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The mid in fake midcentury modern

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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#101

Post by epolanski »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #41
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rational explanation why the majority of items are neutral tones/grey is because this maximizes the market. This can be seen on automobiles, where silver is the most common color because it’s easier to sell second hand, so manufacturers learned to optimize for this.

Yes exactly. When choosing colors or amenities for my home, my real estate agent and contractors would bristle — "that's not going to be good for resale value" This has impacts on the industries surrounding as well. If I want a custom siding color, it's going to be more expensive. We're normalizing everything around the most widely palatable, so it's all fairly bland.

> We're normalizing everything around the most widely palatable

My counter argument to this is that then it is the "norm" and society conditioning our taste and dictating what's palatable.

This goes as deep as influencing and forming our sexuality. We get aroused by things that would've not aroused people centuries ago, the canons of beauty themselves changed a lot.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#102

Post by thundergolfer »

fulltimeloser wrote: post #38
recursivedoubts wrote: post #5

World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur modernist impulse of pride (…

Modernism started and co-evolved with the industrial revolution, long, long before World War 1. Esthetics is a favorite topic for far right thinkers where the demise of civilization is caused by some art that confuse them.

Yes, this top-comment is obviously wrong and mistaken if you know anything about aesthetics and architecture. The broken timelining of Modernist design is the most obvious error. I wouldn’t expect HN to get this right though.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#103

Post by epolanski »

pavlov wrote: post #12

Reminds me of the Parisian art critic who was appalled when they built a modernist colossus that destroyed the beautiful harmony of his home city. The rest of his life he would scrupulously choose walking routes to avoid seeing the monstrosity. The building in question was the Eiffel Tower.

I don't think most think of the Eiffel Tower as something beautiful.

It's iconic and arguably the symbol of Paris, but it's not really something you would think of when thinking of architectural or functional beauty.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#104

Post by pixl97 »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #76
royaltheartist wrote: post #25

This feels less like it tells us anything about the world but more about how small the author's conception of it is. Reminds me of people who complain about how music is "bad these days" but they're only talking about what they hear on the radio and aren't really exploring what the landscape has to offer A lot of what gets created is for functional purposes, and it has always been that way. As time goes on, the funct…

You're not wrong to an extent about the good stuff sticking around but I think you're missing the point. It's not like the aesthetics the author is complaining about were chosen for purpose like a farmer painting his barn red because red is cheap. The slice of the economic ladder from which the author cites his examples is mostly rich enough that small variations in cost or performance are not really a driver of styl…

> It's not like the aesthetics the author is complaining about were chosen for purpose like a farmer painting his barn red because red is cheap

I would completely disagree. "Rich enough" is mostly meaningless, there are a 1000 different subsystems running under this that make a slight deviation in a product increase in price massively. From laws and regulations on consumer products and housing rules, to what gets shipped overseas in massive container ships.

Go by a 'decent' wooden end table, it may cost you around $1000. Now go have a custom end table made to your specifications. Do not be surprised if it costs you an order of magnitude more and takes a year for an artisan to produce.

Modern costs are low because of mass production. When you can create 5 grey SKUs that cover 98% of the market and mass produce thousands to millions of them all of a sudden looking at producing a 'weird red' SKU is going to eat into your profits considerably unless you can recoup that by charging a much higher cost for that product.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#105

Post by sghio4Q2 »

antisthenes wrote: post #68

Nonsense. If you want to seek out beautiful things, simply go to where they are. Don't look for them in a hyper-urban corporate hellscape and then act surprised when you don't find them. Go to a park on a breezy spring day. Take a look at people playing with their dogs, their kids. A mother running after toddlers, father and son launching a kite in a big open field, deer grazing nearby in the brush. Look at it all an…

I agree with this. I feel sometimes people talk about things becoming "uglier," but I choose to find the beauty in things, including ugly things. In fact, I have seen things I thought to be ugly, but once I started looking for the beauty in them, they became beautiful.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#106

Post by blue039 »

sph wrote: post #10

There are two schools of thought: those that think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and those that think, like Steve Jobs famously quipped, that some people just have no good taste. After fighting with this concept for years, I decided to embrace the superiority and smugness that comes with the latter: the vast majority of people have no understanding of beauty and aesthetic. The only thing that stops the w…

There is nothing objectively beautiful about modern architecture. Brutalism, for example, is talentless nonsense.

Before the advent of "everyone gets sued", the ADA, nuclear war, etc there was actual creative freedom. Now, everything is just one size fits all. Just in case you happen to attract the wrong attention.

Architecture really is a reflection on how mind numbingly dull modern life actually is.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#107

Post by zip1234 »

_xnmw wrote: post #99

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

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

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#108

Post by trgn »

trilbyglens wrote: post #92
ericmay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To latch on to this great post there are a couple of other worthwhile discussion points: We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things. World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd…

How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not? I don't really buy the argument that america builds badly because of fear of destruction. It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shi…

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old.

Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an anti-establishment fervor after WW1.

Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#110

Post by jeromenerf »

I live in Paris, went to Wales this summer, found the relative lack of roadsigns very nice, came back to Paris, found the overabundance of roadsigns uglier than before, went to Prague, found the overabundance of signs, large roads and cars within the city ugly, came back to Paris, found it a bit prettier.

Ugliness, envy and jealousy, inextricably mixed.

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