I live in the Philadelphia area and a lot of the row houses here dating to a century or more ago have absolutely beautiful brickwork, incredibly creative and interesting stuff, often on houses that these days barely sell for $100K. It would be completely impossible to duplicate this kind of thing today even with a construction budget of millions. The craftsmen who can do that kind of work are nonexistent now -- today you're lucky to find somebody who can lay bricks in a straight line.

My beef with modern home architecture (the stuff in the US, mainly) is not that it's different or modern, but that it's so fucking fake in its fundamental elements. Vinyl siding stamped to look like old-fashioned wood siding but obviously isn't because of the vertical seams and the bumps; double-paned vinyl windows with glazing dividers emulating old-fashioned casement windows that don't even look three-dimensional; shutters that obviously can't close; panel doors made from one block of essentially cardboard etc. etc.

millenial grey

There's nothing in the construction world that I hate more than the fake gray wood interlocking vinyl floor planks that are in every house now. I guess they're supposed to be the color of wood on old barns or fences, but I've never seen real wood of that color on a floor anywhere. I bought my house a couple of years ago and it had that type of fake flooring in the living room. I deliberately left it uncovered during the renovations, assuming that it would be trashed which would force me to replace it with something I actually like -- no such luck, that stuff is actually pretty indestructable, unfortunately.

I read The Fountainhead in college and thought it was great. Then I recovered from the flu and thought "what the hell was that shit?"

The popularisation of the idea that ornament is inherently bad genuinely did far more damage to the visual environment of the UK than the Luftwaffe managed with years of strategic bombing in my view.

i mean are we not allowed to be opinionated on architecture all of a sudden? in a city environment, its what ends up defining the form of 80-90% of that environment. I feel likr thats actually one of the areas that make a ton of sense for the general public to be very opinionated about.

also, sarcastically commrnting on the amount of opinions people have on architecture, then literally following that up with an opinion on architecture... ironic.

No, I literally want it to be illegal for you to have opinions on architecture and mandatory by law for you to hear mine.

Why you should care? If everyone was as selfish as you, there wouldn’t be land for nature, parks, or agriculture.

We don’t need more houses, we need more density, so less houses and more condos.

Free land means what in this context?

based and dictatorpilled. Big man me with your will to power daddy

Unless you build the house to last 200 years, with occasional maintenance. No drywall monstrosity will survive that long.

As someone who lives in the south of France...they do. Houses like the ones in the second half of the comic are quite rare. No idea what they're crying about.
Even in apartment buildings they have regulations and they all have the same color sun screens on their balconies and stuff.
For example:

Holy shit this is a bad take.

Rectangles were fucking hard for a very long time. Which is why vernacular building strategies came about (why there’s so much variation in architecture older than the Industrial Revolution).

This entire thread reads like it’s filled with opinions from people who have never put anything together.

A post modernist would never argue for neutral styles for efficiency…

I actually enjoy all three styles. Though out of the three, I’d prefer to actually live in the smallest bland box.

I'd think it was always quite expensive to build like that, and what we see today is what survived. A lot of (european) vernacular architecture is just ... not that.

In fact I'd think the "old" houses in the comic, would need constant maintenance. Paint the wooden windows, make sure they don't distort, a new roof every 20-30 years. The places you see in a deserted italian, french or spanish village might have been uninhabited for a few decades, and are basically ruins.

Fachwerksbau (Alsace) is just fetish harness for houses, change my mind.

I was talking more about the overall shape of the building rather than doors, windows etc etc and also not pre-industrial revolution ages.

I lived in a souther italian commune for a while and i still go there in vacation, the houses are very old and most shapes are cubic or rectangles except for windows and doors because it was just easier to build that way (the houses are also not big so it's a factor to keep in mind) while bigger structures do use more arches and many shapes

It's unpopular to say the least.

Fuck the NiMBYs

Yep, I've lived in old buildings most of my life (very german predilection for the "Altbau" I guess) and I'm not sure whether people are aware how much energy it costs.

I love 3.5m ceilings and 2.5m high windows, I love thick walls made from solid stone, that's how I grew up, in a rented place in a wonderful turn-of the century building. ... it's not even expensive to rent compared to where I live now. But heating alone costs enough that it could pay for a single room somewhere else. And given that the walls are thick, but not insulated, you have to make sure you heat it, make sure you don't put things too close to the wall, otherwise you might have to battle moisture and moldy walls. In fact, if the windows insulate too well it might even be a drawback because the moisture can't escape, and you have to air the rooms (the very german habit of "Stoßlüften") frequently to not get mold.

The rectengular zero-energy buildings of today, you probably don't need to heat much. Friends of mine used to live in a building like that. Well insulated, three-pane windows, all that. They barely had to turn the heat on in the middle of winter. Body heat, residual heat from cooking and what not, it's practically enough to keep the place warm.

I am a unique and special snowflake.

Somebody mentions Ayn Rand in a neutral/positive light and gets only upvotes.

What's going on here.

Nonsense. What we need is less population not even more unhumane stapler-boxes where noone would live if they had the choice.
I did my part and didn't procreate, even though we would have more than enough dough to rationalize such a decision. So, you probably have kids so you added to the problem. More housing won't solve our problems.
BTW, here, in germany, situation is not that bad because a few people build bungalows instead of skyscrapers. It's even very rare to find if you don't wanna build.

And yeah I'm selfish in that regard, I can't stand people, so I don't want them around me, if avoidable. And still be in a city not some fucking rural desert.

Please, don't tell me you'd prefer a human shoebox if you could do otherwise. For the sake of other people.

PS: "free land" means larger properties, no neighbors, tiny houses.

It's true. But also could be less true. With our modern tech, we could build like they did back then, but much better. If we built for longevity. But we won't.

Yeah, I'm looking into insulating my 100+ year old house, and it might mean the stones on the base need to be flattened and covered up. The windows and some of the doors are now plastic, since the previous ones (that were already not the original) were water damaged, which somehow involved the indoor doors too.

I just love modern monochromatic architecture. Inject glass walls, metal accents, and white concrete into my veins.

You can stick a fancy facade on basically any wall construction to make it look like an old-half timbered style, or brick, or stone, etc.

But trying to actually build an old brick/stone/plaster and timber monstrosity today wouldn't be smart. Insulation, moisture control, energy efficiency, and even creature comforts like wifi signal penetration are all miles better with newer construction methods.

I agree the architecture is boring, but again, it doesn't have to look this way. However, I think most people would rather have the soulless gray box than have uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter.

and no trees! yuck.

Positive? We established here these boxes are ugly and uninspired.

Having seen other German words, I'm going to just blindly guess that the word etymology is this:

Fachwerksbau

Fuckworks Bau

Sex worker Bough

Sex Dungeon Beams

Yep, fetish harness house.

Architectural degeneration.

Curious that Provence needed neither chimneys nor garages.
What's that about?

uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter

You mean soulful mold?

As long as the house has at least 1 window each on opposing sides, and at least 2 metres of spacing between the next plot margin, I'd give it a pass.
I'm writing this from an area where I won't find such a place even if I were to pay 1/3 of my salary as rent.

That's just (old and) ugly brutalism from the soviet fucking union.

But that would lower the benefit for the constructor of about $600 for a measly 50 years of pleasure.

At least all the things I see on the buildings in the top picture seem to have a utilitarian purpose.
Of course, how well they fulfilled their purpose would have depended upon the availability of materials and manufacturing processes at the time.

I now feel the need to create a coordinate system where a 120 degree angle is orthogonal, so people will say the same for hexagons.
And then pixels on the monitors will be arranged in a hexagonal formation.
It would be fun to watch.

But IDK if that will work out. Perhaps create another space.

You also see people tracing the 4 as a zigzag shape, in one lazy stroke. I tend to do that, but I don’t know if it’s a specifically French thing.

Fun fact about the 7: even in France, you don’t cross them when doing chord notation (in classical music at least), because a crossed number means it’s a diminished intervall. That’s not a problem because the digit 1 isn’t used when numbering chords.

Is that good though? In Japan they build houses with the expectation that they’re only going to last one generation and then will be rebuilt, and the result is that housing is actually affordable because there isn’t nearly as much speculative investing in housing driving up house prices.

That’s funny, my French eye didn’t even notice the difference between the 1s before reading your comment!

Exactly, the vernacular of the past was based on the materials that were available and practical at the time, for the demands of the time. Whatever came out was just the practical way to build under these conditions, not necessarily a choice.

In that sense, the rectangular box IS the vernacular of our time. Practical materials that fulfill the needs people have to present-day homes. Straight walls, insulation, energy efficiency. Of course you can plaster on a fake facade but it's a choice, not a consequence.

Oof, I'd hate to live in a hexagon house with hexagon rooms. Can you just imagine what the corridoors would be like?

Either you accept that the corridors are constantly bending in and out, or you shove a rectangle through there for normalcy and disrupt all the other rooms

Covering up can't be avoided unless you want to insulate on the inside. And insulating on the inside is a real pita to do right, so covering up it will be :) It's a shame to lose the old stone + brick look, but energy wise we must.

Flattening the outside might not be necessary if you've got local contractors who can do carpentry + flexible insulation solutions. See the first option for an example: https://www.eurabo.be/nl/updates/buitenmuren-isoleren-langs-buiten In Dutch because I don't know the terminology to find something like this in English.

the nimbys wouldn't object to high density housing anywhere nearly as much if there were guarantees that the poor wouldn't move in.

That's a great point. Alternative is that once you build enough housing (admittedly that would take some doing to redo everything, best bet is slow replacement) you wouldn't really need that large industry to begin with. You just have houses everywhere that are good and you build a few here or there to replace accidental damage or the slow turnover of old ones.

Idk if that's possible. Humans never did it before.

In Australia, you can get the soulless grey box with shit insulation and mold problems, so it's twice as good! /s

I don't want to

There could be trees, why does it have to be no trees

I would normally agree. But look at those pictures. We can't go against the pictures. What if a tree falls on it and breaks it