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General Architecture & Design Discussion

SMayo said:
I've been to Winnipeg a couple times in the last few months and my honest take away from spending time there is that their architecture blows Edmonton's out of the water. I'm also not even talking about old stuff which they do better, it seems like all of their new 6-12 story apartments have a way better more unique finish to them compared to here where everything is very generic and in lots of cases pretty cheap looking.
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The old stuff does not surprise me. Sadly, we do not have much of it here and don't always cherish what we have left.

I haven't been to Winnipeg for quite a while, so not sure what those newer buildings there look like. Do you have any pictures/examples?
 
I wish we had a better rendering of the Agency Building

edmonton.taproot.news

A moment in history: Dec. 13, 1945

On this day in 1945, one of Edmonton's oddest downtown office buildings was sold.
edmonton.taproot.news edmonton.taproot.news

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I read this interesting piece about how skyscrapers became glass boxes. Most of the piece is devoted to refuting Tom Wolfe's influential but almost obviously wrong argument that high-modernism (and then postmodernism) in architecture became widespread only due to the malign influence of leftist architects who forced it on the public; rather, it explains in detail why the unadorned 'glass box' took hold because it offered major advantages to developers. That's probably nothing new for most people here. But the last two paragraphs resonated with me in the Edmontonian context:
One could argue that there’s a sort of market failure at work here: because architecture is ultimately funded by the people who occupy a building but viewed by people outside of it, there are externalities (in the form of benefits of attractive exteriors) that aren’t being appropriately priced in. An “efficient” market for architecture, which used some sort of mechanism to properly weigh the preferences of everyone who has to look at the building, might be expected to produce more beautiful buildings (for whatever your definition of beautiful is).

Unfortunately for proponents of this theory, we already have such a mechanism: as discussed above, building design is heavily influenced by design review boards, planning commissions, and other forms of community input. Our current system bends over backwards to consider local preferences and give weight to these sorts of externalities. This doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on how “beautiful” buildings are, or the dominance of the glass box aesthetic: all it does is make them harder to build.
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Architects are forced to have two minds -- a technical one that is steeped in multiple branches of science and an artistic one that struggles to find a unique voice that is a means for professional differentiation. Like most professions the 15/85 rule applies where 15% are difference makers and 85% follow along with what are perceived to be "main trends". The difference makers are less concerned with trends and try to reach beyond (whatever "beyond" might be). Some current trends/non trends underscore biophilic design; AI, robotics and machine learning to take on mundane tasks; energy efficiency of the built form; a hackneyed indistinct near passé trend called "new urbanism"; subtractive and additive appliqué form (subtractive attained by CNC cutting/shaping tools, additive by 3d printers); and experiential architecture that tries to grab all of the human senses (in measured quantities and sequentially so as not to overload the grey matter). What does this mean? I think that in todays realm there really is no perceptible trend in architecture -- it is all over the map (to me that is a good thing). Viva free expression!
 
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