The mid in fake midcentury modern • Hacker News Board

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#251

Post by scifibestfi » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

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…

That's some other mental model.

Apple made beautiful products to become the most valuable company in the world.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#252

Post by hinkley » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

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.

“The difference between a Brit and an American is that the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.”

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#253

Post by kelseyfrog » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

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.

At least brutalistic buildings have some character. I'd take living in the hollowed out bones of a concrete monstrosity over the tepid soulless constructions we are building in the post-modern age.

Some of the most fetishous ideas about building design come from AI-art. Unconstrained by economics, practicality, or code, I've been offered glimpses of architectures that could have been and in doing so have a profound impact but also a sense of loss of the could-have-been.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#254

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #250

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 (…

More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the concrete box. Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs". From wikip…

Architecture has almost nothing to do with it...

Hipodromo in Mexico City is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the world.

Architecturally, it's a bunch of hideously ugly buildings. But there's trees and plants everywhere, and they're beautiful, and that's all you see.

The reason everything is ugly is because we don't have trees and nature anymore - we just have roads and parking instead.

There's tons of beautiful tree-lined streets in Chicago with ridiculously ugly houses. You don't notice the mismatched, horrible architecture. You just notice the trees & the birds & the squirrels.

You don't have to be classical Paris to be beautiful. You just need plants and a neighborhood designed for people to live in - not cars to park in.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#255

Post by SQueeeeeL » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #250

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 (…

More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the concrete box. Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs". From wikip…

It's bizarre to blame communism here when we've seen this as a global phenomenon. It's an issue of neoliberal thinking in general, capitalism also acts to minimizes all costs the exact same way, just drive through any American highway exit and look at the uniformity of the architecture.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#256

Post by danans » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

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 (…

> World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had

Who is "we"?

> form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of cultural unity lurk here...

Again, cultural unity amongst whom? At best this is ambiguous, at worst it sounds like a dog whistle for a return to the aesthetics that accompanied the monarchist era.

There are real reasons that aesthetics evolve. For one thing, the hyper detailed and biological shapes and themes of classical aesthetics require a lot of poor, skilled, artisanal laborers, which is why they mostly appear on the buildings of the elite like monarchs.

Regular people during those eras lived in decidedly plainer homes, whose aesthetic charm was mostly a function of their simple shapes and materials.

That started to shift with mass production of decorative elements. The ability to mass produce what were once expensive decorative elements eventually resulted in their becoming passé and kitsch.

Those trends are as much responsible for the aesthetic shifts as the traumas of the world wars.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#257

Post by ridgered4 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

Never seen the Boston City Hall before. I clicked thinking "How bad could it be?" and was sort of surprised at my visceral negative reaction. It is truly hideous! The article describes it as Brutalist, but most Soviet Brutalist stuff I've seen at least gives me a sense of simplicity, efficiency and usually symmetry even if the structures are depressing. This building seems to have eschewed even those positive traits!

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#258

Post by yunwal » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #111

_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.

Those glass boxes aren’t Postmordernist. They’re mostly aligned with Modernist architecture. Postmordernist architecture is a response and rejection of Modernism, and exhibits eclectic and playful design features. Check out the Postmodernist architecture article on Wikipedia. You may be conflating the general antipathy towards a Postmodernist boogeyman with any sort of modernist, neoliberal design system.

The problem is that people use post-modern ideas (e.g. there’s no universal standard of beauty, might as well do the cheapest thing rather than optimize for beauty) to defend modern architecture.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#259

Post by mikysco » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

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’…

Very well said. I had a similar takeaway, captured by this quote which is representative of many flavors of the sameness described in the article

"The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently."

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#260

Post by goto11 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

rob74 wrote: post #136

trilbyglens wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm in Europe (in Germany to be more precise), but believe you me, new buildings that I would describe as "beautiful" are few and far between here too. I think most of it is due to what I would call cookie cutter mentality. For most architects, a building is just a job. They don't realize that even the most unassuming building is something that may be used for 100 years and more, that will influence the lives of thou…

I think architects are certainly aware of the importance of architecture, and most would love to make beautiful quality architecture. But in the end architects are hired by someone who decide the budget, and cookie-cutter is just cheaper.