Scott Teresi
Columbus, OH (near Indianola and Hudson)
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Whenever I see bad architecture, I think of this excellent article:
The authors describe research showing that the architecture profession is wildly out of touch with how their buildings are used and perceived by regular (un-architecturally-educated) people.
It's a long article, so here's some of the points that hit me:
"Instead of a contextual world of harmonious geometric relationships and connectedness, architects tend to see a world of objects set apart from their contexts, with distinctive, attention-getting qualities.... Gifford et al. (2002)... noted that 'architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.' The researchers traced this disagreement to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations.... Architects do not see how certain designs disconnect and isolate people and create hostile environments that cannot be shared"!
"We hasten to add that we do not use this observation to criticize architects as a group. Rather, we raise it as a cautionary alert. Every profession suffers from its own narrow perspective--its tendency to behave like the carpenter with a hammer, who sees every problem as a nail. Architects may only have a particularly strong variety of this narrowed view."
After the German Bauhaus school in the 1920's and 1930's, which emphasized cheap, functional, and minimalist designs, architecture students began to be praised for taking apart a space or an object and reconstructing it using its foundational parts (cubes, planes, cylinders, repeated rectangles, etc.). "Anything that resembles the complexity of traditional architecture is automatically judged negatively (its meaning is supposedly associated with reactionary or philistine culture) and it is rejected without any reflection." Architects now dismiss natural human responses to their work as being "unsophisticated" or uneducated.
Sad that they look on old ornate artistic designs as "philistine."
columbusmike
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These architects make up all sorts of words and reasoning for crappy design. It's just plain ugly.
alexs
Limestone bluffs of the Scioto
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Give me one more piece of faux-industrial, angle-cut, corrugated steel, and I'll say it's no longer a bold departure from architectural convention.
Some of the "green design" can be a bit silly, too. Walk in, and the first message you get is LOOK AT THIS HUGE HONKING HVAC SYSTEM!
jeff_r
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I like the proposed design. If the architects can be persuaded to take the giant sign off the front we'll be able to enjoy a classically modern building very much in the style of Mies Van der Rohe (see also Berlin's New National Gallery, Chicago's Lakeside Center, and the Farnsworth House).
RellekOTE
Olde Towne East
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I think we the people (of ColumbusUndergound) need to form a committee. Any proposed buildings/projects should be presented to us before they begin any approval process from anywhere else! We, overall, seem to have better ideas about what Columbus needs than the developers do. Who's with me?? ;)
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