Architect here: They don't add those lines in the facade just to add visual interest; the panels only come in so big a size. Also, you need to add lines and patterns to brick facades too, otherwise they look like what we in the profession call "clown dookey". That said, it is genuinely more difficult to make aluminum panel siding more interesting architecturally than traditional masonry. There are so few options, and so little ability to customize this type of construction that it legitimately feels like building a house in The Sims designing with the stuff. Whereas, designing masonry is delightful, and to do it properly, you basically HAVE to do it by hand drawing an elevation.
You're an architect, and how could you possibly be so wrong? Because this is decidedly the laziest post-modernist trend that trickled downward from five over ones, the cheapest (built out of wood, plaster and vynil in the US and those favella hollow red blocks, plaster and vinyl in Europe) and tackiest type of a building designed by dime a dozen novice architects where the random nonsense is there just for the kitsch factor. To convince the average buyer that the building is "unique", while the same cheap and simple construction (somewhat robust vaulted ceiling commercial zero floor, minimally structurally sound sardine can residential above) hides beneath the plastic botched facelift surgery of every single of those buildings in the city. There is a way to make things not boring without carving George Lucas tier nonsense into the walls (at least not boring to people who aren't soulless and thereby don't need to be pandered to by kitsch, like if Thomas Kinkade is your favourite artist may god have mercy on your even metaphorically entirely non-existent soul), that's what modernist architecture has been doing since the 1920's. You break up the form with different materials, you block out functional segments, you put in aesthetic forms that also "guide" the flow of people through the building, you add forms because they are challenging to manufacture at the time of making etc. A lot of these things can be seen in good post-modernist architecture, too, because that's how you do good architecture. Bauhaus isn't just simple shapes and bright colours you know, brutalism isn't just grey and cubes and then the Falling Water house isn't an example of great architecture because it's a seemingly simple form with broken up shapes... Good minimalism is simple only to simple minds; which is why Elon Musk, an extraordinarily simple mind, boldly tried to pull it off before even achieving the manufacturing quality of a 1970s vintage Yugo first and all while believing that LCD screens with maximalist graphics are an aesthetic interiour value boost on par with wood and brass inlays. As per making aluminum cladding interesting, and in a post-modernist building at that - Frank Ghery. Absolutely not my thing, but neither "boring" nor "kitsch" would describe it. But you can't make those custom forms out of aluminum plates on dimes, and then resell the thing in the inflated urban housing market, now can you. Should still note that it's exceedingly funny that this new McMansion add on on the tacky and trashy Tudor era McMansion is literally the cheapest and tackiest (because literally no element is function, it's just a cube volume that you put your landlord puts the toilet next to the kitchen table in) residential floor of a five over one brought to the ground. I guess you can buy an ugly Tudor McMansion and then overpay a generic contractor to build a secondary post-modernist McMansion right into it, but you can't buy taste.
@ I don’t know if it was exactly a defense of the aesthetics as much as it was an explanation of how materials are dealt with in order to avoid the worst possible aesthetics. As for your rant; I understand that American architecture is not great, but it’s also a reflection of the economics; driving foremost the choices in materials. Architects are basically being asked to shine turds. Most of these buildings exist solely to fulfill some profit-model, and only need to be aesthetically „good enough“ to the point that people will be initially attracted to them and allow the initial investment to materialize. What happens to the building in 15 or 20 years isn’t considered.
@@TalesFromTheUnderside Wtf is an aeshtetiticist. Love all the people not in the architecture and construction industry commenting and giving their "expert" opinion.
One day someone will post a picture of a house like this, with a man with a poorly fitted suit with a mis-matched shirt, with a white ford f-150 in the driveway, with a I voted for Hillary sign in the yard, and then Vaush will retire on the spot.
I prefer the classic white van. Nothing says "keep some distance" like a white van with no markings and tinted windows. People aren't curious about what's inside, they're concerned😂
One day someone will post that picture and lament that we no longer have the sophisticated elegance that we did back in the box-in-brick retrofit days See also: I sometimes find songs from the late 2000s with comments about how no one makes good music anymore and songwriting died in 2009 ***'nam flashbacks to old crabby people in the 90s complaining that no one has written a decent song since 1966***
Architect here. I love hearing non-architects' opinions on the state of contemporary architecture. More architects need to hear this, but not just architects - the entire building industry needs to take a sobering look at itself. I totally agree that the minimalist or "cube" architecture is lacking the charm and "cherishability" and durability of the old stuff. There are lots of reasons for this all the way from the architects, to the owners/clients, to the supply chain, to the dying/dead building trades and artisans, to the contractors themselves. I hear a lot of hate only for the architects here, which is annoying and unfair, but at least there's a critique happening at all. I would say that if there's an ugly building, there's a cheap/opinionated client right there making the decisions a majority of the time. Architects for most projects are not the all-powerful masterminds we're made out to be. We're simply hired to produce the owners' visions. "Give me a dozen townhouses that look like those other townhouses i see all over. They're selling like hotcakes." If it's not a cube it's a vinyl sided cape cod with vinyl windows and asphalt shingles. It's all a race to the bottom, indicative of a singlularly money-minded capitalist society.
Hire an Anthropologist with Archaeological training to survey the existing housing stock and the people who live in them. Determine the most desirable aspects of vernacular domestic architecture.
Architect here: the budget is everything. A lot of people don't understand that. I'd love to do way more artistically, but it's hard to go to your client with a ballooned budget and tell them that the extra cost adds no utility bit looks pretty. That's a fast way for me to get fired.
Live in the petrocube, eat pure corn syrup for every meal, watch your live action disney remake and work for one of the 3 billionaires who own the planet.
I bet your grandma didn't do this to her house. Because as cheap and lazy as this kind of construction really is, the hive of submediocre companies building it outside of their cheapest five over ones do overcharge quite a lot for it. There's a reason those who can afford tacky mansions of yore, like the Tudor one from the video, are the ones paying to have these things built for them - it's the same kind of "prestige" as those equally tacky gypsum ornaments, lions, columns or whatever that the nuveau-riche liked a lot at one point.
@@RunD.Ones1sthey literally just said they didnt like something, how did you get "triggered" from that? Most people dont like feeling like they're at a commercial building when they're at home.
Tbf, tudors are absolute trash inside. They were made when it was impossible to heat a house. The rooms are tiny (especially the kitchen), and the windows are small. Not that the addition was better. But living in a tudor is way less fun than looking at tudors.
Same goes for half-timbered houses, they are borderline unlivable for people who like it bright and warm. My personal hell would be a half-timbered tenant home. You can hear your neighbors breathe through the walls. Plus most of them were painted with pure poison on the inside in the 20th century ('wood protection'), so they'll be the last place you'll rent in your life. I personally would not buy a Tudor house. But there are plenty of people who'd love to buy one while completely accepting the fact that this house will never have enough natural light in them.
Tudor mansions ARE the McMansion of their era, tacky on the outside and not built for function on the inside. It's just that Vaush has no clue about architecture, so he can't tell they are exactly the same kind of horrible as that post-modernist griblies capitalism stack apartment floor chunk retrofitted onto the Tudor. Why? Because old equals good apparently, uninformed populist nostalgia is always reactionary.
Dormers are the answer for an addition on a Tudor like that. If you want to get fancy a big living room. Built perpendicular to one side with stairs going up to the 2nd floor. What they did is just absolutely dumb as shit.
I call it parasitic architecture. We've got it all over here in Toronto. The ROM is the worst example. A beautiful old museum building, but the main entrance is this cancerous crystal cube growing out of it.
@@grmpf UA-cam in general is VERY touchy as of late with anything even remotely possible to be interpreted badly. Also, from my own experience if you have a bad connection, your comment just goes poof. Don't know why.
@@BerserkerLuke It's been happening on and off for me for a while now. Sometimes the most random innocuous stuff just disappears. I can't see the world where my reply about how the ROM doesn't work even though I respect the concept would be interpreted badly, but who knows… It's definitely not a bad connection in my case, I could at least understand that from a tech standpoint.
The ROM thing is nothing like this. Your analysis is as shallow as "it's a building retrofitted onto a building, so it's the same". Like I didn't even know that building existed before you mentioned it, and at a glance I could tell it's not the same at all. They didn't build a laziest and cheapest residential floor of a post-modernist five over one into it, that much is instantly obvious. Since I know nothing about the design or you specifically, I'll reserve my harshest judgment. However, will say that there is a non-remote possibility that you might be an architectural equivalent of a random reactionary complaining how "women today" have piercings and tattoos. The purpose of beauty and art isn't to not offend shallow opinionated people, you know. Kitsch will make you unoffended, nice and cozy. Granted the original museum building is just a run of the mill building of its era, there are millions of ones just like it across all countries that went through the early 1900's industrial era. It might even have details that are Greco-Roman kitsch that ironically enough parasites off otherwise decent Art Deco architecture way too often, or they might be art if there's actual purpose/commentary behind it (it's a Museum and the window mural appears to be telling some kind of a story and the asymmetric design details in it appear to decidedly deliberate, so I'd lay my bets on artistic); I'm talking about the key ornamentation on the upper set of front facade windows. Speaking of those facade windows, why is the bottom set jarringly not matching the width and the inward depth, so much so that it looks like a sticker? Was there a deliberate artistic intent to introduce the discordance, or was Mr. Grover there and he just really wanted that space to have windows to look out of at all costs and a set that extends the format and style of the above ones couldn't be implemented due to some technical limitations on the floor?
I'll admit a part of me kinda likes that style of architecture from an aesthetic standpoint, but: 1. I live in a small Midwestern town where that style hasn't caught on yet so a lot of it is just novelty for me, and 2. I still would not want to live in one.
as someone who lives in a midwestern brick house thats 120 years old, it's not all butterflies and honeyed pancakes. brick essentially has a negative insulation coefficient. the more you heat the house in winter the colder it feels, and cooling is an impossible task in the summer. maintaining brick is expensive. tuckpointing and repointing are necessary, and that will cost you much dinero. we're talking about 20k for a not terribly large brick home if it needs to be redone, and a not insignifcant amount for maintenance in between full redos. old brick sucks in water like a sponge, too, which means any walls exposed to rain will stain on the inside. so you either have to seal your brick, which is another major expense and has the potential to degrade the brick if done incorrectly (doing it right is more expensive, as always), or deal with the constant interior plaster cracking that results, repainting stained walls that's required, etc. there's a lot if increased difficulty with hanging pictures or mounting anything, as well, since most of the time you need to drill into the brick... a lot of the time i would give a decent amount of $$ to have modern insulation, drywall, and a 100% watertight exterior. the look and durability is nice, though, as it goes without question that the house will stand for at least another 100 years if its cared for correctly. whereas modern homes are going to have trouble even making it to the 50 year mark.
i feel like some folks think that 100 year old buildings weren't built like absolute crap from the cheapest material? there is no inherent value in old shit. in most cases it's just that, shit. so you added some more shit to it, what's it matter? europe is not an open air museum.
Everyone likes looking at these houses. Only a moron wants to live in one of these. Talking about morons: I rented an apartment in a half-timbered house, not knowing what I was getting myself into. Moving in was an almost impossible task due to the sealings having virtually no static strength, but then you could hear our neighbors breathe through the walls. I soon discovered that the open woodbeams on the inside were painted with poisonous wood protection. Then the first winter hit and freezing to death, I finally decided it was the time to gtfo.
When cyberpunk showed homes made of plastic, they were critiquing it. This fact is beyond the fake architect bros who build this shit with the good graces of tve millionares in the Chamber of Commerce
Cyberpunk didn't show homes out of plastic to critique the material, you should read more and play fewer shallow video games like the one that stole the name of the genre. It was the 1970s and 1980s, people thought serial mass manufacturing and new "miracle materials" (plastics in the 1940s and 1950s for example were notoriously bad) was the future (the same as with arcologies and megabuildings). Metabolism specifically, which was at the cutting edge of new materials and prefab elements, was very popular in Japan. Japan as a rising economic power is a staple of cyberpunk in the form of a superpower, with it came stuff like metabolist prefab apartments and capsule hotels as a staple. The critique actually goes way deeper than what you seem to believe. The kind of aspirational utopian architecture that housed millions of previously homeless in Japan after the destruction of WWII became the perversion of itself in a hyper-capitalist dystopia, it's the same reason neo-brutalism is often mentioned in cyberpunk (because it is THE utopian communal architecture, and keep in mind that communist utopianism wasn't dead back then). Those metabolist housing blocks that aspirationally everyone would be able to afford became capsule hotels, because the utopian dream became a capitalist nightmare where you can just barely every now and then afford to pay for a night's stay (not rent monthly, let alone own). An another detail showing the shallowness and utter failure of Cyberpunk 2077 at the level of social commentary and baseline soul; you, an underclass nobody starting from the bottom, live in a huge utopian prefab apartment with all the amenities one could wish for (with an incredibly wasteful communal hangout pit space in the middle of the room as a luxury cherry on top. Hell, your pew toys have their room in Cyberpunk 2077) for in a major metropolis that is Night City. Meanwhile, at the time that offensively politically cowardly and staggeringly socially stunted game was made, shoe box apartments in New York have already become unaffordable for most.
@@AnEntropyFan It's ironic you say that, since those shallow videos games don't typically acknowledge critiques of mass produced plastic homes... it's older Cyberpunk media which did that. So, lol, lmao even. I never even said I was referring to Cyberpunk 2077, so why did you assume that I was referring to it? Even though my point LITERALLY refers to critiques made in earlier media? I think you just wanna be contrarian.
@@AnEntropyFan Me: "Hey, cyberpunk critiqued this." You: "Don't you know that older cyberpunk media critiqued this?? You should stop playing those vidya games, and should start reading media which critiques this!!!!!!" Like yeah... I'm talking about the older media. Obviously? If I mention a criticism made by older media, why would you assume I'm not talking about THAT VERY SAME MEDIA??
The better question is: how much more will you be willing to pay for a nicer exterior. If there was no cost difference, sure - many people will want something nicer, but no one is willing to pay up for that
Oh hey a topic I know about. Most options for siding a house are going to be non permanent in the way that vinyl siding is. Granted, most builders are installing 0.42 vinyl that is gonna last the minimal amount of time. That being said, aluminum, steel, concrete, wood plank, and composite all break down or get damaged over time. Technically all of these products, including vinyl, are repairable. You can remove a piece of broken siding and replace it with a new one as long as you can still get a matching product, but eventually the products get discontinued so you either have to live with mismatching siding, paint if it’s a paintable product, or replace all of it. Ultimately, in our society builders, even high end builders are trying to get houses built as cheaply as possible and they’re gonna use the lowest end products they can get away with. That’s why a product being described as “builder grade” means it’s shitty. You can see countless videos on the internet from home inspectors looking at new “million dollar homes” that are filled to the brim with issues and shoddy work. If you’re ever fortunate enough to be able to purchase a home, stay away from new construction if you can.
I live in an area that is mostly brutalist in style, and I've slowly come to realize just how ... disparaging to my overall mindset this kind of hyperutilitarian/anti-aesthetic environment really is.
This is all over the world… I live in Japan and here this is everywhere. Last year I went back to my home country (Brazil) and I saw the same slop everywhere as well…
In my home town theres a beautiful Victorian hospital. They built a new wing out of black glass. Looks like a cancer tumor and guess what the wing is for.... Its the cancer ward!!
People seem to forget that things cost money, and where do you save money? In design and material. Add to this extreme planning requirements which require a lot of money make slop the only thing most people can afford
@@Gulitize Yes, but it's a preexisting house that didn't need such big renovations, also regular concrete commie block or standalone "cube houses" are cheaper and look better.
The greatest blight that has happened to the part of the country I'm from is that these gorgeous homes built in the 1880's have been completely gutted and turned into these contemporary slop white on grey interiors. There is a home not too far from me that is high 7 figures from the mid 1880s that had this happened, and unsurprisingly, it's not selling. People don't want a Victorian home that was turned into a modern shitbox on the inside.
Its not just the sandwich panels either. We build these houses with dimensional lumber and then face it all in OSB which is that ugly-looking plywood that's essentially woodchips in a PLASTIC resin. Then plastic based insulation is put inside, waterproofed with plastic sheeting, and faced with those ugly plastic sandwich panels outside. Then everything is painted with plastic-based paints, and the interior is furnished with furniture made of MDF which is wood dust held together with plastic resin, painted with plastic paint, finished with faux leather (plastic), etc. And then the only way to get to these places is usually by car which is made of plastic, lubricated with oil, and burns gasoline as a fuel, has synthetic upholstery, plastic-based paint, etc. Oh and it drives on roads which are made of oil and gravel and painted with plastic paint. So basically we've developed an entirely oil-based ecosystem which you can never escape from. Yay!
idk, i’ve always lived near london and houses like this are rare. the overwhelming majority of houses i’ve seen are brick still so this comes across as futuristic to my monkey brain.
They did this to our cathedral in my home town. It's extremely disgusting AND it blocks the view of the northern flank of the original building. You don't even have a clear view of the huge stained glass window anymore.
@innnlove I know. Do you really think I'm that dense? I'm talking about the beautifully designed exterior around the window, that also includes the window.
PVC siding does not last very well. It wasn't installed great, but the PVC sighting on my parents house started to fade and fall apart after about 15 years. It has metal siding now, like a barn (because the metal siding on the barn they built at the same time still looked new).
My mom will not tolerate any piece of furniture in her house that isn't white. She refuses to get an extra cabinet because she can't find one that's white enough. The place looks cold and uncomfortable. Everything is white and I feel like someone is always about to come in to tell me the dentist is ready to see me.
Is that Conneticut Brown brick?????? Holy shit, genuinely that's so sad. For context, there is literally no CT brown stone left on Earth. It only exists in old New-English brick homes and buildings
This take isn't _wrong_ per se but I live in Canada where the housing crisis is especially bad and I'd rather have the petroleum cube than current housing and rent prices. Specifically if it means we can get apartments/townhouses built fast. Preferably by the government.
the ones that look like this normally aren’t cheap either, they’re cheaply *made* but don’t you dare the consumer sees any of that, they’re just as expensive as everything else *as well as* being fūck-ugly.
Fun fact Canada has one of the strictest height restrictions in the world for smaller buildings. Any building above 2 stories needs two pairs of stairs. My family home would be illegal in Canada, and it was planned as an upper middle class single family home in 1912.
My house has asbestos shingles and aslong as you don’t break it your good. It’s held up all my damn life. Feel bad for the workers who put it up in the 70s tho. Hope they didn’t get cancer from it.
To be fair tho, Vinyl window frames are usually longer-lasting than wooden frames, because wood is maintenance intense and usually gets neglected. It also absorbs humidity and deforms according to the moisture content which means your wooden windows will never perfectly seal (unless they are cooated in a thick acrylic layer, which is basically just plastic too...)
Every roof should be a balcony. My idea would be to have a lot of the roof slanted with a wide metal grit above it, covered in some sorta outdoor carpet you roll up for winter.
"It was too dark" I hate the modern, cubic, all-windows, colorless, hard floor, echo-y, looks-like-a-doctor's-office houses. They don't feel like homes.
I live in a historic area in VA where most houses were built late 1800s/early 1900s and these ugly cubes are becoming every 10th building, all new houses being built look like this. Old beautiful Victorian homes will have a giant cube added on the back. The cybertruckification of houses.
wood can also last virtually forever, im norwegian and live next to one of if not THE oldest church in the country, which is well over 800 years old. and another small one a few years younger that used to stand on the neigbouring farm until it was demolished in the late 1800s and parts of it were used to rebuild a replica at a museum in Lillehammer
Plastic is a terrible building material not just because it has a terrible lifespan/replacability/reusability, but also because of mold. Wood, concrete, bricks, they all "breathe" (allow moisture to pass through), plastic doesn't and it causes moisture to accumulate, especially on the border between the plastic and more breathable materials. It's a pretty big problem where I live, because old brick buildings (residential and otherwise) will often replace previous wooden windows with plastic framed ones and suddenly start having mold problems, even though the building has been there for a 100 years with no issues. There are ways to mitigate it, but on residential buildings, the work is often done by people who don't think about it, or they're considered too expensive.
as someone who works in a field contributing to construction mostly of homes and stuff in seattle, those modern style townhomes are so played out and they’re the only thing anyone builds. i hate it
I live in a mobile home that has/had metal siding and when I was able to do repairs and upgrades the guy doing it suggested I put wood over the metal instead of replacing it. The extra insulation has been great so far and the pine wood exterior is beautiful.
Wood lasts a really long time if painted and cared for correctly. My great-grandfather lived in a house made from wood thats old enough to be classified as a protected culture building.
There are literally wooden buildings in Europe that are a thousand years old and still standing tall and functional. Talking about wood as if it doesn’t last is such utter cope
I have an Arc degree i wasn't able to use due to graduating in 08 and being unwilling to move for work. I like Modern architecture, but have very mixed feelings about the execution of these ulta modern cubes. They always look like the worst 3 over 1s. I do like shipping container houses, but again, the execution is key. And i agree, natural materials for the win. They are repairable and biodegrade when they do need replacing. Also, every time I see those geometric cube house windows, all I can think about is how if they're not installed 110% properly they can leak like a sieve.
I think this kind of restoration can be done well and look good - combining modern with old brick architecture. This is just a horrendous example - just a random unproportional cube growing out of one side with an even more random arrangement of windows. It’s ugly. But that’s the result of the choices not the idea in general imo
I don’t think the modern design of these townhomes/apartments is inherently ugly, I think they can look fine if the facade is designed competently enough.
In Chicago, you can tell how gentrified a neighborhood is by how many of these have replaced the 100 year old 2 flat and 3 flats that are still standing proud. My partner and I call them “dream boxes”. They all feature floor to ceiling windows to show off the all white walls. its like the owners are bragging about their lack of style
I dunno, this and a lot of other comments here are being strangely “retvrn” when it comes to architectural design. The problems with this house are not that Architects are evil and want you to suffer in sad houses, it’s with, as all things, capitalism’s parasitic nature sucking away the ability for architects to actually create good-looking architecture. This house wasn’t what an architect wanted, it’s what a client would pay for.
@linuslarson493 well sure that is part of the underlying problem but it doesn't change our analysis of the aesthetics. There are plenty of rich people who could afford good architecture who choose instead to build eyesores
That house looks perfectly fine and the new bit fits in with the old part quite well. Not sure it's worth getting upset about. Also, I can guarantee it is a lot more livable inside this way.
Reminds me of the Combine overtaken cities in Half Life 2, where the alien structures are just plopped down in the middle of eastern European urban areas, incongruently jutting out of pre-existing buildings like techno nightmare tumors.
It was too dark? What a missed opportunity to add a lovely conservatory /orangery that tied into the current style. If you want to live in a brutalism inspired building, leave the old houses alone. If you want the look if a new construction, leave the old houses alone. I am aware you are allowed your poor tastes and if you really want to deface old architecture, you can. I will however be bitter about it.
The majority of new homes in Seattle, especially in older neighborhoods, are these blocky post-modern designs. They're as sterile-looking (and feeling) inside as out. EVERYTHING is white. Any metal is either brushed nickel or dark bronze, though I'm happy to see satin brass coming back in. You're right, it looks like ass. I've poked into these construction sites on weekends to look around, and corners are cut all the fuck over. They're not plastic, but they are shitty. I think staging houses had the "paint everything white, so the new buyer can imagine their own look" rule for so long, people came to accept that "everything is painted white" is stylish.
also sometimes the cladding can be unsafe and make fires more dangerous in buildings, like Grenfel tower in London England which kill dozens of people.
Making an actually modernist brutalist addition out of real concrete, with steel and wood elements (as the gods of brutalism and real modernism in general demand, the form must have function and the decorative accents are actual changes in materials used) could be done well. Adding a post-modernist mish-mash of pseudo-modernist forms and having everything made out of plaster and vinyl is just kitch, an even more of a kitsch than those mass-prodused style-devoid Tudor era McMansions, at least they didn't cover the bricks in "decorative" plaster ornaments (which is on par with neo-Baroque kitsch) that only trap moisture and burn real good.
There is a small apartment complex near were I live that has a similar cubist aesthetic but breaks up the sections with different textures and nice colors and doesn't have any of those lines and it looks way better than all of that slop. Could still be better imo, but it's at least pleasant to look at.
To be fair I've never seen a building like that either, so I kinda get the novelty. It's like "wow, I've never seen a building like this before, I wonder why". And then you never wonder again because that novelty is all it has going for it lol
I get the slop rant. But fuck me if that Tudor house wasn't already hideous to begin with. Solid block of brick with no interesting textures or detailing. Literally a 10 year old's first Minecraft house.
Exactly, vaush calling it beautiful like he'd want to live there lmao. Id actually take the clashing addition over the rest of the house, at least you get sunlight
I think this is style of architecture is genuinely more of a cost cutting thing than anything else. I imagine it’s much more cost effective to 3d print a minimalist cube for that you’re going to rent out to a working professional for 4,000 dollars a month than building some meticulously detailed gothic or victorian building for the same purpose. Another way capitalism has degraded our environment.
Okay so I work as a stonemason, as in, carving profiles and frescoes and ornaments into natural stone, for use in building, and one very massive huge immense problem that is afflicting the building industry is that it's all a race to the bottom. Building is expensive, as it should be, but obviously, people will choose the lowest bidder - and in building, there's always a way to cut costs. You can cut mortar with cheap filler, skimp out on facade anchors (or insulation, or plate strength, etc). This means that the buildings which eventually end up being built at LITERALLY all dogshit. As in, every building you will see today has about a million defects that are at worst life-threatening and at best will cause giant issues with water and erosion later down the line. Anyone who has ever worked on a building site will also tell you that it's lunacy we trust the ground under our feet nowadays. All of this shit is just an emanation of this. What do you think "minimalism" is? A way to cut detail. A way to cut cost. A way to build for cheap.
Aside from these mostly being single family homes, I do quite like the blend of multiple styles. I also particularly enjoy the cubist aesthetic. But I repeat myself, we need more dense housing not the destruction of beautiful historic homes (that are perfectly habitable) to build cubic/brutalist homes
I once rage commented on a video like this that showed the deterioration of beautiful English cottages into Arasaka logo’d hell… & attracted all the slop lovers No lie though, so many middle class homeowners just pave over their front & back gardens, no plant life in their front or back yards, because they’re too fucking lazy or cheap to cut grass once every few weeks. What’s really really hilarious is someone did a study & found that the areas of the UK most at risk from flooding have the highest ratio of cement gardens.
Architect here:
They don't add those lines in the facade just to add visual interest; the panels only come in so big a size. Also, you need to add lines and patterns to brick facades too, otherwise they look like what we in the profession call "clown dookey".
That said, it is genuinely more difficult to make aluminum panel siding more interesting architecturally than traditional masonry. There are so few options, and so little ability to customize this type of construction that it legitimately feels like building a house in The Sims designing with the stuff. Whereas, designing masonry is delightful, and to do it properly, you basically HAVE to do it by hand drawing an elevation.
$$$
You're an architect, and how could you possibly be so wrong? Because this is decidedly the laziest post-modernist trend that trickled downward from five over ones, the cheapest (built out of wood, plaster and vynil in the US and those favella hollow red blocks, plaster and vinyl in Europe) and tackiest type of a building designed by dime a dozen novice architects where the random nonsense is there just for the kitsch factor. To convince the average buyer that the building is "unique", while the same cheap and simple construction (somewhat robust vaulted ceiling commercial zero floor, minimally structurally sound sardine can residential above) hides beneath the plastic botched facelift surgery of every single of those buildings in the city.
There is a way to make things not boring without carving George Lucas tier nonsense into the walls (at least not boring to people who aren't soulless and thereby don't need to be pandered to by kitsch, like if Thomas Kinkade is your favourite artist may god have mercy on your even metaphorically entirely non-existent soul), that's what modernist architecture has been doing since the 1920's. You break up the form with different materials, you block out functional segments, you put in aesthetic forms that also "guide" the flow of people through the building, you add forms because they are challenging to manufacture at the time of making etc. A lot of these things can be seen in good post-modernist architecture, too, because that's how you do good architecture.
Bauhaus isn't just simple shapes and bright colours you know, brutalism isn't just grey and cubes and then the Falling Water house isn't an example of great architecture because it's a seemingly simple form with broken up shapes... Good minimalism is simple only to simple minds; which is why Elon Musk, an extraordinarily simple mind, boldly tried to pull it off before even achieving the manufacturing quality of a 1970s vintage Yugo first and all while believing that LCD screens with maximalist graphics are an aesthetic interiour value boost on par with wood and brass inlays.
As per making aluminum cladding interesting, and in a post-modernist building at that - Frank Ghery. Absolutely not my thing, but neither "boring" nor "kitsch" would describe it. But you can't make those custom forms out of aluminum plates on dimes, and then resell the thing in the inflated urban housing market, now can you.
Should still note that it's exceedingly funny that this new McMansion add on on the tacky and trashy Tudor era McMansion is literally the cheapest and tackiest (because literally no element is function, it's just a cube volume that you put your landlord puts the toilet next to the kitchen table in) residential floor of a five over one brought to the ground. I guess you can buy an ugly Tudor McMansion and then overpay a generic contractor to build a secondary post-modernist McMansion right into it, but you can't buy taste.
Aestheticist here: you’re full of crap
@ I don’t know if it was exactly a defense of the aesthetics as much as it was an explanation of how materials are dealt with in order to avoid the worst possible aesthetics.
As for your rant; I understand that American architecture is not great, but it’s also a reflection of the economics; driving foremost the choices in materials. Architects are basically being asked to shine turds.
Most of these buildings exist solely to fulfill some profit-model, and only need to be aesthetically „good enough“ to the point that people will be initially attracted to them and allow the initial investment to materialize. What happens to the building in 15 or 20 years isn’t considered.
@@TalesFromTheUnderside Wtf is an aeshtetiticist. Love all the people not in the architecture and construction industry commenting and giving their "expert" opinion.
One day someone will post a picture of a house like this, with a man with a poorly fitted suit with a mis-matched shirt, with a white ford f-150 in the driveway, with a I voted for Hillary sign in the yard, and then Vaush will retire on the spot.
The white ford F-150 hurts the most
I prefer the classic white van. Nothing says "keep some distance" like a white van with no markings and tinted windows. People aren't curious about what's inside, they're concerned😂
Make sure it's AI generated.
Evil Hell
One day someone will post that picture and lament that we no longer have the sophisticated elegance that we did back in the box-in-brick retrofit days
See also: I sometimes find songs from the late 2000s with comments about how no one makes good music anymore and songwriting died in 2009 ***'nam flashbacks to old crabby people in the 90s complaining that no one has written a decent song since 1966***
Architect here. I love hearing non-architects' opinions on the state of contemporary architecture. More architects need to hear this, but not just architects - the entire building industry needs to take a sobering look at itself.
I totally agree that the minimalist or "cube" architecture is lacking the charm and "cherishability" and durability of the old stuff. There are lots of reasons for this all the way from the architects, to the owners/clients, to the supply chain, to the dying/dead building trades and artisans, to the contractors themselves. I hear a lot of hate only for the architects here, which is annoying and unfair, but at least there's a critique happening at all.
I would say that if there's an ugly building, there's a cheap/opinionated client right there making the decisions a majority of the time. Architects for most projects are not the all-powerful masterminds we're made out to be. We're simply hired to produce the owners' visions. "Give me a dozen townhouses that look like those other townhouses i see all over. They're selling like hotcakes." If it's not a cube it's a vinyl sided cape cod with vinyl windows and asphalt shingles. It's all a race to the bottom, indicative of a singlularly money-minded capitalist society.
Hire an Anthropologist with Archaeological training to survey the existing housing stock and the people who live in them.
Determine the most desirable aspects of vernacular domestic architecture.
@@tombrown407sorry, who is paying?
Architect here: the budget is everything. A lot of people don't understand that. I'd love to do way more artistically, but it's hard to go to your client with a ballooned budget and tell them that the extra cost adds no utility bit looks pretty. That's a fast way for me to get fired.
@uremailingalex So basically what you're saying is that the problem is capitalism?
I'm going into architecture soon! Im very excited!
You VILL live in ze petrocube
Vill ...eat the pod ...😢😢😨😨
Live in the petrocube, eat pure corn syrup for every meal, watch your live action disney remake and work for one of the 3 billionaires who own the planet.
@@DecMurphy They gonna make you choose your billionaire like the pokemon leagues
You vill own zlop and you vill be happy
What is need is modular plastic globs that be assembled like Cobb.
My grandma did something like this to her house and painted the inside it went from warm and comfy to cold and sterile.
I bet your grandma didn't do this to her house. Because as cheap and lazy as this kind of construction really is, the hive of submediocre companies building it outside of their cheapest five over ones do overcharge quite a lot for it. There's a reason those who can afford tacky mansions of yore, like the Tudor one from the video, are the ones paying to have these things built for them - it's the same kind of "prestige" as those equally tacky gypsum ornaments, lions, columns or whatever that the nuveau-riche liked a lot at one point.
Some people like the modern sterile aesthetic, why does that trigger you
@@RunD.Ones1sthey literally just said they didnt like something, how did you get "triggered" from that? Most people dont like feeling like they're at a commercial building when they're at home.
@@erinkinsella91 you’re even more triggered 🤣 who hurt you?!
@@RunD.Ones1s brother you're the epitome of what you hate.
Jesus Christ, I didn't know border gore was possible on a building...
If I won the lottery, I’d find a good dirt lot and an angry architect who pines for craftsmanship and natural materials and tell em to go to town.
Literally what King Charles did in the UK - he built an entire town, Poundbury
X2
SAAAME.
Slop should have been the new dictionary word
my thoughts exactly
it wasnt?
@@davitdavid7165brain rot was
its existed for a while, this is just a new context.
@@davitdavid7165 it was nominated, brain rot won
Tbf, tudors are absolute trash inside. They were made when it was impossible to heat a house. The rooms are tiny (especially the kitchen), and the windows are small.
Not that the addition was better. But living in a tudor is way less fun than looking at tudors.
Same goes for half-timbered houses, they are borderline unlivable for people who like it bright and warm. My personal hell would be a half-timbered tenant home. You can hear your neighbors breathe through the walls. Plus most of them were painted with pure poison on the inside in the 20th century ('wood protection'), so they'll be the last place you'll rent in your life.
I personally would not buy a Tudor house. But there are plenty of people who'd love to buy one while completely accepting the fact that this house will never have enough natural light in them.
Tudor mansions ARE the McMansion of their era, tacky on the outside and not built for function on the inside. It's just that Vaush has no clue about architecture, so he can't tell they are exactly the same kind of horrible as that post-modernist griblies capitalism stack apartment floor chunk retrofitted onto the Tudor. Why? Because old equals good apparently, uninformed populist nostalgia is always reactionary.
Tudor houses ARE the McMansions of their era; hideous on the outside, not built for function on the inside.
Dormers are the answer for an addition on a Tudor like that. If you want to get fancy a big living room. Built perpendicular to one side with stairs going up to the 2nd floor. What they did is just absolutely dumb as shit.
I call it parasitic architecture. We've got it all over here in Toronto. The ROM is the worst example. A beautiful old museum building, but the main entrance is this cancerous crystal cube growing out of it.
like 50% of my completely normal comments just get eaten on this channel, what is this
@@grmpf UA-cam in general is VERY touchy as of late with anything even remotely possible to be interpreted badly. Also, from my own experience if you have a bad connection, your comment just goes poof. Don't know why.
@@BerserkerLuke It's been happening on and off for me for a while now. Sometimes the most random innocuous stuff just disappears. I can't see the world where my reply about how the ROM doesn't work even though I respect the concept would be interpreted badly, but who knows…
It's definitely not a bad connection in my case, I could at least understand that from a tech standpoint.
Sounds cool
The ROM thing is nothing like this. Your analysis is as shallow as "it's a building retrofitted onto a building, so it's the same".
Like I didn't even know that building existed before you mentioned it, and at a glance I could tell it's not the same at all. They didn't build a laziest and cheapest residential floor of a post-modernist five over one into it, that much is instantly obvious.
Since I know nothing about the design or you specifically, I'll reserve my harshest judgment. However, will say that there is a non-remote possibility that you might be an architectural equivalent of a random reactionary complaining how "women today" have piercings and tattoos. The purpose of beauty and art isn't to not offend shallow opinionated people, you know. Kitsch will make you unoffended, nice and cozy.
Granted the original museum building is just a run of the mill building of its era, there are millions of ones just like it across all countries that went through the early 1900's industrial era. It might even have details that are Greco-Roman kitsch that ironically enough parasites off otherwise decent Art Deco architecture way too often, or they might be art if there's actual purpose/commentary behind it (it's a Museum and the window mural appears to be telling some kind of a story and the asymmetric design details in it appear to decidedly deliberate, so I'd lay my bets on artistic); I'm talking about the key ornamentation on the upper set of front facade windows. Speaking of those facade windows, why is the bottom set jarringly not matching the width and the inward depth, so much so that it looks like a sticker? Was there a deliberate artistic intent to introduce the discordance, or was Mr. Grover there and he just really wanted that space to have windows to look out of at all costs and a set that extends the format and style of the above ones couldn't be implemented due to some technical limitations on the floor?
2015 "minecraft modern house" irl
I'll admit a part of me kinda likes that style of architecture from an aesthetic standpoint, but:
1. I live in a small Midwestern town where that style hasn't caught on yet so a lot of it is just novelty for me, and
2. I still would not want to live in one.
You can’t have it probably because of your weather either extreme heat or wind reduces your options
no you aren't allowed to, vaush (the postmodernist) has already pointed out that it's just ugly and bad.
as someone who lives in a midwestern brick house thats 120 years old, it's not all butterflies and honeyed pancakes. brick essentially has a negative insulation coefficient. the more you heat the house in winter the colder it feels, and cooling is an impossible task in the summer. maintaining brick is expensive. tuckpointing and repointing are necessary, and that will cost you much dinero. we're talking about 20k for a not terribly large brick home if it needs to be redone, and a not insignifcant amount for maintenance in between full redos. old brick sucks in water like a sponge, too, which means any walls exposed to rain will stain on the inside. so you either have to seal your brick, which is another major expense and has the potential to degrade the brick if done incorrectly (doing it right is more expensive, as always), or deal with the constant interior plaster cracking that results, repainting stained walls that's required, etc. there's a lot if increased difficulty with hanging pictures or mounting anything, as well, since most of the time you need to drill into the brick...
a lot of the time i would give a decent amount of $$ to have modern insulation, drywall, and a 100% watertight exterior. the look and durability is nice, though, as it goes without question that the house will stand for at least another 100 years if its cared for correctly. whereas modern homes are going to have trouble even making it to the 50 year mark.
This looks like the combine tech slowly eating city 17 in half life 2.
Only that Combine smart walls and striders weren't so destructive
shoutout to our benefactors for kindly providing this to us
I feel like I’m too European to understand Vaush’s burning hatred
How? I am european too and hate that stile that looks like a child places random white blocks
Tbf our white blocks are still made out of actual building materials
i feel like some folks think that 100 year old buildings weren't built like absolute crap from the cheapest material? there is no inherent value in old shit. in most cases it's just that, shit. so you added some more shit to it, what's it matter? europe is not an open air museum.
@@derkrischa3720those old houses are freezing!!!
@@JimmyJames10-k7v I never said anything about isolation quality, just that those block buildings look shitty
To be fair that old house had very few windows. I bet it was dark as shit in there.
Everyone likes looking at these houses. Only a moron wants to live in one of these.
Talking about morons: I rented an apartment in a half-timbered house, not knowing what I was getting myself into. Moving in was an almost impossible task due to the sealings having virtually no static strength, but then you could hear our neighbors breathe through the walls. I soon discovered that the open woodbeams on the inside were painted with poisonous wood protection.
Then the first winter hit and freezing to death, I finally decided it was the time to gtfo.
Then just add more windows? Not… whatever that is.
@@The1nvisibleJeevas people don't like to think.
Pretty sure they could have come up with a more cohesive solution to adding more windows.
@@The1nvisibleJeevas do you know how fucking difficult it is to alter the statics of an old brick house like that
When cyberpunk showed homes made of plastic, they were critiquing it. This fact is beyond the fake architect bros who build this shit with the good graces of tve millionares in the Chamber of Commerce
Cyberpunk didn't show homes out of plastic to critique the material, you should read more and play fewer shallow video games like the one that stole the name of the genre.
It was the 1970s and 1980s, people thought serial mass manufacturing and new "miracle materials" (plastics in the 1940s and 1950s for example were notoriously bad) was the future (the same as with arcologies and megabuildings). Metabolism specifically, which was at the cutting edge of new materials and prefab elements, was very popular in Japan. Japan as a rising economic power is a staple of cyberpunk in the form of a superpower, with it came stuff like metabolist prefab apartments and capsule hotels as a staple.
The critique actually goes way deeper than what you seem to believe. The kind of aspirational utopian architecture that housed millions of previously homeless in Japan after the destruction of WWII became the perversion of itself in a hyper-capitalist dystopia, it's the same reason neo-brutalism is often mentioned in cyberpunk (because it is THE utopian communal architecture, and keep in mind that communist utopianism wasn't dead back then). Those metabolist housing blocks that aspirationally everyone would be able to afford became capsule hotels, because the utopian dream became a capitalist nightmare where you can just barely every now and then afford to pay for a night's stay (not rent monthly, let alone own). An another detail showing the shallowness and utter failure of Cyberpunk 2077 at the level of social commentary and baseline soul; you, an underclass nobody starting from the bottom, live in a huge utopian prefab apartment with all the amenities one could wish for (with an incredibly wasteful communal hangout pit space in the middle of the room as a luxury cherry on top. Hell, your pew toys have their room in Cyberpunk 2077) for in a major metropolis that is Night City. Meanwhile, at the time that offensively politically cowardly and staggeringly socially stunted game was made, shoe box apartments in New York have already become unaffordable for most.
@@AnEntropyFan It's ironic you say that, since those shallow videos games don't typically acknowledge critiques of mass produced plastic homes... it's older Cyberpunk media which did that. So, lol, lmao even.
I never even said I was referring to Cyberpunk 2077, so why did you assume that I was referring to it? Even though my point LITERALLY refers to critiques made in earlier media? I think you just wanna be contrarian.
@@AnEntropyFan Me: "Hey, cyberpunk critiqued this."
You: "Don't you know that older cyberpunk media critiqued this?? You should stop playing those vidya games, and should start reading media which critiques this!!!!!!"
Like yeah... I'm talking about the older media. Obviously? If I mention a criticism made by older media, why would you assume I'm not talking about THAT VERY SAME MEDIA??
@@IchorOfTheManndrake I only really played the game so I was confused as hell about the plastic part lol
The better question is: how much more will you be willing to pay for a nicer exterior. If there was no cost difference, sure - many people will want something nicer, but no one is willing to pay up for that
Oh hey a topic I know about. Most options for siding a house are going to be non permanent in the way that vinyl siding is. Granted, most builders are installing 0.42 vinyl that is gonna last the minimal amount of time. That being said, aluminum, steel, concrete, wood plank, and composite all break down or get damaged over time. Technically all of these products, including vinyl, are repairable. You can remove a piece of broken siding and replace it with a new one as long as you can still get a matching product, but eventually the products get discontinued so you either have to live with mismatching siding, paint if it’s a paintable product, or replace all of it.
Ultimately, in our society builders, even high end builders are trying to get houses built as cheaply as possible and they’re gonna use the lowest end products they can get away with. That’s why a product being described as “builder grade” means it’s shitty. You can see countless videos on the internet from home inspectors looking at new “million dollar homes” that are filled to the brim with issues and shoddy work. If you’re ever fortunate enough to be able to purchase a home, stay away from new construction if you can.
Cy really be out there putting work showing what's up.
My Vaush HOA keeps trying to get the council to shut down my renovations.
Renovate their places at night!
Not legal advice
You're fined $100 a day until the slop comes down.
I live in an area that is mostly brutalist in style, and I've slowly come to realize just how ... disparaging to my overall mindset this kind of hyperutilitarian/anti-aesthetic environment really is.
This is all over the world… I live in Japan and here this is everywhere. Last year I went back to my home country (Brazil) and I saw the same slop everywhere as well…
In my home town theres a beautiful Victorian hospital. They built a new wing out of black glass. Looks like a cancer tumor and guess what the wing is for.... Its the cancer ward!!
As someone who cannot afford an actual house, I will be willing to live in that house.
People seem to forget that things cost money, and where do you save money? In design and material.
Add to this extreme planning requirements which require a lot of money make slop the only thing most people can afford
@@Gulitize Yes, but it's a preexisting house that didn't need such big renovations, also regular concrete commie block or standalone "cube houses" are cheaper and look better.
The point
You
Are all of these public housing projects that use cheap materials to quickly and efficiently house hundreds of thousands of people?
The greatest blight that has happened to the part of the country I'm from is that these gorgeous homes built in the 1880's have been completely gutted and turned into these contemporary slop white on grey interiors. There is a home not too far from me that is high 7 figures from the mid 1880s that had this happened, and unsurprisingly, it's not selling. People don't want a Victorian home that was turned into a modern shitbox on the inside.
Its not just the sandwich panels either. We build these houses with dimensional lumber and then face it all in OSB which is that ugly-looking plywood that's essentially woodchips in a PLASTIC resin. Then plastic based insulation is put inside, waterproofed with plastic sheeting, and faced with those ugly plastic sandwich panels outside. Then everything is painted with plastic-based paints, and the interior is furnished with furniture made of MDF which is wood dust held together with plastic resin, painted with plastic paint, finished with faux leather (plastic), etc. And then the only way to get to these places is usually by car which is made of plastic, lubricated with oil, and burns gasoline as a fuel, has synthetic upholstery, plastic-based paint, etc. Oh and it drives on roads which are made of oil and gravel and painted with plastic paint. So basically we've developed an entirely oil-based ecosystem which you can never escape from. Yay!
We'll be exhaling lego bricks in no time, just need to top it off with polyester clothes that contribute to microplastics too
idk, i’ve always lived near london and houses like this are rare. the overwhelming majority of houses i’ve seen are brick still so this comes across as futuristic to my monkey brain.
I think its far more common in the US than the UK
The future is here and ugly
cheez
we live in the future and it's dystopian
3:50 if that house was in Tokyo Vaush would love it
The apartment building I live in is like 120 years old and has withstood tornado seasons all through that, made entirely of brick.
They did this to our cathedral in my home town. It's extremely disgusting AND it blocks the view of the northern flank of the original building. You don't even have a clear view of the huge stained glass window anymore.
go inside if you want to see the window???? cuz that's how you're supposed to look at it????????????
@innnlove I know. Do you really think I'm that dense? I'm talking about the beautifully designed exterior around the window, that also includes the window.
@Yormolch sorry i was triggered
@innnlove it's alright, happens sometimes.
PVC siding does not last very well. It wasn't installed great, but the PVC sighting on my parents house started to fade and fall apart after about 15 years. It has metal siding now, like a barn (because the metal siding on the barn they built at the same time still looked new).
Maybe it's just because i live in a place where every house looks like the pre renovation house is every house but this looks cool as hell
some of them straight up look like debug wall textures
Those are actually cement panels. It's okay to building modern additions to older homes.
My mom will not tolerate any piece of furniture in her house that isn't white. She refuses to get an extra cabinet because she can't find one that's white enough. The place looks cold and uncomfortable. Everything is white and I feel like someone is always about to come in to tell me the dentist is ready to see me.
0:17 Combine-type architecture
True
Is that Conneticut Brown brick?????? Holy shit, genuinely that's so sad.
For context, there is literally no CT brown stone left on Earth. It only exists in old New-English brick homes and buildings
This is like me learning about novelty apple trees that only are found on old lands like a ruined settler home in the middle of the woods
So? They did preserve it while adding some modern aspects. Really don't see the issues.
@@XMysticHeroxthat's not what he meant dude
@@XMysticHerox
😐🤳🏽 🤡
Hold still
This take isn't _wrong_ per se but I live in Canada where the housing crisis is especially bad and I'd rather have the petroleum cube than current housing and rent prices. Specifically if it means we can get apartments/townhouses built fast. Preferably by the government.
the ones that look like this normally aren’t cheap either, they’re cheaply *made* but don’t you dare the consumer sees any of that, they’re just as expensive as everything else *as well as* being fūck-ugly.
Fun fact Canada has one of the strictest height restrictions in the world for smaller buildings. Any building above 2 stories needs two pairs of stairs. My family home would be illegal in Canada, and it was planned as an upper middle class single family home in 1912.
Y'all keep helping the problem.
Vaush: It's the slop
Cpt. Beefheart: It's the blimp
Jail for all of these people
My house has asbestos shingles and aslong as you don’t break it your good. It’s held up all my damn life. Feel bad for the workers who put it up in the 70s tho. Hope they didn’t get cancer from it.
***Obligatory auto-tuned Mesothelioma song***
imagine wrecking an antique house by dropping a prefab cube on it, making both the antique house and the prefab cube worse than the sum of their parts
Im be honest. I thought this was an AI generator image and thought this was going to be a rip into content slop being all lies going forward.
To be fair tho, Vinyl window frames are usually longer-lasting than wooden frames, because wood is maintenance intense and usually gets neglected. It also absorbs humidity and deforms according to the moisture content which means your wooden windows will never perfectly seal (unless they are cooated in a thick acrylic layer, which is basically just plastic too...)
As a child I yearned for the slop.
As an interior design student, I fucking hate some of my classmates
If it is too dark, then I support the addition. I have lived in dark buildings and the impact on your mood is real.
Why on gods green earth would you mald over this?
vaush has never lived in these houses , he just thinks the aesthetic is cool meanwhile they are freezing cold and cost millions on heating
This kind of exterior and interior design always makes the house feel more cold.
If the roof is flat, it's automatically crap...
(I'm in the upper Midwest, flat roofs are a nightmare waiting to happen with snow).
Every roof should be a balcony. My idea would be to have a lot of the roof slanted with a wide metal grit above it, covered in some sorta outdoor carpet you roll up for winter.
tbh slopcubes look kinda fun, would "live" in.
"It was too dark"
I hate the modern, cubic, all-windows, colorless, hard floor, echo-y, looks-like-a-doctor's-office houses. They don't feel like homes.
I live in a historic area in VA where most houses were built late 1800s/early 1900s and these ugly cubes are becoming every 10th building, all new houses being built look like this. Old beautiful Victorian homes will have a giant cube added on the back. The cybertruckification of houses.
wood can also last virtually forever, im norwegian and live next to one of if not THE oldest church in the country, which is well over 800 years old. and another small one a few years younger that used to stand on the neigbouring farm until it was demolished in the late 1800s and parts of it were used to rebuild a replica at a museum in Lillehammer
Plastic is a terrible building material not just because it has a terrible lifespan/replacability/reusability, but also because of mold. Wood, concrete, bricks, they all "breathe" (allow moisture to pass through), plastic doesn't and it causes moisture to accumulate, especially on the border between the plastic and more breathable materials. It's a pretty big problem where I live, because old brick buildings (residential and otherwise) will often replace previous wooden windows with plastic framed ones and suddenly start having mold problems, even though the building has been there for a 100 years with no issues. There are ways to mitigate it, but on residential buildings, the work is often done by people who don't think about it, or they're considered too expensive.
as someone who works in a field contributing to construction mostly of homes and stuff in seattle, those modern style townhomes are so played out and they’re the only thing anyone builds. i hate it
2:58
Wake up babe, new alarm dropped
I like those houses they have in Sweden with the white painted windows. Simple. Elegant. Liveable.
I live in a mobile home that has/had metal siding and when I was able to do repairs and upgrades the guy doing it suggested I put wood over the metal instead of replacing it. The extra insulation has been great so far and the pine wood exterior is beautiful.
Can’t wait to drive a triangle car to work tomorrow
We're already living with square 'cars'. Flex, Denali, etc 😢
@ oh yeah you right
Wood lasts a really long time if painted and cared for correctly. My great-grandfather lived in a house made from wood thats old enough to be classified as a protected culture building.
There are literally wooden buildings in Europe that are a thousand years old and still standing tall and functional. Talking about wood as if it doesn’t last is such utter cope
I have an Arc degree i wasn't able to use due to graduating in 08 and being unwilling to move for work.
I like Modern architecture, but have very mixed feelings about the execution of these ulta modern cubes. They always look like the worst 3 over 1s.
I do like shipping container houses, but again, the execution is key.
And i agree, natural materials for the win. They are repairable and biodegrade when they do need replacing.
Also, every time I see those geometric cube house windows, all I can think about is how if they're not installed 110% properly they can leak like a sieve.
the beginning of this video gives me massive little joel vibes and im all here for it
Them: "Tudor"
Me: "Oh, two is a good number of doors I guess. Symmetrical"
Great. Imagine your shiny new house crumbles apart after just a few years because the plastic walls deteriorate from the UV-Sunlight...
I think this kind of restoration can be done well and look good - combining modern with old brick architecture. This is just a horrendous example - just a random unproportional cube growing out of one side with an even more random arrangement of windows. It’s ugly. But that’s the result of the choices not the idea in general imo
Bro. Modern houses are so much more liveable and efficient with energy.
I'm with Chat on this. I could care less what the exterior of a house looks like, what matters is whether I can afford to live inside it.
I don’t think the modern design of these townhomes/apartments is inherently ugly, I think they can look fine if the facade is designed competently enough.
all i want is a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1920s craftsman that hasnt been landlorded
I like weird shit, but it shouldn't come at the expense of something historic or social, lol.
Not Vaush clowning on the modern capitol hill townhomes that i actually want 😭
In Chicago, you can tell how gentrified a neighborhood is by how many of these have replaced the 100 year old 2 flat and 3 flats that are still standing proud. My partner and I call them “dream boxes”. They all feature floor to ceiling windows to show off the all white walls. its like the owners are bragging about their lack of style
It amazes me how architects are so proud presenting us with rectangles and right angles and flatness, thinking they have made a discovery.
I dunno, this and a lot of other comments here are being strangely “retvrn” when it comes to architectural design. The problems with this house are not that Architects are evil and want you to suffer in sad houses, it’s with, as all things, capitalism’s parasitic nature sucking away the ability for architects to actually create good-looking architecture. This house wasn’t what an architect wanted, it’s what a client would pay for.
@linuslarson493 well sure that is part of the underlying problem but it doesn't change our analysis of the aesthetics. There are plenty of rich people who could afford good architecture who choose instead to build eyesores
That house looks perfectly fine and the new bit fits in with the old part quite well. Not sure it's worth getting upset about. Also, I can guarantee it is a lot more livable inside this way.
Reminds me of the Combine overtaken cities in Half Life 2, where the alien structures are just plopped down in the middle of eastern European urban areas, incongruently jutting out of pre-existing buildings like techno nightmare tumors.
While I agree with Vaush, these are ugly as fuck, I'm 95% sure this image at 4:15 is an AI photo.
It was too dark? What a missed opportunity to add a lovely conservatory /orangery that tied into the current style.
If you want to live in a brutalism inspired building, leave the old houses alone. If you want the look if a new construction, leave the old houses alone. I am aware you are allowed your poor tastes and if you really want to deface old architecture, you can. I will however be bitter about it.
The majority of new homes in Seattle, especially in older neighborhoods, are these blocky post-modern designs. They're as sterile-looking (and feeling) inside as out. EVERYTHING is white. Any metal is either brushed nickel or dark bronze, though I'm happy to see satin brass coming back in. You're right, it looks like ass. I've poked into these construction sites on weekends to look around, and corners are cut all the fuck over. They're not plastic, but they are shitty.
I think staging houses had the "paint everything white, so the new buyer can imagine their own look" rule for so long, people came to accept that "everything is painted white" is stylish.
Idk I kinda like the idea of mixing the two styles, I see what they were trying to go for - but the execution really fell flat.
I'd dig a square addition for "more light" but actually make it more glass, cus glass gives more light..
Vaush:" I unironically dont have any training in architecture, but i ironically have a sociology degree, so ill explain architecture now. IRONY!!"
We need a new city beautiful movement.
also sometimes the cladding can be unsafe and make fires more dangerous in buildings, like Grenfel tower in London England which kill dozens of people.
Making an actually modernist brutalist addition out of real concrete, with steel and wood elements (as the gods of brutalism and real modernism in general demand, the form must have function and the decorative accents are actual changes in materials used) could be done well. Adding a post-modernist mish-mash of pseudo-modernist forms and having everything made out of plaster and vinyl is just kitch, an even more of a kitsch than those mass-prodused style-devoid Tudor era McMansions, at least they didn't cover the bricks in "decorative" plaster ornaments (which is on par with neo-Baroque kitsch) that only trap moisture and burn real good.
While I hate this style when it is everywhere I actually liked it added to the brick house, I like the futurism without being completely tasteless.
I love it. Mixture old and new.
There is a small apartment complex near were I live that has a similar cubist aesthetic but breaks up the sections with different textures and nice colors and doesn't have any of those lines and it looks way better than all of that slop. Could still be better imo, but it's at least pleasant to look at.
Philadelphia has a mix of old school and modern and I actually really enjoy it, but not when it’s in the same building lmao
This reminds me of the joke they made in Amphibia when the royal newt lady first visited earth in LA.
“So this is your world? It’s very… geometric.”
I will never forgive architects for their sins.
To be fair I've never seen a building like that either, so I kinda get the novelty. It's like "wow, I've never seen a building like this before, I wonder why". And then you never wonder again because that novelty is all it has going for it lol
I get the slop rant. But fuck me if that Tudor house wasn't already hideous to begin with.
Solid block of brick with no interesting textures or detailing. Literally a 10 year old's first Minecraft house.
"but it's old so it's cool!" -Vaush
It’s literally the 1900s equivalent of the modern flat panel designs, cheap ugly garbage.
Exactly, vaush calling it beautiful like he'd want to live there lmao. Id actually take the clashing addition over the rest of the house, at least you get sunlight
I think this is style of architecture is genuinely more of a cost cutting thing than anything else. I imagine it’s much more cost effective to 3d print a minimalist cube for that you’re going to rent out to a working professional for 4,000 dollars a month than building some meticulously detailed gothic or victorian building for the same purpose. Another way capitalism has degraded our environment.
Okay so I work as a stonemason, as in, carving profiles and frescoes and ornaments into natural stone, for use in building, and one very massive huge immense problem that is afflicting the building industry is that it's all a race to the bottom. Building is expensive, as it should be, but obviously, people will choose the lowest bidder - and in building, there's always a way to cut costs. You can cut mortar with cheap filler, skimp out on facade anchors (or insulation, or plate strength, etc). This means that the buildings which eventually end up being built at LITERALLY all dogshit. As in, every building you will see today has about a million defects that are at worst life-threatening and at best will cause giant issues with water and erosion later down the line. Anyone who has ever worked on a building site will also tell you that it's lunacy we trust the ground under our feet nowadays.
All of this shit is just an emanation of this. What do you think "minimalism" is? A way to cut detail. A way to cut cost. A way to build for cheap.
Those cube houses look like homes in Japan, especially around Tokyo and Osaka.
Aside from these mostly being single family homes, I do quite like the blend of multiple styles. I also particularly enjoy the cubist aesthetic. But I repeat myself, we need more dense housing not the destruction of beautiful historic homes (that are perfectly habitable) to build cubic/brutalist homes
We get those sad grey boxes here in Norway too. Just about every new construction are those, built close together. I hate it.
In Lincoln Park in Chicago there’s these prison houses mixed in with the beautiful old townhouses and it kills me inside
I once rage commented on a video like this that showed the deterioration of beautiful English cottages into Arasaka logo’d hell… & attracted all the slop lovers
No lie though, so many middle class homeowners just pave over their front & back gardens, no plant life in their front or back yards, because they’re too fucking lazy or cheap to cut grass once every few weeks. What’s really really hilarious is someone did a study & found that the areas of the UK most at risk from flooding have the highest ratio of cement gardens.