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Poll

Which

21st century architecture is better than earlier architecture
[ 2 ] (66.7%)
21st century architecture is worse than earlier architecture
[ 1 ] (33.3%)
beer is better than either
[ 0 ] (0%)

Total Members Voted: 3

Topic: 21st century architecture (Read 73002 times)

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #175 –
The language is expertly universal mind you......
"Quit you like men:be strong"

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #176 –
Quote from: Belfrager on
paradoxal
Paradoxical* [ Borrows heavily from Latin, ;) ]
Quote from: Belfrager on
More room and for free.
There's no doubt many a word has multiple meanings... But in this case you shortened a phrase - "free of charge" - which is just a bad writing habit everyone suffers from from time to time occasionally. Redundancies in words and meanings can be avoided by swapping terms around.

However, technically the statement is still false. The 'currency' in jail is time. And time is money. Depending on how you look at it.
(I guess if your time is worthless then it's a wash.)
Quote from: Belfrager on
What I meant it's that is better to be in jail than to be at such "capsule hotel".
It'd be novel to stay in one once or twice. Given my height it would probably get old fast.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #177 –
Hello ensbb3
The 'currency' in jail is time... yes indeed. And time is much more valuable than simple worthless money. Time is all you have.

Those capsule hotels are meant to reduce human dignity, to treat humans as insects, insignificant beings in a cage. Asian societies always had a propensity for doing that.
A matter of attitude.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #178 –
Olá
Quote from: Belfrager on
Those capsule hotels are meant to reduce human dignity, to treat humans as insects, insignificant beings in a cage. Asian societies always had a propensity for doing that.
Indeed. Although I'd assume it serves a practical purpose more than meant to be degrading. Given the population densities.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #179 –
Capsule hotels are transitory, a means to rejuvenate and refresh on the way to home or work. Small, windowless rooms or capsules are the best way to get a great night's sleep (good ventilation and sound insulation are of course a given). 

There is a similar trend here in Stockholm where store basements are turned into hotels. The airport also had a capsule hotel a long while ago, but that one is gone decades ago. There's a reconstructed 747, but that is more in the youth hostel category.

While originally intended as an alternative to going home, longer-term stays are attractive too. Hotel rooms are a distraction from the place you visit. Unless that place is miserable of course, then lounging at the hotel can be a refuge. Compact hotels tend to be in more optimal locations than traditional hotels. That's all a function of real estate prices. Since a compact hotel uses less real estate, that is less a cost factor, and they can be at more expensive locations.

Which is pretty much the case in Asia as well. Room size is not a function of population size, but of real estate prices. China has a higher population than Japan, but while Japanese rooms tend to be small and clever,  Chinese hotel rooms were traditionally large and miserable. This is changing now, the Chinese are learning from the Japanese and the Europeans, rooms are getting smaller and much better, but large, miserable hotel rooms are supposedly common in Asia (though I have never opted for any). 

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #180 –
Quote from: jax on
Capsule hotels are transitory, a means to rejuvenate and refresh on the way to home or work.
An interesting concept. I'd still want to, blindly, argue the concept is derivative of the environment. Way more space in a capusle than the train ride home right after work, so why not chill and catch a later ride home?
Quote from: jax on
Small, windowless rooms or capsules are the best way to get a great night's sleep (good ventilation and sound insulation are of course a given).
And I get it. If I could push the autopilot for a self driving car on my way home and crawl off in the back seat I'd be in haven. But then that kinda seems the death of capsule rooms in that sense.
Quote from: jax on
The airport also had a capsule hotel a long while ago, but that one is gone decades ago.
This makes sense, to me anyway. Long layover - wanna get out of the airport atmosphere. Yeah, I'd appreciate it. Seems maybe it didn't work so well... at least years ago.
Quote from: jax on
There's a reconstructed 747, but that is more in the youth hostel category.
I can even understand this... Just couldn't find an emoji that expressed the look on my face. (≈$226 for the "Double Deluxe Ensuite (Cockpit Suite)". Yeah, I spent too much time on that site.)
Quote from: jax on
While originally intended as an alternative to going home, longer-term stays are attractive too.
But this just isn't for me. I prefer the refuge option at least.
Quote from: jax on
Which is pretty much the case in Asia as well. Room size is not a function of population size, but of real estate prices. China has a higher population than Japan, but while Japanese rooms tend to be small and clever,  Chinese hotel rooms were traditionally large and miserable. This is changing now, the Chinese are learning from the Japanese and the Europeans, rooms are getting smaller and much better, but large, miserable hotel rooms are supposedly common in Asia (though I have never opted for any).
But moreover all these places have way more people than I'm used to. Also dependency on public transit and otherwise dealing with limited mobility (and people) is(/are) a part of culture.

It really doesn't cost that much to put a decent car on the road legally, especially given what it can return in regards to mobility options. Being able to drive up the road to get a place away from the crowd is a luxury in and of itself. To me.  

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #181 –
Quote from: jax on
Small, windowless rooms or capsules are the best way to get a great night's sleep (good ventilation and sound insulation are of course a given).
Coffins...
Bunch of vampires.
A matter of attitude.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #182 –
Quote from: Belfrager on
Coffins...
Bunch of vampires.
Not exactly. Coffins for the poor and nice bedrooms for the vampires.

Wonder when our honored politicians will spend their nights abroad in small, windowless capsules? ;)

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #183 –
Quote from: krake on
Coffins for the poor and nice bedrooms for the vampires.
With a little help from myself finally this thread entered the right way. Architecture turned at the XXI century just like the clock industry, cheap digital for the poor, extremely expensive "analogic" luxury only for the rich.

There's not any reason to justify to close people inside "capsules", even less by trying to justify it with commuting/economic reasons.
When industrial factories were invented, proletarians were not put inside sarcophagus.

A matter of attitude.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #184 –
Consider the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust! We can all be ashes together! :)
进行 ...
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #187 –
I don't really see the attraction in a bathtub — I think I've used ours exactly 0 times.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #188 –
I wonder what the opposite of acquired taste is. I used to enjoy a good, long soak reading or watching something, and cold/warm drinks (depending on weather or mood). A couple years ago I moved into a flat with a fancy tub with massage and other features. I used it twice.  Since I think I took a bath at a hotel once. That's the end of it. Showers all the way. 

In Beijing I had a fancy decontamination type shower with multiple streams and massage (but without seat and air dryer). It was kind of pointless in Beijing though. A city by the Gobi desert, it suffers from water shortage and also had low water pressure. More like trickle down than full steam. LEDs and loudspeakers are used for a more immersive showering experience. A hotel room in Paris had a LED "night sky" shower (when you turned the main light off). That was enjoyable, but the light points were built into the wall, so when those light points wear out they would have to change the wall. 

The most useless fad is the fixed overhead shower. Moving into a new flat soon, and was offered the option for a cool 500€ extra (not even ceiling mounted, just an extra head). These are old-time school (or sauna) showers, there is nothing cool about them at all. I think the idea is to recreate the feeling of rain, the key is showering outdoors, not overhead water stream you cannot move or modify. I have argued for that for our farm shower in Northern Norway, at the edge of wilderness. Get rid of the bath tub, get a more vertical window that could be opened for a more exposed (at will) shower experience. Not that stupid overhead thing. 


Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #189 –
I think our "rain" shower head isn't too bad, although it broke (maybe because it was a small fraction of €500 :P).

I prefer swimming over just sitting around in water, although I did one or twice (in '03-ish) spend an hour or more reading a book in bath. But when you get right down to it I prefer reading outside (in our current weather) or in a blanket wrapped up on the couch or something like that. I also prefer meditating or just lazing around without water, really.

Plus there's the amount of water involved. I shower in just a couple of minutes at lukewarm temp, sometimes cold. I haven't actually done the math, but assuming it takes 10 minutes to fill a bath that'd be several month's worth of water and I can't even fathom how much extra energy wasted. For something I don't even like that much anyway.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #190 –
Something like this?



I have thought if I had unlimited money I might like a Houdini cube in the middle of a multifloor apartment, hoping that the weight of the water wouldn't collapse the floor. Like this, though this is an infinity pool in a Stockholm villa, not an apartment escapist challenge. 

https://youtu.be/IOVrvZ3aKt4

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #192 –
Stockholm secret sauna. The building code for this inner city property only allowed a 3 m² (32 sq.ft.) toolshed, while the owner wanted a sauna. This is what the architect came up with:



Quote
A unique mini sauna is being built in the city center, just a stone's throw from the water. But actually the sauna is illegal. "You can only build a tool shed there, so we make a shed that contains a sauna."


The sauna, which will be built on site this summer, is built as a three square meter tool shed. But the building can be hinged out. Suddenly it has benches, a window section and room for a sauna unit.

- It is impossible to see there is a sauna before the house is folded out. A similar construction has probably never been done before,  

[font="PT Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif]"It's always fun trying to find loopholes in the law. Of course, it's a little provocative to the city building office, but it's good to find out where the boundaries are going, and those who work there may find it interesting to investigate this, "says Anders Berensson.[/font][/size][/color]

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #193 –
It's always fun to come to an interpretation based on your knowledge of other languages.

Quote from: Google Translate (wow, pretty good)
The architect has previously built another Secret Sauna, which is widely used in a secret location in the Stockholm archipelago.

Quote from: Original
Arkitekten har tidigare byggt en annan så kallad ”Secret Sauna”, som finns och används flitigt på en hemlig plats i Stockholms skärgård.

De architect heeft eerder[1] gebouwd[2] een andere so-called[3] "Secret Sauna," som finns[4] […] aanwenden[5] vlijtigt[6] een heimelijke plaats[7] in Stockholms schiergaarde[8]
Quote
Bei Bergen konnte inmitten der Schiergaard-Inseln eine sehr günstige Stelle zum Fange von Travisia gefunden werden

"At Bergen you could find a very favorable spot to catch Travisia(???) in the middle of the Schiergaard islands." Is it actually a placename in Norway or just a German misinterpretation?.
1 tijdig=on time, tijdiger=more on time, but in this case earlier or previously↵
2 looks more like a cognate with Dutch buigen (bend) or gebogen (bent), or maybe a cognate with English buy↵
3 yeah, not Dutch, but that's kind of my point here :P Dutch, English, and German all help to make sense of it.↵
4 clearly finns must be related to English find and Dutch vinden↵
5 aanwenden=use↵
6 vlijtig = industrious, in this case probably more like industrious→busy→being used but that's not Dutch↵
7 a secret place↵
8 a near yard/orchard… not actually a word in Dutch, mind you. I guess the group of islands sense of archipelago means something like "an almost (regular, not divided by sea) domain". Note that a schiereiland (a near island) is a peninsula. Interestingly, there are actually some early 18th century German attestations of the word Schiergaard, e.g., here.

↵

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #194 –
I remember reading somewhere that Google Translate has two core elements:

- synthesising available human translations
- machine translation

What may appear as a passable work of the latter is normally the former. When a translation at Google Translate is surprisingly good, it means you happened to hit on an oft-translated and well-synthesised topic. Machine translation in its proper sense continues to be a still-born idea.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #195 –
Yes, that is the core of machine translation. Large corpora of translated texts (official EU texts being a major source) are used as input to teach the machine. Such sources are made more explicit on a site like bab.la. Click the down arrow on the right → link to source and you'll see it automatically grabs context from TED talks, European parliament documents,[1] opensubtitles, etc. I quite like bab.la because it collects the results of previous human translations, which can include reformulations of idiomatic or figurative phrases at which machine translation is notoriously bad. Note that fairly recently, Google Translate claims to have improved by leaps and bounds, which is true. The announcement in September '16 was only about Chinese, but by now I think it's been upgraded on most or all languages.

Of course you're quite right that the machine doesn't actually know what things mean. But at the same time it's capable of some very impressive tricks related to noticing patterns. It doesn't know what pets or farm animals are, for example, but the algorithm can actually notice that words like cat and dog are often used in similar contexts. As such it has been demonstrated to be able to make a very educated guess at translating a word like dog between two languages even if there is not a singe human-made translation of the word available to teach it.

PS If you're interested I could mail you my bachelor's thesis. I like to think I wrote a pretty decent overview of the inner workings of machine translation.
1 This is what results in translating London to Amsterdam.↵

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #196 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
Of course you're quite right that the machine doesn't actually know what things mean. But at the same time it's capable of some very impressive tricks related to noticing patterns. It doesn't know what pets or farm animals are, for example, but the algorithm can actually notice that words like cat and dog are often used in similar contexts. As such it has been demonstrated to be able to make a very educated guess at translating a word like dog between two languages even if there is not a singe human-made translation of the word available to teach it.
Yes, I know that "noticing patterns" is what machines do and it looks often outright amazing. However, I also know that machines know nothing about the thing called context unless it's pre-defined and fed in (by humans, duh). When some of the semantic or grammatical categories happen to realign due to cultural progress (or regress, fads, new inventions), the machine cannot update itself.

For example, it may be able to do lexical innovation based on regular derivation patterns, but it cannot tell which innovations actually take root with the language community. This must be updated manually. The machine doesn't do educated guesses. It does mechanical trial and error - it might get it right, but it's fundamentally still pure chance.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #197 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
PS If you're interested I could mail you my bachelor's thesis. I like to think I wrote a pretty decent overview of the inner workings of machine translation.
Hey, that would be great! It might marginally touch on the thesis that I am planning. Unfortunately I didn't get it going this year, even though I am doing my best to catch up with the science.

My own batchelor's thingie is most likely uninteresting to you. It's contrasting Finnish and Estonian orthography, not very interesting even for myself these days.

Hopefully my vivaldi.net address works. If not, I will make it work.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #198 –
Quote from: ersi on
My own batchelor's thingie is most likely uninteresting to you. It's contrasting Finnish and Estonian orthography, not very interesting even for myself these days.
Maybe, maybe not. I actually thought that the chapters on Spanish, French, English and German in Orthographies in Early Modern Europe were interesting enough to read, not skim. The chapter on Swedish I read more selectively and I don't yet know what I'll do with Polish.

Edit:
Quote from: ersi on
Hopefully my vivaldi.net address works. If not, I will make it work.
Sent.

Re: 21st century architecture

Reply #199 –
Mine had to do with normative guidelines for orthography, not with historical development. Basically, my point there was that I can do better than some of the details of the current norms are. Particularly boring.