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[Scoops Novel]

Come on, we've got to have a few fans here.

[King Zultan]

I find that older styles of architecture are more interesting than the popular styles of modern times.

[Great Order]

There was that great rant video about modern architecture which included some choice quotes from postmodern architects.

My favourite theme of said quotes was "It's not that our architecture is bad, it's that the public has no taste"

[dragdeler]

All of my travels were looking at fancy buildings in some eu metropole, and I realized I have never left the western roman empire lol. I saw the Habsburg palace twice but I didn't feel like going to Versailles. And I have not much interesting to say about any of it. Am I hereby recognized as autist?

[Starver]

I tend to prefer more Classical designs (or those that are mostly true to the historic forms), mostly because anything that's been around for long enough isn't going to be out of fashion (again?) any time soon, whilst revolutionary post-'whatever the current "Modern" is' styles can look out-of-date as soon as everything changes again.

But it has to fit in (or blend) with its situation and neighbouring structures. There's a few Brutalist designs that work (as well as many that don't/didn't) and convoluted glass-walled towers have their place even if the odd Art Deco construction still defines the 'classical' roots of an area. Gothic-for-the-sake-of-Gothic addition to an original Gothic building can be done badly, where a sympathetic and subtle Bauhaus addition to an existing mediæval construction needn't be too disturbing in the right circumstances and can augment it... Faux-aged stuff that is now no longer new (Tower Bridge and the Conway Rail Bridge come to mind) gains a patina of its own, of course, however brash it might have been when first constructed.

But you'd be hard pressed to get a universal concensus on what works/will work.


(Was going to poke around in my range of architecture books, but it seems they're elsewhere at the moment. And I was just extracting the one called Modern Architecture one from the shelving, or so I thought, when I realised it was titled Modern Artillery, instead! Slightly different, right? I've got a good handful of detailed books on castles at hand, though, so if you want to talk about crenellations and machicolations then I'm your man!)

[MrRoboto75]

IIRC there's a "Brutalist Doom" mod for classic Doom 2 that swaps all the level textures for the gray concrete one.

[Imic]

My favourite theme of said quotes was "It's not that our architecture is bad, it's that the public has no taste"

... If someone said that to me on the topic of postmodern architecture, I'd sit them down and begin the longest rant of my life.

[Starver]

IIRC there's a "Brutalist Doom" mod for classic Doom 2 that swaps all the level textures for the gray concrete one.

I've worked (well, a satellite office, in a University's 'business centre', setting it up and occasionally maintaining it) that had an inner-atrium that reminded me directly of bits of the initial Duke Nukem 3D level...

It had an upper-level bridge that would hae been hard-pressed to do in a Doom WAD (without layout trickery...), and really weird non-parallel/perpendicular angles despite being on a rectilinear groundplan. (If it was to reduce resonant echos, it didn't work as well as it could have! And the work areas were even worse.) I imagine they've improved things since (soft panelling/fittings and/or draped foliage - real or fake), but we were there within a short time of it opening and then it stopped being my responsibility any more.


Separately (different Uni, on a summer-school thing when I was younger), I recall a more interesting Brutalist multi-level atrium concept (plus the memorable floorplan in the entrance saying that the main lecture theatres were "numbered A to H"). It'd be interesting to see if it's still the same. The Wiki page suggests that the Lecture Centre is Grade II Listed, which is probably that bit which I remember, though another of the notable[1] buildings was demolished in 2019.

I had a long association (via another interest of mine) with Derby Assembly Rooms and probably intimently knew every inch of that (from the Stage Door, at the back, all the way up to the lighting gallery) apart from the actual public entrance, which I may have wandered down to from the main atrium in a spare moment, but the doors were never open at those times so were far less useful to know than the various cargo-lifts and crawl-spaces. But I had many a buffet lunch in the concourse, and staring out of the windows[2]. Haven't been there for a while, but Wiki also suggests the place hasn't been open since a fire in an adjacent building forced its closure.

And there are some tower-blocks/tenements not so far from me, which are Grade-somthing Listed examples of a Brutalist design. Started off as a "Community In The Sky" sort of thing, became a shunned 'sink estate' of reducing but proud original inhabitants and proportionally more and more 'undesirables', then has been (somewhat) turned around, redeveloped and marketed as a desirable residence again. Apparently.


But I'm as interested by Iron-age hillforts, all the way through Victorian stations and then anything new that's currently being lofted up by tower-cranes.  As an armchair architect only[3]. (With a bit of a B.S. Johnson bent... my armchairs would probably have four arms, two legs and also be upside-down.)


[1] Bits of Clockwork Orange were filmed there, but I didn't find that out until well after I went there myself...

[2] Perhaps coloured my appreciation of the place, which not all locals (passing by the exterior, doing their shopping) might have shared. There's the possibly apocryphal story, though, of the famous Parisian who absolutely hated the Eiffel Tower, and yet would always choose to dine in its restaurant - on the basis that this was the one good place in Paris where the view outside was not blighted by the sight of the Eiffel Tower.

[3] Though it might have been my career if I had taken a different tack. And I've a cousin who run his own civil engineerng firm, and his son went into architecture himself.

[Loud Whispers]

I'm all for any architecture which doesn't abuse poor concrete and treat it like a cheap disposable material instead of the immortal pillar of civilisation it should be