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The mid in fake midcentury modern

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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#221

Post by User23 »

pixl97 wrote: post #201
scythe wrote: post #36

When I look at pretty old buildings, what sticks out are hand-molded wrought iron, hand-laid brick quoins, hand-carved window siding, hand-assembled decorative fences — surely, you can see the common factor? So it's cost disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease Modern buildings are made principally of prefabricated components designed to be packaged and shipped efficiently and assembled quickly. Wh…

Not sure where to start debunking this... 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. Oh, did I mention that expensive building was expensive? It's easy to ignore that huge parts of the population were living in houses with p…

> 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.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#222

Post by 8jef »

Beauty, as ugliness, is only a matter of perspective, focus and point of view. Anything can be beautiful, everything can be ugly. You find something beautiful or ugly? Try to shift your focus to include its surrounding to various degrees, or do the opposite, zoom into it. You see? Most of us are deeply moved at how Earth is beautiful from space. Then, when you drill from the general to the particular, you might find places on the planet that are more or less attractive. Try this long enough, differently focusing on all things you see and hear and feel, from images to ideas, always moving around the subject, often changing angles, and you might start to see things for what they really are: simultaneously complex and simple, ugly and beautiful, all at the same time.

The big lure was always to embrace one particular point of view as your own. THIS looks crazy stupid. THAT sounds amazingly beautiful. EVERYTHING seems so ugly. And so on... Then, one day you wake up and think the opposite. Beauty becomes ugly, and vice versa. It happens all the time, to everyone. Life can have this effect on the living.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#224

Post by pixl97 »

keiferski wrote: post #192
cryptonector wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Leave opinion on aesthetics to the experts"?

That's what functionally happens, yes. If most people revert to an opinion of "well that's just your opinion, it's all entirely subjective," then the people driving what actually gets valued are the ones that bother to educate themselves and be deemed as experts. To use an example: if a person in New York City said that "all the restaurants taste the same and it's all just subjective," would you buy a dining tour gui…

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 metrics that can subtract from both subjective and in some cases objective beauty. You could have the most objectively beautiful object in the world, but if I can't have it because it's too difficult to manufacture in bulk or too expensive, then subjectively I think your product isn't that great at all.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#225

Post by mensetmanusman »

8jef wrote: post #222

Beauty, as ugliness, is only a matter of perspective, focus and point of view. Anything can be beautiful, everything can be ugly. You find something beautiful or ugly? Try to shift your focus to include its surrounding to various degrees, or do the opposite, zoom into it. You see? Most of us are deeply moved at how Earth is beautiful from space. Then, when you drill from the general to the particular, you might find…

It’s not only a matter of perspective, there seem to be interesting cross cultural universals to what is deemed beautiful.

Almost no one thinks smeared feces on a door handle is beautiful.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#226

Post by yunwal »

pixl97 wrote: post #91
account-5 wrote: post #61

I don't know, it might just be me but if you're going to write an article (a really long one) bemoaning how everything is ugly you need to provide more than one picture. I want picture proof, not long descriptions that leave me to imagine. Pictures paint a thousand words and all that!

The problem with the word ugly is its completely an opinion. There is no right or wrong ugly. The author would have done much better to forego the word ugly and replace it with hyper conformity.

I disagree. I think within a given context like “architecture in the neighborhood I live in”, there’s an objective component to beauty/ugliness. There are universal human needs and desires that are being deprived by bad modern architecture (being in touch with nature, feeling comfortable, human communication and expression).

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#228

Post by mensetmanusman »

BrandonS113 wrote: post #212

I'm now visiting a brand new office building in London and it is stunning. Not minimalist, brutalist, ornate. And unique. And everybody who works in it seems to love it. I want to work there. What bugs me is how most new buildings are similar all across the world. 100 years ago, each city has a character unique to it. Barcelona was uniquely Barcelona. Copenhagen was uniquely Copenhagen. Now most new buildings look li…

Globalization will result in monoculture after enough time has passed. That is a trade off.

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#229

Post by keiferski »

pixl97 wrote: post #224
keiferski wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what functionally happens, yes. If most people revert to an opinion of "well that's just your opinion, it's all entirely subjective," then the people driving what actually gets valued are the ones that bother to educate themselves and be deemed as experts. To use an example: if a person in New York City said that "all the restaurants taste the same and it's all just subjective," would you buy a dining tour gui…

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?

Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern

#230

Post by egypturnash »

helen___keller wrote: post #14

It's worth mentioning that a lot of modern architecture (in single family & small-to-mid multifamily developments) is essentially dictated by money: what sells the best (typically the design that maximizes square footage), what is cheapest to build, and what is capable of passing for a given state and municipalities zoning and building code. People shop by location, price, and square footage as their primary search c…

3. The magazine Better Homes And Gardens was founded in 1922 and still publishes. McCall's was founded in 1873 and ceased publication in 2002. There were other magazines that spent a lot of time on home decoration trends, as well - these are just two that come to mind because my mother subscribed to them in the seventies. A ton of those pre-war homes would have had that hanging around to show them current trends in home decoration.
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