He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.

"I think that thing is ugly, so I'm gonna make something even uglier!"

We can pretend he's the main influence, whilst ignoring the fact that most people prefer square even walls for aesthetic, functional, and - most of all - cost purposes.

I do agree we could do better w.r.t to colour, and millenial grey needs to go. But don't knock the rectangle. Rectangle is good. Rectangle is steady. You can plan on rectangle.

Man, I really don't care for this Adolf character...

I know it was fairly cheap ornamentation, but the damage his philosophy did to buildings in Germany is profound. They straight up tore the ornamentation off a lot of buildings.

The popularisation of the idea that ornament is inherently bad genuinely did far more damage to the visual environment of the UK than the Luftwaffe managed with years of strategic bombing in my view.

At least all the things I see on the buildings in the top picture seem to have a utilitarian purpose.
Of course, how well they fulfilled their purpose would have depended upon the availability of materials and manufacturing processes at the time.

There are a lot of high density housing being built in my city after some planning rule changes to enable it.

It's unpopular to say the least.

I'm just happy that it means more people get to live in a house.

rooftop gardens would be goated

Not fair to equate bland housing with modernism.

Tell me this building is bland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Assembly

common in France, in handwriting the down-tick part is often bigger than the vertical part.

Never seen that in my whole life, it must be a mistake.

On est voisins ?

the grey and black rocks garden!

Yeah I was gonna say, I appreciate how the building in the Auvergne picture is black, because it's accurate to the volcanic stone there.

The cathedral in Clermont Ferrand is pretty bad ass

I live in the Philadelphia area and a lot of the row houses here dating to a century or more ago have absolutely beautiful brickwork, incredibly creative and interesting stuff, often on houses that these days barely sell for $100K. It would be completely impossible to duplicate this kind of thing today even with a construction budget of millions. The craftsmen who can do that kind of work are nonexistent now -- today you're lucky to find somebody who can lay bricks in a straight line.

Yep, I've lived in old buildings most of my life (very german predilection for the "Altbau" I guess) and I'm not sure whether people are aware how much energy it costs.

I love 3.5m ceilings and 2.5m high windows, I love thick walls made from solid stone, that's how I grew up, in a rented place in a wonderful turn-of the century building. ... it's not even expensive to rent compared to where I live now. But heating alone costs enough that it could pay for a single room somewhere else. And given that the walls are thick, but not insulated, you have to make sure you heat it, make sure you don't put things too close to the wall, otherwise you might have to battle moisture and moldy walls. In fact, if the windows insulate too well it might even be a drawback because the moisture can't escape, and you have to air the rooms (the very german habit of "Stoßlüften") frequently to not get mold.

The rectengular zero-energy buildings of today, you probably don't need to heat much. Friends of mine used to live in a building like that. Well insulated, three-pane windows, all that. They barely had to turn the heat on in the middle of winter. Body heat, residual heat from cooking and what not, it's practically enough to keep the place warm.

You can stick a fancy facade on basically any wall construction to make it look like an old-half timbered style, or brick, or stone, etc.

But trying to actually build an old brick/stone/plaster and timber monstrosity today wouldn't be smart. Insulation, moisture control, energy efficiency, and even creature comforts like wifi signal penetration are all miles better with newer construction methods.

I agree the architecture is boring, but again, it doesn't have to look this way. However, I think most people would rather have the soulless gray box than have uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter.

Unless you build the house to last 200 years, with occasional maintenance. No drywall monstrosity will survive that long.

Yeah, I'm looking into insulating my 100+ year old house, and it might mean the stones on the base need to be flattened and covered up. The windows and some of the doors are now plastic, since the previous ones (that were already not the original) were water damaged, which somehow involved the indoor doors too.

and no trees! yuck.

I don't really have any strong opinions on architecture, but I'll still get mad in this instance taking it as a proxy for the French state's efforts to wipe out regional culture throughout its history. You have tons of regional languages, with their own rich cultures and histories, and France has systematically done its best to beat them out of existence. Bréton, Gascon, Picard, Occitane and Corsican, amongst many others, are all considered to be either definitely or severely endangered, according to their wikipedia articles. Even those whose wiki page doesn't mention this, like Alsatian, still generally mention the speakers tending to be predominantly older adults, with fewer and fewer young people learning the language. I've seen stuff about there being positive results with revitalization efforts and bilingual schooling for some of them, but it gets me bummed out and angry to think it might be too little, too late, and all in the name of some misguided nation building policies.

It's kind of lame and boring if they look the same. There's a ton of different modern styles that aren't just black and white.

Like look up Nordic Modern, where there is often wood mixed in heavily.

A lot of modern styles just mean tons of natural light, open concepts, indoor/outdoor integration. It's not inherently bad or boring. It's probably more that luxury homes are being built cheap and fast with dentist office modern style that seems copy and paste, without caring about what makes it nice.

I think what people hate is the fake appearance of modernism where it's made to look new and expensive, and not what makes modern homes modern.

My beef with modern home architecture (the stuff in the US, mainly) is not that it's different or modern, but that it's so fucking fake in its fundamental elements. Vinyl siding stamped to look like old-fashioned wood siding but obviously isn't because of the vertical seams and the bumps; double-paned vinyl windows with glazing dividers emulating old-fashioned casement windows that don't even look three-dimensional; shutters that obviously can't close; panel doors made from one block of essentially cardboard etc. etc.

i mean are we not allowed to be opinionated on architecture all of a sudden? in a city environment, its what ends up defining the form of 80-90% of that environment. I feel likr thats actually one of the areas that make a ton of sense for the general public to be very opinionated about.

also, sarcastically commrnting on the amount of opinions people have on architecture, then literally following that up with an opinion on architecture... ironic.