problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
but unlike @problem_redditor I don't think it gets away with anything, for the past decade it's been my go to 'this is why you need at least some direction in video games' example.
Proteus is a game that's certainly not for most people and I think it could absolutely grate on a player (it's not my preferred style of game either, I'm a very extrinsically-motivated player); it's just fine-tuned to a hyper-specific target audience which it seems @coffee_enjoyer falls into, which is what made me recommend it.
In general I’m just a fan of very targeted experiences that don’t reek of overengineering. From the start there are no pretensions that it's going for any kind of mass appeal, and I respect a game that firmly markets itself to a specialised niche without compromise, far more than I do a game that seems to be trying to achieve several mutually exclusive goals in an attempt to be a widely acclaimed hit. Most open world games in my opinion are juggling contradictory goals of telling a linear story and maintaining a constant stream of content while at the same time still trying to maximise player freedom, and as a result they very rarely deliver on most of what they promise. At the very least Proteus actually does successfully achieve what it is going for, whether the experience it's optimising for appeals to you or not is a different question. There's a difference between a bad game (i.e. one that doesn't achieve what it intended to) and a game that does what it set out to do but isn't catering to you.
Yume Nikki is actually another great example of an exploration-based game without any clear direction, can't believe I forgot that one. I can't say I like that game, but I certainly appreciate it.
I believe what you are looking for is the 2013 indie game Proteus. There is no extrinsic goal or gamification at all, and the entire point of the game is to wander around a large procedurally generated world with strange fauna and sights to see. It's a world made solely so the player can explore it.
I share your sentiments about this by the way - I find that many open worlds have so many gamified elements and nudge you in the right direction so much that it barely even feels free anymore. Sure, you can deviate from the main quest markers if you want to have some fun, but you always know you're going to be returning to the main story, and the world is generally such a content desert that it barely gives incentive to explore. Sure, you can circumvent the quest markers and skip major sections of the story, but you'd only do that on a first playthrough if you want to have a significantly worse experience and miss most of the properly fleshed-out content in the game. This was my exact issue with Breath of the Wild - it felt very gamified and on-rails, and the open world not only seemed irrelevant but was also fairly unrewarding. And don't even get me started on the goddamn weapon durability system.
Games like Proteus are also empty. But games that are explicitly all about exploration and vibes get away with liminality and emptiness better than stuff that tries to meld it with a plot and a combat system and collectibles does. The latter frames itself in a goal-driven way which leads you to approach its open world in the same manner, the former does not. This is why "gamifying" open worlds barely ever works.
Top level posts really should have more effort put into them, but yeah it also squares with my own experience. The most fervent liberals I have seen in real life are the white boomers/Gen Xers in my organisation, who are so intent on their commitment to progressive ideology that they will wax lyrical about representation in their organisation and complain about how Trump is a slippery slope towards dictatorship every two weeks in front of the entire office (as a matter of fact, at the time of writing this I have just got off work after being forced to sit through one such diatribe).
Their viewpoints are so ridiculously canalised they can't even entertain how anybody in the organisation could ever possibly disagree with them on good-faith grounds. To them, it's just Being A Good Person, and the fact that the majority of America voted for Literally Hitler isn't something they can reconcile. They need a form of validation to cushion their own sense of self, and the establishment news media is there to provide them a comforting blanket that can shield them from the ugly realisation that they failed to win hearts and minds, that they are out of touch with what matters to the majority of people.
There's a reason why King Sejong is the most beloved monarch in Korea, and he did even more than that - not only did he invent Hangul in an attempt to improve literacy, he also hugely supported and encouraged many other technological advancements. Most notably, he established a royal scientific institute called the Hall of Worthies meant to house Joseon's greatest minds, and offered a series of grants and scholarships to incentivise bright young scholars to attend. At one point he appointed Jang Yeong-sil, a nobi, as court technician. Jang would go on to make one of the world's first standardised rain gauges (the cheugugi), which would get used all over Korea, as well as a self-striking water clock. Upon Sejong's request, he also made a faster and more efficient form of metal movable type called gabinja in 1434, a number of years before Gutenberg developed the technology in the Western world.
Sejong also ordered that one thousand copies of farmers' handbooks be printed so as to improve agricultural output, and he also published the Nongsa jikseol, which was a compilation of farming techniques conducive to Korea's environment that documented the best planting methods and soil treatment and so on for each region. In addition, he was the king who granted the nobi class parental leave, and did strangely democratic things like poll the public on reforms such as new tax systems. It really does sound like fiction about a benevolent monarch, except it's real.
Regarding Hangul's use over the years, Sejong actually did manage to get it into popular culture if I remember correctly. Hangul continued to be used among the peasantry throughout the years in applications such as popular fiction, apart from a short-lived period in 1504 when it was banned by the monarch Yeonsangun of Joseon, an infamous tyrant who did so because people wrote letters in Hangul criticising him. That ban did not last for long, and eventually Yeonsangun was dethroned via coup, exiled to Gangwha Island (where he soon died) and his sons were forced to commit suicide. Later in 1506 King Jungjong abolished the ministry related to Hangul research, but Hangul saw a resurgence in the late 16th century and novels written in the Korean alphabet became a major genre of literature. I'd say Sejong largely accomplished his goal.
Joseon in general was a shockingly scholarly society. I visited South Korea recently and went to the National Museum, and 90% of what I saw from Joseon was just books on top of books on top of books, with the occasional world map and astronomical chart thrown in. They were dedicated record-keepers, and the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty are the longest continuous record of a single dynasty in the world, stretching from 1392 to 1865. This scholarly focus even affected their art to the point that there was an entire genre of folding screens (chaekgeori) which just consisted of still-life paintings of bookshelves - honestly that part of the museum is wild.
EDIT: wording
People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.
I think you've got the causality here entirely backwards - the reason why traditional architecture is associated with wealthy old neighbourhoods or European tourist traps is because traditional-style properties are capable of commanding high prices and/or an influx of tourist money, resulting in them being high-SES neighbourhoods. That association can only exist, however, because people like these buildings in the first place.
Furthermore in Sweden many towns are built in traditional style, and there have been a few studies evaluating architectural preferences in such places, and the overwhelming majority still prefers older buildings. The study I linked in Part 1 of my post on the preferences of Karlshamn residents is one such example; it evaluates the residents of a town that is primarily traditional in style - you can look up photos of the town - and finds that they also prefer traditional small-town architecture. There is also the fact that scenes that deviate far from the rule of nature are literally harder for the visual cortex to process and cause more discomfort as a result, and modern buildings are less naturalistic and more unpleasant (as noted by that very same study).
On a personal note I can say I very much enjoy all traditional vernacular architectural styles, even those I've only recently stumbled upon - for example I like Korea's hanok and temple architecture, Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty palaces and tombs, and India's Himalayan kath-kuni buildings, they are not represented very widely and you don't come across them often, but even on first glance they were hugely pleasing to me in a way modern architecture has never been. I suppose you can add an epicycle and say they recall other forms of architecture I have positive associations with, but taken alongside the above reasons for skepticism I think this fails as an explanation.
Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.
I don't really understand how this is relevant to an argument regarding aesthetic merit though. Yes, old styles of architecture have been constantly iterated on and improved overtime, and modernist styles could in theory be prettier if we changed all kinds of things about it. But as they currently stand, these buildings are evaluated as less pleasing by the public compared to traditional architecture. How long these respective styles took to develop is not what's in question here. I mean, if you turn the clock forward 200 years perhaps modernism will have mutated into something people really enjoy, but that timeframe isn't necessarily relevant to your average urban-dweller today who will live and die in one of these blocks. All it means is “hey, maybe we shouldn’t have thrown out literal thousands of years of accumulated wisdom in a poor attempt to implement the design equivalent of Year Zero”.
I would also add the Joseon Dynasty to that list, seeing that it lasted for 505 years (1392 to 1897) and was probably the most technocratic, bureaucratic state in East Asia with a lot of checks on royal power. Kings were expected to answer to the public whenever a disaster occurred, issuing formal requests for critique, and early on in Joseon history an oral petition system for grievances was established - a drum was placed in front of the royal palace to be struck if someone had a complaint, and this allowed ordinary illiterate citizens to personally appeal to the king once other forms of redress had failed. The lowest class (nobi) were allowed maternity and paternity leave, and there was even a society for the disabled, the myeongtongsi. There was a system of three offices specifically meant to police the kings and the officials for corruption and inefficiency, and often they gained more power than the monarchy itself. A lot of technology and advancement was invented during Joseon as well, the most famous of those being Hangul, but "[i]n the first half of the 15th century, around 62 major accomplishments were made in various scientific fields. Of these, 29 came from Korea alone compared to 5 from China and 28 from the rest of the world". It certainly fits the definition of a Korean golden age.
With regards to China, you're missing out on the obvious Zhou Dynasty, which lasted for a mind-boggling 790 years (1046 BC to 256 BC) with an impressive level of imperial continuity. Though this depends on how you define "golden age" since the Zhou kings had lost much power by the Warring States period.
EDIT: added more
I definitely think there is some merit to modern interior design principles - I enjoy bright open spaces as much as the next guy - but I find it most visually pleasing when these principles are integrated with older, more rustic styles of design. For example, here's Eunpyeong Hanok Village in South Korea, built in 2014. The interiors clearly crib from modern design with how open and airy they are, but they incorporate traditional stylings into the buildings' interiors seamlessly to make a space that looks inviting. Of course this is adapted for the Korean environment and can't be generalised - localised approaches involving the vernacular style of any given area are always needed, much of this wouldn't necessarily work in the European context.
Currently, I live in a gleaming white block of an apartment building, and frankly I have to say the interiors feel a bit alienating sometimes. It's hard to hate it because it's been my home for years, but it sometimes comes off as quite sterile and bland, and while it's technically designed in a way that's meant to let in light, in spite of this I almost always keep the blinds closed. The sunlight can get harsh. Many traditional East Asian buildings tried to solve this problem by softening the sunbeams through panes of paper, creating a warm diffuse glow, but modernist buildings do nothing of the sort - the light that filters in through the massive glass windows in the midday is brain-boiling, and I dislike having to pull down the blinds every single time noon rolls around.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not strictly in favour of retvrning completely and building everything in perfectly authentically old-style ways, I think there's something to be learned from some modern ideas of design, but as a standalone aesthetic package it just doesn't work for me. I primarily wish we had hybridised these traditional vernacular forms with up-to-date concepts in a more seamless and natural manner - more like a natural progression of the style, instead of simply disposing of all the architectural forms that had developed locally for thousands of years. To see these rich and varied traditions quickly disappear in mere decades feels like a travesty.
problem_redditor
10d ago
The answer is that my partner studied design, and given how much he's talked about Bauhaus in the past I'm trying to see if his positive view of them is warranted.
I am quickly discovering that the emperor has no clothes.
I know of continental philosophy and have read some of it; I just don't like or assign any weight to that philosophical tradition at all. Frankly it comes off to me as consisting of a lot of very broad and often borderline metaphysical statements made without any empirical or logical basis, and their philosophy almost feels completely arbitrary, with their terms being so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them. Many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty, I wouldn't say that is the case with prominent continental philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger. Much of it falls into the category of not even wrong.
The concept of being (sein) is just the word for the concept of existence and presence in the world. Becoming (werden) is the state of constant change. Being and becoming are related in the sense that being is a point in, or snapshot of, the state of becoming. Heidegger's Lichtung, the "clearing", elucidates the concept of ontological Being through an analogy of a light in a clearing where beings are revealed as beings, where beings nevertheless obscure each other leading to concealment which results in the ability to form misconception and self-deception. I don't feel like I learn anything particularly meaningful about being through this, I feel as if I'm hearing somebody's kooky unfalsifiable ruminations about what it means to exist, and to extend these concepts to design (e.g. calling grey "the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away" because it is in between white and black) elevates the whole endeavour to monumental levels of meaninglessness. There is no lens through which these statements can even be whatsoever critically appraised or evaluated.
It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed.
This would have been my hypothesis too if not for two things:
1: There are modern architects and artists, particularly very popular and in-demand ones with the most power to set taste, who actually seem to fail to give the client what they want. See Eisenman's House VI again as an example - he certainly felt comfortable depriving the client of much of what they found important. Again, there's also this comment from an architect under Scott's post on the traditional/modern divide in aesthetics, stating that architects do have some power to impose taste due to the fact that they possess skills the client needs, and that the client does not dictate everything. In Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, he notes "I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out."
2: Most people, including the upper class who have the power and financial wherewithal to commission these buildings, seem to prefer the style of traditional buildings as opposed to modern ones. See the studies linked in Part 1 of my original post, as well as the price premiums that traditional housing commands despite apparently similar construction costs (in part 3 of my original post); it doesn't seem to be the case that this proliferation of modern architecture is primarily a bottom-up, demand-driven phenomenon.
It's a copout, but I don't have a definitive answer for you as to why the public and the art world shifted so heavily out of phase, and how this situation continues to propagate itself. The bulk of my post tries to answer the question of what's happened, why there is such a persistent bifurcation between what is actually being produced and people's stated preferences, and I can't really come to a firm conclusion. I can only guess it's partly down to the maintenance of a strict academic/architectural hegemony and partly down to the influence of city-planning councils which are a nonrepresentative and generally trained group of people that have the power to approve or veto developments. Perhaps there's also some fashionability in there - academic opinion is high status and has the ability to dictate the choices of the public, not just the other way around, and once academic consensus regarding modern art was established it caused some segment of the elite to be willing to forfeit designs they personally enjoy for an attempt at signalling status. For some people, getting a house built by Frank Gehry in what is perceived as forward-thinking styling is more important than actually living somewhere they would most enjoy, and there are also many patrons like governmental institutions who don't actually live in the buildings they commission and may not actually like them but want to project an air of modernity, which isn't inherent to the style but is rather an aesthetic signal academics created once they deemed it the New Style, fit for the Age of Machine. In other words, academics dictate demand just as much as they respond to it.
This is more like one person's opinion than a matter of fact
More like an (admittedly exaggerated for effect) statement of general public evaluation, supported by multiple studies of preference linked within the post itself.
the WTC facade, composed of tridents situated above the square aqueduct-like arches of the foyer, was an example of visually pleasing modern architecture. it does not always have to be bad.
I don't like the WTC. That being said I realise it does not always have to be bad, and there's even a piece of modern architecture I actually do like in my own city - the Sydney Opera House. Unfortunately I also understand that most of what people have constructed does not live up to this standard in the slightest, most of it falls far short of even the most pedestrian traditional buildings, and even with the Opera House I find it works better as an isolated structure rather than an overarching aesthetic for most of the city.
It's a highly modern phenomenon, and it was driven by many things - the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction, for example, since withdrawing from realism was a way to distinguish themselves and find something photography couldn't do. Of course, they didn't have to make the new style so ugly - Islamic art has long tackled non-representational visual style with incredible results which I think most of the public would enjoy, which leads me to my second point:
Artists previously conceptualised themselves as inevitably having to interact with the commercial world - many modern design schools were an attempt to distance themselves from this, to bring taste into the halls of academia, and this also meant they removed all sanity-checks on their vision of artistry. This is how you get things like Eisenman depriving his client of a master bedroom where the couple could sleep together, and depriving them of a staircase with a proper railing, and initially attempting to deprive them of bathrooms in-house. Mies van der Rohe made a building with only three positions for the blinds inside of them; allowing people to only open them fully, halfway, or have them completely closed, because the demands of life should not impose upon their artistic vision. In Tom Wolfe's book From Bauhaus to Our House, a sneering quote can be found from the director of the Museum of Modern Art "We are asked to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers!"
In many European art compounds it was not uncommon to announce something akin to "We have just removed the divinity of art and architecture from the hands of the official art establishment [the Academy, the National Institute, the Künstlergenossenschaft, whatever], and it now resides with us, inside our compound. We no longer depend on the patronage of the nobility, the merchant class, the state, or any other outside parties for our divine eminence. Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in art’s divine glow must come here, inside our compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations, special orders, or loud talk from the client permitted. We know best. We have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future of architecture."
In contrast much art back then was "commercial" art understood to be made primarily for the benefit of wealthy patrons, and the first image that comes to mind whenever I think of a tremendous artist is Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, contorted in an uncomfortable position, paint dripping down onto his face, reading scripture intently so he could draw inspiration from the words of the Bible itself, and yet feeling so inadequate about his ability to rise to the task he literally believed it would destroy his reputation, as detailed in his poem about the painting of the chapel. He did not consider himself a painter and only acquiesced to the pope's pressure for him to take on the commission. But he singlehandedly made one of the most beloved pieces of Western art in existence.
Now consider this absolute hubris from Jan Tschichold's book The New Typography: "More than all previous art, the art of today demands creative will and strength. Its aim is utmost clarity and purity. ... Is it then surprising that its representations at first baffle the unsophisticated viewer, who is used to something completely different, or even actually repel him? Lazy and hostile people are still trying to make it appear contemptible in the eyes of others. and describe it as nonsense. These are the same people from whose physical attacks Manet's "Olympia" had to be protected by the police, a picture that is today one of the most precious treasures of the Louvre. Their prattling is too empty and unimportant to be taken seriously."
Yes, artists being indulgent has always existed, and there's some continuity between the attitudes of artists then and today, but in general the difference in humility is incredible. It's been a trend of modern artists and designers to view themselves as beholden to nothing, with the public being seen as an irrelevant triviality. And that would also be my response to @Primaprimaprima above - dictatorships of taste have never sat right with me, and the purpose of public art is for, well, the public. For artists not to consider the effects of their work on the intended stakeholders is basically a dereliction of their intended function, IMO. The complete separation of art from commerciality or the actual people it's being made for, where they will fail to consider the public's preferences and instead opt for narcissistic works of self-edification, is one of the very many defects of modern artistic thought.
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!
I grouped modern architecture together in part because no studies I know of are conducted with the objective of quantifying architects and laypersons' preference evaluations for specific architectural trends, in general they just present their preferences for broad categories such as "traditional architecture" and "modern architecture". I also think that it's perfectly acceptable to use these broad categories to simplify analysis - despite the different modern architectural trends possessing some differing philosophies they also share a lot and the variance in the end result isn't super significant for someone not well versed in the history of architectural trends.
Perhaps that is not obvious to a person who's read about architecture for three thousand hours and can see all the tiny differences, but two different pieces of modern architecture will both still be perceived as generally minimal and stolid, and there will generally be a high level of correlation between your average layman's evaluations of the two buildings. It's not that an individual layman will have the same opinions on all modern architecture, in fact I think most don't, but a person who dislikes one modern architectural trend will also probably dislike others (again, this is as a general tendency, not saying this always holds true on a person-to-person basis). You will probably find high correlations between what people think of Walter Gropius' Fagus Factory (early modernist) and Robert Venturi's Guild House/Gordon Wu Hall (postmodern). In any case, doing large-scale analyses of broad groupings based on proximity in concept-space is kind of necessary to some extent unless you only ever want discussion to remain on the level of the individual house.
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):
Hegel and the modernists (as well as the architectural tradition they spawned) are exceptional in this regard though. People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't. They literally take more effort to process and increases the amount of oxygen used by the brain. That same source notes "We then analysed images of apartment buildings, and found that over the last 100 years, the design of buildings has been departing further and further from the rule of nature; more and more stripes appear decade by decade, making the buildings less and less comfortable to look at."
I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space. When you walk into a gallery, you tacitly accept the fact that you are going to be seeing an individual artist's expression. The same is not true for public art, which has to be endured by people regardless of whether they want to see it - they have to work and play and travel in these spaces. I remember going into Union Station in Toronto and seeing a horrendous piece of art, Zones of Immersion, plastered all over the walls, it made me feel like I was boarding a train to Auschwitz. It sucked. It was terrible. It made me hate the artist for inflicting that travesty upon commuters that have to use the station day in, day out. In similar fashion every building an architect makes inherently has the ability to elevate or pollute the commons, and it makes me extremely annoyed when the government spends 250 million dollars worth of public money to erect monstrosities their citizens hate.
Personally, I like very weird, discordant music. I would not expect it to be played in a public square and especially not as a permanent fixture.
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'm glad you enjoy the look (given the studies linked in my post and in my comment to you here, I think that opinion might be a fringe one). But architecture is inherently part art, part design, and what makes it unique is that it doubles both as an aesthetic product and a tool which people want to use for its functionality as a living space. House VI indisputably fails at the latter, and in my opinion, the former as well.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
I'm almost deliriously exhausted so I may be retarded right now, but the way the post is structured, it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts; could you cite the sections which you consider as defending his philosophy?
I think that's almost certainly the reason why the midwits in academia prefer modern architecture - it is a signal that you have had the time to develop this type of inaccessible preference. Of course, that still doesn't explain why modern architecture is everywhere despite the general populace seeming to dislike it - they are the clients that developers and by extension architects are marketing to, after all, and one would expect market forces to assert themselves at some point and populate the urban landscape with architecture the public actually likes. That's the very question my post is attempting to answer.
I find the Rietveld Schröder House extremely captivating. Even more impressive is that it was built in 1924. If you don't find it better than an ordinary brick house from that time, the next explanation is 6: If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it
Personally I don't like it, and I've been exposed primarily to modern architecture in my urban environments. I would think this is true for most people who express preferences against modern architecture - they live in cities primarily filled with concrete-and-glass blocks. Perhaps exposure plays a bit of a role here, but I doubt it's the only reason for the disparity between architects' and laypersons' preferences.
I suppose the initial framing is a bit besides the actual question, which was not "why do people like modern architecture", it was "why is the style associated with modern architecture so common, despite the fact that people in my experience dislike it?" I've updated the title of the post to reflect this.
Why is modern architecture so bad, and more importantly why is it so common in spite of this?
The utter vacuity of modern architecture (and art) is probably not lost on many users around here. My distaste for modern architecture has been around for a while, but I never felt very strongly about it up until I visited Toronto and saw just what kind of effect that sort of construction had on the urban landscape - I found a city filled to the brim with ugly water-stained concrete-and-glass skyscrapers, some constructed by the likes of Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei; a city where traditional vernacular architectural styles were typically absent, found only in select areas like the Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market. It was an utterly depressing cityscape, and after I contrasted it with the very many examples of cosy and inviting vernacular architecture in South Korea - some of which were actually new traditional hanok neighbourhoods funded and supported by the South Korean government - I found myself deeply wanting to know why an entire society would willingly subject themselves to the pernicious and subtle form of psychological torture we call "modern architecture".
The gulf between what I perceive most people like and what architectural theorists like is truly incredible, and that shows up in many enthusiast forums. In true gatekeeping fashion, /r/Architecture seems to consider talking about the broad concept of "modern architecture" in a critical way as showcasing one's plebian-ness and disqualifying one from offering opinions on the topic. The general take seems to be that modern architecture is clearly too complex to broad-brush, after all post-war architectural styles span the range of heroic modernism, post-modernism, 60s space age, 70s modern, 80s neo-brutalism, 90s cookie cutter, contemporary, and so on. The blanket claim that one doesn't like all of it seems to be perceived as such a ridiculous and broad statement that no credence should be given to it whatsoever, then as a counterpoint people will recommend a piece of purportedly groundbreaking, humanistic modern architecture that... doesn't look substantially more pleasing to your average person than the concrete blocks people recall when they think of modern architecture.
This is because there is a broad common thread spanning most of these architectural trends, and among these are a "clean slate" philosophy, a conscious refusal to adopt local, pre-modern styles, focus on clean shapes and simplification and minimalism, and design and expressions meant to be adapted for the "age of machine". It's a trend that persists when you look everywhere from early pioneers like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to contemporary starchitects like Zaha Hadid, and even if certain architects weave in vernacular sensibilities every now and then, it will often be expressed within the larger context of this new post-war mode of architecture, for example in an ironic and highly simplified manner like is done in postmodernism. To engage in such obfuscatory pedantry so as to not properly engage with the critical opinions of laymen who aren't as well-versed in architecture-speak (whose opinions on what constitutes good architecture significantly differ from that of the academic world, and who often feel deprived of any say over the urban environments they live in) rubs me the wrong way. So for ease I'll refer to the phenomenon in question as "modern architecture", instead of listing out every single style it encapsulates.
I've seen a number of explanations posited to explain why "modern architecture" is so common, and I've attempted to look into them in order to investigate if they have any credence whatsoever.
1: The general public actually enjoys "modern architecture", and demands architecture in that style.
It is not uncommon for architects to suggest to detractors that the style of building is the client's fault, and not to blame the architect. So is this true, do clients actually ask for modern architecture? This is probably the explanation that is easiest to address - the literature is actually shockingly consistent on this: People hugely prefer traditional vernacular styles over post-war styles of architecture, and this preference is consistently found across groups regardless of political identification or race or sex.
This is practically a formality, but here goes. A 2007 poll of 2,200 random Americans conducted by the AIA found a strong preference for traditional styles after presenting them with a list of 248 buildings deemed important by AIA members, with participants strongly preferring buildings that evoked Gothic, Greek and Roman traditions. It is necessary to note that tastemakers did retort to this, with the rebuttal of urban design critic John King including the assertion that architecture cannot just be evaluated via a photo, as well as the assertion that the list did not reflect the ideas of architectural experts but the opinions of the general populace (this one I find somewhat funny, considering it's a tacit acknowledgement that the preferences of architects are out of line with the general populace). In a similar vein, yet another study of 2,000 US adults who were shown seven pairs of images of existing U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings (consisting of one traditional and one modern building) showed that 72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed). The preference for traditional architecture was also consistent regardless of what socioeconomic status the respondent belonged to, suggesting the disparity in prevalence of traditional architecture and general-populace preference for it isn't an issue of class divide where the richest people can specifically commission buildings and decide what gets built. Neoclassical buildings were most favoured, and brutalist buildings were most disfavoured. A British replication of this result can be found in a YouGov survey, which polled 1042 respondents asking them which building out of four they would prefer to be built in their neighbourhood - the result came out 77% in favour of traditional and 23% in favour of modern. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ruth Reed, responded to this with the assertion that traditional buildings are expensive and unsustainable (a point I will examine later).
But perhaps John King is correct that a photo doesn't properly capture how a piece of architecture actually feels - this is actually a critique I think holds water, there are many places I like far more in person than I imagined I would from a photo alone. Lucky for us, there's a study in Norway which used VR technology to partially circumvent that problem, capturing 360 degree videos of streets in Oslo then presenting them to participants by means of a VR headset. "It emerged that the places characterised by traditional architecture were appreciated considerably more than contemporary urban spaces. The traditional square Bankplassen got the best score, while the contemporary part of Toftes street in the generally popular district, Grünerløkka, came last." But if that, too, isn't a good enough facsimile of the actual experience of visiting a place, here is a Swedish thesis that details the results of a poll in the town of Karlshamn about what parts of their town residents like best, finding that that "the inhabitants make very unanimous aesthetic valuations of the buildings and that the wooden buildings, the small scale and the square are the most appreciated features. Studies in the field of environmental psychology find a general aesthetic preference for features that can be related to the traditional small town".
There are also other more informal polls which one can rely on, such as this bracket assessing readers' favourite buildings in Chicago - the bracket in question was populated via popular nomination, then whittled down to a final four. All of the final four are in traditional style, featuring the Tribune Tower, Carbide and Carbon Building, Wrigley Building, and The Rookery Building. It seems clear that the majority of the public, regardless of demography, prefers traditional architecture, and these results are robust and replicable across many different methodologies. And, well, water is wet. Sometimes it seems that architects are unpleasantly surprised with these results and are in disbelief/denial about the fact that the majority of the public might truly have these views, which brings me to my next possibility:
2: Architects like "modern architecture", the public does not; the excess of modern architecture represents the tastes of architects and not the general populace.
There is a somewhat convincing corpus of evidence showing that architects simply appreciate architecture in a different way from the general populace - as a starting point this study summarises some results from previous work on the topic. One study from 1973 suggests architects respond more to "representational meaning" in a building while the general layman prioritises "responsive meaning", with representational meaning having more to do with the percepts, concepts and ideas that a building conveys and responsive meaning being more of a judgemental view of whether the building is nice in a more immediate affective and evaluative way. 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". The study in question reaffirms these findings, finding from an admittedly small sample that "non-architects gave more affective responses and descriptive responses to the physical features of the building in question, whereas architects commented more on ideas and concepts used to arrive at the physical forms".
This 2001 study showed a large discrepancy between architects' predictions of laypersons' preferences and their actual preferences. They presented a sample of 27 individuals without architectural training with colour slides of 42 large contemporary urban structures constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, and asked them to rate it from 1 to 10. 25 architects were then brought in to "predict or try to mimic a typical nonarchitect's global impression of each building". Low correlations were found between lay ratings of architecture and architects' predictions of lay ratings, and a slight trend towards less experienced architects making better estimations of lay ratings was found. Experience as an architect, if anything, seems to distance one further from the public's idea of "good architecture". While that study showed people contemporary buildings and doesn't directly touch on the traditional/modern dichotomy, it is notable that architects cannot predict lay preferences even within that narrow subset of architecture.
In addition, there are a number of studies which deal directly with that, though sample sizes are typically small. Devlin and Nasar (1989) report on the results of a study where 20 non-architects and 20 architects were shown a series of pictures of buildings which were categorised into general types: "High", which was characterised by fewer materials, more concrete, simpler forms, more white, and off-center entrances, and "Popular", which was characterised by use of more building materials, horizontal orientation, hip roofs, framed windows, centred entrances, and warm colours. Non-architects were more likely to evaluate "high" architecture as unpleasant, distressing and meaningless, while for architects the relationship between architectural style and evaluation was inverted. Small sample sizes, I know, there's not that much research on this, but the research that does exist tends to point in the same direction.
I consider it very likely that some architects (starchitects in particular) do build structures meant for their own self-edification, at the expense of the public and even the client - Peter Eisenman's House VI 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. But most architects are normal working people constrained by clients' preferences and requirements, so the assertion that architects' preferences are responsible for the proliferation of modern architecture feels a bit impoverished to me as an explanation. They may have come up with the style, but it's not clear how much decisive influence their preferences have on most building projects. Perhaps it is just a dictatorship of taste - maybe architects do utilise their monopoly on skill and expertise to push their preferences through, as this comment by an architect on Scott's post "Whither Tartaria" notes, or maybe another driving factor is responsible here.
3: Traditional architecture just costs more to build, and when asked to make a tradeoff between their design preferences and low costs clients would prefer the latter.
This is an often-forwarded explanation for the prevalence of modern architecture, and it was initially the explanation I found the most convincing and intuitive. However, the urban planner and author Ettore Maria Mazzola has put some work into trying to estimate the prices of traditional vs modern architecture, and he does so by using ISTAT (Italian Bureau of Statistics) data, illustrating a large number of buildings and their costs from the 1920s and 1930s and updating them to today's dollars. His findings are presented in his 2010 book on the topic, but that is hard to access so they are also outlined in this paper. According to him "[t]raditional buildings of the first decades of the 20th Century were built in average times ranging from 6 to 12 months, they cost up to 67% less than the current building, and, after all these years, they still have never required maintenance works". Of course, there are problems when you're comparing across different time periods since there are factors that differ between the 1920s/30s and now, such as differing labour costs and building regulations, and so this cannot be considered the last word on the issue.
For a far more illustrative modern-day comparison, there's this paper: "The Economics of Style: Measuring the Price Effect of Neo-Traditional Architecture in Housing" which attempts to study the price premium on neotraditional houses in the Netherlands. They investigate if the higher prices placed on neotraditional houses are due to the higher costs of construction, and from a preliminary investigation into that topic they find: "On our request they provided information on construction costs of houses that vary in style but are otherwise the same. The information provided by Bouwfonds shows that houses in different styles developed by Bouwfonds do not vary in costs. Terraced homes in the style of the 1930s have similar construction costs as houses designed in “contemporary” styles." In an analysis of 86 Vinex housing estates they find significant price premiums for neotraditional houses and houses that refer to neotraditional architecture (as compared to non-traditional houses), with a 15% premium for the former and 5% premium for the latter. They also investigate if differences in interior quality or construction costs could explain the price premium and find that the price premium barely reduces even in more homogenous samples with less room for differences in construction costs. Rather, what they find is that supply is the main factor influencing traditional architecture's prices - in the highly regulated Dutch environment there has been a lack of supply capable of meeting demand, and the price premium has been slowly eroded as more traditional housing has been manufactured overtime. As a result, cost doesn't seem to be the driver for the lack of traditional architecture, nor does it seem to be the case that the style of residential housing perfectly reflects consumer preference - there seems to be an undersupply of neotraditional housing, which then gets reflected in higher prices.
Such an analysis seems to be supported when looking at individual case studies - traditional architecture is not inherently more expensive than modern architecture. An interesting example of this is the Carhart Mansion in New York City, a traditional building which was constructed at "substantially the same unit cost as new Modernist luxury apartment buildings", according to Zivkovic Associates, the organisation that was responsible for the plans and elevations for the building. While it is true that this building was constructed as a luxury apartment building at a higher price point than many other housing markets, the fact that it features a similar unit cost as luxury modernist buildings still raises the question as to why there aren't more traditional buildings at this price point. Furthermore, it's hard to explain away the findings of the earlier Netherlands paper with the claim that traditional stylings are only cost-effective when building higher-end properties, since the similarity in cost seems to persist there too. However, there's an interesting aspect to the case of the Carhart Mansion which might explain the proliferation of modern architecture:
4: City planning boards and other approval committees strongly prefer modern architecture, and are more likely to approve modern-style constructions regardless of the wishes of end-users or architects.
The Carhart Mansion's design was opposed by many members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), with the LPC initially being skeptical about the proposed Classical design, and with many members making statements such as "You can’t do that – the façade has to be plain and simple." According to the source linked earlier, "[t]he LPC’s concerns seemed to focus on the question of how well the design would be executed – whether the quality of the craftsmanship in the new construction would do justice to the historic buildings around it. (Oddly, this did not seem to be an issue with the earlier Modernist design!)"
This quote from the very same source is also illustrative: "If you speak with architects and consultants who appear frequently before the LPC, they characterize their perceptions of the LPC’s decisions as follows: Designs for additions to landmarks or infill buildings in historic districts that do not violate the cornice lines and overall massing of neighboring protected buildings will likely win approval, even if aggressively Modernist in style, materials and details; but new traditional designs would have a harder time being approved on the basis of style alone. Accordingly, a number of prominent New York architects specializing in projects involving landmarks have advised their clients that new traditional designs employing actual historic architectural language, such as fully realized Classicism, would likely cost them a lot more in time and money in the review process. This perception has had a chilling effect on new traditional design in historic districts in New York City and in other cities where similar views prevail."
I'm not aware of any source that properly studies this, but it's probably not implausible that planning committees' preferences and tendencies surrounding architecture differ from the public. It's not necessarily the case that architecture granted planning permission reflects what the public wants - planners are a selected group of people with certain training, and this obviously skews the preferences of the people involved in planning.
Finally, a bonus:
5: People don't like modern architecture less than traditional architecture, it's just that the traditional architecture has been subjected to a selection process which filters out all the bad buildings.
Easily falsified - see above in part 1; even modern architecture selected for their importance doesn't fare as well against the traditional stuff.
Furthermore, here is the modern day Toronto City Hall. Here is the Royal Ontario Museum, with a large contemporary "crystal" built into the original neo-romanesque façade. Here are some old photos of Toronto. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else and maybe some users of this forum will find the current Toronto architecture to be scintillating pieces of art, but I can say it's quite clear to me - a plebeian - which of those looks more appealing, and the examples of modern architecture I've offered up are serious landmarks of the city, whereas the old photos in question are just normal streets in Old Toronto.
Anyway, it's a bit bizarre to me why architecture today seems to skew overwhelmingly modern, despite the public seeming to find these buildings worse than traditional styles. So far I think a combination of point 2 and point 4 is probably what's skewing the ratio, but I've not drawn any firm conclusions.
So I am reading Paul Klee's notebooks, texts which hugely shaped the modernist Bauhaus approach to design and architecture during their attempts to bring all the arts under one umbrella. These texts are held to be as important for modern art as da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.
Here is how the notebooks begin:
"Chaos as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos, but a locally determined concept relating to the concept of the cosmos. Utter chaos can never be put on a scale, but will remain forever unweighable and unmeaurable. It can be Nothing or a dormant Something, death or birth, according to the dominance of will or lack of will, of willing or not willing. The pictorial symbol for this non-concept is the point that is really not a point, the mathematical point. The nowhere-existent something or the somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom from opposition. If we express it in terms of the perceptible (as though drawing up a balance sheet of chaos), we arrive at the concept grey, at the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away: the grey point. The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions."
"The cosmogenetic moment is at hand. The establishment of a point in chaos, which, concentrated in principle, can only be grey, lends this point a concentric character of the primordial. The order thus created radiates from it in all directions. When central importance is given to a point: this is the cosmogenetic moment. To this occurrence corresponds the idea of every sort of beginning (e.g. procreation) or better still, the concept of the egg."
This absolute tripe goes on for two whole volumes spanning 2,500 pages, and was turned into lectures for Bauhauslers.
ive only been to kuala lumpur and I feel like I'm missing out on the rest of malaysia. my impression of the city near bukit bintang was that it was somewhat empty shopping malls and skyscrapers spaced out by dense blocks of slums and pedestrian hostile infrastructure.
I've lived in Kuala Lumpur for much of my life; while it's the most modern place in Malaysia and there are things I do like about it (not least the food culture) it's definitely not inaccurate to say that the urban landscape there is a bit of a mess. Some parts of the city are criss-crossed with overpasses to the point it's almost comical - the city has pretty much grown in an unplanned, uncontrolled way since it has expanded very rapidly and it's easy to push through any development you want with a little bit of bribery. For me it's a source of nostalgia at this point, but I feel like I would be remiss not to say that there are far better places to be in Malaysia as a visitor if you want to see the more charming, rustic side of the country.
The racial economic caste system was obvious to me, as an outsider. Businesswise, english speaking Chinese seemed to be the most trustworthy, followed by "bumiputera".
While I'm not at all the biggest proponent of the affirmative action policies there, the economic disparity between the Chinese and virtually every other group is certainly very noticeable (it is not uncommon for Chinese to be a market-dominant minority group everywhere they go). Thing is, there's a strong selection bias going on with this - much of the Chinese diaspora emigrated with the expectation of finding opportunity elsewhere, and this has ended up having a large skewing effect on overseas Chinese SES.
To some extent I do understand why animosity exists against the Malaysian Chinese, but at the same time it's hard for me to be overly sympathetic. My great-grandfather grew up in China as a child worker shovelling pig shit to sell as fuel, and barely made it into Malaysia with (most of) his family as an unskilled labourer trying to work his way up. The stuff he went through is insane - there's too much to list here, but he had his property confiscated and his brother killed during Japanese occupation, he at one point was burned badly during an explosion at his work as a mechanic, yet despite it all he somehow managed to make a fortune for himself. He possessed a seriously admirable level of tenacity and work ethic, and I can't say he didn't rightfully earn his wealth. It isn't adaptive for a country to penalise that kind of dogged entrepreneurship because of tribal ressentiment at a group's success - especially in a country like Malaysia which can't offer a significantly higher quality of life compared to neighbouring states, these policies end up causing brain drain and emigration of the most productive segment of your population to places like Singapore which offer more opportunities and don't consider your success a social problem that needs to be fixed.
Did not really feel like a islamic country in the same way as indonesia.
Islam is a far less prevalent religion in Malaysia than it is in Indonesia, so that's to be expected.
Sydney doesn't compare at all on the food front, but to be fair it's hard to compete with Malaysia. It's one of the most food-oriented countries I know of, and while that's a characteristic of many Asian cultures, here it's particularly emphasised. To provide food for someone is considered the ultimate display of affection - in contrast, it's not nearly as common for people to demonstrate affection through verbal or physical means, and when I first learned just how often Westerners say "I love you" to each other I genuinely thought it was unnecessary and over-the-top. But, treating them with food is non-negotiable. You can't go two minutes into a social situation without some uncle/aunty (in informal settings, virtually every older man/woman is endearingly referred to as an uncle/aunty regardless of their relation to you) concernedly asking you if you have eaten yet.
Street food is genuinely amazing, and a general rule is that virtually every good food haunt is going to be run out of a ridiculously dilapidated shophouse or a hawker stall. People are very selective and critical when evaluating what they like, and the impossibility of finding any truly authentic Malaysian food when overseas is a big sticking point for many Malaysians who emigrate. Including me.
Frankly, I'm not 100% sure you realise just how effective some of these strategies for ideological capture can be in the third world. As an example, I know managers of larger companies in Malaysia, ideal targets for evangelism who have effectively reported to me that DEI standards have been pushed by external orgs onto their companies, and the boards of directors sign off on these plans in spite of the fact that they don't really seem to care about them. For them, it's just the path of least resistance, but they effectively adopt targets which affect how they function and have large cumulative effects when collectively implemented by a large swath of companies at the same time.
If the NGO-organised classes don't work, there are plenty of other methods of prevention to make sure women are "emancipated", like the funding of shelters (which will provide help only to women, of course), or more likely improving what they consider metrics for women's independence which may involve requiring the implementation of quotas and initiatives to ensure X% of female economic participation at the expense of the male labour force. Missionaries Progressives impose change in a top-down manner, not in a bottom-up way, and I am always surprised that conservatives treat them as ineffectual quokkas even when they've proved otherwise time and time again. They're not omnipotent and they can't Thanos-snap their will into existence, but given that the UN were willing to provide female-selective food aid in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, implementing explicitly discriminatory strategies are most certainly not beyond them.
This isn't a defence of Uganda and I have no special love for the culture there, nor do I doubt that wifebeating is occurring in the country. I just press X to doubt on the idea that women uniquely or disproportionately face violence, in relationships or outside of them - Uganda is just a country where the acceptability of violence is much higher, perpetrated by or on anyone, and I wouldn't want to live there myself. There's no doubt that anyone would have a tough time, but I always scratch my head when I see people portraying situations that are bad for virtually everyone with an "including women and children" bent. To be charitable I get why people emphasise this aspect - it's much easier to push for aid when you stress how social ills affect women and children - but I still can't make myself like it.
It is very charming, and I'm glad I made you want to see more of Malaysia! I'd be happy to offer specific recommendations at any point, but will say upfront that many locals see Ipoh, Georgetown and Malacca as nice towns, and I would agree they're must-sees if you're interested in cultural sites - the old-town areas of Georgetown and Malacca have been inscribed as UNESCO world heritage sites, if that's worth anything to you. Penang in particular is widely acknowledged as having good food (though any discussion about which city/state has the best food in Malaysia inevitably devolves into a regional flame war). For more natural things to do, I distinctly remember climbing into a wooden boat as a kid and having a local man sail my family and I around the coastal mangroves at night, seeing the swampy thicket get lit up with thousands upon thousands of fireflies. There are a number of places in Malaysia where you can do this, I won't claim to know which one offers the "best" experience.
I picked a random spot in Malacca on Google Street View, and I’m immediately confronted with a food truck advertising, in English, “Luojia Stinky Tofu.”
From a brief google search it looks like that food truck is selling the Changsha variant of stinky tofu, which is a popular Chinese dish made by immersing tofu in a brine of fermented milk, meat and vegetables, then deep frying until it's black and crunchy on the outside. I have tried it before and think it's really good when done well, but isn't necessarily a core part of Malaysian cuisine (it's more associated with Mainland China). Still, it’s nice and there are a lot of very fermented foods in Malaysia that are worth trying, anything with shrimp paste in it for example - also, there's some Malaysian takes on stinky/fermented tofu as well.
I currently live in Sydney and have for years, in general my opinion on it is quite positive. Unsurprisingly, the natural setting (specifically the harbour and the nearby Blue Mountains) is its main selling point. I'd say Australia is one of the best countries in the world you can visit for natural sights, I was surprised at how spectacular and genuinely untouched the whole continent is.
There's a ridiculous amount of wildlife in close proximity to Sydney. Kangaroos and wallabies and many colourful species of birds like rainbow lorikeets and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common sights. There are large colonies of flying foxes in Centennial Park, and you can sometimes see whales breaching off the coast during migration season. Combine that with nice weather, historic architecture like the Queen Victoria Building and Museum station, well-maintained infrastructure and transport, and you've got a city I like a lot.
Of course there are also many things I miss about Malaysia which simply don't exist elsewhere, most of which are documented above, and I can't say I don't get antsy and nostalgic sometimes.
almost all Ugandan women and girls (95%) had experienced physical or sexual violence, or both, by partners or non-partners since the age of 15
Sorry for hijacking your thread, but I'm always confused when I see the use and misuse of these types of violence against women and girls sources to prove things about patriarchy. Firstly, you're citing a UN Women-funded source, which is an organisation that is known to be hilariously politically biased, and secondly because it's only providing statistics for women. In countries like Uganda, statistics that "95% of [X population] have experienced violence since the age of 15" aren't gonna be hard to find because these countries are dangerous places in general, and presenting them without any comparative data for the relative rates for other groups really don't prove anything about the level of Male Dominance in the country.
Furthermore, in the VAWG source you're using:
"Appendix table 3.3a shows that overall, more than half of the women (56%), have experienced both physical and sexual violence or either physical or sexual violence perpetuated by their partners. Physical violence was relatively higher (45%) compared to sexual violence (36%)."
But,
"Sometimes husbands/partners perpetrate violence as a response/copying strategy to their wives’ behavior. In the VAWG survey, women were themselves asked if they ever initiated physical violence against their husbands/ partners under any circumstances within the 12 months preceding the survey. Figure 3.10 indicates that of the women who had reported violence in the past one year only 14% had never initiated physical violence against their partners, while 62% had done so once or twice, 20% had initiated several times and four percent initiated most of the time."
Going just off their self-reports, which you would expect to be comparatively favourable to the women doing the self-reporting, 86% of the women who were abused were violent to their partner themselves at some point during the past year. In other words, most partner violence captured in the survey is actually likely to be mutual abuse of some form, not unilateral male-on-female, and this should be ringing some bells in your head that the women-only statistics you're being presented do not represent the whole picture. They have also said they had a questionnaire on violence against men at some point, but for some strange, unfathomable reason the statistics on violence against men are not presented here whatsoever.
Also note that hundreds upon hundreds of studies demonstrate that women are as likely or more likely to perpetrate partner violence than men, and many of these studies demonstrate that gender symmetry in partner violence persists as a finding even when you look internationally. "almost one-third of the female as well as male students physically assaulted a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and ... the most frequent pattern was bidirectional, i.e., both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants." This is consistent with results from Jordan, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and so on, all "patriarchal" countries by WEIRD definitions. Israeli women are more likely to escalate aggression, both verbal and physical, in a partner context than men are. This is a finding that has been repeatedly supported: "Women’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 52.36, SD 5.86) were found to be higher than were men’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 51.87, SD 5.69)." So to not study male partner-violence victimisation in Uganda before concluding the presence of male dominance is questionable, but from a brief review there seems to be quite few Uganda-specific studies that are conducted in a way which allows direct comparison of partner violence victimisation between the sexes. Though that's not surprising.
Funnily enough, the focus on VAWG in that report, if anything, suggests to me that people might be more sensitive to violence against women and girls than they are men and boys.
24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them.
This source re infidelity has the very same issue - the quote you've provided here "24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them" doesn't provide any countersources for women, and in addition while it's not hard to imagine that male infidelity might be more tolerated in cultures that allow polygyny, there are also other sides to the bargain in these cultures which often aren't represented properly.
For example, Baumeister's view on the differential penalties regarding adultery attempts to nuance this view. Looking at differential penalities for adultery (which he asserts was common throughout history), his perspective is that sex is a female resource that women gatekeep, and men give women resources in exchange for sex. In line with this view, the woman's contribution to the marriage is sex, and the man's contribution to the marriage is resources. Thus female infidelity is more of a violation of the social contract than male infidelity is.
Baumeister goes on to summarise the results of a cross-cultural study of marital dissolution by Betzig. "[W]hen only one gender’s infidelity was sufficient grounds for divorce, it was far more often the woman’s (54 cultures) than the man’s (2 cultures). ... These patterns reflect the assumption that sex is something the woman provides the man rather than vice versa. ... In contrast, women but not men were permitted to divorce a partner on the grounds of failing to provide other resources, including money, housing, food, and clothing. (The only exception was that in one culture, failure to provide food was a cause for a man to divorce his wife.) Thus, the woman’s obligation to provide sex appears balanced against the man’s obligation to provide resources for support."
His perspective is that there are reciprocalities in traditional marriage that have been ignored, and that authors rarely cite male obligation (the greater obligation of men to provide resources in the marriage, which is his main contribution to the woman) in order to balance their analysis of the sexual double standard (the greater obligation of women to provide sex and to not give away her main contribution to the man). By erasing half the story, it's very easy to paint a picture of oppression of women, and most people generally do not adequately address the larger social context in which this supposed "double standard" often operates in.
Finally, I would like to note that polygyny isn't all beneficial to men either. What polygyny does do is create a very large reproductive skew among men, and it's impossible to argue that male reproduction is not effectively controlled too in highly polygynous systems. In fact I'd go as far as to say a polygynous society controls the reproduction of unsuccessful men and not the reproduction of women, since it allows successful men to deprive their male competitors of opportunities. In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice and cannot be assumed to benefit men over women.
Sorry again - I just feel like Western commentators, in general, badly misunderstand other countries on this front.
EDIT: fixed a number
Well, my job as a tax accountant continues to depress the shit out of me and I want to complain about it. Still burned out, still exhausted, the works. Can't bring myself to concentrate or focus on anything for a particularly long period of time. Think I'm making an inordinately high number of stupid mistakes in my work because of it, and being much less productive than I could be. I think about calling in sick all the time and sometimes wish I was in fact sick so my conscience didn't penalise me for taking sick days without reason. Alongside trying to make a long-distance relationship work with a significant timezone difference, I'm pretty sure I'm losing my sanity.
During the month I had to rescue a client running a failing business who couldn't pay some of their accumulated tax debts and had a history of defaults on their monthly payment plans meant to pay off that debt, last time I called the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) they had previously denied the client another payment plan leaving them effectively stranded with no feasible way to pay off the debt in short order. The tax office contacted us regarding possible legal action during the month and I had to handle the negotiations with the ATO, eventually I got them to establish a new payment plan for the client and even managed to negotiate a fairly low monthly payment instalment.
How do you bargain with the tax office when they hold all the cards? The answer is that you don't have to; you only have to bargain with the tax office representative on the other end of the phone. I called to negotiate a payment plan at 4:00 PM, they picked up at 4:20 PM, and at that point they were very intent on handling my call and not stretching the entire affair beyond close of business. I had some other evil strategies up my sleeve to deploy if necessary, for example if they pushed back I was gonna say “sorry let me retrieve that for you” every time they asked for info, and then leave them in silence for 5 minutes so I could prolong the call way beyond 5:00 PM. But they agreed to my terms much more willingly than I was expecting.
In my firm we have a monthly wrap-up presentation where we can nominate people who performed well during the month for a token company award. Guess how many nominations I got for establishing a payment plan for the firm's single most debt-riddled client? Zero. It's not a very serious thing, the "award" offers no material benefits, but it would be nice to have any kind of reminder that my efforts were appreciated every now and then. Welp, just a signal to try even less hard next time.
Right now I've got a trip to Vietnam planned in the second half of April. This is the only thing I'm looking forward to at the moment.
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