[HN Gopher] The mid in fake midcentury modern
___________________________________________________________________
The mid in fake midcentury modern
Author : nluken
Score : 247 points
Date : 2022-12-07 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nplusonemag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nplusonemag.com)
| iambateman wrote:
| 3000 words on ugliness. Zero pictures.
|
| If the author is going to complain about ugliness, he may as well
| show some examples.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Related: Whither Tartaria?
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
|
| Follow up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-
| the-co...
| twic wrote:
| Scott loves attributing increasing prices to Baumol's cost
| disease, but I'm not sure I've ever seen him do the work of
| establishing that it's actually what's happened.
|
| > If stonemasonry is a low-tech industry, and new high-tech
| industries are arising all around it, stonemason wages could
| get prohibitively high (compared to everything else) until
| nobody wants to hire them anymore. This would create pressure
| for architectural styles that require as little masonry (or,
| generalized, human labor) as possible.
|
| Stonemasons make about PS20 an hour:
|
| https://uk.indeed.com/career/stonemason/salaries
|
| More than an unskilled labourer, but not even twice as much.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Baumol's cost disease is about wages of irreplaceable labor
| _in general_. It applies to stonemasonry as much as, e.g.
| haircuts.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I came here to post this and a more recent article, his review
| of (the first sixth of) David Brooks' _Bobos in Paradise_ :
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixt...
|
| Towards the end his directly links to "Whither Tartaria",
| suggesting that Brooks' thesis (the old monied aristocracy was
| replace as the upper class by "Bourgeois Bohemians", a class
| which Scott suggests is approximately congruent to the modern
| usage of "bluecheck")
|
| >Around World War II, US civic architecture changed from
| colorful, ornate, old-fashioned looking buildings to brutalist
| concrete cubes or sleek glass modernist arrangements, even
| though most Americans continue to prefer the old-fashioned
| style; other art forms showed similar transitions at different
| times. Brooks' theory suggests that the old-fashioned buildings
| were the preferred architecture of the WASP aristocracy, and
| the new architecture is the signaling equivalent of [bespoke]
| handicraft blankets.
| xyzelement wrote:
| The article is down for me so I am guessing at it based solely on
| the comments, which is dangerous.
|
| Something that has become apparent to me is the connection
| between aesthetic expression and religious expression, which I
| think used to reign but now is missing from the process.
|
| To use an obvious examples, consider something "small detail"
| like the ornate doors of an old European cathedral, they were
| crafted beautifully because their beauty added to the religious
| experience for congregants, they would see the beauty and catch
| an emotional glimpse of the divine.
|
| Similar, I think, the classical composers and painters who saw
| their arts, at least in part, as a conduit for divine beauty into
| this world.
|
| While this ethos still exists in religious art and architecture/
| design, mainstream society's aesthetic has diverged from serving
| a religious purpose, so it no longer aspires to make you feel
| awed in the same way. And what you don't aspire to, you don't
| achieve.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Also remember that different religious agencies would decorate
| this way in order for you to keep giving a tenth of your
| earnings to the Church.
|
| This was really no different than Apple making flashy buildings
| in order to attract the best workers and customers willing to
| pay higher prices. But as many churches that decorated, there
| were far, far, far more places that were boring and
| uninteresting in their times. There was great expense involved
| in creating these flashy features.
| jona-f wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221207142932/https://www.nplus...
| crazygringo wrote:
| There's so much in this essay to unpack, it's all over the place
| -- more of an extended rant than any particularly cohesive
| argument.
|
| But one of the early points is "why is everything so gray instead
| of colorful?" Which is easy to answer -- when all your cars and
| buildings are super-colorful, they clash. They become garish and
| ugly and screaming for attention. _Thank god_ we 've moved to
| more neutral tones that actually tend to go together and recede
| into the background... so that we can use _accent colors_
| instead! If someone chooses to wear an attractive bright red or
| yellow top, let the accent be on _them as a person_ , rather than
| their surroundings.
|
| But otherwise, the answer to most of the rest of the essay is:
| economics. New construction (and furniture) looks the way it does
| because it's the cheapest to put together in terms of initial
| cost and maintenance for the building's desired lifespan.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > because it's the cheapest to put together
|
| Your explanation is that wealthier people choose to spend less
| on quality? (Not just in proportional terms, but absolutely
| less.) That correlation can happen, but as an explanation it
| leaves something out.
| species9606 wrote:
| You should watch "The Unbrellas of Cherbourg" to experience a
| world absolutely full of color, color everywhere, and more
| beautiful because of it. Not every city has to have the same
| chromatic sensibility as men's business wear.
| kennend3 wrote:
| Adding to this and using some every day examples.
|
| Why are expensive "sports cars" almost always ugly (Bright
| yellow or neon green??).
|
| One would think if you had that sort of money you would realize
| that a bright green car is tacky as F, but that is the point.
| To turn heads - this is why they bought the car in the first
| place.
|
| Why are most cars not coloured like this - because it is ugly
| and most people don't drive a bright green "Honda civic" so
| people can look at them.
|
| On the housing front almost every city has bylaws and
| restrictions on what you can and cant do. In the US you also
| have HOA's with even more restrictions.
|
| As an example - I live in what was formerly a small village .
| In order to "preserve the heritage" of the area everything is
| architecturally controlled.
|
| Developers always need to submit your plans for review, but
| this area is further restricted and has its own set of "rules"
| outlined in a 34 page document which is on top of the city
| guidelines.
|
| So all the houses in this area look similar regardless of age
| by design. There are houses from the 1800's a few blocks away
| and my house which was built in 2000 fits in just fine from the
| exterior view. The interior is a different matter because it is
| not controlled and so it uses modern techniques like steel
| I-beams.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| It's kind of weird, this juxtaposition between sports cars
| that are ugly as an intention of being eye-catching, and then
| HOAs that enforce oppressive-ugliness-by-way-of-cookie-
| cutter-blandness. No matter which way we go it still turns
| out ugly.
|
| On the latter, it's this weird and horrific attempt to mimic
| the way that buildings in Europe just fit well with each
| other, even when they use bright colors. In suburban America
| it seems that's not possible without painting a dystopian
| look all over the town.
|
| Some folks will make an argument that modernism is the cause.
| Or that post-modernism is the cause. Or whatever is the
| current style is the cause. I don't buy it because there are
| works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe that are
| widely considered to be beautiful and which strike the eye.
| Going the other way, I've met folks who just don't like
| Impression. So there's aesthetics, and then there's taste.
| That quote by H.L. Mencken seems appropriate.
| joenot443 wrote:
| The folks in Eastern Canada would happily disagree that their
| bright and primary colored homes are ugly, and after having
| seen them in person, I also think they're beautiful.
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/44/0e/32/440e32a0e0c8fdececf6...
|
| I get where you're coming from with grays clashing less than
| the highlights. But given the choice, I'd always take the loud
| bright colors of the Maritimes over the inoffensive neutral
| shades of our West Coast.
|
| https://www.tqconstruction.ca/wp-content/uploads/vancouver-s...
| graublau wrote:
| Strathcona is charming and colourful. I don't necessarily
| agree with the "colour clash" idea above but Canada
| exemplifies "bad architectural era" like no other country due
| to fewer legacy buildings. We have to live with bad
| architecture a lot
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| The rational explanation why the majority of items are neutral
| tones/grey is because this maximizes the market. This can be
| seen on automobiles, where silver is the most common color
| because it's easier to sell second hand, so manufacturers
| learned to optimize for this.
| Pxtl wrote:
| And that's self-reinforcing. I bought my first new-from-
| dealership car (a Prius Prime) a few years back and wanted to
| get one with a color, and learned that this would mean
| waiting months and paying more, while the grey one was on the
| lot right now. Because the grey is the most plentiful option,
| it's also now the easiest to acquire unless you're really
| looking to go out of your way for color.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yes exactly. When choosing colors or amenities for my home,
| my real estate agent and contractors would bristle -- "that's
| not going to be good for resale value"
|
| This has impacts on the industries surrounding as well. If I
| want a custom siding color, it's going to be more expensive.
| We're normalizing everything around the most widely
| palatable, so it's all fairly bland.
| epolanski wrote:
| > We're normalizing everything around the most widely
| palatable
|
| My counter argument to this is that then it is the "norm"
| and society conditioning our taste and dictating what's
| palatable.
|
| This goes as deep as influencing and forming our sexuality.
| We get aroused by things that would've not aroused people
| centuries ago, the canons of beauty themselves changed a
| lot.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| sure, it's cyclical -- the emphasis is on "value" or
| "ROI" before "aesthetic", which in itself is a certain
| aesthetic
| [deleted]
| epolanski wrote:
| White is the best selling used color by the way, followed by
| black and then silver but your point stands.
|
| I kind of miss the times were people had colorful cars, and I
| don't understand this argument of screaming for attention.
| Looking at beautiful cars like the Alfa Giulia being black
| rather than Alfa red [1] or Quadrifoglio green...again?
|
| [1]https://i.pinimg.com/564x/4b/4b/16/4b4b16277ab1652775cd5c7
| de...
|
| [2]https://cdn-
| img.automoto.it/images/22002933/1000x/20200507-1...
| yunwal wrote:
| All that it takes is to travel to Mexico to understand this is
| wrong.
|
| http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3Y5ULj_0l3o/UrYr0ys5RTI/AAAAAAAACo...
|
| This kind of architecture _works_ it just requires a kind of
| unity and dedication to a common ideal that we no longer have.
| Renevith wrote:
| I think it's hideous and I wouldn't want to live there.
| There's nothing "wrong" (nor "right") about the idea that
| lots of bold colors will tend to clash and be unpleasant.
| It's just subjective and different people hold different
| opinions about it.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I think it's hideous and I wouldn't want to live there.
|
| This is really no different from "beautful colorful houses
| in the Nordics" someone gushed about in another comment.
|
| You need consistency and care. If you have that, suddenly
| you are a "tourist destination", "cozy place to live" etc.
| yunwal wrote:
| Bold colors don't clash. Clashing colors clash. You can
| dislike bright colors all you want but you can't change
| color theory.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| > when all your cars and buildings are super-colorful, they
| clash. They become garish and ugly and screaming for attention.
|
| This is not necessarily the case. Many places in places like
| Iceland, Norway, Greenland, and to a lesser extent the rest of
| the nordic countries and some others, like the netherlands,
| have very colorful buildings, where each building is a
| different vibrant color, but nevertheless everything fits
| together nicely, without becoming "garish and ugly and
| screaming for attention", instead looking quite humble and
| cozy.
| trgn wrote:
| Just look at the US too. Charleston, New Orleans, ...
| Victorian architecture in general. Lush, but not garish. The
| idea that bright colors are offensive to taste is just wrong.
| It's how they are applied. And that's what the problem of
| modernism has been. Modernism is the man internalizing the
| logic of the machine. It is easier, from a machine
| perspective, to commoditize and mass market flat neutral
| colors so therefore it is better. It is truly willful
| submission. The scary part is that we have been doing it so
| many generations now, that are sense of aesthetics has been
| completely atrophied.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Much of Alsace too, e.g. Colmar: https://upload.travelawaits.
| com/ta/uploads/2021/04/fcaa4d555...
|
| I'd agree they do sort of "clash", but I'd take that over
| this any day:
|
| https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-
| images/imageserve/118444...
|
| Mind you, even somewhere like Venice is relatively mono-
| chrome (just not grey), but still striking in a way modern
| housing developments never are.
| krona wrote:
| > But otherwise, the answer to most of the rest of the essay
| is: economics.
|
| Correct proportions cost _nothing_. And that 's just for
| starters.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Were proportions mentioned in the article? I couldn't find
| it.
|
| But I'm intrigued now -- I thought I've heard all of the
| complaints about modern design, but I'm not sure I've ever
| heard anyone say that _proportions_ have gotten worse. What
| specifically are you referring to?
|
| The only particularly noticeable thing I can think of is cars
| having gotten more "bulbuous" rather than sleek, but that's
| entirely due to crumple zones for safety.
| krona wrote:
| This made me weep. Pythagorean ideals of proportion have
| existed for a millenia. See Ancient Greek/Roman
| architecture, gothic architecture (e.g. https://link.spring
| er.com/article/10.1007/s00004-022-00591-2) and then go to
| visit an average modern city development and look at what
| modern architects consider to be, I don't know, the 'ideal'
| diameter of a non-supporting (almost entirely aesthetic)
| column, or the incongruous separation of windows. It's
| everywhere.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yes, Pythagorean ideals of proportion have been around
| for a long time, but they've also been essentially
| "debunked" in terms of aesthetic beauty. Kind of the same
| way that precious little of the music we listen to today
| follows Bach's prescriptions for counterpoint. They were
| a historical starting point that we've long since evolved
| away from, in favor of greater freedom and
| sophistication.
|
| Which isn't to say that the proportions of windows or
| columns are always ideal in today's architecture... but
| for every supposedly perfect historical Gothic cathedral,
| there are plenty of terribly-proportioned historical
| examples as well. Overall, I see no evidence of problems
| of proportion getting _worse_. Modern architects are just
| as aware of proportion as they 've ever been. But
| thankfully they're freed from archaic notions such as
| e.g. exact golden ratios.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Modern architects are just as aware of proportion as
| they've ever been. But thankfully they're freed from
| archaic notions such as e.g. exact golden ratios.
|
| It's strange then that these freed minds produce the
| ugliest buildings imaginable, en masse. And then pat each
| other on the backs and give each other awards for being
| beautiful.
|
| See, for example, this beautiful multiple-award winning
| waterfront in Copenhagen
| https://goo.gl/maps/RGpDAsREQhnsvdJu5 only matched by
| this beautiful Copenhagen Opera designed by award-winning
| architects https://goo.gl/maps/krhiU9Poh4Ahqu9v6
| chasd00 wrote:
| i was in Copenhagen last summer and walked by both.
| :shrug: I liked them just fine.
| dmitriid wrote:
| The main problem with them isn't just that they are ugly.
| Or that they form no coherent whole.
|
| The main problem is that they completely ignore the place
| they are: the city, the country, the nation. It's the
| same haphazard collection of steel, concrete and glass
| with no rhyme or reason that you can find _anywhere_ :
| from the third world countries [1] to right smack in the
| center of a medieval city.
|
| They are all devoid of any character (unless the
| character is "yet another soulless something").
|
| Sorry for the TikTok link, but I can't get this from my
| mind: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFb14MTT/
|
| [1] This is from my home town.
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/JnU2AphqF1nPyfnH7?g_st=ic The
| only reason it didn't win any awards is because no one
| wins awards for building ugly stuff in Moldova. Otherwise
| it's no different from Copenhagen Opera.
| krona wrote:
| > _Overall, I see no evidence of problems of proportion
| getting worse._
|
| Except if you ask people, specifically the people who
| *have to work in, live in and around these buildings*,
| and given the choice, they will choose, time and time
| again, architectural styles which have fallen out of
| favour with the vandals.
|
| Some think beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder
| and it's the plebs who have a false consciousness.
| Perhaps you're one of them.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What does any of that have to do with proportion, which
| is the subject you actually brought up?
|
| When I think of people who like older buildings, it's
| because of the materials, the ornamentation, the history,
| the culture, the craftsmanship, the uniqueness, I could
| go on. All of which makes total sense.
|
| But _proportion_ just isn 't something that usually comes
| up. And none of this has anything to do with false
| consciousness, sheesh.
| krona wrote:
| > it's because of the materials, the ornamentation, the
| history, the culture, the craftsmanship, the uniqueness
|
| Reactions to beauty are instinctive, immediate,
| emotional. The average person on the street knows little
| about any of the post-hoc rationalizations you mention.
|
| The topology of beauty has been studied, and we know that
| proportions are important in art, architecture,
| sculpture, the human body itself.
|
| It costs nothing to create beautiful buildings.
| scythe wrote:
| When I look at pretty old buildings, what sticks out are hand-
| molded wrought iron, hand-laid brick quoins, hand-carved window
| siding, hand-assembled decorative fences -- surely, you can see
| the common factor?
|
| So it's cost disease.
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease
|
| Modern buildings are made principally of prefabricated components
| designed to be packaged and shipped efficiently and assembled
| quickly. Why lay bricks when you can nail on a layer of fake
| brick?
|
| Hopefully, 3D printing will save us.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Not sure where to start debunking this...
|
| When you look at old buildings you're automatically starting
| with survivorship bias. Expensive and well kept old buildings
| tend to stay around a lot longer than buildings that were built
| cheaply at the time. Those have all been bulldozed.
|
| Oh, did I mention that expensive building was expensive? It's
| easy to ignore that huge parts of the population were living in
| houses with paper thin walls and spending enormous amounts of
| energy to keep warm or cool (on cooling people had avoided the
| southern united states in mass till cooling options were
| available).
|
| Oh, did we also mention that not only the US population, but
| the global population has increased massively since then. All
| of those processes you're describing are massively energy and
| labor intensive and do not scale as you're trying to put 8
| billion people under rooves.
|
| Why lay bricks rather than fake bricks? So everyone has a home
| and they don't have to burn an entire forest to get it.
| User23 wrote:
| > global population has increased massively since then. All
| of those processes you're describing are massively energy and
| labor intensive and do not scale as you're trying to put 8
| billion people under rooves
|
| This doesn't make any sense. Labor supply obviously scales
| with population. More people needing housing also means more
| people available to build housing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Labor supply scans linearly if nothing else changes. Being
| that 100+ years ago people were not building computers, or
| making money producing minecraft videos, or one of any
| number of tasks that may pay more than flourishing housing.
|
| And you managed to ignore the millions and millions of
| houses that were close to 'dirt hut' and 'a bunch of sticks
| leaned together' that have been the more typical means of
| living for humanity.
|
| And that ignored that until 1900ish population grew _very_
| slowly meaning that multigenerational housing was more
| feasible.
|
| "Everything has changed, why hasn't the world stayed the
| same" -- this article
| twic wrote:
| You can't just observe that labour-intensive elements are less
| common and declare that it's Baumol's cost disease! You have to
| provide evidence that it's that, rather than any other cause.
| aliqot wrote:
| We're asking for it though aren't we?
|
| Anything non-conventional to beauty is being embraced right now.
| For generations we only saw the most visually presentable, and in
| that saccharine world of nothing-better the only thing that
| stands out are things that are unique from that aesthetic.
| Victerius wrote:
| It's come to the point where I find some conventionally
| attractive individuals not particularly interesting. For
| example, men who look like this: https://encrypted-
| tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ8c7xV...
|
| There are so many men who look like this now, on Instagram and
| TikTok. It's boring. They all look the same. When everything is
| beautiful, nothing is.
| MediumOwl wrote:
| > They all look the same. When everything is beautiful,
| nothing is.
|
| Essentially the plot of Boris Vian's 1948 "To hell with the
| Ugly"
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In real life, most men are nowhere near as good looking
| outside of some enclaves in SoCal and NYC. Perhaps the look
| still sells on TikTok and Instagram because that is people's
| escape.
| Victerius wrote:
| You're right, but my point is more about uniformity.
| Society seems to have tacitly agreed that there's only 3
| beautiful looks for everything. You can be beautiful - and
| by "you", I also mean buildings and inanimate objects -,
| but only if you fit this narrow criteria.
|
| Give me diversity. Give me creativity.
| [deleted]
| mejutoco wrote:
| I think there are plenty of beautiful things in the world today.
|
| The theory in art history is that beauty became relegated to
| other factors after WWI and II. I believe this can capture the
| mood of the period, but it is a bit simplistic. IMO there has
| always been many factors, and never was beauty the only aspect of
| all art.
| jonjacky wrote:
| Previously, 2+ years ago, similar title and theme but a
| completely different article, 6 comments:
|
| Why Is the Modern World So Ugly? (theschooloflife.com)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23557284
| antisthenes wrote:
| Nonsense. If you want to seek out beautiful things, simply go to
| where they are. Don't look for them in a hyper-urban corporate
| hellscape and then act surprised when you don't find them.
|
| Go to a park on a breezy spring day. Take a look at people
| playing with their dogs, their kids. A mother running after
| toddlers, father and son launching a kite in a big open field,
| deer grazing nearby in the brush. Look at it all and tell me it
| isn't eye-wateringly beautiful.
| sghio4Q2 wrote:
| I agree with this. I feel sometimes people talk about things
| becoming "uglier," but I choose to find the beauty in things,
| including ugly things. In fact, I have seen things I thought to
| be ugly, but once I started looking for the beauty in them,
| they became beautiful.
| pdntspa wrote:
| This article calls everything ugly without even defining what it
| thinks it -- or beauty -- are. (And if they did past the first
| paragraph or two of what looks to be an incoherent rant, they did
| so way too late)
| papichulo4 wrote:
| The chosen font, spacing, paragraph size... I can't tell if
| it's supposed to be ironic.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| This is the equivalent to "why does modern music suck" (said by
| every generation of the next generation's music)
|
| Scott Alexander posted something similar
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
|
| And the response he got was arguably predictable..., others
| didn't agree that modern architecture is ugly.
|
| Sure there are some ugly buildings. But, for example, for me. I
| went to some 1929 building that I'm sure this author and Scott
| would find beautiful
|
| https://www.450sutter.com/
|
| And it is. But it's arguably NOT functional. On the 25th floor
| the view would be incredible but the windows are tiny and so
| unless you walk directly up to the window you can't see the view.
| In pretty much any modern building the view would be front and
| center, full floor to ceiling, wall to wall windows.
|
| I prefer that modern style. check out an old museum and a modern
| one. The modern one will have all kinds of amazing affordances.
| Places decided to highlight the view, places decide to give a
| sense of space, places designed for eating in unique space.
|
| I'd much rather go to one of these
|
| https://design-milk.com/10-modern-museums-youll-definitely-w...
|
| Than one of these
|
| https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-oldest-museums-a...
|
| Even if the contents was the same.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _This is the equivalent to "why does modern music suck" (said
| by every generation of the next generation's music)_
|
| At first I agreed with you but then I clicked the submission
| article and saw those ugly mouse statue things.
| pizzalife wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws
|
| Lots of people seem to enjoy those "ugly mouse statue
| things".
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Lots of people enjoy those ugly monkey NFTs too, I don't
| know what to tell you <shrug>
| pizzalife wrote:
| Yes, this thread is morphing into "what is art"? I don't
| know.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws
|
| > Lots of people seem to enjoy those "ugly mouse statue
| things".
|
| Sorry, they're still crap. Seriously, taking the MTV VMA
| statue and robotically slapping his characters head on it?
| I recently watched the Nathan For You episode "Dumb
| Starbucks" and those statutes remind me the _deliberately
| terrible_ parodies he displayed at an art gallery to
| establish his bona fides as a "parody artist."
|
| I can't find the YouTube clip of it, but here are some
| screenshots:
|
| https://www.vulture.com/2015/11/test-your-logos-with-
| nathan-...
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3844774/mediaviewer/rm34134138
| 8...
|
| And here's him singing some equally-terrible parody songs:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I71IJOym2ic.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Demonstrably, modern music does suck:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII
| jcotton42 wrote:
| I'd watch this response video to that
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8
| pizzalife wrote:
| I had a hard time taking this article seriously after seeing
| the first picture with the caption "new ugliness". The picture
| depicts art by KAWS, arguably a very successful modern artist -
| someone must think what he is doing is worthwhile. I personally
| don't like his art, but saying it's "ugly" is rather
| subjective..
| smsm42 wrote:
| You're saying it as somehow "subjective" is bad. Of course
| it's subjective, and the whole point it a lot of modern art
| is subjectively perceived by most people as ugly, while being
| praised and promoted by "experts".
| pizzalife wrote:
| I didn't mean that subjective is bad, but the way the
| article is written makes it sound like the author thinks
| there can be an objective view of what constitutes a good
| aesthetic. Also, I'm not sure I agree that "most" people
| think modern art is ugly. Haven't seen any statistics to
| indicate that.
| teawrecks wrote:
| The article opens with:
|
| "WE LIVE IN UNDENIABLY UGLY TIMES."
|
| Doesn't sound like they're going for subjective.
| johntb86 wrote:
| Doesn't that assume that people only think beautiful art is
| "worthwhile"? People - in particular the sort of people who
| deeply care about art - may see value in ugly art, if the
| ugliness helps achieve the goals of the artwork.
| pizzalife wrote:
| This is also true.
| janmarsal wrote:
| Calling it ugly is just an honest way of saying "I personally
| don't like his art".
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Modern (popular) music sucks because it's not human. It's
| produced by software, quantized, gridded, autotuned,
| copy/pasted, and though the result is technically perfect, it
| isn't human.
|
| Modern architecture is the same. It's copy/paste design,
| assembled by software, the human element is gone. When
| buildings were designed by artists on paper there was no
| avoiding the designer's humanity and creativity being infused
| into the design. Today it's just lego blocks. You see the same
| buildings in every city you visit.
| antiterra wrote:
| Music produced by software that's quantized and gridded has
| been some of my favorite stuff for decades and listening to
| it does the same thing any recorded music can do such: remind
| me of something, occasionally teach me something new, be a
| tool for growth or mourning or comfort. Something being
| virtuousic or analog or raw doesn't necessarily make it good.
| Simplicity or rigidness is not inherently bad. sometimes you
| want Raphael instead of Bosch. You may want The Knife instead
| of Fleetwood Mac, or Parry Grip instead of Paganini.
|
| There was a time that the pinnacle of stereotypically bad
| music was Girl From Ipanema on an elevator. Except it's a
| great song, even played for muzak.
|
| Compound that with how the barriers around genre have gotten
| so much more flexible that you can chart with a Nine Inch
| Nails + Billy Ray Cyrus + Hip Hop song, and it kinda seems
| like we're in a golden age.
| oblio wrote:
| I guess you managed to miss their key point about classic
| design:
|
| > And it is. But it's arguably NOT functional.
| sph wrote:
| There are two schools of thought: those that think that beauty is
| in the eye of the beholder, and those that think, like Steve Jobs
| famously quipped, that some people just have no good taste.
|
| After fighting with this concept for years, I decided to embrace
| the superiority and smugness that comes with the latter: the vast
| majority of people have no understanding of beauty and aesthetic.
|
| The only thing that stops the world from becoming uglier is
| social norms and peer pressure. Otherwise there'd be more people
| very proud of wearing socks with their flip flops in public and
| choosing serif fonts for their computer UIs.
|
| Mind you: beauty doesn't have to be conformism nor normative. But
| like music, you need to understand the rules first, before trying
| to break them.
| shadowfoxx wrote:
| I'd like to put forth the idea that taste is cultivated. Might
| seem like I'm splitting hairs but I don't like the idea that
| 'taste' is something you're born with - that its innate - you
| either got it or you don't. Its like saying some people can
| cook and others can't, etc etc. That's a story we like to
| comfort ourselves with. I disagree with the premise /almost/
| entirely.( I promise I'm fun at parties. An individual claiming
| they "just can't do X" is shorthand but "There are people who
| are born incapable to do X, no matter the effort" is where I
| take issue)
|
| Like any talent, its a pursued interest. I seriously think the
| world would be a better, more beautiful place if people were
| willing to push back on social norms and peer pressure more
| often; Especially when the stakes are so low.
|
| I'm not the one to do it but I'm willing to bet we could agree
| on an aesthetic that is based around Flip-Flops and Socks - the
| Japanese might want to have a word or socks with those Adidas
| sandals.
|
| The reality of human pursuits is that regardless of how we like
| to think of history, we aren't actually being led by a few
| Omega-Tier mutant geniuses who gift us with ~ A E S T H E T I C
| S ~ (Tm) but we collaborate and try things and fail and try
| again. A culture where more people feel more free to express
| themselves is one where the Art gets better, IMHO.
| orange_joe wrote:
| can you help me make sense of your argument? If most people
| have bad taste, how can peer pressure prevent ugliness? Peer
| pressure almost by definition demands conformity.
| sph wrote:
| If one isn't born with taste, peer pressure and conformity is
| what stops them from going full ugly.
|
| But of course, the artistic ideal is someone that understands
| taste and beauty, so they can shed norms and just do whatever
| they want. This is why Michael Jackson could pull off wearing
| white socks with dark leather shoes, but we collectively know
| they do not pair well.
| chasd00 wrote:
| music is a good analogy. In college, for whatever reason, i
| hung out with far more architecture students than CS students.
| Hanging out with architecture students (and their professors i
| might add) in their studios and listening to them brag about
| themselves and teardown each other is a lot like hanging out
| with insufferable music fans in a record store.
|
| on a tangent, i felt really bad for the kids in that school.
| They all had such grand plans and were taught that if they
| don't change the world then they're worthless. Then they
| graduate and are stuck doing construction documents for Taco
| Bells and things like that. That has to be a bitter pill to
| swallow.
| blue039 wrote:
| There is nothing objectively beautiful about modern
| architecture. Brutalism, for example, is talentless nonsense.
|
| Before the advent of "everyone gets sued", the ADA, nuclear
| war, etc there was actual creative freedom. Now, everything is
| just one size fits all. Just in case you happen to attract the
| wrong attention.
|
| Architecture really is a reflection on how mind numbingly dull
| modern life actually is.
| sph wrote:
| > Brutalism, for example, is talentless nonsense.
|
| Brutalism is a perfectly serviceable form of art. The problem
| is that architecture has more practical purposes than pure
| art, as its goal is to create inviting living spaces. It
| needs to exist within this constraint, with the ultimate
| judges being the people that dwell in it, and the architect
| as their servant. Imposing architecture on people is just
| plain rude, and brutalism can be quite imposing and
| oppressive.
|
| So in general I agree, brutalist architecture is terrible.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > Brutalism, for example, is talentless nonsense.
|
| I find eco-brutalism to be interesting and eerily
| captivating, but I think it relates to your last sentence:
|
| > Architecture really is a reflection on how mind numbingly
| dull modern life actually is.
|
| Eco-brutalism reminds me of depictions of the remnants of
| long lost civilisations adopted by privitive species*.
|
| * This is likely a consequence of growing up playing Halo CE.
| smsm42 wrote:
| With brutalism, as it is obvious from its name, it is a
| deliberate move. The bigger question is why this direction
| has been embraced so much. I.e. why brutalist architects get
| commissions to build the next ugly building after they built
| the previous ugly (and often poorly functioning) building?
| Why taxpayers, who pay for many of these buildings, tolerate
| it? I think the latter may be because of the "you have no
| taste, peasant" thing - they have been convinced that "the
| experts" know what is _really_ beautiful and _really_ ugly,
| and only their opinion matters. I think there might be time
| to push back on that and admit the possibility that if
| something looks ugly, there may be a chance it is ugly.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| At least brutalistic buildings have _some_ character. I 'd
| take living in the hollowed out bones of a concrete
| monstrosity over the tepid soulless constructions we are
| building in the post-modern age.
|
| Some of the most fetishous ideas about building design come
| from AI-art. Unconstrained by economics, practicality, or
| code, I've been offered glimpses of architectures that could
| have been and in doing so have a profound impact but also a
| sense of loss of the could-have-been.
| com2kid wrote:
| > There is nothing objectively beautiful about modern
| architecture.
|
| I drive by multiple, lovely, modern houses every day. Some
| are incredibly well restored mid century pieces, others are
| tastefully done new buildings.
|
| I'd argue that examples such as
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Einstein.
| ..
|
| http://inspirationist.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/223.jpg
|
| https://mediacloud.theweek.com/image/upload/f_auto,t_content.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stillman_Photo_2.jpeg
|
| are great examples of modern exteriors.
|
| It is also worth noting that modern buildings are largely
| about interior spaces. Tons of natural light all day long,
| and beautiful interiors that work as canvases to hang the art
| that one gathers throughout life.
|
| You want to know what is ugly? Almost everything built in
| America in the 40s.
|
| Cape cod houses.
|
| Saltbox houses
|
| Modern architecture encompasses a wide set of styles. Yes the
| crap "modern" houses being thrown up now days with bad vinyl
| siding are ugly. They also didn't have a single architect
| involved in their creation.
|
| The good modern houses, the ones that play with textures and
| colors, that use natural materials mixes with the modern,
| those are far from ugly.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Keep going though.
|
| It's not just about "taste".
|
| We have always needed opinionated people to be able to push
| their ideas. That's what Linus is, Jobbs was, like him last
| year or hate him this year Musk, Eminem, Pulitzer, Jefferson,
| Tesla or Edison, Stuart Mill, the Wrights, and so on to any
| major or minor scale...
|
| The best things come from opinionated people who were told they
| couldn't go against the grain like that.
|
| We've have rejected that idea. Everything is run by MBAs who
| avoid opinionated in favor of a boring mass appeal.
|
| Look at big tech in the last decade... who was actually
| opinionated? What is actually worth a damn in 10-15 years? Zuck
| and Dorsey are clowns. Bezos seemed to have some great ideas on
| how a company should communicate internally but to an effect
| that is insanely boring (but reliable which is good for
| something else). Uber and Etsy and Apple after jobs, none of
| them show opinion, not in a "dangerous" sense.
|
| We've conditioned ourselves into conformity because being
| opinionated is to be "an asshole". We told assholes they aren't
| welcome with CoCs and that every opinion is equally valid, with
| virtue signaling and post modernism of "my truth", and that you
| can forgo everything else if it people buy it.
|
| We've silenced anyone who could make something beautiful
| because it also might be offensive.
| quest88 wrote:
| I'd consider Zuck opinionated compared to the other FAANG
| companies. I appreciate his bet on the Metaverse. I don't
| think it's a good idea, but I can appreciate having an
| opinion.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I don't know, I guess I've never seen it. But I would say
| in addition to my argument is that I don't think there is
| anything about the MBA-ification of the world that has
| prevented bad decisions.
|
| It just runs them through a calculator and committee first.
| sph wrote:
| I'm saddened to see you downvoted. I do not agree with the
| examples you've made but I agree with the general idea of
| your comment.
|
| In our thirst for a more progressive society, we've created
| an artistically dull culture that is afraid to offend, and
| there can be no beauty if one isn't allowed to say fuck the
| rules. Punk died at the turn of the millennium, and we're all
| a bunch of posers now.
| mikysco wrote:
| Very well said. I had a similar takeaway, captured by this
| quote which is representative of many flavors of the sameness
| described in the article
|
| "The imagined color of life under communism, gray has
| revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital.
| "The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the
| world have merged and blended in the imperial global
| rainbow," wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended
| rainbow produce? Greige, evidently."
| danans wrote:
| > We've conditioned ourselves into conformity because being
| opinionated is to be "an asshole".
|
| Asshole is just a shorthand for "inconsiderate of others".
| Not everyone who is opinionated is an asshole, but some are.
| And some of those assholes even have valuable opinions, which
| we do consider, but still recognize them as being assholes.
| david927 wrote:
| I love that this is down-voted, and in doing so validated.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| I never bought into the "eye of the beholder" on aesthetics.
|
| I might not understand a particular aesthetic. It might be
| impossible to formulate logical rules to decide what is
| beautiful. But beauty is objective, nonetheless.
|
| Be it an exquisite Japanese drawing of a bird with ink and rice
| paper, or Caravaggio, anyone with a soul can see that talent,
| effort, and a sense of "wholeness" went into creating both.
|
| I, personally, cannot appreciate Chinese calligraphy art; but I
| don't doubt for a second it is beautiful and I could appreciate
| its beauty if I cared to learn Chinese calligraphy.
|
| On the other hand, 1950s brutalist buildings, by their own
| architect's admission, are ugly. An attempt by nihilist
| "artists" to force their rejection of aesthetics on others. A
| sea of grey cement m, jagged lines, and boxes resembling prison
| cells reflect the architects' sense that we are oppressed...
| and then shove that claustrophobic feeling on all of us too
| dumb or too happy to be suffer from ennui.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > I never bought into the "eye of the beholder" on
| aesthetics.
|
| Indeed, but I suspect this has a lot to do with the embrace
| of materialism, a metaphysical view that has far-reaching and
| destructive intellectual consequences. Once you accept
| materialism, you have a whole world of phenomena that cannot
| be explained purely in terms of res extensa which leads some
| people to a kind of crypto-Cartesian position in which this
| unexplainable excess is swept under the rug of the
| "subjective". (I say "crypto-Cartesian" because res extensa
| cannot accommodate this excess explanatorily, so clearly
| you've got to pass the buck and squirrel away things in this
| metaphysical time-out zone that you've conveniently
| constructed to hold all that things you cannot explain
| according to your officially stated dogmas.)
|
| Also, philosophical liberalism encourages a kind of
| indulgence of the subjective, a kind of alternate reality
| protected from error and insulated from threatening facts.
| Desire is one such thing kept in the safety of this interior
| world. It is not possible to have evil or disordered desires
| (with some ad hoc exceptions). It is not possible to have bad
| taste. These are "subjective" matters, and since only
| objective matters can be debated, then, as the saying goes,
| de gustibus non est disputandum. "That's just your _opinion_
| , man!"
| com2kid wrote:
| > On the other hand, 1950s brutalist buildings, by their own
| architect's admission, are ugly.
|
| Plenty of brutalist buildings are not ugly.
|
| https://preview.redd.it/1w5r7lmno0491.jpg?width=4032&format=.
| ..
|
| Interesting uses of lines and perspective, a willingness to
| have large sweeping architectural shapes that were not
| possible before, huge stairwells, open air walkways, plenty
| of windows for natural light.
|
| Yes the concrete is ugly as sin, and it turns out it weathers
| and falls apart way sooner than anyone expected, but the
| shapes concrete was able to create are impressive.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _There are two schools of thought: those that think that beauty
| is in the eye of the beholder, and those that think, like Steve
| Jobs famously quipped, that some people just have no good
| taste._
|
| There certainly aren't just two schools of thought. A third
| school would that a variety of aesthetics exist each serving a
| different purpose and each requiring some small or large amount
| of study to appreciate and each providing a somewhat different
| level of reward to those that study it - none of these are
| better or worse but learning none at is bad (like cuisines -
| even fast food can have its charms but fast food all the time
| is sad and unhealthy, etc). Some paintings are both immediately
| striking and can offer more as you study them but other might
| have just one or the other quality.
|
| As far as the article goes, urban architecture has gone from
| traditional to high modernist to the present fair. The thing
| about, say, a building by one of the "great" modernist
| architects is it (usually) provides a fits organically with the
| environment quality while also providing more rewards and still
| offer a given place a "sense of place". Oppositely, a cheap
| contemporary building offers _at best_ , only blending with the
| environment, it's only camouflage and some completely
| eliminates a sense of place from around the building.
| Ironically, the main way one can get a sense of place today
| through the _truly bad_ examples of contemporary architecture,
| thing that fail as camouflage and stand out like a sort thumb.
| throwaway74829 wrote:
| Tolerance is tiresome. Putting up with nonsense, and being
| impelled to consume metaphorical shit, is vulgar to the soul.
|
| In art, the nonsense is the lack of honesty. Inauthenticity
| brought forth and exhibited for all of us to see. People
| without a shred of depth having the obnoxiousness to put
| something out that appears to be more than it is. The hubris.
|
| Each passing day, I understand the wisdom of the French and
| their intolerance more.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The author keeps referencing "cardboard modernism" but really
| should just use the word "postmodernism" to describe the era we
| are still in when it comes to construction, furniture, etc.
|
| The reason things look and feel "cardboard" is because in a
| postmodern world, many objects are approximations of the objects
| we associate them with. So, for instance a vinyl window is made
| to look like a wood window which was designed in such a way
| because of the limits of the material in addition to the function
| of the object. And example being window moldings on a sash
| window. For a wooden window they had a functional purpose
| (enclose the weights and ropes) which has been lost but
| approximated in a postmodern vinyl window because "that's how
| windows look".
|
| Materials in general have changed so much as well. So much
| furniture is made out of engineered wood instead of wood for
| example. But this shouldn't be a condemnation of our postmodern
| times necessarily. These types of materials, manufacturing, and
| assembly have made things accessible to many more people. If you
| want high quality objects made from fine materials and
| craftsmanship it is still out there. It's just extremely
| expensive. It's a huge gap from builder grade to quality to
| custom.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is what happens when authors live in extreme privilege.
| You can easily summarize it as
|
| "I want to go back to a world with 100 million people in it
| that were chopping down old growth forests at an
| unreplenishable rate"
|
| It neglects that not only have populations massively increased
| in the western world, but places in the world that have been
| historically poor now want to partake in the great
| modernization. When you are trying to bring another 7 billion
| out of poverty it would be really easy to wipe nature out of
| you don't change from the ways of the past.
|
| The postmodern stuff that authors complain about is inexpensive
| compared to the past, amazingly safe, relatively easy to
| install, and typically energy efficient in one way or another.
| It feels like the author is saying "I want to get rid of this
| conformity even if that means excluding a huge portion of
| people from the modern economy".
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I'm not even going to read this article because the typesetting
| is total garbage. How can I take someone speaking on aesthetics
| seriously when they're trying to convey their message in such an
| aesthetically broken way?
|
| Also a lot of brutalism haters in this thread, brutalism fucks
| fam. Y'all clearly don't have enough fond memories of growing up
| in soviet apartment blocks to understand what's beautiful.
|
| (though to be slightly less tongue in cheek, pressure to be
| hypercompetitive on price and corporate governance structures are
| the things that beget most of the ugly I see in my day to day
| life)
| odysseus wrote:
| I saw the article title and immediately thought of Corporate
| Memphis:
|
| https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
| marsven_422 wrote:
| greenhearth wrote:
| What an amazing article. Thanks for posting!
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Reminds me of Paul Skallas (LindyMan) and his thoughts on
| refinement culture.
|
| https://twitter.com/paulskallas/status/1546563161587089408
| https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96...
|
| Best way way I can think of to provide a tl;dr is that we live in
| a society where convergence towards the optimum is the goal. We
| have all this data to help us make these informed decisions.
| Companies (and people) feel a need, implicit or otherwise, to
| target the largest audience possible, which is just another way
| of saying that they're trying to appeal to the lowest common
| denominator.
|
| My personal favorite example of this is how recently remodeled
| homes, particularly the ones that are trying to be sold, all have
| the same sort of grayish "trendy" minimalist interior. Odds are,
| they were advised to make their home look this way because it's
| the most broadly-appealing home interior that exists out there,
| supported by "the data". If you make your home look like this
| then you'll have more buyers, or so the logic goes.
|
| Once you know about it though, you see it everywhere.
| pavlov wrote:
| Reminds me of the Parisian art critic who was appalled when they
| built a modernist colossus that destroyed the beautiful harmony
| of his home city. The rest of his life he would scrupulously
| choose walking routes to avoid seeing the monstrosity.
|
| The building in question was the Eiffel Tower.
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone thinks the Eiffel Tower is a masterpiece of
| beauty. More like a hyper-marketized symbol of Paris. And
| frankly the area would probably be nicer if it wasn't there at
| all.
| cdrini wrote:
| Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33896179
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ah, but now you've delved off into opinions. I'd have to say
| the article itself is just a gigantic opinion piece.
|
| Ugly is the wrong word. Conformity is. If you consider
| conformity ugly, you will see it as ugly, if you do not, it
| will not be ugly. It's all subjective.
| keiferski wrote:
| No, I don't think it's just "all subjective" or "that's
| just your opinion, man", but actually discussing aesthetic
| topics to a deeper level requires more expertise and has
| less immediate implications (than say, civil engineering)
| that people are just content to be intellectually lazy
| about it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| "Leave opinion on aesthetics to the experts"?
| keiferski wrote:
| That's what functionally happens, yes. If most people
| revert to an opinion of "well that's just your opinion,
| it's all entirely subjective," then the people driving
| _what actually gets valued_ are the ones that bother to
| educate themselves and be deemed as experts.
|
| To use an example: if a person in New York City said that
| "all the restaurants taste the same and it's all just
| subjective," would you buy a dining tour guide book from
| them? Or would you buy a book from someone that has made
| an effort to understand what makes a restaurant good or
| not?
| cryptonector wrote:
| What a straw man. No one who "is not an expert on taste"
| says all the restaurants taste the same and it's all just
| subjective". Well, ok, maybe people who literally can't
| taste (I know one such person), but the people who _can_
| taste don 't ever say anything like that.
|
| Most of us don't actually use restaurant guides, and we
| don't say "wow that was awesome" unironically when we
| didn't like it but the "experts" told us otherwise.
|
| Aesthetics is fairly subjective, yes.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Good is multi-axis measure.
|
| I have been to 'good' restaurants. Excellent food,
| immaculate plating, perfect service. _Immense cost_.
|
| This is why I'm heavily discounting your opinion here,
| because there seems to be a massive amount of axises that
| are being neglected that make these products 'good'.
|
| Energy use per product, general product acceptance to the
| massive to lower per unit cost, product fungibility are
| all metrics that can subtract from both subjective and in
| some cases objective beauty. You could have the most
| objectively beautiful object in the world, but if I can't
| have it because it's too difficult to manufacture in bulk
| or too expensive, then subjectively I think your product
| isn't that great at all.
| keiferski wrote:
| Of course good is a multi-axis measure. This is obvious.
| Do you really expect someone to write a full theory of
| aesthetics in a HN comment?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Maybe not a full theory, but why not flesh things out a
| bit here, or else link to your papers or blog posts on
| the matter? Or if you're not an expert on aesthetics,
| maybe link to the work of someone who is.
| Kukumber wrote:
| oh right, "you are not an artist or an engineer therefore
| you can't understand my biased opinion that prevails"
|
| "it's ugly" is a very compelling argumentation
|
| i think there is a difference between the Eiffel Tower
| and the random office building in the middle of Roma
| keiferski wrote:
| No? I didn't say that my opinion was right, just that
| most people aren't willing to do the work in order to
| have a deeper discussion on the topic, so they just
| revert to relativism.
|
| I also didn't say the Eiffel Tower was ugly, I said most
| people don't think it's an exemplar of beauty, even those
| that like it.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| Which is _a_ monstrosity.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| a* monstrosity
|
| Use "an" only if the following word starts with a vowel (with
| few exceptions) -> "The Eiffel Tower is an abomination".
| sbaiddn wrote:
| Right.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Technically "if it's pronounced as though starting with a
| vowel", so "an hour" or "an X-ray" but "a utility". For
| some acronyms both are possible: a/an FAQ.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't think most think of the Eiffel Tower as something
| beautiful.
|
| It's iconic and arguably the symbol of Paris, but it's not
| really something you would think of when thinking of
| architectural or functional beauty.
| cdrini wrote:
| Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33896179
| nemo44x wrote:
| > It's iconic and arguably the symbol of Paris, but it's not
| really something you would think of when thinking of
| architectural or functional beauty.
|
| It's an amazing structure and nothing like that was possible
| before. Only after the construction of it could people get a
| view of Paris never before possible.
|
| You should read Robert Hughes' book "The Shock of the New" or
| watch the series. I think it's online on Youtube. It begins
| with the Eiffel Tower as the starting point and centerpiece
| of modernism and works through to the modern day to see how
| art and architecture have evolved for better and worse.
|
| It may give you a new appreciation for the structure within
| the context of history.
| epolanski wrote:
| > It's an amazing structure and nothing like that was
| possible before.
|
| That doesn't make it beautiful but an engineering feat.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I mean, sure - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I
| think it's a beautiful structure. It has so much
| intellectually beauty as well as physical IMO. It's a
| perfect contrast to the rest of Paris.
| david927 wrote:
| The famous French author Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel
| Tower so much that he ate lunch exclusively in the restaurant
| there because "it was the place in Paris where you couldn't see
| the Eiffel Tower."
|
| It's beautiful in many way, certainly iconic and has
| grandfathered its way into our idea of Paris, but I understand
| Maupassant and I think if they built it today, I would feel the
| same way.
| eiffelthelang wrote:
| During the last election, a (arguably fringe) far-right
| candidate had in his platform the destruction of the Eiffel
| tower.
|
| It _is_ a modernist monstrosity.
| cdrini wrote:
| Wow, I'm blown away people here are confidently saying things
| like "most people don't think the Eiffel Tower is beautiful."
| Huh? Are you guys joking? Are these comments generated by GPT?
| It's beautiful because of its geometry. It's beautiful in the
| way it compliments the city. It's beautiful when it's lit up at
| night. What more do you want exactly?
|
| Who would have the gall to say something like "most people"
| don't think it's beautiful? People on hacker news really are
| opinionated about everything, aren't they.
| keiferski wrote:
| Instead of being outraged, I suggest you read the comments
| again. No one said it is ugly or that it isn't beautiful,
| just that it's not typically thought of as an example of "a
| beautiful thing." People think of it as a symbol of Paris,
| not an exemplar of beauty. _Especially_ people that live in
| Paris and see it everyday.
| rrreese wrote:
| A comment made two hours before yours literally calls it a
| monstrosity
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"say something like "most people" don't think it's
| beautiful?"
|
| Note quite, people _today_ see the Eiffel Tower as a world
| wonder and a symbol of France itself. But back in the late
| 1800 's many Parisians considered it gaudy and several
| prominent artists bitterly contested its construction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower
| sbaiddn wrote:
| Its a wrought steel truss in the shape of a basic geometric
| construction. Impressive for 19th century civil engineering.
| Perhaps. Perhaps not.
|
| Compare that to Notre Dame. Also really very tall, but with
| no iron skeleton, no continuum mechanics. Geometry, in fact,
| holds it together - an architect had no other tool at the
| time - but the basic shapes are subtle, and don't scream at
| you "I am a curve on the Cartesian plane"
| openplatypus wrote:
| If everything appears ugly to you, ask yourself:
|
| 1. Is it really? Or this is some weird sentiment towards things
| that passed? I prefer modern "ugly" architecture and "modern"
| medicine, then flamboyant, impractical and wasteful building
| accompanied by poor health; maybe we just recentred our
| attention? ... alternatively
|
| 2. you are depressed; and I don't mean it in a snark way;
| futility, greyness and ever present gloom can be signs that
| you're getting depressed.
| jona-f wrote:
| I would describe your second point as gaslighting. Tastes are
| different and many people dislike modern (and post-modern)
| architecture.
|
| Talking with architects about this, they told me that building
| differently today is too expensive, doesn't go well with
| industrialized construction.
|
| I argue that architecture is an academic shitshow. It's design
| for competition juries and not for the people using it. Which
| is btw very contrary to the initial ideas of Bauhaus, which is
| why i personally consider it a big failure, despite it's
| apparent success.
| openplatypus wrote:
| Tastes are different.
|
| The author could have written, some buildings are ugly. I
| don't like them.
|
| Yet, the author wrote, "everything" is ugly.
| MockObject wrote:
| The author is expressing his aesthetic judgement, so
| overliteral interpretations are really not applicable here.
| projektfu wrote:
| I disagree. In the post-postmodern period Architecture, as a
| whole, has been trying to better understand the needs of the
| users of the building and has been less about flashy design
| wins. New stadiums, for example, have been architected for
| flow, utility, and outdoor air conditioning, while trying to
| maintain a good look. New standalone business buildings are
| more oriented toward usefulness, accessibility, and comfort,
| than they are about making a statement. The proliferation of
| many lower-cost construction models (1+5, for example), show
| that practicality is important.
| jona-f wrote:
| Yes, they've being trying, but as far as i noticed failed,
| cause the underlying systemic problems haven't changed.
| Buildings are status symbols, designed top-down. Those
| deeper societal issues, like classism, have gotten even
| worse.
|
| "Outdoor air conditioning" sounds totally ridiculous and a
| quick search suggests it's just as bad as it sounds. There
| should be no world cup in Qatar to begin with.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Your binary only really allows for the author to like "modern"
| (which should really be called "modernism" to accentuate its
| aesthetic name), or be depressed. But they could a) think it's
| ugly and b) responsible for the sense of alienation or
| discontent. They might believe that the aesthetic makes life
| worse without their life being depressingly bad, for instance.
| openplatypus wrote:
| My binary response is to the absolutist tone of "everything"
| is ugly.
|
| Not everything is ugly. Some buildings are ugly. Some are not
| ugly, but simply cheap.
|
| I don't like a lot of stuff in my city. I am not calling it
| ugly.
| igammarays wrote:
| After spending some time living in Europe, I simply cannot go
| back to North America (except for the few areas built with Old
| World charm). There's something so comforting about the beauty of
| European and other traditional architectural styles.
| (Modern/Postmodern?) glass boxes feel jarringly cold, hostile,
| and alienating.
| zip1234 wrote:
| America is designed to be looked at while zooming by at 50 mph.
| Auto infrastructure is incredibly ugly and takes up a massive
| amount of places. If anyone has an example of non-ugly auto
| infrastructure I would love to see it.
| projektfu wrote:
| That usually only happens when it's buried. Near east
| Chicago, for example, or the result of the big dig in Boston.
|
| I wish that Atlanta would cover the downtown connector and
| make the city contiguous.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Those glass boxes aren't Postmordernist. They're mostly aligned
| with Modernist architecture. Postmordernist architecture is a
| response and rejection of Modernism, and exhibits eclectic and
| playful design features. Check out the Postmodernist
| architecture article on Wikipedia. You may be conflating the
| general antipathy towards a Postmodernist boogeyman with any
| sort of modernist, neoliberal design system.
| igammarays wrote:
| You're right, thanks for the correction. Without a formal
| training in the arts I don't know my terminology, I just have
| an amateur feel for what I hate and know some vaguely related
| terms. In that case I'm against both modernist and postmodern
| styles and prefer the Baroque? Darn I don't know, I just feel
| much more at home walking down the street in Warsaw than in
| NYC or Chicago.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| A lot of Postmodern architecture is pretty ugly too, and it
| is typical for people much prefer the older architectural
| styles found in Europe.
|
| Part of it is the fault of 20th and 21st century
| architecture, but also big changes in urban design and
| property development economics happened throughout the 20th
| century.
|
| I'm pretty on board with the idea that North American urban
| design and architecture is an abject failure, but lay the
| blame not so much with the architects but with greater
| forces of rapid post-war capitalist expansion and
| Neoliberal capitalist 'optimization'.
|
| NYC is not as nice as Warsaw in a lot of ways, but it's
| wildly better than most other USA cities.
| yunwal wrote:
| > A lot of Postmodern architecture is pretty ugly to
|
| Postmodern architecture can sometimes be an eyesore, but
| that's kind of the point. If you attempt to never offend
| anyone's sensibilities you get modern architecture and
| nothingness. Even if you changed modern architecture to
| mean art deco or neoclassical you'd get tired of it.
|
| So yeah, you might get things most consider eyesores
|
| https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/f.BSw.Y41JI35DZDLjslHg-
| -/Y...
|
| But if you ask a little kid whether they like that
| building, they might say yes. So you've created something
| at least _someone_ likes.
|
| I'll take seeing 10 eyesores and one extraordinary
| building any day over blandness.
| yunwal wrote:
| The problem is that people use post-modern ideas (e.g.
| there's no universal standard of beauty, might as well do the
| cheapest thing rather than optimize for beauty) to defend
| modern architecture.
| yboris wrote:
| A short essay that made me notice other people's mistakes when
| talking about _beauty_ (and numerous other topics):
|
| _2-Place and 1-Place Words_ by Eliezer Yudkowsky
|
| People use "beauty" as if it's a 1-place word (objective metric),
| rather than a 2-place word ("beautiful to entity X").
|
| Now anytime anyone says "X is best" I follow up with "for who?
| and in what context?"
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eDpPnT7wdBwWPGvo5/2-place-an...
| gowld wrote:
| helen___keller wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that a lot of modern architecture (in
| single family & small-to-mid multifamily developments) is
| essentially dictated by money: what sells the best (typically the
| design that maximizes square footage), what is cheapest to build,
| and what is capable of passing for a given state and
| municipalities zoning and building code.
|
| People shop by location, price, and square footage as their
| primary search criteria. Safe & bland architecture with no unique
| craftsmanship reflects the fact that these things are not
| relevant for the financing, construction & sale of most housing.
|
| Edit: a few other things to consider.
|
| 1. Our relationship with the outdoors has shifted considerably
| since the invention of modern heating and AC. This has
| implications on modern architecture.
|
| 2. Our relationship with our housing (namely, how many hours we
| spend in what parts of the house) has shifted immensely in the
| past century. This has vast implications on modern architecture
| and construction.
|
| 3. The average person's relationship with art and beauty has
| completely changed in just the past few decades. Consider a pre-
| war world with little-to-no television in the average household,
| where you yourself had to look in the world around you and decide
| what was beautiful; versus the modern world where you open your
| smartphone and scroll down an instagram timeline or a pinterest
| board (or watch a show on HGTV) and instantly have an idea of
| what's "expected" from a "good house". Mass media (including
| social media for the most part) has a homogenizing effect on
| culture.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 3. The magazine _Better Homes And Gardens_ was founded in 1922
| and still publishes. _McCall 's_ was founded in 1873 and ceased
| publication in 2002. There were other magazines that spent a
| lot of time on home decoration trends, as well - these are just
| two that come to mind because my mother subscribed to them in
| the seventies. A ton of those pre-war homes would have had that
| hanging around to show them current trends in home decoration.
| chis wrote:
| I think it's up to local governments to require buildings to
| have some semblance of aesthetics taken into consideration. In
| the olden times a lot of buildings were built BY the future
| residents who had a stake in making it look nice. But modern
| buildings are just built to spec by the cheapest bidder and
| target renters who, like you said, are basically just sorting
| apartments.com by price/sf.
|
| It's arguably a tragedy of the commons. The people who live
| there get maximum value for the money while everyone else has
| to look at a bland monstrosity every day.
| badpun wrote:
| I think the reason might be mechanisation and mass-production.
| Before that, everything was done by hand, so it wasn't that much
| more expensive to produce interesting architecture or say hand-
| crafted ornaments details on buildings. Right now, costs of that
| would be gigantic (which is shown in giant costs of renovation of
| historic buildings, which needs to be done using the older
| methods), compared to a standard boxy builds which can be done
| using prefabricated components. Beautiful buildings would be much
| more expensive than standard glass boxes, so for the most part we
| choose not to build them.
|
| Also, materials. Natural materials such as wood or stone feel so
| much nicer than concrete or glass.
| Renevith wrote:
| "Natural materials such as wood or stone feel so much nicer
| than concrete or glass."
|
| To you. But not to me, which is why I choose to live in a house
| with glass and metal as the primary aesthetic. But stating
| opinions as fact is a nice way to generate engagement,
| especially if they are unpopular, hence the article we're all
| discussing.
| grishka wrote:
| But then modern tech allows manufacturing things like ornaments
| at a fraction of their handmade cost. 3D printing and CNC help
| a lot with that.
| protoster wrote:
| Absolutely. There are beautiful things today as well, but
| people choose the ugly thing because of the cheaper cost.
| halpmeh wrote:
| From the industrial revolution to some time in the early-to-mid
| 20th century, materials were more expensive than labor. It made
| total sense to ornately decorate things as the cost was not
| much more than the material itself.
|
| Now labor is vastly more expensive than materials. Making this
| easy to build makes them way cheaper.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| Because truth is beautiful and atheism is ugly.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| People are intimidated by beauty, that's why. Most can emphasize
| more with ugliness.
| donatj wrote:
| There is a bank near my house that has a facade second floor. It
| makes no attempt to look real from any angle, not from the street
| nor the parking lot. You can see right through the oversized
| glassless windows into the sky, beyond that the entire thing is
| wavy in an unpleasant way. It doesn't even fit with the style of
| the rest of the building. My suspicion is it exists almost as a
| critique of the idea of facades? It's the ugliest thing I have
| ever seen.
|
| This is in my opinion the source of a lot of ugliness in our
| environment - reactionary design. Things designed not outright
| for function or purpose or hell even aesthetics. Things designed
| in reaction to previous trends. Soulless mocking critique.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| So, what is this person's idea of beauty? Ancient Greek/Roman
| architecture? French Second Empire style? Art Nouveau? People
| appreciate modern design because it's clean and simple, not gaudy
| or fussy.
| criddell wrote:
| Stewart Brand's book _How Buildings Learn_ helped me see the
| beauty in ugly structures.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| I'll check it out! I really enjoy buildings in the brutalist
| and post-modern styles from the seventies and eighties. Maybe
| that's just nostalgia.
| keiferski wrote:
| This is a huge question with dozens of answers, but I think the
| shortest, most concise one is this: culture has emphasized
| _novelty_ over _quality._ No one cares if you can demonstrate
| skill, _unless_ it 's in doing something new. Any list of
| celebrated architects and artists from the 1950s on will be
| comprised almost entirely of people that did something shocking
| or novel. There are many reasons as to why this happened, ranging
| from photography making it easy to create realistic images, to
| corporations having an interest in forced obsolescence.
|
| The way past this, I think, will basically come down to two
| things:
|
| 1. Respecting craftsmanship, which is ultimately about _quality_
| and reaching certain standards rather than being novel
|
| 2. Becoming comfortable with abundance and not basing value on
| scarcity. As in, we can all have beautiful things and we don't
| need to use rarity to determine if something is "artistically
| important." This has been the path of the art market (hence the
| huge price tags) and more recently NFTs, which to me are just a
| huge step in the wrong direction
| olliecornelia wrote:
| First that diatribe about car paint now this. The get-off-my-
| lawn-ification of HN is well under way.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Consumerism driven by individualism allowed everyone to be
| "masters" in aesthetic. Look at decoration in houses of 60' and
| 70'. Or fashion nowdays. Or selfnamed photographers on social
| media.
| jll29 wrote:
| No-one has captured this better IMHO than Kunstler:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7oJjWg8_Y .
| ryeights wrote:
| "Places to care about." Brilliant framing. Funny to think that
| 90% of built areas in the US could be nuked into dust without
| anything great being lost. All this destruction of natural
| habitat and beauty and for what? The founders of this country
| would be ashamed.
| 1auralynn wrote:
| When it comes to lighting, I've realized that a portion of the
| population (possibly the majority) prefers everything extremely
| brightly lit with overhead lights. I prefer soft warm lighting
| with many small lamps scattered around and lots of darker areas,
| but through experience I've learned that this makes some people
| super uncomfortable, especially those with vision issues.
| [deleted]
| danjoredd wrote:
| It really does feel that things become more ugly as time goes on.
| It feels like everything must look as utilitarian as possible,
| and that nobody thinks beauty means anything.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| I live in Paris, went to Wales this summer, found the relative
| lack of roadsigns very nice, came back to Paris, found the
| overabundance of roadsigns uglier than before, went to Prague,
| found the overabundance of signs, large roads and cars within the
| city ugly, came back to Paris, found it a bit prettier.
|
| Ugliness, envy and jealousy, inextricably mixed.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are a lot of demonstrably false factual claims in this
| article. I will just pick this one: that renters move more often
| than in the past. This is completely false. The Census CPS
| Geographic Mobility by Tenure table indicates that in 2021,
| renter-occupied households who moved in the past year stood at
| just 16% of all renter households. This figure stood at 34% in
| 1988 and almost monotonically declined since. Renter mobility
| stands at an all-time low. In fact, you can easily argue that it
| is the _lack_ of mobility, rather than hypermobility, that may be
| contributing to ugly architecture. Tenants without choices are
| unable to discriminate on aesthetic grounds.
|
| Subjectively, I also disagree with the implication that "perma-
| class of renters" is somehow bad. The author appears to have been
| poisoned by the distinctly anglo-american idea that occupying
| your own home is for some reason a good thing. In Vienna, only 7%
| of people occupying a home they also own. Everyone I know agrees
| that Vienna is superior in every respect, including architectural
| merit, to any American city.
| Tarucho wrote:
| Because is cheaper
| al2o3cr wrote:
| In the case of that page, the answer is "because somebody's
| setting line-height to 1 for the body copy and the paragraphs are
| Too Damn Long"
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Every time a "journalist" complains about 5-over-1s an angel gets
| its wings.
|
| Apartments should ONLY be Brooklyn brownstones or lofts, and the
| construction of anything new and vaguely similar to another
| building should be banned. Brutalism is the only approved
| architectural format.
| oliv__ wrote:
| I think things are ugly now because they are fake: made of fake,
| cheap materials.
|
| It's much harder to make an ugly cottage home with beautiful wood
| than it is with vinyl.
|
| Similarly, I'd say that music has become ugly because of autotune
| and the like.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Um, when I put drywall in my house I assure you it was 'real'
| certified drywall.
|
| Nothing is stopping you from making your house out whatever it
| is you consider real, well, other than you are not wealthy
| enough to actually afford it. There are 8 billion people on
| this planet and if each of them goes and cuts down the old
| growth trees to make their cottage we just have a deforested
| planet which is something much less beautiful than having a
| house with fiberboard siding. Or would you rather going to have
| 4 generations of your family living with you without modern
| conveniences like sewer, water, and power?
| 8jef wrote:
| Beauty, as ugliness, is only a matter of perspective, focus and
| point of view. Anything can be beautiful, everything can be ugly.
| You find something beautiful or ugly? Try to shift your focus to
| include its surrounding to various degrees, or do the opposite,
| zoom into it. You see? Most of us are deeply moved at how Earth
| is beautiful from space. Then, when you drill from the general to
| the particular, you might find places on the planet that are more
| or less attractive. Try this long enough, differently focusing on
| all things you see and hear and feel, from images to ideas,
| always moving around the subject, often changing angles, and you
| might start to see things for what they really are:
| simultaneously complex and simple, ugly and beautiful, all at the
| same time.
|
| The big lure was always to embrace one particular point of view
| as your own. THIS looks crazy stupid. THAT sounds amazingly
| beautiful. EVERYTHING seems so ugly. And so on... Then, one day
| you wake up and think the opposite. Beauty becomes ugly, and vice
| versa. It happens all the time, to everyone. Life can have this
| effect on the living.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's not only a matter of perspective, there seem to be
| interesting cross cultural universals to what is deemed
| beautiful.
|
| Almost no one thinks smeared feces on a door handle is
| beautiful.
| royaltheartist wrote:
| This feels less like it tells us anything about the world but
| more about how small the author's conception of it is. Reminds me
| of people who complain about how music is "bad these days" but
| they're only talking about what they hear on the radio and aren't
| really exploring what the landscape has to offer
|
| A lot of what gets created is for functional purposes, and it has
| always been that way. As time goes on, the functional stuff gets
| torn down and replaced and anything that's appealing or well-
| built gets to stay. This gives the impression that the past was
| full of ornate, well-constructed wonders. But is and always has
| been an illusion
|
| There were probably people 200, 300, 1000 years ago who thought
| "Everything is so ugly these days" or didn't care. It's not about
| what buildings look like, it's about how we live our lives
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| You're not wrong to an extent about the good stuff sticking
| around but I think you're missing the point. It's not like the
| aesthetics the author is complaining about were chosen for
| purpose like a farmer painting his barn red because red is
| cheap. The slice of the economic ladder from which the author
| cites his examples is mostly rich enough that small variations
| in cost or performance are not really a driver of styling
| trends. Widget designers and real estate developers are
| specifically choosing conformist blandness aesthetics on
| purpose, not simply tolerating them as a means to some other
| end.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > It's not like the aesthetics the author is complaining
| about were chosen for purpose like a farmer painting his barn
| red because red is cheap
|
| I would completely disagree. "Rich enough" is mostly
| meaningless, there are a 1000 different subsystems running
| under this that make a slight deviation in a product increase
| in price massively. From laws and regulations on consumer
| products and housing rules, to what gets shipped overseas in
| massive container ships.
|
| Go by a 'decent' wooden end table, it may cost you around
| $1000. Now go have a custom end table made to your
| specifications. Do not be surprised if it costs you an order
| of magnitude more and takes a year for an artisan to produce.
|
| Modern costs are low because of mass production. When you can
| create 5 grey SKUs that cover 98% of the market and mass
| produce thousands to millions of them all of a sudden looking
| at producing a 'weird red' SKU is going to eat into your
| profits considerably unless you can recoup that by charging a
| much higher cost for that product.
| yunwal wrote:
| I do woodworking and $1000 could get you a really nice
| artisan-made custom end table. Obviously depends on your
| specs but it's hard for me to think of any specs that would
| make it more unless you were specifically trying to make it
| extravagant (some rare wood, gold inlays, etc)
| pixl97 wrote:
| The scale still holds true. For an order of magnitude
| less, around $100 I can get a perfectly workable end
| table that doesn't look horrible but is rather generic.
|
| Honestly I meant to say dresser as they commonly start at
| $1kish for a decent one, but end table still works.
| carvking wrote:
| Please watch https://vimeo.com/549715999 Roger Scruton - Why
| Beauty Matters (2009)
| christkv wrote:
| If I could I would time-travel back and beat the shit out of Le
| Corbusier for the damage he did to the public space with his own
| buildings and all the other shit the inspired. When they one day
| are dynamited (being shoddily built) nobody will miss them.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Because Postmodernism poisoned everything to subvert everything
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_Dialectics
| green20 wrote:
| green21 wrote:
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| This made me laugh the most: To our right is a place that sells
| wiggly candles. Past that is a boutique liquor store whose
| chalkboard sign proclaims, in cheerleader handwriting, that the
| time is Wine O'Clock
|
| Sort of highlights how pathetic things have become
|
| I looked up the Blank St Coffee. What is sad is they just use
| automatic machines so they don't need baristas, so you are
| probably going to get mediocre coffee. Can anyone in NYC attest?
| Also $3.5 being the cheap option sounds nuts.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It is kind of hilarious when you think about what the French were
| capable of 1000 years ago: https://youtu.be/Jk3VsinLgvc
|
| We are utilitarian now, we aren't trying to say anything in
| particular with a building, so it's just a box for stuff and
| people.
| rr888 wrote:
| Its not just architecture. People dress much more casually as
| well, we've all seen the pictures of the plumbers in 3 piece
| suits but even for office professionals jeans and tshirts are
| normal now. I think people stop trying to impress others? Or its
| elitist?
| BrandonS113 wrote:
| I'm now visiting a brand new office building in London and it is
| stunning. Not minimalist, brutalist, ornate. And unique. And
| everybody who works in it seems to love it. I want to work there.
|
| What bugs me is how most new buildings are similar all across the
| world. 100 years ago, each city has a character unique to it.
| Barcelona was uniquely Barcelona. Copenhagen was uniquely
| Copenhagen. Now most new buildings look like the architects have
| one, small template library.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Globalization will result in monoculture after enough time has
| passed. That is a trade off.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| A meme was circulating last week showing dozens of sedans from
| multiple automakers and it highlighted just how similar they
| all looked. The meme was criticizing the notion that
| competition facilitates innovation. However I think people
| failed to take into account that cars have likely converged to
| a common design as a consequence of fuel economy and regulatory
| pressures. I wonder if similar pressures affect architecture
| and likewise result in the blandness we now notice.
| abyssin wrote:
| I know very little about the actual job of an architect, but
| I think new architectural design trends have a lot to do with
| the tools that are used to draw buildings. Being an architect
| used to require strong drawing and mental modelling
| abilities. Those two would have an impact on the aesthetics
| of the buildings.
|
| Another factor is the way we move around. When you walk, you
| have the time to see details. Do architects nowadays spend
| many hours walking in cities every week?
|
| Lastly, the cost of manual work probably had a big impact.
| Builders probably contributed a lot of the beauty that can be
| seen in old buildings, also because drawings used to be less
| precise.
| slyall wrote:
| Could you post a link?
| account-5 wrote:
| I don't know, it might just be me but if you're going to write an
| article (a really long one) bemoaning how everything is ugly you
| need to provide more than one picture. I want picture proof, not
| long descriptions that leave me to imagine. Pictures paint a
| thousand words and all that!
| pixl97 wrote:
| The problem with the word ugly is its completely an opinion.
| There is no right or wrong ugly.
|
| The author would have done much better to forego the word ugly
| and replace it with hyper conformity.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It's also rose colored glasses.
|
| Many of the surviving examples of historic architecture we
| consider classic today, were ugly or dilapidated mass
| architecture in their time. Ask someone in 1900 what they
| thought of a New York tenement or a Sears mail-order home,
| and they would look at you like you were insane for
| suggesting those characteristics now command seven-figure
| premiums.
|
| (What would've been the true beauties of those eras, the
| mansions, are mostly gone, mostly because they tended to be
| in high-value areas that would've been redeveloped in later
| generations because of said high value.)
| wizofaus wrote:
| Surely the opposite effect must also exist - that the
| historical buildings we see today are the ones that
| survived because they were considered worth keeping - you
| wouldn't expect the ugly/shoddily-built ones to survive.
| However given there are entire streets with attractive
| historical buildings in many towns and cities I'm not sure
| either theory explains much - there are virtually no
| streets I've seen anywhere in the world with almost
| entirely attractive modern buildings.
| yunwal wrote:
| I disagree. I think within a given context like "architecture
| in the neighborhood I live in", there's an objective
| component to beauty/ugliness. There are universal human needs
| and desires that are being deprived by bad modern
| architecture (being in touch with nature, feeling
| comfortable, human communication and expression).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Again, 'modern architecture' is the failure point of your
| argument, as in "This has changed and is only a modern
| problem" being the primary failing.
|
| In the past most architecture sucked, it has since been
| bulldozed and replaced by architecture that sucked. Why?
| Because architecture that sucks is generally cheap. I would
| say the past I would say architecture sucked even worse
| most of the time.
|
| I'm sure 40 years from now someone will say "Do you
| remember when we built everything like the Apple campus",
| and the answer to that should be "No, not at all, it was an
| extraordinary building at the time, but it was rare", and
| that is the same comparison to today.
| yunwal wrote:
| It's an attractive theory that only the prettiest
| buildings survive, but doesn't seem to be supported by
| the evidence. Photographs from the turn of the century
| reveal that there are simply fewer unattractive
| buildings.
|
| https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-
| survival-of...
|
| There's an interesting theory at the end that suggests
| maybe every generation sees it's own architecture as
| ugly, because it's more common, etc. This seems possible,
| but there's little evidence of it in the past, and it's
| strange that it doesn't happen as much with other
| aesthetic preferences (music, art, film). There are
| certainly some "born in the wrong generation" types, but
| it doesn't seem as common or to span generations like the
| aversion to modern architecture.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Ironically (to me), the one picture provided basically matches
| the color palette of the website.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Move to Venice, Italy, like I did. You will change your mind.
| avindroth wrote:
| Ironically this page is completely unreadable on the sidebar of
| my iPad, making the text ugly.
| switch007 wrote:
| Why is it the articles which would most benefit from pictures are
| the ones with the fewest?
| bnralt wrote:
| It even changes the name of the building it's criticizing to
| make it more difficult to find. After a search I located it,
| it's The Greenpoint (not "The Josh" as the article claims). You
| can look it up on Google maps, it's 21 India St, Brooklyn, NY
| 11222. It seems fine to me? Not particularly nice, but I'd take
| it over brutalism or international style buildings any day of
| the week.
|
| If anything, I'd say that modern buildings are a lot more
| pleasant than those that were being built in the 60's and 70's.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Perhaps this was for legal reasons. In the Bay Area there's a
| rash of similar-looking apartment buildings that all have
| names like 'The _something_ '. Some marketroid noticed that
| locals often substitute short nicknames for formal 'The Xyz
| Building' titles, so they could give the sense of a
| neighborhood by branding the apartment building with a cutesy
| nickname. One of these days they'll accidentally get it right
| and name one of these glass and steel cubes 'The Borg.'
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| actionfromafar wrote:
| And also, _is_ there a movie named "Army Soldier II" with Ryan
| Reynolds in it, or was I just supposed to understand an oblique
| reference to something else?
| nottorp wrote:
| It's not like Netflix productions are distinguishable from
| one another.
|
| But in this case I guess they didn't want to get sued.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| Maybe this piece is meant to be fictional, as though it was
| written in a possible near-future?
|
| Nothing shows up on IMDB or internet searches.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Not everything is ugly.
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41137685/2024-pagani-utop...
|
| Hyper cars like Pagani or Bugatti aren't cars. They are art. They
| are beautiful. Compare this to the 40 different car brands of
| white midsize suvs which all look exactly the same. Clear
| artistic difference.
|
| how many video games have absolutely breath taking art? Recently
| was watching jacksepticeye's god of war playthrough and omg it's
| beautiful.
|
| It's not that there is no aesthetics anymore. There's more art
| today than ever.
|
| For some reason the author has found some spots like his local
| architecture as ugly but seemingly also cant see the beauty. The
| article says more about the author than actual art.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| an article about aesthetics with no images...
| lancesells wrote:
| Except for the lobby art that isn't mentioned in the article.
| samsquire wrote:
| I don't reject goodness, rightness or truth. If you reject any of
| these things you receive ugliness.
|
| A building can be right - fit for purpose, beautiful.
| fullmoon wrote:
| Is this an Ayn Rand quote out of her novels? It sounds that way
| but I can't find it.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Also, where does the ugly truth come in.
| samsquire wrote:
| I know what you mean but I reject the idea of an ugly
| truth.
|
| I would reject an ugly truth being true but a false thing
| people accept as being true which is not necessarily true.
| If you truly reject anything not true good right it becomes
| easier to avoid degrading words or falling into despair.
|
| Said another way, the truth cannot be ugly. So there is no
| such thing as an ugly truth. Do you agree the truth is
| beautiful?
|
| I think this because true and truth is beautiful. And it
| cannot be assailed or degraded by ugly or it wouldn't be
| true.
|
| In the same way water wets things, the word ugly doesn't
| become true by juxtaposition to the word true.
|
| There must be a precedence to meaning and you must take
| your stand. Otherwise everything becomes mud and there is
| no purity.
|
| In other words, if you bring up an ugly truth I would say
| it was false and reject it as being not true.
|
| Light extinguishes darkness.
|
| Said another way, if something is an ugly truth then it is
| the ugliness that is ugly, not the truth. But I would
| reject it because I reject ugliness.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I can reject there is no ugly truth on a theoretical
| basis (though not a practical basis)
|
| Lets say you become omniscient and now you know that 7
| days from now the universe is going to end in a flash. I
| mean, that's not great in itself. You think to yourself,
| I should let everyone know so they can say their
| goodbyes, but when you do there is a vast amount of human
| suffering and violence. If you say nothing the world goes
| on as it does now until its demise.
|
| Is the truth beautiful in this theoretical case? I don't
| believe so, it doesn't give us anything really truly more
| actionable than we have now (you could die at any time
| for a multitude of reasons as it is). Of course this is a
| logical extreme and you can say that most of life is much
| more in the mud.
| samsquire wrote:
| Thank you for your reply and for your understanding of
| what I say.
|
| I would say there are 2 independent separate things: the
| circumstance or what you are using the word true to refer
| to. True is a property of what is but is separate word
| and meaning from what is
|
| What is can be ugly. But true the word is not. True is
| eternal and immune to badness
|
| True is what _Is truly_ , that isn't false. The what
| referant or circumstances are independent of the true.
|
| The true is not the same as the what. The what can
| potentially be outside the true. The what can be ugly.
|
| From the word "true" it doesn't refer to what is not true
| except by duality (opposite)
|
| The quality of true is beautiful and always good because
| it is what is and not what is false.
|
| It's not the property of true that is ugly, what is going
| on is independent of the true.
|
| Some thing bad going on is independent from the property
| of the property that some thing is going on. True refers
| to the absence of falseness.
|
| In other words, the externality of what is going on is
| going on is beautiful, separate and independent of the
| not good.
|
| Your scenario is unpleasant and not good but the scenario
| is independent from the idea you can be sure of the
| truth. Knowing you can be sure of the truth is beautiful
| even if the referant of the truth is ugly.
|
| True cannot be made wet by what it refers to.
|
| Said another way, why do people think ugly overrides the
| beauty of true rather than the other way round, true
| overrides the beauty of the ugly. It's a precedence
| thing.
| godshatter wrote:
| My grandparents on one side of the family had a beautiful house,
| with beautiful furniture, and one large room you were basically
| forbidden from entering unless on special occasions when they
| were hosting a formal get-together. You had to be careful about
| everything you touched. I hated it. Loved them, but hated going
| there.
|
| My other set of grandparents lived in a small house with a garden
| in back that they used mostly to feed themselves. Nothing
| matched, everything was old and decades out of date with respect
| to modern norms, some things had been repaired often. But it was
| lived in and comfortable and welcoming, and I loved it.
|
| I appreciate beautiful things but I don't want to live in a
| museum. My home is small, and nothing matches. I'm okay with
| this.
| timw4mail wrote:
| I miss Art Deco. At least to me, it seems like a flexible style
| that looks good, while not being purely ornamental.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| "I don't like the $CURRENT_STYLE".
| itsyaboi wrote:
| Yes
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Because we changed our view of what humans are.
|
| We used to think of humans as something special, with a special
| spark. "Created in the image of God" was the culturally-dominant
| statement of this, but the idea was much more culturally
| pervasive than among people who believed the Bible literally. We
| believed in the soul, or something like it.
|
| As a society, we no longer believe that. We believe that humans
| are purely material beings, arising purely by naturalistic means,
| with nothing more than very complicated natural processes. No
| soul, no mind that is anything separate from the brain. Bound by
| the laws of physics, which give rise to the laws of biochemistry,
| which give rise to the laws of neurology. Merely a complicated
| assembly of atoms, _and nothing more_.
|
| And as a result, art died and was replaced by something else.
|
| We used to think that there was such a thing as beauty, and that
| humans could create it. We don't think that anymore. Art now is
| what someone does deliberately with the intention of it being
| art, and nothing more.
|
| Everything is ugly because we no longer think that real beauty is
| possible.
| incogitomode wrote:
| Until a week ago I lived around the corner from the n+1 office
| and the buildings they're talking about. It's astounding how
| expensive the new developments are around there -- like,
| $8k/month 2-bed rentals -- and how terrible much of the new
| architecture is. It's a part of Greenpoint that has some of the
| most beautiful buildings in Brooklyn, most built in the late 18th
| and early 19th century. Which is all to say, I understand where
| the author is coming from and mostly agree.
|
| That said, there actually are some attractive buildings in the
| mix. The massive OMA development, Eagle+West, is grossly
| overpriced but also shows what some amount of creativity and care
| coupled with new building techniques and materials can offer.
| It's not perfect, but we probably have to build in new ways if we
| want to solve problems of homelessness and affordability --
| again, my example is not affordable, but I think that has more to
| do with the developers than the actual input costs.
|
| When you look at the beautiful old streets in Greenpoint you're
| seeing an investment of human labor and materials that is
| incomparable in today's terms. Those homes were built in a time
| when labor was cheap, and the people they were built for far
| wealthier relative to the labor pool. I just moved into a
| townhouse built in 1900 and when I hire a mason or plumber for
| repairs there's a good chance they earn more than I do -- and I'm
| a well-paid developer.
|
| This is all to say, I don't think there's anything fundamentally
| beautiful about the old -- survivor bias, lack of context, and
| aesthetic conditioning are all at play. Nor does the new have to
| be universally ugly. I've seen plenty of new, dense construction
| in northern Europe that is beautiful and affordable.
| ag8 wrote:
| Regardless of my thoughts on the content, this article is very
| beautifully written. The word choice is impeccable, and reads
| like a thoughtfully shot short film of the author's day.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Why would a property developer finish a new build with hardwood,
| stone, brass, etc when they can double their volume and return by
| building towers of cheaply-clad flammable doggy crates?
|
| It's a misallocation of incentives for what gets built these
| days.
|
| There's also a huge survivorship bias with old buildings that
| nobody ever seems to talk about, but that's a whole other
| thread...
| gooseyman wrote:
| I have often felt that we just don't take the time/money to build
| nice things anymore, but after gutting my house built in the
| 1890s, its clear that shotty construction and "cheap" existed
| back then as it does now. The stuff that doesn't last gets torn
| down, while the quality/ornate "lasts."
|
| My house was built fast, by people that were most likely employed
| in some relation to the port (working class). The house is
| standard balloon framing, I don't think whoever built it owned a
| plumb bob and nails are bent over on themselves every other
| board. It has a facade that is hard not to ignore, it's simple,
| and they built it one "section" at a time over several years when
| they had the money or were forced to out of necessity to make
| room for more family.
|
| And yet, not 10 minutes away are beautiful homes with ornate
| masonry and corner stones that read 1890, 1895, etc.
|
| To that end, you could say that my house is still standing
| because of the building materials they used (actual 2x4s from old
| growth forests, nails that are really more "spike" than nail, a
| lack of insulation allowing walls to breathe), but I think it was
| spared and maintained for its utility: it brought shelter to all
| those that lived there before and so it was maintained just
| enough.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of
| aesthetic unity we had
|
| that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the
| ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist
| surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism
|
| the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense
| of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur
| modernist impulse of pride (called innovation)
|
| recommended reading:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
|
| it is interesting to note that even individual aesthetic
| disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood
| with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has
| been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep
| questions of cultural unity lurk here...
| acchow wrote:
| I don't really follow what your point is.
|
| But, developers will build what maximizes profits. They are
| just answering to wallets. If it was mostly the ultra-wealthy
| purchasing real estate (as it mostly was pre-WW2), then the
| developers will build what the ultra-wealthy want to spend
| their money on.
|
| Post-WW2 saw the rise of the middle class and their ability to
| purchase homes. Especially with government-backed mortgages
| (FNMA, Freddie Mac, and etc). Most of the middle class would
| rather spend less on gorgeous architecture and get more square
| footage inside their home.
| zwkrt wrote:
| I'm interested in what the economic motivations were behind
| ornate buildings of old. I'm talking about the craftsmanship
| involved in intricately decorated buildings in urban cores,
| such as found in most of Europe and less baroquely in the
| art-deco buildings in the US. Surely at that time economic
| factors were at work too, and it is very expensive to have
| custom brick-work and gargoyles and copper accents, etc. At
| that time did we have a higher standard of what was passable
| as a public building? A pride in making something pleasing?
| Were these features actually not more expensive to create?
| fulltimeloser wrote:
| Modernism started and co-evolved with the industrial
| revolution, long, long before World War 1.
|
| Esthetics is a favorite topic for far right thinkers where the
| demise of civilization is caused by some art that confuse them.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Of course there was a process involved, the edwardian era was
| stripping down classicism and art nouveau was recognizably
| post-classical, but WWs1&2 (and the subsequent rebuilding of
| europe and build out of america) is where modern architecture
| took over.
|
| The earliest important modernist building from Gropius was
| Fagus, in 1911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_Factory
|
| Sullivan, sometimes considered an early modernist, was
| building buildings like this as late at 1889:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago)
|
| Birmingham UK is the birthplace of the industrial revolution,
| and as late at 1909 was building train stations that look
| like this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Moor_Street_railway.
| ..
|
| Surrendering the aesthetics that everyone save a small group
| of intellectuals, ideologues and capitalist sharpers likes to
| the right (and arrogantly dismissing us as intellectually
| unsophisticated) strikes me as an own-goal.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Yes, this top-comment is obviously wrong and mistaken if you
| know anything about aesthetics and architecture. The broken
| timelining of Modernist design is the most obvious error. I
| wouldn't expect HN to get this right though.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| No, it isn't.
|
| It isn't what is taught in school, but it is a reasonably
| well-informed opinion, as my sibling comments show.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Yes it is. I have an undergraduate in Architecture, and
| your comment reads as wildly incorrect.
|
| Checking out the book you link, I see this in Wikipedia:
|
| > The response to Wolfe's book from the architecture
| world was highly negative. Critics argued that, once
| again, Wolfe was writing on a topic he knew nothing about
| and had little insight to contribute to the conversation.
|
| No surprised. If you're going to critique Modernist
| architecture, at least understand that it started about
| 40 years before you say it did.
| galfarragem wrote:
| More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society
| (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need
| to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of
| industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the
| concrete box.
|
| Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture
| was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a
| minimalism of costs".
|
| From wikipedia[1]:
|
| "During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in
| La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural
| studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with
| the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of
| reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first
| discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret,
| the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but
| now wanted to use it in new ways."
|
| "Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union
| after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his
| architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect Konstantin
| Melnikov during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris,
| and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR
| pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition
| other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's
| invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his
| writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and
| interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office
| building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade
| unions."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I'm going to be a bastard and argue for the soviet take on
| large scale concrete construction.
|
| My personal favorite is the Russian Academy of Science
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Academy_of_Sciences
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Architecture has almost nothing to do with it...
|
| Hipodromo in Mexico City is one of the most beautiful
| neighborhoods in the world.
|
| Architecturally, it's a bunch of hideously ugly buildings.
| But there's trees and plants everywhere, and they're
| beautiful, and that's all you see.
|
| The reason everything is ugly is because we don't have trees
| and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking instead.
|
| There's tons of beautiful tree-lined streets in Chicago with
| ridiculously ugly houses. You don't notice the mismatched,
| horrible architecture. You just notice the trees & the birds
| & the squirrels.
|
| You don't have to be classical Paris to be beautiful. You
| just need plants and a neighborhood designed for people to
| live in - not cars to park in.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _The reason everything is ugly is because we don 't have
| trees and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking
| instead._
|
| I've spent a bunch of time on the 1940s.nyc site and the
| most striking difference between 1940s NYC and 2022 NYC is
| the lack of trees in 1940.
| trgn wrote:
| I think you're describing sense of closure, the public
| realm as an exterior room. Trees offer that for sure. But
| Bruges or Amsterdam have very few trees, and they feel calm
| and verdant as well. The houses are super simple. Simple
| facades, some windows properly spaced. There's nothing to
| it. Yet, it feels perfect.
|
| I'd agree that that is the most important part, the city
| must be a ballroom, and that architecture proper comes
| second. Thing is, we lost both though. No more beautiful
| architecture, but also a complete misunderstanding of how
| to build a harmonious public realm. We can only think cars.
| Parking lot for cars. Streets for cars. Buffer zones for
| the exhaust, noise, and danger of cars. It destroys all
| cohesion.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I'd agree it's possible to have a neighbourhood where most
| of houses aren't especially beautiful but the general
| layout, and in particular the placement and extent of
| greenery can lend a sense of overall beauty - I'd even say
| I live in such a suburb. But it would be far better still
| if the houses themselves had their own aesthetic appeal,
| and had been built to last hundreds of years. Plus greenery
| can only go so far when you're talking about larger
| buildings (4+ storeys). But yes, the dominance of cars in
| our towns and cities is almost certainly part of the
| problem - when you're rushing through a place at 70 or 80
| k/h who cares if it's ugly?
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| It's bizarre to blame communism here when we've seen this as
| a global phenomenon. It's an issue of neoliberal thinking in
| general, capitalism also acts to minimizes all costs the
| exact same way, just drive through any American highway exit
| and look at the uniformity of the architecture.
| [deleted]
| unity1001 wrote:
| > aesthetic unity
|
| Was it aesthetic unity, or was it aristocratic taste that was
| enforced in an uniform fashion upon everyone because the people
| did not have neither time nor money to care about aesthetics...
| throw33away wrote:
| I think new playgrounds are much better now than when I grew up
| in the 80s. The new ones in 80s did have some good things going
| for them but there is much more variety now and they look
| great.
| bombcar wrote:
| Playgrounds passed a point somewhere in the late 90s where
| suddenly it was cheap enough to manufacture quite interesting
| climbing things, and so you suddenly went from the basic
| swings + slide + weird steel tower thing to complex adventure
| sets.
|
| https://www.byoplayground.com/products/koala-keep for example
| red72 wrote:
| phkahler wrote:
| >> interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters
| like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with
| common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been
| singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since...
|
| I just assumed it's all about cost savings. Architecture has
| been affected by the race to the bottom as much as anything.
| trgn wrote:
| No. The race to the bottom doesn't explain the extreme
| rupture that happened in the 40s.
|
| Another thing that may play into it (beyond a psychological
| breakdown), that's we diverted spending on architecture to
| spending on maintenance of car infrastructure. The public
| realm is experience through a car, and as such, sensory
| details, sense of closure and safety, are irrelevant. Rather,
| what becomes relevant is asphalt, large easy to maintain
| buffer zones between car infrastructure and building.
| justinator wrote:
| Ha and yes: and why build beautiful things at all if all
| you're going to do is speed past it in a blur at 75mph? The
| futurists preoccupation with speed. I never thought of it
| like that.
| harha wrote:
| Misaligned incentives do their part too, from fixed rent for
| older buildings to energy efficiency standards not considering
| the energy used in rebuilding
| selectodude wrote:
| >It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
| of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human,
| and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the
| head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable
| in its expression, that _form ever follows function_. This is
| the law.
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| Louis Sullivan is quoted as saying this in 1896, prior to any
| world wars. I think you can blame architecture being reduced to
| the sum of its usefulness to our friends in Chicago, who are
| far more worried about function over aesthetic. Ludwig Mies van
| der Rohe decided "less is more" in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright.
| John Root. Daniel Burnham. This continues today with the
| premiere skyscrapers in the middle east and Asia being designed
| by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings and Merril. It's too cold to care
| what you look like.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| That was certainly part of it, as was the industrial
| revolution, but consider the auditorium building built by
| sullivan in 1889:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago)
|
| There is still a strong connection with the historical
| aesthetics in it. The lead up to WW1, in the edwardian era,
| featured a move towards stripped down classicism, but the
| real break in my mind happened during WW1/2, and particularly
| post WW2.
| acabal wrote:
| I think that is factually wrong. Chicago was building
| beautiful, ornamented buildings well into the 40s. Burnham &
| Root - your examples of "less is more"? - are in fact masters
| of beaux arts. Burnham designed the Railway Exchange[1] in
| 1903 and Union Station[2] in 1909. The Board of Trade[3], a
| masterpiece of ornamental art deco inside and out, was built
| in 1930. There are countless other examples.
|
| In fact, Chicago didn't descend into ugly modernity until
| well into the 50s and 60s, when Mies van der Rohe started
| erecting generic black monoliths like Federal Plaza[4]. But
| he had nothing to do with Burnham & Root, or Graham Anderson
| Probst & White, the two major influences in Chicago
| architecture up through the 1930s and both producing highly
| ornamented and humanist buildings their entire careers.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(
| Chi...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/medi
| a/F...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Buil
| din...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_Un
| ite...
| danans wrote:
| > World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of
| aesthetic unity we had
|
| Who is "we"?
|
| > form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly
| unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of
| cultural unity lurk here...
|
| Again, cultural unity amongst whom? At best this is ambiguous,
| at worst it sounds like a dog whistle for a return to the
| aesthetics that accompanied the monarchist era.
|
| There are real reasons that aesthetics evolve. For one thing,
| the hyper detailed and biological shapes and themes of
| classical aesthetics require a lot of poor, skilled, artisanal
| laborers, which is why they mostly appear on the buildings of
| the elite like monarchs.
|
| Regular people during those eras lived in decidedly plainer
| homes, whose aesthetic charm was mostly a function of their
| simple shapes and materials.
|
| That started to shift with mass production of decorative
| elements. The ability to mass produce what were once expensive
| decorative elements eventually resulted in their becoming passe
| and kitsch.
|
| Those trends are as much responsible for the aesthetic shifts
| as the traumas of the world wars.
| majormajor wrote:
| What does "cultural unity" that you drop in at the end have to
| do with it? Much of the blandness of recent stuff is bad in
| very consistent ways already.
|
| Clearly you and I disagree, for instance, on if victorian
| houses can be aesthetically pleasing on their own, but would
| you rather have a street full of plywood boxes or would you
| rather have my victorian-styled house sitting next to your
| [whatever] and someone else's [whatever]? I'd find that great,
| and much more interesting than a street full of near-identical
| ones.
|
| (But in practice - even without "cultural unity" - that isn't
| what most new development in the US produces today - rather,
| you have a block-or-larger development of a bunch of near-
| identical [something]-esque generic builds. Unity achieved!
| Aesthetic appeal? Maybe not so much...)
| bombcar wrote:
| That's a big part of what people don't realize - city centers
| and old neighborhoods will have houses of vastly different
| ages (my town's center has houses that were built this year
| next to houses that are almost 200 years old).
|
| But most of the houses in America aren't those. They're in
| developments of different ages, and the houses in those
| developments look roughly the same. You might notice some
| differences in the very old 40s developments, because of 80
| years of additions and remodeling, but most of the houses
| will have survived and few will have been rebuilt.
|
| When a city builds up slowly, you get many different things
| mixed together, and that is more interesting.
| ericmay wrote:
| To latch on to this great post there are a couple of other
| worthwhile discussion points:
|
| We're _still_ in a nuclear war mental model. We can 't build
| beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We
| still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War
| II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.
|
| World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's
| why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that
| blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like
| architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted
| into the present day where we build very weird, stressful
| objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are
| incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is
| very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and
| call it art.
|
| I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what
| we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and
| temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that
| either the environmental movement or our desire to become a
| space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our
| species.
|
| There's also no point in building a very beautiful building
| that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX
| if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe
| Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have
| been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to
| change their location priorities and invest in their current
| homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were
| constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs
| and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible.
| But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via
| new offices, garage gyms, etc.
|
| I'm _really_ disappointed in our financial overlords who haven
| 't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in
| the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural
| garbage.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the things any tour of London will talk about is how
| up to his eyeballs in work Christopher Wren was after the
| London Fire. His concession to get more work done for
| everyone lining up for a new cathedral was that he wouldn't
| build you a bell tower. Most (all?) of the bell towers on his
| post-fire churches were added on later in his life once
| things calmed down.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| How is it that America can still be traumatised from the
| world wars architecturally but europe is not? I don't really
| buy the argument that america builds badly because of fear of
| destruction. It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian
| culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that
| anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits
| while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out
| of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade.
|
| I don't think the ugliness is anything philosophical either.
| We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education
| system that never exposes people to art or architecture.
| We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country
| people who think that money = culture.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| > Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who
| think that money = culture
|
| I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of
| person exists, "parvenu."
| rob74 wrote:
| I'm in Europe (in Germany to be more precise), but believe
| you me, new buildings that I would describe as "beautiful"
| are few and far between here too. I think most of it is due
| to what I would call cookie cutter mentality. For most
| architects, a building is just a job. They don't realize
| that even the most unassuming building is something that
| may be used for 100 years and more, that will influence the
| lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it
| and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse), and
| deserves to be treated as such.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| There are road bridges I pass in the UK where I think,
| wow that is really nice. These aren't big things, but
| they are beautifully designed non the less. They were of
| course built many years ago.
|
| I do wonder if there is a bit of survivorship bias here.
| The pretty objects survive, the ugly ones do not. Though
| there are also changes in taste. In the UK people today
| like the rows or terraced houses. They were built to be
| the cheapest possible dwellings, but the style is now
| popular.
| gffrd wrote:
| > even the most unassuming building [...] will influence
| the lives of thousands of people (if only because they
| see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or
| worse)
|
| This bears repeating.
|
| The amount of people who have to contend with a building
| will always far outnumber the number of people who
| inhabit or profit from the building.
|
| How should we build, knowing that?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| this makes architecture particularly important, in a way
| that other forms of art is not
|
| painters are free to create ugly works of art all they
| like, to a first order of appoximation we are in a
| position to ignore them
|
| not so with the built environment
|
| a long conversation...
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Architects certainly realise that a building is more than
| just a job but they also get pulled along in the strife
| for change for change's sake since any architect who just
| repeats or refines whatever has been done before is
| unlikely to find him- or herself chosen by the top
| agencies.
|
| Have a look at where architects live and compare it to
| what they design. You'll find that many if not most -
| architects or otherwise - prefer to live in classical
| buildings which in nothing resemble the concrete-glass-
| steel(-wood) style of modern architecture. There are
| exceptions but they are in the minority, at least among
| the architects I know.
| ozim wrote:
| I love people nagging about architecture of buildings
| that they are not paying for.
|
| I also disagree that most buildings will or should be
| used for 100 years.
|
| I am quite of a fan of one generational building. Mostly
| because a lot of people will move around anyway. Unless
| you are really wealthy family that can afford to stay in
| place for generations.
|
| Well it is cheaper to stay for generations in some
| village than in city center.
|
| But most kids will probably move to the city anyway.
|
| So building something fancy is in my opinion waste of
| resources and most likely having bad impact on
| environment.
|
| Building something that can be easily replaced- even if
| not as nice - has the advantage.
| goto11 wrote:
| I think architects are certainly aware of the importance
| of architecture, and most would love to make beautiful
| quality architecture. But in the end architects are hired
| by someone who decide the budget, and cookie-cutter is
| just cheaper.
| mc32 wrote:
| It seems the options are mostly at the extremes. Cookie
| cutter and Statement architecture, but maybe not much in
| the middle.
| atmosx wrote:
| Most buildings in Greece are build by civil engineers.
| Architects are not needed and rarely involved. The result
| is very small houses with many rooms and "spaces" but all
| very small and ugly. For example, it's common to have 3
| bedroom in 120m2.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| Wait, since when is 120m2 considered small for 3
| bedrooms? That's quite a large apartment.
| Oxidation wrote:
| Europe has been building modernist and post-modernist
| monstrosities gleefully for 80 years.
|
| Everything is either an aggressively ugly concrete
| bunker[1], a generic cubish cement or brick and glass
| mishmash[2] or a glass and steel monolith, maybe with extra
| facets[3].
|
| You just have to look at what the old Imperial Institute[4]
| was replaced with[5] and the charmless glass box they
| plugged onto it later[6].
|
| Nearly every building that has been modified this century
| has gotten unashamedly uglier. Even cathedrals grow tumors.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall
|
| [2]: basically any mid rise residential which can be like
| this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-
| rise_flats,_Turv... to more recent variations on https://co
| mmons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartme...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard
|
| [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_fron
| t_Imp...
|
| [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Build
| ing,_...
|
| [6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_Colleg
| e_Lon...
| oneoff786 wrote:
| > We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything
| might become old.
|
| > Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost
|
| It's really just the second. No need for anything else
| actionablefiber wrote:
| I've got to think a utilitarian culture would say something
| like "huh, maybe we should build homes that are easily
| served by transit." But American culture is much more
| strongly opposed to this than most those in most other
| countries.
| kodyo wrote:
| One thing you notice if you've been in an airplane is
| that there's a lot of room to spread out if people want
| to.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| What people want is of far less moment than what real-
| estate agents, collectively, want. They drive local
| government and planning almost everywhere in the US, to
| the exclusion of almost everyone else.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| If you want to spread out you can do it without robbing
| the people who didn't to pay for your roads and
| utilities, and then banning them from building mid rise
| or transit.
| renewiltord wrote:
| As they should, but a thing that needs planning maps and
| isn't visible from an airplane is that those who don't
| want to spread out can't not spread out.
|
| So the freedom is one-way.
|
| Example: almost all of SF bans building apartments
| actionablefiber wrote:
| And then those people will want things like "electricity"
| and "a network of wide paved roads" and "Internet" and
| "drinking water" and "sewage" and "timely package
| delivery to their front door" and "big box stores with
| parking lots the size of two city blocks" - and those
| things at that density have absolutely terrible unit
| economics and environmental externalities.
|
| I frequently see people complain about how traffic is so
| bad, gas prices are so high, their local drivers are
| insane, and how dare they have to pay tolls and parking
| fees. Wow, I wish there were some form of spatial
| displacement that didn't involve any of that!
| bombcar wrote:
| Heh everything you mention there is available in
| thousands upon thousands of small towns across the US -
| basically anywhere there's a Walmart that isn't a city.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost,
| so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and
| fake bricks glued on the fascade.
|
| I think claiming that building things to a budget is some
| kind of unsophisticated Nouveau riche mentality is
| overlooking the experience of the vast majority of people.
| The US median _household_ income (usually two people) is
| $78,075. The majority of people don 't have the resources
| to care about satisfying your aesthetic requirements.
|
| Plywood and vinyl and 2x4s are inexpensive and good enough,
| a combination that is generally exactly the optimal
| solution when you're considering personal survival.
| Sophistication is a luxury that doesn't come for free.
| rglullis wrote:
| The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the
| materials. It's the _developer_ that is trying to cut as
| much as possible, because this means he gets increased
| profit margins.
| baremetal wrote:
| >The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the
| materials.
|
| In this environment? Citation needed. Building materials
| of all sorts are difficult to source, often with long
| lead times, and are multiples of what they were a few
| years ago. Labor has gone up as well. Builders are lucky
| to get 20% margins.
| rglullis wrote:
| > In this environment?
|
| It doesn't matter the environment, when we are talking
| about margins. Increased costs to the builder are passed
| along to the end customer.
|
| > Labor has gone up as well.
|
| Which makes any possible savings in materials contribute
| even more interesting as a way to increase the margin.
| trgn wrote:
| > We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything
| might become old.
|
| Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of
| beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are
| shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses
| all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings.
| It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At
| the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was
| an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an
| anti-establishment fervor after WW1.
|
| Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that
| clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty
| and comfort.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old"
| architecture.
|
| Sure, there are places like this. Desirable old
| neighborhoods with interesting houses and walkable
| infrastructure. But those are mostly from about 100 years
| ago or more. What's been happening more recently?
| philwelch wrote:
| > Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America
| that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of
| beauty and comfort.
|
| An unenlightened idiot only operates on the level of
| seeing which things are beautiful and which things are
| ugly. It requires an intelligent, educated person to get
| involved in sophisticated games of signaling and
| countersignaling, like pretending to like ugly things in
| order to seem more sophisticated than unenlightened
| idiots.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of
| beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1
|
| Your comment shows the difference between American "old"
| and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live
| in homes far older than that.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said
| of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have
| furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been
| through more wars than this".
|
| She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to
| English for my local friends though!
| chasd00 wrote:
| > My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and
| said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. ...
|
| heh what was she expecting? It's an old mission built on
| the frontier eventually used by the military for storage
| and barracks. It effectively was a warehouse. The
| building isn't the reason why it's historic, what
| happened there is what's important.
| mikestew wrote:
| The "ugly $NATIONALITY" trope goes both ways, and isn't
| just for Americans visiting other countries. I don't know
| why tourists think it's a competition.
| treis wrote:
| It's an accurate critique though. The Alamo is up at the
| top in the competition for World's most disappointing
| tourist destination.
| jonasdegendt wrote:
| Yes but how many people in Europe actually live in houses
| older than two centuries (about when American immigration
| really popped off, so let's arbitrarily pick then)? It's
| a significant minority.
|
| I live in a mid sized European city with a city center
| containing buildings that go back to the 12th century,
| but the house I grew up in was built in 1890. It's one of
| the older houses on the street too, and pretty
| uninspiring to be honest. The place I live in now, very
| near downtown, is like 20 years old.
|
| Sure, most American homes are probably less than 50 years
| old, but on the scale of a couple hundred of years, does
| that make Europe that much more sophisticated and
| "cultured", generally speaking?
| the_third_wave wrote:
| We do, in a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside.
| A large log-house construction, the building was first
| erected somewhere in the late 1600's/early 1700's on the
| other side of the hill. It was moved to its current
| location during the land reform of 1823-1827 when farmers
| moved out to the land they worked, before that they each
| worked several small strips of land spread around the
| hamlet they inhabited.
| dekhn wrote:
| American old is as old as the people who have lived here-
| there are still signs of the native americans who lived
| here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings
| in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs
| of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't
| killed almost all the natives, some of those locations
| may still have people living in them.
| hinkley wrote:
| "The difference between a Brit and an American is that
| the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American
| thinks 100 years is a long time."
| moloch-hai wrote:
| "Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from
| actually-old designs.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Was the GP talking about the US? Because all of it is
| applicable to all over the world.
| nemo44x wrote:
| New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl
| casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and
| disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that
| look like they could survive a bombing, but they're
| actually fragile and cheap buildings.
|
| > building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake
| bricks glued on the fascade
|
| A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality
| construction is still available but you pay for it.
| Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive,
| plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end
| versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A
| modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy
| efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you
| can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in
| certain areas!) but you don't have to.
|
| > We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an
| education system that never exposes people to art or
| architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-
| sophisticated country people who think that money = culture
|
| What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven
| around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all
| familiar with the various styles of different periods?
| bombcar wrote:
| $10m might be getting into actually architected houses,
| but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk.
|
| It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it:
| https://mcmansionhell.com
|
| It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom
| house designed and built, but the only people who bother
| are people who are certain they'll be in an area for
| quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's
| house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each
| one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so
| everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an
| existing one, which is usually just a developer house
| from a decade or more ago.
|
| I mean anyone can order something from
| https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have
| some kind of a style.
|
| But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >https://mcmansionhell.com
|
| Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at
| this.
| atmosx wrote:
| Europe has unmatched heritage, but I would argue the modern
| buildings in Italy suffer from the same problems described
| in the article. There is an Italo-French author called
| Phillipe Daverio, art critique but in reality polymath, who
| has discussed these problems in Italy at length.
| carapace wrote:
| > How is it that America can still be traumatised from the
| world wars architecturally but europe is not?
|
| America is young, Europe is old.
| nine_k wrote:
| USA is nearly 250 years old. Most European _states_ are
| younger, even though European peoples and cultures are
| indeed old. Italy is young, Rome is old.
| jay00 wrote:
| Italy is old. It was founded in 7 bc by Augustus: https:/
| /it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regioni_dell%27Italia_augustea...
|
| Sure it unified again only in the 19th century, but it
| has had a great degree of cultural union throughout its
| entire history. It is actually one of the most
| homogeneous countries in terms of language, religion and
| culture. Italians like to think otherwise for some
| reason. Sorry for the digression!
| jaclaz wrote:
| As an Italian, I would like to learn how you measured the
| level of homogeneity of language and culture (on religion
| I agree with you).
|
| The differences in language and in culture were
| definitely reduced only in very recent years AFAIK, and
| still remain noticeable.
|
| About language, you have to consider how many Italians
| are (still today) effectively bi-lingual, Italian and
| local dialect, with the latter ranging from very similar
| to very different from Italian.
| OJFord wrote:
| My European _house_ is older.
| nine_k wrote:
| Indeed. There are many houses in Europe that survived 3-4
| different states claiming the land on which they stand.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well, I live in England, so unless we count devolution
| (of some powers in other UK constituents) or changes of
| royal household, just the one in my case ;)
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| England is pretty stable. Some places on the continent,
| not so much, esprcially to the east and south of modern
| Germany.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Side question - always been curious. Surely these houses
| were not designed for plumbing, electrical, efficient
| insulation, etc. Do they just bodge these things onto the
| outside of walls, or how does that work?
| bombcar wrote:
| Many of them are basically not insulated; the vast
| majority of "old Europe" is in more temperate climates
| for obvious reasons. And in the colder areas, you have
| the immense thermal mass of brick/stone buildings.
| Sealing air gaps provides some help.
|
| Plumbing and electrical is "simpler" to run than it may
| seem, but it does result in unexpected locations for
| bathrooms, etc, as those were often added wherever they
| could fit them in.
|
| Remember that given the population growth, the vast
| majority of the people living in Europe are not living in
| 300+ year old buildings.
| OJFord wrote:
| Mixed, but sometimes there's trunking on walls yes. I
| have a little bit of that (for something disused
| actually, plan to remove, I've not long moved in) but
| it's mostly under floorboards. (There are also would-be
| exposed pipes in the kitchen, hidden behind counters, I
| believe - but they probably would have done that
| anywhere, that's a relatively modern extension.)
|
| Insulation is a more complicated topic - if you're going
| to do it you need to do it differently, since modern new-
| builds and modern insulation is designed around making
| everything air & water tight, which will make an old
| house very damp and rotten (which will lead to
| woodworm/boring beetle) - the structure needs to
| 'breath'.
| Veen wrote:
| I've lived in a couple of houses built in the mid 1700s
| with parts even older than that. They were cob cottages,
| one with a thatched roof, so very thick walls instead of
| insulation. Plumbing and electrics were just added over
| the years. Windows were single glazed, so not very
| efficient. But pretty comfortable nevertheless, provided
| you remember to duck when going under beams. Houses this
| old are not unusual where I live in Devon, but most are
| more recent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We
| have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might
| become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while
| minimizing cost,
|
| Yeah, I think this is more the real reason. Nothing is
| intended to last. Shopping centers come and go -
| restaurants get built and then torn down and replaced 10
| years later with some other restaurant building (actual
| example in my neighborhood - why didn't they just reuse the
| original restaurant building?), the old Montgomery Wards
| was torn down to build a Home Depot and a Chuck E Cheese.
| None of this has any permanency.
| bombcar wrote:
| Commercial buildings in the US are incredibly cheap
| boxes, and knocking an old one down and rebuilding to
| spec is how the land-owners get new leases.
|
| The companies that DON'T knock down are always a bit
| cheap.
| ericmay wrote:
| > How is it that America can still be traumatised from the
| world wars architecturally but europe is not?
|
| Europe is too, it's just that a lot of the older things
| survived. You can see brutalist and similar architecture
| that sprang up in the Soviet bloc. I don't think Europeans
| are that much more "sophisticated" than Americans or anyone
| else. It's more of an inheritance by happenstance.
|
| Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-
| only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and
| mass-manufactured homes like America did.
|
| The factors influencing aren't quite the same. Amsterdam is
| a popular case [1]
|
| I generally agree with your post, though. The caveat is
| that it's less about capitalism and more about lack of
| ability to make choices in the market (lack of capitalism
| and markets). You can't anywhere in America choose a new
| home that's built in a walkable neighborhood. It's simply
| not for sale (new). You can only buy existing homes in
| neighborhoods that survived demolition after the 1920s, and
| of course those are the most expensive homes by median in
| the country because of a lack of additional supply.
|
| [1]https://exploring-and-observing-
| cities.org/2016/01/11/amster...
| rahen wrote:
| > Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build
| car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized
| and mass-manufactured homes like America did.
|
| Western Europe had the wealth to, it just refused,
| sometimes with mass protests. A good example is Amsterdam
| Jokinen Plan.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan
| soco wrote:
| And Western Europe had that guy called Le Corbusier with
| his ideas about ideal cities where utilitarian and
| ugliness was the entire strategy - just because. As
| ridiculous it might sound, just go to Zurich and you'll
| see his hideous legacy everywhere: no new building is
| anything else than a gray rectangle, even the brand new
| building of the art museum. It might be garbage but it's
| our garbage (Swiss motto)
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| What if "beautiful buildings" are simply too expensive to
| build nowdays and there are cheaper alternatives that are
| functional, yet look sterile and boring? There is a reason
| almost nobody builds brick mansions anymore.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I used to have to deal with some Brutalist structures.
| Ghastly things, look like they were built by some kind of
| enormous alien wasp-like creatures that spit out a paste of
| concrete. Unfriendly interiors. Stairwells almost
| deliberately vertiginous. Floors with the warmth and charm of
| a Detroit loading dock. A building which does not learn, its
| unfortunate inhabitants must adapt to _it_.
| bnralt wrote:
| > A building which does not learn, its unfortunate
| inhabitants must adapt to it.
|
| That's one of the most interesting and depressing parts of
| post-WW2 architecture (it's present in certain "high
| culture" architecture before, but not as ubiquitous). It
| seems narcissistic, entirely focused on what the architect
| thought would look cool, and completely detached from the
| individuals who would actually be using the space.
|
| There's a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building near hear, and
| the usage of space is simply terrible. It's only a few
| stories tall, and you have to either wait a long time for
| the slow and unpleasant elevators to arrive, or rummage
| around several sets of doors behind them to find the hidden
| stairs. There's another "urban renewal project" nearby
| designed by I.M. Pei, and it's a huge deadzone in the
| middle of a bustling area. It feels almost like finding a
| dead city from a Lovecraft story - you have these empty
| huge expanses of concrete that seem much too large for
| humans. Places where people would congregate, like retail,
| is deliberately placed underground and away from the road,
| making the whole area feel abandoned.
|
| Say what you will about modern architecture, but I find it
| much more pleasant than the stuff that was coming out post-
| war.
| soco wrote:
| It's one thing to decide for cool instead of beautiful
| (or useful) but a whole another thing to get paid for it.
| Those architects won a contest, right? One the premise
| of... what? We can build the ugliest, yay? Humans are
| just details? What exactly is the selling point of
| brutalism for a communal living area? You want to design
| your own bunker, be my guest. But something paid by the
| public should serve the public, not be a practical joke
| on the citizens. Yet another failure of the local
| authorities, move on...
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Steward Brand, "How Buildings Learn".
|
| https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-buildings-learn-what-
| happen...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of
| what we are building for (as opposed to constructing
| buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods).
|
| We are building for the shareholders and the market. They are
| our new gods.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I know to each his own, but I love the aesthetic of the
| Boston City Hall, and while not fully brutalist, a lot of
| really cool and abstract designs came from brutalism. My
| favorite college campuses I've been to have fully embraced
| the brutal with bizarre overhangs, odd shapes, posts, etc.
|
| The ugliest campuses to me are either the ones that create a
| faux old world feel or just opt for business park chic.
|
| Same goes for neighborhoods. I love seeing neighborhoods from
| the 60s or 70s that took a more brutalist/abstract
| inspiration. Large windows, backless stairs, conversation
| pits, etc.
|
| To me it looks a whole lot nicer than modern home
| construction trying to mix southern porches with Victorian
| styles, all on top of a sears foundation.
| nine_k wrote:
| I can't speak about Austin, TX, but here in NYC a number of
| aesthetically pleasing buildings have been built in last,
| say, 30 years. Even asymmetric ones, like
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Spruce_Street>, look great;
| I'm saying so as someone who used to see downtown Manhattan
| every day during commute. (One thing I miss after switching
| to WFH.)
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| That might be a very subjective opinion. Personally, I find
| the weird creases on that building disconcerting and
| unpleasant to look at.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, that's ... weird. But then again (in my opinion)
| all skyscrapers look like crap and only become "iconic"
| by being there for a long time and people get used to
| them.
| version_five wrote:
| Two random comments:
|
| 1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings
| were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are
| usually the most interesting thing in a city core.
|
| 2. > Even their own houses typically look like architectural
| garbage.
|
| Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the
| "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for
| who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of
| stone veneer
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Here's the secret to this thread.
|
| Every "adult" generation always hates 50-100 year old
| architecture, because that was what was slightly old and
| starting to show its age when they were kids.
|
| Gen-X/Millenials associate brutalism with non-renovated
| stuffy classrooms, empty downtown office buildings, and
| dirty public plazas.
|
| Then a bunch get torn down (usually the lowest effort
| versions) and people adaptively re-use the best ones and
| everyone remembers the original intent of the style and
| falls in love with it again.
|
| Seriously, people in the 60's thought Victorian homes were
| a _blight_ on San Francisco.
| catiopatio wrote:
| It seems more likely that brutalist architecture is
| uniquely terrible, and the ascendant architects of the
| 1960s simply had horrific taste.
|
| If anything, architecture seems to have been almost
| entirely captured by the avant-garde; people more
| interested in "new and different" than "classic and
| beautiful".
|
| I don't think modern audiences are suddenly falling in
| love with brutalist architecture; even the best examples
| look like dystopian-future prisons or mental hospitals.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I really implore you to seek out the articles where
| people promoting modernism used nearly identical language
| to you when describing Victorian buildings.
|
| It's hard to see the air when it's the environment we've
| lived in our entire lives.
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/cm/lb/4285602/data/manifesto-of-
| futur...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >It seems more likely that brutalist architecture is
| uniquely terrible
|
| Interesting, it seems to me that brutalist architecture
| is actually pretty appealing aesthetically.
|
| I might go so far as to say that objective beauty and
| taste simply does not exist and anyone claiming that it
| does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.
| svieira wrote:
| > anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it
| very hard yet.
|
| Or maybe you haven't given enough thought to what
| "beauty" might mean such that it could be objective. Not
| everyone means by "beauty" "that which I find appealing".
| Some mean "the will's response to truth":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals
|
| A wonderful example of this is given in _All Hallows Eve_
| by Charles Williams:
|
| > "Over here," Jonathan said, and took his friend round
| to the other side of the room. A second easel was
| standing back to back with the first, also holding a
| canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look
| at it.
|
| > It was of a part of London after a raid--he thought, of
| the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him
| dimly of St. Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but
| the rest of the painting was of a wide stretch of
| desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear;
| the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen
| sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the
| most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as
| Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting,
| and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so
| governed the painting that all other details and elements
| were contained within it. They floated in that imaginary
| light as the earth does in the sun's. The colours were so
| heightened that they were almost at odds. Richard saw
| again what the critics meant when they said that Jonathan
| Drayton's paintings "were shrill" or "shrieked", but he
| saw also that what prevented this was a certain
| massiveness. The usual slight distinction between shape
| and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Colour was more
| intensely image than it can usually manage to be, even in
| that art. A beam of wood painted amber was more than
| that; it was light which had become amber in order to
| become wood. All that massiveness of colour was led, by
| delicate gradations almost like the vibrations of light
| itself, towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the
| gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards
| towards their source. It was then that the style of the
| painting came fully into its own. The spectator became
| convinced that the source, of that light was not only in
| that hidden sun; as, localized, it certainly was. "Here
| lies the east; does not the day break here?" The day did,
| but the light did not. The eye, nearing that particular
| day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of
| the light behind. It was everywhere in the painting--
| concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying
| in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid
| in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have
| burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into
| forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the
| colours of those lesser limits. It was universal, and
| lived.
|
| ~ All Hallows Eve: II. -- THE BEETLES by Charles Williams
| https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400061h.html
|
| See also: * _Beauty as a transcendental in the thought of
| Joseph Ratzinger_ by John Jang for University of Notre
| Dame Australia at https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/cgi/vi
| ewcontent.cgi?article...
| catiopatio wrote:
| You could go so far to claim that, but it's exactly that
| point of view that produced so much objectively ugly,
| human-unfriendly architecture.
|
| Relativists replace the moral imperative of "good for
| everyone" with "interesting to people like me", and think
| they've stumbled onto a more sophisticated or accurate
| view of the world, instead of just vapid sophistry.
| amrocha wrote:
| Yeah totally, anyone that disagrees with you on obviously
| objective things such as "does this building look good"
| is a vapid idiot!
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| > people in the 60's
|
| Are you sure that was the opinion of the average person
| or was it the opinion of someone writing a column on
| architecture in a magazine?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| You're not really aware of the history of city, huh?
|
| The neighborhoods with Victorians were either torn down
| or became low income in the 1950s (ever wonder why
| hippies flocked to Haight Ashbury?)
| trgn wrote:
| There's a different between fashionable vs passe, and
| good vs bad. I think this thread is aiming to discuss
| good vs bad.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I won't get into the debate of if it's possible to have
| an objective "good" or "bad" but when it comes to
| architecture that is almost _always_ subjective.
| trgn wrote:
| > possible to have an objective "good" or "bad"
|
| yes
|
| > when it comes to architecture that is almost always
| subjective.
|
| no
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Ok you proved me wrong. You succeeded at designing and
| constructing an objectively bad comment.
|
| Touche.
| [deleted]
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| > I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich
| people" houses are.
|
| If don't have the money to build, then you bid over
| whatever is on the market; whatever some developer and
| architect duo thought would differentiate themselves ten or
| twenty years ago. People prioritize commute, distance to
| family, distacne to the grocery, school zones, number of
| bedrooms and space, kitchen/bath vintage, and price way,
| way before what a home actually looks like on the outside.
| No one really wants to live in a McMansion, but outward
| appearance is so far down on the priorities that it doesn't
| matter.
| david927 wrote:
| That's a fine, valid rationalization.
|
| But I would disagree with one aspect: part of it is that
| _they like it_. We don 't have fine taste anymore and we
| don't have a desire to impress in a classical way. It
| used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner and
| everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.
|
| When money is king, everything else is demoted.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > It used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner
| and everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.
|
| Because anyone can do that, it's not impressive. You
| don't need to have studied Latin to know a Latin phrase.
| We have google translate and the entire internet. It's no
| longer an "exotic" thing. Hell, I see people still do
| things like that, with Latin or some other relevant
| language. It's weird to _think_ that 's impressive.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| De gustibus non est disputandum. The thing about taste is
| that it's relative.
| ericmay wrote:
| Yea I think people just don't understand "what they like"
| here. It's like if you grew up on fast food like I did.
| It's also mind-boggling to me when people travel to
| Europe or Macinac Island and they come back home and
| _gush_ about it, but can 't get over some sort of mental
| blocker they have that you could actually live like that
| here too in the US if we stopped building for cars and
| started building for people.
|
| Although I do think it's an influential factor, I don't
| think money is the primary issue. If anything having more
| money and making more money gives you access to "finer"
| things and more experience. It's much more complicated
| than that. It reminds me of the anecdote about Tik Tok
| (which should be banned IMO) that shows funny videos and
| 'dumb' content to Americans and shows chess championships
| and educational materials to the Chinese. That's what
| we're dealing with here at a societal level.
|
| Great post, David. :)
| mjhay wrote:
| If you like complicated rooflines, you'll love McMansion
| Hell:
|
| https://mcmansionhell.com/
| ask_b123 wrote:
| This is very good! But now I wonder if there's something
| similar for good architecture.
| bombcar wrote:
| She has it behind the paywall ;)
|
| > Did you just join my team of patrons?! Yes, yes you
| did. THANK YOU! As an official patron, you'll have access
| to my patron-only feed, the **NEW Discord server**, as
| well as access to the "Good House of the Month!" - The
| antidote to the month's house roast.
|
| > You'll also receive a special slideshow featuring a
| curated collection of abandoned McMansions!
|
| https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3844491
| frobolo wrote:
| That site is just about equal parts hilarious and
| traumatic to browse.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| DrBazza wrote:
| > We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build
| beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war.
| We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World
| War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.
|
| No, we're in a capitalist mental model. It's the same in the
| UK.
|
| It's build cheap, maximise profit, and a race to the bottom.
|
| Want that bas-relief from a master stonemason? No chance. Two
| reasons - profit. Second reason, so few master stonemasons
| because... the chase for profit and cheap buildings has
| removed any superfluous detailing, and hence destroyed a
| profession.
|
| I can't envisage a new Chrysler building being built in the
| US (or UK) in the near future, or any of the 20-30s
| skyscrapers with ornate detailing up on the 40+ floor. Yes, I
| know we're all about steel and glass, but that doesn't stop
| elegant design and innovation.
|
| It's the same on residential housing in the UK. You can just
| see it evolve over the last century from well built bricks
| and mortar with detailing, to modern (often grey) boxes,
| using the cheapest materials erected in the fastest time.
| scifibestfi wrote:
| That's some other mental model.
|
| Apple made beautiful products to become the most valuable
| company in the world.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| One of the small towns I grew up in had a post office,
| probably built in the early 20th century or very late 19th
| (I don't recall for sure, but I'm certain it had the date
| displayed on one or more floor or wall plaques, somewhere)
|
| Heavy metal doors with perfectly smooth-operating hinges.
| Marble _everywhere_ --floors, counters, stairs, [edit:
| hell, even the walls!], everywhere, and this _was not_ in
| an area that mined marble, it was surely imported from at
| least several hundred miles away, and likely much farther.
| Thick, ornate brass doors on the PO Boxes. Serious- and
| heavy-looking metal light fixtures. I loved going there as
| a kid. It seems silly, maybe, but that post office felt
| _magical_.
|
| Similar story for older libraries (including the one in
| that same town), older university buildings (ditto), older
| bank buildings even. They're all so _nice_ to be in, and
| embody a confidence in some kind of permanence and
| continuity.
|
| Now all that shit's in strip malls or buildings that are
| otherwise intended to have a 50-year lifespan at most.
| Cheap low-pile carpet on plywood, comically fake
| ornamentation if they bother to have any at all.
|
| What's so weird is that we built basic public buildings
| like we were rich, back when we were, relatively speaking,
| paupers, but now that we're wildly rich we build everything
| like we're paupers. It'd be inconceivable for anyone to get
| half the budget it'd take to build a post office like that
| one, for a new post office building these days.
|
| Hell, even my Grandparents' cheap, small post-WWII house in
| a cheap rural town had details that are rarely found
| outside luxury homes today--the heavy solid-wood front door
| and extremely solid-and-smooth-feeling metal doorknob, nice
| metal switch-plates and heavy-feeling, satisfying switches,
| that kind of thing. I bet you'd have to special-order a
| storm door to get one with more than half the metal in it
| that theirs had and it'd cost a fortune, and god, all that
| stuff felt so _nice_ , and held up to years and years of
| use without being the worse for it. Their whole working-
| class neighborhood was built like that.
| rovolo wrote:
| > Cheap low-pile carpet on plywood
|
| Part of it is that carpet and plywood are fabricated
| materials. Prefabricated plywood and wall-to-wall
| carpeting weren't really things until ~1930s. The older
| materials seems more luxurious now, but that's because
| the newer materials have become cheap. It's like how
| aluminum was once more expensive than gold, but is now
| ubiquitous because the material itself has become much
| cheaper.
|
| https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-history-of-plywood-in-
| ten-o...
|
| https://www.thisoldhouse.com/flooring/21017998/all-about-
| wal...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Kinda, but there were definitely far-cheaper options for
| materials in the early 20th century than ornamental sorts
| of stone like marble, they could definitely make much
| cheaper doors than big-ass heavy metal ones that'd still
| last at least as long as cheap modern doors, and they
| could make stick-built structures instead of e.g. heavy
| stone or brick buildings back then, and they often did--
| far nicer in some ways than ours, but that part of our
| slide in quality has the excuse that there simply _isn
| 't_ any lumber as good as what they used, anymore, unless
| you tear it out of an old building--but instead they
| chose to spend quite a bit more to make serious
| institutional buildings _feel serious_. Even for
| something as mundane as a post office or library in a
| little nowheresville coal town.
| ericmay wrote:
| I'm sure capitalism has an effect (similar to how communism
| built a lot of absolutely disgusting, depressing housing)
| but I don't think capitalism created American suburban
| homes out of thin air. There isn't anything inherently
| cheaper about building a home that isn't symmetrical
| regardless of materials - in fact the opposite would be
| true.
|
| I think it's less about economic models though and more
| about a lack of societal awareness and understanding.
| Really we need _more_ capitalism and more free markets in
| this space in particular to provide actual market choices
| and competition to bring prices down. It 's a tough
| problem. A home builder making a profit on suburban homes
| with car-only infrastructure is more of a symptom than a
| cause.
| DrBazza wrote:
| If I'm a shareholder of a company that builds office
| blocks, I'll be demanding dividends and a return on my
| investment.
|
| Unless the customer (e.g. Apple and their giant
| do(ugh)nut) specifically ask for something that isn't
| structurally significant, a construction firm isn't going
| to add it.
| ericmay wrote:
| > If I'm a shareholder of a company that builds office
| blocks, I'll be demanding dividends and a return on my
| investment.
|
| Sorry I'm not following the point here. Can you
| elaborate?
|
| > Unless the customer (e.g. Apple and their giant
| do(ugh)nut) specifically ask for something that isn't
| structurally significant, a construction firm isn't going
| to add it.
|
| That's my point. There isn't any competition in the
| marketplace or any options for customers.
|
| There are roughly 0 firms today that offer everyday
| people the ability to live in any new construction that
| isn't an asymmetrical suburban house built in a car-only
| development. A few have popped up, granted, but these are
| a tiny fraction of a fraction of new development in
| America at least.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Everyday people have insufficient wealth to shop around
| for homes or dictate design.
| bombcar wrote:
| Many "ordinary" people who buy homes could custom-build,
| but it costs more in time and hassle and money (mainly
| the first two, to be sure) and then you're limited on
| locations.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > I'm hopeful that ... our desire to become a space faring
| civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.
|
| But don't we need that passion (and hope) _before_ we can
| become a space faring civilization? We kind of had that
| space-faring passion back in the 60s when the US /NASA did
| the Apollo program - at that point the general feeling was
| that the government was capable of doing good things. That
| general feeling has been gone for a while now and has been
| replaced with a general distrust of institutions like
| government. To some extent it seems like you need some level
| of hope before you can trust.
| conductr wrote:
| Since we're talking about ugly city hall buildings...
|
| > When you do a city hall, it has to convey an image of the
| people, and this had to represent the people of Dallas ...
| The people I met - rich and poor, powerful and not so
| powerful - were all very proud of their city. They felt that
| Dallas was the greatest city there was, and I could not
| disappoint them. - I.M. Pei (architect)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_City_Hall
|
| Despite best intentions this building feel intimidating. Just
| walking up to it, it hangs over your head, and feels like the
| weight of government is about to be inflicted upon me and I
| just want to file a permit for my home security alarm. Just
| pointing out, the artists themselves have trouble making
| their designs match their intentions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It was used (with a matte painting to make it taller) as
| the OCP building in robocop, for reference on how "evil" it
| either already was considered or now is considered.
| chasd00 wrote:
| the inside is even more ridiculous. It would be easier and
| faster to get in, do what you need to do, and get out if it
| was just an office building. No one physically goes to City
| Hall unless there's absolutely no other option.
| conductr wrote:
| > unless there's absolutely no other option
|
| I hit that scenario a couple times a year. Basic stuff
| that a city should do online, Dallas does not.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of
| what we are building for
|
| That wouldn't be bad at all, but at the same time we are
| facing a humanistic crisis too. We don't respect the gods to
| create things for them, and we don't respect the people to
| create things for them.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| Never seen the Boston City Hall before. I clicked thinking
| "How bad could it be?" and was sort of surprised at my
| visceral negative reaction. It is truly hideous! The article
| describes it as Brutalist, but most Soviet Brutalist stuff
| I've seen at least gives me a sense of simplicity, efficiency
| and usually symmetry even if the structures are depressing.
| This building seems to have eschewed even those positive
| traits!
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Massachusetts strongly dislikes you and wants you to know
| you should go away. It's built into architecture across the
| state.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| One of the very few things the Trump admin did that I kind of
| liked was requiring new federal buildings to have
| neoclassical/gothic/beaux arts styles. I wish we could look
| at more federal buildings and say "wow, that's beautiful,
| that's cultural". That in contrast to brutalism, for which I
| have a slight soft spot due to growing up with it but damn
| it's ugly.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers
| that blended in with nature.
|
| Maybe you meant architects _like_ him, but not "him"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright
|
| he was born in 1867. Much of his important work was done
| before WW I.
|
| Have you ever been to Taliesyn or Fallingwater? Those are not
| "bunkers that blended in with nature." Blending in with
| nature was completely his aesthetic, so much so that Taliesyn
| in Wisconsin was uninhabitable in the winter.
|
| Most of the rest of your post, I agree with.
| kansface wrote:
| We _did_ build beautiful things post war! A driving tenant of
| Modernism was to bring good design to the masses through mass
| manufacturing - better living through ~science~ good design
| (see eg MoMA 's Good Design Exhibition [1]). If you are
| thinking chiefly about architecture, consider the Sydney
| Opera House or the Gateway Arch. If you are thinking about
| houses, consider the Kaufmann house [2] or the Stahl
| House[3].
|
| The fact is that we literally do not design homes in the US;
| over 90% of homes were just built by someone. That someone
| does not stop to consider design, aesthetics, ergonomics or
| _joy_. House developers are more or less doing enterprise
| sales. They just go by a checklist and the developer with the
| most checks wins. "Upgrades" merely change the quality of
| the thing on the checklist (formica -> granite), but thats
| the extent of it.
|
| 1. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1714 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufmann_Desert_House 3.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahl_House
| bombcar wrote:
| I mean the houses are "designed" insofar as plans are drawn
| up, etc. They're just all the "same" and the builders want
| the ability to "add uncharges" so you have a basic house
| that looks pretty decent, but once you select all the
| available admins (the three car garage, dormers on every
| root, gables everywhere) you end up with a McMansion.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| World war 1 was the suicide of Europe.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Almost all the people who died in WWI were very young. WWII
| was harder on people of all ages.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| the timing fits but the reasoning doesn't. I'm having a hard
| time believing that WW1 & 2 had an impact on consumer demand. I
| think it's lack of appreciation of good design. People don't
| care if their house looks like crap. All they care about is
| that it's got a ton of car garages, and a crap ton of asphalt
| all over the place to park all their garbage everywhere.
|
| I've seen it firsthand. There's a beautiful house on a decent
| lot with lots of nice trees and landscaping, I know of with a
| side garage. Guess what draws all the compliments? the
| stonework?, the bueatiful roofline? the landscaping? the
| archicture. Nope none of those. First thing people care about
| and compliment is the horrendous side garage to store their
| crap in.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture
|
| https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...
| com2kid wrote:
| The title image in that article is of boring old (IMHO ugly)
| building devoid of natural light, next to a rather boring
| looking modern building that looks like it is delightful to
| be inside of.
|
| The next image, left building, looks amazing Bright, light
| filled, with a weather protected area underneath it for
| social gatherings.
|
| Not the best visual supporting evidence for her argument.
| hooverd wrote:
| If ever there was an example of "people who disagree with me
| are mentally ill"... What's the solution here, maintain a
| registry of anyone who could have an ASD and forbid/revoke
| them from practicing architecture.
|
| I do wonder if we could apply this to make more human
| software too?
| trgn wrote:
| That's misreading the article.
|
| The solution is help patrons nurture their sense of civic
| responsibility and internal confidence so they do not
| commission misanthropes like Le Corbusier.
| trgn wrote:
| Great article, quite provocative.
| voldacar wrote:
| A lot of people responsible for 20th century architecture
| believed more or less that beauty is Literally Fascism, so
| that's another component. The ugliness isn't always accidental.
| tgv wrote:
| The weird thing is: that aesthetic is also completely gone in
| fascist art. Look at New Rome, or Speer's plans. The human
| aspect is gone.
| voldacar wrote:
| Some of Albert Speer's stuff is pretty cool. Certainly
| nowhere near the ugliness of anything Le Corbusier
| designed. Though it definitely does have a kind of austere
| bloodlessness that is also present in Italian Fascist
| architecture, sort of monumental yet dead.
| ectopod wrote:
| Fun fact: Qatar's world cup football stadia were designed
| by Albert Speer & Partners. This Albert was the son of
| the Nazi.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Even before there was the idea that ornamentation was
| ultimately a waste of resources and is incompatible with the
| promise of efficiency that brings about the modern world.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
| masswerk wrote:
| Still, the _Looshaus_ was rather ornamental for present day
| standards.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looshaus
|
| There's also a considerable difference in
| modernist/brutalist architecture and current blandness.
| Speaking of Vienna, compare the same lot, Rathausstrasse 1,
| Harry Gluck, 1980 [1], and current replacement [2]. (It's
| not just the US.)
|
| [1] former computation center of the city of Vienna: https:
| //de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Rechenzentrum_Harry_Gluc...
|
| [2] commercial replacement:
| https://images.app.goo.gl/1S6Xjnk6XLmZ9XqbA
|
| (BUWOG, as seen on top of the mall-like structure, is the
| former housing cooperative for federal officers, now
| privatized and mostly selling off the apartments. For the
| better or - as may be feared - the worse, the replacement
| building is literally a temple to residential building.)
| api wrote:
| Fascism via "vokisch" movements and ideas attempted to more
| or less co-opt and own romanticism, classicism, and other
| forms of non-"modernist" aesthetics. As a result you had a
| counter-reaction that labeled these things fascist and
| embraced intentionally minimal, modernist, or decadent themes
| in rebellion against them.
|
| The solution is probably to de-fascize(?) classical and
| romantic aesthetics. Not sure how you'd do it though since if
| you search Twitter for random people with greek and classical
| looking avatars they're inevitably raging racist
| totalitarians or nihilistic /pol troll types.
|
| Maybe you could do it with shocking-to-fascists heresy like
| "woke" propaganda wrapped in neoclassical high culture
| aesthetics. No idea.
|
| Of course it could also be useful to just point out that
| fascism is really a form of "high modernism." Fascism is a
| form of "we are smart people who know better and are going to
| centrally plan and re-make culture the way we think it should
| be," which is precisely what's wrong with the high modernist
| approach to the inhabited landscape.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > Fascism via "vokisch" movements and ideas attempted to
| more or less co-opt and own romanticism, classicism, and
| other forms of non-"modernist" aesthetics.
|
| In my opinion, it's not so much that "fascism" (sort of a
| useless label in today's world) has co-opted traditional
| aesthetics, it's that the left has run away from the actual
| concept of beauty.
|
| As an example: look at the body positivity movement.
| Everybody, no matter how obviously repulsive, is celebrated
| as beautiful no matter what. They're not just having their
| dignity as people recognized which is a great thing, but
| their actual level of beauty. How can the concept of
| aesthetics exist in a realm where everything is
| automatically labelled as beauty?
|
| To have beauty, some must be recognized as better than
| others.
| trs8080 wrote:
| "Body positivity" is not about labeling everything as
| beautiful but rather not labeling people who may not
| match traditional standards of beauty as "ugly."
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Is this actually how it's practiced? I know this is the
| professed meaning of the term/movement but when it comes
| to the implementation it seems to be turning into
| something much different. Also, in this definition of
| beauty where do you draw the line for "ugly" or is it now
| a word without a meaning?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I'm in a lot of these circles and usually it's exactly
| how it works.
|
| You see a fat person, someone says they're beautiful.
|
| Do you A: call them ugly to make them feel bad
|
| or
|
| B: keep moving.
|
| The basis of body positivity is to help folks have less
| self hate while being like "wtf dude, don't be a dick" to
| the people constantly criticizing them.
| ogogmad wrote:
| I agree. It's a "live and let live" movement. Not some
| form of austere modernism.
|
| Beauty of people is indeed subjective. Different
| ethnicities have different innate preferences.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| bilvar wrote:
| Those people you mention, as far as I understand you are
| identifying what we call the 'Intelligentsia'. They are
| the ideological siblings of the Fascists, so no wonder
| they have the same / very similar approach.
| eternalban wrote:
| > The solution is probably to de-fascize(?) classical and
| romantic aesthetics.
|
| This is all so funny. Rewind a generation or two and all
| this "fascist" talk was directed at folk who admired men
| wearing togas while emitting Latin. Back then, 'to strip
| down to its essence and meaning' was the revolutionary act.
|
| > [Architecture] is a form of "we are smart people who know
| better and are going to centrally plan and re-make culture
| the way we think it should be,"
|
| And that is the point of architecture (vs mere act of
| building). Your myths, religions, literature, music,
| philosophy, and architecture and most matter of
| significance that is part and parcel of your culture was
| most likely created and promoted by a tiny (tiny!) subset
| of the population. Always has been. Everywhere.
|
| > to centrally plan and re-make culture the way we think it
| should be,"
|
| Is, has been, and will always remain the prerogative of the
| ruling class. All this aesthetic talk is blather masking
| the underlying and reasonable _social angst_ regarding the
| highly distorted wealth and power distribution among the
| population. The clique in power sets the tone and direction
| of culture. Heck, your kings used to have dreams, wake up
| and change religions, and then presto pagans become
| Christian or Jew or Muslim. [Don 't shoot the messenger.
| Just pointing out facts.]
|
| And if you think this gray "putty" business is bad, I
| invited you to review K-Mart catalogues from 70s.
| Everything came in two neon colors - some washed out puke
| blue and a variation of 'dirt color'. I remember asking my
| dad when we first came over to US (and I got my first
| k-mart shock) as to why won't they make nicer colors for
| the common people. It remained a puzzle for a long time,
| this insistence on making cheap consumer items look even
| cheaper.
|
| So this gray is actually the progression from K-Mart Puke
| Pallet -> Gap's B&W T -> faux-thoughtful "gray". It is
| progress, of a sort, believe it or not.
| Jackim wrote:
| Are you saying that Victorian homes, as a rule, are aesthetic
| disasters? I'm curious to learn more about this as it's not
| something I've heard before. If you have any recommended
| reading about that I'd greatly appreciate it.
| nemo44x wrote:
| A lot of people refer to them as the "late 19th century
| McMansion". They were built with intricate looking
| woodworking which was available suddenly to a lot more people
| due to the mechanization of woodworking tools. It didn't
| require a craftsman to spend days carving things like it used
| to which made those types of details only available to the
| truly wealthy.
|
| The beginning of 20th century was a complete rejection of
| this aesthetic because it's really just trying to come off as
| something it isn't really. So the Arts & Crafts movement
| began where simplicity and high quality became more
| important. This was a complete rejection of victorian
| aesthetics.
|
| Saying that, many examples of Victorian styled homes in pre-
| war towns are beautiful and far more appreciated today. Even
| still you see some that are just confused in what they're
| trying to be (we might call them "eclectic" today), similar
| to many McMansions today where they use ideas out of context.
| bombcar wrote:
| In support of this, actually doing detailed tours of many
| "victorian houses" and then compare them to actual mansions
| of the era shows significant differences.
|
| Like our McMansions of today, the _houses_ often combine
| aspects that on their own can be nice in ways that don 't
| quite "fit".
| kome wrote:
| I am _SO_ happy to live in Europe. In a city that is universally
| considered ugly or plain, like Milan, there is art and beauty at
| every corner. Let 's not talk about Paris, Lyon, Madrid,
| Barcelona, Lisbon, Porto... breathtaking places.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| Funny, this website struck me as profoundly ugly.
|
| Ugly beige and muted browns and grays.
|
| Misaligned header and side columns.
|
| Don't get me started on the "ugliness" of the homepage... :/
| Pxtl wrote:
| I gotta say this essay is a bit disappointing. It seems mostly an
| excuse for the author to grouse and enjoy their own flowery
| prose. It's the kind of writing I'd expect to see in a Neal
| Stephenson novel, and it's fun, but it's not really useful as an
| essay -- it offers very little insight or information.
|
| I've often been curious - besides the obvious problems of
| municipal red-tape, why is construction so expensive now? Here in
| the first world we have more money than ever and condos were
| going for a million apiece, so why do we build with the cheapest
| imaginable materials? Why can we no longer afford solid steel and
| concrete and ornament? The leftists blame corporate greed, but
| surely with margins that huge _somebody_ would be cutting in and
| either making buildings that were either actually affordable or
| that used proper materials.
| scythe wrote:
| Economies of less scale may be contributing. We still use a lot
| of concrete; use peaked in 2006. But most of that is for roads
| and bridges. Cement mixers are dispatched much less often to
| small projects. Developers have a strong preference for putting
| things up quickly, not waiting for cement to cure, which is
| compounded by high labor costs. Steel consumption has been
| roughly constant since the '90s, but prices have doubled,
| possibly due to energy costs. GFRP rebar performs similarly to
| steel but generally is even more expensive (the greatest
| misconception about plastic is that it's "cheap"), though this
| may be compensated in the long run due to its high corrosion
| resistance. The application of reinforced concrete is more
| cautious than it historically was due to rebar corrosion
| issues, requiring more waterproofing and higher safety factors;
| GFRP is virtually immune to corrosion but has (correctly) been
| subject to intense scrutiny to hopefully avoid a similar crisis
| due to any unexpected failure modes.
| acabal wrote:
| I think about this a lot. I live in a large city that has a rich
| architectural heritage, so there are old beautiful buildings all
| around me from various eras. Neoclassical, beaux arts, art deco,
| etc.
|
| But of course the city suffers from the problem of new ugliness -
| nearly all modern construction is in-your-face ugly, with hideous
| blocks of primary colored plastic paneling, discordant jutting
| shapes, and headache-inducing asymmetry. At _best_ , new
| construction is faceless, shapeless wall-to-wall glass. But
| that's a really sad best.
|
| I often wonder if NIMBYS would be less opposed to new
| construction if new construction actually looked beautiful. I
| make a point to campaign to my representative in favor of
| density, but even _I_ have to admit that a dense apartment
| complex built in the modern-ugly style is truly unpleasant to
| live around. The ugliness becomes quietly oppressive.
|
| It's strange that Americans campaign so hard to preserve
| beautiful buildings, but when it comes to new buildings, nobody
| wants to build beauty any more. Truly sad.
| revskill wrote:
| Free market doesn't work ... for "good" people in some societies
| (developing countries lead by bad dictatorship). Basically a
| cheater will have more opportunities to destroy wealth. It's like
| a destruction.
| jmartrican wrote:
| It could be the case that in 30 years, we look back at the
| aesthetics of our current times with fondness and nostalgia.
| dbspin wrote:
| Likely, but probably more for the full bellies and access to
| medical care than the aesthetics, which truly have become
| stultifying.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I know I am in the minority here, but I actually like brutalist
| architecture between 1965 and 1985. Not the cookie-cutter
| ghettos, I mean artful architecture, like Habitat 67 or the
| Robarts Library, or the Wellcome headquarters.
| zip1234 wrote:
| There is a definite survivorship bias in buildings. The 'good
| ones' tend to survive and the horrendous ones torn down. The
| major problem with brutalist is that it often sacrificed
| comfort of those using the building. Who wants a building
| near an outside wall but having no windows?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I too like brutalist architecture for its sincerity. Big
| Cities are inherently ugly. Brutalist architecture just don't
| pretend they are pretty.
| [deleted]
| muro wrote:
| Big cities can be ugly, but don't have to be. Less car
| centric, more green cities can be very pretty. Any
| brutalist architecture in those is terrible, making the
| place look worse on purpose.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Big cities are not inherently ugly. What makes a big city
| ugly to you?
| jmartrican wrote:
| I like it too. I especially like it for big government
| agencies, like FBI and post-office. Gives the impression of
| "we are not here to f*k around".
| itsyaboi wrote:
| I too enjoy the deep paternalistic emotions evoked by
| government buildings.
| debacle wrote:
| Because art has never been more separate from the people.
|
| There are small local art galleries in my city. They are vibrant,
| and full of the kind of art I want to look at. Meanwhile, the
| local big name art gallery (which just rebranded to an acronym
| because apparently that's what you do now) is cold, and in many
| ways hideous.
|
| The financial networks that drive nearly everything, but
| especially art, have been overly centralized. This has only been
| beneficial for a small minority.
| kriskrunch wrote:
| The article is lacking illustrative photos to support the
| claims... If McModern is so common, I assume providing or
| producing photos should be easy
| yunwal wrote:
| I mean, you can just Google "Modern Highrise apartment
| building". If the author lives in SF and writes to a mostly SF
| audience, they'll immediately know what they're talking about.
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