Hello from a land where McDonald’s architecture and Pizza Hut architecture is much more consistent and predictable than religious architecture. Over here, these nice ideas about building classification have only ever been viewed as theory, not practice. We recognize these stereotypes, but they don’t seem very useful.
I can tell you the history of this abandoned building as fast as any Geoguessr player could identify the White House, just by glancing at its roof:
One of the most famous Jewish synagogues in the country was designed to look like an Islamic mosque, both inside and out:
Across the street is the Catholic cathedral, built to look like a Greek temple, right down to the iconography inside:
The solemn brick building behind it is City Hall. It was never a church. All three buildings are among the oldest in the city.
Architectural historians will never be able to reliably query for America’s stereotypical Gothic or onion-domed churches using building=church alone. For years, I’ve used that tag for too many megachurches that were built to look as bland as Amazon fulfillment centers on the outside. Instead, you’ll have to rely on the more specific but less common building:architecture=gothic or roof:shape=onion.
I know the Norwegian use of highway=trunk doesn’t sit well with the “it needs to look like a road I think of as a trunk road” crowd. The (non-motorway) national highway network in Norway has a wildly varying standard due to the sparse population and challenging geography. Even so, the rule is that a national highway, or a top-level county highway (recently reclassified from national highway), is a trunk road, because that’s its purpose.
Looking at random examples from the UK, Sweden, the US, Congo, India, China, and Australia, they all seem to follow more or less the same pattern. Non-motorway national (or previously national, now second-highest tier) highways, regardless of physical form.
In countries where the road’s physical form and its highway hierarchy status are highly correlated, you might create a rule that form is the defining trait for a trunk road. It’s certainly more easily observed on the ground to a lay mapper than reading road signs and deciphering number systems.
Still, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Is it a trunk road because it is a dual carriageway, or is it a dual carriageway because it is a trunk road (and because we chose to spend the money)?
which is “the other building”? The one on the left can likely be a church. Nobody said all churches look the same, already in the past there were many different types of churches, but with the 20th century there are even more.
This is the crux of the matter, isn’t it. As far as I can understand @Thrall, that I was replying to, a building=church is a distinct and recognizable architectural style. The wiki says it’s a building that was built as a church, even if it no longer functions as a church.
Obviously these might come into conflict in these cases we have both presented. There’s no apparent common distinct architectural style between the three buildings (we all know which three).
Is there (sufficient) agreement on the distinct architectural style of a church? Does this rule out two of the three buildings that fit the wiki requirement for a building=church? What do we do then?
Is there even a distinct architectural style for churches? Is building=church meant to represent a typical Catholic or Protestant church built in Europe between 1000 AD and 2000 AD? Is this a good criterion for mappers? What if it’s not a church, and never was a church, but people regularly mistake it for a church? Do we map building=church then?
We’re back to this conflation of form and function and the argument “I think it looks like foo, so therefore it is foo”.
And I never got a reply from your about that bank…
Because hard cases make bad law. Since some churches (expressly built for the purpose) do not resemble a typical church, it does not mean that a “typical church” does not exist. When I encounter a building which, quote, “represent[s] a typical Catholic or Protestant church built in Europe between 1000 AD and 2000 AD?”, which make up some 99% of churches I’ve mapped, I tag it as a building=church. It’s then a “good criterion” for myself. As for the remaining 1% of churches that do not fit that criterion… I don’t know. And I don’t care. Tag it as a building=yes, it will hardly change anything.
Sometimes people are simply mistaken, and they don’t accept being corrected, insist on still doing it wrong, and use “it looks like foo” or “to me, this is a foo” as proof that they are right.
And I’m trying to raise the issue that this leads us down a path we maybe don’t want to go.
Obviously these might come into conflict in these cases we have both presented. There’s no apparent common distinct architectural style between the three buildings (we all know which three).
there is no common style, but there is a common type: a big assembly room for the community, likely an exposed place for the cleric to preach, a celebration of space, christian iconography like crosses, often a tower (bell tower), etc. maybe other functional areas like chapels, a choir, a sacristy
Far away from Europe, I grew up in a deeply religious town of about 12,000 that is home to more churches than traffic lights and also the birthplace of a notable liturgical architect. Almost every church building or former church building can be construed as “typical” or “traditional”, and most were built by immigrants from Europe, but no two look alike.
To me, building=church just means it was built as a church and will likely be called a “converted church building” after the congregation moves out and something else moves in. That’s all. Any mapper or data consumer who imparts more meaning is doing so in spite of the data.
I think this is what tends to happen when we develop rigid typologies that only cater to one part of the world. Over time, the various types are prone to reinterpretation as each local community adapts it to suit their understanding or needs. Sometimes we can use British English vocabulary as our source of truth, to avoid misunderstandings, but hopefully everyone can see the problem with defining Christian architecture worldwide as only the forms familiar to that one island.
I agree, basically. I was just annoyed by the OP’s apparent insistence that OSM should provide hard rules defining clearcut, objective criteria for classifying fuzzy things in a fuzzy world. And being annoyed is not the best condition to participate in a discussion. Sorry. I’m setting this thread to “ignore”.
The issue I raised was that some people insist that we name a thing after its purpose (case in point: cycle barrier) and then use the name on other things even if the purpose is completely different (case in point: motor vehicle barrier) solely because to those people, the two things look similar enough.
It doesn’t really matter what the thing or the purpose is.
I’ve personally had this issue with cycle barriers and sidewalks, because I care about those. I’ve never had it with churches, but it looks like the situation could arise there as well.
Reading the thread might be good, and I’m sorry this is such a hard issue to explain…
I’m thinking of a possible solution to the conflict between architectural style and intended use: For the purpose of mapping building=, we can agree to map it as such depending on the intended purpose at the time in which the architectural style was implemented.
This would mean tagging building=church if and only if, when the core elements of the style were put in place, they were meant to complement a church. (but again, this does not take into account different cultural views on the concept of “church”)
Doing so would disambiguate cases in which it looks like a church but functions as a library since it was built, for example. It would not be tagged as building=church.
If, on the other hand (and by the same rule) we consider a building that looks like a museum but was meant to be a church, we could tag building=church.
Do you think this could help solve the issue at hand? Would it need improvement? I think we’re trying to reinvent the wheel
You’re absolutely right, the underlying issue is with us trying to make one standard out of many cultures, like we were trying to forcibly cast foreign concepts into our culture’s molds.
Defining a set of features that distinguish a religious place from others might make sense, but again, different religions have different celebrations.
For example, I know for a fact that Jeovah’s Witnesses’ Rooms could be tagged as community centres by mistake, but both are sort of correct. They are indeed community centres, but they serve a religious purpose. They may have no choir, no chapels, but they host mass nonetheless. Where does the functional space end, and where does the religious building begin? In many cases there is no clear answer.
Some religions celebrate mass in outdoor sites. Is landuse=* a disservice to them? No, it is indeed an open field. Could it then be tagged with the proper function in its entirety? Not either.
We can improve on the situation by separating the looks from the functions, like we’re already doing, but at some point we won’t be able to go further. Our level of detail, given the same tags, might clash with someone else’s view.
The issue is when people see something (building, road, barrier, whatever) and classify the thing based on apparence as something that is different from what the thing really is (purpose/“built as”).
It’s a general issue across several types of “things”. The ambiguity of classifying a building based on apparence was yet another an example to help illustrate the issue for those who did not recognize the ambiguity of the cycle barrier or sidewalk cases.
The purpose of this thread was not to agree on churches, but to discuss how we can deal with this general issue.
Let’s not conflate “style” and “type”, architectural style is usually referring to a period or doctrine, like “gothic”, “classicism”, “bauhaus” (=“modern”), “postmodern”, “art-deco” etc. These styles can be regional or international, and there can be sub-styles (further differentiations).
“type” is referring to the inner workings of a building, the structure and composition of space. Both can be related, but they do not have to.
For example a “museum” is a type of building, the purpose (collecting, storing and exhibiting things) dictates the spatial requirements, but it does not mean all museum have to be build the same way or look the same, there can be many different spatial and structural solutions for the requirements. On top of that, there is style, independently, or at least we could see it like this in order to be flexible with possible combinations.
By the way, did someone look up the above mentioned Venturi
Here’s an image about one of the kinds of building the book is about:
It’s kinda hard to have something tagged building=church for the purposes of navigation if the defining traits of a church are all interior. So it seems at least you two are not in agreement on how to determine that a building “is” a church.
Not that any one of you are responsible for agreeing, it’s just that this further underlines the inherent weakness of tagging based on each individual’s opinion and not on observable facts.
Which is a weakness we must learn to live with and deal with, so the question then becomes: what do we do when people’s opinions are provably wrong, and people refuse to adapt to the evidence, but rather insist on enforcing their opinion on the world?
Identity has a complicated relationship with both form and function. When I was young, my parents would stick a label on various things around the house to help me learn their names in English: “bookshelf”, “piano”, “piggybank”, “cookie jar”. Ironically, the bookshelf held as many picture frames as books, but the store sold it to us as a bookshelf. The piano was technically an electric keyboard, but I practiced piano on it. Unlike the stereotypical piggybank, mine looked like a postbox, painted green to represent the dollar bills that went in. It did not oink like a pig. However, the battery-powered cookie jar, resembling a barn, did make cute animal noises whenever I removed the lid.
Our wiki serves mappers as sort of a field guide: if you see something like that, then use this tag. But people sometimes take this guidance too literally, leading to misguided attempts to define feature types more scientifically. Once, I overheard the wiki described as a guide for aliens who had just arrived on Earth. Aliens probably would appreciate a definition of shop=bakery that specifies the maximum sugar content of the baked goods, to avoid confusion with shop=pastry, or a definition of shop=* that requires customers to come away with shopping bags, to avoid confusion with amenity=*. These definitions are useful as rules of thumb, but they become harmful when people interpret them pedantically. Trucks in a shopping bag?
Lest anyone thinks I’m exaggerating, tactile_paving=* currently has a definition that is unusable in the field and unworkable in countries that aren’t named France. Worse, fuel:octane_*=yes used to be universally defined in such a way that, in some countries, mappers would have had to engage in criminal corporate espionage instead of simply reading the label on the fuel pump. Whenever the wiki oversteps the bounds of reason due to a lack of global perspective, we can safely assume that mappers simply ignore the wiki.
There’s no such thing as a universal, language-agnostic dictionary, so there’s no point in turning the wiki into one. All we can do is offer enough hints that the mapper will successfully relate them to something they observe based on their previous lived experiences.
This is a good rationalization of the building=* scheme, though I don’t think most mappers think about it all that much. As long as the preset is called Church Building, most mappers will use it for anything they intuitively consider to be a church building. Maybe they distinguish between as-built and converted church buildings, maybe not.
One of the reasons mappers care about building=church, building=train_station, etc. is that some renderers, especially OSM Carto, give them a more prominent color as “significant” buildings. OSM Carto introduced this treatment as a compromise when deemphasizing buildings overall. It uses these values as a proxy for important landmark buildings, applying a traditional European perspective globally.
At the time, I did a rough back-of-the-napkin calculation to find that only a quarter of religious buildings in Cincinnati, a relatively religious U.S. city, could be considered historic landmarks, making building=church a worse proxy for importance than building=school. (Traditionally, American topographic maps mark places of worship, schools, libraries, post offices, town halls, and fire stations as significant landmarks. As a result, these facilities are considered “community anchor institutions” for various purposes.)
My takeaway is that the values are nearly useless to global renderers that aim for an unbiased presentation. Still, they would still be useful for helping a geocoder label e.g. “Church Building” in search results, leaving the specifics to the user’s imagination.
I just have two points to add. The strength of OSM is in local mappers. Generally speaking, if a local mapper recognises it as a church building, they are going to tag it as a church building. This simple rule automatically accounts for variation in architectural styles across the world, it means we don’t have to write down rules of the form: it’s a church if - and only if - it has a spire. Yes, the local mapper might make a mistake if the building doesn’t look like a church, but it’s only a matter of time before another mapper with an interest in local history corrects them.
I’ve always thought of the values of building= as especially useful not for rendering or navigation, but for data analysis. How many former churches in Britain are now pubs, how many are flats, how many are climbing gyms, and how many are still places of worship? Before OSM existed, that would have probably taken years of research and field surveys. Now you can find out in a few minutes.
maybe they are nearly useless on a global scale, but they can definitely be quite relevant on a local scale. If you are rendering a map of your town, it can help a lot to have classifications like this, so you can treat some buildings differently.
