OH PLEASE!
This is such a tired old trope/prejudice.
A lot of the modernists lived in ornate pre war buildings because THEY WERE BORN AND BECAME ADULTS BEFORE THE WAR.
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Next you’ll tell me that many early automobile designers rode horses!
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But they never lived in buildings in the style they designed. As adults they could have easily chosen to do so, but they didn’t. When what you choose for yourself is vastly different from what you are creating for others, people might be forgiven for thinking that you aren’t quite sincere in your work.
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I could start lining up modernist architects (Aalto, Corbusier, Erskine, Markelius, Gray and etc etc forever) who lived in buildings they designed themselves but it would be a pointless excercise.
The whole argument about where any architect choose to live is kind of pointless because architects like all people have a lot of difference reasons why they live where they live. You know things like location, budget, family circumstances, “can’t be bothered to move” and so on and so forth.
There is also the simple fact that architects are not some kind of omnipotent demiurges of the build environment but rather a part of a process. An architect is a professional hired by someone to design something for that someone.
So let say that if you work with designing flats while you yourself want to live in a row house or suburban detatched housing when you yourself want to live in a downtown flat. There is a rather obvious problem if you absolutely have to live in something you designed yourself.
Another thing to point out is that as an architect it is quite possible to like historical buildings and environment without feeling the urge to recreate them. An architect is a person. And a person can like several different things as you know.
As I said the whole architects somehow are hypocrites or conspires to force something they themselves do not want upon others is a tired trope.
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But well-warranted in several cases. Talked to any building scientists recently? Or, better yet, forensic building scientists?
The architect isn’t always the cause of building failure, but quite often. The required schooling for architects is rather…lacking in terms of human comfort and materials science and thermal and pressure and fluid dynamics. Some of them get the importance of those things, but a lot become these ego architects. It’s frustrating being part of the workforce who goes and fixes that stuff.
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not really a hypocrite.
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This thread has everything. Architecture, Baseball, Nazis, Ayn Rand, Communism, The 1893 World’s Fair, Costco, Eugenics.
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As long as you can reproduce the marvelous acoustics with sleek glass and raw concrete…
An accidental benefit of plasterwork.
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Here I would’ve thought that a Modernist architect was someone like Gaudi (i.e. lots of ornamentation), but I’ve understood Modernism to generally mean Western culture, pre-WW1 (or pre-WW2, at the latest; see also: Joyce, Yeats).*
I’ve never really understood “postmodernism” except in the sense that it follows Modernism (as I’ve described it above). I couldn’t figure out whether the things it describes are supposed to be a negative, or a positive? (Perhaps the answer is “yes”)
*I’ve mentioned on the BBS before, I had an English professor who further distinguished between Modernism (art for art’s sake, elitist and even outright misanthropic e.g. Baudelaire, Yeats) and avant-garde (provocative, socially engaged, political: e.g. Surrealism, Mexican muralists, Situationist, punk rock). If, perhaps, Dada is where some things might have switched from one to the other, then that’s also right after WW1, though the older Ubu Roi might go under this definition of avant-garde. Same professor was also skeptical of postmodernism, but also without explaining (in a way that I, at least, could understand) what it is.
I’m gonna pry the fake shutters off a bunch of houses and glue them to the acoustically reflective surfaces in the restaurants. Then everybody will be happy.
All seriousness not aside, bad acoustics are not a hallmark of modern design, but of bad design.
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if it helps, i think this is a good example of post modernism:
( via Walmart parking lot bollard gives the 11 ft 8in bridge a run for its money - Boing Boing )
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“… the Aristocrats” 
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The wikipedia articles are pretty good.
Modern architecture - Wikipedia
Postmodern architecture - Wikipedia
Briefly stated-- modernism is form follows function, and the new materials (plate glass, reinforce concrete, steel) free us from the old archictural conventions. We should have a new style that couldn’t have existed before.
(even classical architecture has callbacks to old timber framing).
so many cantilevers—
Postmodernism is partly an attempt to use modernist building techniques and conventions to comment, parody, or deconstruct the past.
The chiippendale roofline serves no function except whimsy, so it isn’t modernist, but neither does it adhere to any premodern architectural order.
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I guess in the architectural sense, modernism & postmodernism are different from (or at any rate, occur later) than what I’m thinking of (i.e. other arts, & literature). I knew of the Chippendale bldg. as an example, but I’m not sure why Greek/Roman-style buildings from the 18th or 19th centuries (US Capitol, any number of old banks – or, from 80ish years ago, the Main Bldg. at UT Austin) wouldn’t be “postmodern” (since whoever designed them had “seen it all before,” which I gather is a tenet of PoMo).
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Umberto Eco’s definition might help:
“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.”
The neoclassical buildings you mention, in this view, are past styles revisited innocently, with earnestness and gravity. Postmodern buildings are past styles revisited ironically, with whimsy and lightheartedness.
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Maybe. But I don’t think papa Walton(mart) is talking to architects and saying “but beautiful…”.
The most soulless boxes that people were supposed to live in built here in the 00s boom were done by a similar developer who boasted about despising architects and not using them . Architects imagine space and its use and make buildings work. If they’re good. If they are stars they deliver wow looking facades for Klept, autocrats, psychopathic coeporations, and oil slave and murder states.
This architect here, if we believe the article, has done the former. They have designed a functional building designed to be looked at from a human scale and deliver stunning viewing in a comfortable environment with pleasant public spaces and good interfaces. Fucker wants a fantasy Nazi thing that crushes human scale and awes people and looks great from drones.
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I don’t know enough about the stadium to know for sure if it works well for those on the inside, but it’s a blight on the landscape for those on the outside. Which is not to say that adding a bunch of massive decorative columns and heroic statuary and other fascist frou-frou all in white faux marble would improve things
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I get that; where I’m skeptical is the implication (or maybe it’s an actual tenet, not even implied) that nothing’s original, none of us are sincere, and (another aspect I’m just remembering, 32 years later) that no one is sane - the exception to all of this, presumably, is whoever came up with these assertions in the first place.
I’m sure at some level I just refuse to understand it, whether due to stubbornness or laziness. (Is it possible to be both stubborn and lazy? The former can require a bit of effort)
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