25 ms·
Why is everything so ugly?
- surfingdino 3y agoI blame the preset hustle.
- gary_0 3y agoYes, but isn't it cyberpunk as fuck? Welcome to living out your wildest nightmares.
- unobatbayar 3y agocyberpunk is not ugly though.
- gary_0 3y agoMovie cyberpunk makes the ugly pretty and the sordid exciting, upping the saturation until the fluorescents become psychedelic. The cyberpunk we are living has no such aesthetic filters. An adventure is something terrible that happens to someone else.
- Avicebron 3y agoAs much as I claim to like brutalitism as a design philosophy, I do think we could bring back some things like classic marble architecture. Maybe some new fountains
- ekianjo 3y agothere is no money for that anymore
- user_7832 3y agoPerhaps brutalism is common where you live, but here in the Netherlands I would love to see more brutalist architecture as it is at the very least distinct. All houses here are (legally mandated almost) to have the same brick brown color.
- braza 3y agoI see it in another way: in the past aesthetics and the richness in the detail was beloved to connected with the divine and sublime, and in a more contemporary times is related something more experimental. However, in the modern world with set of regulations plus complexities with urban places, and cost of build is not viable to have such so great ornaments around. For instance: one of most recognised and awarded architects had a lot of criticism[1] due to a new set requirements for urban life. [1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/slideshow/the-dark-side-of-oscar-niemeyer/ https://foreignpolicy.com/slideshow/the-dark-side-of-oscar-n...
- juggertao 3y agoClassic marble architecture is considered racist and white supremacy adjacent these days. https://intersectionist.medium.com/american-power-structures-white-columns-white-marble-white-supremacy-d43aa091b5f9 https://intersectionist.medium.com/american-power-structures... https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/11/how-classical-architecture-became-weapon-far-right https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/11/how-classical-...
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> Classic marble architecture is considered racist and white supremacy adjacent these days. Probably by some insane woke ultra-leftists. Romans had white marbles. Romans also had black emperors, from Africa (yes, really). You have to have a serious sick mind to believe "white" means "white supremacy" and that anything "black" means oppression towards black people. I think a talk should be had about the Ottoman entire, when non-white people ruled a great part of the world, including Europe and had, shocker... Wait for it... White people as slaves. Wow. What do the woke have to say about that? How comes we're not asking for retribution, today, to turkish people for the white people their ancestors used to have as slaves? One of my brother married a japanese woman and another brother had a kid with an african woman. So my kid's two cousins are half-asian and half-african. We speak several languages at home. We've lived in four countries. And I despise this cancer on earth that are woke leftists.
- zilti 3y agoAt this point there is so much that is claimed to be racist that the word is just about to lose it's meaning
- lindig 3y ago"Show, don't tell" is lost on the authors. They only talk about visual ugliness.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoIt's hard for me to understand what the author is exactly talking about without seeing more images.
- ekianjo 3y agoits a word salad rant. An exercise in style to say mostly something that could be summed up in a few sentences.
- extractionmech 3y agotldr: “cars that look like renderings”
- KineticLensman 3y agoOr just over two pictures, at 1 pic == 1000 words (he used ~2100 words)
- antegamisou 3y agoVery typical of the average HN pseudointellectual actually.
- ajkjk 3y agoAh just walk outside in literally any city.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoDoesn't even matter where I am from? I get different vibes in different cities and within the same city depending on the area as well. And does it specifically mean US cities only? I have been to US, but otherwise I'm from Europe.
- tetromino_ 3y agoThe article is an exaggerated but decently accurate portrayal of many cities and suburbs in the US in 2024. Europe is, I suppose, not as enshittified so far, but it's a matter of time.
- Erratic6576 3y agoThe other day, I saw some workers finishing a series of 8 white shipping-sized containers each with A/C, aligned one next to the other on a plot of urban land. I decided it had to be the expansion of a public (state) school, because I’ve read on the press about these containers being used in cases of shock-doctrine implementation. Compared to foreign universities, Public education and public buildings in general used to be ugly, uninspiring, from the cradle (horrible huge hospitals) to the grave (horrible huge condominia-like wall with niches for a coffin). We are transcending these thresholds to go full ugliness for the poor, in the name of economic efficiency
- firtoz 3y agoThere's a lot more variation nowadays imo, and you can find whatever you are looking for, consciously or not. If you want to find ugly, you can. If you want to find vibrant bright colours, you certainly can, too. At least in the UK, in both London and Manchester, where I have lived, you can find the best and the worst of many kinds of styles. Where I visited in Belfast, also. Also in Indonesia, from Bali to Jakarta, there's so much different kinds of styles you can experience. Sure, the "average vibe" is also kind of persistent, but I think the average vibe has been quite bland in many places for a while. This includes art, architecture and the vibe as well as interior decor. Edit: adjusted to distinguish between "general" and "average"
- hasty_pudding 3y agoTheres a style I see on HN where ppl disagree with the post at the start, the halfway in agree with the post. Im not sure if thats a new thing or if I just started noticing it. > sure, the "general vibe" is also kind of persistent, but I think the general vibe has been quite bland in many places for a while.
- firtoz 3y agoThe article is talking about the new ugliness somewhat more, that's what I am trying to address. But, ironically, my comment of "you can find what you look for" is applicable for your observation too ;) Besides, it's okay to agree with some points and disagree with some points.
- midasuni 3y agoBeauty isn’t valued in these areas by those with the resources to choose it. When the majority of people and businesses live hand to mouth, those that don’t have to constantly maximise exponential returns to their owners. Who has money to burn on “valueless” beauty Even if the cost of beauty is the same, and there is an actual value, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you are increasing maximum potential value but you are reducing the minimum (you turn off some buyers who don’t like the look). Throw in the concept changing over time (pale green bathrooms used to be a big think in the U.K. in the 80s) and people go for neutral and boring.
- extractionmech 3y agoThe issue is that New York decided as a strategy to rely on tourism revenue - it has nothing to do with “millenials”. I remember working as an intern building models for the disney land of 42nd street. Yes the models were cheesy (go take a look) but I mean anyone here remember Times Square before? That was one serious cesspool and I say this as a confirmed fan of late 80s New York, you know the city that your mom and dad were afraid to visit? (Anyone here remember having beers on the stoop outside of Finneli’s on Prince? AfterHours Soho was awesome..) No one is afraid anymore so the ‘filter’ that selected ‘confirmed urbanites’ was lifted. The city reflects its new demographics. The OP and myself and the rest of urbanite that got a ‘buzz’ just walking in the city now mostly decamp to Brooklyn. Speaking of Brooklyn, I must register my public approval of gentrification of Williamsburg. I actually lived in Williamsburg when the only (only) sign of civilization was a bagel shop next to the L. But let’s take Domino Park. That’s not ugly, is it? So, two items: Money, and Taste. Now we people of ‘taste’ were priced out of Manhattan. And now you have what you have. Let’s blame Giulliani for this. I never liked the man /g
- MiguelX413 3y agoIs /g an abbreviation of /gen?
- extractionmech 3y ago/g for grin. /G big grin that shows teeth
- skywhopper 3y agoCan’t bring myself to read a screed like this. Every few years there’s been an article making exactly this complaint for hundreds of years. Most things are ugly and/or trash. Always has been, always will be. And the current fashion will eventually change, it always does.
- electric_mayhem 3y agoAs for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at." — André Malraux
- jrockway 3y agoYeah I kind of jumped around to figure out what the meat of the argument is. I didn't figure it out, but I do feel bad for the authors. If everything around you is consistently terrible and every waking moment is agony... it might not be the world that's the problem. That might come from inside. Maybe talk to someone about how you feel.
- moritzwarhier 3y agoThe submitted link has an anchor in the middle of the article. Why?
- moritzwarhier 3y agoThe submitted link contains an anchor/hash pointing to the middle of the (long) article. Why?
- Almondsetat 3y agoPoster was as sloppy as the author himself
- ekianjo 3y agoits art?
- andrelaszlo 3y agoMaybe for people (like me) who stopped reading the article half-way through when it was posted about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679 The title should have had an additional exclamation point.
- newsclues 3y agoWhy do communists build brutalist buildings? I don’t think the recent trend in abandoning aesthetics is accidental.
- camdenlock 3y agoBrutalism and communism are what happens when people pretend that human nature doesn’t exist.
- shakow 3y ago> Why do communists build brutalist buildings? Typically because they face a huge population move from the countryside to the city areas, and thus have to build as fast as can be and on a budget, which leads to what you can see there. You can observe a similar pattern in many countries, e.g. here[0] in France, in the Lyon suburbs. [0] https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/image/boW0onRHUjdzzltjpcNIrtWmo5U/600x400/regions/2020/06/09/5edf9e954d9c2_debat_villeurbanne_ill_drone_ville-00_00_19_02-4805414.jpg https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/image/boW0onRHUjdzzl...
- Barrin92 3y agoBecause there's overlap between what brutalism is about and what communism is about, an exposure of the material and structure to the outside, a rejection of nostalgia and traditionalism, etc. Of course this isn't exclusive to Communism but also quite popular in the US, as the other big cultural center of modernization in the 20th century. This has nothing to do with abandonment of aesthetics though, as Brutalism is a very explicit aesthetic and architectural movement. We did indeed abandon aesthetics but the product of this is the non-offensive, utilitarian, convenient Starbucks store, the Ikea furniture and so on, not Brutalism.
- alkonaut 3y agoThe debate about how we can’t make classic beauty anymore will always be around (and it’s not very interesting). But what strikes me in some “ugly” cities is how accepted it is to let things be objectively ugly, for example in some cities you can see how a building wedged between two beautiful buildings has been torn down but the effort to build a new one seems on hold. As if owning the building/land gave the right to leave a scar for any amount of time. In cities where this doesn’t happen I imagine you simply don’t get a permit to leave an ugly hole. Build it or face a stiff fine, perhaps forcing you to sell to someone who would build. Seems like the only reasonable way of keeping it tidy. A lot of UK inner city areas look like this for example.
- pixl97 3y agoI'm pretty sure gravity may have some demands in how fast an ugly building comes down.
- mw67 3y agoRelevant account for those wanting more photos illustrating the article: https://x.com/culture_crit?s=21&t=vrepFz-CnvLdHpV1b9UI0A https://x.com/culture_crit?s=21&t=vrepFz-CnvLdHpV1b9UI0A And a great YT channel explaining these points too: https://youtu.be/C9pg2j2oGy0?si=83HrNdnZ6PdwGfrf https://youtu.be/C9pg2j2oGy0?si=83HrNdnZ6PdwGfrf
- dzdt 3y agoDiscussed previously (2022) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679
- user_7832 3y agoI’ve got a counterpoint: we finally have the time to breathe and actually notice the ugliness. You don’t care about looks in a time of war. You put a lot of effort into “looks” and loving well shortly after a war as a rebound “look now it’s so better” compensation. We’ve instead (mostly) plateaued, which, at a (mostly) global level isn’t necessarily bad. (Of course, if art is a reflection of present-day it’s not necessarily predicting a stable future in the context of global warming/water wars etc. I wonder if more graffiti will show up on these themes over time.)
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoWorld War 3 has been going on since 2010. We are currently in one of history's times of great turbulence. (Most people lived through the fall of the Roman Empire and didn't even notice it.)
- I-M-S 3y agoWhy 2010 exactly?
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoStart of the "Arab Spring" and the clusterfuck that led to the dissolution of all international law.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhere is your evidence for any of this ("world war 3", "dissolution of all international law") and why do you believe it?
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoAmong academic historians there is a consensus of what a "world war" is - it is a conflict that cannot be solved in terms of existing international diplomatic practices, and requires going "back to the drawing board" and setting up a whole new system of international relations when the dust settles. So the Thirty Years' War was "world war zero", a classic example of what a world war looks like. It ended with the Westphalian Peace, WWI ended with the League of Nations, WWII ended with the establishment of the UN and its Security Council. The current clusterfuck will abolish the UN at its end and start something new. The current period will go down in history as a world war.
- andrelaszlo 3y agoDiscussion from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679
- donatj 3y agoMy city and apparently numerous cities in my area have passed ordinances that new buildings over a certain size have to have multiple facades to look like multiple buildings butted up to each other. The effect has been this astonishingly hideous theme park esq approximation of small town America that isn’t fooling anyone. It looks more out of place next to the actual turn of the twentieth century buildings than an unambiguously new building would. We can all see quite clearly this block long apartment building isn’t actually 5 buildings. Yet, now we have to suffer five hideous facades.
- dzdt 3y agoAnd there is no economic possibility for small developers to actually build multiple buildings organically anymore. This is because of the economics of scale of complying with stringent building code requirements along with endless zoning board approval meetings, environmental reviews, traffic studies, etc etc etc.
- ajkjk 3y agoSounds hilarious. Where's that?
- donatj 3y agoMinneapolis Suburbs. There’s been a huge apartment building boom, and cities with leftover small town vibes have passed these ordinances.
- thedonkeycometh 3y ago[dead]
- jszymborski 3y agoI just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoI blame house flippers honestly. They buy up houses that are in rough shape on the cheap, then renovate strictly to sell, not for personal taste. The incentives at play are to shoot for a very dull, milquetoast instagram-ish aesthetic that anyone can sort of get along with, so you won't lose people for not liking whatever hardwood or paint colors you picked.
- FerretFred 3y agoYeah! Watching any episode of (UK) daytime-TV's "Homes Under the Hammer" will reveal any number of properties - some with real character - refurbished with every shade of grey you can imagine. It looks awful to be honest and really, what kind of philistine paints over real wood anyway? What really bugs me is the way the estate agents visit afterwards and say "how tastefully it's been renovated".
- Scene_Cast2 3y agoBut what if you look at it from an auction theory perspective. If there's a set of buyers with a set of bids, you're trying to get a large set of buyers (if you're pulling samples from a distribution, more samples = higher max), but you're also trying to increase the value these buyers are willing to pay (shift the distribution to the right). I wonder if there's some amount of customization, in a healthy housing market (tons of buyers) that you can do that increases the expected max bid despite decreasing number of prospective buyers.
- jwells89 3y agoMy guess is that most things that would boost selling price while narrowing buyers are not cheap which cancels (or mostly cancels) out the price increase, making it cheaper and more foolproof to go the boring inoffensive route.
- vdaea 3y ago[flagged]
- mmbop 3y agoThis would require a huge amount of collaboration amongst the elite and managers. Where can I find out more?
- dhdidbsisnab 3y agoThe same line of reasoning could be used to justify creationism. Human culture is an incredibly complex system that can create shared behaviors without any central coordination. While I’m not in agreement (or disagreement) with the parent, it’s certainly plausible without the coordination you’re implying.
- mmbop 3y agoI was politely trying to point this out. I think this is a classic Occam’s Razor scenario. One likely cause is that “boring” style can appeal to a wider audience and sell more units.
- vstm 3y agoNowadays even the conspiracy theories are becoming ugly and boring. The only thing they've got going for them is how many people are spreading them. Now I actually want to die from the vaccines.
- dhdidbsisnab 3y ago> Now I actually want to die from the vaccines Are you implying that’s a conspiracy theory? Big pharma has a history of abusing the edge cases and dismissing those is one of the major causes of “conspiracy theories”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3y ago
- apantel 3y agoA whole article about ugly things with no pictures of them?
- 65 3y agoI don't trust the author if he's not giving any visual examples. Why should I trust his opinion?
- logicprog 3y agoYeah, I immediately skimmed the article to see if there were any pictures of what the author considers ugly so I could get a sense for what their tastes are and adjust for that accordingly, or even conclude that their opinions weren't relevant to me, and the one single picture of an example ugly thing that I was able to find looked absolutely perfectly fine to me, in fact I liked it. I think a lot of the complaints around ugly architecture are just matters of difference of aesthetics: I'm autistic and a have certain amount of brain damage to my vision centers and so I deal with sensory overload a lot, and so I tend to prefer interfaces and environments that are clean and simple, made of just enough shapes and colors to communicate the structure of things and that's it, with no extraneous ornamentation or gradients or whatever, so a lot of modern architecture looks fine or even nice and refreshing to me, like a glass of cool water. Meanwhile, most of the people I find complaining about this sort of thing are the typical hipsters and grouchy conservatives — both of the "I was born too late" variety and the "I was literally born a long time ago" variety — that are looking fondly on a past age just out of their own personal preferences and predilections, and probably without any real understanding of what it was like to live surrounded by overly ornate architecture all the time, which is perfectly fine for them, but then they make these Grand think pieces and statements about how things should be, which is frustrating since I would rather gouge my own eyes out then live in the world they would prefer oftentimes.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI don't think the intent is to convince people with visual evidence, or "bring the receipts". Not every article is or should be targeted at convincing the resistant reader, and visual examples can be a distraction or simplification of a broader idea. It is valid for an article to simply connect ideas together, in a way the reader may not be aware of. A reader may have their own examples to think about, which are much more powerful.
- karaterobot 3y agoAnother article on the same topic, is "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture" by Adrian Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo... The two don't necessarily disagree, but I think the one I linked is better written. Plus, something about having all the block quotes be from tweets always makes me feel like the author isn't doing enough research or reading widely enough to be authoritative.
- chatallo 3y agofwiw I don't think the block quotes are from tweets, I think that's just a link to share the quote on twitter
- Jeema101 3y agoOh man. There is this building in the city where I live. It's SO uncompromisngly gray and ugly that sometimes I think maybe it's actually a parody of this particular style. It kind of looks like a prison from the outside too... but it's actually condos! I hate it so much that I love it. :) Anyway here's a great photo of it I found on Google: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipMKvYH4OHFU5o4gZlSZX3C-sULYprW2fLAa-oZx=s680-w680-h510 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipMKvYH4OHFU5o4gZlSZ...
- waldothedog 3y agoI kinda like it! The rivets are interesting, and the window proportions too. Plus the photo has nice light, which doesn’t hurt.
- j4yav 3y agoWow you weren’t kidding. Looks like a sheet metal factory.
- toastedwedge 3y agoIt looks like it's straight out of an urban scene for Equilibrium.
- reportgunner 3y agoThis is pretty to me.
- joegibbs 3y agoIt looks like something that you'd put in a movie to show the oppressive miserableness of a British coal town in the 1970s.
- dzdt 3y agoMissing context: I believe the building referred to as "The Josh" is the Gluck+ affordable housing development Van Sinderen Plaza. [1] Compare the colorful panel surfacing to the description "Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford... We spent the summer certain that the caution tape–yellow panels on The Josh’s south side were insulation, to be eventually supplanted by an actual facade. Alas, in its finished form The Josh really is yellow, and also burgundy, gray, and brown." The coy phrasing about "apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford" is a disguised reference to the fact that the apartments are reserved only for low-income residents; the author would not want to live in Brooklyn on the poverty-level income required to be eligible for the housing development. The pictured sculpture the author dislikes is "Waiting" by the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly). [2] [1] https://gluckplus.com/project/van-sinderen-plaza-affordable-housing https://gluckplus.com/project/van-sinderen-plaza-affordable-... [2] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/kaws-waiting-brooklyn-sculpture https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/kaws-waiting-brook...
- woodruffw 3y agoI don't think it's that building: the visual description matches, but Brownsville has (thus far) resisted the gentrification that the author describes in the associated area. My educated guess is that the building in question is somewhere in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, or maybe Bushwick.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- abhaynayar 3y agoI misread it as everyone and was disappointed when I realized.
- Throw84949 3y agoGo and spend summer in Russia, it is the perfect antidote. St. Petersburg is amazingly beautiful! Museums, architecture, cultural performances, no morbidly obese people on streets, no graffiti, even metro is nice!
- CamperBob2 3y agoI'd rather visit sunny Magnitogorsk: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fnzgacoaci4b51.jpg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fn... (Actually I'd rather visit Kyiv but I've heard that now's not a good time.)
- Throw84949 3y agoYou can visit Kyiv. Regiojet.com has daily trains from Krakow to Kyiv, with guaranteed connection at UA border. It takes about 14 hours and 50 euro. Or dozens buses every day, but you will have to wait for several hours at border (train skips queue).
- hooverd 3y agoHey, you forgot to add the grey filter.
- BizarreByte 3y agoAn areal photo during the winter isn't very fair to the city. Looking around on street view during the summer months it doesn't look nearly as bad. A bit run down, but that's common for nearly all ex-soviet cities.
- Throw84949 3y agoMagnitogorsk has nice weather in summer. Some green parks, decent public transport. But not that much fun, westerners usually prefer university cities. It has very nice surrounding nature. Polution is ok I guess (India and China were far worse from my experience). It is not industrial shithole as OP suggests. Factories were cleaned up over 30 years. And smoke stack are quite high and leave smoke in high atmosphere. And most of them use natural gas anyway... There is 2.5 hours walk through on youtube: "Magnitogorsk, Russia. Metallurgic Capital and Steel Heart of Russia. Ural Trip 1".
- hbarka 3y agoContrast it with beautiful areas like the Amalfi Coast or any old town in the Mediterranean. They have color and trees. The advent of concrete, specifically Portland cement, brought on the gray brutalism. Builders would rather leave the stark concrete raw than color it.
- skymast 3y ago[dead]
- detourdog 3y agoI see quality building as a materials problem. I'm little surprised at the number of comments promoting that color is tied to quality. I see color generally as the least significant feature of design. There are situation where color becomes important to communicate ideas. These moments I see as design details. I don't see them generally as intrinsic to design. Mosts of the factors I see discussed in this thread are more related to mass manufacturing and trying to guess what people want. Everything is ugly becuase few people take personal responsibility in making the world better.
- hindsightbias 3y agoThe new Prius is actually not that awful.
- snakeyjake 3y ago> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out people almost rioted. Their harsh orange glow invaded bedrooms creeping between gaps in curtains and assaulting the eyes, destroyed the soft and warm ambiance that had set the night scene for generations, and muted all colors into a monochromatic hellscape. After just 30 seconds on TimesMachine I found an article from 1982 about the transition and how some residents were hesitant and one jurisdiction rejected the change out of hand. It took a long time for NYC to gain its orange glow and people didn't like it. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1982/09/12/137352.html?pageNumber=326 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1982/09/12/137... Lol here's another article from the 40s: "Sodium light is not suitable for city streets, Commissioner Goodman said, because it gives a person a sallow appearance not liked by women." https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1940/05/26/issue.html https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1940/05/26/iss... People of my age view them as a nuisance born out of the austerity of the 1970s, a temporary suboptimal fix that persisted due to inertia. A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. Now this dude is nostalgic for them?
- dghlsakjg 3y agoPeople hate new things more than they hate the mediocrity they know.
- renewiltord 3y agoMost of these aesthetic criticism people are just conservative people. They don't like change. The world was best when they arrived somewhere. That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.
- achileas 3y agoThis is the only real takeaway of the article. “I don’t like this because it’s new to me, therefore it’s universally bad.” I live in Boston and there was a similar freakout about the gas lamps in Beacon Hill being replaced by LEDs. Not a single person I talked to about it knew that the gas lamps were only added to the neighborhood in the late 70s to make it look more quaint and historic.
- cs702 3y agoWell, I for one don't think everything is ugly. Apple devices and stores look clean and elegant to me. Tesla vehicles feel and look simple and beautiful to me. If given a choice, I'd rather live in new buildings with bright, light-filled interiors than in old buildings with darker, mustier interiors. I could provide more examples of things I don't think are ugly. The main point is this: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
- JadeNB 3y ago> Tesla vehicles look beautiful to me. As you say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder—but, seriously, the Cybertruck as a thing of beauty? (This is from someone who actually liked the boxy car designs of old.)
- pixl97 3y agoEvery family has that ugly cousin no one talks about.
- xprn 3y agoObligatory “if you don’t know who it is, it’s you”
- cs702 3y agoYes, the Cybertruck looks great to me. Is it different? Yes. But ugly? Not in my view. Have you seen it in person?
- callalex 3y agoI had the opposite experience. I thought pictures on the internet looked neat because it was unique. In person it causes an almost physical reaction in me because I found it so hideous.
- JadeNB 3y ago> Have you seen it in person? I have not. I can't imagine it improving that much in person, but who knows? Anyway, whether I think it's ugly, in person or from afar, is not the issue; I was surprised that someone found it beautiful (which is different from just not being ugly), but I certainly don't mean to argue the point.
- sph 3y agoDupe from last year, 500+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679 They lied on the publication date.
- ojintoad 3y agoOdd, do you mean they lied back in 2022? Definitely confusing at the least! https://web.archive.org/web/20221206160651/https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221206160651/https://www.nplus...
- argiopetech 3y agoNever attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Hanlon, Robert
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- accoil 3y agoI dunno. I can see how Dec 2022 could be Winter 2023 for New York, but basing publication dates off seasons seems purposefully vague.
- argiopetech 3y agoIt's a tri-annual publication, Winter (the first publication of the year, this year's doesn't appear to be out), Summer, and Fall.
- iamgopal 3y agoWhy good looking car expensive when cheap car and expensive car used same Color steel and lights ?
- z5h 3y agoWhen we believed that our institutions (religious, governmental, cultural, corporate) took care of us (whether or not they did), we would invest our efforts in return. The jig is up. Why invest more than “minimum viable caring” at this point? As an Ontarian who recently took a road trip through Quebec (where a faith in culture still presides), it seemed like there was more “giving a shit” about all institutions and it came through in quality across the board.
- mglz 3y agoMy crackpot theory: This is in part due to CAD: * Colors other than gray don't look nice in CAD and aren't the default. * It's super easy to just stack a bunch of rectangles (looking at you, architects...) * You can chamfer and fillet but that's the end of what most people do. More complex shapes are hard to due due to the clunky spline tools. Hence elaborate ornaments are left out.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoNot such a crackpot theory in my opinion - the tools we use to communicate design surely will influence what we design.
- jareklupinski 3y agothat makes sense in the era of blueprints, where you had to draw literally everything from scratch every time, human pride would necessitate taking the time to add flourishes or small details to every page, just to keep the talent who is producing them from losing their minds look at old bibles, full of small details that are ultimately useless for the message being conveyed, but still announce the presence of a poor soul doomed to reproduce these glyphs for eternity nowadays... you can just open an old drawing, hit copy-paste, and be down by the pub at 11am.... not a bad deal for the drawer, but for the people looking up on the sidewalk...
- esperent 3y agoI think this is valid, but it's only one part of the equation - and I would guess it's the smaller part. The other side is manufacturing. In an era of mass production, making things like buildings look unique is expensive. If your building is made from rectangles, lines, and few curves, you can use off the shelf panels to build it. Order them from a factory, have a truck deliver them, stick them together with cement and bolts. On the other hand, even if you do pay someone for the extra time to create beautiful, unique, complex designs in a CAD program (which is not that hard), actually making those parts is extremely expensive so they will get rejected by most architectural and construction firms. Perhaps as we come into the era of 3d printing, more complex structures will come back into vogue again. It will be kind of ironic if 99% of all futuristic cities depicted in scifi, all clean lines, spires, and cylinders turns out to be wrong and the skyscraper of the future looks more like the Sagrada Familia, but built in six months instead of three centuries. (Although personally I'm hoping the future looks like forested garden cities.)
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoAesthetics has always seemed like the front line of the war for civilization against chaos.
- corethree 3y agoThere's a stupid article like this every decade where the writer thinks he's being edgy when he's actually just regurgitating the same shit spewed by regular people every 10 years. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but really stupid people who write articles like this think their eyes are the center of the universe. Take a look at this from over a decade ago: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5gynqq/what-v11n11 https://www.vice.com/en/article/5gynqq/what-v11n11 Part of the article laments how the shape of cars have turned into "cough drops" and "globular tears". Clever but I can also write a edgy article about how idiots in the past designed cars as if they were hideous boxes and the concept of a curve was too advanced for their square minds to comprehend.
- TheCleric 3y agoCall me overly practical, but as long as we have a shortage of housing, build all the ugly you can. I’d rather have people housed in ugly buildings they can afford over waiting for something aesthetically beautiful.
- keenmaster 3y agoIt’s possible for everyone to like beautiful things but not build them when given the chance. The “problem” is, everyone has a different preference. Let’s say I like mid-century modern, and spend $75,000 extra on building (tastefully) in that style. Now it’s 10 years later and I want to sell the house. A potential buyer likes everything except the mid-century modern. Their favorite style is neoclassical. To them, mid-century modern styling has a value of zero or even -$25,000. So if I didn’t build in that style, they might have been willing to pay 75k-100k more. The paradox here is that a divergence in preferences, due to cultural atomization and the internet, has led to lower returns on investment in beauty (and atrophying of craftsmanship and the ability to build beautifully to begin with). If you ask me, a tasteful aesthetic monoculture is a good thing, and can result in timeless beauty which will be appreciated long after that monoculture evolves/ends. Sameness is not inherently bad! See: Florence, Venice, Andalucia, 1800’s Paris, etc…
- barrysteve 3y agoAll the new builds in my area share a rendered concrete and jail-bar fencing aesthetic that is monstorous, undesirable and ugly. There are no sensible features to look at. The corners of the build look so sharp, you'd cut your hand if you touched them. The hundred-million dollar shopping centre was done up last year and it removed most of the internal landmarks and created a series of flat hallways. There is nothing to rest your eyes upon, nothing to look at. It's one flat, dated shop after another. Usually based on some dead subculture from 10yrs ago and recent ladies' fashion trends. The apartments went up as part of the build and that are flat cubes, copy pasted with doors and windows cut into a wall behind a front patio of flat wooden slats. Minecraft aesthetic for ferrari prices. It is physically irritating to look for a pattern or a boundary line or a landmark and find nothing to anchor yourself. Everything is textureless and shapeless. I avoid the place. The concept of an aspirational home is dead in my books. The traditional homes may raise the blood pressure a touch too much and seem complex.. The contemporary builds are ugly and irritating. A sense of balance, proportion, beauty and differentiated shapes, physically calms me. It has to be updated traditional. Neo classical or french colonial or some such new variation on an outdated style.
- fleventynine 3y agoWe need more housing, and we needed it yesterday. Ugly is better than nothing. Folks that care about aesthetic quality over quantity are part of the problem.
- tomcam 3y ago> WE LIVE IN UNDENIABLY UGLY TIMES. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding — many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best. One of these things is not like the others
- opportune 3y agoThis article is trying too hard to be intellectual and incorporate artsy prose. A lot of it is just nonsensical or self-contradictory. Basically the author is self-aware that others’ preferences and economic conditions have led to a built environment that’s incompatible with their tastes, and that they don’t actually have the right to dictate what others choose to build and buy. So they decide to snobbily denigrate them because… (makes them feel better? some kind of psychological need to establish superiority?) Tastes change. There has been a pretty continual oscillation within architecture between more minimalist and austere styling and ornately decorated styling. Feels pretty pointless to get caught up in argument that boils down to red being a better color than blue
- throwaway220033 3y agoWest is not just ugly, it’s also dirty, its streets smell pee, it has no moral compass, no standard in anything. It promotes abandoning traditions in favor of degeneration and the result is ugly and disgusting. Its politicians have orgies and organize festivals to run naked on the street once a year in the name of “pride”. Art is not art anymore, they’re producing “artists” who put candles in their ass and walk like dogs for “art”. Same as poets or singers. So much nakedness, nothing deep or beautiful. There’s no more good art, novels or movies coming out of Western culture. Careful people even take steps to protect their children from it.
- audunw 3y agoA lot of that isn’t unique to the west. China tore down most of its beautiful temples (the contrast between mainland and Taiwan is striking), totally obliterated any moral compass among its people, its politicians are just comically corrupt (when it’s politically convenient to prosecute one of them they need trucks to unload the literal ton of cash in their homes), etc. Their movies are now mostly pointless propaganda with zero appeal outside China. And the examples you list are incredibly niche. There’s still plenty of good art if you care to look. There’s always been weird niche art and trashy popular art, all throughout the history of civilisation. What country do you look to as a good example?
- zeroday28 3y ago22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms. From The Original Complete List Of The 45 Declared Goals.
- incomingpain 3y ago>WE LIVE IN UNDENIABLY UGLY TIMES. We live in undeniably depressed times. Where people don't stop and smell the flowers or pet the dog. They don't see the bald eagle flying over. You are surrounded by utter wonderful beauty and you can't see it. https://www.pagani.com/ https://www.pagani.com/ Sunsets/Sunrises/Landscapes have gone nowhere. Music is literally at all time peak for beauty because it's understood far better than ever. Special FX has reached a point where they are simulating younger/dead people like Leia in Rogue one? Acts of kindness and charity are now made easier then ever. I'm checking out at some big box store and you're offered a 99% charity to donate to... Yes, please, every time.
- incomingpain 3y agoI'm surprised how quickly I got downvoted on this one. Guess I can't have a positive message?
- k99x55 3y agoRelated: Why Many Cities Suck from Not Just Bikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4kmDxcfR48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4kmDxcfR48
- spicyusername 3y agoI like to refer to pieces like this as weaponized pessimism. They have a certain junk food allure, but their tone isn't really something we should strive to feel in our lives.
- leg100 3y ago> Gah! Blinded by the intense glare of an LED streetlamp, we bump right into said streetlamp. Fortunately there’s an urgent care across the street, still open in the dwindling dusk. We’re no doctor — at least not until they start giving out PhDs in walking around — but we can tell that our knee is bleeding. Who is this "we" they keep referring to...are they Siamese twins?
- dusted 3y agoI guess design is more about the amount of emotion evoked, rather than the quality of emotion evoked. Destruction is easier than creation. Creating something so ugly that it induces a negative emotion is probably easier than creating something so beautiful that it induces a positive emotion. That would also explain modern UI design.
- JohnClark1337 3y ago[dead]