Hacker News Reader

> there's lot's of buzz for example on Twitter about how some old stuff was beautiful and the new one is ugly. They are doing this for political propaganda and money

Some of us really do prefer the old stuff, not just for the politics and money!

Sure, its just something else when you try to push a point or stir a controversy by constantly repeating "why they don't make things like that anymore" without actually looking into why they stopped and why they don't anymore.

"because doing $contemporaryStyle is cheaper and more broadly appealing, and might even have some practical benefits. And it's cheaper not just because it's inherently more optimized or because labor is more expensive than it was back then, but because being the only one doing $oldWay means you don't have any scaling benefits and will struggle to find labor. Going with the herd is just inherently better value for money". There, free premise for a 1h youtube video. Just adapt it to architecture or cutlery or something.

The worst is when people say "Why don't they make things like X anymore", where X is one of the best examples of its type from the entire decade it was created. They didn't make things like X back then either, you dingbat!

X is a stand-out work of genius, head and shoulders above everything else it was contemporary with, at the time it was made. It was the confluence of strong artistic vision, technical excellence and innovation, and near-flawless execution, where all the parts managed to come together cohesively without any thematic friction - which rarely happens in any project. The reason X is better than 99% of stuff made today is because it was better than 99% of stuff made then, too.

Someone probably will make something as good as X this decade, but expecting most things to be as good as X is absurd. Remember Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Although I know what you're saying, I couldn't help thinking that X actually isn't genius, especially contrasted to how it was before the rocketman took over.

Please get help. Bringing up this entirely off-topic flamebait here is analogous to bringing up Donald Trump in a thread about copyright issues surrounding Donald Duck. Aka “something better reserved for reddit”.

People also tend to forget (or not know due to never having experienced that specific period themselves because young age or any other reason) that during the time when “things like X” were actually made, there was a point of oversaturation (without much evolution happening), and the public got tired of it and moved on to something more unexplored.

Examples: pop-punk in early to late 00s, photorealism in paintings in 1900s, “boomer shooter” videogames of late 90s/early 00s, etc. I don’t see photorealism in paintings having a massive comeback or a nostalgia wave right now, but pop-punk and “boomer shooter” videogames have been having pretty strong nostalgia waves recently, and they are doing quite ok.

And I 100% agree with your overall point, people remember titans like the original DOOM/Quake, but forget the flow of all the lazy unimaginative derivative slop that eventually started proportionally dominating those niches (which is what eventually spelled out the end of the mainstream hype era for those, and let us enter the “they dont make things like that anymore” fallacy stage).

I've often wondered if one reason we don't get amazing like-life paintings is because we have photos.

We do get those, search for photorealistic paintings. It's just that they are not very popular and people don't value them much. They tend to be interesting only in the context of being a painting that looks like a photo.

AFAIK with the proliferation of photography the people who used to do life-like painting of other people lost a lot of business and it seized being a profession.

I'm not literally saying we can't do them, just that as you say they're not popular.

People tear down beautiful things and replace them with crap, because what's wrong with the beautiful thing is that it wasn't made by them. They want to leave their mark, like a dog pissing on a lamp post. We see it all the time in software UI, so it doesn't surprise me that it also happens in architecture.

That's one opinion to hold if you are cynical enough or young enough not to remember stuff changing over time.

For example, if you are old enough to witness the transition you can remember how much a fresh breath of air was moving away from the clutter and pertinaciousness of post modernist interior design into the functional and comfortable minimalism then only to go the the next phase seeking some more cozy spaces once the minimalism begin feeling impersonal and cold and then the designers remember how cool and inspiring some stuff from the 60s and 70s were.

Aren't you sort of saying the same thing? The pursit of change for its own sake, rather than striving towards a (relatively) objective improvement does look a bit fruitless.

No, not at all. The styles don't change of its own sake, they change as people come up with ideas on how to address the problems of the last one. Each iteration solves something only to create its own problems that will be solved by the next iteration. Also, people revisit old ideas all the time.

Problem solving chain is only one force, there's also the desire force. As time change, people desire different things. At one point people may desire order if the world is too chaotic only to desire freedom later on when the world becomes too strict and rigid when trying to get things into order and all that reflects into the design of everything.

Another force would be economy and technology, old ideas that didn't work because the tech wasn't there yet are revisited or designs can be optimised for cost when times are tough. Tiny demons carved by hand on the facade are nice but when the demand for just getting into the plane at the cheapest cost is strong you can't make you airports to look like 1800s train stations.

> The styles don't change of its own sake, they change as people come up with ideas on how to address the problems of the last one.

I don't think this bit is true, or at least I don't believe these are "problems" being solved, when it comes to art. There are no problems, only changes. That's why being derivative is bad. It's a drive for change for its own sake.

Well, design is not something that exists on its own sake. Just like with UI design in computers, product or architectural/interior design solves problems. Aesthetics is a component of it but, function and communication is too. People want big windows, designers figure it out. People want cheap places that can be reconfigured for function, designers figure it out, people want cheap sunglasses and designers figure it out, people want watches that makes them look serious and designers figure it out, - you get the idea. They do all that within the framework of technology and materials and as the tech and materials availability change they find new solutions.

BTW, this idea of "designers just make eye candy" is something I keep seeing in the AI Hype train folks. They enter a prompt and the AI generates an image of, let's say a chair that looks cool at first glance and they think that AI is ready to take away the design jobs. They are deeply mistaken because they have no idea what the designers actually do and what it takes to design a product and no, it's not about coming up with something to sit on and looks of a particular type, out of the blue.

> They enter a prompt and the AI generates an image of, let's say a chair that looks cool at first glance and they think that AI is ready to take away the design jobs

Well, I'd say this is wrong, but not for that reason. The advances you list are all really engineering and materials science advances. Once an engineer shows you how to design a skyscraper using a framed tubes, you can draw 100 of them. AI might be able to do the drawing, but it probably won't be doing the structural engineering / materials science in the same ways.

It works the other way around, the designers design and the engineers are figuring out how to build it. Unless of course you can shove it down the throat of the customers, then you can have engineers make you an apparatus and call it a product.

The designers usually have some understanding on what's possible and they work with the engineers to tweak their design for feasibility.

No one cares about the 100 hundred drawings of skyscrapers. The soviets did it with the commie blocks, although practical its nowhere nearly as desirable as having a neighbourhood designed by people thinking beyond structural engineering.

> people thinking beyond structural engineering

It's not "beyond". It's just a different job, and generally speaking, one with a lower bar to entry. Doesn't mean it's not useful, but I think it's silly to talk as though this sort of design is so significant. Plenty of ugly buildings exist; all designed by architects.

Well, these days you plug the numbers into the computer and can tell you how to build your design. For most purposes, the engineering is there only because of associations or organisations lobbying the government making it compulsory.

It's not an original work after all, the computations are modelled into the software and it tells you if it will meet the requirements.

> For most purposes, the engineering is there only because of associations or organisations lobbying the government making it compulsory.

Definitely not. An engineer signs off the safety etc. All the non-cosmetics. You're right that it's computerised, but that's because it's not fashion - there's an objective "better" and so that can be programmed. Fashion, not so much. Until AI.

Try living in a dodgy Victorian conversion first. I'll take almost any new build over them.

Do you believe that all beautiful things are dodgy Victorian conversions?

I think the UK overprotects "historical" stuff to the point of degrading the life of it's people, and not in a small way.

This wouldn't be a problem if we built houses in proportion to population growth (whether through birth rate or immigration) - but we have so many landlords in parliament, that we can't really do anything that would threaten to reduce the growth of house prices.

Judging the quality is possible to an extent IMHO. You can see if an artist practiced their skills and techniques and you can see if precise pieces were done with care for instance.

From the pictures it looks like there are parts that show real care but other parts that are kind of messy and maybe more half finished projects.

That's just production precision, which I appreciate but many significant art pieces don't have much of that. If you don't like it, you don't like it(I don't like it too, I value mastery) but that doesn't say much about the quality or more importantly significance of the art.

Having at least one objective characteristic somewhere, somehow, is more than zero though.

I don't know, it's like a having an essay with no grammatical errors. Does it make the essay any good? Sure, having a great essay written with lots of typos and grammatical errors can be hard to consume but on the other hand we, in the internet age, have some great stories called "copypasta" written horribly and people love those. They are culturally significant artefacts of a time period of the internet culture and their production is not so good.

We have "HODL" which is a cultural phenomenon, which itself is a typo.

We have numerous memes images of cultural significance which is made with very low production value because their original makers had a great idea but not very good image editing skills.

I don't think that "production correctness" or "precision" is a metric that art can be evaluated on.

In the case of an essay the quality can maybe be seen in correct grammar but mostly by the writer being able to convey the story well, make sentences people want read and other things.

A cultural phenomenon is not art in my opinion. I think things can be made by people and found interesting and well liked without them being art just as a natural phenomenon can be interesting and well liked.

Production precision is just one of the examples I gave. There are other things that can indicate the quality as well. In this particular case the art is painting and sculpting and those can be done with more and less quality.

Of course there is modern art where it can seem like anything can be considered art but even in those cases there is often work and talent involved. Maybe it's through the selection of which works to make public or the storytelling with the art pieces or coming up with new experiments.

But isn't it just your opinion that a quality work of art should appear to have a certain consistent high level of care throughout?

It seems possible, if not likely, these were unfinished pieces that were in-progress when the artist died. Perhaps many of these would never have been finished no matter how long the artist lived. You might look at one and see what had gotten a lot of attention and what hadn't, maybe even see what had gotten attention first and what later, and wonder about exactly why. It's pretty interesting, IMO.

Probably one good way to value art is its impact on the viewer. So that's obviously very subjective. But surely a variety is good. Or put it this way... the skillfully and richly crafted masterworks that you view in a museum are certainly worthy works of art. But if skillfully and richly crafted masterworks that you view in a museum are one of only a small set of forms of worthy works of art, you're putting art in a small, confining pen. That would really limit the impact it can have. Which, I think, means that's just a far too limiting a view of art.

Just to make a counter point - you're suggesting a completely modernist tabula rasa view of aesthetics, which doesn't seem to gel with observed human aesthetic preferences, whether in fine art or architecture. Our reactions to aesthetics are obviously culturally mediated, but that doesn't mean that they are exclusively culturally derived (culture too of course springing from shared evolution). Cross culturally to pick an uncontroversial example, we show a high expressed preference for windows, higher ceilings, less cramped rooms etc. This extends also to proportionality, symmetry, ornamentation etc. The very recent historic move away from aesthetically pleasing buildings has much more to do with economics and the priorities of industrial and post industrial society, than the choices of the citizens who have to live in frequently grim and alienating environments.

Andries Kerpestien has a good series on some universal expressed aesthetic preferences in relation to architecture - https://casualrealism.substack.com/p/architecture-and-evolut...

I agree with you completely about aesthetics, it's just that not all art or design has to serve the function of pleasing people. In some cases people want to induce fear, disgusts, sadness, sense of control, of greatness, of smallness, of oppression etc.

I might humbly suggest that architects and architecture should rarely if ever be employed to induce fear, disgusts, sadness, loss of control, smallness, oppression etc. That fact that it all too frequently does so, especially in public housing and industrial architecture is my point exactly.