Why is everything so ugly? | Hacker News Reader

Why is everything so ugly?

nplusonemag.com

201 pointslucabenazzi314 comments

> 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/1982/09/12/137...

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/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?

People hate new things more than they hate the mediocrity they know.

Most 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.

This 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.

So they were added to suit the character of the neighborhood? That is a great selection criterion.

In SF, the most recent two controversies were over historic seating being removed from a Castro theatre and historic rusted iron protective chains being replaced by the waterfront. Age of said seating? 20 y. Age of chains? 30 y.

It's not that I have a problem with this. It's just that I personally don't want to be considered historic in my mid 30s.

How are things ever supposed to become historic if people aren't allowed to fight to keep them around when they are only 20 or 30 years old?

To be honest, I don't think seats and rusted iron railings should be things we strive to just retain so that they can be considered historic.

Though I do like the idea of forcing everyone to keep their iPhone 13 for the next 20 years so that it can become old enough to be historic.

On the other hand, that they didn't know they were added "just" 40 years ago suggests that the decision to install them was a very good one? Not that I support gas street lighting, but there is a distinct lack of genuinely quaint and historic districts in US cities.

Are you sure?

Many more people admire Taj Mahal or Ancient Greek/Roman buildings than, say, brutalist architecture. Heck, even Art Deco, while distinctly modern, seems to be likeable.

I am fairly conservative myself, but I like some new Czech buildings, such as the Masaryčka project by Zaha Hadid. It has a soaring soul that is hard to describe, but nevertheless you can feel the positive vibe of the structure when you walk underneath it.

https://www.masarycka.com/cs/o-projektu/

On the other hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm.

I can't speak to the culture in Eastern Europe. I meant in the US where I'm quite sure considering old beloved artifacts of today are all the nightmarish monsters of yesteryear that people protested.

Fortunately, the American version of this view will be smashed in the next two decades and we will enter an era of creation once again.

Yellow street lamps are not Taj mahal

> hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm.

This is how I feel about the watergate, in which I work.

Do you really prefer hospital lighting over yellow lighting?

I really prefer full spectrum lighting over yellow lighting in all circumstances. Bring on the white LEDs.

You should talk with architects and interior designers.

Lights can transform the feel of a place and they have their purpose.

Are we calling full spectrum daylight "hospital lighting" now?

When you're an artist who tries to recreate things from the past you learn very quickly the limitations of what we use nowadays. Tradeoffs in efficiency are often paid for with quality of life. For example many of the older high pressure sodium lamps were better for human eyesight because of their colour spectrum being a segment of daylight allowing better contrast perception and not straining the upper limits of the cones in your eyes for night vision. Their falloff was also much better, preventing harsh shadows inherent to fluorescent and LED lights that hide things all too easily and create unwelcoming chiseled depth on architecture. Sadly adding in those little quality of life benefits costs more fractions of a cent per unit, so the modern LED bulbs capable of recreating them go without.

The other thing, about the "McCentury Modern" architecture, has been proven time and again over the last decade. Flat shapes without detail with random splashes of colour cause anxiety because the human mind needs visual definition and coherency. There are ongoing studies about whether or not modern architecture causes depression because so many people have noticed. At least in the past the cheapest stuff used bricks for facades, but developers think even those are too expensive now. That and the proliferation of grey is entirely about money, because it's easier to sell the lowest common denominator without a hint of individuality. This is especially true when it comes to market instability, because when tenant turnover is in the range of months grabbing the cheapest thing and throwing together the least personable environment to rope in anybody at all will keep you from having a vacancy of longer than a few weeks.

The films thing is just... Nobody actually looks at physical examples anymore, so they have no idea how things should look. With practical effects you were manipulating and testing what already existed instead of trying to recreate it as an approximation. There's a surrealist level of detail in almost anything created via CG, only worsened by the lighting needing to be flattened to cover up the unfinished work done because of an impossible schedule and masked with digital colour correcting. Real waves don't have that much foam, real diamond weave cloth doesn't have that specular profile, real explosions don't have such low luminosity and so many particles, so on and so forth.

A lot of people realize things are very wrong with the world, they just don't have the expertise or the vocabulary to explain it. So they point at things they know other people will innately understand as examples. Don't say they hate change because of that limitation.

> A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era.

I think there's a tendency to romanticize this kind of thing, a la an early Tom Waits song. I've lived in Portland for a little under 5 years. I feel like it has been moving in the "ugly" direction the author describes for a while, and it started before I moved here. People that have been here much longer describe how it used to be much more "gritty" and dangerous. They say it with sort of a twinkle in their eye, almost as if they miss it. Part of me would have loved to see how it was, but the other part of me knows what's its like to be in the wrong part of town. At least you have the wherewithal to see why a move to LED lights was probably a smart move. Just because it's new and different doesn't make it bad.

When someone mentions the "disneyfication" of Times Square I'm declined to think they have either very selective memories or they were never around that area and 42nd Street in the 80s especially late at night. They can still hang out at the Port Authority if they want to experience echoes of that time.

I think some people really like to have a lot of (negative) drama in their lives for some reason. You can see it in their relationships too; they seem to be unable to have a relationship with a partner that doesn't have a lot of needless drama in it. Maybe they have some kind of addiction to chaos. Put them in an environment where everything is nice and peaceful and works well and they feel lost.

My main memory from the 70s as a child was the ugly fluorescent light everywhere outside.

Chances are the pre-1980s lamps were mercury-vapour, not incandescent. Incandescent lamps were obsolete for road lighting by the 1950s. Sodium lamps caught on because they were much more efficient than both.

> 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?

You could just as readily be talking about a cassette tape.

The cassette tape has a lot of things going for it. They play for longer than CDs, they don't skip, they are simple to duplicate and record onto (with most cassette decks capable of one, if not both, actions), and the occasional tape tangle teaches patience and encourages mechanical understanding of the system. They can't compete with my phone and a bunch of FLAC for fidelity, but I wish they weren't effectively dead technology.

Next, let's talk about how I miss CRTs...

< Next, let's talk about how I miss CRTs

Best television I had was a HD Sony CRT. Incredible picture.

Also weighed over 230 pounds.

My back does not miss CRTs

I guarantee you that this is not the case. Go watch an old CRT, even the eye-wateringly expensive ones sucked compared to even a mediocre OLED. We just think they were great because of the SD pieces of crap we compared them to. Ditto for all of the technology Millennials have ennui for.

As an Xer who grew up with all these old technologies and saw the transitions to modern stuff, I fully agree. It's odd how Millennials are so interested in obsolete and obviously inferior technologies like LPs and Polaroid photos.

There's very, very few cases I can think of where an older technology really was better in a significant way. Mechanical keyboards like the IBM Model M (or better yet, the Model F, though the layouts on those keyboards sucked) were really great, but they were also expensive, and we do have all the Cherry-switch mech keyboards now, though personally I don't like them as much.

However, one big negative trend I do see is with streaming services and the entire lack of ownership this carries. This isn't really a technology problem: there's nothing stopping you from buying real CDs and ripping them to FLAC and listening to those on your phone, for instance (that's what I do). I'd call this a mis-application of new technology, similar to how so much software is so ridiculously slow and laggy: it's entirely possible (and easier than ever before with modern tooling) to write software that performs well, but people are just too lazy to do it, and insist on building in too much BS like ads and tracking.

I theorize that it comes down to: newer stuff is better, but as a society we’ve somehow made everything trend towards being super impersonal, and thus the next gen is searching for that feeling.

This is is for me. I don't put on a record when I want to work out or drive in the car or hear some ear worm, but I do when I want to create a comfortable, relaxing environment. The lower (than FLAC through nice headphones) fidelity, the soft hum of the turn table, the physical act of choosing and placing a record on a turn table that hasn't changed since it was built 50+ years ago... It's a mechanical thing that requires care and maintenance (though not too much of either), and that brings me joy.

It's a stark contrast to mousing/thumbing around on a bright screen.

Personally I don't really see the point of ownership. If I can listen to the music I'm good, I don't need to "own" a copy.

I'm probably an outlier, I don't really see the point of collecting things in general. Seems strange to me to have a hobby that consists of literally just buying things.

I agree with you. Though my reason is that if I were somehow deprived of listening to particular album or watching particular movie, I would not really care.

Two problems: 1) As people have found out all too often, something you previous had access to, suddenly you don't because the streaming service suddenly removes it for some reason. This is extremely common. This is much more common with movies, admittedly. 2) For music in particular, why pay a monthly fee for something you listen to over and over? That seems very strange to me. I own albums I've had for decades; the idea that I should have been paying a monthly fee just to keep access to them sounds literally insane.

Keep in mind that the OP stated "HD CRT".

Large 1080i 16:9 CRT TVs existed for several years. Several had HDMI inputs. They were massive.

I once conducted a side-by-side with a Pioneer Kuro plasma, PRO-111fd. Both sets were ISF calibrated with a colorimeter. The HD CRT was visibly and measurably better in nearly every category, most noticeably in black level. I, unfortunately, don't remember the model number of the HD CRT in question, but I know it was produced by Sony. The KD-34XBR960 looks close to what I remember.

There are some things that look better on a CRT e.g. pixel art games or shoddy set design that you really don't want to see without an Instagram like filter to suspend your belief.

Too much of what people think is fidelity is actually a type of noise e.g. what matters to me in a drama is the writing, acting, plot, ideas and message. Going from 320p to 4320p does not add signal if it means I can see all the seams in the set, all the make-up, how badly the wigs fit etc... it's actually added noise.

> Ditto for all of the technology Millennials have ennui for.

Do you mean ennui (apathy)? Or do you mean nostalgia, yearning, yen, rose-tinted romanticism etc.?

It's not about the resolution, it's about the sound they make as the tube powers up, and the smell, and the slight whistle in operation. They're also have excellent refresh rate and add no latency to the incoming signal.

I still have a CRT for my SNES. It's not in the best of shape (bit of burn-in from a previous owner), but it makes me happy every time it turns on.

You might call it a "slight whistle" but I call it a headache inducing high pitched screech

That might be the sign of a bad flyback transformer. It shouldn't be hard on the hearing.

That said, if every CRT is like that, you may just be blessed/cursed with good high-range hearing. One of my siblings can't drive in my truck because the turbo bothers her hearing -- I bet she doesn't like CRTs either.

I had one HD CRT. I don't recall the brand. It was definitely an opportunity for a hand cart and a helper...

> Now this dude is nostalgic for them?

No, they really were better for sleep.

With the orange-ish sodium lights, I could go to sleep with their light still coming through the bedroom window. The amber glow was reminiscent of the glow of fire.

The harsh blue light now tells my brain it's daytime. I had to buy blackout curtains to be able to fall asleep.

It's the same principle as using the amber-hued Night Mode on your phone in the evening.

I never experienced the pinkish-white, but the transition from orange to blue has been horrible for sleep. Nighttime lighting around homes should be amber, not blue. (Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense.)

> Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense

I remember some kind of study around yellow light being ideal for roads actually. The human eye is more sensitive in the green/yellow part of the spectrum, the lights are more efficient and cut through fog better.

The difference between white & yellow light in fog is minimal. What really makes fog lights effective is being under 18 inches off the ground so they shine under the fog.

And they also shine much brighter.

White light scatters more since it contains multiple wavelengths, generating more glare and losing brightness faster. And this is about street lighting, a 10% difference in brightness can result in massive energy savings.

> With the orange-ish sodium lights, I could go to sleep with their light still coming through the bedroom window. The amber glow was reminiscent of the glow of fire.

> The harsh blue light now tells my brain it's daytime. I had to buy blackout curtains to be able to fall asleep.

When I moved in with my fiancee (at the time my girlfriend), I noticed after a couple months that I had a bit of trouble sleeping due to her often falling asleep later than me and being on her laptop for a bit. Since blackout curtains don't help with that, I bought a sleep mask for a few dollars from Amazon (basically a piece of nylon fabric and a strap, nothing specialized), and it's not an exaggeration to say that it's been life-changing. As a child, I'd often struggle to fall asleep due to literally any amount of light in my bedroom, and when I was in elementary school it got bad enough that it would take me several hours of lying in bed to finally fall asleep, and I ended up getting prescribed insomnia medication that I continued taking for a couple of decades. It turned out that with the sleep mask, I was able to taper off the prescription sleeping medication within a year or so, and I'm even able to get up earlier without being quite as groggy due to my quality of sleep increasing so much.

If anyone else has similar issues with lighting interfering with their sleep, especially if it's from things within their building rather than outside, I'd highly recommend investing a few bucks to try this out. Obviously my sample size is only one, but given how drastic the effect was and how low-cost it is to try out, it would almost feel irresponsible for me not to suggest this to people.

Sleep mask + very good earplugs + some melatonin made me a very sound sleeper in my forties, while I suffered from chronic insomnia since my teens.

I'm lucky that I either am not sensitive enough to noise or have a quiet enough environment that I can get by with just the mask, but definitely a good recommendation as well!

An alternative to earplugs for people who are sensitive to having things in their ears is a good old white noise generator. Preferably a non-electronic one, like the original Marpac DOHM.

By the way, if you or others have issues with the cool-white LED street lights, you can fix that with a color filter, duct tape, and a ladder. I fixed all the street lights on my street and my neighbors thank me every time they see me. They have been holding strong for a few years now.

Try the "LEE Filters 206R: Converts 6500K Daylight Sources to 4600K"

The evidence that blue light is bad for sleep is much worse from an experimental standpoint than the evidence that it improves cognition and reaction time, which are obviously rather important considerations in street lights. Consider for instance that placebo glasses which filter the so-called harmful blue light wavelengths have been shown to fully reverse the apparent effect on sleep quality. This is despite them just being clear glass with no appreciable filter effect on visible light.

It is literally true that human mind is suggestible to an unimaginable degree.

I have seen something similar on TV to do with MSG. The room was split down the middle and I believe the participants were told half the room ate food with MSG and the other half without. They interviewed the participants after and the majority on the side with MSG had symptoms. The only problem was that no one had consumed MSG.

going off of memory from something I saw a decade ago

This kind of thing is why, while I hold the sciences in healthy regard, I'm especially wary of treating fields such as psychology as usually producing factual results.

Your links require a subscription to view.

> Now this dude is nostalgic for them?

An easily-unrealized benefit until people were forced to use them, they didn't ruin our low-light vision, at least not nearly as much as the new ones. You could easily see into unlit areas, or go from an unlit area to a lit one without your vision having to adjust.

> Now this dude is nostalgic for them?

I stopped reading there. I'll take LEDs over ugly orange any day (or mercury-arc, as well). When my town converted, they picked neutral-white lights for the side streets and ones with a very slight yellow tint for the major streets. Either of these is far better as far as I'm concerned.

Even the old mercury-arc lights weren't that great - either sickly greenish or a color-corrected version that was blue-white. The 175W mercury-arc streetlight on my corner was replace by a 40W LED, with better lighting to boot.

Low-pressure sodium is even worse - an absolute monochromatic yellow. If you forgot where you parked your red car, good luck finding it. Been there, done that.

Actually neutral white and blue tinged white (the most common led shade) is terrible for night vision, glare, and light pollution all due to the actual physics of light.

You seem to make no room for the possibility that the people rioting were correct in both cases, that the current lights are worse than the yellow, and the yellow lights are worse than the pinkish.

The problem with LEDs is the massive increase in light pollution they cause.

But do they? LEDs are directional vs Sodium is omnidirectional and reflected; So given a similar housing, LEDs causes less light pollution.

The bigger factor (in my neighborhood at least) is the LEDs being many times brighter than what they replaced.

All light is reflected, unless your neighborhood has opted for an avante garde Vantablack theme.

Given a similar housing, the brighter light causes more light pollution.

It's amazing how people get used to stuff. I remember well how awful those sodium lamps were when they were first put in, and how nearly everyone hated them in part because they made everything look ugly.

Now, people get nostalgic for them. People are weird.

My 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.

And 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.

Actually if you're talking about the US there are actually laws that prevent small developments; it's not just financials.

This is very, very, very place dependent, which is part of the problem TBH.

Sounds hilarious. Where's that?

Minneapolis Suburbs. There’s been a huge apartment building boom, and cities with leftover small town vibes have passed these ordinances.

Can you drop a street-view link?

I sometimes quite like what others claim is hideous in these discussions, mainly because it's a refreshing change from my own local architectural group-think. There is a fair bit of regionality in the "cardboard" being pumped out.

I expect future generations will create taxonomies and venerate it and laugh at all the naysayers here as has happened so often before! We are too close to it and not subjected to the next horror yet. We will miss overground houses with windows as we climb into our underground pods and plug-in.

Most of them in my town are newer than the street view data, here's a couple older ones however

- https://maps.app.goo.gl/cec7VtUmDsAeHm5w7

- https://maps.app.goo.gl/h3p8xeBWgrAM7TjF8 (see directly behind this view as well)

- https://maps.app.goo.gl/GHcmRYGQS6fmMX1p9

A previous poster has a good example of the style as lll

That’s funny. I don’t know about any ordinance, but you’re describing my town’s new downtown. [1]

Just around the corner is a 75+ yro brick building (to the right of this street view) [2] with a detailed facade fashioned to have a small personal scale and plays with ornament to align with other older buildings on this street. (And this is some firm’s same solution/plan that you can find in at least one development miles away. [3])

The building to the left of the street view is a monstrosity, and here is another around the corner [4]

I’ve heard many long-time residents complain bitterly about the experience of walking our downtown, so I hope this new building will move the needle in the right direction for folks.

For the speed the new building went up and the challenge to develop in such a central area on a large plot, I think the result is positive (though, I’m sure I could not afford to rent there).

[1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/XKzYWUhiV5WTUBXv7?g_st=ic

[2]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fGY9DYCvH6xZdNbz5?g_st=ic

[3]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pgBMZ3wLUr3yCGvL8?g_st=ic

[4]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Yj1Mk9pAE9BFMrNm6?g_st=ic

For most hideous misfeature of [1], I nominate this clash of siding styles: The turrets of mid-mod aluminum rectangles not merely abutting, but actually projecting out of their base walls of faux-wood-lap siding.

It's actually often enforced in zoning codes as "breaking up the massing".

Wow, what a misguided and dumb "solution." If they're going to be that controlling, at least they could have enforced a truly helpful set of aesthetic guidelines.

I 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.

I 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.

Yeah! 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".

But 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.

My 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.

Right, for example if I was shopping right now a house elevator would be a huge positive to me as my daughter is a wheelchair user and will be getting more difficult to carry up and down the stairs.

That said as someone who was in a lot of middle class and upper class homes due to a previous job, I saw exactly one elevator in a single family home. I doubt it would even factor into the price because most people would have no interest in even using the elevator beyond a novelty.

HGTV's Home Town goes for a more vernacular look, so is to be applauded. What they do seems more labor intensive though.

Nothing wrong with vinyl, you can get some real good quality vinyl flooring.

Totally, I'm really happy with the functional properties of the vinyl I ended up buying. That said, I truly love how hardwood looks.

I thought this grey decor trend was a British phenomenon - glad it's not just us!

Millennials in America apparently actually like the monotone look; it’s not just the resale thing. The process of making the house more bland for resale used to be called ‘beige-ing‘ by realtors (estate agents?) in the US; it’s not new, but it wasn’t always white and gray.

Someone I know (Gen X I guess) just built a new house and the design is nice enough and the location great. But the unending gray in every room... would not have been my choice.

Not sure where you're getting this. Zero of my millenial friends like this look -- and we represent a wide range of the millenial years.

I don’t know if it’s millennials per se but subreddits about cozy, nice living spaces are upvoting for whatever reason quite uniformly empty and gray minimalist designs. Like a distopian hospital from the future or something.

Since when are redditors representative of the population?

Just noting the existence of a trend, not making any broader statement about redditors being representative of the population. Hopefully we can at least agree there are millennials on Reddit upvoting the style, or if not there’s always plenty of articles like https://millennialmagazine.com/2019/10/02/why-are-millennial.... Or, if that isn’t compelling either, there are replies from other millennials here indicating they like it.

In any case try not to worry too much about it, there are plenty of people with (arguably) bad taste in every generation.

Well Redditors sure as hell aren't typically Boomers, and the Zoomers can't afford houses.

> Not sure where you're getting this.

No, it is (or was) definitely a trend. Google "millennial gray" -- it's so common it became a meme.

I've observed the trend. I'm unsurprised that it was named after the generation that was putatively buying the most houses at the time. But I haven't observed any people my age actually liking this fact.

Pretty sure it’s embraced by Millenials. Kids toys and room decorations used to be vivid bright colors, and now they are a sea of beige highlighted with very faint pastal colors if they have color at all.

https://www.crateandbarrel.com/kids/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hot-new-baby-gear-is-sad-beige-...

That second one looks like a sanitarium for babies.

What, but that "Wild and Free" banner totally livens everything up. /s

I would be interested in seeing the adult that grew up in that nursery. Like, do their meals have a side of fava beans and a nice chianti?

"Do you like Raffi? I've been a big children's music fan ever since the release of his classic album, "Singable Songs for the Very Young." Before that, I really didn't understand any of the kiddie tunes. Too jingly, too toddler-tastic. It was on "Singable Songs" where Raffi's catchy melodies became more apparent. I think "Baby Beluga" was the artist's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic lullaby on ocean adventures. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Teddy, take off your PJs."

I do believe this is the first time I've ever read such an adult critique of a children's performer. I have no idea about anything you just said though, but you clearly feel passionately about ABCs and 123s. Or you're decent at the GPT prompt

It was meant as a parody of one of Patrick Bateman’s monologues in American Psycho.

It's called "taste".

Personal theory (being a Millennial that likes it): The walls shouldn't draw attention and this is a great way to do it, giving more focus to what's actually in the room. First image does this well.

But then that second one is just bad. Like product makers don't understand the goal, thinking we actively like the color instead of de-emphasizing the walls, and we're stuck with it.

No, it's forced on Millenials who are told they must like it and are given no choice in the matter.

Which is hilarious because all of the free/cheap real wood furniture on FB Marketplace is stained golden oak or similar.

My entire dining room cost $600. All from FB. All solid wood. Buffet table, china cabinet, dining table, and six chairs. It must have cost $5,000+ when purchased new.

My peers would rather fill a home with monotone colors and disposable cardboard furniture.

So as a millennial all I can say is: Yay! I'll gladly take the stuff they're passing up.

Friend bought an older house and had a designer over. They were looking at one rooms redo and upon hearing the previous owners were younger gen she sighed and said “Oh, that it explains it. We call them The Grays”

No, you've infected the rest of us as well. Congrats!

I remember all my rental properites in the uk had hideous beige woodchip wallpaper back in the nineties, and cheap carpets everywhere, surely it's an improvement on that.

When selling our previous property, the seller agent recommended we paint it in "agreeable gray," supposedly the current color that is neutral and will not affect anyone negatively.

Is that like greige ?

https://www.thespruce.com/greige-best-neutral-color-ever-797...

The problem with grey is that it's blue-ish and therefore feels dark and cold.

greige fixes that.

I have a lot of beige in my house. If I didn't want to go that warm, I could definitely see some take on greige as an alternative to colder gray.

I have been trained to prefer off-white... So I find that grey or brown somewhat offensive and think off-white is actually better for light and everything... Even when my choice is as non-personal.

What I find really interesting is that women can see shades that men cannot. My wife painted several shades of grey on the wall, including "agreeable gray" and I could not tell the difference, all looked the same. I experienced the same thing when she was looking for a grey / green for the kitchen cabinets. I could not tell the difference and all looked grey. She was also able to see shades of blue where all I saw was grey.

I have asked around and I am not the only male in my acquaintances that experiences this.

https://www.xrite.com/hue-test

I got a perfect score (0) relatively quickly. I do suspect this phenomenon (which i've also experienced regarding fashion) comes from something other than actual visual perception though. Something like a combination of different aesthetic preferences and what one deems important vs what one deems unimportant in interior design

I got close to perfect which is odd as I have a hard time with hues in real life

Like when you look at new builds.

You have builder grey, builder white, builder off white, and builder beige.

The current advice is when you buy something to already think about the resale value of the item.

So this excludes all colors for everything. Black, white, gray everything.

Call it capitalism, call it competition, call it an optimization process or w/e but this is a common phenomenon. Whenever you have people trying to maximize some value they'll copy the strategy they view as most successful and other factors take a back seat.

Maximizing the resale value of a home involves making it appeal to the largest number of people. Adding character risks lowering demand by appealing to niche markets. So you end up with lots of white and grey.

You see similar things all over the place. Want to maximize your career? Better suppress your individuality in favor of copying how successful people speak, act, and dress.

If you've ever heard the term "TikTok Beat" that's a similar phenomenon where the most popular music on TikTok gets copied like a meme by wannabe famous music producers.

It's a process that ends up with bland results as variety is reduced over time. It's also dehumanizing as humanity is slowly stripped away due to inefficiency.

To piggyback off of this with a call-to-action against the realities you point out, I think it's absolutely valuable and worth it to go after the aesthetic things that you like even for subjective reasons, and even if prevailing trends say otherwise, at the expense of falling outside the confines of conformity for the sake of pseudo-safety.

Safety in numbers is a thing, but when it comes to art & design & aesthetics, it utterly kills courage, and things are done out of fear of rejection or disapproval, which makes the end product feel bland, uninspired, forgettable, and will be dated in a few years. Might as well just explore what is interesting to you and not worry about public reception. But then that's tied into many other things like fear of rejection, fear of sticking out, fear of failure, etc., that may need to be unearthed and explored in oneself – which is utterly worthwhile and necessary to do, and by staving it off you only do yourself and others a massive disservice and continue to operate in fear.

But yeah I'm making blanket statements that needs context, etc.

I don't think this is the only issue.

People have always copied each other throughout history. In the past before the industrial age it was much more difficult though as you had to use local materials and labor. Now we have global corporations and many of them are near monopolies in many industries. Add to this that making a billion of one thing massively drops the costs over something you make a million of, so you're far more apt to see the billion item unit on cost factors alone.

Also we see lots of wildly different looking products when looking back at the past, but this is likely a lot of survivorship bias. Because they were different people kept them and tossed the common thing without regard.

Lastly, I'd add in a question of how things are financed. If you're asking for a huge pile of money to make a product, it's going to be a lot easier to get it when you choose the safe and proven option then one that is riskier.

There is also the question of new mass media.

I would hazard a guess and say if you look at AirBnB throughout major cities in the world, the aesthetic will largely be the same. Trends existed before but were often adapted to local taste, yet now everywhere has the same overpriced coffee shop with rustic wood/metal tables and edison bulbs.

There's also a boiling the frog element.

I see it as an “iphonification” of industrial design and architecture. White cars became trendy in the early 2010s, after the white iPhone 4. Every item that wants to be perceived as a quality one is targeting that minimalistic, uncluttered, quirk-free look.

Beige computer cases with lots of details falling out of the way for black boxes, and then black boxes with LEDs, will always be the bane of my aesthetic existence.

I hate beige but miss it for computers.

On espresso-colored desks, great, but if your office doesn't have the color scheme of a vampire bordello, black cases and monitors are ugly as hell. Aside from SOCs and law offices, it's so conspicuous it's not really a good fit anywhere.

My desks at work and home are both light wood and thanks to all the black boxes and black cables everywhere, even with cable management my desk surface forever looks like two Minecraft squids tentacle-raping each other on the deck of a ship.

I'm not really sure that's the issue... Even by 2000 color car popularity had began its drop with silver and black with the growing market. White did gain a lot of popularity then, but a lot of this was recovery from what it had lost in the early 90s.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

>You see similar things all over the place.

It's called society. If most people didn't follow other people (or demand it!) we would not have societies at all. We'd be individualistic animals, or at best small tribes.

>It's also dehumanizing

You're completely wrong. People copying and following the path of others is one of the reasons we've dominated earth. Only a very small portion of us are risk takers that make new trends that others follow.

Humans are messy and sub-optimal. Optimization processes will always favor robotic adherence to optimal characteristics which means, unless constrained, our humanity is on the chopping block.

There’s a reason phrases like “worker bee” have become common, it’s because people feel like they’re expected to be drones at work instead of humans.

I think luxury goods, and the privilege of living within your means, is to be able to buy goods and instantly depreciate them.

I buy electronics equipment, computers, furniture, clothes, and cars with the mindset I will be the last owner of them, and they will have no resale value.

“I bought this, and I will assume it’s instantly worthless”

It keeps me from buying the same thing twice and causes me to save up for the thing I really want, and keep it for as long as possible. It also lets me be picky about my preferences and really scope out exactly what I want on a relaxed timeframe.

Perhaps it’s a side effect of growing up with hand me downs, and knowing anything our family owned was one step to junk, but it does keep spending in check now that I am doing okay in my career.

I don’t know about that, gray in houses exudes a feel of cheapness. If I see gray and especially gray vinyl it screams budget build and corner cutting. If one looks at rental housing, like half of them have gray floors and those ones are always cheaply renovated.

I make a show of disrespecting people who follow that advice instead of buying what makes them happy.

I firmly dislike cherrywood, anything that is more red than brown is absolute shit to me. My parents loved it, thought it was the pinnacle of wealth.

Now you might be questioning why I dislike cherrywood. The answer doesn't actually matter though, I dislike it. Most importantly, I am not the only one.

I like vinyl, because I spent a few weeks of my life (probably at most a few hours total actual wall clock hours on it) replacing flooring in a couple of rooms through a few houses. The beginning, and the rest of my answer here though, also does not matter. It only matters that I like it and will pay money for it over wood. I am also, not the only one.

Gray is used for many reasons in new builds, its a neutral color, and because many builders build a house/apartment, THEN sell to customers. Very few customers buy a plot of land, contract an architect, make customizations, and then build the building. It comes with the realization that people will substitute out the things they want on their own, not requiring someone else figure out everything they like and being creative all on their behalf for $0.

No idea why you're downvoted for this, but I guess pointing out the obvious on HN makes some people mad.

You do not understand why people are pressing the "this is correct" button even while you recognize that the comment is stating the obvious?

Perhaps you don't understand why anyone would take time out their day to press any button that doesn't do anything? I suppose that's fair. One of life's mysteries.

Had you started your post with i like vinyl, i would have stopped reading sooner.

I think my comment above is of equal quality to this article, do you not agree?

>Gray is used for many reasons in new builds, its a neutral color, and because many builders build a house/apartment, THEN sell to customers. Very few customers buy a plot of land, contract an architect, make customizations, and then build the building. It comes with the realization that people will substitute out the things they want on their own, not requiring someone else figure out everything they like and being creative all on their behalf for $0.

Interesting. Here in Poland when you buy an apartment from developer, you generally get it unfinished, like this: https://www.domoweklimaty.pl/app/uploads/2018/10/co-dokladni...

It's up to you to find contractors to finish it the way you want it - maybe together with interior architect if you want one.

My current place have this. I don't care to pay to replace it, but I would much prefer something light wood. Which is somewhat traditional indoors. It would also go with most things.

Forget flooring, why are carpets and rugs with a grey and washed out faded look so popular? If you want a muted look, just don't buy one! Their whole purpose is to add color and style to a room and yet so much of what's available looks terrible.

The AirBnB/house flip aesthetic is truly quite lowest common denominator.

No, one big purpose of a rug is to keep your place warmer and give you a softer and warmer place to walk or put your feet. So in front of your sofa, for instance, where your feet are usually on the floor, is better covered with a rug, so your feet don't get cold from the floor.

They also help reduce the noise caused by walking around, so your neighbors don't complain.

After a flood, I bought pine? colored Luxury Vinyl Plank at my wife's insistence. Previously we had dark engineered bamboo which looked good but it constantly scratched (chairs and dogs) which really bothered her and I was always worried about water getting on it. I was against the vinyl just because it was vinyl. I was wrong. This stuff is awesome. Looks great, close to water proof short of a flood and pretty much no scratches in a year plus of being down. It was not that much cheaper though vs engineered wood but a good deal less expensive than hardwood.

That’s surprising. From the interior design content I watch, the white and grey aesthetic is very much considered outdated and a mistake. Warm wood tones are much higher regarded.

When my parents were selling their house, their realtor told them they needed to paint a bunch of stuff grey because "that's what Millennials want."

Now we mock everything grey as "Millennial grey."

Same when we sold our house. We had some pretty muted pastel colors in our rooms, nothing flamboyant like bright pink or whatever, and the first thing our realtor said was "we need to repaint everything light gray." We also offered to leave some of our furniture around in order to make the home appealing and show better. Again, nothing wacky, just a few sofas, tables and generic non-family pictures on the walls. Realtor said "nope, you need to stage it for 30-40 year olds" (with the most generic, bland, airbnb-like non-furniture I've ever seen). I can't argue with the results--she successfully sold the house in the recent toughest house market we've seen in 10 years. But, wow, that's the aesthetic now??

Well now all of a sudden "clutter" is supposed to be in.

This is symptomatic of declining taste across the board... which actually means the trend of celebrating shitty taste, which has always existed in plentitude.

Hey, pretty things are hard. Why isn’t half of HN looking their best at least once a week?

It costs money and time. I work with people in shirts that are only befitting for elementary school kids.

You can have the niceties, just have to pay for them.

But I think this is about where the market is going. People (with the money for homes) don’t care, so that’s how they’re catered to.

Maybe not a in a typical house, but I can see a minimalist architecture with white walls, cement pillars, grey wood floors, and a single tree branch sculpture.

One of the carpet companies I was recommended exclusively makes browns and greyscale. No. NO!

And getting my car, the only options were grey and white. :(

I hate the greypocalypse that has happened. So depressing.

My 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.

Not such a crackpot theory in my opinion - the tools we use to communicate design surely will influence what we design.

that 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...

I 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.)

Well, 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.

> 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.)

Every family has that ugly cousin no one talks about.

Obligatory “if you don’t know who it is, it’s you”

Yes, the Cybertruck looks great to me.

Is it different? Yes. But ugly? Not in my view.

Have you seen it in person?

> 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.

I find it beautiful as well, but beauty for me transcends the visual and into the conceptual / historical.

It’s interesting, unique, strange and therefore beautiful.

As a comparison data point, have you also studied Esperanto?

No, sorry, no idea who Esperanto is

I think the reference was to the language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto, which is interesting and strange. (I am not sure to what extent it is unique, but it is probably the best known among the conlangs.)

That looks very interesting. Thanks

I 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.

Cybertruck fan here, I wouldn't describe it as either ugly or beautiful. It is bold and different, and utterly unlike anything else out there, much the same way modern architecture was 70 years ago and modern art 100+ years ago. I find this very appealing.

If you don't like the Cybertruck, you can close your browser tab and not be offended further. Tesla 3s and Ys exist in the real world, and they're more pleasant to look at than most vehicles.

Are they? Something about them seems off to me, but I cant put my finger on it

No grille in the front?

Model S looks good to me, but others look kind of funny or not in correct proportions and the front lights of those are also weird.

Relax. He didn't lash out in fury at their existence. He just said he doesn't like their appearance. Did you design it or something?

I couldn't read any strong emotion in my comment. Maybe it's on your end?

Def not just on their end, your comment reads needlessly aggressive.

Well then, my apologies.

Your comment just proved the point of gp. Even if you think something is ugly, why not acknowledge the fact that some might consider it beautiful?

> Even if you think something is ugly, why not acknowledge the fact that some might consider it beautiful?

I do. I was checking to see whether my parent really meant to include Cybertrucks among things of beauty. I didn't say that they were wrong—I think I made my point of view implicitly clear, but also said, in a reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081204 to cs702's reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39080900, that my opinion was of no relevance to whether they found it beautiful.

Or maybe you mean, why even go so far as to ask the question?—but, well, this is a discussion board, the topic under discussion is specifically whether everything is ugly, and Teslas were advanced contra that thesis, so it seemed relevant!

The Cybertruck looks like something from the Rigger Black Book for Shadowrun. (Whether that's good or bad is, as JadeNB says, left as an exercise for the viewer. But for me it definitely fits its name.)

What gets me about the Cybertruck is that it feels like it's almost a cool design. I feel like if I squint my eyes, I can almost see a modern version of the DeLorean design (which was cool as hell). But it went wrong somewhere, and Tesla took a left turn into the ugly zone.

I like the look of the cybertruck. I also like the look of my Thinkpad 420. GIVE ME BIG ANGULAR THINGS.

I for sure find the cybertruck prettier than 99% of cars on the roads anyway. The SUVs are especially ugly imo.

What's beauty? It seems like a bit of a handwavy term.

We are talking about beauty here, and the first thing that comes to mind is freakin' Apple devices and Tesla vehicles? Even by HN standard, that feels like ... weird.

This is what a lot of negative comments were about, so there's nothing weird about also commenting on that.

As soon as they added the 3-eyed protruding camera, iPhone’s lost a lot of their appeal.

Tesla vehicles look fairly bland, dry and devoid of emotion to me.

There are things that objectively make something more beautiful. Symmetry for example. Not all beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty 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.

The 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

Is /g an abbreviation of /gen?

/g for grin. /G big grin that shows teeth

(I studied architecture until I switched to CS.)

It's not beauty, exactly. It's norms.

Some places have fairly strong norms. If you own a plot of land (perhaps with an old building) in such a place and go to an architect ask for a proposal to renovate/rebuild/whatever, the architect will tell you clearly what you'll be permitted to build and what not.

In such a place, your new building will look rather like its neighbours. Unless you want to try to fight the building commission, maybe you think the voters disagree with the commission and you can force the elected officials to overrule the commission.

In other places you have a lot more flexibility, and in that case you have the option to build beautifully, and you also also a lot of less beautiful options.

You may think the second question is the key: Do people who hire architects and builders choose to build beautifully or not? I think the first one is the most important factor. The second matters seldom, because even when the choice is there, the choice is usually for such a small area that you can see five or ten independent buildings, and the overall effect will lack beauty even if one or two buildings are beautiful.

> (you turn off some buyers who don’t like the look)

Fortunately the modernist minimal grayscale look is universally beloved, so no-one is turned off by that.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I am turned off by the grey. I've seen some apartments that I might have considered renting except that everything was grey. I wouldn't buy a house with a bunch of grey flooring, or I'd at least underprice by the cost to replace it.

But nobody is more turned off. You have 3 people all disliking boring grey, and 2 grey properties for sale, you have more demand than supply and price rises

Build something pink and now you only have 1 person liking it and 2 strongly disliking it, demand now equals supply so price doesn’t rise.

Is it worth the risk?

There’s a reason rented properties are co feed in magnolia, not just because it’s cheaper to get the same paint in bulk, but because if turns off the fewest people, and those it does don’t have any choice anyway as everywhere is magnolia.

> Build something pink

Yes, when people say they hate dull gray modernist architecture, what they mean is that they want garish pink buildings instead. Thank you for this strawman.

A whole article about ugly things with no pictures of them?

I don't trust the author if he's not giving any visual examples. Why should I trust his opinion?

Yeah, 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.

I 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.

It's even weirder than that — the movie that is mentioned, "Army Soldier II" is not coming up in my searches.

Still, to this point:

> Such bad lighting — and such large portions! We exit the movie theater to a bright realization: our films are exactly as overlit as our reality. As our environment has become blander, it has also become more legible — too legible. That’s a shame, because many products of the new ugliness could benefit from a little chiaroscuroed ambiguity

Cool that I learned a new word. Having just watched "Badlands" last night from 1973, I definitely agree modern cinema has become way too "graded".

I think it is a reference to "Red Notice 2"

Strong Sad taught me that word back in 2003: https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/58-dragon

Pictures risk having people disagree with the author's personal taste and the article hinges on there being a single correct taste

Dupe from last year, 500+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679

They lied on the publication date.

Odd, do you mean they lied back in 2022? Definitely confusing at the least!

https://web.archive.org/web/20221206160651/https://www.nplus...

    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

-- Hanlon, Robert

I dunno. I can see how Dec 2022 could be Winter 2023 for New York, but basing publication dates off seasons seems purposefully vague.

It's a tri-annual publication, Winter (the first publication of the year, this year's doesn't appear to be out), Summer, and Fall.

It's hard for me to understand what the author is exactly talking about without seeing more images.

its a word salad rant. An exercise in style to say mostly something that could be summed up in a few sentences.

tldr: “cars that look like renderings”

Or just over two pictures, at 1 pic == 1000 words (he used ~2100 words)

Very typical of the average HN pseudointellectual actually.

Ah just walk outside in literally any city.

Doesn'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.

The 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.

Honestly, where I am, I feel like cities have become better over time.

Ah yes it's US cities in particular, yeah.

You're going to need some more caveats for this, I'm afraid.

Most major older cities established a central core in an age where people had taste.

Or, you're falling to survivorship bias in the sense that only the older cities that had taste still remain whereas the tasteless tasted the blade of the bulldozer.

The entire subject is just annoying to respond to; on the topic of beauty it is much more helpful to have people advocating a positive than decrying a negative. It is too easy to complain that the world doesn't meet an unspecified artistic standard. It probably doesn't, but without some details on what standard we're talking about there is no conversation to be had. We don't do fiddly buildings these days, but that is because we're a lot better at building these days and a big building isn't automatically a masterpiece.

Although on the art front I'm looking forward to learning what storms lie in wait for the first publicly notable pro-Trump statue in the US. It'll be a real cultural discovery.

Perhaps as, as an artist, the author was doing a write-up as ugly as the subject he was talking about.

I could not finish it.

Performance art, maybe.

Do a google image search for "millennial beige". Alternatively, look at just about any house listed on Zillow/Redfin/etc. It's a design style that prioritizes modern designs and neutral colors.

Oh 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/AF1QipMKvYH4OHFU5o4gZlSZ...

I kinda like it! The rivets are interesting, and the window proportions too. Plus the photo has nice light, which doesn’t hurt.

Wow you weren’t kidding. Looks like a sheet metal factory.

It looks like it's straight out of an urban scene for Equilibrium.

This is pretty to me.

It looks like something that you'd put in a movie to show the oppressive miserableness of a British coal town in the 1970s.

When 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.

Missing 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-... [2] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/kaws-waiting-brook...

I 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.

There'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"

Theres 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.

The 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.

Can’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.

As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at." — André Malraux

Yeah 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.

I’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.)

World 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.)

Why 2010 exactly?

Start of the "Arab Spring" and the clusterfuck that led to the dissolution of all international law.

Where is your evidence for any of this ("world war 3", "dissolution of all international law") and why do you believe it?

Among 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.

When I said 'evidence' I meant links and past events, not incoherent predictions for the future with no actual information.

There'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

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.

"Show, don't tell" is lost on the authors. They only talk about visual ugliness.

Discussion from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679

The 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.

I'm pretty sure gravity may have some demands in how fast an ugly building comes down.

The 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

Another 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-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.

fwiw I don't think the block quotes are from tweets, I think that's just a link to share the quote on twitter

Relevant account for those wanting more photos illustrating the article: 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

Aesthetics has always seemed like the front line of the war for civilization against chaos.

This 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

I 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.

All 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.

The submitted link has an anchor in the middle of the article. Why?

The submitted link contains an anchor/hash pointing to the middle of the (long) article. Why?

Poster was as sloppy as the author himself

its art?

Maybe 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

The title should have had an additional exclamation point.

Call 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.

Related: Why Many Cities Suck from Not Just Bikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4kmDxcfR48

Discussed previously (2022) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894679

> 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?

I 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.

Contrast 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.

It’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…

Yes, but isn't it cyberpunk as fuck? Welcome to living out your wildest nightmares.

cyberpunk is not ugly though.

Movie 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.

> 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

Go 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!

I'd rather visit sunny Magnitogorsk: 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.)

You 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).

Hey, you forgot to add the grey filter.

An 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.

Magnitogorsk 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".

> Magnitogorsk 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.

Sounds like a lot of western cities honestly. Most are okay places to live, but not exactly happening, overly fun places.

I'll be honest I expected a lot worse when looking on street view, but I looked around a bunch of places and was like "I could live here".

> There is 2.5 hours walk through on youtube: "Magnitogorsk, Russia. Metallurgic Capital and Steel Heart of Russia. Ural Trip 1".

I'll take a look.

> "I could live here".

Winters are brutal and quite depressing. All sorts of blood leaching insects in summer. Some people have alergies to clouds of pollen... And Russian administration was challenging even before the war.

I am nomad, it is part of my rotation. Very nice place for couple of weeks at right time of year. (not Magnitogorsk specifically)

> Winters are brutal and quite depressing. All sorts of blood leaching insects in summer. Some people have alergies to clouds of pollen..

Honestly sounds like most Canadian cities I'm familiar with, particularly Winnipeg.

> And Russian administration was challenging even before the war.

Yah that I don't know if I could put up with that.

If you are tired of Canada, try Wroclav in April for a month, slavic mentality may not be for everyone. There is yt channel "offshore citizen", international tax accountant from Canada, pretty good info.

>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/

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.

I'm surprised how quickly I got downvoted on this one.

Guess I can't have a positive message?

I 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.

As 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

there is no money for that anymore

Perhaps 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.

I 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-n...

Classic marble architecture is considered racist and white supremacy adjacent these days.

https://intersectionist.medium.com/american-power-structures...

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/11/how-classical-...

> 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.

At this point there is so much that is claimed to be racist that the word is just about to lose it's meaning

We 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.

I misread it as everyone and was disappointed when I realized.

The new Prius is actually not that awful.

I blame the preset hustle.

Why good looking car expensive when cheap car and expensive car used same Color steel and lights ?

22. 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.

Why do communists build brutalist buildings?

I don’t think the recent trend in abandoning aesthetics is accidental.

Brutalism and communism are what happens when people pretend that human nature doesn’t exist.

> 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/boW0onRHUjdzzl...

Because 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.

West 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.

A 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?

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