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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.
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):
Focusing in on some specific examples:
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.
But why does man-made beauty need to be something normies hate? As a strong example, consider traditional bonsai, which is primarily about making things more natural than nature. Theres also a strand of modern industrial design which isnt forcefully minimalist;the things it makes are not usually beautiful, but they are cool, and in certain product categories very popular. The architecture version is the glassbox skyscraper, which is not super popular but propably some of the best of modernism.
Well, there was that one study where architects actually are psychologically incapable of seeing beauty like a normal person. (I know it was linked on here, but I can't find it).
But really, it's all about how the general public perceives the designer's intentions. Dropping an intentionally-ugly structure in the middle of the city is basically a giant fuck you to its residents, whether the designers meant it that way or not (and given the demeanor and... political persuasion of the average artist, I think this happens more than anyone wants to admit).
We already know government buildings are designed with brutalist architecture in mind simply to make them seem more imposing, powerful, and official, so it's not exactly far-fetched that rich patrons (or groups of patrons) commission [modern] art for that purpose as well.
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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.
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'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'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?
Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.
There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".
I'm not sure that this is coherent. If the artist has the freedom to put a sculpture of a gory corpse outside my house against my will, because that fits his conception of beauty, then do I not have the freedom to melt down his sculpture with a blowtorch against his will, because that fits my conception of beauty? Am I not also an artist, for making the world around me more beautiful as I see it?
You might say "well, he got approval from the government and you didn't", but since we're presupposing that the public agrees with me, and since this is presumably a democratic government that is supposed to follow the public will, for the government to give him and not me approval is an obvious bug, not intended behaviour.
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To what extent is this itself a modern phenomenon? Plenty of historical artists were obsessed with natural, including human, forms (e.g. da Vinci, Michelangelo, Durer). I could believe that the obsession with man made beauty is a "preversion" of the modern artistic class, but I don't see a reason why it should be so, or even why the members of the academy should have been replaced by those who don't care about natural beauty in the first place.
You could argue that the mere act of creating art at all is already an admission that there is something deficient or lacking in nature such that it needs to be supplemented by human creation.
And artificial/non-natural subject matter has always existed in art, see for example Hieronymus Bosch or the three headed Jesus paintings.
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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.
Like modern art's relation to photography I feel your discussion of modern architecture is missing some mention of the development of novel materials. A great big part of why so much of it is steel beams, sheet glass and reinforced concrete or finished in synthetic colours and assembled with adhesives and rivets or such is because they were newly available and made what was previously impossible possible. Tie that in with the "truth to materials" attitude from the Arts & Crafts movement and you arrive at a distinctly industrial era aesthetic, both in the sense that the materials are made in a factory and the resulting buildings are often vaguely reminiscent of the factories where the materials were made.
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Your first point is good and sounds reasonable.
Your second point is not clear to me. What is it that caused artists in the modern era to rebel against the tastes of their patrons? Why is it that these rebellious artists, rather than toiling in obscurity, actually became commercial successes with ample patronage?
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 is kind of kicking the can down the road, because we can ask why the taste of patrons changed in the first place - but I'm comfortable saying that peoples' tastes change over time for some exogenous reasons, and sometimes they change for the worse.
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.
There's a very simple solution that I'm honestly surprised no one has voiced. I confess I have neither the knowledge nor rhetoric to conclusively prove this theorem beyond my passionate and amateur interest in house design and architecture, but it basically boils down thusly;
Architecture is heavily invested in Academics. Academics are very political. Therefor, it's reasonable to assume that Architecture is also heavily political and driven by politics.
When you trace 'Modern'(I use capital M for a reason) Architecture back to the Bauhaus movement and the entire reasoning behind it, I feel it becomes very obvious.
Then again, I am clearly biased, as I absolutely loathe Bauhaus and nearly everything it's influenced.
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Two possibilities come to mind for a shift in power towards artists:
Artistic defectors have been shunned for hundreds of years. Off the top of my head, the Vienna Secession and the Exhibit of Rejects both consisted of artists with heterodox styles that couldn't find a place in the academy and had to strike out on their own.
Those are 1897 and 1863. Going purely by the links provided, the Vienna case is angry modernists splitting off from what they considered to be a defunct institution; the Paris case was similar and they got a special exhibit put on for them by the emperor.
Especially in Vienna, this doesn’t look like the academy shunning defectors so much as defectors coordinating to shun the traditional academy. Being less tolerant, they won and took over.
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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.
I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it. The problem is there is nowhere in this country where I could get that even if I wanted to (and the thought of moving to Europe disgusts me).
As long as you don't work in one, you don't have to. As for commercial areas... there's usually not that much housing there and what housing there is, is on the lower end of the market, so you can pay your premium and not look at them all the time. Here is a pretty good example. Ugly, yes. But this is the suburb it's in. Don't want to stare at a "stroad"? Don't live on Route 10. There's lots of other space.
tfw your fellow forum-dweller posts a road that you have walked down multiple times as a "pretty good example" of an "ugly" "'stroad'"On a serious note, I think you mixed up your links, as the first one and the second one are not in the same area.
Sorry, I have no idea why that link goes to Lexington Avenue now. I checked before I posted and it went to the right spot. In fact, when I cut and paste the link from the source it still goes to the right spot. I've replaced it with a Google Maps link to the same place.
The original version of the first link pointed to an unintended location (which apparently varied depending on who clicked on it) because it included multiple tildes, which were misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.
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Yeah, when I hover over the "ugly" link the url says it's in New Jersey, but when I click it takes me to my own neighborhood. Which is several states away from the Garden State.
I figured it out. The first link points to an unintended location because it includes multiple tildes, which are misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.
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I, who have never had a driver's license, find stroads a real pain in the ass. I don't want to think about how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through 20-acre parking lots. God forbid anyone actually put the parking lot in the back, with the store right on the sidewalk like in a real city, and have the main entrance on the sidewalk, and a separate entrance in the rear (supermarkets used to be built like this in the thirties and forties).
Putting parking lot in the back makes little difference. It only matters if you’re already on the street with the front entrance. If you’re a block away, you need to cross the parking lot anyway.
More generally, without a car you are effectively disabled, in the literal sense: not fully able to participate in society in the same way the majority is. Most societies make some accommodations to the disabled, but there are real limits and trade offs involved. For example, people who have trouble walking (which in US is I suspect a bigger group than people without access to a car) typically appreciate a lot being able to drive right to their destination, and park right at the entry.
Point is, it is not clear to me why we should cater to your disability, to the detriment of the majority.
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People don't use that term, but that doesn't mean that people like them. The problem is when people have to spend significant amounts of time looking at the visual equivalent of, as you say, a factory interior, whenever they need to commute or go to the store.
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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.
Because all of that is expensive. Expensive in your own time because you have to go to the store every day instead of once a week; expensive because the shops can't be megastores on relatively cheap land, and instead have to be studio apartments that sell bread or parsnips; expensive because the stores have to get their food delivered somehow, and if there is no road, that has to be done with some alternative, slower, more expensive implement than a truck.
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Let me see you pick up two bags of 25 kg each rice and flour on foot. Or fill a bottle of propane.
No issue on a cargo bike. Also I prefer fresher food that buying tens of kg of food that is meant to be stored for years.
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"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.
It's not that way in Scandinavia, or wasn't when I visited. It's just too bad the US doesn't have the demographics of Denmark.
(deleted and reposted because I posted one level too deep)
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There isn't an inherent reason that public transportation has to be a mobile insane asylum. If we're fantasizing about tearing out stroads, we can throw that into the bargain too.
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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.
The cars came before the crime. Crime on public transit is a deal-breaker in many cases, but public transit has plenty of disadvantages before that. It's not door-to-door or even garage-to-parking lot, so there's a longer walk at each end. You have to wait for it. It has to stop all the time to pick up passengers. Passengers who aren't criminals are still often annoying, talking loudly or playing music or (usually children) crying and screaming. To make bus routes efficient, they tend to be circuitous so they take not only more time but more distance than driving. The target in transit is a "3-seat ride", which means changing vehicles twice with an additional wait each time; lesser destinations either are not served or require even more changes. When ridership is low they cut routes or limit hours; when it's high you end up standing for a long time or waiting for the next bus/train or both.
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I occasionally visit my parents for brunch.
How would you recommend I exercise my supposedly-increased freedom to travel without a car if I wanted to make a 100 km trip to a rural location that isn't on the route between two cities?
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Cars give convenience , which is close enough. Public transportation is slow and a waste of time even if it saves a small amount of fuel. Time wasted waiting for the bus, bus stops, and then walking too and from the stops.
In many cities it is as fast if not faster. Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car. The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.
Which cities?
I just checked my daily commute, and I'd have to leave an hour earlier and get home 45 minutes later if I had to take the bus. I could cut that down to half an hour each if my boss let me change my shift to match the busses, but that's still an hour a day on top of getting that accommodation.
A short drive is faster than a short walk. I've driven to the store literally 400 meters away (280 m as the crow flies) because I was in a rush and driving is faster than running.
You can criticize me for my poor planning, but I confirmed that it was faster by timing my next few trips. It wasn't a lazy misconception or a naive assumption.
That's literally the majority of Americans, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. Are you saying they have a distorted mindset and are factually incorrect? That it's true for them (due to their bad circumstances), but the idea has spread to people it doesn't apply to? Is it a moral judgment?
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Not in any Canadian city, unless you happen to live right next to the trunk. A commute that would take 15 minutes by car ultimately ballooned to an hour by a combination of bus, train, and being on foot.
I would rather commute an hour by car. I can buy a car that is nice (I could even get one where the roof comes off), I don't have to worry about belligerent drunk people, schedules being offset so that the bus departs right before the train arrives for whatever reason, or worry about being stuck out late once the transit system has shut down for the night.
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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.
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.
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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That’s an entirely circular issue. “We chose to cede our cities and public spaces to the underclass and mentally ill drug addicts, so now public transport is scary and unsafe” is a political choice, not an inevitability. There are many countries in which public transport is clean, safe, well-policed and used by all classes except the super rich, even where those very same people have cars or can afford to drive. Long road trips are tiring, and on public transport you can read, work, or relax instead of performing the labor of driving.
That assumes that crime and vagrancy are the reason Americans don't embrace public transport. But these aren't problems everywhere. Pittsburgh transit doesn't have these problems, at least not to the degree that anyone has expressed concern about them. I used to rely on bus lines, including some that served bad neighborhoods, when I lived in the city, and the worst thing I had to deal with was poor people listening to shitty rap music with cheap headphones that didn't contain the sound well. While this may be one of the reasons that some people say it's relatively easy to live here car-free, most people still use their cars to get around, despite the fact that narrow streets and a dearth of easy parking doesn't make driving particularly easy, either.
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If all of the policies that would reverse this state of affair are firmly outside the Overton window, then unfortunately it is an inevitability rather than a choice. The choice was made a long time ago.
What Overton window? If DOGE can dismantle executive agencies at will and we're discussing undoing birthright citizenship and annexing Greenland and Canada, then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?
Mainly because crime is a local issue, not a federal one, and nearly every metro area is firmly under local single-party rule.
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That would be logical, but logic doesn't have much power in the culture wars. Have you seen any evidence that's actually the case?
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We are doing at most one of those things. It may yet turn out to be zero of those things, once the courts have their say. So there's not much reason to believe "let's lock up mentally ill drug addicts" is back on the table.
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And they also are denser or in other ways optimized for public transport. America , except for some cities, has never been optimized in this way.
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Additionally, if most people could walk to their local pub, drunk driving injuries/deaths would be almost nonexistent.
Only if all your friends also live within walking distance, which is unlikely in any case.
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For what it’s worth, Japan did not have the issues with vagrants and crazy people on their trains - instead, we were packed in like sardines with people so close that I couldn’t hold my arms flat against my sides without touching someone (and I was noticeably a foreigner and a man - my sister had it far worse). I’d take time spent in traffic over the subway any day of the week.
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It is a circular issue. But the ceding of America’s public spaces to the Visigoth marauders is something no municipal administration will ever, ever fix. So when sensible Americans hear “we should abolish cars for walkable cities and public transportation” they correctly hear “please step inside the rape tube”
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No, this is a code for: "we want traditional European urbanism without traditional European rule of law"
Close. The issue is that they think they can have European urbanism without a European population.
It’s not the population. Public transport in Addis Ababa is literally cleaner and safer than in LA. It’s solely the rule of law and harsh (or not so harsh) treatment of the vagrant, violent underclass.
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Do you have children? How many people do you need to buy groceries for? Have you ever needed to buy one (or multiple!) sheets of plywood? Do you own your own home, or do you rent an apartment?
Car/stroad haters seem to overwhelmingly be young, childless, apartment-renting city-dwellers. If you somehow aren't, then your critiques make no sense.
I lived in Europe as a missionary for two years. Carried all my shopping by hand either walking or on public transit. It sucked then, and I was 19 to 21 at the time and extremely physically active and only shopping for myself (my companion was carrying his own groceries). It would suck far more now.
lol, on Reddit there is a nearly 1-1 overlap between childfree/fuckcars subs
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I have three sons, do practically all the shopping and I have been doing just fine without a car for the past 4 years. If I lived in a suburb it would probably not be fun but I live in an urban area with a medium sized shop between me and the subway station. An alternative is of course having your groceries delivered, which is still far cheaper than owning a car.
On the rare occasion we actually need a car we just borrow or rent one. We found owning one was excessive for our current needs.
Not always. in the long-run a car is cheaper. You pay a huge premium for delivery.
Not that big a premium. I'd have to buy groceries in excess of $5000 a month for car to just break even with home delivery.
You need other frequent or important uses of the car for it to be remotely economical.
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That probably depends on location? Where I live grocery stores will deliver to you for free if you order more than €40 of food.
Yes, but how much do they charge for smaller orders, and how much do you pay each year to own a car? In the UK we pay £2–4 for delivery of a £40+ order every few weeks (buying the rest of what we need on foot, typically once a day on the way home from the station). Let's say we spend £150/y on delivery (certainly an overestimation). No car can be owned for so little, even if you could get insurance and fuel for free.
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In my big city (indeed the biggest) in Europe, what most people in the middle class and above do is order groceries 1x per week online. Because the city is so dense, the truck makes like 20 stops over a couple of hours and delivery fees are therefore very cheap. I pay $5 a month for unlimited deliveries, and all the groceries are the exact same price as in the store with no additional service charges or fees.
This accounts for all heavy items like detergent and bottled water, bulky bags of potatoes etc. Then for the rest of the week I either walk to the grocery store, deli/butcher or farmer’s market on Sunday (all a maximum of ten minutes’ walk) and get fresh meat/bread/pastries if I want them. This works pretty well and I never feel overburdened.
I could buy all my groceries every day in person with little additional nuisance, because there are multiple grocery stores in the five minute walk between my subway station and home and in the four minute walk between my destination subway station and my office. In that case, like many people, I’d just buy items in smaller purchases instead of once for the week or fortnight. But I prefer planning my meals.
I have family who live out in the suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut. Walking from the parking space to the store, around the huge and not very dense grocery store (since space in big warehouse stroad strip malls is cheap), and then back to the car likely covers a greater distance than many trips to and from (and around) the grocery store in dense cities on foot.
LOL, no. The distance to the furthest spot to the store entrance in my suburban NJ grocery store shopping center is 600 feet. Nobody ever has to park that far away; those particular spots are only used by employees and other far spots are used by people going to other stores that are closer. More typically it's less than half that. Most places in Manhattan are more than 600 feet, never mind the typical lesser distances, from the grocery store. 600 feet is just over two short blocks in Manhattan, and less than a long block.
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I thought i did too, because that was how my mother taught me, but when i stopped it was as if a massive weight came off my shoulders. Now i just shop every other day, buy what's on sale and make something from that. If me or the family happen to crave something specific I can adjust on the day. I plan like 1 meal a week and I love it.
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