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The mid in fake midcentury modern

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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#451

Post by torotonnato »

antiterra wrote: post #428
SoftTalker wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern (popular) music sucks because it's not human. It's produced by software, quantized, gridded, autotuned, copy/pasted, and though the result is technically perfect, it isn't human. Modern architecture is the same. It's copy/paste design, assembled by software, the human element is gone. When buildings were designed by artists on paper there was no avoiding the designer's humanity and creativity being infused int…

Music produced by software that’s quantized and gridded has been some of my favorite stuff for decades and listening to it does the same thing any recorded music can do such: remind me of something, occasionally teach me something new, be a tool for growth or mourning or comfort. Something being virtuousic or analog or raw doesn’t necessarily make it good. Simplicity or rigidness is not inherently bad. sometimes you…

Haha speaking of barriers and Nine Inch Nails: have you heard the cover of "Head like an hole" by an improbable (but good!) Miley Cyrus? It was made for an episode of Black Mirror.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#452

Post by Lammy »

> “Outdoors, the situation is depressingly similar. After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white.”

It's not so humans can see better — it's so our computers can

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#454

Post by scythe »

pixl97 wrote: post #280
User23 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> global population has increased massively since then. All of those processes you're describing are massively energy and labor intensive and do not scale as you're trying to put 8 billion people under rooves This doesn't make any sense. Labor supply obviously scales with population. More people needing housing also means more people available to build housing.

Labor supply scans linearly if nothing else changes. Being that 100+ years ago people were not building computers, or making money producing minecraft videos, or one of any number of tasks that may pay more than flourishing housing. And you managed to ignore the millions and millions of houses that were close to 'dirt hut' and 'a bunch of sticks leaned together' that have been the more typical means of living for hum…

>Labor supply scans linearly if nothing else changes. Being that 100+ years ago people were not building computers, or making money producing minecraft videos, or one of any number of tasks that may pay more than flourishing housing.

You realize that that is Baumol's cost disease, correct? If you want to "debunk" my post, you should make sure you don't actually agree with it.

>When you look at old buildings you're automatically starting with survivorship bias. Expensive and well kept old buildings tend to stay around a lot longer than buildings that were built cheaply at the time. Those have all been bulldozed.

We are also using, for comparison, the most expensive buildings built today. Pointing out that we're comparing them to the expensive buildings from yesteryear doesn't make it an invalid comparison. It's not only tract houses that are ugly.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#455

Post by stemlord »

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…

I agree with you and also think you're being uncharitable to the author's allegedly narrow-minded pov. I agree there's another side to all this but that's not necessarily discounted by the author's criticisms. We all know the reason not every new building can be the duomo di milano is because money. It's still arguably unnecessarily ugly and the money thing and all its 21st century quirks does indeed become a relentless drag on day to day life no matter how good you are at ignoring it or embracing irony. Worth having public discourse over it

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#456

Post by nemo44x »

bombcar wrote: post #418
nemo44x wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that look like they could survive a bombing, but they're actually fragile and cheap buildings. > building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is…

$10m might be getting into actually architected houses, but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk. It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house…

There’s always been a lot of shit built. The good things will last 100’s of years and the shit will be ripped down in 40. The examples linked here are garden variety crap mainly. The 1970’s-1990’s in particular had a lot of bad stuff built. Especially if you want 6k sq feet and don’t understand that to build that inside and out at quality will cost a few million + land costs.

If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#457

Post by nadavr »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #245
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…

> Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of person exists, "parvenu."

Not sure what you mean by "precisely this sort of person", but a "parvenu" is better thought of as the inverse of a "pariah" -- someone from an outgroup who has achieved special acceptance, status, and celebration.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#458

Post by GrazeMor »

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…

Yeah also that magazine is ugly. They were complaining about a yellow building but they're a brown website.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#459

Post by thatfrenchguy »

Pxtl wrote: post #33

I gotta say this essay is a bit disappointing. It seems mostly an excuse for the author to grouse and enjoy their own flowery prose. It's the kind of writing I'd expect to see in a Neal Stephenson novel, and it's fun, but it's not really useful as an essay -- it offers very little insight or information. I've often been curious - besides the obvious problems of municipal red-tape, why is construction so expensive now…

Construction is expensive because construction salaries are high.

Authors clearly have never owned a century old building though, as easily shown in the first paragraph:

> Our own walk begins across the street from our apartment, where, following the recent demolition of a perfectly serviceable hundred-year-old building, a monument to ugliness has recently besieged the block

Century old buildings (I own in one!) are full of problems (plumbing, electricity, insulation, heating, lead paint) that are big projects for their owners, which 75% of the time they just ignore (thus kicking the can down the road), because renovation is even more expensive if you want to keep your building pretty / not destroy half your building while doing this. It’s a fun project for upper middle class folks who have either a lot of time to dedicate to them or a lot of money, sure, but not practical safe housing for most people.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#460

Post by kriskrunch »

yunwal wrote: post #234
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.

While I am as lazy as anyone else, when I search "Modern Highrise apartment building" as you suggested... A lot of really cool buildings appear. Same for "McModern Highrise apartment building"...

I'm not sure that's what he's complaining about. I have an inkling feeling that I know, but I want to be certain.

When I search for a building, "The Josh", that the author mentions -- I can only find "The Joshua" in Hollywood. And it is UGLY and about the same colors described.

The single image in the article is illustrative to an extent, but it's heinous public art and not the building.

I lived in Los Angeles and near the SF Bay Area for over 20 years. I'm curious to know if the hideous architecture imposed upon me over the course of two decades is what he's discussing, or if there is some newer, insidious, soul crushing design that I'm not aware of.

Only images included with the article can make that clear.

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