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Radu's avatar

The smugness and the superiority we felt when proposing to normie clients terraced roofs. As if we knew some secret from the future and were willing to share it with the plebs. And each time the client stuck to its pitched roof, felt like a defeat. Soon I learned to follow the client more, but then felt like losing the whole purpose of enlightening the masses.

The CAD didn't help much, au contraire, the easiness of copying and pasting, and the difficultness of drawing anything but simple geometry made it so "everybody" could do it. Much like LLM's now, the CADs seemed to stealthily facilitate the dumbing down. I for one felt for the whole minimalist trend out of comfort ultimately. Expediency. Efficiency.

I then felt like everybody should have been given the tools to design for himself. Small projects to be excused of not hiring an architect. Democratization. For a supposed return to the vernacular. But apparently once the virus of modernity has been deployed, you can't unbake the cake. No more vernacular as we understood it, built on solid foundations. The new vernacular is just mutants of modernity. So everybody can design anything and nobody apparently really can.

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saopaulo450's avatar

Brasilia is a good example of the results of modernism. The town is hostile towards pedestrians and the buildings are hostile to humans. Walking in niemeyer's buildings is a physical and psychological ordeal, the white cement reflects light and heat from all angles, its like being inside a solar oven, trees are non existent and shadow is rare. The inside of the buildings aren't better, the huge windows let too much sun and heat to penetrate, so they need to tint the windows with strong shading to make the space minimally habitable.

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