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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   33239 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?

I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.

Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.

Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".

This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):

Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.

We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.

[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.

Focusing in on some specific examples:

Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.

I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.

I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.

Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example

Nobody uses that term but fans of Strongtowns. Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory. Their priority isn't visual appeal, it's function. Quaint medieval (or in the US, imitations of same) town centers with narrow twisting alleys and hipster shops are very picturesque, but if you want to get some serious shopping done, not very practical. Bringing your SUV to your nearest commercial area, bisected by a "stroad", and hitting the Home Depot, Target, and then the grocery store... now that's more like it.

Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created. The issue is that people live in suburbs that have the greenery and freedom of a city while having the services of a rural area forcing people to drive places.

The car based city layout makes people obese, is ugly as sin, and isn't functional as it is incredibly demanding to maintain.

"Sensible cities and walkable environments" is code for "we want to force people to use public transportation because cars give you too much freedom". And you really do not want to be forced to use public transportation in America.

Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs. Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic. Police spend more time controlling drivers than any other mode of transport.

The issue in the US is a black crime issue. Instead of solving that issue the US has revamped its cities to socially isolate people by wasting vast sums of money on cars. The result is urban sprawl with low social cohesion with fat people driving around in cars with cops controlling them.

Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs.

Cars are both more regulated than other forms of transport, and still give more freedom than they do. The ability to go directly where you want, at the time you want, with the cargo you want, is that significant that it far outweighs everything else.

Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic.

This is just plain false.

being stuck in traffic is offset by time waiting for the bus/train to come, stops, and so on. Except for maybe BART during heavy congestion, it is not faster.

it is not faster

I'm skeptical of this, and even if true, it doesn't matter. Economists have been wrestling with this issue for a long time, and the conclusion they always find is that people would rather be stuck in traffic in their own personal conveyance than stuck in public transport, as they value the privacy and control personal conveyance gives.

then how does this explain flying? maybe people choose flying because its faster at the cost of loss of control

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