The mid in fake midcentury modern

Exactly, music is absolutely incredible these days. In any genre you pick, you will find very inspired, innovative and beautiful examples.

Some people who say "music is bad these days" try to contrast pop music with 18th/19th century Western classical music. But that makes absolutely no sense because there are heaps over heaps of beautiful classical music composed in 21st century. You just need to go out there and find them. E.g. there are Unsuk Chin, Jennifer Higdon, Fred Lerdahl, Michael Torke, James Yannatos etc... There is no shortage of beautiful classical music produced today, if you care to look outside of household names.

Similarly, when people contrast pop music with classic rock (e.g. mid-to-late 20th century Rock and Hard Rock), I think they're once again failing to find the right kind of aesthetics. There are Greta Van Fleet, Heart, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club etc... All kinds of artists who make great Rock music. But since they're not mainstream anymore, they're not exposed to masses as much as Rolling Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin etc...

And yes, the past was much more ornate because architecture was a vector of communication -- administrative/state buildings and religious edifices in particular obviously. Which, as a side effect, produced beauty still revered millennia after its creation. So maybe we should ask: what's modern ideology saying? And what does it says aesthetically? The answer is for all to see, and for all to debate.

Maybe the lack of TV is why people made their homes beautiful (eg wallpaper is very unpopular today).

It's arguably a tragedy of the commons. The people who live there get maximum value for the money while everyone else has to look at a bland monstrosity every day.

- a high angle silver metal roof with a very small overhang

- white rough plastered walls

- black accents

Another building in the complex had the same but with black walls.

This shape building had been popular for a few years for 1-2 floor single family houses, but not for apartment buildings. The local architectural design agency gave it their "Building of the Year" award.

Now basically every new apartment either has this colour scheme or this shape, it's like somebody used Stable Diffusion just trained on pictures of the first building to make new designs :D

https://www.eika.lt/basanaviciaus-9a/

https://www.newmoon.lt/#Galerija-1

https://renesanso.lt/gallery/

https://citify.eu/lt/paupys-7-etapas/

This is not necessarily the case. Many places in places like Iceland, Norway, Greenland, and to a lesser extent the rest of the nordic countries and some others, like the netherlands, have very colorful buildings, where each building is a different vibrant color, but nevertheless everything fits together nicely, without becoming "garish and ugly and screaming for attention", instead looking quite humble and cozy.

Why are expensive "sports cars" almost always ugly (Bright yellow or neon green??).

One would think if you had that sort of money you would realize that a bright green car is tacky as F, but that is the point. To turn heads - this is why they bought the car in the first place.

Why are most cars not coloured like this - because it is ugly and most people don't drive a bright green "Honda civic" so people can look at them.

On the housing front almost every city has bylaws and restrictions on what you can and cant do. In the US you also have HOA's with even more restrictions.

As an example - I live in what was formerly a small village . In order to "preserve the heritage" of the area everything is architecturally controlled.

Developers always need to submit your plans for review, but this area is further restricted and has its own set of "rules" outlined in a 34 page document which is on top of the city guidelines.

So all the houses in this area look similar regardless of age by design. There are houses from the 1800's a few blocks away and my house which was built in 2000 fits in just fine from the exterior view. The interior is a different matter because it is not controlled and so it uses modern techniques like steel I-beams.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3Y5ULj_0l3o/UrYr0ys5RTI/AAAAAAAACo...

This kind of architecture works it just requires a kind of unity and dedication to a common ideal that we no longer have.

Correct proportions cost nothing. And that's just for starters.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/44/0e/32/440e32a0e0c8fdececf6...

I get where you're coming from with grays clashing less than the highlights. But given the choice, I'd always take the loud bright colors of the Maritimes over the inoffensive neutral shades of our West Coast.

https://www.tqconstruction.ca/wp-content/uploads/vancouver-s...

Your explanation is that wealthier people choose to spend less on quality? (Not just in proportional terms, but absolutely less.) That correlation can happen, but as an explanation it leaves something out.

Talking with architects about this, they told me that building differently today is too expensive, doesn't go well with industrialized construction.

I argue that architecture is an academic shitshow. It's design for competition juries and not for the people using it. Which is btw very contrary to the initial ideas of Bauhaus, which is why i personally consider it a big failure, despite it's apparent success.

To you. But not to me, which is why I choose to live in a house with glass and metal as the primary aesthetic. But stating opinions as fact is a nice way to generate engagement, especially if they are unpopular, hence the article we're all discussing.

Now labor is vastly more expensive than materials. Making this easy to build makes them way cheaper.

At first I agreed with you but then I clicked the submission article and saw those ugly mouse statue things.

Modern architecture is the same. It's copy/paste design, assembled by software, the human element is gone. When buildings were designed by artists on paper there was no avoiding the designer's humanity and creativity being infused into the design. Today it's just lego blocks. You see the same buildings in every city you visit.

If anything, I'd say that modern buildings are a lot more pleasant than those that were being built in the 60's and 70's.

It's beautiful in many way, certainly iconic and has grandfathered its way into our idea of Paris, but I understand Maupassant and I think if they built it today, I would feel the same way.

Who would have the gall to say something like "most people" don't think it's beautiful? People on hacker news really are opinionated about everything, aren't they.

It's iconic and arguably the symbol of Paris, but it's not really something you would think of when thinking of architectural or functional beauty.

It is a modernist monstrosity.

> If stonemasonry is a low-tech industry, and new high-tech industries are arising all around it, stonemason wages could get prohibitively high (compared to everything else) until nobody wants to hire them anymore. This would create pressure for architectural styles that require as little masonry (or, generalized, human labor) as possible.

Stonemasons make about £20 an hour:

https://uk.indeed.com/career/stonemason/salaries

More than an unskilled labourer, but not even twice as much.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixt...

Towards the end his directly links to "Whither Tartaria", suggesting that Brooks' thesis (the old monied aristocracy was replace as the upper class by "Bourgeois Bohemians", a class which Scott suggests is approximately congruent to the modern usage of "bluecheck")

>Around World War II, US civic architecture changed from colorful, ornate, old-fashioned looking buildings to brutalist concrete cubes or sleek glass modernist arrangements, even though most Americans continue to prefer the old-fashioned style; other art forms showed similar transitions at different times. Brooks’ theory suggests that the old-fashioned buildings were the preferred architecture of the WASP aristocracy, and the new architecture is the signaling equivalent of [bespoke] handicraft blankets.

We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.

World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted into the present day where we build very weird, stressful objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and call it art.

I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that either the environmental movement or our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.

There's also no point in building a very beautiful building that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to change their location priorities and invest in their current homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible. But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via new offices, garage gyms, etc.

I'm really disappointed in our financial overlords who haven't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall

Esthetics is a favorite topic for far right thinkers where the demise of civilization is caused by some art that confuse them.

Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs".

From wikipedia[1]:

"During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but now wanted to use it in new ways."

"Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade unions."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

Emphasis mine.

Louis Sullivan is quoted as saying this in 1896, prior to any world wars. I think you can blame architecture being reduced to the sum of its usefulness to our friends in Chicago, who are far more worried about function over aesthetic. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe decided "less is more" in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright. John Root. Daniel Burnham. This continues today with the premiere skyscrapers in the middle east and Asia being designed by Chicago's Skidmore, Owings and Merril. It's too cold to care what you look like.

Clearly you and I disagree, for instance, on if victorian houses can be aesthetically pleasing on their own, but would you rather have a street full of plywood boxes or would you rather have my victorian-styled house sitting next to your [whatever] and someone else's [whatever]? I'd find that great, and much more interesting than a street full of near-identical ones.

(But in practice - even without "cultural unity" - that isn't what most new development in the US produces today - rather, you have a block-or-larger development of a bunch of near-identical [something]-esque generic builds. Unity achieved! Aesthetic appeal? Maybe not so much...)

https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...

Who is "we"?

> form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of cultural unity lurk here...

Again, cultural unity amongst whom? At best this is ambiguous, at worst it sounds like a dog whistle for a return to the aesthetics that accompanied the monarchist era.

There are real reasons that aesthetics evolve. For one thing, the hyper detailed and biological shapes and themes of classical aesthetics require a lot of poor, skilled, artisanal laborers, which is why they mostly appear on the buildings of the elite like monarchs.

Regular people during those eras lived in decidedly plainer homes, whose aesthetic charm was mostly a function of their simple shapes and materials.

That started to shift with mass production of decorative elements. The ability to mass produce what were once expensive decorative elements eventually resulted in their becoming passé and kitsch.

Those trends are as much responsible for the aesthetic shifts as the traumas of the world wars.

I just assumed it's all about cost savings. Architecture has been affected by the race to the bottom as much as anything.

But, developers will build what maximizes profits. They are just answering to wallets. If it was mostly the ultra-wealthy purchasing real estate (as it mostly was pre-WW2), then the developers will build what the ultra-wealthy want to spend their money on.

Post-WW2 saw the rise of the middle class and their ability to purchase homes. Especially with government-backed mortgages (FNMA, Freddie Mac, and etc). Most of the middle class would rather spend less on gorgeous architecture and get more square footage inside their home.

I've seen it firsthand. There's a beautiful house on a decent lot with lots of nice trees and landscaping, I know of with a side garage. Guess what draws all the compliments? the stonework?, the bueatiful roofline? the landscaping? the archicture. Nope none of those. First thing people care about and compliment is the horrendous side garage to store their crap in.

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

When you look at old buildings you're automatically starting with survivorship bias. Expensive and well kept old buildings tend to stay around a lot longer than buildings that were built cheaply at the time. Those have all been bulldozed.

Oh, did I mention that expensive building was expensive? It's easy to ignore that huge parts of the population were living in houses with paper thin walls and spending enormous amounts of energy to keep warm or cool (on cooling people had avoided the southern united states in mass till cooling options were available).

Oh, did we also mention that not only the US population, but the global population has increased massively since then. All of those processes you're describing are massively energy and labor intensive and do not scale as you're trying to put 8 billion people under rooves.

Why lay bricks rather than fake bricks? So everyone has a home and they don't have to burn an entire forest to get it.

"I want to go back to a world with 100 million people in it that were chopping down old growth forests at an unreplenishable rate"

It neglects that not only have populations massively increased in the western world, but places in the world that have been historically poor now want to partake in the great modernization. When you are trying to bring another 7 billion out of poverty it would be really easy to wipe nature out of you don't change from the ways of the past.

The postmodern stuff that authors complain about is inexpensive compared to the past, amazingly safe, relatively easy to install, and typically energy efficient in one way or another. It feels like the author is saying "I want to get rid of this conformity even if that means excluding a huge portion of people from the modern economy".

This was really no different than Apple making flashy buildings in order to attract the best workers and customers willing to pay higher prices. But as many churches that decorated, there were far, far, far more places that were boring and uninteresting in their times. There was great expense involved in creating these flashy features.

Authors clearly have never owned a century old building though, as easily shown in the first paragraph:

> Our own walk begins across the street from our apartment, where, following the recent demolition of a perfectly serviceable hundred-year-old building, a monument to ugliness has recently besieged the block

Century old buildings (I own in one!) are full of problems (plumbing, electricity, insulation, heating, lead paint) that are big projects for their owners, which 75% of the time they just ignore (thus kicking the can down the road), because renovation is even more expensive if you want to keep your building pretty / not destroy half your building while doing this. It’s a fun project for upper middle class folks who have either a lot of time to dedicate to them or a lot of money, sure, but not practical safe housing for most people.

I might not understand a particular aesthetic. It might be impossible to formulate logical rules to decide what is beautiful. But beauty is objective, nonetheless.

Be it an exquisite Japanese drawing of a bird with ink and rice paper, or Caravaggio, anyone with a soul can see that talent, effort, and a sense of "wholeness" went into creating both.

I, personally, cannot appreciate Chinese calligraphy art; but I don't doubt for a second it is beautiful and I could appreciate its beauty if I cared to learn Chinese calligraphy.

On the other hand, 1950s brutalist buildings, by their own architect's admission, are ugly. An attempt by nihilist "artists" to force their rejection of aesthetics on others. A sea of grey cement m, jagged lines, and boxes resembling prison cells reflect the architects' sense that we are oppressed... and then shove that claustrophobic feeling on all of us too dumb or too happy to be suffer from ennui.

There certainly aren't just two schools of thought. A third school would that a variety of aesthetics exist each serving a different purpose and each requiring some small or large amount of study to appreciate and each providing a somewhat different level of reward to those that study it - none of these are better or worse but learning none at is bad (like cuisines - even fast food can have its charms but fast food all the time is sad and unhealthy, etc). Some paintings are both immediately striking and can offer more as you study them but other might have just one or the other quality.

As far as the article goes, urban architecture has gone from traditional to high modernist to the present fair. The thing about, say, a building by one of the "great" modernist architects is it (usually) provides a fits organically with the environment quality while also providing more rewards and still offer a given place a "sense of place". Oppositely, a cheap contemporary building offers at best, only blending with the environment, it's only camouflage and some completely eliminates a sense of place from around the building. Ironically, the main way one can get a sense of place today through the truly bad examples of contemporary architecture, thing that fail as camouflage and stand out like a sort thumb.

Like any talent, its a pursued interest. I seriously think the world would be a better, more beautiful place if people were willing to push back on social norms and peer pressure more often; Especially when the stakes are so low.

I'm not the one to do it but I'm willing to bet we could agree on an aesthetic that is based around Flip-Flops and Socks - the Japanese might want to have a word or socks with those Adidas sandals.

The reality of human pursuits is that regardless of how we like to think of history, we aren't actually being led by a few Omega-Tier mutant geniuses who gift us with ~ A E S T H E T I C S ~ (Tm) but we collaborate and try things and fail and try again. A culture where more people feel more free to express themselves is one where the Art gets better, IMHO.

It’s not just about “taste”.

We have always needed opinionated people to be able to push their ideas. That’s what Linus is, Jobbs was, like him last year or hate him this year Musk, Eminem, Pulitzer, Jefferson, Tesla or Edison, Stuart Mill, the Wrights, and so on to any major or minor scale…

The best things come from opinionated people who were told they couldn’t go against the grain like that.

We’ve have rejected that idea. Everything is run by MBAs who avoid opinionated in favor of a boring mass appeal.

Look at big tech in the last decade… who was actually opinionated? What is actually worth a damn in 10-15 years? Zuck and Dorsey are clowns. Bezos seemed to have some great ideas on how a company should communicate internally but to an effect that is insanely boring (but reliable which is good for something else). Uber and Etsy and Apple after jobs, none of them show opinion, not in a “dangerous” sense.

We’ve conditioned ourselves into conformity because being opinionated is to be “an asshole”. We told assholes they aren’t welcome with CoCs and that every opinion is equally valid, with virtue signaling and post modernism of “my truth”, and that you can forgo everything else if it people buy it.

We’ve silenced anyone who could make something beautiful because it also might be offensive.

In art, the nonsense is the lack of honesty. Inauthenticity brought forth and exhibited for all of us to see. People without a shred of depth having the obnoxiousness to put something out that appears to be more than it is. The hubris.

Each passing day, I understand the wisdom of the French and their intolerance more.

Before the advent of "everyone gets sued", the ADA, nuclear war, etc there was actual creative freedom. Now, everything is just one size fits all. Just in case you happen to attract the wrong attention.

Architecture really is a reflection on how mind numbingly dull modern life actually is.

on a tangent, i felt really bad for the kids in that school. They all had such grand plans and were taught that if they don't change the world then they're worthless. Then they graduate and are stuck doing construction documents for Taco Bells and things like that. That has to be a bitter pill to swallow.

Almost no one thinks smeared feces on a door handle is beautiful.

You don't need to invent a new langauge to express age-old ideas.

If you want to mathematize it, you can use standard terms like "relation" and "2-ary predicate".

The author would have done much better to forego the word ugly and replace it with hyper conformity.

There are so many men who look like this now, on Instagram and TikTok. It's boring. They all look the same. When everything is beautiful, nothing is.

Nothing is stopping you from making your house out whatever it is you consider real, well, other than you are not wealthy enough to actually afford it. There are 8 billion people on this planet and if each of them goes and cuts down the old growth trees to make their cottage we just have a deforested planet which is something much less beautiful than having a house with fiberboard siding. Or would you rather going to have 4 generations of your family living with you without modern conveniences like sewer, water, and power?