Posted on 03/21/2017 12:39:14 PM PDT by Lorianne
I have visited Beijing from the late 80's until present. Although Mao made his Stalinist scars on the city in many ways - destroying the thousand-year-old, ornate City gates and walls, leveling many miles of neighborhoods for large socialist avenues, etc... The city still maintained many quiet, naturally developed neighborhoods, with courtyard homes in the traditional style that were many centuries old.
What happened to Beijing in the last 25 years was exactly what one would expect from Communist central planners, in love with their twisted version of "modernity," and suddenly with a bit of money to spend.
they turned the city into a frankenstein version of Los Angeles and East Berlin.
The hideous extension in the center photo should not have been allowed——it should have been brick.
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They’re affordable for somebody, or they would be vacant. Maybe it’s being rich that is making the residents happy.
Correlation does not equal causation.
You make a good point.
I can’t argue with that at all.
I do not recall that being there the last time I saw St. Joseph’s, which would have been prior to 2006.
Or it’s possible that I just overlooked that every time I passed, because, good God, who would even do that!?!?
The inside of that church though is absolutely breathtaking.
Boston’s Old City Hall was closed in favor of a new “Brutalist Architecture” Monstrosity almost a half century ago.
Now the old one is part of Boston’s Architectural heritage, while the New one is STILL ugly.
Decide for yourself:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boston+city+hall+new+&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images
I think more studies would need to be done even to begin to determine the extent to which traditional architecture in parts of a city affects general happiness.
I’m happy with the kind of turn-of-the-century white wooden houses my grandparents lived in. However, in a Georgian pile, I think I’d be looking over my shoulder waiting for someone to toss my lower-class tuchus back out on the street.
I always liked the “Hobbit Hole” type of architecture.
I would like to live in a rural setting in a mostly underground house built into a hill. Ideally, the well would be inside the house, and there would be an independent power supply, the woods would be full of game, the rivers full of fish, and the surrounding fields and farms full of good neighbors...
Of course, there would be fast Internet connectivity.
There’s a fantastic book on architecture that I read decades ago, that helps to explain why modern buildings are so flat and uncompelling. Title is “The Old Way Of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic - And How To Get It Back,” published in 1994, author Jonathan Hale.
Modern architects are just using surface decoration as an add on to a box or boxes, basically. Old architecture had rules of scale and proportion dependent upon the golden mean, which is the Phi ratio. Even commonplace buildings such as farmhouses observed these rules, carpenters had pattern books for scale and placement of windows. Now, very few pay any attention or are actively hostile to the old, classical rules of architecture.
I love old buildings too-and that is a gorgeous church.
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Well, classical architecture is expensive to build and maintain. The cost of restoring and maintaining Grand Central Terminal in New York City must be somewhere way up there keeping all those classical architectural elements clean.
On reflection, it sounds a lot like Switzerland!
LOL. I hear you.
In 1972 I had to go there for my Marriage License, and it was like going to The Ministry of Truth in 1984.
My mother worked there when it was new———she despised the building.
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LOL! Of course!
Interestingly, Moscow—of all things!—has some really spectacular pieces of architecture from the late Stalinist era. The famous “Seven Sisters” in that city—with the main building of Moscow State University the most famous—are world-famous (if a bit over-styled!), and so are number of stations in the Moscow Metro system.
We live in a throw away world so does our architecture have to reflect that too?
Very informative.
I prefer a plain box to a fussed-up box.
It’s expensive. That’s why.
And most of it is built where conservatives move (the outer suburbs) because they want to save a buck.
Seriously don’t act like its some leftist thing. I cant even get people on the right to acknowledge that streets ought to actually connect in a grid system because they think it invites crime!
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