From the article:
"It’s legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It’s not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be."
I can't help but mentally find & replace Paris -> San Francisco.
I just wish there was some neighborhood like La Défense where 'all future high rises' in the Bay Area are exiled, where people prefer a vital, living, high-density, sustainable city to the preservation of the aesthetic of their sentimental notions of the city.
I think it really says something impressive that the F.B.I. is preparing to abandon the Hoover building. Opened in 1975, pretty universally reviled, and has become such a maintenance nightmare that the government is finding it cheaper to site a new location, build an all new headquarters and then move the Bureau out of D.C. than to just maintain it.
That's correct, it's only 40 years old.
Actually, it was determined the building was already in a dreadful state 15 years ago, when the building was only 25 years old, and it was literally starting to fall apart by 2006. The review that came after that determined that the cost to repair the building and get it back up to usable was not justifiable.
In 2008 the building was appraised and it was determined that even if all $660 million in repairs and renovations were made, the quality of the original building was so poor it would still not be classified as "Class A" space.
By 2011, the renovation estimate increased to $1.7 billion. It would be cheaper, at $850m to simply demolish the building and put up a new one.
I think it's one thing to experiment a bit with architecture, it's totally another to keep building poorly designed ugly garbage piles. The world will be a slightly better place when that building is demolished. Even if it was replaced with an empty lot.
People actively dislike these kinds of urban spaces. They don't visit them, photograph them, enjoy them. They avoid them. But that isn't the only hideous building in D.C. [2]
I know people hate Centre Pompidou but I do not share that hate. As a child my parents took me there many times and for years I would have wild, beautiful architectural dreams about it. It's what made me realize that architecture is not just a historical thing but something that people who are living in the present can do as well, and that it is something that can be shocking and beautiful at the same time.
There is a great story I heard about the architects winning the competition. The jury had to do an inspection of their offices to ensure the architects were established enough to take on the project. So Rogers & Piano hired out a floor of an office building and got all their friends to 'staff' it for the week the jury was visiting.
I can't understand why anyone would hate this building, I would love to visit it. But beyond personal preference, the success of the building is not merely about beauty but in how it functions both practically and phenomenologically. Judging architecture on looks alone is like judging, i don't know, twitter for its logo.. The pompidou centre made a large plaza based on classical proportions ie.the same size as the façade—in an area of paris without public space. And with the symbolism of the inner workings being exposed—transparency was a strong political statement to which the public responded.
Rogers:"The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe."
I remember when Melbourne wanted to build a new 'city square' sort of area, which required knocking down an existing building. The building was the Gas & Fuel Corporation Towers, which was a pretty boring orange-brick high-rise[1]. A Melburnian all my life, I'd never heard anyone posit an opinion on the building, good or bad, in person or in media. It was boring. It wasn't pretty, but it was just there.
But then they wanted to knock it down, and out came a media campaign where all the newspapers were talking about how ugly it was and what a blight, and suddenly people were ferociously hateful towards it. "Don't you just hate that building?" Well, no. And neither did you until you read about it in the paper. The weird thing was that the campaign was unnecessary (IMO) because people didn't care one way or another. It's not like people treasured the aesthetics or it had some historical tie...
They replaced it with a building that looks like a pile of glass at the recyclers [2]. Admittedly it's not boring, but neither is it attractive.
Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and opposition rarely gets called to account, so it's a magnet for the cowardly self-righteous.
I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. Preventing building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.
As a non-Melbournian, I felt like this was one of the most unwelcoming parts of the city, especially for someone pushing a stroller with all the different levels and a pub closing the passage way with bouncers even for passers by. Apparently there are some events happening there, but it feels very esoteric and not compelling.
Having grown up just down the road from the second building on this list and having tried to navigate its dilapidated, maze-like corridors and awkwardly arranged "open" spaces, I can testify to its horrendous design. It routinely shows up on these types of "most hated" lists both nationally and globally for good reason.
I wish I could understand the mindset of the original architect or, better yet, the local bureaucrats back in the day who thought it was a great idea to build something so large seemingly modeled on a random stack of toddler's play toys.
Now it just serves to suck the county coffers dry due to ludicrously exorbitant maintenance costs (I mean, come on, "80 roofs?"). A soon-to-be-demolished, barely-used monument to bad government decisions and a complete lack of foresight of the late 1960's and early 1970's.
It was awful, actually several "wings" in one building. It was possible to get locked out of the building on a walkway between two wings, with no other exits. You would sometimes have to go through one person's office to get to another office.
The theory when I was a student there was that university construction in the late 60s was obsessed with dealing with civil unrest - psych buildings with riot-proof windows, admin buildings with confusing layouts, an open square covered in bricks that get slippery when hosed down, etc.
Nobody defending the brutalist city hall building in Boston, I see...
> I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile.
Seems eerily familiar to the sentiment surrounding the plaza by the city hall in Boston.
For some reason, people seem to be opposed to brutalism. Personally, I love it... the powerful, stark lines, clean geometry, abstract shapes. (http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/). It sounds like this building is disliked more for its painful layout though.
I was very surprised Albany's plaza was on the list. Having grown up there I have many memories of staring in awe at its monolithic towers as they soar up from the plaza. I always really liked it and the plaza's great. They put shows on there and small festivals I believe.
The Zaha Hadid, Ada Tolla, and Norman Foster seem to have the connecting thread of visibly stained concrete, making them look dirty on top of any other aesthetic flaws.
What legacy will we pass on, what heritage will we build if all we do is imitating the past?
Why don't we go and burn old books in our libraries and paintings in our museums because we think they're 'ugly'? Heritage is more that today's sense of prettiness.
[+] [-] qiqing|10 years ago|reply
I can't help but mentally find & replace Paris -> San Francisco.
[+] [-] qiqing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayvanguard|10 years ago|reply
Paris is very dense. All of the places in the top 30 mentioned below are actually neighborhoods of Paris:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...
[+] [-] pesenti|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
Also relevant: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ug... ("There are many gorgeous buildings in D.C. Unfortunately for us, in the ’60s and ’70s, the federal government only hired architects with early onset glaucoma.")
[+] [-] cgio|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platz|10 years ago|reply
http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/5667743710/campbell...
http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8260917974/prentice...
http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/2935927750/laborato...
http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8300999834/raymond-...
[+] [-] bane|10 years ago|reply
That's correct, it's only 40 years old.
Actually, it was determined the building was already in a dreadful state 15 years ago, when the building was only 25 years old, and it was literally starting to fall apart by 2006. The review that came after that determined that the cost to repair the building and get it back up to usable was not justifiable.
In 2008 the building was appraised and it was determined that even if all $660 million in repairs and renovations were made, the quality of the original building was so poor it would still not be classified as "Class A" space.
By 2011, the renovation estimate increased to $1.7 billion. It would be cheaper, at $850m to simply demolish the building and put up a new one.
I think it's one thing to experiment a bit with architecture, it's totally another to keep building poorly designed ugly garbage piles. The world will be a slightly better place when that building is demolished. Even if it was replaced with an empty lot.
People actively dislike these kinds of urban spaces. They don't visit them, photograph them, enjoy them. They avoid them. But that isn't the only hideous building in D.C. [2]
Here's one of the best talks on this issue [3]
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building
2 - http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ug...
3 - http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
[+] [-] pivo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cam_l|10 years ago|reply
I can't understand why anyone would hate this building, I would love to visit it. But beyond personal preference, the success of the building is not merely about beauty but in how it functions both practically and phenomenologically. Judging architecture on looks alone is like judging, i don't know, twitter for its logo.. The pompidou centre made a large plaza based on classical proportions ie.the same size as the façade—in an area of paris without public space. And with the symbolism of the inner workings being exposed—transparency was a strong political statement to which the public responded.
Rogers:"The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe."
[+] [-] Osmium|10 years ago|reply
I had no idea. I absolutely adore the Pompidou. I've only visited once, a few years back, but I remember it vividly. Colourful and full of joy.
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
But then they wanted to knock it down, and out came a media campaign where all the newspapers were talking about how ugly it was and what a blight, and suddenly people were ferociously hateful towards it. "Don't you just hate that building?" Well, no. And neither did you until you read about it in the paper. The weird thing was that the campaign was unnecessary (IMO) because people didn't care one way or another. It's not like people treasured the aesthetics or it had some historical tie...
They replaced it with a building that looks like a pile of glass at the recyclers [2]. Admittedly it's not boring, but neither is it attractive.
[1]http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-cor... [2]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federatio... [2a]http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federat...
[+] [-] tjradcliffe|10 years ago|reply
I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. Preventing building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.
[+] [-] cgio|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] USNetizen|10 years ago|reply
I wish I could understand the mindset of the original architect or, better yet, the local bureaucrats back in the day who thought it was a great idea to build something so large seemingly modeled on a random stack of toddler's play toys.
Now it just serves to suck the county coffers dry due to ludicrously exorbitant maintenance costs (I mean, come on, "80 roofs?"). A soon-to-be-demolished, barely-used monument to bad government decisions and a complete lack of foresight of the late 1960's and early 1970's.
[+] [-] wildwood|10 years ago|reply
(http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/june07/content/view...)
It was awful, actually several "wings" in one building. It was possible to get locked out of the building on a walkway between two wings, with no other exits. You would sometimes have to go through one person's office to get to another office.
The theory when I was a student there was that university construction in the late 60s was obsessed with dealing with civil unrest - psych buildings with riot-proof windows, admin buildings with confusing layouts, an open square covered in bricks that get slippery when hosed down, etc.
[+] [-] nja|10 years ago|reply
> I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile.
Seems eerily familiar to the sentiment surrounding the plaza by the city hall in Boston.
[+] [-] kazagistar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfTerm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowsandmilk|10 years ago|reply
I would much more expect to see Boston's Government Center on the list.
[+] [-] leejoramo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyxley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erispoe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtVessel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gertef|10 years ago|reply