claim

active

claim:the-makers-of-image-ridden-ugly-buildings-did-not-truly-please-themselves-they-acted-out-of-wilfulness-and-a-desire-to-conform

The makers of image-ridden, ugly buildings did not truly please themselves; they acted out of wilfulness and a desire to conform.

Alexander argues that what appears to be self-pleasing in modern architecture is actually wilfulness and professional image-management.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Concepts (1)

concept

Wilfulness
associated_with
The false pleasing of oneself done out of a desire to be somebody, to be important, or to conform to professional images—very different from true pleasing.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

The image-conscious high-style architecture served as justification for mass-produced commercial buildings that also lacked unfolding due to industrial procedures.claim0.792
Connection between high style and mass production.
The images created by famous architects (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc.) formed an accepted style that embodied defects of the production system and became targets for younger architects.claim0.790
Image propagation in architectural culture.
It is, then, this love of life which is embodied in the conception of a building, in its detail, in its execution - because the wholeness that people paid attention to really was the whole, really was all of life, and people were not ashamed or too frightened to respond to all of it in their actions as builders.claim0.772
Love as the driving force of living creation.
The ugliness of much contemporary building comes from builders no longer knowing how to make a building truly one with its surroundings.claim0.770
A diagnostic claim about the root cause of poor built environment.
Virtually all shocking blunders of modern and postmodern architecture turned out bad because they were unexamined experimentally—proposals were not compared by feeling to find the step with the deepest life.claim0.769
Historical/diagnostic claim linking bad architecture to failure of empirical comparison.
After 1900, a variety of modern building processes came into use that are not structure-preserving—some accidentally structure-destroying, others actively promoting ugliness for profit.claim0.765
Historical shift.
Buildings made with an eye to the past will most often fail to have living structure, because the process of historical reproduction somehow turns vivid, living structure sour.claim0.764
Argues that copying historical forms does not produce living structure.
The great majority of modern buildings are awkward assemblies of unrelated components, lacking the coherence necessary to be living designs.claim0.760
Aesthetic judgment on modern buildings.