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Why is everything so ugly?

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Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#61

Post by chatallo »

karaterobot wrote: post #51

Another article on the same topic, is "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture" by Adrian Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo... The two don't necessarily disagree, but I think the one I linked is better written. Plus, something about having all the block quotes be from tweets always makes me feel like the author isn't doing enough research or reading widely enou…

fwiw I don't think the block quotes are from tweets, I think that's just a link to share the quote on twitter

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#62

Post by waldothedog »

Jeema101 wrote: post #59

Oh man. There is this building in the city where I live. It's SO uncompromisngly gray and ugly that sometimes I think maybe it's actually a parody of this particular style. It kind of looks like a prison from the outside too... but it's actually condos! I hate it so much that I love it. :) Anyway here's a great photo of it I found on Google: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p/AF1QipMKvYH4OHFU5o4gZlSZ...

I kinda like it! The rivets are interesting, and the window proportions too. Plus the photo has nice light, which doesn’t hurt.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#63

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #48
jszymborski wrote: post #38

I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.

I blame house flippers honestly. They buy up houses that are in rough shape on the cheap, then renovate strictly to sell, not for personal taste. The incentives at play are to shoot for a very dull, milquetoast instagram-ish aesthetic that anyone can sort of get along with, so you won't lose people for not liking whatever hardwood or paint colors you picked.

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 market (tons of buyers) that you can do that increases the expected max bid despite decreasing number of prospective buyers.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#64

Post by ajkjk »

donatj wrote: post #28

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…

Sounds hilarious. Where's that?

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#65

Post by dzdt »

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’s south side were insulation, to be eventually supplanted by an actual facade. Alas, in its finished form The Josh really is yellow, and also burgundy, gray, and brown."

The coy phrasing about "apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford" is a disguised reference to the fact that the apartments are reserved only for low-income residents; the author would not want to live in Brooklyn on the poverty-level income required to be eligible for the housing development.

The pictured sculpture the author dislikes is "Waiting" by the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly). [2]

[1] https://gluckplus.com/project/van-sinderen-plaza-affordable-... [2] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/kaws-waiting-brook...

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#66

Post by jwells89 »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #63
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame house flippers honestly. They buy up houses that are in rough shape on the cheap, then renovate strictly to sell, not for personal taste. The incentives at play are to shoot for a very dull, milquetoast instagram-ish aesthetic that anyone can sort of get along with, so you won't lose people for not liking whatever hardwood or paint colors you picked.

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.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#67

Post by logicprog »

65 wrote: post #52
apantel wrote: post #40

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?

Yeah, I immediately skimmed the article to see if there were any pictures of what the author considers ugly so I could get a sense for what their tastes are and adjust for that accordingly, or even conclude that their opinions weren't relevant to me, and the one single picture of an example ugly thing that I was able to find looked absolutely perfectly fine to me, in fact I liked it. I think a lot of the complaints around ugly architecture are just matters of difference of aesthetics: I'm autistic and a have certain amount of brain damage to my vision centers and so I deal with sensory overload a lot, and so I tend to prefer interfaces and environments that are clean and simple, made of just enough shapes and colors to communicate the structure of things and that's it, with no extraneous ornamentation or gradients or whatever, so a lot of modern architecture looks fine or even nice and refreshing to me, like a glass of cool water. Meanwhile, most of the people I find complaining about this sort of thing are the typical hipsters and grouchy conservatives — both of the "I was born too late" variety and the "I was literally born a long time ago" variety — that are looking fondly on a past age just out of their own personal preferences and predilections, and probably without any real understanding of what it was like to live surrounded by overly ornate architecture all the time, which is perfectly fine for them, but then they make these Grand think pieces and statements about how things should be, which is frustrating since I would rather gouge my own eyes out then live in the world they would prefer oftentimes.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#68

Post by CooCooCaCha »

juggertao wrote: post #58
jszymborski wrote: post #38

I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.

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 markets. So you end up with lots of white and grey.

You see similar things all over the place. Want to maximize your career? Better suppress your individuality in favor of copying how successful people speak, act, and dress.

If you've ever heard the term "TikTok Beat" that's a similar phenomenon where the most popular music on TikTok gets copied like a meme by wannabe famous music producers.

It's a process that ends up with bland results as variety is reduced over time. It's also dehumanizing as humanity is slowly stripped away due to inefficiency.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#69

Post by michaelt »

ajkjk wrote: post #30
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #4

It's hard for me to understand what the author is exactly talking about without seeing more images.

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.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#70

Post by KerrAvon »

petepete wrote: post #54
jszymborski wrote: post #38

I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.

I thought this grey decor trend was a British phenomenon - glad it's not just us!

Millennials in America apparently actually like the monotone look; it’s not just the resale thing. The process of making the house more bland for resale used to be called ‘beige-ing‘ by realtors (estate agents?) in the US; it’s not new, but it wasn’t always white and gray.
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