29 ms·

The mid in fake midcentury modern

• switch007 4y ago
  Why is it the articles which would most benefit from pictures are the ones with the fewest?
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  • actionfromafar 4y ago
    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?
    • isleyaardvark 4y ago
      Maybe this piece is meant to be fictional, as though it was written in a possible near-future? Nothing shows up on IMDB or internet searches.
    • nottorp 4y ago
      It's not like Netflix productions are distinguishable from one another. But in this case I guess they didn't want to get sued.
  • bnralt 4y ago
    It even changes the name of the building it's criticizing to make it more difficult to find. After a search I located it, it's The Greenpoint (not "The Josh" as the article claims). You can look it up on Google maps, it's 21 India St, Brooklyn, NY 11222. It seems fine to me? Not particularly nice, but I'd take it over brutalism or international style buildings any day of the week. If anything, I'd say that modern buildings are a lot more pleasant than those that were being built in the 60's and 70's.
    • anigbrowl 4y ago
      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.'
• samsquire 4y ago
  I don't reject goodness, rightness or truth. If you reject any of these things you receive ugliness. A building can be right - fit for purpose, beautiful.
  • fullmoon 4y ago
    Is this an Ayn Rand quote out of her novels? It sounds that way but I can’t find it.
    • actionfromafar 4y ago
      Also, where does the ugly truth come in.
      • samsquire 4y ago
        I know what you mean but I reject the idea of an ugly truth. I would reject an ugly truth being true but a false thing people accept as being true which is not necessarily true. If you truly reject anything not true good right it becomes easier to avoid degrading words or falling into despair. Said another way, the truth cannot be ugly. So there is no such thing as an ugly truth. Do you agree the truth is beautiful? I think this because true and truth is beautiful. And it cannot be assailed or degraded by ugly or it wouldn't be true. In the same way water wets things, the word ugly doesn't become true by juxtaposition to the word true. There must be a precedence to meaning and you must take your stand. Otherwise everything becomes mud and there is no purity. In other words, if you bring up an ugly truth I would say it was false and reject it as being not true. Light extinguishes darkness. Said another way, if something is an ugly truth then it is the ugliness that is ugly, not the truth. But I would reject it because I reject ugliness.
        • pixl97 4y ago
          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.
• KptMarchewa 4y ago
  "I don't like the $CURRENT_STYLE".
  • itsyaboi 4y ago
    Yes
• recursivedoubts 4y ago
  World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur modernist impulse of pride (called innovation) recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House it is interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of cultural unity lurk here...
  • harha 4y ago
    Misaligned incentives do their part too, from fixed rent for older buildings to energy efficiency standards not considering the energy used in rebuilding
  • ericmay 4y ago
    To latch on to this great post there are a couple of other worthwhile discussion points: We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things. World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted into the present day where we build very weird, stressful objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and call it art. I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that either the environmental movement or our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species. There's also no point in building a very beautiful building that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to change their location priorities and invest in their current homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible. But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via new offices, garage gyms, etc. I'm really disappointed in our financial overlords who haven't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
• jmartrican 4y ago
  It could be the case that in 30 years, we look back at the aesthetics of our current times with fondness and nostalgia.
  • dbspin 4y ago
    Likely, but probably more for the full bellies and access to medical care than the aesthetics, which truly have become stultifying.
  • DocTomoe 4y ago
    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.
    • jmartrican 4y ago
      I like it too. I especially like it for big government agencies, like FBI and post-office. Gives the impression of "we are not here to f*k around".
      • itsyaboi 4y ago
        I too enjoy the deep paternalistic emotions evoked by government buildings.
    • Ygg2 4y ago
      I too like brutalist architecture for its sincerity. Big Cities are inherently ugly. Brutalist architecture just don't pretend they are pretty.
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • zip1234 4y ago
        Big cities are not inherently ugly. What makes a big city ugly to you?
• zozbot234 4y ago
  Related: Whither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria Follow up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
  • twic 4y ago
    Scott loves attributing increasing prices to Baumol's cost disease, but I'm not sure I've ever seen him do the work of establishing that it's actually what's happened. > If stonemasonry is a low-tech industry, and new high-tech industries are arising all around it, stonemason wages could get prohibitively high (compared to everything else) until nobody wants to hire them anymore. This would create pressure for architectural styles that require as little masonry (or, generalized, human labor) as possible. Stonemasons make about £20 an hour: https://uk.indeed.com/career/stonemason/salaries https://uk.indeed.com/career/stonemason/salaries More than an unskilled labourer, but not even twice as much.
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      Baumol's cost disease is about wages of irreplaceable labor in general. It applies to stonemasonry as much as, e.g. haircuts.
  • LordDragonfang 4y ago
    I came here to post this and a more recent article, his review of (the first sixth of) David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixt... Towards the end his directly links to "Whither Tartaria", suggesting that Brooks' thesis (the old monied aristocracy was replace as the upper class by "Bourgeois Bohemians", a class which Scott suggests is approximately congruent to the modern usage of "bluecheck") >Around World War II, US civic architecture changed from colorful, ornate, old-fashioned looking buildings to brutalist concrete cubes or sleek glass modernist arrangements, even though most Americans continue to prefer the old-fashioned style; other art forms showed similar transitions at different times. Brooks’ theory suggests that the old-fashioned buildings were the preferred architecture of the WASP aristocracy, and the new architecture is the signaling equivalent of [bespoke] handicraft blankets.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  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.
  • hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
    The rational explanation why the majority of items are neutral tones/grey is because this maximizes the market. This can be seen on automobiles, where silver is the most common color because it’s easier to sell second hand, so manufacturers learned to optimize for this.
    • Pxtl 4y ago
      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.
      • tonyarkles 4y ago
        When I found out that the grey colour is called “cement” I just shook my head in disbelief that that’s a colour someone would actually want.
    • micromacrofoot 4y ago
• aliqot 4y ago
  We're asking for it though aren't we? Anything non-conventional to beauty is being embraced right now. For generations we only saw the most visually presentable, and in that saccharine world of nothing-better the only thing that stands out are things that are unique from that aesthetic.
  • Victerius 4y ago
    It's come to the point where I find some conventionally attractive individuals not particularly interesting. For example, men who look like this: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ8c7xVY04uGgVe7hgHcwzrPosCrjgcp3Ufww&usqp=CAU https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ8c7xV... There are so many men who look like this now, on Instagram and TikTok. It's boring. They all look the same. When everything is beautiful, nothing is.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      In real life, most men are nowhere near as good looking outside of some enclaves in SoCal and NYC. Perhaps the look still sells on TikTok and Instagram because that is people’s escape.
      • Victerius 4y ago
        You're right, but my point is more about uniformity. Society seems to have tacitly agreed that there's only 3 beautiful looks for everything. You can be beautiful - and by "you", I also mean buildings and inanimate objects -, but only if you fit this narrow criteria. Give me diversity. Give me creativity.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • MediumOwl 4y ago
      > They all look the same. When everything is beautiful, nothing is. Essentially the plot of Boris Vian's 1948 "To hell with the Ugly"
• sph 4y ago
  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.
  • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Keep going though. It’s not just about “taste”. We have always needed opinionated people to be able to push their ideas. That’s what Linus is, Jobbs was, like him last year or hate him this year Musk, Eminem, Pulitzer, Jefferson, Tesla or Edison, Stuart Mill, the Wrights, and so on to any major or minor scale… The best things come from opinionated people who were told they couldn’t go against the grain like that. We’ve have rejected that idea. Everything is run by MBAs who avoid opinionated in favor of a boring mass appeal. Look at big tech in the last decade… who was actually opinionated? What is actually worth a damn in 10-15 years? Zuck and Dorsey are clowns. Bezos seemed to have some great ideas on how a company should communicate internally but to an effect that is insanely boring (but reliable which is good for something else). Uber and Etsy and Apple after jobs, none of them show opinion, not in a “dangerous” sense. We’ve conditioned ourselves into conformity because being opinionated is to be “an asshole”. We told assholes they aren’t welcome with CoCs and that every opinion is equally valid, with virtue signaling and post modernism of “my truth”, and that you can forgo everything else if it people buy it. We’ve silenced anyone who could make something beautiful because it also might be offensive.
    • quest88 4y ago
      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.
• pavlov 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Parisian art critic who was appalled when they built a modernist colossus that destroyed the beautiful harmony of his home city. The rest of his life he would scrupulously choose walking routes to avoid seeing the monstrosity. The building in question was the Eiffel Tower.
  • sbaiddn 4y ago
    Which is a monstrosity.
    • itsyaboi 4y ago
      a* monstrosity Use "an" only if the following word starts with a vowel (with few exceptions) -> "The Eiffel Tower is an abomination".
      • sbaiddn 4y ago
        Right.
      • wizofaus 4y ago
        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.
  • keiferski 4y ago
    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.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      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.
• helen___keller 4y ago
  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.
  • vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Consider a pre-war world with little-to-no television in the average household, Maybe the lack of TV is why people made their homes beautiful (eg wallpaper is very unpopular today).
    • idontpost 4y ago
  • egypturnash 4y ago
    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.
• badpun 4y ago
  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.
  • halpmeh 4y ago
    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.
  • Renevith 4y ago
    "Natural materials such as wood or stone feel so much nicer than concrete or glass." To you. But not to me, which is why I choose to live in a house with glass and metal as the primary aesthetic. But stating opinions as fact is a nice way to generate engagement, especially if they are unpopular, hence the article we're all discussing.
  • grishka 4y ago
    But then modern tech allows manufacturing things like ornaments at a fraction of their handmade cost. 3D printing and CNC help a lot with that.
    • badpun 4y ago
      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.
• donatj 4y ago
  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.
  • 62951413 4y ago
    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.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    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.
    • donatj 4y ago
      I mean it has a fake second story similar to the way many buildings in the old west did. https://lifedeathiron.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/ohio1.jpg?w=1228 https://lifedeathiron.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/ohio1.jpg?...
• royaltheartist 4y ago
  This feels less like it tells us anything about the world but more about how small the author's conception of it is. Reminds me of people who complain about how music is "bad these days" but they're only talking about what they hear on the radio and aren't really exploring what the landscape has to offer A lot of what gets created is for functional purposes, and it has always been that way. As time goes on, the functional stuff gets torn down and replaced and anything that's appealing or well-built gets to stay. This gives the impression that the past was full of ornate, well-constructed wonders. But is and always has been an illusion There were probably people 200, 300, 1000 years ago who thought "Everything is so ugly these days" or didn't care. It's not about what buildings look like, it's about how we live our lives
  • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    You're not wrong to an extent about the good stuff sticking around but I think you're missing the point. It's not like the aesthetics the author is complaining about were chosen for purpose like a farmer painting his barn red because red is cheap. The slice of the economic ladder from which the author cites his examples is mostly rich enough that small variations in cost or performance are not really a driver of styling trends. Widget designers and real estate developers are specifically choosing conformist blandness aesthetics on purpose, not simply tolerating them as a means to some other end.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      > 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.
• timw4mail 4y ago
  I miss Art Deco. At least to me, it seems like a flexible style that looks good, while not being purely ornamental.
• Pxtl 4y ago
  I gotta say this essay is a bit disappointing. It seems mostly an excuse for the author to grouse and enjoy their own flowery prose. It's the kind of writing I'd expect to see in a Neal Stephenson novel, and it's fun, but it's not really useful as an essay -- it offers very little insight or information. I've often been curious - besides the obvious problems of municipal red-tape, why is construction so expensive now? Here in the first world we have more money than ever and condos were going for a million apiece, so why do we build with the cheapest imaginable materials? Why can we no longer afford solid steel and concrete and ornament? The leftists blame corporate greed, but surely with margins that huge somebody would be cutting in and either making buildings that were either actually affordable or that used proper materials.
  • scythe 4y ago
    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.
  • thatfrenchguy 4y ago
    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.
• xyzelement 4y ago
  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.
  • jona-f 4y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20221207142932/https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221207142932/https://www.nplus...
  • pixl97 4y ago
    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.
• scythe 4y ago
  When I look at pretty old buildings, what sticks out are hand-molded wrought iron, hand-laid brick quoins, hand-carved window siding, hand-assembled decorative fences — surely, you can see the common factor? So it's cost disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease Modern buildings are made principally of prefabricated components designed to be packaged and shipped efficiently and assembled quickly. Why lay bricks when you can nail on a layer of fake brick? Hopefully, 3D printing will save us.
  • twic 4y ago
    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.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Not sure where to start debunking this... When you look at old buildings you're automatically starting with survivorship bias. Expensive and well kept old buildings tend to stay around a lot longer than buildings that were built cheaply at the time. Those have all been bulldozed. Oh, did I mention that expensive building was expensive? It's easy to ignore that huge parts of the population were living in houses with paper thin walls and spending enormous amounts of energy to keep warm or cool (on cooling people had avoided the southern united states in mass till cooling options were available). Oh, did we also mention that not only the US population, but the global population has increased massively since then. All of those processes you're describing are massively energy and labor intensive and do not scale as you're trying to put 8 billion people under rooves. Why lay bricks rather than fake bricks? So everyone has a home and they don't have to burn an entire forest to get it.
    • User23 4y ago
      > 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.
• pdntspa 4y ago
  This article calls everything ugly without even defining what it thinks it -- or beauty -- are. (And if they did past the first paragraph or two of what looks to be an incoherent rant, they did so way too late)
  • papichulo4 4y ago
    The chosen font, spacing, paragraph size... I can't tell if it's supposed to be ironic.
• openplatypus 4y ago
  If everything appears ugly to you, ask yourself: 1. Is it really? Or this is some weird sentiment towards things that passed? I prefer modern “ugly” architecture and “modern” medicine, then flamboyant, impractical and wasteful building accompanied by poor health; maybe we just recentred our attention? … alternatively 2. you are depressed; and I don't mean it in a snark way; futility, greyness and ever present gloom can be signs that you're getting depressed.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    Your binary only really allows for the author to like "modern" (which should really be called "modernism" to accentuate its aesthetic name), or be depressed. But they could a) think it's ugly and b) responsible for the sense of alienation or discontent. They might believe that the aesthetic makes life worse without their life being depressingly bad, for instance.
    • openplatypus 4y ago
      My binary response is to the absolutist tone of “everything” is ugly. Not everything is ugly. Some buildings are ugly. Some are not ugly, but simply cheap. I don't like a lot of stuff in my city. I am not calling it ugly.
  • jona-f 4y ago
    I would describe your second point as gaslighting. Tastes are different and many people dislike modern (and post-modern) architecture. Talking with architects about this, they told me that building differently today is too expensive, doesn't go well with industrialized construction. I argue that architecture is an academic shitshow. It's design for competition juries and not for the people using it. Which is btw very contrary to the initial ideas of Bauhaus, which is why i personally consider it a big failure, despite it's apparent success.
    • openplatypus 4y ago
      Tastes are different. The author could have written, some buildings are ugly. I don't like them. Yet, the author wrote, “everything” is ugly.
• Tarucho 4y ago
  Because is cheaper
• account-5 4y ago
  I don't know, it might just be me but if you're going to write an article (a really long one) bemoaning how everything is ugly you need to provide more than one picture. I want picture proof, not long descriptions that leave me to imagine. Pictures paint a thousand words and all that!
  • pixl97 4y ago
    The problem with the word ugly is its completely an opinion. There is no right or wrong ugly. The author would have done much better to forego the word ugly and replace it with hyper conformity.
    • bobthepanda 4y ago
      It's also rose colored glasses. Many of the surviving examples of historic architecture we consider classic today, were ugly or dilapidated mass architecture in their time. Ask someone in 1900 what they thought of a New York tenement or a Sears mail-order home, and they would look at you like you were insane for suggesting those characteristics now command seven-figure premiums. (What would've been the true beauties of those eras, the mansions, are mostly gone, mostly because they tended to be in high-value areas that would've been redeveloped in later generations because of said high value.)
      • wizofaus 4y ago
        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.
        • bobthepanda 4y ago
          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.
• avindroth 4y ago
  Ironically this page is completely unreadable on the sidebar of my iPad, making the text ugly.
• antisthenes 4y ago
  Nonsense. If you want to seek out beautiful things, simply go to where they are. Don't look for them in a hyper-urban corporate hellscape and then act surprised when you don't find them. Go to a park on a breezy spring day. Take a look at people playing with their dogs, their kids. A mother running after toddlers, father and son launching a kite in a big open field, deer grazing nearby in the brush. Look at it all and tell me it isn't eye-wateringly beautiful.
  • sghio4Q2 4y ago
    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.
• yboris 4y ago
  A short essay that made me notice other people's mistakes when talking about beauty (and numerous other topics): 2-Place and 1-Place Words by Eliezer Yudkowsky People use "beauty" as if it's a 1-place word (objective metric), rather than a 2-place word ("beautiful to entity X"). Now anytime anyone says "X is best" I follow up with "for who? and in what context?" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eDpPnT7wdBwWPGvo5/2-place-and-1-place-words https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eDpPnT7wdBwWPGvo5/2-place-an...
  • gowld 4y ago
    "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". You don't need to invent a new langauge to express age-old ideas. If you want to mathematize it, you can use standard terms like "relation" and "2-ary predicate".
• keiferski 4y ago
  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
• jll29 4y ago
  No-one has captured this better IMHO than Kunstler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7oJjWg8_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7oJjWg8_Y .
  • ryeights 4y ago
    “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.
• sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Because Postmodernism poisoned everything to subvert everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_Dialectics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_Dialectics
  • green20 4y ago
  • green21 4y ago
• godshatter 4y ago
  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.
• trilbyglens 4y ago
  an article about aesthetics with no images...
  • lancesells 4y ago
    Except for the lobby art that isn't mentioned in the article.
• iambateman 4y ago
  3000 words on ugliness. Zero pictures. If the author is going to complain about ugliness, he may as well show some examples.
• mejutoco 4y ago
  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.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  The author keeps referencing "cardboard modernism" but really should just use the word "postmodernism" to describe the era we are still in when it comes to construction, furniture, etc. The reason things look and feel "cardboard" is because in a postmodern world, many objects are approximations of the objects we associate them with. So, for instance a vinyl window is made to look like a wood window which was designed in such a way because of the limits of the material in addition to the function of the object. And example being window moldings on a sash window. For a wooden window they had a functional purpose (enclose the weights and ropes) which has been lost but approximated in a postmodern vinyl window because "that's how windows look". Materials in general have changed so much as well. So much furniture is made out of engineered wood instead of wood for example. But this shouldn't be a condemnation of our postmodern times necessarily. These types of materials, manufacturing, and assembly have made things accessible to many more people. If you want high quality objects made from fine materials and craftsmanship it is still out there. It's just extremely expensive. It's a huge gap from builder grade to quality to custom.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    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".
• _xnmw 4y ago
  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.
  • thundergolfer 4y ago
    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.
    • _xnmw 4y ago
      You're right, thanks for the correction. Without a formal training in the arts I don't know my terminology, I just have an amateur feel for what I hate and know some vaguely related terms. In that case I'm against both modernist and postmodern styles and prefer the Baroque? Darn I don't know, I just feel much more at home walking down the street in Warsaw than in NYC or Chicago.
      • thundergolfer 4y ago
        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.
• danjoredd 4y ago
  It really does feel that things become more ugly as time goes on. It feels like everything must look as utilitarian as possible, and that nobody thinks beauty means anything.
• jeromenerf 4y ago
  I live in Paris, went to Wales this summer, found the relative lack of roadsigns very nice, came back to Paris, found the overabundance of roadsigns uglier than before, went to Prague, found the overabundance of signs, large roads and cars within the city ugly, came back to Paris, found it a bit prettier. Ugliness, envy and jealousy, inextricably mixed.
• throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Every time a "journalist" complains about 5-over-1s an angel gets its wings. Apartments should ONLY be Brooklyn brownstones or lofts, and the construction of anything new and vaguely similar to another building should be banned. Brutalism is the only approved architectural format.
• oliv__ 4y ago
  I think things are ugly now because they are fake: made of fake, cheap materials. It's much harder to make an ugly cottage home with beautiful wood than it is with vinyl. Similarly, I'd say that music has become ugly because of autotune and the like.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    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?
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  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.
• rr888 4y ago
  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?
• incogitomode 4y ago
  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.
• cjohnson318 4y ago
  So, what is this person's idea of beauty? Ancient Greek/Roman architecture? French Second Empire style? Art Nouveau? People appreciate modern design because it's clean and simple, not gaudy or fussy.
  • criddell 4y ago
    Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn helped me see the beauty in ugly structures.
    • cjohnson318 4y ago
      I'll check it out! I really enjoy buildings in the brutalist and post-modern styles from the seventies and eighties. Maybe that's just nostalgia.
• incomingpain 4y ago
  Not everything is ugly. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41137685/2024-pagani-utopia-revealed/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41137685/2024-pagani-utop... Hyper cars like Pagani or Bugatti aren't cars. They are art. They are beautiful. Compare this to the 40 different car brands of white midsize suvs which all look exactly the same. Clear artistic difference. how many video games have absolutely breath taking art? Recently was watching jacksepticeye's god of war playthrough and omg it's beautiful. It's not that there is no aesthetics anymore. There's more art today than ever. For some reason the author has found some spots like his local architecture as ugly but seemingly also cant see the beauty. The article says more about the author than actual art.
• debacle 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• 1auralynn 4y ago
  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.
• breakpointalpha 4y ago
  Funny, this website struck me as profoundly ugly. Ugly beige and muted browns and grays. Misaligned header and side columns. Don't get me started on the "ugliness" of the homepage... :/
• BrandonS113 4y ago
  I'm now visiting a brand new office building in London and it is stunning. Not minimalist, brutalist, ornate. And unique. And everybody who works in it seems to love it. I want to work there. What bugs me is how most new buildings are similar all across the world. 100 years ago, each city has a character unique to it. Barcelona was uniquely Barcelona. Copenhagen was uniquely Copenhagen. Now most new buildings look like the architects have one, small template library.
  • mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Globalization will result in monoculture after enough time has passed. That is a trade off.
  • BitwiseFool 4y ago
    A meme was circulating last week showing dozens of sedans from multiple automakers and it highlighted just how similar they all looked. The meme was criticizing the notion that competition facilitates innovation. However I think people failed to take into account that cars have likely converged to a common design as a consequence of fuel economy and regulatory pressures. I wonder if similar pressures affect architecture and likewise result in the blandness we now notice.
    • abyssin 4y ago
      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.
    • djur 4y ago
      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.
• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Because we changed our view of what humans are. We used to think of humans as something special, with a special spark. "Created in the image of God" was the culturally-dominant statement of this, but the idea was much more culturally pervasive than among people who believed the Bible literally. We believed in the soul, or something like it. As a society, we no longer believe that. We believe that humans are purely material beings, arising purely by naturalistic means, with nothing more than very complicated natural processes. No soul, no mind that is anything separate from the brain. Bound by the laws of physics, which give rise to the laws of biochemistry, which give rise to the laws of neurology. Merely a complicated assembly of atoms, and nothing more. And as a result, art died and was replaced by something else. We used to think that there was such a thing as beauty, and that humans could create it. We don't think that anymore. Art now is what someone does deliberately with the intention of it being art, and nothing more. Everything is ugly because we no longer think that real beauty is possible.
• 8jef 4y ago
  Beauty, as ugliness, is only a matter of perspective, focus and point of view. Anything can be beautiful, everything can be ugly. You find something beautiful or ugly? Try to shift your focus to include its surrounding to various degrees, or do the opposite, zoom into it. You see? Most of us are deeply moved at how Earth is beautiful from space. Then, when you drill from the general to the particular, you might find places on the planet that are more or less attractive. Try this long enough, differently focusing on all things you see and hear and feel, from images to ideas, always moving around the subject, often changing angles, and you might start to see things for what they really are: simultaneously complex and simple, ugly and beautiful, all at the same time. The big lure was always to embrace one particular point of view as your own. THIS looks crazy stupid. THAT sounds amazingly beautiful. EVERYTHING seems so ugly. And so on... Then, one day you wake up and think the opposite. Beauty becomes ugly, and vice versa. It happens all the time, to everyone. Life can have this effect on the living.
  • mensetmanusman 4y ago
    It’s not only a matter of perspective, there seem to be interesting cross cultural universals to what is deemed beautiful. Almost no one thinks smeared feces on a door handle is beautiful.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  It is kind of hilarious when you think about what the French were capable of 1000 years ago: https://youtu.be/Jk3VsinLgvc https://youtu.be/Jk3VsinLgvc We are utilitarian now, we aren’t trying to say anything in particular with a building, so it’s just a box for stuff and people.
• kriskrunch 4y ago
  The article is lacking illustrative photos to support the claims... If McModern is so common, I assume providing or producing photos should be easy
  • yunwal 4y ago
    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.
    • kriskrunch 4y ago
      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.
• kome 4y ago
  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.
• revskill 4y ago
  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.
• jonjacky 4y ago
  Previously, 2+ years ago, similar title and theme but a completely different article, 6 comments: Why Is the Modern World So Ugly? (theschooloflife.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23557284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23557284
• thot_experiment 4y ago
  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)
• gfxgirl 4y ago
  This is the equivalent to "why does modern music suck" (said by every generation of the next generation's music) Scott Alexander posted something similar https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria And the response he got was arguably predictable..., others didn't agree that modern architecture is ugly. Sure there are some ugly buildings. But, for example, for me. I went to some 1929 building that I'm sure this author and Scott would find beautiful https://www.450sutter.com/ https://www.450sutter.com/ And it is. But it's arguably NOT functional. On the 25th floor the view would be incredible but the windows are tiny and so unless you walk directly up to the window you can't see the view. In pretty much any modern building the view would be front and center, full floor to ceiling, wall to wall windows. I prefer that modern style. check out an old museum and a modern one. The modern one will have all kinds of amazing affordances. Places decided to highlight the view, places decide to give a sense of space, places designed for eating in unique space. I'd much rather go to one of these https://design-milk.com/10-modern-museums-youll-definitely-want-to-visit/ https://design-milk.com/10-modern-museums-youll-definitely-w... Than one of these https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-oldest-museums-around-the-world/RgURWUHwa_fKSA https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-oldest-museums-a... Even if the contents was the same.
  • booleandilemma 4y ago
    This is the equivalent to "why does modern music suck" (said by every generation of the next generation's music) At first I agreed with you but then I clicked the submission article and saw those ugly mouse statue things.
    • pizzalife 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws Lots of people seem to enjoy those "ugly mouse statue things".
      • booleandilemma 4y ago
        Lots of people enjoy those ugly monkey NFTs too, I don't know what to tell you <shrug>
• Bjorkbat 4y ago
  Reminds me of Paul Skallas (LindyMan) and his thoughts on refinement culture. https://twitter.com/paulskallas/status/1546563161587089408 https://twitter.com/paulskallas/status/1546563161587089408 https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96726c642 https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96... Best way way I can think of to provide a tl;dr is that we live in a society where convergence towards the optimum is the goal. We have all this data to help us make these informed decisions. Companies (and people) feel a need, implicit or otherwise, to target the largest audience possible, which is just another way of saying that they're trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. My personal favorite example of this is how recently remodeled homes, particularly the ones that are trying to be sold, all have the same sort of grayish "trendy" minimalist interior. Odds are, they were advised to make their home look this way because it's the most broadly-appealing home interior that exists out there, supported by "the data". If you make your home look like this then you'll have more buyers, or so the logic goes. Once you know about it though, you see it everywhere.
• nxmnxm99 4y ago
  Because truth is beautiful and atheism is ugly.
• jeffbee 4y ago
  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.
• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  Move to Venice, Italy, like I did. You will change your mind.
• greenhearth 4y ago
  What an amazing article. Thanks for posting!
• gooseyman 4y ago
  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.
• acabal 4y ago
  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.
• marsven_422 4y ago
• al2o3cr 4y ago
  In the case of that page, the answer is "because somebody's setting line-height to 1 for the body copy and the paragraphs are Too Damn Long"
• l33tbro 4y ago
  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...
• olliecornelia 4y ago
  First that diatribe about car paint now this. The get-off-my-lawn-ification of HN is well under way.
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  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.
• bulbosaur123 4y ago
  People are intimidated by beauty, that's why. Most can emphasize more with ugliness.
• nonameking2026 4y ago
  Please watch https://vimeo.com/549715999 https://vimeo.com/549715999 Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (2009)
• ag8 4y ago
  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.
• odysseus 4y ago
  I saw the article title and immediately thought of Corporate Memphis: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
• christkv 4y ago
  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.
• msla 4y ago
  > We live in undeniably ugly times. And, in a few decades, it'll be seen as retro, and stylish, and something to be emulated. Does anyone really pretend style makes progress, as opposed to merely making changes?
• presentation 4y ago
  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.
• throwaway82388 4y ago
  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.
• Lammy 4y ago
  > “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
• bagels 4y ago
  Article has exactly one image. I'd love to see some examples of what the author finds so terrible.
• MrPatan 4y ago
  So many thousands of words
• syl_sau 4y ago
  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-for-federal-buildings 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-edward-sachse.html 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 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria and the very important follow-up https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern/ 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.