111–120 of 328 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When selling our previous property, the seller agent recommended we paint it in "agreeable gray," supposedly the current color that is neutral and will not affect anyone negatively.
Is that like greige ? https://www.thespruce.com/greige-best-neutral-color-ever-797...
greige fixes that.
My city and apparently numerous cities in my area have passed ordinances that new buildings over a certain size have to have multiple facades to look like multiple buildings butted up to each other. The effect has been this astonishingly hideous theme park esq approximation of small town America that isn’t fooling anyone. It looks more out of place next to the actual turn of the twentieth century buildings than an un…
And there is no economic possibility for small developers to actually build multiple buildings organically anymore. This is because of the economics of scale of complying with stringent building code requirements along with endless zoning board approval meetings, environmental reviews, traffic studies, etc etc etc.
Missing context: I believe the building referred to as "The Josh" is the Gluck+ affordable housing development Van Sinderen Plaza. [1] Compare the colorful panel surfacing to the description "Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford... We spent the summer certain that the caution tape–yellow panels on The Josh’…
My educated guess is that the building in question is somewhere in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, or maybe Bushwick.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if you look at it from an auction theory perspective. If there's a set of buyers with a set of bids, you're trying to get a large set of buyers (if you're pulling samples from a distribution, more samples = higher max), but you're also trying to increase the value these buyers are willing to pay (shift the distribution to the right). I wonder if there's some amount of customization, in a healthy housing mark…
My guess is that most things that would boost selling price while narrowing buyers are not cheap which cancels (or mostly cancels) out the price increase, making it cheaper and more foolproof to go the boring inoffensive route.
That said as someone who was in a lot of middle class and upper class homes due to a previous job, I saw exactly one elevator in a single family home. I doubt it would even factor into the price because most people would have no interest in even using the elevator beyond a novelty.
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The current advice is when you buy something to already think about the resale value of the item. So this excludes all colors for everything. Black, white, gray everything.
Call it capitalism, call it competition, call it an optimization process or w/e but this is a common phenomenon. Whenever you have people trying to maximize some value they'll copy the strategy they view as most successful and other factors take a back seat. Maximizing the resale value of a home involves making it appeal to the largest number of people. Adding character risks lowering demand by appealing to niche mar…
It's called society. If most people didn't follow other people (or demand it!) we would not have societies at all. We'd be individualistic animals, or at best small tribes.
>It's also dehumanizing
You're completely wrong. People copying and following the path of others is one of the reasons we've dominated earth. Only a very small portion of us are risk takers that make new trends that others follow.
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The issue is that New York decided as a strategy to rely on tourism revenue - it has nothing to do with “millenials”. I remember working as an intern building models for the disney land of 42nd street. Yes the models were cheesy (go take a look) but I mean anyone here remember Times Square before? That was one serious cesspool and I say this as a confirmed fan of late 80s New York, you know the city that your mom and…
Is /g an abbreviation of /gen?
A whole article about ugly things with no pictures of them?
Why do communists build brutalist buildings? I don’t think the recent trend in abandoning aesthetics is accidental.
Typically because they face a huge population move from the countryside to the city areas, and thus have to build as fast as can be and on a budget, which leads to what you can see there.
You can observe a similar pattern in many countries, e.g. here[0] in France, in the Lyon suburbs.
[0] https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/image/boW0onRHUjdzzl...
A whole article about ugly things with no pictures of them?
I don't trust the author if he's not giving any visual examples. Why should I trust his opinion?
Not every article is or should be targeted at convincing the resistant reader, and visual examples can be a distraction or simplification of a broader idea.
It is valid for an article to simply connect ideas together, in a way the reader may not be aware of. A reader may have their own examples to think about, which are much more powerful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call it capitalism, call it competition, call it an optimization process or w/e but this is a common phenomenon. Whenever you have people trying to maximize some value they'll copy the strategy they view as most successful and other factors take a back seat. Maximizing the resale value of a home involves making it appeal to the largest number of people. Adding character risks lowering demand by appealing to niche mar…
To piggyback off of this with a call-to-action against the realities you point out, I think it's absolutely valuable and worth it to go after the aesthetic things that you like even for subjective reasons, and even if prevailing trends say otherwise, at the expense of falling outside the confines of conformity for the sake of pseudo-safety. Safety in numbers is a thing, but when it comes to art & design & aesthetics,…
People have always copied each other throughout history. In the past before the industrial age it was much more difficult though as you had to use local materials and labor. Now we have global corporations and many of them are near monopolies in many industries. Add to this that making a billion of one thing massively drops the costs over something you make a million of, so you're far more apt to see the billion item unit on cost factors alone.
Also we see lots of wildly different looking products when looking back at the past, but this is likely a lot of survivorship bias. Because they were different people kept them and tossed the common thing without regard.
Lastly, I'd add in a question of how things are financed. If you're asking for a huge pile of money to make a product, it's going to be a lot easier to get it when you choose the safe and proven option then one that is riskier.
