The easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to do that is to build a boxy skyscraper and fill it with tenants right away.
Those fantastic structures you hint at, many of the them are built in the Gulf States where a nation’s immense wealth is concentrated in a few decisive hands, populations are low, and arid land is cheap. With cheap land and few native tenants, they can build such fanciful structures to attract international clientele.
I’m not disagreeing with you. You can point to new structures in the US that are breath-taking (though still tame compared to a lot of those fanciful oil-money structures). Singapore and Hong Kongwhere capital is kingalso is home to many fantastic buildings. I think things are changing, but just suggesting how the price of land and heavy regulation on the use of it can drive builders to go for space-maximizing solutions.