Chill, dude.
Isn’t that what the pictures on the webpage are for?
You made that up, didn’t you? There’s no such expectation.
In the past, weren’t architects expected to design structures that were tasteful at the time they were being built, rather than expecting that the citizenry would come to accept their experimental aesthetic at some hypothetical future date?
Sure, all past architectural styles were at one time experimental. However it seems like those older styles mostly experimented while also attempting to retain the obviously sound principles established by previous traditions. Generally they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel all at once, disregarding contemporary tastes in favor of pure experimentation.
I think this may be a big part of the reason why historical architectural styles don’t tend to provoke the “dear god, that’s fuck ugly” reaction so common to contemporary buildings. Our tastes and sensibilities are not enormously different from those of past generations, or from other traditions from around the world-- the Far East, Mesoamerica, etc. The buildings they took care to design generally still hold appeal to modern eyes. Conversely, the most publically visible and costly of today’s buildings may be conceptually transgressive and audacious, but often-- too often-- simply don’t look good, and only go downhill as they age.
For what it’s worth, I kind of like Norman Foster’s London City Hall design. It looks a bit like a giant tick.
Ya got me.
I don’t like it because I’m ignorant.
I’m ignorant because I don’t like it.
Can’t argue with logic like that.
I couldn’t agree with you more. And it’s not hard to find other buildings and bridgesof his which are :eek: actually popular, and which also do their job very well indeed. (And they were just ones which came to mind straight away, no prizes for spotting the local plug 
)
Now, what do we all know about anecdotes which include the word ‘apparently’?
Although I do think **Key Lime Guy ** was a bit…er…emphatic in his response to this question, I do think he has several good points to make concerning the attitudes I have seen in this and other threads concerning modern Architecture. A few selected ‘name’ buildings are put forth as representative of all of modern architecture. These name firms may have some of the big commissions but trust me not the majority of the commissions in this country. They truly do represent a very small minority of the actual built work. These name firms do push the art of Architecture and from their pens generate many design concepts that are the spring board for discussions which lead to much of the architecture around us. However they are the edge and do no represent the vast majority of built work.
Here is a very small list of just nine firms in the Seattle area that practice Architecture in this area and in many parts of the US and the World. They range in size from a few dozen Architects to over 600 Architects. The range in their work is vast and they all represent themselves for the most part as practicing modern Architecture. I used Seattle since that is where I practice and I know this city more then I know other areas, but I do know that the work around the country are representative to the work here. Each area obviously has influences of it locale (such as the rain here in Seattle as opposed to heat in Arizona), but the modern movement is alive and frankly doing very well in this country.
http://www.cutler-anderson.com/index.html
http://www.millerhull.com/htm/projects_all.htm
http://www.callison.com/ourWork/
http://www.hewittarchitects.com/Projects.asp
http://www.oskaarchitects.com/Projects/Type/Featured
http://www.gglo.com/our-work.aspx
So the OP states that people dislike Modern Architecture. Is this true? Do you hate the array of work I have outlined above by these firms? Seattle isn’t the hotbed of design in the world, but these firms I think do a good job of representing much of the work being done in this country.
Let’s look at a few of the buildings more closely:
http://www.cutler-anderson.com/projects/maplevalley/index.html by Cutler-Anderson. Now personally I really enjoy this firms work quite a bit, but it is much smaller in scale then many of the others (although he also did Bill Gates house). But very nice detailing of modern architecture.
http://www.millerhull.com/htm/residential/island_cabin.htm by Miller Hull. An excellent modern cabin that I feel fits the context it is placed in. Do you not agree that a Victorian or craftsman house is widely inappropriate in this setting?
http://www.millerhull.com/htm/nonresidential/tillamook.htm another project by Miller Hull which is an interpretive center—beautiful example of modern Architecture.
http://www.callison.com/ourWork/index.cfm?display=project&Project_ID=60 by Callison. A 30 story residential hi rise in downtown Seattle. It fits the street and the scale of the city. The serrated edge bay of the residential tower fits the shift in the city grid at this location and affords each unit a direct oriented view towards the water. A good modern interpretation of the Flatiron building from Chicago.
http://www.callison.com/ourWork/index.cfm?display=project&Project_ID=88
and
http://www.callison.com/ourWork/index.cfm?display=project&Project_ID=98
by Callison are ski lodges in Wyoming and California. Modern interpretation of traditional ski lodges
http://www.hewittarchitects.com/Projects/Architecture/BSP-Arch.asp by Hewitt. Is a modern interpretation of the traditional buildings along the Seattle waterfront. It houses a conference center, restaurants, cruise ship terminal and a short term lodge. Very nice project.
Now you may have different aesthetic tastes, etc. and that is always going to be a hindrance in discussing these types of artistic issues. But to make a blanket statement that a few crappy building represent modern Architecture is where I feel that ignorance is being displayed.
If these firms all suck—what pray tell do you wish to see? Buildings with Corinthian columns? A Greek temple forced into a cabin site? In my humble opinion I do think most Architects are very conscientious and concerned about how their buildings fit into the landscape, the context and the language they use. A few bad examples by big name Architects doesn’t prove to me that people dislike modern Architecture.
Hell, no, what you linked to didn’t suck at all – lots of lovely work! Elegant, clean lines, lively imagination that doesn’t get carried away into cartoonish exaggeration of the Modern, thoughtful deference to setting without slavishly aping it, and – most important of all – a warm welcome to the people who will inhabit and use these buildings, an embrace of the human scale. Let me repeat that – an embrace of the human scale, a respect for the human beings who created and live with that architecture’s surroundings and who will see and experience directly the Modern building.
If Norman Foster would stick to bridges, I’d have no beef with his work, that part of it is gorgeous. The McLaren Center is stunning, and I mean that in a good way. Some of the other stuff in his website’s portfolio also looks magnificent (though I have no idea how well it functions or maintains). BUT! That doesn’t mean it’s all good, and the London City Hall is a gobsmacking example, in my opinion, of contempt for the building’s milieu; the language that building uses, to me, is a hearty “FU!” to the world.
The OP’s question “Why do people dislike Modern architecture” needn’t have a binary answer, hate or love across the board. There’s plenty of Modern work that is worthy of admiration, as you point out; there’s plenty of older architecture that’s horrid. Thing is, when a big name architect excretes an abomination, it’s what grabs people’s attention. I suspect a lot of folks wouldn’t even think of the things you linked to as “Modern architecture”; they’d just think, “Oh, that’s a really nice building” and go on with their lives, enjoying the uplift that a fine addition to the built environment gives them without consciously analyzing why they find that particular part of their world inviting. Let them turn a corner and find one of the bad examples looming over them, inescapable, and yeh, you’ll evoke a response antipathetic to Modern architecture.
I can’t comment on the others, but St Mary Axe (aka The Dildo) does its job pretty badly - apart from the odd glitch like windows falling out (which can happen to any large new building) the people working in it hate it because of the odd-shaped floors and rooms (which make about 40% of the space unuseable) and problems with airflow and ventilation, so it sucks as a place to work. When it first opened they couldn’t get anyone to move in, so it’s not that great a commercial proposition either.
Oh, my mistake. After a bit of digging I found the website of people who maintain said machine - a JLG 150HAX. According to the manufacturer this is “The highest working height, longest outreach and the most up and over height of any self-propelled lift in the world”, so it seems they need the biggest cherrypicker money can buy anywhere.
However as a practioner I have to say that the examples cited in this thread are what inspire us as Architects. The design pushes the design envelope. I agree many of the buildings noted in this thread are not my particular cup of tea, but as a designer I do and can appreciate what they are trying to do. So while I may not get a commission to do something with a cantilevered glass wall, I might get a project where a smaller more human scale of the same concept might be applicable and I might attempt it. I might have come up with the idea on my own, but I also am influenced by the work of other architects–especially the outlandish ones. They push an idea to an extreme. I use a lot more metals in my work now and without the influence of architects like Foster I might not have.
I also believe that Architecture should embrace a human scale and I think the vast majority of it does. Some of it doesn’t that is also true. But the tone from this thread I have been getting is similar to saying I don’t like Broccoli so all vegetables suck 
The tone has been modern architecture is failing and as my noted examples show it is not at all.
btw–I know several of the Architects who worked on some of the buildings you liked that I linked to–I will pass on your comments. For myself how people interact with my projects is VERY important to me. I often go down to the openings of my projects with my family and mill around acting like just another citizen. I like to eavesdrop and hear what people like and don’t like about the project; which is something that they would never tell me if they knew I designed it.
OK, fair enough. But there’s still the other part of your statement, that it was ‘inept’ design, rather than perhaps a solution to a question posed at the design, which was found to be acceptable by all parties involved?
When you tell us what those are, we can start having an actual debate.
Well, not having had any involvement in the City Hall I probably should not pontificate too much on that. However I have spent two years regularly visiting and working in another Foster-designed building, coincidentally together with someone who helped build the place, and there was certainly plenty of designed-in ineptitude on display there.
While Craftsman/Arts and Crafts style residential architecture is among my favorite styles, it’s something of a myth that pre-WWII houses were built exclusively by master tradespeople for whom even the most mundane sawcut was was lovingly and thoughtfully crafted.
In the United States, mass-produced housing and suburban sprawl date back almost to the origins of balloon-frame construction. Just like today, in the late 1800s and early 1900s a homebuyer could have a custom home commissioned in a neighborhood planned by Frederick Law Olmsted, or pick out one of the thousands of spec houses in the newest subdivisions – then called “additions” – at the end of a streetcar line. There was also a lot of “industrial vernacular” crap built at the time, too, like the tens of thousands of “telescoping houses” that dominate the East Side of Buffalo; cheap houses literally hacked out by their poor owners on a shoestring budget, with awkward floorplans, minimal ornamentation, and less-than-precise construction.
The social commentators of the day were just as critical of pre-WWII suburban development as their peers today, using many of the same terms we’re familiar with: fake, inauthentic, sterile, characterless, and so on. Criticizing suburban development and the perceived quality of residential construction isn’t a modern invention.
Here’s some houses being “lovingly crafted by skilled immigrant carpenters who formerly practiced their art of the Gothic cathedrals of Germany”, as so many locals like to say, in the Buffalo of the 1920s.
http://wnyheritagepress.org/photosofweek/building_buffalo/traymore.htm
http://wnyheritagepress.org/photosofweek/building_buffalo/lisbon.htm
http://wnyheritagepress.org/photosofweek/building_buffalo/radcliff_nf_blvd.htm
http://wnyheritagepress.org/photosofweek/building_buffalo/sheffield.htm
http://wnyheritagepress.org/photosofweek/building_buffalo/edgewood_cazenovia.htm
http://wnyheritagepress.org/photosofweek/building_buffalo/burlington_bailey.htm
Oh, come on, you’re just making me want to scream CITE? 
Both are awesome. 
But seriously, that Salk Institute one–holy crap that’s beautiful! Like I think I would feel emotional just from being there. It’s amazing what you can do with straight lines, angles and concrete. Thanks for the link.
-FrL-
Nice.
I asked the question you claim nobody asked. I would love to live in places like the ones you were referring to.
You don’t have to like it, but it is wrong to make such sweeping general assumptions about what just anyone would or could prefer.
-FrL-
Well, as a photographic subject, yeh, the Salk is glorious. However, as a person who’s experienced the horror of perambulating City Hall Plaza in Boston, in scorching summer sun as well as bitter wind-whipped winter, I have to tell you that wide-open expanses like that can be decidedly user-unfriendly (hell, downright hostile). I suspect I’d feel like an ant on a hotcake griddle walking around there in hot weather.
IANAA and I haven’t taken classes on the subject. I do live in Manhattan though
I do not hate all new buildings A block away from the classic Beekman Tower on 1st Ave, they put up a new residential tower. It not only has “Beekman” in the name (as does nearly every above-ground structure in the vicinity), it does a very good job of echoing the original Beekman’s structural elements while at the same time incorporating windows of a sort that could not have been built when the Beekman was built, yet withotu them looking out of place; and on the inside it’s a residential tower with nice spacious apartments that are elegantly done with a trace of Art Deco styling, yet aren’t replicas of anything in the Beekman. It’s an accolade but not a slavish one.
I do not hate all buildings done in a modern style The new New York Times tower, which is a far cry from classical or retro, is a work of art.
But a whole lot of large, tall, space-occupying, opportunistic structures have been built over the last 40 years that in the name of “modernism” or “modernity” were constructed without imagination or soul and they’re ugly-looking. I give you a recent offender, the Trump Residential Tower at 1st Ave / 47th. It looks for all the world like one of those grey plastic magnetic paper clip dispensers writ large.
By “obviously sound principles,” I mean those elements of style and proportion that exhibit a near-universal appeal to the eye even across millennia and across diverse cultures. That is to say, those features that most people find naturally attractive and harmonious. There’s no ironclad set of rules, so there’s plenty of room for innovation. A Doric temple and a Chinese pagoda have few direct commonalities, but they both exhibit a keen sense of eye-pleasing proportion and respect for the viewer and environment.
You see, in the past, architects couldn’t simply declare that their work was beautiful; they had to actually make buildings that other people would find beautiful. Often these people were the sort of gross, ignorant citizens that you wouldn’t dare allow to have an opinion about architecture today. So when designing their buildings, architects would-- you may wish to sit down first-- they would look at the most beautiful works of earlier architects, and try to make something similar. Architecture was largely evolutionary, not revolutionary. The goal was to use the lessons from the past to build the most beautiful cathedral possible; not to discard all preconceptions of what a cathedral should look like, and instead build a cathedral that looked nothing like any cathedral before it.
That didn’t mean architects didn’t experiment-- far from it, they would try to create work that was even better than that of their predecessors. However, this also meant that they ran the risk of being judged poorly in comparison. That’s because they were referencing the same aesthetic standards as their forebears.
Today’s architects, of course, have escaped that trap by simply producing work that deliberately makes no concession to tradition or surroundings, and is therefore largely immune to formal criticism. The London City Hall might be judged an aesthetic failure compared to the surrounding architecture-- but there aren’t any points of comparison to begin with! The building makes absolutely zero appeal to context or dignity or proportionality or function or history of any kind. It could have been built anywhere on the planet-- Belize, Reykjavik, the Sahara-- and it would refuse to relate to its surroundings in exactly the same manner. It could have been built for any purpose at all. Is it a city hall, or a revolutionary new geothermal power station? What can you say about it? It’s like it was poorly Photoshopped onto the city.
In general, this design strategy of willful ignorance works brilliantly, as it is virtually impossible to specify the aesthetic failings of a structure with no real aesthetic tradition. Unfortunately, architects must still contend with the problem that, occasionally, ignorant citizens will look at their buildings.
There appears to be a naivity about Architects of the past here. The comments here about modern Architects have been also said about these older era Architects in their time and afterwards. Architects 100 years ago had a much larger ego and role on design frankly then Architects today.
Daniel Burnham was instrumental in much of the design of Chicago—this is a link to a very damning article about him and his work–His firm was instrumental in trying to keep the Beaux-Arts movement alive in this country, going against what the ‘modern’ architects of the time were doing. An interesting read if you are interested is Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.
this link is about Daniel Burnham.
http://www.architechgallery.com/arch_info/artists_pages/daniel_burnham_bio.html
This is an article on the bio of Louis Sullivan, another famous Chicago Architect of the 1800’s. Note the article states that the major architects of this time period promoted the theory that ‘architecture should respond to the particular melieu of a period and not slavishly copy European models’. Note on page 3 of the Sullivan .pdf where it states that ‘clients either had to agree to his terms or he wouldn’t work with them at all.’
www.chicagoelections.com/press/docs/BIO56.pdf
The idea that Architects in the past had to cater to what the public wanted is laughable. Frank Lloyd Wright could care less what his clients wanted or needed-he is the epitomization of the ‘name architect’ that is being criticized in this thread. Here is a good essay on him–again note the comment 'If the cost of gambling on greatness was some leaky roofs, badly heated rooms, sagging cantilevers, and unhappy clients, then Wright was more than willing to pay the price"
However FLW also had one of my most favorite quotes :
“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” Luckily so far I have not had to advise an client to do that!
Look I realize that some here don’t feel these buildings should be built, but they aren’t being built in a vacuum. There is a client who is paying for these buildings and they are as much of part of the equation as the Architect and the Builder. The client isn’t paying for something unless he/she sees some value—money runs my world just as much as it runs most of our worlds.
I agree with you–this building screams corporate office building to me. There is nothing here that indicates it is a residential building. My opinion buildings should reflect their use.