Over the past few months I have asked a male architect for ideas & drafts for the renovation of the farmhouse, and at every turn I am stunned by his utter disregard for any cleaning-related concerns. For example, he is very into the idea of having in the living-room a big, non-openable window near the ceiling—which, granted, looks pretty, like having a piece of blue sky when you raise your eyes, but immediately I’m like, with a high ceiling, how will I clean this? You can’t open it so you have to clean both sides separately, and you can’t easily reach either side. I’ll need a tool with an absurdly long telescopic handle. He says, a stepladder. I’m like, but I’ll need to carry it by myself to the living-room and the front of the house every time. “So?” So a very tall stepladder is heavy? And it will be hard not to get dirty water dripping down the wall. He reacts like he can’t believe he is being asked to bring the concept of dirty soap water into his grand designs, like these are base, trifling considerations, when to me it’s a crucial factor in the decision to add this decorative window.
Similarly we both agree on leaving most of the wood beams exposed because they’re old and beautiful, but when I ask if we ought to insulate in such a way as to cover every other one, so the remaining ones are farther apart and it’s harder for spiders to use them as ready-made anchors for their webs, he just looks disgusted, like “I am talking about Architecture and you bring up spiderwebs.” At this point I start to entertain the idea that men make horrible architects. You design someone’s house to give them a nice, convenient space to live in, not to make their life more difficult. A man who has never used a sponge in his life should not be allowed to graduate from architect school and that’s the end of it.
Related reading:
All of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses had leaky roofs and were basically uninhabitable
Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture
My mom is an architect and I can confirm . Male architects are overwhelmingly pretentious douches that half ass their projects
Im currently studying interior design and have been involved in the field in and off for a long time. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people live in ‘architecturally designed’ houses where the male architect was more interested in winning awards so he could upgrade his Maserati than designing something humans can actually live in.
Whenever I see fancy architecture, my first thought is nearly always “this is gonna be a bitch to heat”, closely followed by “that staircase looks terribly unsafe”.
I don’t understand why so many fancy architects don’t seem to consider, that people would have to live in that house. If you are an architect and people don’t actually want to live and spend time in your house, aren’t you a failed architect?
I live in a country where it rains 265 days of the year, and it irritates me immensely how many modern buildings locally have clearly been designed by architects who either don’t know this, or don’t care. Why would you ever design a flat-roofed building in this climate? There are so many new buildings here that look fine when it’s sunny, but are grey and depressing when it rains. And so many slightly less new buildings which are streaked with rust and mold because they’ve been rained on constantly for the last ten years, and the architect never considered what that would do to them.
Architects need to look to traditional building techniques. Houses in England have steep roofs for a reason. Houses in Israel have flat roofs for a reason.
I’ve seen what English weather does to a flat roof!
Best architectural disaster remains the French Library Bibliothèque nationale François Mitterrand
The building is slowly sinking into the ground
Because the architect didn’t take into account THE WEIGHT OF THE FUCKING BOOKS
My high school was an all glass cube wall place designed by a famous architect but the custom ordered and shaped glass was from a defunct company and less than 5 years later there were wooden planks replacing the glass floor tiles and wall panels in several places from normal ware and tear as well as a hurricane. The school was expensive to clean and teachers had to put up curtains in all the rooms or everyone in the hallways could just see into the classroom and people in the hallway would stare in like classrooms were fish aquariums.
If architecture doesn’t consider the consequences of a space being used and maintained over time it is ultimately more hubris than art.
My college has some acceptable 1950’s architecture, but the town around it is more fascinating
I disagree with the article wanting to abolish the skyscraper entirely, though, as there are many good art deco skyscrapers
Oh, thank God, a post where I can bitch about brutalism. Because fuck that shit. Where’s the joy? Where’s the adaptation to climate? Where’s the fucking comfort? WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT.
Read the second article lierdumoa posted above because it is the most delicious tea ever. I haven’t read such a good article in a while.
Oh, I did. The author gave ZERO fucks. The sarcasm, the burns. All very well-deserved. Also some awesome pictures of the Alhambra.
“Capitalism eats culture, and it makes ugly places. Money has no taste.”
Brutalism was explicitly invented as a response to capitalist excess. Concrete specifically was seen as a proletarian material of the people, and brutalism design was meant to give off one thing: Power.
It looks lovely when you cover it in plants.
i remember visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house a few years ago, and the tour guide tried to make things seem like architectural genius but it was basically impossible not to rip on the dude. some things i remember:
wright was 5'6", which he believed to be the ideal male height. all the ceilings were built to accommodate this. i was taller than this at the time, and i had to crane my neck or risk hitting my head.
the house was built over a waterfall, but wright refused to put bug screens in the windows. the family who lived there ended up getting a contractor to do it because he refused to sacrifice the beauty of his creation even a little to protect against mosquitoes.
the roofs were all flat and fenced in, accessible by a hatch i believe. there was no drain. in Pennsylvania. where winter can yield many feet of snow.
there was some kind of porch beneath the house, i cant remember exactly how it was accessed only it was entirely windows so you had a good view of the waterfall, and the tour guide said it made the house a bitch to heat.
this is all not even to mention complete inaccessibility for the physically disabled
was the house pretty? sure. but as a museum, not a home.
bonus: my mom used to work in a research building that was curved, considered a great, award-winning design. one of the walls was almost entirely windows, meaning that spring’s tornado season was brutal; the only safe place in the whole building was a lab in the basement that was locked most of the time due to lab safety protocols. everything in the building leaked, the rooms were so tall she couldnt reach the ceilings to clean out cobwebs, there was 0 insulation, and overall my mom is thoroughly unimpressed with male architects.
Architecture schools usually don’t have any classes about people, only about form. In terms of accessibility too this is problematic, as bringing things up to accessibility code is often seen as a fight with design instead of intrinsic to the design itself. This is instead something that ought to be built in as the main purpose of the building (the fact that it will be used by human –and other– beings of all abilities and needs, not just a concept to be presented for praise or critique).
That said, I have some thoughts on criticism of architecture (esp brutalism). As @asundergrowth said, brutalism was an anti-capitalist statement–which is why so many big government buildings and university buildings are brutalist. It was seen as unpretentious architecture, and it was a huge surprise that it failed to be the culturally/socially accessible thing it was intended to be. Architecture swung the other way after that–so legible as to be condescending, drawing inspiration from billboards and other capitalist marketing tactics (Robert Venturi eg).
When I started studying architecture a friend asked jokingly, why are those (pointing to a big soulless apartment block) buildings so ugly? I very happily replied that it’s the capitalist meaninglessness of repetitive labor practices that we’re reacting to, only to have an older Polish friend say–but those buildings were all over communist Poland too. I guess my point is that critiques based on ideology have proved insufficient. Hubris, elitism, architectural pedagogy are all responsible. Even if capitalism is partly to blame (see Tafuri’s “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”), there’s other things that need to be taken into account, as all the examples above show.
I worked at a theater during college. I was a manager and I needed to write something to facilities about a door being broken. I also mentioned that a few light bulbs were out. Well it turns out that the theater was designed to be really cool looking, but it was a complete mess to deal with. In order to replace those bulbs they would need to build scaffolding, so they were just planning to wait until they refurbished the theater to change them. They had been out for 10 years when I worked there? Still out now?
