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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41368866

文艺复兴时期的建筑师菲利波·布鲁内莱斯基 (Filippo Brunelleschi) 创造了创新的结构设计，包括采用独特的方法建造意大利佛罗伦萨帕齐礼拜堂的圆顶。尽管遭到其他工程师的抵制，他仍坚持使用最少的支撑，从而形成了一个自支撑圆顶，被称为“布鲁内莱斯基圆顶”。几十年后，当其不寻常的建造方法被发现时，他的开创性方法被证明是正确的。同样，维多利亚时代的工程师布鲁内尔建造了梅登黑德铁路桥，该桥采用宽而平坦的砖拱，至今仍是世界上最大的。尽管官员们最初要求他在施工期间提供额外的支持，但布鲁内尔拒绝了他们的要求，因为他知道他的设计是合理的。当这座桥竣工时，它被证明是成功的，展示了布鲁内尔卓越的工程技能。纵观历史，建筑商在墙内留下了材料和物品的残余物，有时是故意为了将来的修复目的。一位房主在翻修浴室时发现了原建筑剩余的瓷砖，其历史可以追溯到 70 年前。翻修期间，人们还在墙壁上发现了旧碎片和文物，例如 20 世纪 70 年代的压碎啤酒罐。一些人认为这种行为源于懒惰或节俭，而另一些人则将其归因于保留资源以供将来使用的愿望。过度饮酒在工人中似乎很普遍，特别是在十九世纪，当时功能性酗酒在男性中很常见。工人们会在午餐时间喝酒以保持精力充沛和注意力集中。如今，酒精饮料被故意设计成让人快速中毒，这与现代工作实践相冲突。建筑商经常将垃圾和碎片隐藏在建筑物内，有时会在改造项目期间造成意想不到的挑战。一位房主在挖掘花园时发现了一个完整的、完好无损的厕所埋在他的房子里。除了结构改进之外，建筑师和设计师还可以添加装饰功能（例如柱子），以增强建筑物的美感。然而，这些装饰元素可以起到双重作用，既提供视觉趣味又有助于整体结构稳定性。例如，最近的一次扩建在校园建筑中添加了非承重柱，以达到组织和风格的目的。批评者认为这些柱子破坏了原始结构的流动和统一，而支持者则声称它们成功地创造了独特的空间体验。最终，建筑师

Reminds me of Filippo Brunelleschi; in the 1400s he grokked structural mechanics far better than anyone else and protested supporting the domed ceiling of the Pazzi chapel with columns. All the engineers of the time made the case he was wrong, and such a large dome needed support — he built the columns and had them finish a few inches short of the ceiling. This was discovered many years later and has become part of architecture lore.

There's a similar story about Brunel building Maidenhead Railway Bridge, which 160 years later still has the widest, flattest brick arches in the world (if that makes sense). The authorities absolutely required him to support the arches while the rest of the bridge was built, but he refused, knowing it was safe. He eventually relented but built the supporting structure a (visible) foot too short, just to prove his point.

This sort of thing is brilliant. Folks put things inside walls a lot.

When doing a bathroom repair I needed a few additional tiles that would be impossible to find (was an old house). Guess what I found when we busted open the wall… the leftover tiles from when the house was built like 70 years prior! I could almost feel some tile layer from generations prior giving me a little smile and pat on the back.

Pretty sure that was laziness, not foresight on their behalf. Builders leave a lot of trash in walls.

Not very useful to find once you've crushed up half the existing tiling.

Breaking up the 50 year old concrete pad near my house, I found old 1970s crushed beer cans buried under the concrete (the kind that predate the attached pull-tab). Kind of a neat link through time, imagining them sweating in the same sort of heat that I was.

Of course, it might also explain some of the other 'questionable' issues in the construction that I keep finding...

My neighbours found loads of trash in their back yard as they were digging it up because the original job was shit too, they found a complete / intact toilet pot and things like that.

After many years of hiring contractors, my belief is many are drunk all day long. I have found empty hard liquor bottles on finished work sites many times. It could be because their bodies are in pain, but I have a good friend whose a painter who began his career at 16 in NYC and he said they always had a case of beer at 3pm.

There is probably a historical element. Bricklayers and other tradesmen have traditionally been drinking beer (or cheap, watered-down wine) at lunchtime throughout Europe for centuries, since it was cheap, refreshing, and packing calories; in the past, alcoholic contents were significantly lower-grade, so it didn't interfere dramatically with their work.

Add to it that, in the XIX century, "functioning alcoholism" was basically the norm for most men.

Obviously things are different today: alcoholic drinks are now built explicitly to get you drunk as fast as possible, and hence are increasingly incompatible with modern living and working practices.

They're definitely drunk and reckless in the afternoon. Here in Sydney, at least, utes (aka pickups) drive like absolute maniacs around 3pm, no doubt as they're heading to/from the pub.

I often see things like this on TV and it annoys me to no end.

Our main character drives up to a pub/bar/restaurant of some sort, sits by the counter and orders an alcoholic drink. Proceeds to drive elsewhere later as though DUI laws didn't exist.

While any driving under the influence is inadvisable, most likely an adult having a single drink of the kind of beer you’d today get in a bar like that, is probably under the legal limit. Unless you weigh 120lbs or something.

As long as you’re not chugging it, drinking a 12oz 4.5% ABV beer probably won’t be over the limit.

I got some pet rabbits that roam free in our yard and as they've been working on creating various burrows all over the place, they've been pulling out insane amounts of bricks and stone rubble.

Impressive on the rabbits end, pretty infuriating on the builders end.

We don't have an attic, but there was some leftover floor laminate (which we used to fix bent planks due to dog accidents) and shower tiles in there. Always good to buy a bit extra for breakage and repairs.

Possibly, that page has only been around since March according to the internet archive. The domain has been around since 2020 though, predating chatgpt.

That said, it's a generic company website, the owners and their website building company will put a lot of general information and padded fluff on sites like this to try and increase SEO.

Architects' whimsy doesn't always "make sense" from a practical standpoint but often has some kind of reasoning behind it. In this case it's right there in the article - for purely aesthetic reasons, to invoke the sense of entering an underground "crypt" sort of space when the real treasures (the artworks themselves) lie on a floor above. Makes a little more sense when you know what the article doesn't obviously state, that the whole extension uses a lot of pastiche of ancient Egyptian style, Tutankhamen's tomb and all that, and that the street level entrance is lower than the original main entrance of the National Gallery itself.

In architecture, there is this phenomenon where people may have an irrational fear of collapse. Adding (the suggestion of) redundant structural support may take away that fear.

On the other hand, this comment reminds me of a project I started working on midway through, in London many years ago, demolishing and rebuilding an operational train station under a 20 storey building.

My first site meeting with the contractors we were standing across the street and looking at the massive new columns they installed on the side street holding the transfer beams for the building above. And I am not saying anything looking, just looking at the structurals and back at the building and counting the columns. Not wanting to make a fool of myself, but there was no way of avoiding it, but there was one more column on the structural drawings than on the building.

So I mentioned it, and the head contractor goes pale and cancels the meeting. The next time I went to site there was an extra column. Redundancy is not just there for phobias and earthquakes.

You triggered memories of being in the south tower observation deck with my feet a foot and a half from the window and my forehead braced against the glass, staring 1200 feet straight down.

> there is this phenomenon where people may have an irrational fear of collapse.

That's most appropriately a "phobia."

> may take away that fear.

I'm also not aware of any materials that suggest a way to deal with generalized megalophobia is by adding by false lobby columns everywhere you go.

for some reason this makes me think of gauls who purportedly believed that the sky was about to fall on their heads. now i imagine them lining all their roads with tree trunks and large stones, and wait, now i got the purpose of stonehenge. ;-)

It's disappointing to see you being downvoted for asking a genuine question. Such silly downvoting is pointless, counterproductive to conversation, and needs to stop.

I did read the article and still have the same question.

To show that I read it I can even quote the line where they talk about the architect’s motivations: “Venturi wanted the foyer to have the feel of a mighty crypt, leading upstairs to the galleries, so it was a subsidiary space—the beginning of a journey, not a destination.”

And still I have the same question? Why would those two false collumn make the space a “subsidiary” space? (Or to put it differentl why would the addition of those two collumns make it more of a subsidiary space than the fact that it is just the foyer of a gallery?)

And then the further question is why did they place the false collumns unevenly? If i see it right they form a pair with the real collumns, instead of being evenly distributed in between them. Which is… a choice.

I have no idea, there is a severe lack of graphic context in these articles about a specific architectural detail. In the original article it looks like people are standing by the column the letter was found in.

Yeah it's insane that they have an article about these columns and don't show which ones it is prior to showing the people next to the deconstructed one without any context of where they are located.

The guy was right, but as a donor surely someone there could have just instructed the architect not to add them in.

Here on one side of the argument is a rich guy who's giving you millions, and on the other a glorified hired hand who's looking to be expressive or whatever. Money talks, usually, I'm surprised how the architect got away with this one back in the day.

If you hire a world famous architect and then start micromanaging their design they will walk away from the project and publicly tell everyone it’s going to be shit. They don’t want to be associated with something that is not their design; it’s bad for their brand.

If I know I’m writing the code under protest or to deal with a bug in a library or elsewhere in the system, I put it in the commit message, and set up the commits so the worst change can be reverted by itself.

Essentially here’s the reason we “had” to do this. Subtext: here is my blessing to revert this when it’s not necessary anymore.

In a way it’s my Chekov’s Gun. Load the weapon, leave it lying around and wait for the third act.

So, it seems like the architect died in 2018, and Sainsbury in 2022. This could all have been extremely awkward if they'd done the work a few years earlier...

Learning from Las Vegas is Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's seminal work and the ideas drove their work. In a nutshell, buildings are either ducks or decorated sheds. [0] Their clients hired them to design decorated sheds and that is why there were non-structural columns.

That doesn't mean the columns did not have a purpose. Columns can create points that organize spatial experience. Columns are cultural iconography (e.g. the Parthenon vs Johnson Wax).

There are certain ironies in the fine article:

1. The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.

2. If Venturi and Scott Brown had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].

For context, Charles Windsor's architectural opinions are contrary not just to the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown but to the aesthetics of the last 150 years.

[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/lessons-sin-city-arch...

[1]: Architects with functional dogma will incorporate structural columns into their designs to achieve iconography and spatial organization because structural use justifies their inclusion.

Surely that's an inherent false dichotomy. The mere utterance of "decorated shed" implies the existence of an undecorated shed, where nothing lacks structural purpose.

>The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.

The letter reads as if the columns are criticized not for lacking structural purpose, but rather for being unnecessary obstructions. "We [will] live to regret our accepting this detail of his design." That would have to be because the columns are either ugly or a hindrance.

Because they are sheds, most sheds are undecorated. They are unremaked upon for the same reason.

But to be clear, Venturi and Scott Brown’s distinction is in the context of architectural practice. Learning from Las Vegas started as a studio in Harvard’s GSD. The radical idea was looking at actual buildings built for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways…the radical idea was valuing the study from contemporary vernacular architecture.

> contrary not just to the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown but to the aesthetics of the last 150 years.

I have a half-developed theory that the reason NIMBY and excessive use of listed building conservation are so popular is that most people don't like the aesthetics of postwar architecture. They not unreasonably assume that anything new will be ugly and/or user-hostile and campaign against it.

(London managed the extreme of user-hostile architecture, a building that could set random onlookers on fire https://londonist.com/london/history/walkie-talkie-death-ray )

I also think the "decorated shed" category is unnecessarily dismissive of good decoration. St. Pancras station, famously saved by John Betjeman, count as a "decorated shed" by this categorization.

> Columns are cultural iconography (e.g. the Parthenon vs Johnson Wax).

Flashbacks to every McMansion I ever had a client at. It's always gotta have columns. Just jammed in. No sense, no style, no awareness of the form, just "put a column there for no reason."

Columns used to represent something that was _difficult_ to build and place and often carried artwork and detail of their own. The days of them being iconographic lobby structure are long gone.

> Columns can create points that organize spatial experience.

These columns are ugly, do not match their surroundings, and are sat right in the middle of a transition that has no point in being divided. They're also sat in a pair side by side in what is possibly the worst arrangement of column I've seen yet.

> had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].

This is a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style. I'm with the author, the wing's columns are gaudy and completely misplaced.

Thanks for this, I've never thought about it that way before. I've never liked cosmetic structural-looking parts, but I've never thought about the fact that had the architect been instructed to have no cosmetic parts, they might have been included as structural parts anyway, making them impossible to remove!

Wright had the reverse problem. He didn’t want structural elements where nature and physics demanded them. So his stuff sort of falls apart.

The last factoid in the tour of his house was how he removed a load bearing wall from his sister’s house and did not replace it.

That whole tour was supposed to be for Wright fans but it just made me loathe him with every fiber of my core. Can you tell I’m an applied sciences person?

There are lots of reasons to dislike Wright and though his house has historical significance, it is not among the works I find interesting enough to recommend…for me, his houses don’t resonate because they reflect lifestyles I dont identify with.

His more public work is another matter. I was struck by the color of the sky against the blue roof the first time I passed Marin County Civic Center from the highway. And Florida Southern in Lakeland is spectacularly good.

The whole Architectural Uprising movement sort of started in 1984 when the young Prince Charles gave a speech at the Royal Institute of British Architects 150th anniversary gala evening. During his speech, the prince said that a proposed new modernist extension to the National Gallery was ugly. Or to be more precise, he called it a carbuncle in the face of a dear old friend.

The Venturi columns seems to lack entasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entasis

The fact that telex was immensely faster, lower bandwidth, operated on terrible PSTN networks (not regular telephone networks) with absurdly low quality, could work internationally with no special hand-off equipment or special fax lines being required, and had multicast and store-and-forward built-in to the protocol and had an image printer protocol extension that was superior in quality to fax and again, required no special equipment for international transmission, could work even when the mains electricity was down (phones and telexes were on separate networks), teleprinters could be powered directly from the telex connection, could work over low bandwidth ham radio connections, and is still in use today in certain parts of the world where it is critical the information gets through, there's a reason that a lot of companies still used the telex well into the early part of the 21st century.

Not meant as a explaining type of response, merely as a "this is an interesting piece of useless information."

This might be the most passive aggressive thing I have ever heard. England truly elevates passive aggression to art form

EDIT: Someone downvoted me, so I should say I grew up in England until I was 14 so I'm allowed to say this! Downvoting itself is a form of passive aggression

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