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Comment by _xnmw | Hacker News Reader

After spending some time living in Europe, I simply cannot go back to North America (except for the few areas built with Old World charm). There's something so comforting about the beauty of European and other traditional architectural styles. (Modern/Postmodern?) glass boxes feel jarringly cold, hostile, and alienating.

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Those glass boxes aren’t Postmordernist. They’re mostly aligned with Modernist architecture. Postmordernist architecture is a response and rejection of Modernism, and exhibits eclectic and playful design features. Check out the Postmodernist architecture article on Wikipedia. You may be conflating the general antipathy towards a Postmodernist boogeyman with any sort of modernist, neoliberal design system.

You're right, thanks for the correction. Without a formal training in the arts I don't know my terminology, I just have an amateur feel for what I hate and know some vaguely related terms. In that case I'm against both modernist and postmodern styles and prefer the Baroque? Darn I don't know, I just feel much more at home walking down the street in Warsaw than in NYC or Chicago.

A lot of Postmodern architecture is pretty ugly too, and it is typical for people much prefer the older architectural styles found in Europe.

Part of it is the fault of 20th and 21st century architecture, but also big changes in urban design and property development economics happened throughout the 20th century.

I'm pretty on board with the idea that North American urban design and architecture is an abject failure, but lay the blame not so much with the architects but with greater forces of rapid post-war capitalist expansion and Neoliberal capitalist 'optimization'.

NYC is not as nice as Warsaw in a lot of ways, but it's wildly better than most other USA cities.

> A lot of Postmodern architecture is pretty ugly to

Postmodern architecture can sometimes be an eyesore, but that’s kind of the point. If you attempt to never offend anyone’s sensibilities you get modern architecture and nothingness. Even if you changed modern architecture to mean art deco or neoclassical you’d get tired of it.

So yeah, you might get things most consider eyesores

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/f.BSw.Y41JI35DZDLjslHg--/Y...

But if you ask a little kid whether they like that building, they might say yes. So you’ve created something at least someone likes.

I’ll take seeing 10 eyesores and one extraordinary building any day over blandness.

The problem is that people use post-modern ideas (e.g. there’s no universal standard of beauty, might as well do the cheapest thing rather than optimize for beauty) to defend modern architecture.

America is designed to be looked at while zooming by at 50 mph. Auto infrastructure is incredibly ugly and takes up a massive amount of places. If anyone has an example of non-ugly auto infrastructure I would love to see it.

That usually only happens when it’s buried. Near east Chicago, for example, or the result of the big dig in Boston.

I wish that Atlanta would cover the downtown connector and make the city contiguous.

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