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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   3071 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

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!

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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.

It's ultimately a question of taste, but according to surveys, they have the numbers on their side.

(That's just one of their many nonsensical and ignorant claims. An exhaustive list would be very long.)

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.

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