About F%$#ing Time

Original Proposal


After public complaints. Note that the flat roofs of the initial proposal are spectacularly ill suited to a place with heavy snow, like, for example, Scandanavia

In Sweden, the citizenry are revolting against the public masturbation that is modern architecture.

While Louis Sullivan used the freedom granted by the use of steel frame buildings to soar, modern architects use the freedom granted by modern building materials and techniques to produce blights on the city skyline.

In Sweden, Norway, and Finland, it appears that the public is no longer buying the ugly bullsh%$ that folks like Frank Gehry are selling:

In 2014, the Norwegian architecture firm MAD Arkitektur hit a wall. The architects’ edgy, glassy proposal for a renovation of Sandakerveien 58 B/C, a mixed-use space in the Oslo neighborhood of Torshov, had been rejected by both the city’s Cultural Heritage Management Office and Planning and Building Services Commission. It was too tall, the commissioners ruled, and discordant in a neighborhood whose buildings were otherwise in traditional Scandinavian styles.

Nine years later, as the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported in January, MAD returned with an aesthetic about-face, unusual within the field: a truncated design, sans the drama of the original, that mirrored the styles around it.

For the Norwegian branch of the social media movement Architectural Uprising, this revision was another feather in its cap. Founded in Sweden in 2014 as a public Facebook group, the Uprising is a collective of citizen design critics who object to what organizers call the “continued uglification” of developments in Nordic cities, and push for a return to classically informed design. With more than 100,000 social media followers across some 40 different branches, the group now serves as a significant platform for those who assert that the public, not just bureaucrats, architects, developers and property owners, ought to have a voice in the design of their built environments.

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Most of the Uprising’s messaging occurs through its signature social media posts, which often take the form of “before and after” memes: pairing historical images of locations in Scandinavia with images of those same locations after demolition or reconstruction. Another common type juxtaposes images of newly built traditional-looking developments in other countries with less appealing variations in Scandinavia — proof, members said, that eyesores aren’t the default everywhere.

LUMA tower in Arles


Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis


Bilbao


Dancing House, Prague

Uprising branches in Norway, Sweden and Finland hold annual public polls to select their respective country’s “ugliest” buildings, Nordic architecture’s equivalent of Hollywood’s Golden Raspberries. Oslo’s new Munch Museum and National Museum have each taken home the Norwegian Uprising’s “Grøss Medal” in polls involving over 10,000 voters — a referendum of sorts on the city’s recent efforts to reenvision itself as a cultural capital.

“A big part of the Architectural Uprising movement is making architecture available to people,” said Peter Olsson, a volunteer social media moderator and blogger. “You can say that a building is beautiful or ugly without needing to be an architect. It’s everybody’s living environment, and everyone should be able to have an opinion about it without being mocked.”

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Uprisings have since caught on in Germany, Estonia, Poland, the Netherlands and even the US. In Norway, with local parliamentary elections around the corner, Lie says, the group is realizing that there is indeed power in numbers. “We are being contacted by politicians who want to meet with us, have us on their podcasts, ask our opinions,” Lie says. “The fact that they are now coming to us, rather than us hammering on their doors, is significant.”

When you look at something like these, these are all Frank Gehry, you can only think that this is a need to mark one's territory, like those tourists in Rome who tagged the coliseum.

It feeds the ego of the architect, and it feeds the ego of the developer or bureaucrat who commissions the work, because they all get lots of ink, both in the architectural and mainstream text, but it makes public space ugly.

I would also note that a number of these buildings, don't work from a purely functional perspective, with issues like leaky roofs or frying next door neighbors.

Just make it stop.