Quote:
Originally Posted by aaron38
I saw plenty raw efficiency driving through China today for three hours. And for three hours, every time I looked out the window it was exactly the same. Eventually I stopped looking. Raw efficiency is not enough.
I agree that crazy for its own sake is no solution either. But at least crazy is different. Raw efficiency converges to one global design per construction material set.
But really I have three main complaints.
- The tower on podium
- The Jenga tower that is designed to look like it’s going to fall over.
- The mirror glass building, which I call negative architecture because it doesn’t really exist in the cityscape.
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That's not raw efficiency, that's cheapness. There is a difference between a lavish, but efficient building and a box slapped together and cheaply as possible.
If you look at buildings in Chicago from the period of high modernism, they are almost universally detailed to a T. The way the steel seams overlap, the way welds are hidden, the way lines in Concrete and steel align. You can't look at buildings like this and tell me a city full of like structures woudn't be on par with Rome in her glory days:
thedaleycenter.com
som.com
wikipedia
These buildings were all built by people who cared about details. They were constructed at the hands of true craftsmen, people who learned the trades as the technologies were born. The problem we have today is that much less enlightened people love to glom onto these styles because you can make something that looks similar for next to nothing cost wise. The execution is not there either and the style loses all its appeal. It's not like the good old days when you could just round up a bunch of immigrant craftsmen and ask them to build you a building with basically no plans and it would still end up looking great because the one or two guys with actual skill showed up and carved a bunch of beautiful limestone details for the facade.
I have buildings where the the front facade is gorgeous, but you can tell one crew would show up to do the ornate side of the building and the goon squad built the rest. This building below is one I'm rehabbing and the front facade is literally perfect, everything is square, everything is hand carved or stamped terracotta, but you go and look at the common brick on the sides and it's clearly built by the numbnuts crew:
When you look at the brick on the side, it drops almost three full courses from where they started building on one side to the other, literally they dropped 8" out of level as they built around the building. You can even see where the crew that did the front facade compensated. This is very much the same problem we have today except the good crews work only on the most premium houses and the goon squad builds the rest of the buildings as quickly and shittily as possible. There is no more "use the good guys where it counts and have the cheap guys do the backside" in construction. It's now either you have a really great GC that is top notch or you use the cheapest possible labor. There is no more attention to detail, I've had to fire multiple subcontractors because they simply don't listen to directions, you tell them "don't grind the front facade" and what happens? They are grinding away at it 15 minutes later. You tell them "DO NOT DEMOLISH THE ORNAMENTAL WOODWORK AROUND THE DOORS". You come back a few hours later and they've ripped a huge chunk out. You can see that in the above picture, I made them dumpster dive all the parts back out of their trailer that they tore down and docked them two days of pay so I can have someone put that woodwork back together again. But that matters to me, it doesn't to most people. Obviously the demo crew looks at that crusty painted victorian woodwork and just assumes "that looks old and shitty, better rip it apart". There is no appreciation or understanding of craftsmanship anymore...