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Why is everything so ugly?

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141–150 of 328 posts

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#141

> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

People hate new things more than they hate the mediocrity they know.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#142
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah just walk outside in literally any city.

You're going to need some more caveats for this, I'm afraid. Most major older cities established a central core in an age where people had taste.

Or, you're falling to survivorship bias in the sense that only the older cities that had taste still remain whereas the tasteless tasted the blade of the bulldozer.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#143

> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

Most of these aesthetic criticism people are just conservative people. They don't like change. The world was best when they arrived somewhere.

That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#144

> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

> A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era.

I think there's a tendency to romanticize this kind of thing, a la an early Tom Waits song. I've lived in Portland for a little under 5 years. I feel like it has been moving in the "ugly" direction the author describes for a while, and it started before I moved here. People that have been here much longer describe how it used to be much more "gritty" and dangerous. They say it with sort of a twinkle in their eye, almost as if they miss it. Part of me would have loved to see how it was, but the other part of me knows what's its like to be in the wrong part of town. At least you have the wherewithal to see why a move to LED lights was probably a smart move. Just because it's new and different doesn't make it bad.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#146
When we believed that our institutions (religious, governmental, cultural, corporate) took care of us (whether or not they did), we would invest our efforts in return. The jig is up. Why invest more than “minimum viable caring” at this point?

As an Ontarian who recently took a road trip through Quebec (where a faith in culture still presides), it seemed like there was more “giving a shit” about all institutions and it came through in quality across the board.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#147

> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

My main memory from the 70s as a child was the ugly fluorescent light everywhere outside.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#148
My crackpot theory: This is in part due to CAD:

* Colors other than gray don't look nice in CAD and aren't the default.

* It's super easy to just stack a bunch of rectangles (looking at you, architects...)

* You can chamfer and fillet but that's the end of what most people do. More complex shapes are hard to due due to the clunky spline tools. Hence elaborate ornaments are left out.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#149

> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

Most of these aesthetic criticism people are just conservative people. They don't like change. The world was best when they arrived somewhere. That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.

This is the only real takeaway of the article. “I don’t like this because it’s new to me, therefore it’s universally bad.”

I live in Boston and there was a similar freakout about the gas lamps in Beacon Hill being replaced by LEDs. Not a single person I talked to about it knew that the gas lamps were only added to the neighborhood in the late 70s to make it look more quaint and historic.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#150

> 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. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

> A reminder of the rot and desperation of the that era. I think there's a tendency to romanticize this kind of thing, a la an early Tom Waits song. I've lived in Portland for a little under 5 years. I feel like it has been moving in the "ugly" direction the author describes for a while, and it started before I moved here. People that have been here much longer describe how it used to be much more "gritty" and danger…

When someone mentions the "disneyfication" of Times Square I'm declined to think they have either very selective memories or they were never around that area and 42nd Street in the 80s especially late at night. They can still hang out at the Port Authority if they want to experience echoes of that time.
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