[slindsey]

Part of the problem within this article is the choice of pictures. The first section states, “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” They then present 9 pictures that reinforce the concept that people all around the world expect the _same_ thing. But that's simply not true.

They didn't take that description and give it to artists all around the world to paint. "Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results."

So _they_ painted pictures that were essentially the same, reinforcing their own point. The rest of the article selects pictures reinforcing the same point.

As user nassimm pointed out, you only need to walk down the street and look around to see the differences. Travel a little and you'll see the differences everywhere.

People may want similar things, but the actualization of that is different everywhere.

[SamBam]

I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.

The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or Denver. All I could think looking through it was "These look exactly like all the apartments near me in Boston and Cambridge.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-develo...

[sidewndr46]

5 over 1 is the result of regulations of various kinds converging resulting in economic pressures dictating that building format.

Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.

[wongarsu]

Freshwater, sewage, fire codes, elevators, foundations, load-bearing structures, HVAC all get more difficult as you add more floors (beyond some small number around 4 where it's all pretty trivial).

Another advantage 5-over-1s have (which the NYT article also mentions) is that they are cheap and easy to build. Very tolerant to cheap building materials, lots of prefabricated parts, lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them. And because there's more demand then supply and people mostly pay based on location there's little incentive to do something more expensive

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them

that's a bit circular, no?

[beckingz]

You do what you're good at which you got good at by doing.

[zymhan]

Yes, that's how economies of scale work

[SamBam]

It's not the format that I'm referring to but the style.

The dominant architectural style of them includes:

- Multiple boxes merged into each other at different heights and depths

- Multiple (2-3) siding materials used in a regular pattern, such as vinyl slats + brick, or smooth aluminum + brick + cement.

- Multiple colors used in a regular pattern, usually white + gray + bright-primary-color. Primary color is used in small rectangular splashes, usually below or beside alternate windows

The basic look is that of many shipping containers nestled into each other.

[spankalee]

That's also caused by design reviews and regulation that require "breaking up massing". So you get boxes jutting out and a mishmash of cladding materials.

[sheepybloke]

My biggest gripe with 5 over 1's is the interior and the pricing. They're all cheap drywall with no insulation, quartz counter tops with an island and stainless steel appliances, and vinyl, wood grain flooring. They then claim that because they hit all of the "luxury" points, they are "luxury" apartments and can charge an extra $750 more than other apartments. In the end, all new apartments are like this, and beside location, basically interchangeable.

[Karrot_Kream]

They're marketed as "luxury" because it's so hard to build new housing in the US. The luxury you're paying for is new construction. You're not going to get competition on materials used in housing until it becomes easy to compete on housing.

[joelcollinsdc]

Kind of weird that you are calling out drywall here, what other building material makes sense for interior walls? And when you say no insulation do you mean in the interior for sound proofing? Exterior walls certainly have and require adequate insulation to be to code.

[sidewndr46]

I'm reasonably certain it's an exaggeration on the authors part.

[Damogran6]

And those economic pressures include: at 5 floors, you can stickbuild the structure with relatively unskilled labor. External skins can make them look relatively different, but a single concrete floor with stores, and a structure that wraps around and hides the parking structure is, pragmatically, easy and cheap to build.

[anthomtb]

I'm no expert but sewage seems rather simple in a tall building. You have gravity on your side so you "just" need longer pipes.

Its getting the fresh water up that should get exponentially more difficult as building height increases.

[sidewndr46]

Try dropping a baseball from the 75th floor of a building and watch how hard it hits the ground. You can't just have a sewage vertical going up that high.

[TheCoelacanth]

Sewage is far more difficult to handle than water.

You need to maintain a continuous downward slope. You are very limited in how you can have bends in pipes or two pipes join each other. You need to make sure air can get in and out of every point of the pipes, otherwise differences in air pressure will make things get stuck inside.

With pressurized water it just gets pushed wherever you route the pipes and you don't need to worry about the exact route nearly as much. Yeah, you need pumps to get the appropriate pressure on higher floors, but it's still simpler than sewage.

[unavoidable]

It's not quite that simple. If you've ever lived in a tall building and heard/seen/smelled stories of sewer pipes backing up, well you'll know what I mean. The bottom floor of a 50 storey building needs much more sewage space than the bottom floor of a 5 storey building. Anyway, there are considerations about venting, as well as increased capacity for lower floors versus higher floors, and the whole thing has to be designed in conjunction with the rest of the plumbing anyway.

[yt-sdb]

> I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling.

I don't disagree, but this is simply bad rhetoric. Don't start with an incorrect/misleading/confusing example, and then expect readers to stick with you for the more compelling stuff.

[Karrot_Kream]

All housing waves produce cookie-cutter housing. Victorians all look like other Victorians, dingbats look like other dingbats, and brownstones look like other brownstones.

[helloplanets]

Yep. This article is a good example of how to not do science. Not a single counterexample is provided from another decade. Not to even talk about actually trying to prove the same point for the 50's etc, with pictures.

> Before long, the designer had stumbled on the perfect research tool: AirBnB. From the comfort of her home the app gave her a window into thousands of others. She could travel the world, and view hundreds of rooms, without leaving her chair.

AirBnB the perfect research tool for interior inspiration? Well, it is if you wish to cherry pick for the specific topic of things looking the same.

[sparsely]

It's indeed unsurprising that if you look at the designs produced to match a specific context (AirBnB) you'll get a good amount of uniformity, as sellers converge on efficient solutions. If you looked in other contexts (high end apartments for sale in major city, cheap new builds in small towns, mass produced single family homes in another country) you might end up finding more differences.

[Ekaros]

I would probably look at listings of new apartments in various parts of the world to get picture what is common and what is not. And this should be matched to similar segments(low, mid and high income) in each location.

[mmkhd]

> look at listings of new apartments

And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.).

Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like radio/tv has smoothed out local accents and dialects within a country, the internet produces global trends. This is not all bad.

[gizmo686]

That is bassically the same here (usa), although we typically include major appliances and cabinets.

However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.

Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.

Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.

[ElevenLathe]

Nobody can afford to furnish an apartment the way big complexes stage their model. They rent good-looking but useless furniture from some place like Rent-a-Center. They can afford the rent on it (they pay for it pre-tax, while actual people have to pay for it post-tax) but its such shoddy quality that it will fall apart as soon as you use it. I've never seen anyone decorate their apartment like this. Even AirBnB hosts quickly find out that they can plaster cheap glittery decorative tchotchkes everywhere but the bed and couch need to be something that won't fall apart if you look at it wrong.

[sparsely]

That would definitely be better, although you're still only capturing part of what's available, or at least a biased sample of what's available. Different form factors come onto the market at different rates - some may never be on the market, or not in an easily accessible manner (sold locally, or via word of mouth, or via private auction etc). I think perhaps that's a distinction that the article fails to make, it's easier than ever to access goods and services from all over the world, but that ease also favours mass market products. If you put as much effort into doing whatever you're trying to do as someone would have pre-internet, you probably have access to at least as much variety as they did.

[bmicraft]

Especially when many AirBnBs are also interested in international customers

[uhtred]

The article is still not wrong though, despite how you try to science it. Everywhere I look it's too much of the same shit: the instagram clone army of injected lips and fake eyelashes, the same craft ipa on every shelf, the same song released by someone with $$$ lil and x in their name, the same superhero movie with people being thrown through buildings, the same "our food is natural" burger chain.

[pier25]

It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to become homogeneous because this helps survival.

The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.

[tsunamifury]

No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way.

Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today.

I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].” It’s like engineer cognitive scale Markov chain.

[nonbirithm]

I think he means globalization. All those cultures were probably homogeneous to some extent in their own isolated bubbles. The thing that changed was near-instant global communication. When most people in each society had full visibility into the standards/cultures of other societies, their definitions of an ideal society converged based on the new information.

[pier25]

Yes this exactly.

[ryandrake]

> I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just like the article pointed out. At scale here everyone’s comment is “no you’re wrong because [some mundane detail observation that misses the point].”

Nitpicking mundane (and unimportant) details is HN Commentary In a Nutshell. I totally expected these comments and did not come away disappointed. We make an art out of missing the forest for the trees here!

It sucks, too, because the article makes a great point with numerous examples, but all we have here are comments like "Well, ackshually, in paragraph 5 sentence 3, the author says 'all' when he meant 'most' so the entire article is clearly wrong!" which completely miss the point.

[pier25]

> Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago

Precisely.

150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).

I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.

[bmicraft]

To add to that, the author completely ignores the fact that the differences from one person to the next might be much more significant than averaged differences inherited from their country's culture.

[heywhatupboys]

Meh, you see the Danish flag in one of them. Danish people love their flag in art, celebrations, etc. So clearly it was desired by them.

[Mizoguchi]

Agree.

The author seems to be experiencing a case of what's known as Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

There may be such thing as the AirSpace look, but this may be driven by cost cutting more than actual style.

Exposed brick, exposed air ducts, reclaimed wood, brass plumbing pipe lamps with Edison bulbs...

All this is DIY stuff you do when you want to keep your expenses at the minimum while making the place look nice, and it accomplishes that very well, if donde right, I think.

But I bet most people would go with a $50K custom Italian kitchen instead of exposed shelves if they could afford it.

[masswerk]

I don't agree on the cost cutting argument: preparing a wall of exposed brick is certainly more expensive than simply slapping another coat of paint onto it, industrial artefacts of the past have become sought after items and are selling at good prices, and what has once been available as barely designed, locally produced base-line products is now selling as designer items.

I'd argue, the element of cultural alignment to the universally accepted is predominant, regardless of the price.

(As often, the simple, DIY-style, apparently cheap, is actually more costly. As a fancy example, once VW/Audi sold the same platform twice, once as the more elaborate Audi 80, once as the more base-line, economic VW Passat. Both variants shared the same dashboard with minor variations: the Audi came with sleek control lights behind a smooth cover, whereas the Passat exhibited its economic appeal by a group of bare lamps in the cavities of a basic, moulded plastic base board. However, the Audi dashboard was considerably cheeper to produce, with just a printed sheet of plastic snapping onto the mounts, while the economic appeal of the Passat afforded lights of varying color and a complex moulding of the plastic inlays.)

[hoosieree]

Eventually all the good wood will be "reclaimed" and you'll start to see synthetic replicas and "genuine reclaimed wood look" hollow plastic panels.

[hindsightbias]

It's not the age of average, it's the age of utility.

[stereolambda]

Economic convergence is actually one of the themes in the article. It's possible that much of aesthetic uniqueness stemmed/stems from being in an economically inefficient situation, where you don't know or don't have access to the solution that's "globally optimal" in some sense.

Many things can be crushed by efficiency. If every work and business has to solve some inefficiency (which seems to be true even in a communist-type system), in an optimal world you starve to death.

Still, there are many ways to use reclaimed and used stuff that won't look Instagrammy.