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The mid in fake midcentury modern

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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#441

Post by recursivedoubts »

thundergolfer wrote: post #411
recursivedoubts wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. It isn't what is taught in school, but it is a reasonably well-informed opinion, as my sibling comments show.

Yes it is. I have an undergraduate in Architecture, and your comment reads as wildly incorrect. Checking out the book you link, I see this in Wikipedia: > The response to Wolfe's book from the architecture world was highly negative. Critics argued that, once again, Wolfe was writing on a topic he knew nothing about and had little insight to contribute to the conversation. No surprised. If you're going to critique Mod…

I saw the U.C. Berkeley architecture department ignore and mock Christopher Alexander from their hideous (and richly deserved) concrete monstrosity, so I hope you'll forgive me if an undergraduate architecture degree doesn't impress me, and I am completely indifferent towards the same communities opinion on Wolfe's book.

You need to read my initial comment more closely, I didn't claim modernism sprung fully formed from Gropius' head on September 2nd, 1945: "World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had."

Of course forms of modernism were experimented with pre-WW1, but high modernism and it's attendant ugliness didn't come dominate the built environment until post-WW2. This is of course true, and I think you know this, but you are using snobbish nit-picking (ah yes, architecture) in an attempt to intimidate me because we disagree on aesthetics.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#442

Post by sdwr »

gnulinux wrote: post #437
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…

> music is "bad these days" Exactly, music is absolutely incredible these days. In any genre you pick, you will find very inspired, innovative and beautiful examples. Some people who say "music is bad these days" try to contrast pop music with 18th/19th century Western classical music. But that makes absolutely no sense because there are heaps over heaps of beautiful classical music composed in 21st century. You just…

Beyond the "good ol days", there's something to be said for mass popularity. When something has its moment, there's a magic in the air. A lightning in a bottle feeling coming from shared attention and excitement.

Sure, modern rock might be technically as good as classic rock, but rock doesn't rule the music world anymore. Honestly music doesn't really rule the entertainment world either.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#444

Post by throwaway82388 »

I enjoyed the observations in this essay, but I missed the answer to the question in the title. I have a few thoughts in that direction.

Neutral colors like greige are fitting for our hypernetworked, hyperconformist age, where eccentric behavior, unconventional views, and standing out generally get you odd looks at best, surreptitiously filmed and socially shunned at worst. Being boring is an aesthetic survival mechanism, and entirely apt. As is the flimsy built environment.

Clothing is subject to fashion cycles so rapid, why would anyone make anything to last when it’s likely to be discarded and replaced in a year anyway?

Another banal observation, but architecture is subject to survivorship bias. Most of the mediocre buildings of the past have long since been demolished and replaced. We’re mostly familiar with successes. But the fact that buildings today are generally cheaper, uglier, and flimsier is true. And yet, people were making the same observation 100 years ago. And for decades before that.

General aesthetic degradation has been a more or less continual process since industrialization. It’s put more goods in the homes of more people, and the price is more uniformity and more ugliness. And it is relative. Our ugly present environment will possibly be an aesthetic high water mark to future generations, as midcentury aesthetics, derided for their ugliness in their time, seem to us today.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#445

Post by rovolo »

yamtaddle wrote: post #419
rovolo wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cheap low-pile carpet on plywood Part of it is that carpet and plywood are fabricated materials. Prefabricated plywood and wall-to-wall carpeting weren't really things until ~1930s. The older materials seems more luxurious now, but that's because the newer materials have become cheap. It's like how aluminum was once more expensive than gold, but is now ubiquitous because the material itself has become much cheaper.…

Kinda, but there were definitely far-cheaper options for materials in the early 20th century than ornamental sorts of stone like marble, they could definitely make much cheaper doors than big-ass heavy metal ones that'd still last at least as long as cheap modern doors, and they could make stick-built structures instead of e.g. heavy stone or brick buildings back then, and they often did—far nicer in some ways than o…

I was curious how expensive marble actually was, so this is my attempt at looking at historical archives:

Tiles were ~1" thick: https://archive.org/details/TheBookOfVermontMarbleAReference...

Using an 1889 price book, it cost ~$0.25/ft2 of tile. Add $0.70/ft3 for shipping to St Louis, which is $0.06/ft2 of tile @ 1" thick. That's ~$0.30/ft2 total in materials. https://archive.org/details/pricelistrutland00verm/page/16/m...

50' x 50' x 10' building, (floor:(50 x 50) + walls:(4 x 50 x 10)) = 4.5k ft2, which @ $0.30/ft2 is $1,350 of marble.

For comparison,

- Average annual wages look like ~$700: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002738212&vi... - A 50'x50' 2 story house was probably $4-5k: https://archive.org/details/gfbarber1905/page/n20/mode/1up

So adding the marble interiors may have been 25-33% of the price of a house. If the average US house today is $400k, then that's $100-130k for the marble interior.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#446

Post by throwaway82388 »

kennend3 wrote: post #71
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…

Adding to this and using some every day examples. Why are expensive "sports cars" almost always ugly (Bright yellow or neon green??). One would think if you had that sort of money you would realize that a bright green car is tacky as F, but that is the point. To turn heads - this is why they bought the car in the first place. Why are most cars not coloured like this - because it is ugly and most people don't drive a…

The question about cars is largely one of personality. Who drives bland cars? People who feel social pressure to not stand out, possibly who feel powerless, or who appreciate anonymity. Who drives flashy cars? People who feel important, who feel in control of their own circumstances and image, who think of themselves as iconoclastic.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#447

Post by nemo44x »

bombcar wrote: post #429
nemo44x wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In support of this, actually doing detailed tours of many "victorian houses" and then compare them to actual mansions of the era shows significant differences. Like our McMansions of today, the houses often combine aspects that on their own can be nice in ways that don't quite "fit".

There’s a Queen Anne-ish home near me that I always joke is a window showroom. There’s like 1 of every style of window on this thing. A double hung sash with a gothic thing and then a sleeper and a casement etc. Even the lines of the home - just everywhere.

But in todays context it’s a simply gorgeous home. “Eclectic” if anything but it has stood the test of time.

But I imagine looking at it from that period and it probably looks like a poorly designed McMansion today. Except for built with really great materials.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#448

Post by tonyarkles »

Pxtl wrote: post #37
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.

And that's self-reinforcing. I bought my first new-from-dealership car (a Prius Prime) a few years back and wanted to get one with a color, and learned that this would mean waiting months and paying more, while the grey one was on the lot right now. Because the grey is the most plentiful option, it's also now the easiest to acquire unless you're really looking to go out of your way for color.

When I found out that the grey colour is called “cement” I just shook my head in disbelief that that’s a colour someone would actually want.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#449

Post by SxC97 »

ridgered4 wrote: post #257
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…

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!

I had the same reaction, I think it might have to do with the many rectangular holes along the top. It gives me a slightly trypophobic reaction.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#450

Post by blurri »

keiferski wrote: post #229
pixl97 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good is multi-axis measure. I have been to 'good' restaurants. Excellent food, immaculate plating, perfect service. Immense cost . This is why I'm heavily discounting your opinion here, because there seems to be a massive amount of axises that are being neglected that make these products 'good'. Energy use per product, general product acceptance to the massive to lower per unit cost, product fungibility are all metri…

Of course good is a multi-axis measure. This is obvious. Do you really expect someone to write a full theory of aesthetics in a HN comment?

Ah so leave it to the experts who can't explain it without a "full theory of aesthetics".
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