Not only are some of these examples cherry-picked and subjective. Some of them are plain dumb. The wooden lecture hall might look pretty, but whoever is sitting on the sides wouldn't be able to see anything on the blackboard or any projected presentation. The old lamps look nice, but are super inefficient, not only because of the light source used, but also because the pretty shape isn't very good at light distribution. And there are many nice looking modern streetlamps, but the author chose the ugliest concrete abomination he could find. It's not even a fair comparison because the pretty lights are mostly used for illuminating areas meant for pedestrians, meanwhile the ugly modern one (which seems to be 30+ years old anyway) is intended to be used to illuminate roads and so needs to be easier and cheaper to manufacture in bulk. I have an old book of streetlights and I can tell you, lamps like this have always been ugly and minimalistic.

Good thread. But I have mixed feelings on bashing cheapness. If you could travel back in time, the differences between the haves and have nots was more stark than it is today. Cheaper materials allow more people to be housed in a functional home, rather than be stuck in shanty town tents. We still have homelessness, yes, but not nearly as much as we used to. More people live with running water and electricity today than in the past. We only have that because of cost efficiency. The beauty of the Gilded Age had a message of its own- objects were more important than people. No wonder communism started to sprout. More effort was put into a bus garage than safe homes for the bus drivers. There's an argument to be made for ugly, cheap architecture- no object is as beautiful as the people that make/use it. So while I see what this author is saying, I'd take housing a family any day over wrought iron curlicues.

I've worked on quite a few older buildings and they also had their share of ugly. I think a lot of it was budgetary. You may have had enough money for function but not flair.

What these people forget is, at the same time that those beautiful old buildings were being constructed, there were a lot of people crammed into miserable slum dwellings with no electricity or indoor plumbing. So sure, mass produced buildings may lack character, but they give a lot more people a roof over their head that doesn't leak and plumbing that works. Workplaces may be more blah, but they aren't dark, dangerous, and unhealthy for the most part.

The beautiful architecture from 200 years ago was for the elite only. The peasant huts were purely functional.

I'm with him on interior lighting: The grey-ish, flickering, humming, bright flourescent lights in the office are one of the reasons I rather WFH.

I'm going to sound like a philistine but I think the author has lost touch with the common man. Cost has to be considered. Always. Being cheaper and more efficient is not an affront to "art". It is how the common man gets more. The world back then has a fraction of the population today. The economic divide is also far more profound. There are kids that are already destined at birth, to work in the mines for life. It is the efficiency in both cost and labor that narrowed this gap by affording more access to the essentials like food and education. In a way, the older architecture, though aesthetically pleasing, is lavish luxury at a time when we were ignorant enough to think resources will always be plentiful.

Blah. I think Mr. Tutor is confused and confusing. There are many examples of good, design nowadays, and of antique bad design. In common housing, the intentions have been more or less the same since forever. Of course there are things that are too expensive or take too long to buid today. And of course, there are countries / cities with design tradition which put a lot more value on it. You can't compare US design with Italian, Finnish, etc. for example.

Maybe the writer should also mention the no. of times he/she got turned down by corporations, institutions or manufacturers for trying to provide free consultation on aesthetically pleasing and yet cost-effective designs. Oh. Perhaps he/she is just an armchair critic.

Everybody should read Roger Scruton ! And this thread should be sent to the mayor of Paris. Check the hashtag #saccageparis

If we take the great monumental buildings, particularly cathedrals, there's a strong sense of community ownership of the prestige. People wanted to shape them and to be connected with them. Even the Victorians understood this.

I'll be honest - this is why I love seeing graffiti. Cafes with amateur paintings being sold for fifteen bucks. People making scrap sculptures in their front yards. If there's one thing modern, cheap, accessible architecture does really, really well, it's to provide a universal canvas. Your easy, daily resistance against this isn't to make a Tweet, it's to scrawl your 2AM drunk philosophy on a bank wall. It's to buy a dollar store canvas and badly but authentically paint whatever the hell lives in your soul. The world gave us this blank space and fights forever to get us not to use it, which is all the more proof that we should.

The Art Deco movement was focused on having the modern machine-made-and-replicated objects be as beautiful as possible, so that the economies of manufacturing and scale would allow everyone to afford beautiful things in their everyday lives (almost like rich people who could afford to have custom-made things). Problem is, the efforts towards streamlined elegance was streamlined even further into smooth nondescript-ness by the next generation of designers, where somehow elimination of anything aesthetic became its own aesthetic.. Take flatware for eating; the press that shapes them could easily be minting traceries of design onto every piece, rather than just pressing them flat and polished, but flat and polished will definitely sell while multiple designs involve complications of inventory, distribution, retail, and people's taste.

Among the examples the author gives, that one about the interior lighting is where he nose dives and crashes. The amount of light in a space, how it is distributed, its suitability to the function of the space and the color temperature are all important in lighting comfort of a space. You can have the best looking, most efficient light fixtures, can use LED light sources, and still have too much blinding light with the wrong color temperature and be miserable in an environment. This is an issue where a little knowledge of lighting criteria goes a long way even in the face of ugly capitalism. 1/3

The rich have decided the poor don't deserve beauty.

I don't understand when building, why one would build ugly when building beautiful would cost close to the same. Same amount of material, same nails, same hammer. Same with automobiles. Same amount of metal, Why stamp metal an ugly curve, when you can stamp metal a lovely curve. Makes no sense to me.

The last tweet sums it up totally. Esoteric "but we no longer value beauty" is hogwash. It's as ancient a phrase as "kids these days don't have respect". Nope, it's all about industrial efficiency.