5 ms·

Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugl

by boh 19d ago

Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. It may come as a surprise but it required years of cultural development and education for most people to accept the work of Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production. It's only recently, (with designs like the Ferrari EV for instance) that people are starting to see how limited our aesthetic language has become. Modernism is too cheap to replace so the "beauty" of soulless minimalism will likely endure in the zeitgeist, but it's not a very interesting environment to be in.

dmix 19d ago
That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas. So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.
- interiorchurch 19d ago
  This is sort of a just-so story that isn't completely true. Stalin pushed "socialist classicism" [1] as an aesthetic, and it wasn't until his successors took over that modernist architectural ideas imported from the West became a hallmark of actually-existing socialism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture
  - TFNA 19d ago
    There was a whole decade of Soviet design before Stalin, which was often radically modernist even by the standards of its day, and that is what the OP was referring to. Stalin was notoriously conservative in his artistic tastes.
    - int_19h 19d ago
      Stalin was notoriously conservative in most things. I mean, the guy banned abortions, criminalized homosexuality, and re-instituted paid high school.
    - jordanb 19d ago
      A huge part of the Soviet period before Stalin was the civil war and minimal efforts to do anything other than fight it ("war communism"). After that you got the NEP and things going traditional. Stalin pushed classical and actually within the soviet union Stalinst buildings were considered the best. These are called Stalinka. Khrushchev embarked on a massive post-war building campaign in an effort to improve living conditions within the USSR by providing millions of new housing units. These were modernist mid-rise and high-rise buildings and were designed for mass production and efficiency above everything else. These were regarded as considerably lower quality buildings than the Stalinka and were called Khrushchyovka. The Krushchyovka were the classic "commie blocks."
      - TFNA 18d ago
        Again, this comment is not informed (I work in a field largely centered around the early Soviet era). Mass housing construction of dispiriting blocks boomed in the Khrushchev era, and the early Soviet era was indeed tumultuous, but the 1920s and even early 1930s saw architectual designs for public buildings that were remarkably modernist. Wikipedia has more than enough coverage if you want to learn more.
        jordanb 18d ago
        This person may be an expert but I have no way to assess that because this low-effort garbage comment provides absolutely no evidence their background and no effort to back up their claims. Most of this comment, after saying I'm "not informed" just repeated everything I said in my comment with less details. This seems to be a comment where someone started with a prompt of "no ur wrong" and had AI elaborate it out into something less juvenile.
  - dmix 19d ago
    I said early Soviet for a reason.
recursivedoubts 19d ago
We are too rich to be able to afford things like Sears Roebuck houses now.
- paleotrope 19d ago
  So rich but nobody has any money anymore.
  - rbanffy 19d ago
    All the money belongs to a remarkably small group of people.
  - lotsofpulp 18d ago
    All the money is (or will be) spent on land near other rich people so your kids can have a school peer group with parents who have higher education/wealth/social network achievements, and after that, healthcare, and after that, liability coverage. If there is money left over, then you decorate. But you’ve probably bought into a new housing development with an HOA that doesn’t allow exterior modifications without approval.
torginus 19d ago
I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives. I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind. And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former. And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
- bix6 19d ago
  They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?
  - torginus 19d ago
    I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.
    - bix6 19d ago
      Yes plus everyone is competing on cost so the lowest bid gets chosen.
    - asdff 19d ago
bix6 19d ago
The influencer aesthetic. Why do people pay so much to look so boring?
ragall 19d ago
> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain. Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.
- pessimizer 19d ago
  [flagged]
TheOtherHobbes 19d ago
Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment. But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly. Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful. But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.) The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations. If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.
- rbanffy 19d ago
  > But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly. It's far more common than it should be. > The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations. The economic of bathtub curves incentivises designs nobody hates, even if at the cost of nobody loving them.
  - asdff 19d ago
    The bathtub curve is not the most optimal however. I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun? Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill. Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?
Gibbon1 19d ago
> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction. What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.
- jordanb 19d ago
  I actually think this is a big part of nimbyism. People know that whatever is built is going to make the neighborhood uglier because they have no faith in architecture, so they start opposing everything.
alex-moon 19d ago
"The aesthetic is more or a side-effect of using cheaper resources and cheaper methods of production." This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your statements at all?
- alexgoodhart 19d ago
  My guess is that at best it's a specious argument. It would be interesting but difficult to try to elucidate. Still what occurs to me is – Cheaper: than what? Is it that premodern architects had the same technology and materials available but chose not to use them <because they had a higher aesth-ethical integrity>? – What is a 'side effect' in architecture in a way that's unique from the necessary compromising that the needs of occupants, material constraints, longevity, cost, time, labor, aesthetics, and etc. which essentially is architecture? > given {cheap material, not the good stuff / I don't feel like it / measuring sucks / I just want to cram people that will ruin your neighborhood everywhere}, the average roll of the dice yields simpler geometry with less ornamentation. But simpler geometry is structurally stronger and allows more spacious airflow / less heat trapping. The cost of materials is not inert, the demand for them affects the cost obviously. Energy efficiency is beneficial to all. Open floor plans are less prohibitive on use cases. Large window sectioning allows for more light/efficiency and also keeps the street level perspective from seeming insular. The logic doesn't follow for me that capital was plainly more benevolent, then around some time or another they began the project of "educating" people into accepting their cheap and accidental aesthetic standard. What survives the past are its most accomplished projects, and thus maybe per capita it appears of higher quality than modern. And more importantly re: the submitted article, it has informed centuries of signing what "home", safe, hospitable, threatening, and etc. mean. So the whole measurement of who prefers what says something but I don't think it speaks to natural perception.
  - alex-moon 19d ago
    That's it yeah. These kinds of pieces have been written for centuries. Surprise: people like what they are familiar with! There is no meaningful conclusion to draw from this. Look at Monet or Satie. In their own time? Grotesque, offensive - the kind of art scruffy pompous intellectuals enjoy. Now, a century later? At home in a greige IKEA showroom house being sold on the open market. To be clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with this - I love IKEA! I am buying a greige house as we speak! It is just not an interesting observation, and when writers attempt to use it as an argument against making new things, it's facetious at best, and at worst? Well, several interesting possibilities.
mmooss 19d ago
> Ugliness has become a cultural norm I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning. You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference? Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target. Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!
- asdff 19d ago
  I think a lot of the reflexive distaste for the modern would be softened if we were still able to build in The Old Way, whatever that might be. People like these older brick mid rise buildings with the bit of trimming decoration. But, they just don't get built. Sometimes in NYC or chicago someplace you might see a more recent build where they tried to get those old elements down. They used brick and made it square and tried to do a little decoration, but something is missing. They didn't do the thing where they use nicer brick on the street facing side of the structure, or they didn't do the actual cement formed decorative trim pieces throughout. All the brick is laid the same instead of having some lines on the top edge turned out in a decorative way for example. The whole thing feels severely value engineered even if on paper it's actually a quality building with modern amenities and comforts. Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.
grebc 19d ago
White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia. It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.
- __d 19d ago
  I painted my house blue and orange in protest at the boring colour choices most people make. No one else on my street has followed my lead though. I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.
  - vintagedave 19d ago
    This is the grey car theory of real estate. It’s easy to sell grey, white, and black cars. So it’s what you buy. This assumes no purchase is longterm. Which is its own indictment. I should add: I love that you broke this idea. Can you (safely for the internet) share any photos?
  - a34729t 19d ago
    I wanted to paint my house in Razzle Dazzle, but orange and green. My wife threatened to leave me, so the idea was abandoned.
  - zdragnar 19d ago
    I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house". Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal. What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
- chris_armstrong 19d ago
  A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.
Theodores 19d ago
In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about. One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades. Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture. There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on. Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day. In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad. There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK). Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years. Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day. The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me. So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from. Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce! The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car. The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it. The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the 'peak car' maintainable vehicles that people wish they had today. Fortunately I will never be a customer for Ferrari, however, if I was a tax-dodging benevolent dictator with the wealth to put together a motor museum, I would not hesitate to buy a Luxe for the collection, to go alongside an OG Tesla Model S, with the faux grille, and a Xiaomi SU7. I would like to add a Ford Cortina and a Ford Sierra too, however, millions were made and millions rusted away, leaving none for my fantasy museum, particularly in the desired Saluki Bronze colour.
chasil 19d ago
This is not a general truth. The Dana-Thomas House, designed and executed by Frank-Lloyd Wright, spared no expense in an age when skilled craftsmen were affordable. Are there seeds of the Guggenheim in New York between these two buildings? https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-house-a-treasure-saved/ https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-ho... https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687-Reviews-Solomon_R_Guggenheim_Museum-New_York_City_New_York.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687...
msy 19d ago
The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.
- magarnicle 19d ago
  Isn't that exactly their point? Every new building looks like an iPhone: sleek glass and metal.
  - msy 19d ago
    But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
  - sagarm 18d ago
    I can't believe this has to be said, but glass skyscrapers predate even the first iPhone. The is hopefully the high watermark of Apple fans thinking Apple invented something they didn't.
    - magarnicle 18d ago
      That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.
- kragen 18d ago
  Apple hardware is glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepipeds very similar to the glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepiped skyscrapers that this article is decrying. The main difference is that Apple hardware has rounded corners as a necessary concession to practicality.
pvab3 19d ago
Not really. That may have been true in the past, but it would be so cheap to CNC carve or extrude or injection-mould some ornamentation. Certain materials have gotten more expensive, but I think most of modernism was driven by materials progress and a boredom with previous trends
analog31 19d ago
Modern materials and production methods eliminated the need for ornamentation to prove a craftsman's skill and attention to detail. I'm thinking of something like a violin. You can't pick up a violin and judge the perfection of the fitting between the wood surfaces that are glued together. If that work isn't perfect, the instrument will eventually fly apart. But you can look at the "scroll" and "bees sting" which are unforgiving of tiny errors. These kinds of features persist to this day due to traditionalism, but have disappeared from most industrial products. Today, I don't expect an ornamented house to be of any better quality than a plain house.
- jojobas 19d ago
  There's plenty of traditional architecture that's not baroque, and is therefore not very rich in ornamentation. An austere brick home with a tiled roof still wins over a modernist cube house in both form and function, if not cost.
bluegatty 19d ago
It's fair to have a cynical take but that's not what modernism is and modernism is not necessarily ugly.
hardbass 19d ago
I am not sure how it is about "cheaper". Lathering on a finish with a roller is much cheaper than a carefully prepared spray system. Modern furniture and structures often use uniformly sprayed coatings. You are mistaking cleanness of look with cheapness, getting such a uniform coating is quite expensive and takes skill and discipline regarding hygiene and cleanup between abrasive grits etc as well. And if you are against things generally in the sphere of "Bauhaus" interior design then I would say you are engaging in a cargo cult of using modern materials in unnatural ways to copy older designs without eye to how the modern material has its own natural form and manner of usage. I would say, for example if one only has hand tools and solid wood then it is reasonable to follow Colonial design school, but if one has glass, stainless steel and plywood, it is wasteful to force them into a Colonial shape rather than their natural forms. Either style respects the substances and tooling it uses. You are free to pay four digit prices for every piece of furniture if you truly oppose designs that are aligned toward mass production.
KaiserPro 19d ago
> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources Which modernism? 1930s modernism was about new materials to allow luxury for the modern man (electricity! large windows! electric oven! washing machines! fridges! indoor toilets!) 1960/70s modernism was about creating new communities, adapting land to fit the modern car based world. No more pokey little shops with only a few items, requiring a trudge along a wobbly high street. NO! drive your car, go to a futuristic supermarket only once a week. I don't think we see a modernism now, not as a movement. I will now divert to UK building, because in the US its different. Part of the reason why thats the case in the UK is that councils used to build houses, facilities and infrastructure with their own money. This meant they had their own architects. This lead to town plans that were coherent, if not always successful. See Birmingham, milton keynes, roehamton. Housing wise, council houses were built, or should have been built to a standard. They were, especially in cities much bigger, brighter and luxurious compared to what preceded them. Were they pretty? no, modern is never pretty, because its not what you grew up with. When I was a kid everyone _hated_ victorian terrace houses, because thats what poor people have. They were more pokey compared to executive estate housing, and in some places didn't have a drive for your four door saloon. Now, those estates are meh and terrace houses are very expensive, despite being cold, draughty, dingey little shitboxes with odd toilet arrangements. (unless you've slapped in a loft conversion and extended over the kitchen/outdoor toilet) > Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production. The problem is, Rams was about bringing the complex new object into the house in a was that was reliable and simple. If we were all about Rams' vision, then we'd have got rid of radiators, had decent windows, insulated the place, had lots of cupboards and cleanly separated living spaces. Not an everything room and a bedroom with inbuilt mould farm (shower + shitter) Yes the modern apartment is inspired by loft living and dieter rams, but that requires 100sqm/1000sqft and high ceilings. none of which most places have. So you get a kitchen diner because it allows developers to shave off one room from the floorplan and increase density by 1/3rd without extra mateiral costs. But thats not modernism, thats poor fucking standards, and the lack of competition in the uk in the form new council houses. (a 3 bedroom council house will be at least 90sqm with seperate kitchen, living room)
modo_mario 19d ago
It's not even always cheaper. https://youtu.be/y5w4REl_Few https://youtu.be/y5w4REl_Few
jameshart 18d ago
A lot of the sample images shown of ‘traditional’ architecture in this piece are not what you’re talking about - they aren’t ’traditional materials’ or ‘traditional techniques’, they just use choices of exterior cladding and window layouts that are evocative of traditional choices - but they are just as much a soulless product of low cost materials and construction efficiency. Not the case for all of them (the brick-built viaduct proposal for example looks like it would be a nightmare to build and maintain), but most of the buildings shown, the ‘traditional’ variant just uses less visible steel and glass, in favor of ‘layer cake’ designs with stone cladding panels on the lowest level.

by boh 19d ago

dmix 19d ago

That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas. So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.

interiorchurch 19d ago
This is sort of a just-so story that isn't completely true. Stalin pushed "socialist classicism" [1] as an aesthetic, and it wasn't until his successors took over that modernist architectural ideas imported from the West became a hallmark of actually-existing socialism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture
- TFNA 19d ago
  There was a whole decade of Soviet design before Stalin, which was often radically modernist even by the standards of its day, and that is what the OP was referring to. Stalin was notoriously conservative in his artistic tastes.
  - int_19h 19d ago
    Stalin was notoriously conservative in most things. I mean, the guy banned abortions, criminalized homosexuality, and re-instituted paid high school.
  - jordanb 19d ago
    A huge part of the Soviet period before Stalin was the civil war and minimal efforts to do anything other than fight it ("war communism"). After that you got the NEP and things going traditional. Stalin pushed classical and actually within the soviet union Stalinst buildings were considered the best. These are called Stalinka. Khrushchev embarked on a massive post-war building campaign in an effort to improve living conditions within the USSR by providing millions of new housing units. These were modernist mid-rise and high-rise buildings and were designed for mass production and efficiency above everything else. These were regarded as considerably lower quality buildings than the Stalinka and were called Khrushchyovka. The Krushchyovka were the classic "commie blocks."
    - TFNA 18d ago
      Again, this comment is not informed (I work in a field largely centered around the early Soviet era). Mass housing construction of dispiriting blocks boomed in the Khrushchev era, and the early Soviet era was indeed tumultuous, but the 1920s and even early 1930s saw architectual designs for public buildings that were remarkably modernist. Wikipedia has more than enough coverage if you want to learn more.
      - jordanb 18d ago
        This person may be an expert but I have no way to assess that because this low-effort garbage comment provides absolutely no evidence their background and no effort to back up their claims. Most of this comment, after saying I'm "not informed" just repeated everything I said in my comment with less details. This seems to be a comment where someone started with a prompt of "no ur wrong" and had AI elaborate it out into something less juvenile.
- dmix 19d ago
  I said early Soviet for a reason.

recursivedoubts 19d ago

We are too rich to be able to afford things like Sears Roebuck houses now.

paleotrope 19d ago
So rich but nobody has any money anymore.
- rbanffy 19d ago
  All the money belongs to a remarkably small group of people.
- lotsofpulp 18d ago
  All the money is (or will be) spent on land near other rich people so your kids can have a school peer group with parents who have higher education/wealth/social network achievements, and after that, healthcare, and after that, liability coverage. If there is money left over, then you decorate. But you’ve probably bought into a new housing development with an HOA that doesn’t allow exterior modifications without approval.

torginus 19d ago

I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives. I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind. And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former. And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.

bix6 19d ago
They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?
- torginus 19d ago
  I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.
  - bix6 19d ago
    Yes plus everyone is competing on cost so the lowest bid gets chosen.
  - asdff 19d ago

bix6 19d ago

The influencer aesthetic. Why do people pay so much to look so boring?

ragall 19d ago

> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain. Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.

pessimizer 19d ago
[flagged]

TheOtherHobbes 19d ago

Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment. But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly. Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful. But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.) The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations. If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.

rbanffy 19d ago
> But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly. It's far more common than it should be. > The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations. The economic of bathtub curves incentivises designs nobody hates, even if at the cost of nobody loving them.
- asdff 19d ago
  The bathtub curve is not the most optimal however. I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun? Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill. Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?

Gibbon1 19d ago

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction. What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.

jordanb 19d ago
I actually think this is a big part of nimbyism. People know that whatever is built is going to make the neighborhood uglier because they have no faith in architecture, so they start opposing everything.

alex-moon 19d ago

"The aesthetic is more or a side-effect of using cheaper resources and cheaper methods of production." This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your statements at all?

alexgoodhart 19d ago
My guess is that at best it's a specious argument. It would be interesting but difficult to try to elucidate. Still what occurs to me is – Cheaper: than what? Is it that premodern architects had the same technology and materials available but chose not to use them <because they had a higher aesth-ethical integrity>? – What is a 'side effect' in architecture in a way that's unique from the necessary compromising that the needs of occupants, material constraints, longevity, cost, time, labor, aesthetics, and etc. which essentially is architecture? > given {cheap material, not the good stuff / I don't feel like it / measuring sucks / I just want to cram people that will ruin your neighborhood everywhere}, the average roll of the dice yields simpler geometry with less ornamentation. But simpler geometry is structurally stronger and allows more spacious airflow / less heat trapping. The cost of materials is not inert, the demand for them affects the cost obviously. Energy efficiency is beneficial to all. Open floor plans are less prohibitive on use cases. Large window sectioning allows for more light/efficiency and also keeps the street level perspective from seeming insular. The logic doesn't follow for me that capital was plainly more benevolent, then around some time or another they began the project of "educating" people into accepting their cheap and accidental aesthetic standard. What survives the past are its most accomplished projects, and thus maybe per capita it appears of higher quality than modern. And more importantly re: the submitted article, it has informed centuries of signing what "home", safe, hospitable, threatening, and etc. mean. So the whole measurement of who prefers what says something but I don't think it speaks to natural perception.
- alex-moon 19d ago
  That's it yeah. These kinds of pieces have been written for centuries. Surprise: people like what they are familiar with! There is no meaningful conclusion to draw from this. Look at Monet or Satie. In their own time? Grotesque, offensive - the kind of art scruffy pompous intellectuals enjoy. Now, a century later? At home in a greige IKEA showroom house being sold on the open market. To be clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with this - I love IKEA! I am buying a greige house as we speak! It is just not an interesting observation, and when writers attempt to use it as an argument against making new things, it's facetious at best, and at worst? Well, several interesting possibilities.

mmooss 19d ago

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning. You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference? Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target. Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!

asdff 19d ago
I think a lot of the reflexive distaste for the modern would be softened if we were still able to build in The Old Way, whatever that might be. People like these older brick mid rise buildings with the bit of trimming decoration. But, they just don't get built. Sometimes in NYC or chicago someplace you might see a more recent build where they tried to get those old elements down. They used brick and made it square and tried to do a little decoration, but something is missing. They didn't do the thing where they use nicer brick on the street facing side of the structure, or they didn't do the actual cement formed decorative trim pieces throughout. All the brick is laid the same instead of having some lines on the top edge turned out in a decorative way for example. The whole thing feels severely value engineered even if on paper it's actually a quality building with modern amenities and comforts. Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.

grebc 19d ago

White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia. It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.

__d 19d ago
I painted my house blue and orange in protest at the boring colour choices most people make. No one else on my street has followed my lead though. I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.
- vintagedave 19d ago
  This is the grey car theory of real estate. It’s easy to sell grey, white, and black cars. So it’s what you buy. This assumes no purchase is longterm. Which is its own indictment. I should add: I love that you broke this idea. Can you (safely for the internet) share any photos?
- a34729t 19d ago
  I wanted to paint my house in Razzle Dazzle, but orange and green. My wife threatened to leave me, so the idea was abandoned.
- zdragnar 19d ago
  I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house". Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal. What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
chris_armstrong 19d ago
A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.

Theodores 19d ago

In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about. One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades. Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture. There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on. Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day. In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad. There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK). Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years. Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day. The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me. So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from. Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce! The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car. The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it. The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the 'peak car' maintainable vehicles that people wish they had today. Fortunately I will never be a customer for Ferrari, however, if I was a tax-dodging benevolent dictator with the wealth to put together a motor museum, I would not hesitate to buy a Luxe for the collection, to go alongside an OG Tesla Model S, with the faux grille, and a Xiaomi SU7. I would like to add a Ford Cortina and a Ford Sierra too, however, millions were made and millions rusted away, leaving none for my fantasy museum, particularly in the desired Saluki Bronze colour.

chasil 19d ago

This is not a general truth. The Dana-Thomas House, designed and executed by Frank-Lloyd Wright, spared no expense in an age when skilled craftsmen were affordable. Are there seeds of the Guggenheim in New York between these two buildings? https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-house-a-treasure-saved/ https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-ho... https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687-Reviews-Solomon_R_Guggenheim_Museum-New_York_City_New_York.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687...

msy 19d ago

The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.

magarnicle 19d ago
Isn't that exactly their point? Every new building looks like an iPhone: sleek glass and metal.
- msy 19d ago
  But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
- sagarm 18d ago
  I can't believe this has to be said, but glass skyscrapers predate even the first iPhone. The is hopefully the high watermark of Apple fans thinking Apple invented something they didn't.
  - magarnicle 18d ago
    That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.
kragen 18d ago
Apple hardware is glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepipeds very similar to the glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepiped skyscrapers that this article is decrying. The main difference is that Apple hardware has rounded corners as a necessary concession to practicality.

pvab3 19d ago

Not really. That may have been true in the past, but it would be so cheap to CNC carve or extrude or injection-mould some ornamentation. Certain materials have gotten more expensive, but I think most of modernism was driven by materials progress and a boredom with previous trends

analog31 19d ago

Modern materials and production methods eliminated the need for ornamentation to prove a craftsman's skill and attention to detail. I'm thinking of something like a violin. You can't pick up a violin and judge the perfection of the fitting between the wood surfaces that are glued together. If that work isn't perfect, the instrument will eventually fly apart. But you can look at the "scroll" and "bees sting" which are unforgiving of tiny errors. These kinds of features persist to this day due to traditionalism, but have disappeared from most industrial products. Today, I don't expect an ornamented house to be of any better quality than a plain house.

jojobas 19d ago
There's plenty of traditional architecture that's not baroque, and is therefore not very rich in ornamentation. An austere brick home with a tiled roof still wins over a modernist cube house in both form and function, if not cost.

bluegatty 19d ago

It's fair to have a cynical take but that's not what modernism is and modernism is not necessarily ugly.

hardbass 19d ago

I am not sure how it is about "cheaper". Lathering on a finish with a roller is much cheaper than a carefully prepared spray system. Modern furniture and structures often use uniformly sprayed coatings. You are mistaking cleanness of look with cheapness, getting such a uniform coating is quite expensive and takes skill and discipline regarding hygiene and cleanup between abrasive grits etc as well. And if you are against things generally in the sphere of "Bauhaus" interior design then I would say you are engaging in a cargo cult of using modern materials in unnatural ways to copy older designs without eye to how the modern material has its own natural form and manner of usage. I would say, for example if one only has hand tools and solid wood then it is reasonable to follow Colonial design school, but if one has glass, stainless steel and plywood, it is wasteful to force them into a Colonial shape rather than their natural forms. Either style respects the substances and tooling it uses. You are free to pay four digit prices for every piece of furniture if you truly oppose designs that are aligned toward mass production.

KaiserPro 19d ago

> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources Which modernism? 1930s modernism was about new materials to allow luxury for the modern man (electricity! large windows! electric oven! washing machines! fridges! indoor toilets!) 1960/70s modernism was about creating new communities, adapting land to fit the modern car based world. No more pokey little shops with only a few items, requiring a trudge along a wobbly high street. NO! drive your car, go to a futuristic supermarket only once a week. I don't think we see a modernism now, not as a movement. I will now divert to UK building, because in the US its different. Part of the reason why thats the case in the UK is that councils used to build houses, facilities and infrastructure with their own money. This meant they had their own architects. This lead to town plans that were coherent, if not always successful. See Birmingham, milton keynes, roehamton. Housing wise, council houses were built, or should have been built to a standard. They were, especially in cities much bigger, brighter and luxurious compared to what preceded them. Were they pretty? no, modern is never pretty, because its not what you grew up with. When I was a kid everyone _hated_ victorian terrace houses, because thats what poor people have. They were more pokey compared to executive estate housing, and in some places didn't have a drive for your four door saloon. Now, those estates are meh and terrace houses are very expensive, despite being cold, draughty, dingey little shitboxes with odd toilet arrangements. (unless you've slapped in a loft conversion and extended over the kitchen/outdoor toilet) > Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production. The problem is, Rams was about bringing the complex new object into the house in a was that was reliable and simple. If we were all about Rams' vision, then we'd have got rid of radiators, had decent windows, insulated the place, had lots of cupboards and cleanly separated living spaces. Not an everything room and a bedroom with inbuilt mould farm (shower + shitter) Yes the modern apartment is inspired by loft living and dieter rams, but that requires 100sqm/1000sqft and high ceilings. none of which most places have. So you get a kitchen diner because it allows developers to shave off one room from the floorplan and increase density by 1/3rd without extra mateiral costs. But thats not modernism, thats poor fucking standards, and the lack of competition in the uk in the form new council houses. (a 3 bedroom council house will be at least 90sqm with seperate kitchen, living room)

modo_mario 19d ago

It's not even always cheaper. https://youtu.be/y5w4REl_Few https://youtu.be/y5w4REl_Few

jameshart 18d ago

A lot of the sample images shown of ‘traditional’ architecture in this piece are not what you’re talking about - they aren’t ’traditional materials’ or ‘traditional techniques’, they just use choices of exterior cladding and window layouts that are evocative of traditional choices - but they are just as much a soulless product of low cost materials and construction efficiency. Not the case for all of them (the brick-built viaduct proposal for example looks like it would be a nightmare to build and maintain), but most of the buildings shown, the ‘traditional’ variant just uses less visible steel and glass, in favor of ‘layer cake’ designs with stone cladding panels on the lowest level.