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
Exactly, music is absolutely incredible these days. In any genre you pick, you will find very inspired, innovative and beautiful examples.
Some people who say "music is bad these days" try to contrast pop music with 18th/19th century Western classical music. But that makes absolutely no sense because there are heaps over heaps of beautiful classical music composed in 21st century. You just need to go out there and find them. E.g. there are Unsuk Chin, Jennifer Higdon, Fred Lerdahl, Michael Torke, James Yannatos etc... There is no shortage of beautiful classical music produced today, if you care to look outside of household names.
Similarly, when people contrast pop music with classic rock (e.g. mid-to-late 20th century Rock and Hard Rock), I think they're once again failing to find the right kind of aesthetics. There are Greta Van Fleet, Heart, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club etc... All kinds of artists who make great Rock music. But since they're not mainstream anymore, they're not exposed to masses as much as Rolling Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin etc...
Beyond the "good ol days", there's something to be said for mass popularity. When something has its moment, there's a magic in the air. A lightning in a bottle feeling coming from shared attention and excitement.
Sure, modern rock might be technically as good as classic rock, but rock doesn't rule the music world anymore. Honestly music doesn't really rule the entertainment world either.
People in the developed world usually point to the Internet and mobile phones as the most prominent example of big societal changes in their lifetime, and those are obvious picks, but I think the end of rock as the dominant (super-)genre of popular music is overlooked.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
I agree with you and also think you're being uncharitable to the author's allegedly narrow-minded pov. I agree there's another side to all this but that's not necessarily discounted by the author's criticisms. We all know the reason not every new building can be the duomo di milano is because money. It's still arguably unnecessarily ugly and the money thing and all its 21st century quirks does indeed become a relentless drag on day to day life no matter how good you are at ignoring it or embracing irony. Worth having public discourse over it
Look at the buildings in this painting: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/view-of-washington-dc-ed... . Do they look exceptionally ugly?
To be fair they look almost exactly like the ones in the "old town" part of the city where I live (just more red and less orange), which is by far the most-visited part of my city (because it's pretty and also walkable).
People take pictures right outside of the places were I live. There are photography events in my neighborhood all the time.
The buildings in the painting sure look more appealing than the brand-new district in my town: https://www.lyon-entreprises.com/wp-content/uploads/confluen...
And yes, the past was much more ornate because architecture was a vector of communication -- administrative/state buildings and religious edifices in particular obviously. Which, as a side effect, produced beauty still revered millennia after its creation.
So maybe we should ask: what's modern ideology saying? And what does it says aesthetically? The answer is for all to see, and for all to debate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of it is complying to building codes, and part of it is a tactic to get through design review boards. "This is a design you've approved a dozen times before and appears in cities all over the country" is an effective argument against all kinds of design nitpicks, and complaints about the buildings looking too similar can be addressed by letting the board slap on some random facades and whatnot until they feel invested.
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.
A few years ago a new apartment building in my city had a rather unique design, the fundamentals of it are very simple:
- a high angle silver metal roof with a very small overhang
- white rough plastered walls
- black accents
Another building in the complex had the same but with black walls.
This shape building had been popular for a few years for 1-2 floor single family houses, but not for apartment buildings. The local architectural design agency gave it their "Building of the Year" award.
Now basically every new apartment either has this colour scheme or this shape, it's like somebody used Stable Diffusion just trained on pictures of the first building to make new designs :D
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The question about cars is largely one of personality. Who drives bland cars? People who feel social pressure to not stand out, possibly who feel powerless, or who appreciate anonymity. Who drives flashy cars? People who feel important, who feel in control of their own circumstances and image, who think of themselves as iconoclastic.
When I think of "people who feel important, who feel in control of their own circumstances and image" I think of people who choose understated cars, because they're confident in themselves and have nothing to prove or compensate for by feeling the need to show off flashy colors.
But when I think of people who are insecure and not getting enough emotional approval elsewhere in their lives -- isn't that the "stereotypical" flashy-car owner?
When you look at high-powered execs in Manhattan -- who feel very important and very in control -- they're not the ones in flashy-colored cars.
That stereotypical insecure sportscar owner is certainly real. But not every one of them is insecure. Some just feel like they’ve won and deserve the spoils. And of course there are far more variables than I listed. I was just making some sweeping generalizations. I’ve met both. Old money, true to stereotype, tend to drive inconspicuous cars. I’m not old money, but I do the same.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This made me weep. Pythagorean ideals of proportion have existed for a millenia. See Ancient Greek/Roman architecture, gothic architecture (e.g. https://link.springer.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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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").
[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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Still way more expensive than just laying cheap, factory-made bricks or pouring cheap concrete. Not to mention, at least in most of Europe, the buildings are expected to be thermally insulated, which is usually done with styrofoam on the outside walls (whereas, in the past we didn't have styrofoam so buildings just needed to have a lot of thermal mass (which in practice meant thick walls), which also made them more interesting and prettier). Placing the ornaments on top of it is not great solution, since the styrofoam has limited lifespan.
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.
> 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 lazy, 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:
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..
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".
Why not both? If we, collectively, perceive most of things surrounding us as ugly, then we, collectively, can feel like we live in ugly times, even though there's no objective measure of ugly. While feelings are subjective, their prevalence can be objectively seen and argued about.
Imagine instead the headline were "we live in frightening times", and described how a lot of people fear what's going on around. Fear is not objective - it's an inherently a subjective feeling. But the number of people feeling afraid can be studied (e.g. by polls, or other sociological means) and if it's high, the argument can be made that it is the "frightening times". And definitely there's ample precedent of using "frightening times" in the headlines. So why not "ugly times"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Haha speaking of barriers and Nine Inch Nails: have you heard the cover of "Head like an hole" by an improbable (but good!) Miley Cyrus? It was made for an episode of Black Mirror.
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.
There is a bank near my house that has a façade 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 façades? 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.
Speaking of banks. I am not sure about other states but in CA it is so common to see impressive buildings that used to be banks 100 years ago. They look almost like Greek temples. Recent examples that come to mind: Petaluma and Cambria. For some reason nowadays they host unremarkable shops while banks occupy nondescript building nearby.
Can you clarify what you mean by a "façade second floor"? To me, façade means front side of the building in general, regardless of how it's constructed.
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.
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.'
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
I'm not outraged, just surprised at how confidently people will say statements that are near impossible to justify. Eg the Eiffel Tower "is not typically thought of as an example of 'a beautiful thing'". ... What?? Citation needed? Did you conduct a survey? Why do you think you know what most people think? And to state it just as a fact. When, opposite that discussion is the fact that it's one of the most internationally recognized buildings _ever_ -- to confidently say that none of those people see it as "a beautiful thing" and only as a symbol of Paris?? I'm perplexed :P I don't even a little bit follow your logic.
One of the best passages in Foucault's Pendulum is when the main character wanders Paris and describes the tour as a "foul metal spider", "Lone suppository, hollow obelisk, Magnificat of wire, apotheosis of the battery, aerial altar of an idolatrous cult, bee in the heart of the rose of the winds, piteous ruin, hideous night-colored colossus, misshapen emblem of useless strength...". It goes on for quite a while. Mind you, the character is half insane and entirely paranoid at that point. It's quite a fun monologue.
>"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.
I always find that story funny because the structure is so clearly beautiful to my eyes! I was responding to some sibling comments that said that today "most people" don't think it's beautiful.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
There’s always been a lot of shit built. The good things will last 100’s of years and the shit will be ripped down in 40. The examples linked here are garden variety crap mainly. The 1970’s-1990’s in particular had a lot of bad stuff built. Especially if you want 6k sq feet and don’t understand that to build that inside and out at quality will cost a few million + land costs.
If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.
> 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.
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?
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
>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.
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.
>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.
This is plainly and patently false. Materials are (more or less) fully half of the cost of building. If you use nonstandard materials that goes up because you need specialized labor in addition.
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.
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!
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.
Yes, and those have terrible unit economics and environmental externalities! We should not be looking at the unsettled land in between as an opportunity to stretch ourselves even thinner!
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.
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
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.
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.
Not sure what you mean by "precisely this sort of person", but a "parvenu" is better thought of as the inverse of a "pariah" -- someone from an outgroup who has achieved special acceptance, status, and celebration.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
All italian dialects derive from a single language, with very low influence from the outside. Most Italian dialects are actually intelligible to an Italian speaker in written form and become difficult to understand only because of pronunciation. Try reading a few Wikipedia articles in different Italian dialects and you'll realize you understand at least 90% of text for all of them, possibly with the only exception of Sardinian.
Additionally, dialects were never the language of higher culture anywhere in Italy, all intellectuals have always used a common language and had a nationwide audience even when the country was politically fractured in many states. Said common language being Latin for many centuries after the fall of the Roman empire and Italian from around year 1500.
Dialects are rarely written, they are spoken and while (obviously) usually someone natively speaking a given dialect can talk with someone from another near region, dialects from the north (say Lombardia or Veneto) are so different from those of the south (say Campania or Sicilia) that they are effectively distinct languages.
The above is the hypothetical case of two unschooled people, as said before most if not all italians are bi-lingual with their own dialect and switch automatically to italian (possibly with some local peculiar forms or accent) that is the common language when talking to some "foreigner".
As you say, italians can usually understand (in written form) a dialect because of the common roots, but for what it matters an Italian with some good Latin knowledge can usually get the overall sense of written text in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and possibly French.
The unification of language to Italian has been a process that went on for decades, through schooling and later radio and television, when Italy was re-united in the decade 1860-1870 it was a tower of Babel.
Imagine the conversation between a (unschooled) soldier from Friuli attempting to interact with a (as well unschooled) farmer in Sicily in the early years of the unified state.
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?
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.
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.
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'.
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 ;)
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
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.
Were they torn down or became low income because they were built in the Victorian style or was it perhaps because they were older buildings that needed a lot of renovation so it was cheaper to tear them down and build new or sell them off at lower prices?
> 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.
Then why hasn't that happened with brutalism? It was hated in the '90s, '00s, and '10s, and it's still hated now. And why is the "international style" so much better regarded despite being the same age?
International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.
And the brutalism point confuses me, since plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.
> International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.
My point is you saw a lot less of people complaining about how ugly the style was.
> plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.
Bet most people will still think it's ugly, even in 60 years.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
I think you missed my point by taking the example too literally. I'm saying that being well-educated (in a classical sense -- deeply knowing Latin, Greek, Philosophy, Mythology, etc) used to be considered impressive. It would dictate your value, socially, to a large extent.
That has transitioned to being good-looking, along with the amount of your wealth and how you spend it. Education and intellectual endeavors are no longer in the mix.
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.
It's really not -- at least not in the finer things, which is what we're talking about.
Yes, you can enjoy pistachio ice cream; feel free. But the Louvre doesn't choose what it puts on its walls randomly. The curators don't shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, I mean, it is relative."
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I don't think that the Art Deco style skyscrapers look like crap. I quite enjoy them. I think most modern sky scrapers look like crap because they're all done in a modern style with no decoration. Other styles never really got a chance to express themselves since everything was taken over by the modernist look.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
Some of it was needing to build cheap, low-maintenance buildings quickly, to replace what had been destroyed in the war. There's nothing wrong with making a considered decision to build something ugly and cheap because getting usable space is a higher priority than making it look good. But when you try to make a virtue of that by pretending ugly is pretty, then you're making a major mistake.
Makes fully sense indeed. Ironically enough, what is built nowadays around me is exactly the other way around: personal space buildings look at least half-way passable, and public/office buildings are all those gray square turds, with some glass. But yes this is Switzerland, birthplace of Le Corbusier...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
So adding the marble interiors may have been 25-33% of the price of a house. If the average US house today is $400k, then that's $100-130k for the marble interior.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Body positivity" is not about labeling everything as beautiful but rather not labeling people who may not match traditional standards of beauty as "ugly."
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?
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.
I don't think body positivity is needed for that, just manners. Is there actually a problem that is being solved by body positivity that can't be solved by just being polite?
> 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.
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.
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.
There's also a considerable difference in modernist/brutalist architecture and current blandness. Speaking of Vienna, compare the same lot, Rathausstraße 1, Harry Glück, 1980 [1], and current replacement [2]. (It's not just the US.)
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
I saw the U.C. Berkeley architecture department ignore and mock Christopher Alexander from their hideous (and richly deserved) concrete monstrosity, so I hope you'll forgive me if an undergraduate architecture degree doesn't impress me, and I am completely indifferent towards the same communities opinion on Wolfe's book.
You need to read my initial comment more closely, I didn't claim modernism sprung fully formed from Gropius' head on September 2nd, 1945: "World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had."
Of course forms of modernism were experimented with pre-WW1, but high modernism and it's attendant ugliness didn't come dominate the built environment until post-WW2. This is of course true, and I think you know this, but you are using snobbish nit-picking (ah yes, architecture) in an attempt to intimidate me because we disagree on aesthetics.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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?
The solution is help patrons nurture their sense of civic responsibility and internal confidence so they do not commission misanthropes like Le Corbusier.
> 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 passé and kitsch.
Those trends are as much responsible for the aesthetic shifts as the traumas of the world wars.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
There’s a Queen Anne-ish home near me that I always joke is a window showroom. There’s like 1 of every style of window on this thing. A double hung sash with a gothic thing and then a sleeper and a casement etc. Even the lines of the home - just everywhere.
But in todays context it’s a simply gorgeous home. “Eclectic” if anything but it has stood the test of time.
But I imagine looking at it from that period and it probably looks like a poorly designed McMansion today. Except for built with really great materials.
I think a lot of the "love" for these types of homes is simply the materials and the craftsmanship - even as they became "mass produced" they were built "heavy" - modern drywall is better in almost every way but it doesn't have the gravitas.
Yeah, the materials are great -in particular the old growth wood which simply isn’t available today. There’s also a good chance the home design is completely unique since home building by and large was done very differently pre-1940s. So a neighborhood of them looks awesome compared to one where everything went up in the post-war era.
Just compare a period revival built in 1915 to one from 1970. It probably isn’t even close which one not only looks better but also uses the right lines, moldings, etc. I think there was simply a better understanding by architects about what details a particular style of home should and should not have.
But yes a well constructed modern home is probably better in most ways than an old home. Better waterproofed, more efficient, engineered better, etc. If built well which I’d argue most modern homes aren’t unfortunately. But I have seen modern homes framed out entirely in engineered wood, have advanced sheathing and waterproofing and high-end siding. Will last many generations.
There was a "bad spot" around the late 80s through the early 2000s I feel, when houses were just starting to be "improved" for energy efficiency, where some really bad decisions were being made (water barriers that trap water in the walls allowing mold to spread, etc).
Modern building science has raced past those, but not all construction crews are utilizing them; which is sad. Many times there's not an increased cost at all; it's simply correctly using materials.
And it also has to be done right. I noticed a small leak in my home that aligned with where a new vent was installed a couple years ago and I went up to confirm my suspicion that the flashing was installed wrong. And it was.
One of the better advances in recent times have been things that reduce "envelope penetration" because dammed if it is never ever done right apparently, even on brand new construction. Furnaces and water heaters venting via PVC through the wall seems to work out better.
It's the #1 reason I'd hire multiple home inspectors during construction if I ever have a house built.
Misaligned incentives do their part too, from fixed rent for older buildings to energy efficiency standards not considering the energy used in rebuilding
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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
>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.
You realize that that is Baumol's cost disease, correct? If you want to "debunk" my post, you should make sure you don't actually agree with it.
>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.
We are also using, for comparison, the most expensive buildings built today. Pointing out that we're comparing them to the expensive buildings from yesteryear doesn't make it an invalid comparison. It's not only tract houses that are ugly.
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.
I enjoyed the observations in this essay, but I missed the answer to the question in the title. I have a few thoughts in that direction.
Neutral colors like greige are fitting for our hypernetworked, hyperconformist age, where eccentric behavior, unconventional views, and standing out generally get you odd looks at best, surreptitiously filmed and socially shunned at worst. Being boring is an aesthetic survival mechanism, and entirely apt. As is the flimsy built environment.
Clothing is subject to fashion cycles so rapid, why would anyone make anything to last when it’s likely to be discarded and replaced in a year anyway?
Another banal observation, but architecture is subject to survivorship bias. Most of the mediocre buildings of the past have long since been demolished and replaced. We’re mostly familiar with successes. But the fact that buildings today are generally cheaper, uglier, and flimsier is true. And yet, people were making the same observation 100 years ago. And for decades before that.
General aesthetic degradation has been a more or less continual process since industrialization. It’s put more goods in the homes of more people, and the price is more uniformity and more ugliness. And it is relative. Our ugly present environment will possibly be an aesthetic high water mark to future generations, as midcentury aesthetics, derided for their ugliness in their time, seem to us today.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Construction is expensive because construction salaries are high.
Authors clearly have never owned a century old building though, as easily shown in the first paragraph:
> Our own walk begins across the street from our apartment, where, following the recent demolition of a perfectly serviceable hundred-year-old building, a monument to ugliness has recently besieged the block
Century old buildings (I own in one!) are full of problems (plumbing, electricity, insulation, heating, lead paint) that are big projects for their owners, which 75% of the time they just ignore (thus kicking the can down the road), because renovation is even more expensive if you want to keep your building pretty / not destroy half your building while doing this. It’s a fun project for upper middle class folks who have either a lot of time to dedicate to them or a lot of money, sure, but not practical safe housing for most people.
Hah yeah I live in a century home I know that feel. Double brick walls are lovely but there are definite downsides to living in that old a building. It's just that there's the obvious question "why don't we build new Old Buildings"? Some of it is obviously labour - nobody wants to pay a bricklayer in this day and age.
I was mostly confused because I live in the greater Toronto/Hamilton area, which rapidly joined Vancouver and SF in insane price inflation, and so we're talking million dollar homes made of cheap materials.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's.. not pretty. A wannabe portico that is more reminiscent of a jail hallway. Its lined with buttock crushing benches to "rest".
As you (necessarily briefly) sit on this bench, at no point are you allowed to fathom that you'll ever escape the concrete that envelops you on every side.
Concrete floor.
Concrete walls.
Concrete ceiling.
But! There's hope in the horizon! A few trees grow in the courtyard. these are the only things that shatters this prison cell. That introduces hope and, yes, beauty. None of it manmade.
For the beauty in this picture, if there is any at all, is exclusive to nature. The trees' elegance jumps at the viewer precisely because otherwise everything in this picture is ugly.
> But! There's hope in the horizon! A few trees grow in the courtyard. these are the only things that shatters this prison cell. That introduces hope and, yes, beauty. None of it manmade.
It is a wonderful campus to be on. Open air walkways between classes, vines growing everywhere, lots of natural light.
Concrete allowed for playing with new shapes and angles, the beauty is in the flow and dynamism of shapes.
Interiors like https://i.redd.it/e7yucwdqia461.jpg are wonderful to be in, and new technologies in construction materials and techniques made those interiors possible at a much lower price compared to what was possible before.
I'm not going to claim Brutalism has a good track record vs art deco or modern styles that incorporate natural material (loved me some mixed textures!) but claiming everything brutalist is ugly is just false.
> 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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
“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.
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.
> “Outdoors, the situation is depressingly similar. After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white.”
It's not so humans can see better — it's so our computers can
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.
While I am as lazy as anyone else, when I search "Modern Highrise apartment building" as you suggested... A lot of really cool buildings appear. Same for "McModern Highrise apartment building"...
I'm not sure that's what he's complaining about. I have an inkling feeling that I know, but I want to be certain.
When I search for a building, "The Josh", that the author mentions -- I can only find "The Joshua" in Hollywood. And it is UGLY and about the same colors described.
The single image in the article is illustrative to an extent, but it's heinous public art and not the building.
I lived in Los Angeles and near the SF Bay Area for over 20 years. I'm curious to know if the hideous architecture imposed upon me over the course of two decades is what he's discussing, or if there is some newer, insidious, soul crushing design that I'm not aware of.
Only images included with the article can make that clear.
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.
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!
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.)
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.
Usually it's how hard people fight to keep a building.
Take the NYC tenements. They were substandard housing when they were built, with multigenerational families using a single room on a floor with a single shared bathroom for the floor.
A lot of times, the reason we lost wealthy housing or buildings, is because wealthy tastes and fashions changed, and they no longer cared for outdated buildings, which may have lacked modern electric or water services. Or the wealthy may have moved on from the area entirely; in the mid-19th century when mansions were built around it, Central Park was the edge of NYC, but 100 years later these barons preferred pastoral estates in Long Island, upstate New York or New Jersey, and their old mansions were in the middle of a metropolis.
Poor areas were more likely to not get redeveloped via market forces, because there wasn't money to be made giving poor people the latest and greatest in housing, and on top of that poor people were not going to demand the latest and greatest because they wouldn't be able to afford the rent on that kind of building. And people fight harder for their housing if its redevelopment means getting displaced onto the streets. Gentrification of poor areas in the United States doesn't really get going until the '80s, by which time we already have historic preservation laws.
Obviously there are exceptions to these scenarios but this is one of many sources of why some buildings survive and some do not.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
If you ask me, function is beauty. I live in Tokyo, the architecture here is 99% ugly, but the way it functions is phenomenal so I don’t feel that ugliness at all. I just experience a great city.
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.
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.
On the subjectivity of "beauty" in modern architecture:
- if you average the "subjectivity" of most people (in the USA at least), you get "we prefer traditional architecture": https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-fo...
- when you study "composition" in painting or photography, it's obvious that there are some "rules" to make some pictures better than others. Of course there is intent, but there's also this aspect of making things pleasant to look at. Maybe it's the intent of harmony, I don't know. What these rules would be is subject to debate, but it's not unusual to think there aren't natural aesthetics rules in architecture. It ultimately stems from our interaction with the world and the patterns we see in nature. To me this untold magic is best shown in one of the most famous greek sculpture "Laocoon and His Sons". An upside down Chrysler Building would look incredibly off.
On survivorship bias: look at the buildings in this painting: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/view-of-washington-dc-ed... . Do they look exceptionally ugly? To be fair they look almost exactly like the ones in the "old town" part of the city where I live (just more red and less orange), which is the most-visited part of my city (because it's pretty and also walkable).
"It was WWI/WWII" -- Modern art debuted before WWI even happened. Marcel Duchamp's first oeuvre was in 1912, his famous Fountain is from 1917. The fracture didn't happen with WWI/WII even though people keep hammering these points. What started however at the start of the century was the rise of global ideologies: Communism mainly. This is not to say it's communism's fault, it's simply to say that the idea of a bright egalitarian future seem to have coincided with a general renounciation to beauty. And as the brilliant (communist) essayist Lukacz puts it, artistic expressions are reflections of the consciousness of a people at any given time. Modern aesthetics is modern ideology.
"Modern architecture is cheaper" -- It's really not. There's plenty of projects everywhere that were built "classically" and are still comparatively cheaper to their modern counterparts.
Some of you have mentioned Scott Alexander's piece (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria and the very important follow-up https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...). The only comment who did argue at length for an opposite case was from... an architect. (Yes I've read all of the comments on both articles, yes this topic is my pet-peeve). Of course, he argues that beauty is subjective ("that's your opinion man") and when challenged on the fact that most people seem to find the buildings he champions as frankly repulsive, he defers to the usual "well you have to understand the point of view of the architect"... And no, no I really don't, and in fact nobody ever needed to do that for any building, ever. Except a certain class of architects when it comes to modern buildings.
I could write an essay on this topic, but I've got to stop here.
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.
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.
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.
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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