It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I have a file in my notetaking program that I've named "mottepost ideas", with things ranging from bullet points to semi-complete drafts of posts to try and finish when I'm in a writing mood and not too frustrated with this place. The problem is that I've also been toying with the idea of trying my hand at real-name blogging for a while - both because I think some of those ideas would be interesting to write up for people I know in real life, and because the idea of attracting more real-life friends with similar interests by public writing is appealing in the abstract - and posting the idea on the Motte first would burn it for using there unless I'm willing to risk self-doxing.
Two entries in that file that I'm pretty okay with burning (because they're low-quality anyway):
Regarding architecture, my pet theory is that modern architecture is optimized to look good from a distance, as from a moving car, or a plane, or as from across the valley from where your residence is, looking into the city center. Whereas traditional architecture is optimized to look good up close, as to a pedestrian.
When viewed briefly from a car window cruising by at 40+ mph, all the architectural detail and texture of traditional architecture becomes muddled and visually pointless.
More options
Context Copy link
Why do you believe modern architecture sucks?
Personal opinion, and I have yet to see anyone disagree in a setting sufficiently anonymous to remove the signalling advantage to disagreeing. (See also that SSC post ("Whither Tartaria?", I think) which cited some statistics suggesting that modern buildings are generally unpopular)
To be clear, I'm talking strictly about the macroscopic aesthetic qualities. I think modern buildings have many advantages in terms of interior space, plumbing, wiring, ventilation, materials, insulation etc.; however I would not even chalk those up to architects, considering that none of the US architecture students I knew seemed to be learning anything to do with this. Rather, as I understood it at the time, the architectural process is now such that the architect comes up with some artistic macroscopic design, and the details of how to turn it into a liveable building that satisfies relevant codes and regulations are worked out by subordinates with actual understanding of construction and physics (Civil or structural engineers?).
I ask because I recently stumbled upon the subreddit /r/architecturalrevival and was greatly annoyed by the ignorance on display. I've been thinking of writing a critique, so when I saw your post, I was interested in hearing what someone who believes modern architecture sucks thinks. The subreddit has no real arguments: the belief that modern architecture sucks is usually implicit, and if it is ever expressed explicitly, it is in a circlejerky manner.
Would you mind sharing your opinion on the Sydney Opera House and the works of Zaha Hadid? This question is inspired by one of the most common complaints on the subreddit, something to the effect of "modern buildings are all just boring concrete and glass boxes", which is plainly false. (That's just one of their many nonsensical and ignorant claims. An exhaustive list would be very long.)
Edit: Other people's opinions are welcome, too.
It ultimately still seems difficult to communicate what exactly makes some objects ugly while others are beautiful in one's eyes, and the general theories of beauty that I've heard about symmetry, structure and surprise all seem to be such that nobody in an even slightly contrarian mood would ever agree to them. Therefore, I see no better option than to resort to the argument from majority revealed preference something like "few people seek out the appearance of these buildings unless they have status to gain from appearing to do so". For my own opinions, though -
Sydney Opera House: I've never seen it in person, but it strikes me as pretty ugly considering for example pictures like the standard Wikipedia one. The bottom part is just plain brutalist concrete with all of the charm of an Atlantic Wall bunker - inhospitable, lacking in symmetry and ornamentation, having an unattractive colour and evoking the general rusty rebar feeling of "if I scrape myself on this, I might get tetanus". I can see the sail-like structure on top as having been a fun gimmick for like the first week after it was built, but a single gimmick like that is bound to get old extremely fast, and especially now that it exhibits clear aging/weathering symptoms that do not agree with the sail theme, it looks like some 1990s Chinese plastic toy that washed up on the beach.
Zaha Hadid: I wasn't too familiar with her work (though I knew that she is a famous architect in the abstract), and some of the pictures of buildings I found actually looked somewhat nice - but (1) for some of them I suspect they have the same gimmick nature as the Sydney Opera House superstructure, where it's fun to look at for a while at first but once you got used to it there is nothing appealing to come back for; there is no detail to get lost in, little that's intrinsically beautiful, and a lot of the design is just gratuitously loud and conspicuous, and it seems designed to draw your attention even after you are already so overfamiliar with the architectural punchline that you derive zero novelty from looking at it again, like the same running gag screamed into your ear repeatedly forever, and (2) many of them might be fine standing isolated in the desert somewhere but are inevitably going to look jarring against any real cityscape, amplifying the "old joke screamed in your ear whether you want it or not" effect. In detail, Guangzhou Opera House, Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Vitra Fire Station all look bad; (the concept art for) Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye Smart City looks quite good; Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base Tower C-1 might be ok; the Beko Building seems okay in isolation but I've been to the location where they're building it and it seems like a travesty to place it between the old castle and the river.
I thought some of the buildings posted on architecturalrevival looked nice, but the place does have an upvote-farming circlejerk nature to it. To be clear, I really don't consider myself a neogothic-or-bust RETVRNer who wishes to roll back architecture in the hope of rolling back society along with it - the Ghibliesque buildings of the quasi-hippie that was Friedensreich Hundertwasser are appealing to me, and even the cheap knockoff Bauhaus style of modern Austrian vernacular architecture is perfectly okay. I really just think that the stuff that self-proclaimed tastemakers sell as akshually award-winning architecture that the plebs are just too crude to appreciate, starting approximately with the Brutalist era (or perhaps Le Corbusier, who had all the hallmarks of actually just being your typical narcissist who gathered a sufficiently big mob of enablers to sybil-attack the social proof system), is terrible.
More options
Context Copy link
Not who you asked, but the sails are good as a skyline piece while the bottom layers of the SOH are a boring block of concrete, so the whole thing looks better from a distance than up close. And looking at the works of Hadid, she reasonably exemplifies the trend of inhuman boxes and blobs of weird shapes which look interesting for 5 seconds but seem in no way to be awe-inspiring, pleasant to be around or part of a beautiful skyline.
Really, this is the essence of the issue for me - a lot of Architecture from the previous century feels designed to impress people looking at it for 5s-5min. Wow, what an unusual design. But buildings are going to be the home or workplace of many people, and part of many more people's daily commute or view. I'd pick any place from the front page of that subreddit over any of Hadid's buildings for this.
More options
Context Copy link
It's ultimately a question of taste, but according to surveys, they have the numbers on their side.
An exhaustive list would still just be a list of exceptions, as far as a cursory glance out my window can tell, and even those exceptions will probably range from "meh" to ugly (which is my opinion on Sydney Opera / Zaha Hadid)
To be clear, I was not talking about a list of every modern building I like, but a list of the subreddit's many nonsensical and ignorant claims, as I said. De gustibus non est disputandum, of course, but these people are claiming their taste is objectively superior and the only reason anyone would disagree is because they're an evil globohomo communist or an evil greedy capitalist. They then have to justify this with the concrete box canard. Everyone certainly would hate modern architecture if it really did consist entirely of boring concrete boxes, but as the examples I mentioned show, this is not the case. No one thinks a forest of Soviet commieblocks looks good, but citing that as an example of modern architecture is a strawman. (Not even a weakman, since these buildings were not designed with appearance in mind at all. They were designed to house as many people as possible as quickly as possible.)
The list would further include conflating modern architecture with modern car-centric urban planning (you can have one without the other), comparing modern-day slums built by amateurs without the involvement of any architects at all to medieval palaces, and much more.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Modern architecture has two things going against it... first schools reward "creativity". So all of the grads from the top schools with top marks like to make buildings that are a little zany.
The other is competing preferences. Locals don't particularly care if their city hall looks like every other city hall. They just want a distinguished looking building for city hall stuff. However architects enjoy travelling and looking at unique buildings. So they have a bias towards weird.
Imagine if every city mayor had to buy all their suits from designs proposed by respected graduates of top fashion schools. Inevitably the mayor of Cincinnati would end up in a hot pink suit with rhinestones simply because that was the most normal looking option offered.
It's been my observation that the "high end" of every creative endeavor turns into a circlejerk between practicioners who sit around creating weird things. I've observed this in various arenas: modern art, cooking, fashion, and so on. My guess is it's because by the time you get to the top, you've spent so much time immersed in the field that you're just profoundly bored of all the normal options. That, and they've probably been done before. So between boredom and the desire to make their mark on the world, these folks compete to outdo each other in creating the weirdest possible things.
Unfortunately, that means that the high end stuff also has completely lost touch with everyone who isn't living and breathing that world. Normal people don't give a flying fuck about some weird avant-garde fashion show garment, they just want normal clothes that look nice. So these art forms wind up kind of sucking compared to what came before, because they're busy wrapped up in their quest for novelty instead of considering what people will actually enjoy.
Also, it seems like the creators don't really recognize their own limits. Everyone wants to be the pioneer who revolutionizes their field with a new creation, but few people actually have the chops to pull that off. I recently was at a restaurant where they had a deconstructed black forest cake. Every element of the traditional cake was done in an alternative way (e.g. cherry sorbet for the cherries, chocolate cake crumbs instead of a sponge cake, etc). It was very creative, but frankly it was just plain worse than a normal black forest cake. That chef would've been better off knowing their limits and just sticking to the classic instead of trying to reinvent it in a creative way. The same goes for many artists, fashion designers, and so on. They just aren't as good as they think they are, and so they make something that is not really very good as they miss greatness.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link