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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Notes -
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.
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