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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 gl

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
- version_five 4y ago
  Two random comments: 1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are usually the most interesting thing in a city core. 2. > Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage. Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of stone veneer
  - mjhay 4y ago
    If you like complicated rooflines, you'll love McMansion Hell: https://mcmansionhell.com/ https://mcmansionhell.com/
    - frobolo 4y ago
      That site is just about equal parts hilarious and traumatic to browse.
    - ask_b123 4y ago
      This is very good! But now I wonder if there's something similar for good architecture.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        She has it behind the paywall ;) > Did you just join my team of patrons?! Yes, yes you did. THANK YOU! As an official patron, you'll have access to my patron-only feed, the **NEW Discord server**, as well as access to the "Good House of the Month!" - The antidote to the month's house roast. > You'll also receive a special slideshow featuring a curated collection of abandoned McMansions! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3844491 https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3844491
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cjohnson318 4y ago
jiveturkey42 4y ago
The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...
- trgn 4y ago
  Great article, quite provocative.
- hooverd 4y ago
  If ever there was an example of "people who disagree with me are mentally ill"... What's the solution here, maintain a registry of anyone who could have an ASD and forbid/revoke them from practicing architecture. I do wonder if we could apply this to make more human software too?
  - trgn 4y ago
    That's misreading the article. The solution is help patrons nurture their sense of civic responsibility and internal confidence so they do not commission misanthropes like Le Corbusier.
- com2kid 4y ago
  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.
voldacar 4y ago
A lot of people responsible for 20th century architecture believed more or less that beauty is Literally Fascism, so that's another component. The ugliness isn't always accidental.
- tgv 4y ago
  The weird thing is: that aesthetic is also completely gone in fascist art. Look at New Rome, or Speer's plans. The human aspect is gone.
  - voldacar 4y ago
    Some of Albert Speer's stuff is pretty cool. Certainly nowhere near the ugliness of anything Le Corbusier designed. Though it definitely does have a kind of austere bloodlessness that is also present in Italian Fascist architecture, sort of monumental yet dead.
    - ectopod 4y ago
      Fun fact: Qatar's world cup football stadia were designed by Albert Speer & Partners. This Albert was the son of the Nazi.
- api 4y ago
  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.
fulltimeloser 4y ago
Modernism started and co-evolved with the industrial revolution, long, long before World War 1. Esthetics is a favorite topic for far right thinkers where the demise of civilization is caused by some art that confuse them.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Yes, this top-comment is obviously wrong and mistaken if you know anything about aesthetics and architecture. The broken timelining of Modernist design is the most obvious error. I wouldn’t expect HN to get this right though.
  - recursivedoubts 4y ago
    No, it isn't. It isn't what is taught in school, but it is a reasonably well-informed opinion, as my sibling comments show.
    - thundergolfer 4y ago
      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.
      - recursivedoubts 4y ago
        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.
red72 4y ago
phkahler 4y ago
>> interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... I just assumed it's all about cost savings. Architecture has been affected by the race to the bottom as much as anything.
- trgn 4y ago
  No. The race to the bottom doesn't explain the extreme rupture that happened in the 40s. Another thing that may play into it (beyond a psychological breakdown), that's we diverted spending on architecture to spending on maintenance of car infrastructure. The public realm is experience through a car, and as such, sensory details, sense of closure and safety, are irrelevant. Rather, what becomes relevant is asphalt, large easy to maintain buffer zones between car infrastructure and building.
  - justinator 4y ago
    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.
sbaiddn 4y ago
World war 1 was the suicide of Europe.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Almost all the people who died in WWI were very young. WWII was harder on people of all ages.
selectodude 4y ago
>It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human, and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. Emphasis mine. Louis Sullivan is quoted as saying this in 1896, prior to any world wars. I think you can blame architecture being reduced to the sum of its usefulness to our friends in Chicago, who are far more worried about function over aesthetic. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe decided "less is more" in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright. John Root. Daniel Burnham. This continues today with the premiere skyscrapers in the middle east and Asia being designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings and Merril. It's too cold to care what you look like.
- recursivedoubts 4y ago
  That was certainly part of it, as was the industrial revolution, but consider the auditorium building built by sullivan in 1889: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago) There is still a strong connection with the historical aesthetics in it. The lead up to WW1, in the edwardian era, featured a move towards stripped down classicism, but the real break in my mind happened during WW1/2, and particularly post WW2.
- acabal 4y ago
  I think that is factually wrong. Chicago was building beautiful, ornamented buildings well into the 40s. Burnham & Root - your examples of "less is more"? - are in fact masters of beaux arts. Burnham designed the Railway Exchange[1] in 1903 and Union Station[2] in 1909. The Board of Trade[3], a masterpiece of ornamental art deco inside and out, was built in 1930. There are countless other examples. In fact, Chicago didn't descend into ugly modernity until well into the 50s and 60s, when Mies van der Rohe started erecting generic black monoliths like Federal Plaza[4]. But he had nothing to do with Burnham & Root, or Graham Anderson Probst & White, the two major influences in Chicago architecture up through the 1930s and both producing highly ornamented and humanist buildings their entire careers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(Chicago)#/media/File:Railway_Exchange_Building_-_Chicago_(51575329179).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(Chi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/media/File:Chicago_union_station_hall.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/media/F... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Building#/media/File:Chicago_Board_Of_Trade_Building.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Buildin... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_United_States_Courthouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_Unite...
Jackim 4y ago
Are you saying that Victorian homes, as a rule, are aesthetic disasters? I'm curious to learn more about this as it's not something I've heard before. If you have any recommended reading about that I'd greatly appreciate it.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  A lot of people refer to them as the "late 19th century McMansion". They were built with intricate looking woodworking which was available suddenly to a lot more people due to the mechanization of woodworking tools. It didn't require a craftsman to spend days carving things like it used to which made those types of details only available to the truly wealthy. The beginning of 20th century was a complete rejection of this aesthetic because it's really just trying to come off as something it isn't really. So the Arts & Crafts movement began where simplicity and high quality became more important. This was a complete rejection of victorian aesthetics. Saying that, many examples of Victorian styled homes in pre-war towns are beautiful and far more appreciated today. Even still you see some that are just confused in what they're trying to be (we might call them "eclectic" today), similar to many McMansions today where they use ideas out of context.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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".
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      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.
throw8383833jj 4y ago
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.
galfarragem 4y ago
More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the concrete box. Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs". From wikipedia[1]: "During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but now wanted to use it in new ways." "Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade unions." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Architecture has almost nothing to do with it... Hipodromo in Mexico City is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the world. Architecturally, it's a bunch of hideously ugly buildings. But there's trees and plants everywhere, and they're beautiful, and that's all you see. The reason everything is ugly is because we don't have trees and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking instead. There's tons of beautiful tree-lined streets in Chicago with ridiculously ugly houses. You don't notice the mismatched, horrible architecture. You just notice the trees & the birds & the squirrels. You don't have to be classical Paris to be beautiful. You just need plants and a neighborhood designed for people to live in - not cars to park in.
danans 4y ago
> 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.
throw33away 4y ago
I think new playgrounds are much better now than when I grew up in the 80s. The new ones in 80s did have some good things going for them but there is much more variety now and they look great.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Playgrounds passed a point somewhere in the late 90s where suddenly it was cheap enough to manufacture quite interesting climbing things, and so you suddenly went from the basic swings + slide + weird steel tower thing to complex adventure sets. https://www.byoplayground.com/products/koala-keep https://www.byoplayground.com/products/koala-keep for example
acchow 4y ago
I don't really follow what your point is. But, developers will build what maximizes profits. They are just answering to wallets. If it was mostly the ultra-wealthy purchasing real estate (as it mostly was pre-WW2), then the developers will build what the ultra-wealthy want to spend their money on. Post-WW2 saw the rise of the middle class and their ability to purchase homes. Especially with government-backed mortgages (FNMA, Freddie Mac, and etc). Most of the middle class would rather spend less on gorgeous architecture and get more square footage inside their home.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  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?
unity1001 4y ago
> aesthetic unity Was it aesthetic unity, or was it aristocratic taste that was enforced in an uniform fashion upon everyone because the people did not have neither time nor money to care about aesthetics...
majormajor 4y ago
What does "cultural unity" that you drop in at the end have to do with it? Much of the blandness of recent stuff is bad in very consistent ways already. Clearly you and I disagree, for instance, on if victorian houses can be aesthetically pleasing on their own, but would you rather have a street full of plywood boxes or would you rather have my victorian-styled house sitting next to your [whatever] and someone else's [whatever]? I'd find that great, and much more interesting than a street full of near-identical ones. (But in practice - even without "cultural unity" - that isn't what most new development in the US produces today - rather, you have a block-or-larger development of a bunch of near-identical [something]-esque generic builds. Unity achieved! Aesthetic appeal? Maybe not so much...)
- bombcar 4y ago
  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.

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

version_five 4y ago
Two random comments: 1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are usually the most interesting thing in a city core. 2. > Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage. Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of stone veneer
- mjhay 4y ago
  If you like complicated rooflines, you'll love McMansion Hell: https://mcmansionhell.com/ https://mcmansionhell.com/
  - frobolo 4y ago
    That site is just about equal parts hilarious and traumatic to browse.
  - ask_b123 4y ago
    This is very good! But now I wonder if there's something similar for good architecture.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      She has it behind the paywall ;) > Did you just join my team of patrons?! Yes, yes you did. THANK YOU! As an official patron, you'll have access to my patron-only feed, the **NEW Discord server**, as well as access to the "Good House of the Month!" - The antidote to the month's house roast. > You'll also receive a special slideshow featuring a curated collection of abandoned McMansions! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3844491 https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3844491
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cjohnson318 4y ago

jiveturkey42 4y ago

The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...

trgn 4y ago
Great article, quite provocative.
hooverd 4y ago
If ever there was an example of "people who disagree with me are mentally ill"... What's the solution here, maintain a registry of anyone who could have an ASD and forbid/revoke them from practicing architecture. I do wonder if we could apply this to make more human software too?
- trgn 4y ago
  That's misreading the article. The solution is help patrons nurture their sense of civic responsibility and internal confidence so they do not commission misanthropes like Le Corbusier.
com2kid 4y ago
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.

voldacar 4y ago

A lot of people responsible for 20th century architecture believed more or less that beauty is Literally Fascism, so that's another component. The ugliness isn't always accidental.

tgv 4y ago
The weird thing is: that aesthetic is also completely gone in fascist art. Look at New Rome, or Speer's plans. The human aspect is gone.
- voldacar 4y ago
  Some of Albert Speer's stuff is pretty cool. Certainly nowhere near the ugliness of anything Le Corbusier designed. Though it definitely does have a kind of austere bloodlessness that is also present in Italian Fascist architecture, sort of monumental yet dead.
  - ectopod 4y ago
    Fun fact: Qatar's world cup football stadia were designed by Albert Speer & Partners. This Albert was the son of the Nazi.
api 4y ago
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.

fulltimeloser 4y ago

Modernism started and co-evolved with the industrial revolution, long, long before World War 1. Esthetics is a favorite topic for far right thinkers where the demise of civilization is caused by some art that confuse them.

thundergolfer 4y ago
Yes, this top-comment is obviously wrong and mistaken if you know anything about aesthetics and architecture. The broken timelining of Modernist design is the most obvious error. I wouldn’t expect HN to get this right though.
- recursivedoubts 4y ago
  No, it isn't. It isn't what is taught in school, but it is a reasonably well-informed opinion, as my sibling comments show.
  - thundergolfer 4y ago
    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.
    - recursivedoubts 4y ago
      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.

red72 4y ago

phkahler 4y ago

>> interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... I just assumed it's all about cost savings. Architecture has been affected by the race to the bottom as much as anything.

trgn 4y ago
No. The race to the bottom doesn't explain the extreme rupture that happened in the 40s. Another thing that may play into it (beyond a psychological breakdown), that's we diverted spending on architecture to spending on maintenance of car infrastructure. The public realm is experience through a car, and as such, sensory details, sense of closure and safety, are irrelevant. Rather, what becomes relevant is asphalt, large easy to maintain buffer zones between car infrastructure and building.
- justinator 4y ago
  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.

sbaiddn 4y ago

World war 1 was the suicide of Europe.

moloch-hai 4y ago
Almost all the people who died in WWI were very young. WWII was harder on people of all ages.

selectodude 4y ago

>It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human, and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. Emphasis mine. Louis Sullivan is quoted as saying this in 1896, prior to any world wars. I think you can blame architecture being reduced to the sum of its usefulness to our friends in Chicago, who are far more worried about function over aesthetic. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe decided "less is more" in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright. John Root. Daniel Burnham. This continues today with the premiere skyscrapers in the middle east and Asia being designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings and Merril. It's too cold to care what you look like.

recursivedoubts 4y ago
That was certainly part of it, as was the industrial revolution, but consider the auditorium building built by sullivan in 1889: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building_(Chicago) There is still a strong connection with the historical aesthetics in it. The lead up to WW1, in the edwardian era, featured a move towards stripped down classicism, but the real break in my mind happened during WW1/2, and particularly post WW2.
acabal 4y ago
I think that is factually wrong. Chicago was building beautiful, ornamented buildings well into the 40s. Burnham & Root - your examples of "less is more"? - are in fact masters of beaux arts. Burnham designed the Railway Exchange[1] in 1903 and Union Station[2] in 1909. The Board of Trade[3], a masterpiece of ornamental art deco inside and out, was built in 1930. There are countless other examples. In fact, Chicago didn't descend into ugly modernity until well into the 50s and 60s, when Mies van der Rohe started erecting generic black monoliths like Federal Plaza[4]. But he had nothing to do with Burnham & Root, or Graham Anderson Probst & White, the two major influences in Chicago architecture up through the 1930s and both producing highly ornamented and humanist buildings their entire careers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(Chicago)#/media/File:Railway_Exchange_Building_-_Chicago_(51575329179).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Exchange_Building_(Chi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/media/File:Chicago_union_station_hall.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Union_Station#/media/F... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Building#/media/File:Chicago_Board_Of_Trade_Building.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_Buildin... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_United_States_Courthouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_McKinley_Dirksen_Unite...

Jackim 4y ago

Are you saying that Victorian homes, as a rule, are aesthetic disasters? I'm curious to learn more about this as it's not something I've heard before. If you have any recommended reading about that I'd greatly appreciate it.

nemo44x 4y ago
A lot of people refer to them as the "late 19th century McMansion". They were built with intricate looking woodworking which was available suddenly to a lot more people due to the mechanization of woodworking tools. It didn't require a craftsman to spend days carving things like it used to which made those types of details only available to the truly wealthy. The beginning of 20th century was a complete rejection of this aesthetic because it's really just trying to come off as something it isn't really. So the Arts & Crafts movement began where simplicity and high quality became more important. This was a complete rejection of victorian aesthetics. Saying that, many examples of Victorian styled homes in pre-war towns are beautiful and far more appreciated today. Even still you see some that are just confused in what they're trying to be (we might call them "eclectic" today), similar to many McMansions today where they use ideas out of context.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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".
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    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.

throw8383833jj 4y ago

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.

galfarragem 4y ago

More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the concrete box. Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs". From wikipedia[1]: "During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but now wanted to use it in new ways." "Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade unions." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Architecture has almost nothing to do with it... Hipodromo in Mexico City is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the world. Architecturally, it's a bunch of hideously ugly buildings. But there's trees and plants everywhere, and they're beautiful, and that's all you see. The reason everything is ugly is because we don't have trees and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking instead. There's tons of beautiful tree-lined streets in Chicago with ridiculously ugly houses. You don't notice the mismatched, horrible architecture. You just notice the trees & the birds & the squirrels. You don't have to be classical Paris to be beautiful. You just need plants and a neighborhood designed for people to live in - not cars to park in.

danans 4y ago

> 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.

throw33away 4y ago

I think new playgrounds are much better now than when I grew up in the 80s. The new ones in 80s did have some good things going for them but there is much more variety now and they look great.

bombcar 4y ago
Playgrounds passed a point somewhere in the late 90s where suddenly it was cheap enough to manufacture quite interesting climbing things, and so you suddenly went from the basic swings + slide + weird steel tower thing to complex adventure sets. https://www.byoplayground.com/products/koala-keep https://www.byoplayground.com/products/koala-keep for example

acchow 4y ago

I don't really follow what your point is. But, developers will build what maximizes profits. They are just answering to wallets. If it was mostly the ultra-wealthy purchasing real estate (as it mostly was pre-WW2), then the developers will build what the ultra-wealthy want to spend their money on. Post-WW2 saw the rise of the middle class and their ability to purchase homes. Especially with government-backed mortgages (FNMA, Freddie Mac, and etc). Most of the middle class would rather spend less on gorgeous architecture and get more square footage inside their home.

zwkrt 4y ago
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?

unity1001 4y ago

> aesthetic unity Was it aesthetic unity, or was it aristocratic taste that was enforced in an uniform fashion upon everyone because the people did not have neither time nor money to care about aesthetics...

majormajor 4y ago

What does "cultural unity" that you drop in at the end have to do with it? Much of the blandness of recent stuff is bad in very consistent ways already. Clearly you and I disagree, for instance, on if victorian houses can be aesthetically pleasing on their own, but would you rather have a street full of plywood boxes or would you rather have my victorian-styled house sitting next to your [whatever] and someone else's [whatever]? I'd find that great, and much more interesting than a street full of near-identical ones. (But in practice - even without "cultural unity" - that isn't what most new development in the US produces today - rather, you have a block-or-larger development of a bunch of near-identical [something]-esque generic builds. Unity achieved! Aesthetic appeal? Maybe not so much...)

bombcar 4y ago
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.