The beauty of concrete
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
One hypothesis I've been kicking around: human brains like detail.
I thought of this on a walk down a (sub)urban city street.
- High detail: I first noticed the variety of plants in just the garden strips between the sidewalk and the street. I was trying to count how many there were, and I quickly lost track. Then I started looking at each individual plant, and the amount of detail is wild---the sheer intricacy and variation in all the parts and stages of growth. Not to mention the colors (OK, and smell and movement).
Then, I looked at the human made objects around me:
- Low detail: Flat concrete road. Flat concrete sidewalk. Flat stairs. All from rectangular tiles. Metal pole handrail.
The houses around weren't much better---boxy shapes, low ornamentation.
While I think it's generally accepted that nature is more pleasing to the senses to be around human-created objects, it made me wonder whether amount of detail is a fundamental aspect of what our brains enjoy.
This rumination gets activated whenever I walk by old ornate buildings or read an article like this.
Relatedly, even low-poly games people find beautiful (Tunic comes to mind) have an extraordinary amount of detail when you dissect the textures and postprocessing effects. I'd share a video but I'm way off track now.
Like a bored border collie but it’s the visual cortex
A vast desert vs. a teeming rainforest, that sort of thing.
Like how I always assumed that we prefer cold water because of alpine streams.
A book about this came out recently too: https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/brutalist-plants-book
I would change that to "nature is more pleasing to the senses to be around human mass produced objects"
Human made houses and gardens and various objects can be very beautiful works of art.
But they usually aren't, because it is expensive. A permaculture garden is a joy to walk in, unlike a monoculture field. A handcrafted table with ornaments is beautiful, a common plastic table not so much. And just adding generic details would be cheap as well, but would still be ugly to me. It is not just about details, but the right details in the right pattern that makes objects beautiful and fitting in its place. Ideally also an house is designed to fit its surroundings. Otherwise it looks out of place. (Most do)
So I am really looking forward the robot revolution, that will (hopefully) free us from the need to produce cheap, so we can focus on producing beautiful again.
I envy your optimism.
It also created a tremendous energy efficiency issue. Stone has much higher thermal mass than glass.
it was even more so of a conscious decision not to use any ornamentation that they weren't limited to stone facades (btw many steel core buildings had stone facades until recently, among other materials like precast concrete - in the financial district of London most buildings pre 2010 are not glass, and most post 2010 are)
it just seems to be the case that the ruling elites like those buildings, and that's the main reason they are pervasive across skylines
I find this extremely odd! I would think there would be a large market for beautiful cast stone things. Instead, there is (apparently) an extraordinary market for concrete frogs.
I figured that in the era of 3D printing and widespread 3D models[1], it might be fairly inexpensive to make my own mold and pour my own casts, even if I do destructive casting techniques. Here again I was disappointed: To order a 3D plastic print from a site like ShapeWays came out to over $1300 for something fairly small. So that's off the table, too.
I expected more democratization of ornament than there really has been, given the tech today. It's surprising to me that no one is trying to make silicone molds available of famous statues, generally, but I guess there's just no interest or no perceived demand. Or maybe there is a big market, and I've missed it, because I was not searching for silicone molds of frogs.
[1] For instance, The British Museum has a sketchfab with free models: https://sketchfab.com/britishmuseum
I’ve done cast stone… poured into cast silicone… which was cast from 3D printer molds… which was printed from my own 3D models… and silicone was by far the most expensive part.
It only made sense because I was casting a lot of stone molds.
It seems reasonably within expectations that ornamental concrete frogs are a bigger market than ornamental naked dudes holding up a severed head, tough, no?
Storing is hard because of the space it takes and manual labour to move the heavy item when reorganizing.
Transportation is costly for the same reasons and additionally it can easily damage and any damage causes it to suddenly have virtually zero value.
You are saying:
- classical statues are beautiful, I like beautiful things
And they are saying:
- classical statues belong in palaces, and I don't own a palace, or want people to think that I'm reaching above my status
PCBWay and JLCPCB both offer similarly-priced very cheap 3d printing and CNC services out of China. Weerg in Italy also offers 3d printing and CNC services and I'm probably going to try them out for the next thing I need printed. The only non-marketplace service I've seen in the US that offers instant quotes is i-solids in Texas, but they have quite high startup costs and seem to be more geared towards small-medium production runs.
If you are on the DIY path could you possibly find a hackspace and print it for yourself?
You've discovered a market with unmet needs!
Sears only sold about 75,000 house kits, btw.
Has anybody actually studied the cost of hiring a string quartet?
Modern logistics and construction has significantly reduced secondary costs. Cost per calorie of food is nearly free compared to the past.
One thing that might make it hard to study is that the cost depends on the event and what's actually being delivered. Everybody charges a premium for weddings and corporate events. But those things also have to run absolutely like clockwork. On the other hand, the bands I'm in are also happy to charge a lower price for a "budget" wedding that isn't a $100000 Disney blowout.
Everybody charges different if travel is involved. What most ensembles do is, first, book as many high-dollar gigs as possible. Then, fill in the holes in the schedule with lesser gigs. The best musicians in my locale will take a $50 gig if the alternative is staying home.
Adjust for inflation and it would look much more reasonable. There are also four people earning wages in a quartet.
For $1000, you can hire someone to work for a year today, in Burundi, Somalia, or any of the other countries that are as poor today as Englishmen were in 1100.
The comparison isn't US$1000 exchanged to Somali Shillings and looking at purchasing power. A Somali quartet is not earning anywhere near $1000 after conversion, and the price of many other products and services would be much cheaper compared to the US as well.
Nor is the comparison $1000 US dollars in 2024 and looking at what that same nominal amount would purchase in distant history.The quartet would be earning much less in nominal amounts, but the nominal amounts of everything are cheaper as well.
Here are some hard figures. Using the year 1800 as the comparison.
USA economy $1000 in 2024 = $40 in 1800. A 2388% increase attributed to inflation.
String quartet gig in 2024 = $1000 For 1800 it's hard to find earnings for anything outside of labor and manufacturing however the wage for a teacher was around $1 per day.
If we make a big assumption that teachers and musicians pay were equivalent, then it would appear that the purchasing power of a string quartet has 10x the purchasing power today after accounting for inflation $40 / 4 persons / $1 = 10).
10x is quite consistent across all occupations that I can find equivalents for (skewed heavily toward labouring and manufacturing, very few services are reported in 1800).
So in that sense the string quartet isn't an outlier, for the most part we are all enjoying around 10x the purchasing power since 1800.
One day's earnings now is equivalent to 10 days in 1800. This is great, but not anywhere near 1 day = 1 year.
Estimating inflation back to 1100 would be very difficult .. as would determining day wages, the economic system was very different.
Sources: Inflation - https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1800?
Labor wages in 1800 - https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89071501472&seq=17...
Current wages - bis.gov
It's unfortunate that making buildings look nice seems to be secondary to other types of status signaling. It's hardly a new issue either. When the Chrysler Building was completed in 1930 it was criticized for being gaudy for having the nerve to actually try to have some style.
>"Lewis Mumford, a supporter of the International Style and one of the foremost architectural critics of the United States at the time, despised the building for its "inane romanticism, meaningless voluptuousness, [and] void symbolism".
If the ornamentation had value outside of signaling, it’s now readily available to everyone, as the article says.
But I’m not sure how much I believe that. Fashion is fashion. I’m sure there is a hypothetical present where minimalism isn’t valued nearly as much. But I still think that’s mostly orthogonal to how much people care about aesthetics.
The average Roman peasant would have been exposed to more ornamentation in their life than the typical American. Whereas Americans would be driving by endless McDonalds, Starbucks, and strip mall number 523, a Roman peasant would have seen the great triumphal arcs, the facades of the great buildings, etc. It's just a complete loss. Anyone who's been to an older city in Europe or Asia knows exactly what we're missing. When ornament is a thing that exists, whether private or public, the whole public enjoys it regardless.
The statues and fountains throughout Madrid are a great example of this. Sheer beauty all over the city that you pass just going out for a coffee.
You'd have to count ornamentation very selectively for that to be true. Every corporate logo is ornamental. A modern American farmer probably encounters more ornamentation before they get into their ornamentally bright-green tractor. The rivet in their pants is ornamental, the mirror-polish on the bezel of their phone is ornamental, the 'World's Best Mom' on their coffee mug is ornamental, etc.
If you're in charge of cleaning your own things, perhaps you desire surfaces that are easier and quicker to deal with. If you're in a position to hire people to do it, maybe you don't care as much.
And I wonder if that's one reason for less ornamentation. There's also a desire for more simplicity, I guess as a reaction to the layers of complexity we wrap our lives up in, and again, perhaps ornamentation in that case becomes psychologically unsettling.
Regarding the philosophy of ornament or not, brutalist architects were obsessed with texture. Many buildings that may seem at first to be without ornament actually had a huge amount of effort put into casting their concrete forms with rows of fins that stick out and are later roughly pounded back to form a particular look. This cost a lot of extra money even though it comes off as a rather plain texture to many.
And when it comes to cost analysis this take is very shallow. An interesting counterexample is the recent rebuilding of a hospital in Chinatown, San Francisco. The initial designs were extremely plain and boxy based on the idea that every bit of money spent on ornament could be spent on life saving devices instead. Only when a foundation was formed to raise money specifically for ornamentation of the building was that added to the design.
When you're walking you have time to apreciate ornaments on nearby buildings and you can see the whole buildings around you.
When you're driving you don't have time to see anything that is close (as it whizzes by), the car roof occludes anything higher than the 1st floor, and anything that is far you can't see in detail. What's the point of ornaments when 90% of people won't see them? So instead of detailed ornaments people design buildings that look nice from 2 km away.
Even the difference between walking and biking is huge. The same street visited by bike feels completely different than on foot. With cars you're basically half-blind. You no longer see the buildings around you - at best you might see the skyline on the horizon.
I blame cars for the modern buildings' lack of decorations.
isn't brutalism the very essence of using concrete without ornamentation?
it's not the concrete that makes brutalism ugly, but the lack of ornamentation.
i didn't mean that the article should showcase brutalist examples, but where it talks about more modern architecture using less and less ornamentation, brutalism is the worst outgrowth of that, so i thought it would make sense to at least mention that.
It is a big mistake to conflate traditionalism/conservatism with fascism/nazism, these movements were inherently modern, even when the majority of people under them were not (as is the case in most of the world - the politically active minority creates revolutionary ideologies which are then stripped down to only the essentials by the pragmatic masses).
A lot of things are imposing but are not Nazi or Fascist. However Nazism and Fascism without traditionalism doesn't make sense. Both (especially Nazism) draw heavily on nationalistic mythology. This is not to say that traditionalism implies either Nazism or Fascism. That should be obvious. My point is that Brutalism has nothing to do with either Fascism or Nazism.
In that respect I think it's more similar to older ornamented aesthetics than it is to modern glass and steel skyscrapers or McMansions.
Emissions do not really matter for a material that can last hundreds of years. Genociding old growth forests in Europe for biomass "renewable" energy, though. That's a problem.
This slow shift in architecture style also means an eclipse of the ability of humanity to perceive beauty in general. The eclipse is temporary, but it lasts for centuries and we are yet to see its darkest moment. All this talk about productivity and efficiency is another face of this eclipse.