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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31384 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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In my darker (and less sober) moments, I wonder if there's an active campaign against beauty itself. On my local city sub-Reddits I often see people complaining about "wasteful" government spending on a modicum of ornamentation on anything. Faux stone veneers on highway support columns? Wasteful. Planting trees along the highway? Wasteful. Apparently brutalism ugly-ass concrete boxes is the only acceptable architectural form these days.

Edited for Gdanning's pedantry

Against this, I'll dig up my favourite quote from The Fountainhead:

  • It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.
  • Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon! The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
  • Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”

Maybe those were nice houses for their time (though on many, I see exactly the sort of cargo-cult ornamentation Rand's character complains about). Today, when I hear people clamour for beauty in architecture, they seem to want those old designs back! They have no positive vision of the future. Concrete boxes might be uninspired, but I'm not sure they're that much worse than making a modern copy of a Victorian copy of a Renaissance copy of ancient woodworking.

I'm increasingly convinced that beauty is local and specific. The forms we find loveliest are recognizably from somewhere. A climate-controlled box of concrete, glass, and steel can plop down anywhere.

Yeah. Brutalism at least had an interesting concept - house as machine for living. "What does the most efficient house or building look like, aesthetics be damned?". "What is the least expensive way to build a building that meets this minimum threshold?". Unfortunately, Brutalism didn't deliver. The buildings weren't all that good as buildings; if they had been, perhaps their ugliness could have been forgiven.

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