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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The same line of reasoning could be used to justify creationism.
Human culture is an incredibly complex system that can create shared behaviors without any central coordination. While I’m not in agreement (or disagreement) with the parent, it’s certainly plausible without the coordination you’re implying.
Are you implying that’s a conspiracy theory? Big pharma has a history of abusing the edge cases and dismissing those is one of the major causes of “conspiracy theories”.
Yeah no. The "elites" want profit, that's why we turned every part of the planet that we don't use for agriculture into concrete car scapes. Or Something.
> advertisements with unattractive people practically didn't exist ten years ago. Now we are constantly bombarded with them
incel vibes here.
This is so hilariously stupid that it prevents me from being tempted to flag your comment.
What's stupid, that there are many more unattractive people in advertisements today that ten years ago? You may disagree if you want but I don't see how that observation is "stupid". No idea what incel vibes means...
You’re bombarded with advertisements with uggos because of backlash from the very kind of people who would blame all their failure and misery on “elites.” They rage tweeted every time someone disciplined in maintaining their health and physique dared to appear in an advert.
"incel" is short for "involuntary celibate"; people who the other sex doesn't find attractive / can't get laid. Originally it was self-applied by people who wanted to figure out what was wrong with themselves, but turned into an insult years ago.
> advertisements with unattractive people practically didn't exist ten years ago. Now we are constantly bombarded with them.
It's not all bad. A lot of film from the 70s had conventionally unattractive actors in leading roles. It made films more relatable.
Advertising is an interesting venue to try this in though. You're supposed to sell an ideal to aspire to, not a reflection of your own mediocrity.
The best advertisement I've ever seen was outside a hair salon in Japan. It was literally just a mirror on a sandwich board-- the most unflattering view of yourself possible.
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".
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.
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:
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]
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.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 781 ms ] threadHowever, 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...
https://intersectionist.medium.com/american-power-structures...
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/11/how-classical-...
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.
Europe is, I suppose, not as enshittified so far, but it's a matter of time.
Most major older cities established a central core in an age where people had taste.
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.
I could not finish it.
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
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Fortunately the modernist minimal grayscale look is universally beloved, so no-one is turned off by that.
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.
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.
The title should have had an additional exclamation point.
I don’t think the recent trend in abandoning aesthetics is accidental.
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...
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.
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.
The cyberpunk we are living has no such aesthetic filters. An adventure is something terrible that happens to someone else.
And a great YT channel explaining these points too: https://youtu.be/C9pg2j2oGy0?si=83HrNdnZ6PdwGfrf
(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.)
(Most people lived through the fall of the Roman Empire and didn't even notice it.)
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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
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.
In any case try not to worry too much about it, there are plenty of people with (arguably) bad taste in every generation.
No, it is (or was) definitely a trend. Google "millennial gray" -- it's so common it became a meme.
https://www.crateandbarrel.com/kids/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hot-new-baby-gear-is-sad-beige-...
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?
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.
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.
https://www.thespruce.com/greige-best-neutral-color-ever-797...
greige fixes that.
I have asked around and I am not the only male in my acquaintances that experiences this.
You have builder grey, builder white, builder off white, and builder beige.
So this excludes all colors for everything. Black, white, gray everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
They also help reduce the noise caused by walking around, so your neighbors don't complain.
Now we mock everything grey as "Millennial grey."
This is symptomatic of declining taste across the board... which actually means the trend of celebrating shitty taste, which has always existed in plentitude.
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.
And getting my car, the only options were grey and white. :(
I hate the greypocalypse that has happened. So depressing.
Human culture is an incredibly complex system that can create shared behaviors without any central coordination. While I’m not in agreement (or disagreement) with the parent, it’s certainly plausible without the coordination you’re implying.
One likely cause is that “boring” style can appeal to a wider audience and sell more units.
Now I actually want to die from the vaccines.
Are you implying that’s a conspiracy theory? Big pharma has a history of abusing the edge cases and dismissing those is one of the major causes of “conspiracy theories”.
Yeah no. The "elites" want profit, that's why we turned every part of the planet that we don't use for agriculture into concrete car scapes. Or Something.
> advertisements with unattractive people practically didn't exist ten years ago. Now we are constantly bombarded with them
incel vibes here. This is so hilariously stupid that it prevents me from being tempted to flag your comment.
"incel" is short for "involuntary celibate"; people who the other sex doesn't find attractive / can't get laid. Originally it was self-applied by people who wanted to figure out what was wrong with themselves, but turned into an insult years ago.
Homosexuals can't be incels?
It's not all bad. A lot of film from the 70s had conventionally unattractive actors in leading roles. It made films more relatable.
Advertising is an interesting venue to try this in though. You're supposed to sell an ideal to aspire to, not a reflection of your own mediocrity.
The best advertisement I've ever seen was outside a hair salon in Japan. It was literally just a mirror on a sandwich board-- the most unflattering view of yourself possible.
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.
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".
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.
Anyway here's a great photo of it I found on Google:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipMKvYH4OHFU5o4gZlSZ...
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...
My educated guess is that the building in question is somewhere in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, or maybe Bushwick.