Good grief, that first CA article reads like a reactionary "good old genteel days" with a central villain Eisenman.
Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life.
The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops").
What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs.
If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it!
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p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms.
And then we can ask the questions:
Does architecture favor a specific class?
Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case.
Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less?
Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds?
And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?
I think the problem you're describing, how to build big and still have it look as nice as baroque / gothic / art nouveau, was basically solved by things like art deco skyscrapers in the US and the seven sisters in Moscow. And for most housing it's not a big problem anyway, because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was possible to build then should still be possible now and much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast.
> Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life
This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a school is possible; having it serve the poor would be possible, too. I wish it happened.
> because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
Lol. Plenty of density is relative. It does give you more than the average density of a West coast city, which is enough to get upvotes here, though, so there is that.
> Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries.
There is an order of magnitude more regulation. Or maybe an order of magnitude more paperwork?
The metaphysical BS is the problem, architects treat buildings like sculptures, novels, and stories; as vehicles to say something as much or more than livable places. I don't know why we have the idea that structures need to be an artistic representation of ideals like sculpture when they are designed to be used primarily by people to live in and customize as they see fit.
It would be like designing hammers that are commentary on the homelessness problem in the world today but are strikingly ineffective to actually hammer nails; its fine if the only result is to be part of a museum exhibit but the architects force us to use the hammers.
The eisenmann snippet of the second page has him try to defend his work because it is supposed to say something, a commentary on modern dislocation. But that's a message designed for people to not escape, and most arcihtecture in that sense is the tyranny of the artist or government trying to immortalize feelings in books which you can only close the cover of by moving away.
Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life.
The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops").
What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs.
If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it!
--
p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms.
And then we can ask the questions:
Does architecture favor a specific class?
Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case.
Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less?
Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds?
And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?