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The mid in fake midcentury modern

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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#181

Post by sph »

blue039 wrote: post #106
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.

> Brutalism, for example, is talentless nonsense.

Brutalism is a perfectly serviceable form of art. The problem is that architecture has more practical purposes than pure art, as its goal is to create inviting living spaces. It needs to exist within this constraint, with the ultimate judges being the people that dwell in it, and the architect as their servant. Imposing architecture on people is just plain rude, and brutalism can be quite imposing and oppressive.

So in general I agree, brutalist architecture is terrible.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#182

Post by Renevith »

badpun wrote: post #15

I think the reason might be mechanisation and mass-production. Before that, everything was done by hand, so it wasn't that much more expensive to produce interesting architecture or say hand-crafted ornaments details on buildings. Right now, costs of that would be gigantic (which is shown in giant costs of renovation of historic buildings, which needs to be done using the older methods), compared to a standard boxy b…

"Natural materials such as wood or stone feel so much nicer than concrete or glass."

To you. But not to me, which is why I choose to live in a house with glass and metal as the primary aesthetic. But stating opinions as fact is a nice way to generate engagement, especially if they are unpopular, hence the article we're all discussing.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#183

Post by ectopod »

voldacar wrote: post #69
tgv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is: that aesthetic is also completely gone in fascist art. Look at New Rome, or Speer's plans. The human aspect is gone.

Some of Albert Speer's stuff is pretty cool. Certainly nowhere near the ugliness of anything Le Corbusier designed. Though it definitely does have a kind of austere bloodlessness that is also present in Italian Fascist architecture, sort of monumental yet dead.

Fun fact: Qatar's world cup football stadia were designed by Albert Speer & Partners. This Albert was the son of the Nazi.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#184

Post by pixl97 »

nemo44x wrote: post #96

The author keeps referencing "cardboard modernism" but really should just use the word "postmodernism" to describe the era we are still in when it comes to construction, furniture, etc. The reason things look and feel "cardboard" is because in a postmodern world, many objects are approximations of the objects we associate them with. So, for instance a vinyl window is made to look like a wood window which was designed…

This is what happens when authors live in extreme privilege. You can easily summarize it as

"I want to go back to a world with 100 million people in it that were chopping down old growth forests at an unreplenishable rate"

It neglects that not only have populations massively increased in the western world, but places in the world that have been historically poor now want to partake in the great modernization. When you are trying to bring another 7 billion out of poverty it would be really easy to wipe nature out of you don't change from the ways of the past.

The postmodern stuff that authors complain about is inexpensive compared to the past, amazingly safe, relatively easy to install, and typically energy efficient in one way or another. It feels like the author is saying "I want to get rid of this conformity even if that means excluding a huge portion of people from the modern economy".

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#185

Post by [deleted] »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #22
crazygringo wrote: post #8

There's so much in this essay to unpack, it's all over the place -- more of an extended rant than any particularly cohesive argument. But one of the early points is "why is everything so gray instead of colorful?" Which is easy to answer -- when all your cars and buildings are super-colorful, they clash. They become garish and ugly and screaming for attention. Thank god we've moved to more neutral tones that actually…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#186

Post by bilvar »

at_a_remove wrote: post #84
api wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascism via "vokisch" movements and ideas attempted to more or less co-opt and own romanticism, classicism, and other forms of non-"modernist" aesthetics. As a result you had a counter-reaction that labeled these things fascist and embraced intentionally minimal, modernist, or decadent themes in rebellion against them. The solution is probably to de-fascize(?) classical and romantic aesthetics. Not sure how you'd do…

Quoted post unavailable.

Those people you mention, as far as I understand you are identifying what we call the 'Intelligentsia'. They are the ideological siblings of the Fascists, so no wonder they have the same / very similar approach.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#187

Post by nine_k »

ericmay wrote: post #23
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 (…

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…

I can't speak about Austin, TX, but here in NYC a number of aesthetically pleasing buildings have been built in last, say, 30 years. Even asymmetric ones, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Spruce_Street>, look great; I'm saying so as someone who used to see downtown Manhattan every day during commute. (One thing I miss after switching to WFH.)

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#188

Post by trgn »

mostlylurks wrote: post #26
crazygringo wrote: post #8

There's so much in this essay to unpack, it's all over the place -- more of an extended rant than any particularly cohesive argument. But one of the early points is "why is everything so gray instead of colorful?" Which is easy to answer -- when all your cars and buildings are super-colorful, they clash. They become garish and ugly and screaming for attention. Thank god we've moved to more neutral tones that actually…

> when all your cars and buildings are super-colorful, they clash. They become garish and ugly and screaming for attention. This is not necessarily the case. Many places in places like Iceland, Norway, Greenland, and to a lesser extent the rest of the nordic countries and some others, like the netherlands, have very colorful buildings, where each building is a different vibrant color, but nevertheless everything fits…

Just look at the US too. Charleston, New Orleans, ... Victorian architecture in general. Lush, but not garish. The idea that bright colors are offensive to taste is just wrong. It's how they are applied. And that's what the problem of modernism has been. Modernism is the man internalizing the logic of the machine. It is easier, from a machine perspective, to commoditize and mass market flat neutral colors so therefore it is better. It is truly willful submission. The scary part is that we have been doing it so many generations now, that are sense of aesthetics has been completely atrophied.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#189

Post by nemo44x »

Jackim wrote: post #128
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 (…

Are you saying that Victorian homes, as a rule, are aesthetic disasters? I'm curious to learn more about this as it's not something I've heard before. If you have any recommended reading about that I'd greatly appreciate it.

A lot of people refer to them as the "late 19th century McMansion". They were built with intricate looking woodworking which was available suddenly to a lot more people due to the mechanization of woodworking tools. It didn't require a craftsman to spend days carving things like it used to which made those types of details only available to the truly wealthy.

The beginning of 20th century was a complete rejection of this aesthetic because it's really just trying to come off as something it isn't really. So the Arts & Crafts movement began where simplicity and high quality became more important. This was a complete rejection of victorian aesthetics.

Saying that, many examples of Victorian styled homes in pre-war towns are beautiful and far more appreciated today. Even still you see some that are just confused in what they're trying to be (we might call them "eclectic" today), similar to many McMansions today where they use ideas out of context.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#190

Post by LordDragonfang »

zozbot234 wrote: post #7

Related: Whither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria Follow up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...

I came here to post this and a more recent article, his review of (the first sixth of) David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixt...

Towards the end his directly links to "Whither Tartaria", suggesting that Brooks' thesis (the old monied aristocracy was replace as the upper class by "Bourgeois Bohemians", a class which Scott suggests is approximately congruent to the modern usage of "bluecheck")

>Around World War II, US civic architecture changed from colorful, ornate, old-fashioned looking buildings to brutalist concrete cubes or sleek glass modernist arrangements, even though most Americans continue to prefer the old-fashioned style; other art forms showed similar transitions at different times. Brooks’ theory suggests that the old-fashioned buildings were the preferred architecture of the WASP aristocracy, and the new architecture is the signaling equivalent of [bespoke] handicraft blankets.

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