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I think humans have a deep spiritual need for beauty. For example, the obligation to dress well and take care of oneself isn’t only something we owe to ourselves (and possibly our partners), it’s something we owe to society. The experience of being around beautiful people is aesthetically invigorating. The experience of being surrounded by Walmart fatties is aesthetically painful, demoralizing, bad. It’s an embarrassment that human stock in the world’s richest country is so poor. Even nice Midwestern or Southwestern suburbs built in vernacular styles of which I approve are full of the obese. It is this, not architecture, which must be the primary consideration for any American who cares deeply about aesthetics.
That said, architecture is still important, it’s the most regular form of art (along with interior design, arguably a sub-discipline thereof) that most people encounter. But there’s still a lot of misunderstanding here. The modal American white picket fence suburb is not particularly aesthetically abominable. In some parts of the country (particularly the Northeast and parts of the Northwest, where there are plentiful trees, shade, sidewalks in the suburbs, sometimes even stores and so on that you can walk to) it may even be quite attractive. Single family homes are one of the last domains in which classical pastiche or semi-vernacular (eg. in the Southwest) styles dominate. The problem with suburbs isn’t necessarily that they’re ugly, it’s that they’re deeply atomized and represent an unjustifiable rejection of the way humans have always lived in groups, connected to neighbors and community, where children can roam freely and don’t have to be driven everywhere etc. The epidemic of ugly architecture is much more clearly visible in apartment building, public and corporate/office architecture.
Lastly, there is the issue of squalor as @DaseindustriesLtd said. Squalor is different from architecture, there are old colonial cities in Central America full of beautiful architecture that are largely in a state of squalor, for example, and there are ugly Nordic cities dominated by 20th century modernism and brutalism that are nevertheless very clean and safe. Squalor is the worst issue American cities face, and the most pressing priority, because it includes the homeless issue.
I'm a little confused about what the original aesthetic complaint against the modern west is then. I always read the "Why can't we build anything beautiful anymore" from neoreactionary-types as being followed by a claim that this is caused by something fundamental to our culture and it can't be fixed until the culture is overthrown.
The examples you gave do not seem to fit this---both are very easily fixed by money and you can see this if you walk around any rich part of the west where there is very little squalor and much fewer fat people (well, San Francisco is it's own weird thing, but consider Bay Area suburbs instead---maybe more precisely any part of the west where poverty is excluded). I don't think any culture has done a good job of keeping its poorer parts aesthetically pleasing.
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