Bleg. Yes, you are right. I’m not very good with my music terminology.
True, and I might also add that I find both Gehry and Libeskind very hit-and-miss*. On the one hand, Gehry’s toweris rather fetching, but on the other hand, I’m not a fan of the EMP or the Disney concert hall, and it’s hard to conceive of a tackier building than this. But the Swiss Re building is quite pretty in a non-obtrusive way (for those without phallic obsessions), and the International style of architecture makes downtowns more united in form and less grey.
*I know that neither of them designed that building. Actually, I can think of more striking examples than the one you gave.
ETA: nobody has brought up brutalism, but if they do, I agree —brutalism sucks.
Sure, but if symmetry were a controlling design principle, the hodgepodge of factors wouldn’t have mattered. Clearly they accepted asymmetry and perhaps even found it beautiful.
It’s generally popular among people who do or have either. The City is an area which has always constantly changed, and in any case it’s not easy to get a view of it from up close, at least in a way that makes it look all that different from other office buildings.
In that case, you’re all the more wrong with your description of what was going on. Take this example of mature serialism - no consonance? Hardly. Indeed, the Bach quotations, beginning 30 seconds in, don’t sound out of place, not least because of the amount of dissonance in the chorale from which they come.
Edit: brutalism? Done well, it can be good, albeit with the unfortunate tendency of concrete to get terribly stained. I went off to find a picture of the Hayward Gallery, which I really like, and found this…rather an appropriate banner for this thread 
Wow, nice pic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen brutalist architecture look whimsical before.
Yeah. The Scottish Parliament’s outside of the protected zones of the Old and New Towns, though. It still doesn’t stop UNESCO going insane over that and similar developments, though. The real shame of the Scottish Parliament is that it borders Holyrood Palace and is at the bottom of the Royal Mile. Once more, modernist architects fail to take into account any sort of local context.
:dubious:
Not all of them, but a great many, and the other mistakes are irrelevant to the thread at hand.
Do you accept that good design is vital for the continued health of a town or city? That city planners have a responsibility to the future growth of a city. That “experimental architecture” like that seen in Cumbernauld has a very high risk of looking dated within a decade? Would you live in Cumbernauld, given a choice?
The building’s acoustics and internal plan have very little to do with the outer shell, so I don’t see the relevance that comment has: any modern concert hall costing hundreds of millions of Dollars is going to have decent acoustics, and, one would hope, be fit for purpose; it would have been a great concert hall whether the outer had been clad with wood or yet another Gehry twisted metal horror.
I think you’ve misunderstood my reference to Cumbernauld. Of course it’s a shithole. However, your protectionist stance is at odds with the right course of action, which would be to tear down the failed developments and rebuild from scratch, precisely because you seem to resist anything modern (not necessarily modernist) being built. Except wooden-clad concert halls - are you serious, there, that you’d rather major public buildings be simple brown blocks than actually have a spirit of adventure? That you don’t like the Disney Hall is only your personal opinion, as I’ve already pointed out, it is not some objective measure of the qualities of that piece of architecture.
No, the right course of action is to prevent shitholes from being built in the first place, through proper restraint of proposed developments. What sort of suggestion is leveling towns every half century when the current fad sweeping the architectural world wears off?
What? Again, no, you miss my point by a country mile. You brought up the interior of the Disney Concert Hall as proof that it is well designed. My point, being, that the interior is largely independent of the exterior shell, and the building would have functioned well as a concert hall no matter what the outside looked like. Nobody was seriously suggesting cladding the outside in wood like a garden shed. Good God, no!
Then, I guess having a proponent admit the “correct” course of action being to level a town every fifty years is as objectively damning of the current state as we’re likely to find!
Of course it would be great if mistakes were never made. But they are, and will continue to be, which is why kneejerk protectionism isn’t always a good idea.
I’ve not seen inside it, and I don’t think anything I’ve said suggested otherwise. My knowledge that it’s a good acoustic comes from the reports of others, along with (absolutely fantastic) recordings which have been made there. A concert hall is far more than the auditorium, though, and the sense of ownership a public can have of a place is important - it’s perhaps what’s never really been there in London, with the Festival Hall or the Barbican, but is certainly there in the Bridgewater Hall (to bring it close to home again 
), with the design and layout of the building as a whole being crucial.
I’ve alluded to this before, and I want to now ask it outright: what do you think a modern concert hall should look like?
Here it is-the biggest abortion I have seen (MIT Stata Center):Stata Center - Wikipedia
According to my MIT friends, the windows leak, the floors are warped, and the rooms are extremely weird.:smack:
As for leaks and so on, I think your link sums up the situation, that buildings at the cutting edge of what’s possible might become problematic. The screwup seems to me a failure to decide who would be liable before problems arose.
As for ‘rooms being weird’…I’ve seen ‘weird’ rooms in lots of buildings, but weird is in the eye of the beholder. I’d like to know what their particular objections are…if the lack of right angles is causing them trouble, then my reaction is to phone for the wahmbulance.
Piece of crap. Why the hell should anyone be stuck with an inadequate building? Would you be content to have a car that won’t start, with tires that won’t stay inflated, that uses 15 gallons of gas to go 5 miles, because it’s designed by some famous guy?
It’s a con job, and people keep falling for it. A building is meant to be lived in, or for people to work in. If it cannot meet those simple expectations in the most basic manner, then the buyers have been had.
I really don’t want to get that involved in this thread, because I’ve argued my point to death, but I remember the last time we did this, somebody brought in a bunch of site about the all the maintenance problems and problems with light reflection that Disney Concert has. So I don’t really think you want to use that particular building to prove your point.
Gehry again, naturally.
The Schermerhorn in Nashville (finished 2006), looks quite nice, and makes good use of natural lighting and modern materials.
My reaction is to execute the architect.
I think it looks vile. (Seriously.) Therefore, using your argument and assuming it’s not the case that your opinion is somehow superior than mine, it equally has no place being foisted on any city centre.
You assume wrong 
I think it looks quite tacky.
See, look, we all have opinion! Isn’t having variety what makes this world great?
I said it looks quite nice; it’s a step in the correct direction, which, for the purposes of this thread, should be defined as the complete opposite of whatever people like Gehry think or do.
No. Building nice buildings is what makes the world look great. Gehry and co. don’t make nice buildings. There is no virtue in variety in of itself if the constituent buildings are so ugly that they’re bordering on being in violation of natural law.
Define ‘ugly’. Objectively. While we’re at it, define ‘nice buildings’.
As for ‘natural law’, I suppose you could just pick one of any number of definitions, or make up your own. Regarding that Nashville thing, which looks like something I’d expect at a Vegas hotel, you already know I think it’s ugly, so that must also be bordering on a violation of natural law?