*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.
Bottom doesn’t have trees, bushes and the sea. Modernism does not have to be soulless.
Also, let’s talk about the class issue. The people who live in the most boxy and ugly “boxes” today would be living in literal shacks in the past. Not everyone is a wealthy farmer.
Don’t idealize the past and don’t forego the future.
We should be building beautiful, livable, comfortable housing for all humans.
Curious that Provence needed neither chimneys nor garages.
What’s that about?Architectural degeneration.
I just love modern monochromatic architecture. Inject glass walls, metal accents, and white concrete into my veins.
and no trees! yuck.
There could be trees, why does it have to be no trees
I am a unique and special snowflake.
Fachwerksbau (Alsace) is just fetish harness for houses, change my mind.
I don’t want to
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.
This is dictated by cost and the desire to insulate. It’s possible to build well insulated buildings that look traditional, but it’s going to cost more and it’s not going to improve the quality of living inside the house.
Flat rectangular insulation panels with plaster on top placed on large flat surfaces -vs- irregularly shaped insulation with a cavity and a bespoke brick façade. Just the bricks alone, so without the labour, is going to cost about the same as the finished plaster. In the long term brick and a sloped roof should require less frequent renovations, but I doubt that it would ever offset the higher initial cost.
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.
In Australia, you can get the soulless grey box with shit insulation and mold problems, so it’s twice as good! /s
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.
uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter
You mean soulful mold?
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.
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.
Unless you build the house to last 200 years, with occasional maintenance. No drywall monstrosity will survive that long.
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 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.
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.
It’s true. But also could be less true. With our modern tech, we could hold like they did back then, but much better. If we built for longevity. But we won’t.
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.
I like it. But I also will never own one, so wtv I guess.
People sure are opinionated about architecture… I mean I think both are nice. Although the modern designs do tend to all look the same, which isn’t ideal
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.
based and dictatorpilled. Big man me with your will to power daddy
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.
I don’t really have any strong opinions on architecture, but I’ll still get mad in this instance taking it as a proxy for the French state’s efforts to wipe out regional culture throughout its history. You have tons of regional languages, with their own rich cultures and histories, and France has systematically done its best to beat them out of existence. Bréton, Gascon, Picard, Occitane and Corsican, amongst many others, are all considered to be either definitely or severely endangered, according to their wikipedia articles. Even those whose wiki page doesn’t mention this, like Alsatian, still generally mention the speakers tending to be predominantly older adults, with fewer and fewer young people learning the language. I’ve seen stuff about there being positive results with revitalization efforts and bilingual schooling for some of them, but it gets me bummed out and angry to think it might be too little, too late, and all in the name of some misguided nation building policies.
It’s kind of lame and boring if they look the same. There’s a ton of different modern styles that aren’t just black and white.
Like look up Nordic Modern, where there is often wood mixed in heavily.
A lot of modern styles just mean tons of natural light, open concepts, indoor/outdoor integration. It’s not inherently bad or boring. It’s probably more that luxury homes are being built cheap and fast with dentist office modern style that seems copy and paste, without caring about what makes it nice.
I think what people hate is the fake appearance of modernism where it’s made to look new and expensive, and not what makes modern homes modern.
Back then, the builders built homes.
These days builders build houses.
If it got more people into houses I wouldn’t give a shit, but sadly, its shitty in both ways
There are a lot of high density housing being built in my city after some planning rule changes to enable it.
It’s unpopular to say the least.
I’m just happy that it means more people get to live in a house.
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.It’s unpopular to say the least.
Fuck the NiMBYs
the nimbys wouldn’t object to high density housing anywhere nearly as much if there were guarantees that the poor wouldn’t move in.
The mass production of modern Box homes is a mistake, the older homes need to be mass produced
The curves and stone aren’t really something you can easily mass produce.
*Cries in french* Around my hometown I have 4 styles of different houses depending of the microregion they are in. All in a 40 km radius. There is even a continum with hybrids as we move from a place to another.
… That’s for older house of course. They are still here, terribly laking heat isolation and in desperate need of renovation, but still here but for every new family that move in the village of for every second brother that stays as an adult, there is a cookie cutter home terribly laking in hot weather resistance that will be desperate for renovation in just 15 years.
That same stucco sterile box style is everywhere. It’s like a generic rich people tract house that you get from a vending machine. Just add water and they pop up, all the same, brick paved driveways, generic minimalist interiors, nobody actually lives there. It’s as empty and uncreative as the people who hired someone else to design it for them.
A wonderful thing is the regional differences in door casing styles.
Every house everywhere have doors and all of them have trims (door casing), but they’re not the same.
In a lot of old houses/apartments, these are rarely changed. They suck to change because you’ll probably want the same for all the doors in the house or it looks weird. So if you want to change/repair just one, you’d want the same profile again and that’s not available, because every single carpenter had their own design back in the pre-1950s where stuff like this wasn’t mass produced, but made by the carpenter. So you either don’t change it or you get the same again. The design caries over either way.
In old large cities like Copenhagen where they obviously had several carpenters, you can tell to this day which neighborhood you’re in by looking at the door trims if you know how they look.
These days the new ones are all just flat. No profile. Sure, it makes it easier to maintain, but its a real loss in my opinion.
