But the contemporary built environment is not the millennials’ legacy; it is their inheritance. They didn’t ask for cardboard modernism — they simply capitulate to its infantilizing aesthetic paradigm because there is no alternative. Or if there is an alternative, it’s between an $8 ice cream cone or an $11 ice cream cone (or a $49 ticket to the Museum of Ice Cream).
time to discuss everyone's favorite subject: aesthetics! is everything actually ugly? are aesthetic critiques of modern living fascist? that's for you to decide!
Yes, everything’s ugly. Yes, it’s capitalism’s fault. No, it’s not fascist to point this out. Yes, it’s fascist to focus on it as if fixing it will fix society at large. No, I did not read the article.
How’d I do?
You've passed the test. You're finally free. You can stop posting now.
This was a wonderful article, and I appreciate you sharing it.
I don't have a lot to add here yet, my thoughts are still crystallizing. But one bit of serendipity is how well this tied into my recent move into a different house. It was a few months ago now, and we've barely put any decorations up. A few weeks ago, I set my phone to greyscale mode to discourage mindless browsing. Colors are a big part of how apps or the internet at large keep you hooked; without them, it's a lot easier to disengage. And I quickly realized how bare my walls and home look. It hit me in a way that it just hadn't before. It's now a lot more important for me to get the permanent and Christmas decorations up.
Most of us spend huge chunks of our free time staring into little glass boxes filled with light and color. I'm not solely blaming our drab public areas on this fact, but I do think it's a factor. The immediacy of needing beauty and color in our surroundings is lost because we're literally not paying attention, and our brains are frankly overstimulated with color.
I've heard the phone trick before but it always sounded like mysticism to me. i'll try it with my desktop.
it always sounded like mysticism to me
How so? I have to say it's worked pretty well for me
I just don't see why color saturation would be a central part of screen addiction. But like I said, I haven't tried it, so maybe it'll work.
Of course it really depends on what you're using your phone for. If it's mostly reading, greyscaling your phone probably won't do much. But instagram, tik tok, and reddit were all immediately far less able to hold my attention once colors were removed. Idk I'm sure it's not for everyone, but may as well give it a try!
Man it sure would help if I wasn’t forced to have white walls
Perhaps if the world outside the screen were more colourful then the screen's power over us would be dulled a bit.
Everything is so ugly because it's designed to be.
Commercial real estate is designed to be as neutral as possible, so you can copy & paste whatever benign mass-appealing inoffensively fake friendly personality of the chain you drop in.
Accompanying commerical signage is designed for function, not aesthetic, ie for people driving, usually down a long strip of competitive commerce. Walkable cities would not function this way. This pours into housing too-- cities are designed for people with cars, not people.
New Housing is basically a short term scam in the making, full of shoddy materials and poor construction that looks "good" for pictures, but will massively fall apart in only 10-20 years. The proximity of homes is used to maximize land space for profit, details often cropped out of real estate ads.
Most design now for anything, from homes to breweries, has become homogenized by multi national companies. It's why so much of say the United States looks & feels exactly the same. It lacks any perspective or personality because it's designed to be as unoffensively neutral as possible, in an environment built for cars instead of people.
an obscure wood-like substance
Composite lumber? Don't even get me started. Composite lumber is the cryptocurrency of building materials.
Not nice to look at, never quite as cheap as actual lumber (at least at the retail level), worse for the environment, uncomfortable to step on in bare feet on a hot day.
A problem is our Laissez-faire approach to everything means there is no rhyme or reason to the aesthetics of anything. It's just a jumbled mess of different advertisements and the cheapest infrestructure possible to get you in between those advertisements. Of course it's going to look shit.
It’s like a Minecraft server without rules or moderation after several years. Just an endless sprawl of mismatched ugly dilapidated dogshit
all of it is bound by the commandment of planned obsolescence, which decays buildings even as it turns phones into bricks.
Damn, fucking bars
Let me state for the record that i prefer a convenience store with saggy and stained tiles and a tv set older than the world wide web in the corner ten times more than a convenience store with plastic made to look like grey wood everywhere and a front counter with a touchscreen payment service with the worst ui possible
Shit like this makes me think of that Tommy Tallarico house tour and how I felt that it was at least visually interesting, which is more than can be said for most interior design these days
I had the same thought watching it. He was at least blowing his money on neat shit, not living in a minimalist apartment and getting $50 bowl cuts.
Archive coz the site was annoying me: https://web.archive.org/web/20221210000931/https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/
like the modernism bit is always fun, like architecture is really weird as an art because it can't escape reality, building is expensive and who owns the land decides what is built, but like ugly and pretty are too subjective. Architecture was the first to get hit hard by reality, like before the samey marvel movie, or the corporate art stuff, this discussions was already there, because what can be built is much more of a political discussion than a aesthetic one, so "are aesthetic critiques of modern living fascist? " not really it is just that it is a subjective discussion that is kinda pointless, especially when the fash do it, because they are part of the reason why this happens, their ideology is the one that makes cities ugly,
Remember on the Chapo sub we shared that Imgur threat a fascist tried to make of all the good fascist architecture and it's all ugly-ass dogshit, especially this one.
https://imgur.com/gallery/ASxzy
It would be nice if cities were encouraged to stick to particular styles of architecture to make them more unique. Some towns do do this but it's a rare occurrence
In Europe they do this on regional basises all the time and it gives a city a lot of charm
Everything is ugly because we abandoned the solemn understaed beauty of well-designed brutalism paired with live plants and/or the elegance of art deco
Or just pillars add a bunch of pillars to shit, that's how you know it's classy
Our dérive has deposited us near a subway stop. We swipe in with a trusty MetroCard, soon to be replaced by the privately owned data-tracking behemoth OMNY, whose neon-on-black logo recalls the chilly visual identity of another threat to transit, Uber.2 But at least as far as branding goes, OMNY is no uglier than other offenders.
For some reason the link put me in the middle there, to that paragraph, and I immediately checked out the logo. Gotta say, looks pretty good to me? Seems to harken back to the 70s style of logos with that typefont.
But then I never heard of OMNY before, but apparently it's garbage as far as the actual service goes, which seems to suggest to me it's not that everything is necessary ugly, it's just all shit and the world don't look nice through grey-coloured glasses.
ah, i copied the anchor link from clicking the return button on a footnote, sorry
