*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.
I like it. But I also will never own one, so wtv I guess.
Back then, the builders built homes.
These days builders build houses.
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
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.
If it got more people into houses I wouldn’t give a shit, but sadly, its shitty in both ways
*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.
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.
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.
Modern boxy homes would be pretty great if their roofs are also designed to be used as a patio area with awnings or solar panels. It just seems like a waste otherwise.
rooftop gardens would be goated
This is the “light” version. The worst are when they don’t even have street facing windows, only concrete and garage doors facing the street and all around the house nothing but concrete/tiles, no greenery. These houses make me so sad while walking around a neighboorhood :(
the grey and black rocks garden!
Ʌ921 is crazy
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.
Funny enough 1921 is when all the houses from the second half of the comic started.
Not fair to equate bland housing with modernism.
Tell me this building is bland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Assembly
That’s horrific
The reflecting pool is so funny… What’s there to reflect? The legislative assembly for my province is more breathtaking
It looks like it hasn’t been used since the fall of the soviet union and I’m only half sure it’s not intentional.
Blander than any of the Corbusier buildings you’re responding to, tbh
it’s not bland, but can someone powerwash that thing?
And lose all the brutalist charm? Might as well wash the sauce off your spaghetti before eating it.
And lose all the brutalist charm? Might as well wash the sau
Wait… other people DON’T do that?
You can blame this guy: Adolf Loos, at least in part.
Major influence behind Modernism. He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.
“The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” is the core theme of his essay “Ornamentation and Crime” .
Basically,
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ornamentation causes buildings and useful objects to go out of style.
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Things that go out of style require materials and manpower to update.
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It is the moral imperative of the designer to make useful things, things that need to be redone are less useful and are wasteful.
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Therefore it is the moral imperative of the designer to remove all ornamentation from design.
He saw ornamentation as “degenerate” and equated ornamentlessnes with moral and intellectual development. He also made it a race thing. He used the example of people from Papua New Guinea having tattoos. Paraphrasing: “these primitive savages ornament themselves with tattoos, we enlightened europeans don’t. We smart, they dumb. Therefore ornament = dumb bad, no ornament = good smart. See?”
He was a major inspiration behind the modernist movement. It helped that unadorned buildings are cheaper and easier to construct - especially with the advent of cheap glass and steel construction. So you end up with this sort of soulless architecture that gives no sense of time or place - that tells you nothing about its purpose or the people who built/use it.
I know it was fairly cheap ornamentation, but the damage his philosophy did to buildings in Germany is profound. They straight up tore the ornamentation off a lot of buildings.
He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.
“I think that thing is ugly, so I’m gonna make something even uglier!”
We can pretend he’s the main influence, whilst ignoring the fact that most people prefer square even walls for aesthetic, functional, and - most of all - cost purposes.
I do agree we could do better w.r.t to colour, and millenial grey needs to go. But don’t knock the rectangle. Rectangle is good. Rectangle is steady. You can plan on rectangle.
Relevant YouTube video: how did the world get so ugly?
But consider this:
Hexagons - bestagons
Rectangle good, sure. But rectangle that gives no sense of time or place sad, I think.
I really like some architecture inspired by modernism. Huge FLW fan - fallingwater is my favorite building. But the good modernist or modernist-derived buildings incorporate and emphasize their surroundings and give a sense of time and place by incorporating traditional stylistic elements, local materials, etc.
Also, no pretending needed - this guy was a major progenitor of the style. The style can be a very good fit for the needs of people who commission buildings to be built, and it can look cool in its own right, but regardless of any of that Loos was a pioneering force in the Modernist movement
Unpopular opinion: I never saw the appeal of Frank Lloyd Wright, honestly. I don’t know how anybody can look at Falling Water and not see a bunch of cardboard boxes somebody left at the creek.
Yeah, that’s unpopular alright. How do I look at it without seeing cardboard boxes? With my functional eyes
Tell me you’ve never read Buckminster Fuller without telling me
Hmm, tricky but I’ll try.
*Mimes: Five words*:
- 1st word: *Points at self *
- 2nd word: *Crosses arms straight, refusal motion*
- 3rd word: *Folds hands open and holds close to eyes*
- 4th word, 1st syllable: *Cups hand to ear, then makes thrusting motion with hips*
- 4th word, 2nd syllable: *Hold first finger and thumb close together, squints eyes*
- 4th word, 3rd syllable: *Walking motion whilst lowering knees gradually*
- 5th word, 1st syllable: *Pats belly and plumps out cheeks*
- 5th word, 2nd syllable: *Makes a confused gesture, scratches head, looks around*
LMFAO
Like… everything he wrote?
Rectangle looks like shit and is monotone
No like really, I can see it making sense for older times where it was harder to build shit but cmon we are in 2026…
I think an aspect of the problem is the modern high expectations of functionality for things like climate control and ingress protection against pests and water. It’s much easier to not make a mistake on those if you aren’t adding any “frills”. Balancing those needs with ornamentation and cost is such a difficult juggling act, most people just don’t.
It’s also a question of cost. You can probably take the layout off the modern house and have the facade look like the housing of old. But building houses is expensive so costs need to be cut where it can, thus very minimalist facades. If you live in your own house would you pay 50k or 100k just to have your house look a certain way from the outside? I know I wouldn’t. I could barely afford the house.
Man, I really don’t care for this Adolf character…
Just normal Adolf things. Y’know, like white supremacy
Ayn Rand also writes about this in The Fountainhead
Goddamn she found a way to be as wrong as possible about every single topic.
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“Guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your cat’s are gonna love it.”
They are building those in my (mainly 1940s) neighborhood and yeah I hate them. Half the bottom floor is a garage, no front porch, front door recessed so unfriendly and people just drive into the garage, close the door and enter the house without ever stepping outside. And so very ugly and builders ask 1.5 million for them. They buy one lot then build two mc mansions on them. I get splitting the lot but we don’t need those monstrous buildings.
I also mourn the loss of community but honestly moving to a living situation without a front door was such a huuuuuuge quality of life upgrade. The relentless greedy advertisers were so entitled.
