A Nordic revolt against 'ugly' modern architecture
bloomberg.comIf you walk around Gamla Stan (old town) in Stockholm, you can almost pretend you've gone back in time. Every building is hundreds of years old or made to look so, and all in a unified style.
If you walk around Kyoto's Gion district, there are a few streets that give you this feel, but if you stray but a little from the tourist paths it becomes a mish-mash of architectural styles, everything is encrusted in AC units, exposed pipes are everywhere, and a dense web of electrical wiring looms over everything.
If you walk around Gamla Stan at 5 am in the summer, it's a beautiful, relaxing experience. You can go in almost any direction and there's more of it. If you walk around Gion at 5 am, it feels like you're in a theme-park built on the edge of a razor. Fall off the razor's edge and you're in an urban hellscape.
If you built in this nordic neo-traditional style in Kyoto it would just add more chaos to the hellscape. If you build in this style in the appropriate place, however, it blends in. The right style is contextual. The greatest sins of 'ugly' modern architecture happen when it pays no heed to context.
Sometimes buildings should stand out but, most of the time, they should blend in. It's good that architects are starting to become more aware of this.
Minimalist, modern jarring cube buildings have been out of style for a long time now. developers keep building them because they're cheap. It's artless commerce.
Self-awareness and contextuality are arguably the key differences between modern and postmodern works. We've been living in postmodernity for over a half century now, but architecture moves a little more slowly than other things because the creatives are at the mercy of financiers who are much more risk-averse.
Any decent architecture from the past few decades pays attention to the surrounding context, and often incorporates local cultural, historical, and environmental elements.
It seems to me that Stockholm, culturally and ethnically, was very homogeneous hundreds of years ago. That homogeneity was reflected in the architecture of the time as well. And now they are preserving that, at least architecturally. Many seem to think that’s good (at least in context).
But what about diversity of food? Industry? Is homogeneity of architecture really something we want? Isn’t it backwards when many say it “feels good” when all the buildings look the same?
I'd say it means nothing for diversity in general, and especially when it comes to people. People aren't buildings.
edit: Okay now that you've edited your comment this doesn't make much sense anymore.
Unified style is overrated. London is gorgeous and it's because of its mixing of modernity with the ancient. It feels fluid and alive. Same with Tokyo. Feels magical. By comparison, old European cities feel like tombs.
Tokyo is "gorgeous"? Really? There's a reason publicity photos are always either neon-drenched alleys (hiding the buildings) or aerial photos zoomed out so far the city becomes grey paste with Mt Fuji in the background.
Absolutely stunning in person. One of my favourite places. Though I can see that a worldview made from publicity photos would form a different image.
As someone who just lived in tokyo and loved it, you have to admit that Tokyo, and most of Japan is an absolute hellscape of architectural laziness and function over form to a fault. There are so few "beautiful" areas, outside major boulevards and government buildings. Every street is stuffed with exposed electrical wiring, whirring AC units, generic vending machines, mini parking lots, etc.
It's really interesting how anti-Zen it all is, and how the disharmony of Japanese cities contrasts with the harmony, balance, and simplicity of Japanese parks and temples.
Again, as an urbanist, I ADORE Japan; the public transportation, the convenience, the dense urban fabric, but you cannot deny how ugly it all is haha
> Again, as an urbanist, I ADORE Japan; the public transportation, the convenience, the dense urban fabric, but you cannot deny how ugly it all is haha
You obviously only lived in Tokyo. I live in the inaka, and it is horrible urban sprawl: a million little houses scattered everywhere, and the random big supermarket or shop here and there. There is no public transportation, and you need the car for everything. I absolutely hate it.
I really don’t see the appeal outside of a small selection of more interesting areas. It’s got a surprising amount of above ground cables if you’re interested in infrastructure and quite a few trees. But in general most of the city comes off as a forgivable random jumble of mid rise buildings IMO.
No reason to look at publicly photos when street view shows what the city actually looks like.
I lived in Tokyo for years, which is why I'm pointing out that the publicity photos do not match the reality.
I was going to make the same comment. London's buildings vary in age and style even in the most historic districts—thanks to German influence—and it still looks and feels great. I loved walking around and exploring central London the few times that I've visited; it managed to be simultaneously venerable and fresh.
Definitely agreed! I think there's a difference between "living" and "visiting" when it comes to enjoying city architectures. Unified style gets very boring very fast if you live in the neighbourhood.
Seeing different architecture styles of different periods of time somehow creating a cohesion is a wonderful experience, but I think it only works if the city is big enough (I have a blast in Tokyo just for that reason!). Toronto is trying out quite a lot of "save facade, build a glass house on top of it", which I'm kind of enjoying when I visit the city. Wondering how it'll look 5-6 years later.
> everything is encrusted in AC units, exposed pipes are everywhere, and a dense web of electrical wiring looms over everything
This is more about being cheap and lazy than about architectural style.
> It's good that architects are starting to become more aware of this.
This is like talking about software developers "becoming aware" of application performance. Architects have been aware of these concerns for as long as anybody else, and the language for critiquing buildings that don't fit their context comes straight from the profession. Professional awareness has not and will never stop bad architecture and tasteless development, any more than software developers being aware of performance will prevent companies releasing bloated, sluggish apps. People in it for the money will not give a shit, and they will find professionals to do their bidding. And professionals at companies like Spotify will not always be in a position to simply resign and go elsewhere if they disagree with the design priorities of the people paying for development. That's why pushback against bad architecture happens via local politics and grass-roots organizations.
“People have the right to be angry, because all the ugliness they see is on purpose.”
I like this quote and it gets at the heart of the matter especially in some of the more ostentatious modern designs. It seems in some part purposely created to instill in you a disgust response, as if it is in protest of beauty and good taste.
Aside from that there is some boring pseud posturing to "subvert expectations" by calling attention to itself for being different (than what people actually like). Good for these citizens for standing up and saying no. The replacements in the article are so much better than the original modern designs.
The purpose is to depress the citizens so that they don't get any ideas and keep in their place. If you are surrounded by beauty and grandeur you start getting ideas that don't fit with the low level of mind the rulers want you to have.
Yes I suspect so. Deliberately ugly buildings are intended to demoralize people. Beautiful buildings don't require great aristocratic wealth to build and maintain, and in fact the cost of ugly modern architecture is often far greater than conventional construction due to material and design problems caused by the architect's 'novelty'. When large amounts of money and effort are put into designing something that turns out to be extremely ugly, it's fair to conclude that it was intended to be ugly.
You realize the "beauty and grandeur" you are referencing comes from aristocratic families boasting about their wealth and making it obvious to the poor that they are better than everyone? The buildings you are thinking about were quite literally made to humiliate others and boost some rich guy's ego. So much for values and tradition
Is it? The most beautiful building in my city are late 19th/early 20th century brickhouse schools, hospitals, and rental condos.
Pushback against modern architecture has been happening about as long as modern architecture itself. One notable example is Charles III fight, culminating of him building a complete town to his vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury
What to me is evident that cost-optimization is at least as much to blame for ugliness as is the choice of style. It is striking how in the two norwegian examples in the article the "not ugly" examples have presumably far less floor area, making them less cost effective. Also bulk housing made to cost by bottom of barrel architects isn't a good starting point for having pretty buildings.
I have to say that I actually do like quite a bit of modern architecture. It certainly has unique qualities to it.
That said, I don't see why people keep putting "random block with geometric patterns" everywhere. It is the least imaginative style I can think of and its sheer ubiquity and blandness make them offensive on their own. It gets even worse when the building is begging for attention by contrasting itself with the buildings around it, that just makes it one step more offensive.
I guess they are the corporate memphis of architecture.
It's anti-homeless architecture. They look visually busy like a casino carpet so you don't notice that they offer zero shelter to anyone at street level.
Rather than making the streets more pleasant to sleep on, I'd advocate providing actual housing for the homeless.
No its not. And you shouldn't design houses so that mentally ill people can harass everyone in sight. In nordic countries you can only be homeless by choice or by mental illness.
To paraphrase a classic comic, it's not that modernist architecture is ugly, but rather that ugly architecture is ugly.
There are aspects of aesthetics that are subjective, but there are also centuries-old rules of composition, of proportion, rhythm, space, and texture that transcend styles and objectively make some buildings, old and new, more beautiful than others.
The apartment blocks in the header image: terrible visual rhythm, no sense of proportion. You could slap some neoclassical filigree on those and it wouldn't change the underlying aesthetic shortcomings.
The contemporary value of traditional architectural styles is that because it's largely only the beautiful examples that have survived, they offer a readymade set of templates that have stood the test of time. With modern architecture, the bar is that much higher to get it right.
> but rather that ugly architecture is ugly
I think it’s also worth nothing that things that are new are often hailed as ugly. A number of pieces of what we’d identify today as beloved classic architecture were called outrageously offensive to good taste when they were first constructed. For example, from a letter signed by 300 artists and architects published by Le Temps on 14 February 1887:
> We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection ... of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower ... To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years ... we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.
If even “great” modern architecture is met with scorn, middling modern architecture is sure to attract so much more hate!
Seems to mostly be a Facebook phenomenon:
https://arkitekten.se/nyheter/arkitekturupproret-fem-ar-av-h... (in Swedish)
This is the paper for those that are accused of designing those ugly buildings in the first place.
Of course they are going to say that average people have it wrong, "it's a modern social networking phenomena" etc.
Obviously these elitists know beauty better than the average person /s.
I'd love this here in Seattle. I am not against modern home design with its excellent safety features and efficient usage of available land, but boy am I tired of the 'contemporary' aesthetic consuming every plot of land that comes up for sale.
Really? I feel the complete opposite. I moved to Seattle recently from Europe, and I feel the contemporary houses way prettier.
Most of the homes in my suburb seem to have been built in the 60s or 70s and they could be described as a shed-like box coming in 2 or 3 variations. Most contemporary homes are also boxy, but I find them far more aesthetically pleasing.
But as someone else said it's a matter of context. If you were building in the historic city center of a European town with its own traditional style, contemporary architecture would feel jarring and out of place.
I'm not arguing about what's aesthetic or not. I'm saying that a city should explicitly pick one: either have all the same design because that's how you want the city to be, or have varied designs because the alternative is the above without the honesty.
I would prefer the latter because I think 'modern' designs aren't modern at all and are instead cheaply executed clones of what was transgressive architecture 50 years ago. But I appreciate that the city should make decisions based on what everyone wants-- not just me, but also not just developers.
But don't they already do? either cities have strict rules about how buildings look like (rare) or they don't.
Probably what you are seeing is just a side effect of the slow effect of gentrification. When you have old houses in desirable parts of town, it's often better to level them to ground and build a new one rather than refurbish it. New builds are mostly dominated by contemporary aesthetics because... well, they are what's fashionable now.
If this happened in the 90s, you would have a lot of Mc Mansions with 90s aesthetics, and in 20-30 years you'll get houses with whatever style is popular then.
It’s even worse on the eastside where modern houses do not fit the surrounding landscape.
This is very subjective. There is no reason a traditional architectural style fits the landscape more than modern other than that's what you are used to seeing. The most significant modern house in the US is totally at home in the surrounding landscape.
Frankly, using FLW as an example is a bit uncharitable to the opposing argument. Dude was one of the, if not the single, greatest architects in history. I don't think anybody would complain about living in a world of his design.
The problem is without a keen eye for aesthetics, it's really easy to use the post(-post?)-modern style in really, really lazy ways, to create absolutely hideous structures. Brutalism runs into the same problem: there are some Brutalist buildings, especially those that pioneered the style, that are absolutely breathtaking. The problem is that Brutalism was also pretty cheap to pull off, so you ended up with a bunch of hacky office buildings that pulled a couple pages out of the design, and built every college campus in North America.
Is there a solution to this? I dunno. Chicago's "it's illegal to build ugly buildings in downtown" seems to have worked alright. But there's always going to be a market pressure to build the cheapest building possible while tipping your hat to whatever architectural style you can get away with, for minimal extra cost.
Not really sure where I was going with all that, but bring back Art Deco.
Modern/Post-modern in a rural area is a real stand out, not in a good way.
The modern farmhouse thing is so confusing! They would look fine on a 20 acre farm, but crammed together in a neighborhood they look ridiculous. I hope it ends soon.
To me these "traiditional" style buildings in Europe would be considered "modern" by North American standards.
Structurally, it feels like North American houses have been built the same way since the colonies started (sidings, frames/studs, gabled/shingled roofs). We even try to keep the houses look as close to the colonial styles as possible, with plastic/aluminum sidings and windows imitating wood.
In Europe it seems like they moved completely over to steel-frame, concrete/composite walls. Roofs mostly metal, windows large and not flimsy. I heard one explanation is the trees being all cut down in Europe during the industrial revolution, but I'm not sure that tells the whole story. Dimensional lumber there are easy to buy and not that much more expensive. Ocean shipping is dirty cheap.
If I were to take a wild guess it has more to do with modern fire-safety standards (can't spread to another room), which the lumber/construction industry in NA have probably lobbied against.
Lumber is widely used in Nordic and other Northern European countries, precisely because they have lots of forests. It's most common in houses, but even apartment locks are being built from wood these days. Fire safety is not much of an issue if you do it right.
Using more wood would make a lot of sense, since it's essentially a long-term carbon sink. Concrete production on the other hand causes massive carbon emissions. After spending some time in a house with lumber from 1800s, I can only admire the quality and craftmanship.
>but even apartment locks are being built from wood these days.
Are the apartments traditional wood-framed or cross-laminated timber? CLT is an entirely different beast that performs more like concrete or heavy timber in fire. I would put them more in the category of composite material.
I think CLT are already popular in parts of Europe, but in NA they are quite rare. They are usually only for very premium apartments or government buildings. Most wooden multi-unit buildings in NA are built the same way as houses and are quite flimsy. Though in the past couple years they tried to mitigate it with heavy stuffing of sound insulation to make everything sound more solid. One major difference is you don't hear footsteps as much. Older wooden buildings are a nightmare if you are sensitive to noise.
Pre-war houses (middle/upper-class ones) in NA are also quite solid. The structural quality difference between pre-war and post-war houses are night and day.
Traditional wood frame, with lumber pressure treated with a fire retardant. They might have some CLT beams, but they're predominantly built out of pressure treated lumber and plywood. They're safe because they have sprinkler systems, building-wide fire alarms and redundant fire-resistant staircases.
Sound generally isn't an issue if you have polite neighbors, but if somebody upstairs is doing jumping jacks you'll definitely hear it.
A lot of the old European stuff was also bombed out in the 40s. I would imagine that in the postwar era, getting everyone under roofs quickly would've been the priority, and there wasn't possibly enough wood to do that for all of Europe.
The amount of destruction from bombing Europe is greatly exaggerated I think. Most of towns and cities were hardly touched.
I don‘t think it was exaggerated when Europe needed the Marshal plan to reconstruct. You can check the scale in dollars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
In many cities bombs are still routinely found and deactivated. In Berlin, for example, a few blocks of Kreuzberg are now and then emptied (go do sth for the day) by the authorities to deactivate ww2 bombs.
It also sounds a bit insensitive.
Maybe in Sweden. Certainly not between Rhein and Dnieper.
Beautiful coastal cities like Rotterdam or Le Havre were bombed to smithereens.
Europe is enormous.
There’s also the second part of that statement; the need to house people quickly.
Even untouched places like Sweden had to deal with housing masses coming to cities due to postwar urbanization. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme
> Structurally, it feels like North American houses have been built the same way since the colonies started (sidings, frames/studs, gabled/shingled roofs).
In the US, this depends a lot on where you are (at least for older buildings). Buildings tended to be built from whatever materials were in the area, so you get lots of brick in the midwest, lots of woodframe in the west, etc. What primary material was used has a pretty large effect on the style of the building.
I'm not sure about other parts of the East Coast, but when I was in Toronto, while the older houses are bricks, many newer ones are wood-framed with a brick facade. What surprised me was that many owners had no idea, especially if they bought second-hand.
Modern architecture is individualism run amok. Buildings are more testaments to architects’ egos than organic improvements to the surrounding environment, or sources of aesthetic pleasure to passers by.
> Modern architecture is individualism run amok.
I don't see much individualism in modern architecture, though. All these modern buildings tend to look the same. Ugly and depressing.
While spoken by a fictional character, I believe this is a good way to view what architecture should be.
"A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!"
Would that produce an architectural style run amok? I don't think so. But I believe the view point described there would be described as individualism.
There’s also practicality. E.g. in the first set of pictures, the rejected “modern” one featured balconies, and perhaps a garden level in the middle (based on the amount of plants).
Responding to modern needs with modern solutions might be easier without having to match the traditional style.
It’s literally the opposite of that. It was embracing fabrication over craft creation. It was prioritizing local placement and the uses of the structure over the sentiments of the architect.
It’s possible that _you_ don’t like the resulting aesthetic but that’s not some broader statement about modern architecture, it’s literally your personal preference.
Maybe the problem is that the egos are too small--if they REALLY had an ego, they'd build a massive monument to their own memory, like the Great Pyramid or the Taj Mahal, and it'd become forever celebrated as a monumental human achievement.
What art can't you say that about?
It’s very easy to avoid seeing or paying for modern “art”, not so easy with modern buildings.
Which buildings of any era have you been able to unsee? Can you teach us this technique?
None, that’s what I meant by “not so easy” (just in case you missed the mild sarcasm, and took my comment to literally mean that it’s not easy but still doable to not see ugly buildings).
Ironically, one of the major themes of modern(ist) architecture is eliminating ornamentation and focusing solely on the hierarchy of spaces buildings create and what their uses are. "Form follows function" comes from modern architecture.
(Not all of it is successful! And like, it's hard to say Calatrava is about that. But we hear more about the failures than the successes in modern architecture, and conversely less about the failures of classical architecture, b/c survivorship bias.)
Most of the pioneering modernist architects were socialists—not a lot of ideological overlap with individualism run amok.
They were western socialists. Have you seen stalinist architecture, it is almost neo-classical compared to modernist architecture...
Looking at the residential complex in the article, Risørholmen, it looks like the "ugly" modern houses have rooftop gardens are large windows while the traditional houses have only a few small windows. Sure, the red tiled roofs look nice, but I wonder if this is a case of aesthetics taking precedent over functionality.
In Finland in the 1970s, there was a trend away from traditional gable roof to modern flat ones: so much cleaner, more elegant, and easy to build!
Then they realized that it snows a lot in Finland, and having big flat spaces where snow can accumulate is not a great idea.
To add to this: large windows seem great on the surface, however in Nordic countries, the houses are generally very well insulated and rarely have air conditioning, so the new houses with floor to ceiling windows turn into unlivable greenhouses in the summer.
>so the new houses with floor to ceiling windows turn into unlivable greenhouses in the summer.
I find this hard to believe. I live in a place with tall (not quite floor to ceiling) windows and hot summers and having such large windows gives the house way more ventilation, not less.
I remember a apartment where I live as student. First floor next to bus stop, west fasting windows. So not really that great to open. And the central ventilation itself was not that effective. Net result was 27C inside in mid winter...
But it is the alternative to paying workmen to go up on slanted rooves to knock the snow off them - "lumityö".
In addition to functional advantages, the modern variant of that complex just looks better to me. It would be even better if it was a bit more colorful.
The original buildings that were never built are photocopies of other buildings I saw in my country and in other places around the world. They carry a stamp with a date >= 2010 and are completely anonymous. The ones that they actually built are not necessary beautiful but at least tell a story about the place they are in.
So are traditional houses.
Maybe it says something about this design being successful for some reason. Housing around the world has always been dictated by cost and lately about environment.
I think this debate shouldn't be about modern vs. classic. But rather about ugly vs. beautiful/interesting. There's so much great modern architecture if you look at Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusie, Mies van der Rohe, SANAA, Tadao Ando... But these buildings in the article just look very ugly, cheap and generic.
The original Swedish 'branch':
Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like modern architecture is about cutting labor and material costs as much as possible. Old architecture had craftsmen put a lot of time into things like smooth plaster walls, molding, wainscoting, herringbone floors, and decorative exteriors. Modern architecture is founded on the principal of hiring the cheapest labor possible to throw up the cheapest drywall available and covering it up with texture to hide the low quality - then charging as much as buildings using the older, higher quality methods.
Of course modern architecture is just going to look bland, generic, and low quality compared to old architecture - there's only about 10% the effort put into it.
This is the comment I was looking for. If I remember correctly, there have been a number of scandals in Gothenburg around new residential buildings being built cheaply and badly. Most infamous perhaps are the apartment buildings that popped up about a decade ago on Friggagatan, which the local newspaper described as “fuskbygget”. Being there feels a bit like being in prison too.
It's more than that. Every element of western architecture, from sidewalks to office buildings, is devoid of art. Just look around. Our architecture is stereometric brutalism made of identical concrete slabs of plain gray appearance. Note, that it would cost nothing to imprint sidewalk slabs with some ornament when those slabs are still liquid concrete, but not only there is no desire for such art expression, the public would ridicule such an idea. It's telling that there is no such thing as American ornament or art style. Even clothes that westerners wear are plain bland lookalike. The western society lays squashed under the immense pressure of the utilitarian mindset, the same mindset that's creating its science.
Some of the examples in the blog have complex features like cantilevered spaces. The wall of glass look must be more expensive than plain concrete walls. It can't be all about cost.
> This early proposal for Sandakerveien 58 B/C in Oslo was rejected by local authorities in 2014
> The revised building boasts a far more traditional look.
Seems like early proposal had different FAR which seems like bigger issue than style.
Brutalism, is and always will be, cold, tasteless, lazy, and fucking ugly because taste.
I don't care if architecture is minimalist, traditional, or experimental as long as it's not oppressively uniform or hostile like it should be the headquarters for a reverse mortgage company or the secret police.
Props to local cities to balking at cookie-cutter, modernity-obsessed designs that would harm the aesthetics of their neighborhoods.
Scandinavia often seems to get a pass "because Scandinavia", the enlightenment is implied.
Yet people mock Poundbury in the UK, which was a stylistically similar effort.
Who mocks Poundbury, and why? I never heard of it before, but in pictures it looks.. fine? Not exciting, but not offensive either. A bit bland in a palatable way.
It's considered a bit of a joke by many architects for being stylistically backwards.
It was started by the king who wanted to make a new town but with traditional architecture that people would actually like.
I would always pick cheap and ugly over beautiful and expensive when buying housing. It is already expensive enough and to expect me to pay 50% or 200% more so that someone who didn't even pay for it can think it looks nice is just waste of money.
Interesting that Denmark is not mentioned at all (expect for a single reference to BIG as a leading studio). Perhaps modern architecture in Denmark is more thoughtful, constrained by public regulation or maybe Danes are just more open to modern approaches.
Modern, brutalist architecture feels forced into a landscape.
The picture at the top looks truly awful. It looks a lot less bad in person
New stuff is new. Gets adopted and publicized. Public craze ensues. Reactionaries midlessly push back. Society reevaluates. New stuff is old now. Less of it, becomes assimilated.
New stuff is new....
Why are people even surprised things always go like this? It's like the stages of grief, once you know the trick you just roll your eyes knowing what will eventually happen