A Nordic revolt against 'ugly' modern architecture

If you walk around Gamla Stan (old town) in Stockholm, you can almost pretend you&#x27;ve gone back in time. <i>Every</i> building is hundreds of years old or made to look so, and all in a unified style.<p>If you walk around Kyoto&#x27;s Gion district, there are a few streets that give you this feel, but if you stray but a little from the tourist paths it becomes a mish-mash of architectural styles, everything is encrusted in AC units, exposed pipes are everywhere, and a dense web of electrical wiring looms over everything.<p>If you walk around Gamla Stan at 5 am in the summer, it&#x27;s a beautiful, relaxing experience. You can go in almost any direction and there&#x27;s more of it. If you walk around Gion at 5 am, it feels like you&#x27;re in a theme-park built on the edge of a razor. Fall off the razor&#x27;s edge and you&#x27;re in an urban hellscape.<p>If you built in this nordic neo-traditional style in Kyoto it would just add more chaos to the hellscape. If you build in this style in the appropriate place, however, it blends in. The <i>right</i> style is contextual. The greatest sins of &#x27;ugly&#x27; modern architecture happen when it pays no heed to context.<p>Sometimes buildings should stand out but, most of the time, they should blend in. It&#x27;s good that architects are starting to become more aware of this.

“People have the right to be angry, because all the ugliness they see is on purpose.”<p>I like this quote and it gets at the heart of the matter especially in some of the more ostentatious modern designs. It seems in some part purposely created to instill in you a disgust response, as if it is in protest of beauty and good taste.<p>Aside from that there is some boring pseud posturing to &quot;subvert expectations&quot; by calling attention to itself for being different (than what people actually like). Good for these citizens for standing up and saying no. The replacements in the article are so much better than the original modern designs.

Pushback against modern architecture has been happening about as long as modern architecture itself. One notable example is Charles III fight, culminating of him building a complete town to his vision <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Poundbury" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Poundbury</a><p>What to me is evident that cost-optimization is at least as much to blame for ugliness as is the choice of style. It is striking how in the two norwegian examples in the article the &quot;not ugly&quot; examples have presumably far less floor area, making them less cost effective. Also bulk housing made to cost by bottom of barrel architects isn&#x27;t a good starting point for having pretty buildings.

I have to say that I actually do like quite a bit of modern architecture. It certainly has unique qualities to it.<p>That said, I don&#x27;t see why people keep putting &quot;random block with geometric patterns&quot; everywhere. It is the least imaginative style I can think of and its sheer ubiquity and blandness make them offensive on their own. It gets even worse when the building is begging for attention by contrasting itself with the buildings around it, that just makes it one step more offensive.

To paraphrase a classic comic, it&#x27;s not that modernist architecture is ugly, but rather that ugly architecture is ugly.<p>There are <i>aspects</i> of aesthetics that are subjective, but there are also centuries-old rules of composition, of proportion, rhythm, space, and texture that transcend styles and objectively make some buildings, old and new, more beautiful than others.<p>The apartment blocks in the header image: terrible visual rhythm, no sense of proportion. You could slap some neoclassical filigree on those and it wouldn&#x27;t change the underlying aesthetic shortcomings.<p>The contemporary value of traditional architectural styles is that because it&#x27;s largely only the beautiful examples that have survived, they offer a readymade set of templates that have stood the test of time. With modern architecture, the bar is that much higher to get it right.

Seems to mostly be a Facebook phenomenon:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arkitekten.se&#x2F;nyheter&#x2F;arkitekturupproret-fem-ar-av-hanfulla-natkommentarer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arkitekten.se&#x2F;nyheter&#x2F;arkitekturupproret-fem-ar-av-h...</a> (in Swedish)

I&#x27;d love this here in Seattle. I am not against modern home design with its excellent safety features and efficient usage of available land, but boy am I tired of the &#x27;contemporary&#x27; aesthetic consuming every plot of land that comes up for sale.

To me these &quot;traiditional&quot; style buildings in Europe would be considered &quot;modern&quot; by North American standards.<p>Structurally, it feels like North American houses have been built the same way since the colonies started (sidings, frames&#x2F;studs, gabled&#x2F;shingled roofs). We even try to keep the houses look as close to the colonial styles as possible, with plastic&#x2F;aluminum sidings and windows imitating wood.<p>In Europe it seems like they moved completely over to steel-frame, concrete&#x2F;composite walls. Roofs mostly metal, windows large and not flimsy. I heard one explanation is the trees being all cut down in Europe during the industrial revolution, but I&#x27;m not sure that tells the whole story. Dimensional lumber there are easy to buy and not that much more expensive. Ocean shipping is dirty cheap.<p>If I were to take a wild guess it has more to do with modern fire-safety standards (can&#x27;t spread to another room), which the lumber&#x2F;construction industry in NA have probably lobbied against.

Modern architecture is individualism run amok. Buildings are more testaments to architects’ egos than organic improvements to the surrounding environment, or sources of aesthetic pleasure to passers by.

Looking at the residential complex in the article, Risørholmen, it looks like the &quot;ugly&quot; modern houses have rooftop gardens are large windows while the traditional houses have only a few small windows. Sure, the red tiled roofs look nice, but I wonder if this is a case of aesthetics taking precedent over functionality.

The original buildings that were never built are photocopies of other buildings I saw in my country and in other places around the world. They carry a stamp with a date &gt;= 2010 and are completely anonymous. The ones that they actually built are not necessary beautiful but at least tell a story about the place they are in.

I think this debate shouldn&#x27;t be about modern vs. classic. But rather about ugly vs. beautiful&#x2F;interesting. There&#x27;s so much great modern architecture if you look at Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusie, Mies van der Rohe, SANAA, Tadao Ando... But these buildings in the article just look very ugly, cheap and generic.

The original Swedish &#x27;branch&#x27;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arkitekturupproret.se&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arkitekturupproret.se&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arkitekturupproret.se&#x2F;om-au&#x2F;about-english&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arkitekturupproret.se&#x2F;om-au&#x2F;about-english&#x2F;</a>

Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, but it feels like modern architecture is about cutting labor and material costs as much as possible. Old architecture had craftsmen put a lot of time into things like smooth plaster walls, molding, wainscoting, herringbone floors, and decorative exteriors. Modern architecture is founded on the principal of hiring the cheapest labor possible to throw up the cheapest drywall available and covering it up with texture to hide the low quality - then charging as much as buildings using the older, higher quality methods.<p>Of course modern architecture is just going to look bland, generic, and low quality compared to old architecture - there&#x27;s only about 10% the effort put into it.

&gt; This early proposal for Sandakerveien 58 B&#x2F;C in Oslo was rejected by local authorities in 2014<p>&gt; The revised building boasts a far more traditional look.<p>Seems like early proposal had different FAR which seems like bigger issue than style.

Brutalism, is and always will be, cold, tasteless, lazy, and fucking ugly because taste.<p>I don&#x27;t care if architecture is minimalist, traditional, or experimental as long as it&#x27;s not oppressively uniform or hostile like it should be the headquarters for a reverse mortgage company or the secret police.<p>Props to local cities to balking at cookie-cutter, modernity-obsessed designs that would harm the aesthetics of their neighborhoods.

Scandinavia often seems to get a pass &quot;because Scandinavia&quot;, the enlightenment is implied.<p>Yet people mock Poundbury in the UK, which was a stylistically similar effort.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;owgQb" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;owgQb</a>

I would always pick cheap and ugly over beautiful and expensive when buying housing. It is already expensive enough and to expect me to pay 50% or 200% more so that someone who didn&#x27;t even pay for it can think it looks nice is just waste of money.

Interesting that Denmark is not mentioned at all (expect for a single reference to BIG as a leading studio). Perhaps modern architecture in Denmark is more thoughtful, constrained by public regulation or maybe Danes are just more open to modern approaches.

Modern, brutalist architecture feels forced into a landscape.

The picture at the top looks truly awful. It looks a lot less bad in person

New stuff is new. Gets adopted and publicized. Public craze ensues. Reactionaries midlessly push back. Society reevaluates. New stuff is old now. Less of it, becomes assimilated.<p>New stuff is new....<p>Why are people even surprised things always go like this? It&#x27;s like the stages of grief, once you know the trick you just roll your eyes knowing what will eventually happen