Re threadkilla's photos, a) looks like mid-20th century Scandinavia to me, pre or post war I don't know (could be elsewhere at another time, I'm no expert on that period). It seems like it would be a respectful neighbor in any urban context. Like.
b), some Russian (or other country with the cyrillic alphabet) atrocity. Don't even know if the historic element is real or not. Dislike.
c) looks like a traditional Japanese house, not my preference, but interesting for its influence on Wright and other early 20th century architects. OK.
d) The oval shape makes me think this is not a traditional Asian building, although it seems influenced by same. OK.
e) Appears to be another traditional Asian building, can't tell if it is a house or not, or japanese or Chinese (or maybe Korean). I like all the exposed natural wood and the carpentry details. An influence on Greene and Greene.
Plans:
a) traditional Japanese house. Interesting. Like.
b) Looks like a Wright plan. Like.
c) I admit I searched the internet for this. A plan by an over-the-top traditionalist, John Henry. Dislike. To me he is the sort of designer who gives traditional architecture a bad name.
d/ looks like regency period in england or Federal period in the US. I don't recognize it, and I would want to make some serious tweeks to the plan, but I can imagine that the spaces are quite sublime. Like.
Not sure if this is relevant but Western countries seem to have an aversion to Classical buildings after Mussolini and Hitler's projects. Something still reminds people of fascism when they see those columns... or banking which hasn't exactly won themselves any favors of late.
Those 'traditional' Japanese homes are pretty darn rare because they're cold in the winter and hard to cool in the humid summers - not to mention all the vermin that get in and out. Not so comfortable or clean. My recollection of old European homes with their tall ceilings is they had a similar comfort problem...
And a floor plan combined with elevations makes 3 dimensions genius.
Wrong again. Floor plans, like elevations, are also two-dimensional. A perspective drawing is also two dimensional, but it is a representation of three dimensions.
suri, your arrogance is almost as boundless as your ignorance.
miles... obviously on their own they have 2 dimensions. when you have a floor plan's two dimensions and an elevation which has the third and one of the first two, you have all the dimensions. Would you like me to find a children's book to help explain this basic geometry to you?
3tk, The Prora resort on the inland of Ruga is the largest still standing example of Nazi architecture. It is a mile-long hideous modernist building virtually ripped intact from the notebooks of Le Corbusier, who himself was a Nazi sympathizer.
The obvious diagnosis is borderline personality disorder with at least a touch of OCD. I urge you, for your own benefit, to visit a mental health professional.
Volunteer: as I recall Bauhaus was seen as too communist and therefore shut down by the Nazis? My comment stems from what may of my non-architect friends in Europe were speculating. I recall some political connection of Classical (roman not greek) to the right spectrum and Modernist/International Style to the left. Speer, to me, sings to the classical order more than modernist.
Suri: May I point you to the section of 'Devil Wears Prada' film where Meryl Streep is scolding Anne Hathaway? There are 'taste-makers' in this world and whether anyone wants to admit it much of the art/fashion/design world is influenced by the upper echelons. That echelon pays a lot to shape tastes and it trickles down. Some of the vernacular has that influence as well; someone must have pointed out 'Learning from Vegas' and Venturi's suburb studio studies. Deal with it, or pay for what you want. You may enjoy the some of the work of RAMSA, led by the dean of Yale.
aojwny: I believe those who have made an intense study of proportional systems believe that there are underlying principles, and rules even, that are universal.
i doubt that.i would imagine that the sense of proportions is inculcated and develops historically. the genesis of western classical architectural proportioning has been historically related to that of the development of western classical music (in actual fact a linkage of all three, architecture, music and maths). the development of musical scale intervals and chords shows great changes, discoveries and developments of fundamental harmonies based on utilization and expansion of new musical intervals and the orthodoxification of what were once deemed dissonant harmonies frowned upon by religious clergy and their latter commonplace usage. and this development of harmony, of musical proportioning, forms the backbone of classical music.
i would say the same applies in architecture. and i would say, exactly as nowadays musicians (i mean actual musicians, composers..) may explore the prospect of unorthodox harmony/ dissonance based on a fundamental understanding of harmony and harmonic motion ...then architects should equally have that right to view their domain as an open ended one that has a rich history that guarantees the development of ideas that are not stylistically or otherwise dogmatically circumscribed by what has already happened before. in other words, there is completely the right to view certain architectures not as ossified product of a closed, completed history but as architectural experiments in breaking out of Architecture, out of orthodoxy.
And yes, there is also the right to have a Mozart for a Beethoven, a Shostakovich for a Schoenberg, a Vivaldi for a Bach...and so on. There are people who work internally, they make the interior plush and nice and beautiful and there are people who push the boundaries. There are also people who look/ed back (classically) and around (vernacularly), Stravinsky, Janacek, Bartok (who did some very pleasant folk-based music and some extremely difficult 'modernist' music...lovely stuff actually.)
But there are also people who are just Others. Debussy and Ravel. If people stuck to neoclassicism, we would never had such gorgeous music. I mean Ravel's music is the closest thing musically to eating a delicious assortment of macarons....mmm
yes, musicians create, perform, practice. different stuff, open, a box of endless desserts. but architects seemingly....quibble. maybe its an american thing (to be fair to architects?)
Volunteer: as I recall Bauhaus was seen as too communist and therefore shut down by the Nazis? My comment stems from what may of my non-architect friends in Europe were speculating.
Why is this not surprising? I could see this. Bauhaus is machine like and generally lacks hierarchy. Then, you got the reportedly Mussolini era commissioned oppressive eyesores, like Milano Centrale, Milan's main train station. Well, architectural history cycles. Communistic brutalistic concrete structures and other forms of modernism were pushed aside when post-modernism came into vogue, almost coincidentally in synch with the decadent 80s when Wall Street and investment bankers were revered in, at the very least, American culture.
I think there are absolutely underlying principals that are universal. Some of our aesthetic preferences are learned, but some are clearly part of our nature as humans beings.
do you think that can be proven eke? if you were to outline which principles are universal, such as saying you need a triglyph centered over a column, since that is reminiscent of a form of wood construction that is no longer in common practice. what was the universal truth at the end, where the last triglyph either doesn't go to the corner, or has a bigger gap from the adjacent triglyph? i suppose you just have irregular spacing for your columns right? because it is part of our nature as human beings to prefer irregular column spacing at the end so our triglyphs line up?
was this developed in other cultures, like say the east instead of only in the west? there are a number of traditional japanese temples that can be used to compare. did they have the same column and triglyph spacing? if it's a universal part of humanity, then surely they would have developed their architecture in the same direction, as the aztecs would have, and every other culture that was building permanent structures.
i'm a rational person, so i'm quite interested in how the opinion is formed that there is something in human nature tied to aesthetics. mostly, it sounds to me like this vitruvius guy wrote a book a long time ago, specific to a narrow time period, region, and culture, and some people essentially built a religion out of it. there is a whole lot of human history that occurred both before and after that book that is basically ignored in his hypothesis. on the other hand, there seems to me to be considerable evidence suggesting your theory is wrong. different people like different things.
3tk,
You have a hard time ignoring the IG Farben headuarters building, the Goering Air Ministry, and the 1936 Olympic Stadium, all in Berlin and all still standing and all in use.
My husband is about to travel to a southeast Asian country, so I've been looking at a lot of images of its capital city and rural buildings, including temples. The proportions of the traditional buildings in that culture have no relationship to the proportions of Greek temples or Gothic churches or Inuit longhouses or Aztec pyramids.
So I'll say again what I said on the last page: If someone says "traditional" your response should be "Whose tradition?".
I never said that a specific column spacing, or the placement of triglyphs represented any kind of universal truth. On the contrary, the triglyph "corner problem" has been resolved in different ways by different practitioners.
I'll tell you want I do believe. I believe that as human beings there are certain geometries that we are innately predisposed to find pleasing and beautiful. I know this is controversial, and that many here will reject that notion, but I believe it's true. I've said it here before. People across ages, across cultures, find the same aspects of the natural world to be beautiful. It's not cultural, it's part of our programming. It doesn't need to be taught. The classical language of architecture represents an attempt to accumulate wisdom about some of these natural geometries. Is it perfect in all of its nuances? No, of course not. Is it the only way that these resonances can be achieved? No, of course not. But it has proven to be a very efficient engine for creating beautiful things.
Hi Donna... you said " the proportions of the traditional buildings in that culture have no relationships to Greek temples or Gothic churches....."
Not to be a nerd, but there are studies that measure preferences for placement, sizing, and things like facing inwards or outwards. But I wouldn't put too much stake in them, to be fair, psychology experiments of this type are clunky and the sampled people were also probably American psychology students themselves, but I do think they show there are at least some universals in aesthetics.
If there are universally appealing choices, there is also a way to universally violate the aesthetic. We call it tension. Or attention a related word. The post-modern architect is well-trained in tension. Modernism actually did try to tap into these universal senses.
There is no universal anything... it's just a grab bag of anecdotal observations where people tend to connect whatever dots they find to have meaning to them.
Successful architects manage to sell these abstract patterns because they took into consideration more than their own interests/bias.: They addressed the client's needs and budget parallel to their own pattern-finding design methodology.
There is too much attempt to make architecture formulaic: X + Y = good. It's not that simple and honestly, you're a pretty poor designer if you think everything boils down to a few "universal" truths. Waste of time to argue philosophy, everyone has one, everyone is wrong.
They will reduce your point to a simulacrum of what you intended becasue they fear accpeting your points will devalue their stock. This wouldn't have to be the case if we could all agree that "different people like different things" even if some trends are apparent.
What you're pointing to has been recently explored in depth by neurologists and anthropologists. The fear is that some schmuck will then say if you don't follow these rules, you are wrong, and as we all intuitivly know, true art is never pure rationalization, as much as some modernists and classicists have tried to make it. The joy or delight has a firm foothold in intuition, and this is the catch-22 that's always fascinated me. How do you teach intuition? You can't since we all differ as to how much we rely on it, but you can speak of its importance while also talking about compositional rules throughout cultures, especially ones that have contributed so much to ours.
In my opinion, these proportional rules should be taught, but with the caveat that they are not necessary for good work but simply should be used as one see's fit. It didn't relegate the early modernists to a life of imitative neo-classicism, so I'm not sure why there's so much trepedation that it will do so today, except for the scoring of political points. This isn't much of an ideology to hang a flag on, but there's the conumdrum of life. We need rules to order civilization, but we should never allow them to override or basic humanity. Square that circle.
Donna, hate to be a spoil sport but if you look at the Aztec temple of Teotihuacan one half of the base length divided by the height comes awfully close to the "Golden Mean" of 1.618.
the height is 233 feet and one half the side length of 733.2 feet is 366.6 feet.
In the end, both EKE and there is no there seem make the best points on this subject:
there is no there-
I do think they show there are at least some universals in aesthetics...but there is also a way to universally violate the aesthetic. We call it tension.You can't abstract what you haven't made whole first.
EKE-
The classical language of architecture represents an attempt to accumulate wisdom about some of these natural geometries. Is it perfect in all of its nuances? No, of course not. Is it the only way that these resonances can be achieved? No, of course not. But it has proven to be a very efficient engine for creating beautiful things.
And this get's to the point about modernism as an ideology, not a style. It's emphasis on function and concept over beauty is why the public hasn't embraced it as surveys show (despite all the claims of conspiracy the surveys have elicited). Beauty is has an subjective and objective basis, and trying to dicipher the exact proportion is a fool's errand becasue there are simply too many variables. It reminds me of racists who try to figure out what ethnic group has an advantage over others based on historical record. It's appealing in a phseudo rational way, but is ultimatly more about the person's fear of the other than in bioligy.
So Vounteer can you also find how the other Aztec temples, not just that one, fit the same rule, and how the elements within each temple also fit those rules, and how the Inuit, Thai, and Icelandic ALSO all fit those rules, in total and in individual elements? That might show some kind of universal but if not then the Aztec example just as easily shows coincidence.
What there is no there said on the last page is important to: trying to measure universals is nigh on impossible because the point of inquiry - aka the culture of the researcher - can't help but impact the study. Psychologists are finally, finally starting to find out the embarrassing truth of just how difficult it is to actually get unbiased answers.
What Non Sequitur said is right: it's much easier to find dots that connect into the answer you want than any pattern that really exists.
And I still can't believe this ridiculously overblown and nonsensical discussion is still alive! I know I'm as guilty of continuing it as anyone, I just can't help it.
"There is no universal anything... it's just a grab bag of anecdotal observations where people tend to connect whatever dots they find to have meaning to them."
This the central philosophical crux of this whole discussion, in a nut shell. I couldn't disagree with you more profoundly.
Psychologists are finally, finally starting to find out the embarrassing truth of just how difficult it is to actually get unbiased answers.
So why bother trying since it's all biased. So much for intellectual inquary?
So Vounteer can you also find how the other Aztec temples, not just that one, fit the same rule, and how the elements within each temple also fit those rules, and how the Inuit, Thai, and Icelandic ALSO all fit those rules, in total and in individual elements
Becasue if there's an exemption, then there's no rule? How about a trend, or a tendancy? Your instinct to be wary of over generalizations is good becasue like I said earlier, in the wrong hands, a lot get's brushed over. But to throw one's hands up and say it's all for poop seems equally dangerous, becasue it pre-suposes that we can't understand things with nuance. It seems to come down to personalities. Some prefer rules, some abhore rules, some are comfortable with flexible rules, and all of us can't be perfectly categorized into any one of these labels. Yet we have no problem calling things classical or modernist, whether we all agree or not, and we clearly all share enough of a cultural reference to be able to have this conversation into the 900's comments. I gotta be me!
That's a beautiful image, from whatever culture your from. It's that understanding that's so fascinating to those looking for what binds us as a human family. To others, the idea of family is smothering.
It is thought that the human brain (and it's preferences) evolved to find appeal in the scattered light, leaf and branch patterns of an acacia tree.
Yep. The fractal qualities of the natural world, such as detail at multiple scales, and self-similarity, are another realm of geometries that we are hard wired to connect with. Or, to put it another way, are universal.
Also, I can easily understand someone looking at that acacia tree image and, assuming it's a sunset, feeling terror that the nocturnal battle to survive is about to begin, therefore, not beautiful at all.
The fact that I can't know from the image whether it's a sunset or a sunrise or a sunbreak through a cloud of toxic chemical gas pretty much denies the proposal that any image could have universal resonance, no? It does show that humans will bring whatever we want to/can't help but bring to any image. In other words, your glorious achievement of mankind going back to the Greek temples is my oppression by the Western patriarchy.
if it's true that there is some sort of magic universal truth to beauty or whatever, it can be measured and codified. if it cannot be measured and codified, it doesn't exist (of course there is the possibility that we don't have the tools or techniques to measure it yet, but that's just an obstacle to overcome. noone said it would be easy). create a set of rules to define your universal truth, the same way newton created a set of rules to define how nature works.
if your set of rules is to copy vitruvious, it should be plainly evident that his laws are not universal, as they have not been applied consistently across time or region. copying vitruvious is only creating a snapshot of the past. the time and place his book was written is gone forever, and it will never come back. ever. you can repeat it if you want to, there is nothing wrong with that, but you should understand that all your doing is copying a thing that happened in the past. there is nothing spiritual or universal about that.
if you can codify your universal truths, we can give those rules to the parametricists and our strip malls will stop looking like shit. until you can formulate your rationale into something measurable and repeatable, it's only an opinion. you might like greek columns. other people people might like steel tubes, and still others might like wide flange beams or welded plates. eke's opinion is well educated, as are many of the opinions here, which might be able to set them apart from a 6 year old, but the average 6 year old still has a valid opinion. that's the nature of opinions. i've seen no reason to assume suri's or thayer's opinions are any more relevant than a 6 year olds.
If there is no such thing as universal appeal, what is good design and why the hell do we need designers? Everything can be poorly designed and humanity will carry on its path to ever higher utopia. Actually, maybe that is what is wrong with humanity, too many narcissists who cannot connect with other people over things like beauty.
tint, I think there *are* culturally-based agreed-upon aesthetic conventions that *generally* hold true. But only generally.
Maybe the human universal is that we can mentally block out the things that aesthetically don't appeal to us to try to focus on the things that do. Thus strip malls.
tint, non-universal beauty only implies that different people like different things. beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. it is not narcissistic to say i might like something different than someone else.
if two wealthy patrons wanted a building designed, placing an importance on how it looks as well as how it functions and stands up, i bet you would get two very different buildings. there is a good chance neither building would follow vitruvius's book. i don't see that as a bad thing at all. i may not like post-modernism or anything eisenmann ever did, but obviously somebody liked it. if they didn't, i wouldn't know his name well enough to criticize him.
of course a lot of wealth patrons don't have any interest in what their environment looks like, and are more interested in building cheap and fast so they can maximize profit. i don't think that's a particular good set of values, but since i'm not the wealthy patron, there isn't a whole lot i can do about it.
Example: a higher position tends to connote power therefore tends to be desirable. But some people are afraid of heights, and in walk-ups the more stairs one has to climb the less desirable the height is.
It's hard for people to break away from superstitions. There always has to be "something" there, an underlying principle that forms the basis of everything, there simply is no such underlying principle, no matter how hard you search. Just look at religion, patterns are easy to find if you customize your blinders to suit.
Claim there is a universal aesthetic formula, you'll find one. I think all coffee mugs are yellow, and this claim was confirmed because the first I saw today was yellow. Any other mug holding coffee which is not yellow is a modern attempt to replicate the traditional classic yellow mug.
So if there are things that are widely appealing across a group, then it makes sense to me that there are things that are widely appealing across the human group. Like leaves and light against a sky. My understanding of modernism is that the goal was to reduce to find the universal aesthetic, if there is such a thng, anyway. Early Mondrian.
Not arguing, trying to bring it together, find the common ground. Obviously I have too much time on my hands.
Why won't you design what we (the public) want?
Re threadkilla's photos, a) looks like mid-20th century Scandinavia to me, pre or post war I don't know (could be elsewhere at another time, I'm no expert on that period). It seems like it would be a respectful neighbor in any urban context. Like.
b), some Russian (or other country with the cyrillic alphabet) atrocity. Don't even know if the historic element is real or not. Dislike.
c) looks like a traditional Japanese house, not my preference, but interesting for its influence on Wright and other early 20th century architects. OK.
d) The oval shape makes me think this is not a traditional Asian building, although it seems influenced by same. OK.
e) Appears to be another traditional Asian building, can't tell if it is a house or not, or japanese or Chinese (or maybe Korean). I like all the exposed natural wood and the carpentry details. An influence on Greene and Greene.
Plans:
a) traditional Japanese house. Interesting. Like.
b) Looks like a Wright plan. Like.
c) I admit I searched the internet for this. A plan by an over-the-top traditionalist, John Henry. Dislike. To me he is the sort of designer who gives traditional architecture a bad name.
d/ looks like regency period in england or Federal period in the US. I don't recognize it, and I would want to make some serious tweeks to the plan, but I can imagine that the spaces are quite sublime. Like.
We live in 3 dimensions threadkilla, lets see the elevations. No one chooses a house from a floor plan.
Elevations are two-dimensional. Which exceeds by one the number of dimensions that suri's argument has.
i kind of thought the oval shape in (d) was largely due to lens distortion/fish-eye
I want to live in a flat in a tromp l'oeil building overlooking the Ligurian coast.
http://www.beautiful-liguria.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/trompeloeil02-200x300.jpg
Not really. They're corny, but fun to photograph.
Could you imagine American subdivisions full of tromp l'oeil effects?
Not sure if this is relevant but Western countries seem to have an aversion to Classical buildings after Mussolini and Hitler's projects. Something still reminds people of fascism when they see those columns... or banking which hasn't exactly won themselves any favors of late.
Those 'traditional' Japanese homes are pretty darn rare because they're cold in the winter and hard to cool in the humid summers - not to mention all the vermin that get in and out. Not so comfortable or clean. My recollection of old European homes with their tall ceilings is they had a similar comfort problem...
"Elevations are two-dimensional. Which exceeds by one the number of dimensions that suri's argument has."
....
And a floor plan combined with elevations makes 3 dimensions genius.
And a floor plan combined with elevations makes 3 dimensions genius.
Wrong again. Floor plans, like elevations, are also two-dimensional. A perspective drawing is also two dimensional, but it is a representation of three dimensions.
suri, your arrogance is almost as boundless as your ignorance.
miles... obviously on their own they have 2 dimensions. when you have a floor plan's two dimensions and an elevation which has the third and one of the first two, you have all the dimensions. Would you like me to find a children's book to help explain this basic geometry to you?
Am I having deja vu about the greek pantheon episode here? You people are impossible.
The greek pantheon with the columns, or the one without?
3tk, The Prora resort on the inland of Ruga is the largest still standing example of Nazi architecture. It is a mile-long hideous modernist building virtually ripped intact from the notebooks of Le Corbusier, who himself was a Nazi sympathizer.
suri, out of 933 posts here, 121 (13%) are yours.
The obvious diagnosis is borderline personality disorder with at least a touch of OCD. I urge you, for your own benefit, to visit a mental health professional.
Volunteer: as I recall Bauhaus was seen as too communist and therefore shut down by the Nazis? My comment stems from what may of my non-architect friends in Europe were speculating. I recall some political connection of Classical (roman not greek) to the right spectrum and Modernist/International Style to the left. Speer, to me, sings to the classical order more than modernist.
Suri: May I point you to the section of 'Devil Wears Prada' film where Meryl Streep is scolding Anne Hathaway? There are 'taste-makers' in this world and whether anyone wants to admit it much of the art/fashion/design world is influenced by the upper echelons. That echelon pays a lot to shape tastes and it trickles down. Some of the vernacular has that influence as well; someone must have pointed out 'Learning from Vegas' and Venturi's suburb studio studies. Deal with it, or pay for what you want. You may enjoy the some of the work of RAMSA, led by the dean of Yale.
aojwny: I believe those who have made an intense study of proportional systems believe that there are underlying principles, and rules even, that are universal.
i doubt that.i would imagine that the sense of proportions is inculcated and develops historically. the genesis of western classical architectural proportioning has been historically related to that of the development of western classical music (in actual fact a linkage of all three, architecture, music and maths). the development of musical scale intervals and chords shows great changes, discoveries and developments of fundamental harmonies based on utilization and expansion of new musical intervals and the orthodoxification of what were once deemed dissonant harmonies frowned upon by religious clergy and their latter commonplace usage. and this development of harmony, of musical proportioning, forms the backbone of classical music.
i would say the same applies in architecture. and i would say, exactly as nowadays musicians (i mean actual musicians, composers..) may explore the prospect of unorthodox harmony/ dissonance based on a fundamental understanding of harmony and harmonic motion ...then architects should equally have that right to view their domain as an open ended one that has a rich history that guarantees the development of ideas that are not stylistically or otherwise dogmatically circumscribed by what has already happened before. in other words, there is completely the right to view certain architectures not as ossified product of a closed, completed history but as architectural experiments in breaking out of Architecture, out of orthodoxy.
And yes, there is also the right to have a Mozart for a Beethoven, a Shostakovich for a Schoenberg, a Vivaldi for a Bach...and so on. There are people who work internally, they make the interior plush and nice and beautiful and there are people who push the boundaries. There are also people who look/ed back (classically) and around (vernacularly), Stravinsky, Janacek, Bartok (who did some very pleasant folk-based music and some extremely difficult 'modernist' music...lovely stuff actually.)
But there are also people who are just Others. Debussy and Ravel. If people stuck to neoclassicism, we would never had such gorgeous music. I mean Ravel's music is the closest thing musically to eating a delicious assortment of macarons....mmm
yes, musicians create, perform, practice. different stuff, open, a box of endless desserts. but architects seemingly....quibble. maybe its an american thing (to be fair to architects?)
Volunteer: as I recall Bauhaus was seen as too communist and therefore shut down by the Nazis? My comment stems from what may of my non-architect friends in Europe were speculating.
Why is this not surprising? I could see this. Bauhaus is machine like and generally lacks hierarchy. Then, you got the reportedly Mussolini era commissioned oppressive eyesores, like Milano Centrale, Milan's main train station. Well, architectural history cycles. Communistic brutalistic concrete structures and other forms of modernism were pushed aside when post-modernism came into vogue, almost coincidentally in synch with the decadent 80s when Wall Street and investment bankers were revered in, at the very least, American culture.
I think there are absolutely underlying principals that are universal. Some of our aesthetic preferences are learned, but some are clearly part of our nature as humans beings.
do you think that can be proven eke? if you were to outline which principles are universal, such as saying you need a triglyph centered over a column, since that is reminiscent of a form of wood construction that is no longer in common practice. what was the universal truth at the end, where the last triglyph either doesn't go to the corner, or has a bigger gap from the adjacent triglyph? i suppose you just have irregular spacing for your columns right? because it is part of our nature as human beings to prefer irregular column spacing at the end so our triglyphs line up?
was this developed in other cultures, like say the east instead of only in the west? there are a number of traditional japanese temples that can be used to compare. did they have the same column and triglyph spacing? if it's a universal part of humanity, then surely they would have developed their architecture in the same direction, as the aztecs would have, and every other culture that was building permanent structures.
i'm a rational person, so i'm quite interested in how the opinion is formed that there is something in human nature tied to aesthetics. mostly, it sounds to me like this vitruvius guy wrote a book a long time ago, specific to a narrow time period, region, and culture, and some people essentially built a religion out of it. there is a whole lot of human history that occurred both before and after that book that is basically ignored in his hypothesis. on the other hand, there seems to me to be considerable evidence suggesting your theory is wrong. different people like different things.
different people like different things.
but most people tend to prefer traditional work over modernist work.
So why won't you (architects) design what we (the public) want?
discuss...
3tk, You have a hard time ignoring the IG Farben headuarters building, the Goering Air Ministry, and the 1936 Olympic Stadium, all in Berlin and all still standing and all in use.
My husband is about to travel to a southeast Asian country, so I've been looking at a lot of images of its capital city and rural buildings, including temples. The proportions of the traditional buildings in that culture have no relationship to the proportions of Greek temples or Gothic churches or Inuit longhouses or Aztec pyramids.
So I'll say again what I said on the last page: If someone says "traditional" your response should be "Whose tradition?".
Nice post re: music, tammuz.
And sorry to double post but the answer to this has been stated a zillion times:
So why won't you (architects) design what we (the public) want?
We design what our clients request.
Sneaky Pete said it best:
"I think I'll build a traditional bridge you can live under. I'll even put up a traditional sign.
"Please do not feed the troll."
I never said that a specific column spacing, or the placement of triglyphs represented any kind of universal truth. On the contrary, the triglyph "corner problem" has been resolved in different ways by different practitioners.
I'll tell you want I do believe. I believe that as human beings there are certain geometries that we are innately predisposed to find pleasing and beautiful. I know this is controversial, and that many here will reject that notion, but I believe it's true. I've said it here before. People across ages, across cultures, find the same aspects of the natural world to be beautiful. It's not cultural, it's part of our programming. It doesn't need to be taught. The classical language of architecture represents an attempt to accumulate wisdom about some of these natural geometries. Is it perfect in all of its nuances? No, of course not. Is it the only way that these resonances can be achieved? No, of course not. But it has proven to be a very efficient engine for creating beautiful things.
Hi Donna... you said " the proportions of the traditional buildings in that culture have no relationships to Greek temples or Gothic churches....."
Are you sure of that? :).
(Have a great trip!)
My coffee mug is already empty. Anyone want to take a walk across the street for another?
Not to be a nerd, but there are studies that measure preferences for placement, sizing, and things like facing inwards or outwards. But I wouldn't put too much stake in them, to be fair, psychology experiments of this type are clunky and the sampled people were also probably American psychology students themselves, but I do think they show there are at least some universals in aesthetics.
If there are universally appealing choices, there is also a way to universally violate the aesthetic. We call it tension. Or attention a related word. The post-modern architect is well-trained in tension. Modernism actually did try to tap into these universal senses.
For a good understanding of the nature of aesthetics (preferences), read Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape.
There is no universal anything... it's just a grab bag of anecdotal observations where people tend to connect whatever dots they find to have meaning to them.
Successful architects manage to sell these abstract patterns because they took into consideration more than their own interests/bias.: They addressed the client's needs and budget parallel to their own pattern-finding design methodology.
There is too much attempt to make architecture formulaic: X + Y = good. It's not that simple and honestly, you're a pretty poor designer if you think everything boils down to a few "universal" truths. Waste of time to argue philosophy, everyone has one, everyone is wrong.
EKE,
They will reduce your point to a simulacrum of what you intended becasue they fear accpeting your points will devalue their stock. This wouldn't have to be the case if we could all agree that "different people like different things" even if some trends are apparent.
What you're pointing to has been recently explored in depth by neurologists and anthropologists. The fear is that some schmuck will then say if you don't follow these rules, you are wrong, and as we all intuitivly know, true art is never pure rationalization, as much as some modernists and classicists have tried to make it. The joy or delight has a firm foothold in intuition, and this is the catch-22 that's always fascinated me. How do you teach intuition? You can't since we all differ as to how much we rely on it, but you can speak of its importance while also talking about compositional rules throughout cultures, especially ones that have contributed so much to ours.
In my opinion, these proportional rules should be taught, but with the caveat that they are not necessary for good work but simply should be used as one see's fit. It didn't relegate the early modernists to a life of imitative neo-classicism, so I'm not sure why there's so much trepedation that it will do so today, except for the scoring of political points. This isn't much of an ideology to hang a flag on, but there's the conumdrum of life. We need rules to order civilization, but we should never allow them to override or basic humanity. Square that circle.
Donna, hate to be a spoil sport but if you look at the Aztec temple of Teotihuacan one half of the base length divided by the height comes awfully close to the "Golden Mean" of 1.618. the height is 233 feet and one half the side length of 733.2 feet is 366.6 feet.
In the end, both EKE and there is no there seem make the best points on this subject:
there is no there-
I do think they show there are at least some universals in aesthetics...but there is also a way to universally violate the aesthetic. We call it tension. You can't abstract what you haven't made whole first.
EKE-
The classical language of architecture represents an attempt to accumulate wisdom about some of these natural geometries. Is it perfect in all of its nuances? No, of course not. Is it the only way that these resonances can be achieved? No, of course not. But it has proven to be a very efficient engine for creating beautiful things.
And this get's to the point about modernism as an ideology, not a style. It's emphasis on function and concept over beauty is why the public hasn't embraced it as surveys show (despite all the claims of conspiracy the surveys have elicited). Beauty is has an subjective and objective basis, and trying to dicipher the exact proportion is a fool's errand becasue there are simply too many variables. It reminds me of racists who try to figure out what ethnic group has an advantage over others based on historical record. It's appealing in a phseudo rational way, but is ultimatly more about the person's fear of the other than in bioligy.
So Vounteer can you also find how the other Aztec temples, not just that one, fit the same rule, and how the elements within each temple also fit those rules, and how the Inuit, Thai, and Icelandic ALSO all fit those rules, in total and in individual elements? That might show some kind of universal but if not then the Aztec example just as easily shows coincidence.
What there is no there said on the last page is important to: trying to measure universals is nigh on impossible because the point of inquiry - aka the culture of the researcher - can't help but impact the study. Psychologists are finally, finally starting to find out the embarrassing truth of just how difficult it is to actually get unbiased answers.
What Non Sequitur said is right: it's much easier to find dots that connect into the answer you want than any pattern that really exists.
And I still can't believe this ridiculously overblown and nonsensical discussion is still alive! I know I'm as guilty of continuing it as anyone, I just can't help it.
This machine fights anarchists. Or idiots.
"There is no universal anything... it's just a grab bag of anecdotal observations where people tend to connect whatever dots they find to have meaning to them."
This the central philosophical crux of this whole discussion, in a nut shell. I couldn't disagree with you more profoundly.
Except neuroscience is sorting psychology out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-we-love-beautiful-things.html?_r=0
The article mentions Jackson Pollack. The controversy in this thread reminds me of a discussion on his work.
Thanks, Miles, I have heard of that read, I'll have to pick it up and give it a whirl.
It is thought that the human brain (and it's preferences) evolved to find appeal in the scattered light, leaf and branch patterns of an acacia tree.
Psychologists are finally, finally starting to find out the embarrassing truth of just how difficult it is to actually get unbiased answers.
So why bother trying since it's all biased. So much for intellectual inquary?
So Vounteer can you also find how the other Aztec temples, not just that one, fit the same rule, and how the elements within each temple also fit those rules, and how the Inuit, Thai, and Icelandic ALSO all fit those rules, in total and in individual elements
Becasue if there's an exemption, then there's no rule? How about a trend, or a tendancy? Your instinct to be wary of over generalizations is good becasue like I said earlier, in the wrong hands, a lot get's brushed over. But to throw one's hands up and say it's all for poop seems equally dangerous, becasue it pre-suposes that we can't understand things with nuance. It seems to come down to personalities. Some prefer rules, some abhore rules, some are comfortable with flexible rules, and all of us can't be perfectly categorized into any one of these labels. Yet we have no problem calling things classical or modernist, whether we all agree or not, and we clearly all share enough of a cultural reference to be able to have this conversation into the 900's comments. I gotta be me!
There is no there,
That's a beautiful image, from whatever culture your from. It's that understanding that's so fascinating to those looking for what binds us as a human family. To others, the idea of family is smothering.
It is thought that the human brain (and it's preferences) evolved to find appeal in the scattered light, leaf and branch patterns of an acacia tree.
Yep. The fractal qualities of the natural world, such as detail at multiple scales, and self-similarity, are another realm of geometries that we are hard wired to connect with. Or, to put it another way, are universal.
Yup, a neuroscientist would say it is a function of the architecture of the brain. Thus, function follows form. And there you have it.
PS Miles, The Naked Ape is only meaningful if you're in college. Then you outgrow that shit. Same with Atlas Shrugged.
Also, I can easily understand someone looking at that acacia tree image and, assuming it's a sunset, feeling terror that the nocturnal battle to survive is about to begin, therefore, not beautiful at all.
The fact that I can't know from the image whether it's a sunset or a sunrise or a sunbreak through a cloud of toxic chemical gas pretty much denies the proposal that any image could have universal resonance, no? It does show that humans will bring whatever we want to/can't help but bring to any image. In other words, your glorious achievement of mankind going back to the Greek temples is my oppression by the Western patriarchy.
if it's true that there is some sort of magic universal truth to beauty or whatever, it can be measured and codified. if it cannot be measured and codified, it doesn't exist (of course there is the possibility that we don't have the tools or techniques to measure it yet, but that's just an obstacle to overcome. noone said it would be easy). create a set of rules to define your universal truth, the same way newton created a set of rules to define how nature works.
if your set of rules is to copy vitruvious, it should be plainly evident that his laws are not universal, as they have not been applied consistently across time or region. copying vitruvious is only creating a snapshot of the past. the time and place his book was written is gone forever, and it will never come back. ever. you can repeat it if you want to, there is nothing wrong with that, but you should understand that all your doing is copying a thing that happened in the past. there is nothing spiritual or universal about that.
if you can codify your universal truths, we can give those rules to the parametricists and our strip malls will stop looking like shit. until you can formulate your rationale into something measurable and repeatable, it's only an opinion. you might like greek columns. other people people might like steel tubes, and still others might like wide flange beams or welded plates. eke's opinion is well educated, as are many of the opinions here, which might be able to set them apart from a 6 year old, but the average 6 year old still has a valid opinion. that's the nature of opinions. i've seen no reason to assume suri's or thayer's opinions are any more relevant than a 6 year olds.
"When you wish upon a star..."
The Mysterious connection between Sirius and Human History
This happens to sit in front of the IRS headquarters. Universally beautiful?
Or how about some of Foster's work in Astana:
Can esoteric symbolism be universal?
If there is no such thing as universal appeal, what is good design and why the hell do we need designers? Everything can be poorly designed and humanity will carry on its path to ever higher utopia. Actually, maybe that is what is wrong with humanity, too many narcissists who cannot connect with other people over things like beauty.
tint, I think there *are* culturally-based agreed-upon aesthetic conventions that *generally* hold true. But only generally.
Maybe the human universal is that we can mentally block out the things that aesthetically don't appeal to us to try to focus on the things that do. Thus strip malls.
tint, non-universal beauty only implies that different people like different things. beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. it is not narcissistic to say i might like something different than someone else.
if two wealthy patrons wanted a building designed, placing an importance on how it looks as well as how it functions and stands up, i bet you would get two very different buildings. there is a good chance neither building would follow vitruvius's book. i don't see that as a bad thing at all. i may not like post-modernism or anything eisenmann ever did, but obviously somebody liked it. if they didn't, i wouldn't know his name well enough to criticize him.
of course a lot of wealth patrons don't have any interest in what their environment looks like, and are more interested in building cheap and fast so they can maximize profit. i don't think that's a particular good set of values, but since i'm not the wealthy patron, there isn't a whole lot i can do about it.
Example: a higher position tends to connote power therefore tends to be desirable. But some people are afraid of heights, and in walk-ups the more stairs one has to climb the less desirable the height is.
(And: height isn't an aesthetic principle.)
It's hard for people to break away from superstitions. There always has to be "something" there, an underlying principle that forms the basis of everything, there simply is no such underlying principle, no matter how hard you search. Just look at religion, patterns are easy to find if you customize your blinders to suit.
Claim there is a universal aesthetic formula, you'll find one. I think all coffee mugs are yellow, and this claim was confirmed because the first I saw today was yellow. Any other mug holding coffee which is not yellow is a modern attempt to replicate the traditional classic yellow mug.
So if there are things that are widely appealing across a group, then it makes sense to me that there are things that are widely appealing across the human group. Like leaves and light against a sky. My understanding of modernism is that the goal was to reduce to find the universal aesthetic, if there is such a thng, anyway. Early Mondrian.
Not arguing, trying to bring it together, find the common ground. Obviously I have too much time on my hands.
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