Comic Strips

I like it. But I also will never own one, so wtv I guess.

People sure are opinionated about architecture... I mean I think both are nice. Although the modern designs do tend to all look the same, which isn't ideal

If it got more people into houses I wouldn't give a shit, but sadly, its shitty in both ways

Back then, the builders built homes.

These days builders build houses.

A wonderful thing is the regional differences in door casing styles.

Every house everywhere have doors and all of them have trims (door casing), but they're not the same.

In a lot of old houses/apartments, these are rarely changed. They suck to change because you'll probably want the same for all the doors in the house or it looks weird. So if you want to change/repair just one, you'd want the same profile again and that's not available, because every single carpenter had their own design back in the pre-1950s where stuff like this wasn't mass produced, but made by the carpenter. So you either don't change it or you get the same again. The design caries over either way.

In old large cities like Copenhagen where they obviously had several carpenters, you can tell to this day which neighborhood you're in by looking at the door trims if you know how they look.

These days the new ones are all just flat. No profile. Sure, it makes it easier to maintain, but its a real loss in my opinion.

*Cries in french* Around my hometown I have 4 styles of different houses depending of the microregion they are in. All in a 40 km radius. There is even a continum with hybrids as we move from a place to another.

... That's for older house of course. They are still here, terribly laking heat isolation and in desperate need of renovation, but still here but for every new family that move in the village of for every second brother that stays as an adult, there is a cookie cutter home terribly laking in hot weather resistance that will be desperate for renovation in just 15 years.

The mass production of modern Box homes is a mistake, the older homes need to be mass produced

Modern boxy homes would be pretty great if their roofs are also designed to be used as a patio area with awnings or solar panels. It just seems like a waste otherwise.

This is the "light" version. The worst are when they don't even have street facing windows, only concrete and garage doors facing the street and all around the house nothing but concrete/tiles, no greenery. These houses make me so sad while walking around a neighboorhood :(

Ʌ921 is crazy

That same stucco sterile box style is everywhere. It’s like a generic rich people tract house that you get from a vending machine. Just add water and they pop up, all the same, brick paved driveways, generic minimalist interiors, nobody actually lives there. It’s as empty and uncreative as the people who hired someone else to design it for them.

Funny enough 1921 is when all the houses from the second half of the comic started.

You can blame this guy: Adolf Loos, at least in part.

Major influence behind Modernism. He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.

"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects" is the core theme of his essay "Ornamentation and Crime" .

Basically,

1. ornamentation causes buildings and useful objects to go out of style.

2. Things that go out of style require materials and manpower to update.

3. It is the moral imperative of the designer to make useful things, things that need to be redone are less useful and are wasteful.

4. Therefore it is the moral imperative of the designer to remove all ornamentation from design.

He saw ornamentation as "degenerate" and equated ornamentlessnes with moral and intellectual development. He also made it a race thing. He used the example of people from Papua New Guinea having tattoos. Paraphrasing: "these primitive savages ornament themselves with tattoos, we enlightened europeans don't. We smart, they dumb. Therefore ornament = dumb bad, no ornament = good smart. See?"

He was a major inspiration behind the modernist movement. It helped that unadorned buildings are cheaper and easier to construct - especially with the advent of cheap glass and steel construction. So you end up with this sort of soulless architecture that gives no sense of time or place - that tells you nothing about its purpose or the people who built/use it.

"Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet, but your cat's are gonna love it."

They are building those in my (mainly 1940s) neighborhood and yeah I hate them. Half the bottom floor is a garage, no front porch, front door recessed so unfriendly and people just drive into the garage, close the door and enter the house without ever stepping outside. And so very ugly and builders ask 1.5 million for them. They buy one lot then build two mc mansions on them. I get splitting the lot but we don't need those monstrous buildings.

Looks like in the past people wanted to be Hobbits and now they want to be Robots! I like them both, I think there is more diversity in modern styles than is really depicted here, even if I understand the sentiment.

I'll say this much, when it comes time to replace the roof, Style A is gonna punch you in the nuts a whole lot harder than Style B.

In many European countries there are regulations that your house architecture has to match the overall appearance of the locality. Maybe France doesn't have that or lags behind or it is badly enforced?

So you can be creative but have to match the colors and materials and roof style of the neighborhood. That can be annoying too but I can see how such bland architecture everywhere would be much worse. I always wanted to build a container home castle but it would never be approved.

I think the creative processor for our simulation is failing. This explains a lot of the wacky things that are happening.

What is the leading character of the older year? Capital 1?