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I am not reluctant to say, "the reason [Issue X] is a problem is because people are stupid," but I don't see how it applies here. "Ugly buildings are bad" is not the kind of proposition that 90IQ (hell, even 70IQ) people would find hard to understand.
I think your comment is a bit dismissive of my point (or at least the point I attempted to make). Merely 'ugly' buildings are not at issue here. This communist architecture is not attempting to make buildings which are merely ugly, or buildings which meet a particular aesthetic that all non-communists agree is ugly.
Rather, they are making weapons. Every aspect of the design is specifically selected to cause disharmony and discomfort along all conceivable dimensions. Real factories are designed to maximize output (and ideally safety). Every single aspect of the factory is designed and tested to achieve that goal. The worker has 10 square feet of space, because he needs 10 square feet of space to do his job effectively and safely. Any more or any less and his output decreases or accidents increase. The lighting is such that he can do his job, but its not so much that it damages his eyes or gives him such a headache that he cant work. At least that is the goal.
If Eisenman or other such socialists designed this factory, every single choice would be made based on what caused the greatest degree of disharmony and psychic pain. If they had the data to determine the geometry most likely to create discontent among the workers sufficient to spark a riot or a labor strike, or cause the workers to divorce their wives or leave their churches or abandon their nations, they would build it. As Eisenman said, it is a moral imperative for them to maximize those effects.
Its not 'ugly buildings are bad.' Its 'these people are putting immense resources into harming you and everyone you know and everything you love.'
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I would go further- talking yourself into believing ugly buildings are good requires a high IQ to understand what the arguments are saying.
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See, I have this general take that ability to perceive beauty correlates with IQ. To some approximation everyone can, but -- well, for example, I think that stupid people are less-able to distinguish true beauty on a woman, say, from clownish makeup artlessly intended to evoke a superstimulus response. This is just based on personal observation among friends.
Porn ties into this opinion. I'm not a fan, and while I'd like to say that's entirely for reasons of personal virtue (mostly it is, I hope), the reality is that I find the overwhelming majority of porn 'actresses' so incredibly visually unpalatable that I'm unable to enjoy the material. (There are pretty ones, but those just make me sad.) Meanwhile, the average consumer of porn clearly has no problems here.
I think this extends to aesthetics in media, belief systems, and architecture, too. I think a lot of people out there in ugly places are genuinely insensitive to that ugliness. I've traveled a lot and live in what I think is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Expensive, but worth it to me for that reason. Yet I constantly run into people who are here for whatever reason, talk about how they hate it, and look at me with blank expressions when I mention the natural beauty. It just doesn't register for them. But I also travel for work a lot, and go many places which are aesthetically soul-crushing, and find the inverse of the phenomenon there. People don't seem to notice or care, and on the rare occasion that I've tried to ask the question (as politically as possible), they generally have no idea what I'm talking about. But I notice that, the smarter a person is, the more likely it is that they see things my way.
Anyway, to the matter at hand, my guess is that on some psychological level people are being measurably harmed by these environments. But you might be surprised, as I have been, at how entirely unaware they are of the situation.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! The typical woman in mainstream studio porn looks terrible. I'm not big on most celebrities either. I find "average" women to be far more arousing. I always just attributed this to my own sexual deviance though, not to IQ.
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This isn't because they have room temperature IQs, it's because of the hedonic treadmill, plus the fact that most people have other things going on besides noticing the buildings. When you're visiting a place and you see some awful cement shitshack of a building it's a terrible affront. When you pass that building twice a day on your commute, you simply accept it and move on.
Which is not to say that it doesn't matter if buildings are beautiful or ugly, simply that the beauty of a building is not always salient. I talked to a guy living in Vienna about what a beautiful city it was, but for him it was just boring.
In general I seriously doubt that appreciation of beauty is tied to IQ, and in fact it might be inversely related to IQ. One of my smartest friends, when faced with some postmodernist affront to the senses and forced to evaluate its beauty, will squirm and change the topic to its "interestingness". He's used his intellectual faculties to conquer his innate sense of what is beautiful and what is ugly. Meanwhile polls of the hoi polloi consistently find a preference for buildings that our ancestors would have considered beautiful. I also suspect that even non-human animals experience beauty, but I admit this is speculative on my part.
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