Free market doesn't work ... for "good" people in some societies (developing countries lead by bad dictatorship). Basically a cheater will have more opportunities to destroy wealth. It's like a destruction.
The mid in fake midcentury modern
241–250 of 512 posts
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was a…
> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1 Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.
My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been through more wars than this".
She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#243World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur modernist impulse of pride (…
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…
One of the things any tour of London will talk about is how up to his eyeballs in work Christopher Wren was after the London Fire. His concession to get more work done for everyone lining up for a new cathedral was that he wouldn’t build you a bell tower. Most (all?) of the bell towers on his post-fire churches were added on later in his life once things calmed down.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was a…
> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1 Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.
American old is as old as the people who have lived here- there are still signs of the native americans who lived here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't killed almost all the natives, some of those locations may still have people living in them.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#245Earlier 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…
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."
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've got to think a utilitarian culture would say something like "huh, maybe we should build homes that are easily served by transit." But American culture is much more strongly opposed to this than most those in most other countries.
One thing you notice if you've been in an airplane is that there's a lot of room to spread out if people want to.
What people want is of far less moment than what real-estate agents, collectively, want. They drive local government and planning almost everywhere in the US, to the exclusion of almost everyone else.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#247Previously, 2+ years ago, similar title and theme but a completely different article, 6 comments:
Why Is the Modern World So Ugly? (theschooloflife.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23557284
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think most think of the Eiffel Tower as something beautiful. It's iconic and arguably the symbol of Paris, but it's not really something you would think of when thinking of architectural or functional beauty.
> It's iconic and arguably the symbol of Paris, but it's not really something you would think of when thinking of architectural or functional beauty. It's an amazing structure and nothing like that was possible before. Only after the construction of it could people get a view of Paris never before possible. You should read Robert Hughes' book "The Shock of the New" or watch the series. I think it's online on Youtube.…
> It's an amazing structure and nothing like that was possible before.
That doesn't make it beautiful but an engineering feat.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#249I'm not even going to read this article because the typesetting is total garbage. How can I take someone speaking on aesthetics seriously when they're trying to convey their message in such an aesthetically broken way?
Also a lot of brutalism haters in this thread, brutalism fucks fam. Y'all clearly don't have enough fond memories of growing up in soviet apartment blocks to understand what's beautiful.
(though to be slightly less tongue in cheek, pressure to be hypercompetitive on price and corporate governance structures are the things that beget most of the ugly I see in my day to day life)
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#250World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur modernist impulse of pride (…
More down-to-earth and simplistic answer: the classless society (Socialism and derivates like Social democracy) with the need to provide reasonable housing for the masses and the spread of industrial concrete[0] took us to the optimal solution: the concrete box.
Once Alvaro Siza (Pritzker prize) was asked if his architecture was minimalist. He answered (paraphrasing): "No, it's just a minimalism of costs".
From wikipedia[1]:
"During World War I, Le Corbusier taught at his old school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He concentrated on theoretical architectural studies using modern techniques. In December 1914, along with the engineer Max Dubois, he began a serious study of the use of reinforced concrete as a building material. He had first discovered concrete working in the office of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of reinforced concrete architecture in Paris, but now wanted to use it in new ways."
"Le Corbusier saw the new society founded in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution as a promising laboratory for his architectural ideas. He met the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov during the 1925 Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, and admired the construction of Melnikov's constructivist USSR pavilion, the only truly modernist building in the Exposition other than his own Esprit Nouveau pavilion. At Melnikov's invitation, he travelled to Moscow, where he found that his writings had been published in Russian; he gave lectures and interviews and between 1928 and 1932 he constructed an office building for the Tsentrosoyuz, the headquarters of Soviet trade unions."