The unsightly science of architecture

I asked many architecture students in Zürich what they thought of Kornhaus, a local symbol of brutalism. Most seemed bored by the question, possibly due to the regularity of the event, and the contempt in their response correlated with their appreciation of the building. “Concrete,” one said, “the choice of concrete and other materials”, when I asked what made that grey rectangle remarkable.

As with these students building our bleak, rectangular future, I have talked with other weary experts. One regionally renowned wine critic, when I inquired, used “flawless” as his highest praise about some soulless, oaky red wine. A gourmet described their branch of celery as “crunchy and delicious” in the second course of their fancy fine dining experience. I asked myself then: what unites these exhausted groups of people, showing the tendency to gratify a simple and ugly option over any other?

Three reasons came to my mind. First, as experts of artistic fields, our need for modeling the complex oversimplifies it. A wine can be both flawless and bad if your sole metrics are the acidity and sugar levels. In the same spirit, the quality standards of a building today concerns itself mostly with practicality and safety. When optimized for, these produce the perfectly optimal shape of a cat carrier.

Second, our incentives do not reflect the remaining aspects of a beautiful design, as whatever effort not included in the optimization task is spent on reducing costs. Hence, that cat carrier is left as raw concrete, without any color or decoration.

Third, our desire to avoid failure, both as an expert and as an artistic human being, prevents us from pushing forward. As a gray cat box in the name of a living space is obviously insulting to humanity, and yet there is no clear path in our simple model to improve upon it, we have successfully found an excuse and called it brutalist, so that it finds a valid place in our field of expertise.

Yet, however much the current teachings empty out their meaning, what we build today is not brutalist like the Barbican, just as a scientifically perfect 1980s Pinot from Burgundy is not a good wine ¹. What we have today is evasive architecture, evading costs and risks, as well as the common beauty, somewhat like software developers in a large bank evading open source in favor of an IBM mainframe.