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The mid in fake midcentury modern

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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#231

Post by BitwiseFool »

BrandonS113 wrote: post #212

I'm now visiting a brand new office building in London and it is stunning. Not minimalist, brutalist, ornate. And unique. And everybody who works in it seems to love it. I want to work there. What bugs me is how most new buildings are similar all across the world. 100 years ago, each city has a character unique to it. Barcelona was uniquely Barcelona. Copenhagen was uniquely Copenhagen. Now most new buildings look li…

A meme was circulating last week showing dozens of sedans from multiple automakers and it highlighted just how similar they all looked. The meme was criticizing the notion that competition facilitates innovation. However I think people failed to take into account that cars have likely converged to a common design as a consequence of fuel economy and regulatory pressures. I wonder if similar pressures affect architecture and likewise result in the blandness we now notice.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#232

Post by yunwal »

pixl97 wrote: post #104
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shi…

I do woodworking and $1000 could get you a really nice artisan-made custom end table. Obviously depends on your specs but it’s hard for me to think of any specs that would make it more unless you were specifically trying to make it extravagant (some rare wood, gold inlays, etc)

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#233

Post by BitwiseFool »

cdrini wrote: post #154
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.

Wow, I'm blown away people here are confidently saying things like "most people don't think the Eiffel Tower is beautiful." Huh? Are you guys joking? Are these comments generated by GPT? It's beautiful because of its geometry. It's beautiful in the way it compliments the city. It's beautiful when it's lit up at night. What more do you want exactly? Who would have the gall to say something like "most people" don't thi…

>"say something like "most people" don't think it's beautiful?"

Note quite, people today see the Eiffel Tower as a world wonder and a symbol of France itself. But back in the late 1800's many Parisians considered it gaudy and several prominent artists bitterly contested its construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#234

Post by yunwal »

kriskrunch wrote: post #227

The article is lacking illustrative photos to support the claims... If McModern is so common, I assume providing or producing photos should be easy

I mean, you can just Google “Modern Highrise apartment building”. If the author lives in SF and writes to a mostly SF audience, they’ll immediately know what they’re talking about.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#235

Post by throw8383833jj »

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 (…

the timing fits but the reasoning doesn't. I'm having a hard time believing that WW1 & 2 had an impact on consumer demand. I think it's lack of appreciation of good design. People don't care if their house looks like crap. All they care about is that it's got a ton of car garages, and a crap ton of asphalt all over the place to park all their garbage everywhere.

I've seen it firsthand. There's a beautiful house on a decent lot with lots of nice trees and landscaping, I know of with a side garage. Guess what draws all the compliments? the stonework?, the bueatiful roofline? the landscaping? the archicture. Nope none of those. First thing people care about and compliment is the horrendous side garage to store their crap in.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#236

Post by ericmay »

DrBazza wrote: post #193
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…

> 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. No, we're in a capitalist mental model. It's the same in the UK. It's build cheap, maximise profit, and a race to the bottom. Want that bas-relief from a master stonemason? No chan…

I'm sure capitalism has an effect (similar to how communism built a lot of absolutely disgusting, depressing housing) but I don't think capitalism created American suburban homes out of thin air. There isn't anything inherently cheaper about building a home that isn't symmetrical regardless of materials - in fact the opposite would be true.

I think it's less about economic models though and more about a lack of societal awareness and understanding. Really we need more capitalism and more free markets in this space in particular to provide actual market choices and competition to bring prices down. It's a tough problem. A home builder making a profit on suburban homes with car-only infrastructure is more of a symptom than a cause.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#237

Post by moloch-hai »

sangnoir wrote: post #220
trgn wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1 Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.

"Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from actually-old designs.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#238

Post by grishka »

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…

But then modern tech allows manufacturing things like ornaments at a fraction of their handmade cost. 3D printing and CNC help a lot with that.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#239

Post by kome »

I am SO happy to live in Europe. In a city that is universally considered ugly or plain, like Milan, there is art and beauty at every corner. Let's not talk about Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Porto... breathtaking places.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#240

Post by david927 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #56
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…

Keep going though. It’s not just about “taste”. We have always needed opinionated people to be able to push their ideas. That’s what Linus is, Jobbs was, like him last year or hate him this year Musk, Eminem, Pulitzer, Jefferson, Tesla or Edison, Stuart Mill, the Wrights, and so on to any major or minor scale… The best things come from opinionated people who were told they couldn’t go against the grain like that. We’…

I love that this is down-voted, and in doing so validated.
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