Brian Potter: belief

Transcript context

…Gotcha. Okay, so they were replacing the old stoneworks and stone masonry stuff and the gargoyles with these kinds of things. Okay, I see.So yeah, let's talk about one because the idea that the older designs were less efficient in some way to steer man to the opposite position. Someone might say that a lot of the value of construction and building is just the aesthetic presence that it has in a city or a neighborhood and to an extent, we've lost that. Maybe we got to use less material on a bridge or a skyscraper, but then it just acts as this ugly thing in the middle of the city. Or if not ugly, at least not as aesthetically pleasing as it could have otherwise been. How would you react to something like that? Yeah, so I guess to clarify what I was talking about before, I don't think that new buildings necessarily use less material in a sense. I just think they have an aesthetic that's more minimalist and streamlined without a lot of extra decoration. The complaint is that “Oh all buildings have to be a cylinder of glass or a rectangle of glass or whatever,” but I think one reason that is true is that, while it may not be super interesting from the outside, when you're on the inside of a building, you actually kind of want a whole lot of glass. It’s really nice to have a large open space to walk through and to have a lot of natural light. That was very hard to do prior to the mid-20th century for a couple of reasons. One is because buildings weren't really air-conditioned before that. Another one is it was like really expensive to have big expansive glass. It's still expensive, but back then, it was even more expensive. As you go farther back, there was a glass-making process invented in the 1950s 1960s called the float glass process, which made it a lot easier for you to basically make really high-quality glass for way way way cheaper than it was possible to previously. So for air conditioning and stuff like that, it basically advances in like structural design and increases the use of steel. It basically became a lot more possible to just have your building be a big giant slab of glass with a lot of natural light and a lot of openness on the inside, and that creates kind of a nice experience if you're actually in the building. To some extent, I think that applies a little bit more generally if you look at an HGTV remodel or something like that. Everybody wants to create a big giant open concept floor plan or whatever with all the walls blown out and lots of natural light coming in everywhere. So to some extent, it's just the technology. It seems like it's maybe a case of the technology evolving so you can create this nicer interior space. To some extent, that perhaps came at the expense of having a lot of really ornate decoration on the outside (not on the top, but the outside). If you're building a building, it makes sense to optimize the inside at the expense of the outside because that's what you're actually using. Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. One comment that I've heard is the progress of YIMBYism has been hurt by the fact that new buildings, because of this rational self-interest, are ugly on the outside and very pleasant on the inside. The result is that the people who are community organizers will oppose these new buildings because what they get to see is the outside, and all these historical preservation boards will notice that these older buildings are not as pleasant on the inside and have obviously less occupancy and everything. They look more pleasant in their neighborhood than the new buildings that people want to tear down and build. So if we want to convince the Nimbys to go along with the new construction, you kind of have to make it look beautiful. What do you think about that?…

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