Since this is the closest thing I’ve seen to an architecture discussion on Lemmy, can I sidetrack this conversation?
I really want to talk about how I simultaneously love the Obamas and hate a lot of their style choices. The Brutalism of his new presidential library is… Imposing and unwelcoming.
A lot of people love Brutalism, but it’s not for me either.
I love brutalism. I’m also not a fan of the design of the library.
Brutalism kind of requires an environment. But it’s like a jagged tooth sticking out of a garden. Like a giant lawn rock. Lift it up and you’ll find the keys to the American dream. Locked away like some davinci code nonsense.
Jesus. That looks like Bracknell.
Google search for Bracknell just pointed me to a town in England. What are we talking about here?
OoOoOoOoO… I can’t leave… Do you know what type of interest loan I have? OoOoOo
modern ghosts haunt abandoned bowling alleys instead…
I can’t find a picture to post but recently the building fad in my country for single family homes is cubes. Literally, cubes. The houses are made of grouped cubic structures. No rounded surfaces, no decorative details. A bit like watered down brutalism.
Can’t imagine those houses aging well.
Meanwhile, old stone houses just look… good. Renovated, awsome. Abandoned, creepy. No ghosts though.
Haunted houses are old. There’s no way McMansions will last long enough for ghosts to sprout.
Am I the only one or does that picture look kind of uncanny?
I can’t place it… It looks uneven and wavy.
I smell burnt toast.
It’s because it’s now dead malls that are getting haunted. To know what’s worth haunting today we’ll need to wait about 30 to 50 years to see what sorts of architecture is considered spooky.
I’m thinking the next 10-20 when all these data centers are emptied and become liminal spaces.
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I honestly don’t understand the houses going up in my neighborhood - it’s getting gentrified and what is being built is so ugly. Who is buying these ugly ass houses for 1.5 MILLION dollars? If that was my budget I’d build something beautiful with a big porch like this picture, but all the “luxury” homes are boxes with big garages in front. I look at them on Zillow and they aren’t even pretty on the inside.
Vinyl siding never looks good. Use any other material. And the insides are all sterile tones of grey. All the “luxury” apartments in my area are all grey. The floors this grey vinyl pho wood. Grey cabits and counters. Bleh
Faux. Pho would imply they are made of soup.
Yeah ours has the vinyl and it does cheapen the look. It’s on the list. The boxes though - they are just blocks made with concrete blocks and stucco-ed.
I like some gray but gray fake wood floors are among the worst, who thought that would look good for more than 5 minutes? I don’t like marble floors either. Wood in a wood color is #1, terrazzo is fine, nice tile is fine.
I do know people have different taste but don’t think that this exterior or interior could be pleasing to anyone, and again the house was well over a million $. Though to be fair they had to drop it from 1.5 to 1.2 to sell it, that is still too much and nobody is building anything reasonable except people who are hiring their own builders. All the speculative ones are either straight up boxes or something like this, going into a neighborhood that was just little houses, frame or block. For that $$ I would want much more kitchen too.
I work for a city that’s an enclave for the mega-rich and is going through hyper-gentrification. People are buying 3 million dollar houses, tearing them down, and building 15 million-dollar houses.
It’s the 1%ers being pushed out by the .01%ers. It’s a whole different planet.
But the contractors still suck and cut every corner they can, so it really is the same anywhere you go.
And they all look alike in some developments. One cheap house after another, all exactly alike. Crap materials, horrible construction. Seriously, who wants to live in that kind of neighborhood?
While this house is beautiful and magnificent, it probably also needs to be gutted, insulated, rewired/replumbed, and lacks common hidey holes for central air. All those shingles are custom now, and the whole thing needs repainting regularly. The doorways and stairs are narrow, and most of the rooms are small by today’s standards. The windows aren’t low-e, and even with all that, it’ll still probably leak air like a sieve.
It is a magnificent house, but it’s also an absolute money pit to maintain, heat, and cool.
Agreed. I have never lived in a house younger than 70. While there are upsides beyond style (old growth forest framing, solid wood floors) there are downsides - have always been able to get central air, even in the 1925 house, but so very many things have to be changed and fixed. I wouldn’t even try with a 200 year old house unless I was so rich. But if I was, I might. Or might build a reproduction with some reclaimed materials and some modern touches.
Even in our house, half 1940 half 1990, new metal roof, roof attachments, hurricane windows, and we are not yet close to the current building standards. An endless work in progress, I would enjoy that if it wasn’t financially stressful, but the house I love and it’s not as stressful as a mortgage and taxes on a 1.5M ugly house.
100 years from now haunted house stories will be about boxes with big garages in front.
…that’s essentially already liminal horror; it’s been a thing my entire life but most folks don’t recognise its modern incarnation since pop culture associates the genre with period affections of liminal horror from a century ago…
New builds really bug me too. They’re so pricey and big, yet the developers keep putting them on postage stamp lots. Like, who wants to spend that much money on a freestanding house while being so crammed together that you might as well be sharing walls?
…it’s driven by developer business models, the same reason lots grow narrow-and-deep: they’re trying to maximise the market value of plattable land (square area) per infrastructure cost (linear streets + utilities), and narrow houses built right up to setback line means developers can squeeze the most 2500 ft2 mcmansions possible on their subdivided parcel…
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Yeah that happens here because they are knocking down one house and building two. I don’t really disagree with that, honestly. But they don’t need to be that big.
What other choice do people have? My options around here are 100 year old failing cardboard houses, or overpriced stupid Zillow Grey boxes. It’s that or just abandon my family.
If you have the budget to buy the ugly box, you have the budget to buy the cardboard house, knock it down and build something you like that isn’t so enormous. We didn’t have the budget for either so are just slowly renovating and hardening the house we bought.
My point isn’t that houses are too expensive - that is beyond question at this point. Even your cardboard box would cost too much now for most anybody. What I do not understand is rich people buying ugly prefabricated stuff in general. I would use that budget for something bespoke.
I know two people who were dead set on building a house who then gave up on it because it was too expensive. Just massively overpriced. Better to just buy an existing home
1.5 didn’t get you much of you are spending 1 on the land alone.
All I am seeing here, is the insane yearly cost of recurring maintenance on an old wooden house…*shudders*
Shutters
It’s really not that bad except the paint job every 10-20 years which costs as much as a new car, but back in the day they had oil paint which didn’t peel like latex does. Still, imo, worth it to live in an historic, unique, drag queen of a home.
I suppose if you can afford a house like this you can afford a really nice new car every so often. A really nice car. Because a full scraping, sanding, and repair plus 2-3 color paint can cost over $100,000.
Or … you just develop a hobby of house painting…
You could start a small business just to paint and maintain your own estate.
My brother legit did this to repair his old farm house that he shouldn’t have bought. Tools and supplies are tax write offs, the company always operates at a loss, but he is basically a decent carpenter and worked through college and highschool summers as one.
Also don’t buy an ancient house unless you have the funds to build another house in it.
Your own personal golden gate bridge
As someone with an old wooden house, it’s actually not bad. They’re built so damn well that they just… stay there.
The expensive part is if you need to do any renovations. Updating electrical, plumbing, and HVAC sucks.
The looks you get when you tell your contractor you want plaster, not drywall.
They had to find a guy who still knew how to do plaster walls when we redid our bathroom. He was well past retirement age.
I put in about 40hrs a year on scraping and painting and the total building envelope is only 160m2, and is much less detailed.
We figured out how to install gas lines appropriately. Many “ghosts” were gas inhalation induced hallucinations.
And ‘juvenile delinquency’ stopped after they took lead out of gasoline.
It’s amazing how much the violent crime rate went down with the removal of leaded gas.
I like to read science fiction from that time and look at the things the authors, some of them actual scientists, overlooked.
An example of things that authors missed! I just watched a YouTube video looking at the history of instant communication devices in Sci-fi and Fantasy, and also how the author thought to use them in the narrative; contrasting that with how we’d actually use them through our modern understanding. They go on to argue that usage of instant communication is now so ubiquitous to our collective psyche that current sci-fi and fantasy stories can just invent it in basically every setting nowadays. It’s actually a really easy thing to cook up if your narrative has any kind of magic system, be it science or standard issue. https://youtu.be/2Pw_7vAK9k8
Are video essays, specifically ones about storytelling, my special interest? Yes, but I hardly see how that’s relevant.
To wax pedantic.
Starting with the last. Read a play called “We Bombed In New Haven” by Joseph Heller. It’s all about smashing the fourth wall.
You might want to look up thse books. David Gerrard’s The making of Star Trek, and The Making of 2001 by Stephanie Schwam. Both deal with the problems of creating a science fiction movie at a time when every special effect had to be ‘practical’ and handmade. For example, on Star Trek there was a scene that involved a salt shaker. Production brought a dozen exotic looking shakers, only for them to decide that those things looked too weird and that the audience wouldn’t understand what they were. In the end they used a salt shaker from the NBC commissary and gave the others to Dr. McCoy to use in sickbay.
Also, think on this. To 1960s audiences Uhura as Communications Officer was a big deal. The audiences had grown up with [or actually lived through] WW2 stories where the radio operator was a vital member of the team. With improved communications tech, the people who made The Next Generation decided that the bridge no longer needed a dedicated Communicatuions Officer.
Finally, I can name a dozen stories where a Faster Than Light traveler gets a paper letter or a telegram.
It’s like all those stories from the 1800s of clocks stopping the moment a person died. Turns out of a lot of the clocks back then would stop running if you turned them sideways, which a lot of doctors did at night to be able to read the time of death.
You didn’t see anything!
The lights have always been this way.
Say, isn’t that the old Henderson place? I heard they never could find a buyer after what happened.
Oh wait, here comes a happy and naive young family from out of town.
Look at this place baby… So much room. I could totally see us living here the rest of our lives.
…GeT…OuuuUuut…
To bad we can’t stay baby!
If we go by the logic in some media where the ghosts are bound to the house/property, they probably don’t want to be stuck somewhere that will eventually just dissolve in the rain.
“My house is haunted.”
“You live in a ranch in the suburbs built in 1983. What kind of white bread ghost stuck around that mess?”
Literally the plot of some Phasmophobia maps lol
ranch in the suburbs
I thought that was what they call eating out in Iowa?
Fun fact I once witnessed someone chug ranch dressing in a rural Nevada parking lot. I wish I filmed it because they drained it from new to empty in the same period of time it takes me to chug a gallon of water.
One who complains about the lack of Bree and the quality of the toilet paper?
That house looks like it’s $3.2 million dollars.
I wonder if older houses seem more “hauntable” simply because they were built to facilitate air flow within them. Before air conditioning, homes had to be built to allow air to naturally circulate. Thought was placed into room, door, and window layouts to encourage air flow throughout the home, windows were designed to fully open, and transom windows allowed air flow even when doors were closed.
The point is that old homes were built to allow air flow. This means that there’s more opportunity for doors to randomly close and other things to be disturbed by the wind. Older homes also weren’t as sealed and insulated as well. They were designed assuming that some of the structure would get wet and then dry out. Older buildings were designed to undergo constant moisture cycling, while newer buildings try to seal out moisture all together. More dramatic changes in lumber moisture content means more creaks, groans, and other ghostly noises.
Simply because of how buildings science has evolved, it’s possible that older homes just more readily produce “haunting” sounds than modern ones.
