Seattle PBS channel KCTS asked local architect Rick Mohler to deconstruct Seattle’s new apartment buildings. Explains some of Vancouver’s look too, only we need the highrise version.
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Mr. Mohler is an architect, much of whose work is presumably within Seattle, so it makes sense that he would not also put the finger to the city’s onerous design approvals process. These buildings are dull and inoffensive. That’s much of the point. They’re good enough and won’t soil anyone’s sense of aesthetic propriety.
I don’t know what the contemporary equivalent of a Queen Anne would be, but good luck getting that one through City Hall.
“Things all looking the same when they’re built now, that’s a bad thing. Things all looking the same when they were built 100 years ago, that’s a good thing.”
That’s snobbish, as well as ahistorical and naive. The bungalow subdivisions of the 1920s and before were derided in their time as monotonous, homogeneous. The Victorians of the even older city were considered cheap and tacky when new, crass structures with little class. Even Paris, with its nearly uniform Haussmann blocks, was despised by many, including planner Werner Hegemann, who derided them as “indulging in fashionable looking coats, not minding dirty underwear,” the dirty underwear in this case standing in for the poor living conditions inside.
Some of us–including Rick Mohler–look back on late 19th and early 20th century structures, a century hence, and find them charming and beautiful. That’s taste. That’s subjective, not empirical, not facts. That’s part of the trope of urban nostalgia, and therefore has little or no social relevance.
Will today’s panel buildings age well? I rather doubt it, but that has zero to do with if they look similar. It has to do with whether the materials themselves will withstand long-term use and weathering, or if they will deteriorate in the way that the plaster and concrete of ersatz 20th century modernism has. Such pragmatic questions are worth asking.
Agreed. Architural nostalgia is pure sample bias. People love the old buildings because they’re still around to love. The Victorians built a lot of crap, too, but most of it is gone and no longer taints our flavour for that style. What still exists today exists partially because those that survived were not necessarily crap and partially through dumb luck. The mere fact that a building has survived is not proof that it is any better than a new one.
I read that as conscious irony, and assumed the point was the same as the one you make.
I absolutely agree with your conclusion. It wasn’t until I saw 1960/70s buildings in Switzerland, where they had been properly maintained, that I understood that they could look fine – previous instances I had seen had simply not been looked after.
Though in general I think there’s far too much attention paid to architecture; such focus privileges individual expression and taste over community and everyday experience. Save me from the architects! I’ll take pragmatic time-tested solutions any day over pretensions that buildings should be “art.”
Man that soundtrack was abrasive.
Given the choice between a boring cheap utilitarian and reliable Toyota, and a fancy-pants-in-the shop-all-the-time expensive Jaguar, the prudent choice is the first one.
Who looks at these buildings – and how often? These are places to live, not the Bilbao Guggenheim.
There are so few architectural and heritage aesthetes – a preponderance of whom are lurking on this blog.
Yes, we like San Francisco’s painted ladies, and the Marine Building, and view cones for that matter, but that’s a minuscule minority.
Hardly anyone looks at this stuff. Hardly anyone cares.
If a building “pops” against this background, that’s a bonus. A modern structure, like Liebeskind’s Ontario Museum, or Sir Norman Foster’s work on the Reichstadt are exciting and memorable for their novelty and juxtaposition. If all structures were built in this fashion, it would no longer even register.