[QatzelOk]

Victor Hugo once wrote:
"There are two things in a building: its use and its beauty.
Its use belongs to the owner, her beauty to everyone, To you, to me, to us all."

He wrote this in the 1800s, and it was to defend beautiful old buildings from destruction.

Fast-forward to the post-WW2 era, to Mies Van der Rohe and the highway networks that were built in European cities that were bombed, and North American cities that were destroyed in front of their smiling residents.

"its use belongs to the owner, her beauty to everyone..."

This was the end of altruism. There would be no more beauty "for everyone," and machines would revert to being purely about "use" (machines for living). Only the owner would have any importance.

Likewise, the expression "kill the street" was meant to indicate that communities and cooperation - two things whose beauty belonged to everyone - would be destroyed by cars and ugly suburbs, who only had a "use" for the owners.

Ugly highrise boxes, ugly suburban bungalows, ugly streets. Beauty was no longer important after WW2 because our owners - the 1% - decided that there was no point in giving any beauty to everyone. Beauty just makes everyone think they deserve respect and life quality.

[snapdragon]

It was rather it was thought comfort , warmth and decent sanitation were better than beautiful but bug ridden, insanitary and damp old ruins

As a boy, my father's house was full of bugs, had no running water apart from condensation streaming down the walls and no toilet. There was a tap in the courtyard shared by 30 families.

His home was finally demolished courtesy of the Luftwaffe, and although inconvenient at the time, it was all for the best.

[One Degree]

Random thought entering my mind; The US was so proud of their efficiency in gearing up for WWII that it became a point of national pride. That national pride became the norm for the Western world. Efficiency is all that matters. Did our current world evolve from a prideful moment?

[ness31]

Beauty just makes everyone think they deserve respect and life quality.

☹️ Stop being so ruthlessly cynical you soulless so and so..

I do get what you're saying though. But I think the trend away from the aesthetic was because there was a lack of understanding of the concept. I suspect not grasping this most basic human desire to please the senses with beauty has even effected things like birth rates. I don't think it was malicious..

☹️

[QatzelOk]

It was rather it was thought comfort , warmth and decent sanitation were better than beautiful but bug ridden, insanitary and damp old ruins.

What was publically "said" and what was privately "thought" are two different things.

Like Jane Jacobs, Corbu and Mies and others claimed to have some "amazing new habitat form" that would "revolutionize our lives!!"

But the other reality was that communism, trade unions, and wild notions of "equality for everyone" were products of close-knit communities in inner city neigborhoods.

Robert Moses, while mayor of NYC, destroyed black neigborhoods to build highways, but saved Jewish and WASP neighborhoods. Which is why Jane Jacobs is given so much air time: to pretend that she had something new to say.

Ugly highrise structures and bungalow zones... are both excellent ways to destroy community and to surveil and control movement.

The early modern city-planners were all fascists. And they came from an increasingly paranoid controlling class who were fed up with dealing with confrontation from the poor who lived literally blocks from their homes, offices, and third spaces.

So they shipped working class rats out to the rabbit-cage bungalows of suburbia, inner-city minorities into highrise prisons, and laughed about how they had tricked the prolos into destroying their own social capital - their own communities which had given them so much strenght.

http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/twiki/bi ... ngineering

[MB.]

The post modern asthetic is a kind of celebration of the science-religion, and it's staying power is derived from its undeniable success at creating fantasies. Beyond the terrible failure of modernism in architecture I think we've moved to a new "reality" where the ideal really is possible, although only as a dream fantasy.

Look at this vision of reality as perfected in the game Grand Theft Auto, for example. As has been pointed out by other critics- I won't repeat it here- the fantasy encapsulated in this virtual reality is infinitely more appealing than actual "reality" which is doubly amazing considering that the simulation is a simulation of reality. Zagadka once said he doesn't cream his pants from the "mind blowing real world physics engine" of actual reality, but, tragically, or hopefully, we are now entering the phase where the fantasy is definately more appealing than the reality.

[QatzelOk]

...tragically, or hopefully, we are now entering the phase where the fantasy is definately more appealing than the reality.

And for other people who require other types of fantasies, there are the myriad Pain Management Clinics of Florida - located in the idealized shopping centers of the late 80s.

OxyContin or GTA4. Pick your fantasy because the reality of modern urbanism and architecture is... torture that's been branded as pleasure.

Healthy communities lead to healthy communities. And healthy communities DEMAND equality. Which is why the rich killed our communities and brainwashed us with media. To prevent equality from happening on their watch.

------------

Other Historical Lies Regarding the Built Environment

In the late 19th Century, there was a lot of misery in our inner cities because of income inequality and the resulting atrocities. What did the rich controlling class offer as a solution then? The City Beautiful. They figured the problem was that cities weren't pictoresque enough, and they bankrupted many cities with decorated middle class streets with tramways. But only the violence of the poor got them anywhere. Lovely terra-cotta bricked villas were not, it turns out, the answer.

Of course, after WW2, the rich controlling class had internalized the lessons of earlier times, and they understood that, to stay richer than others, they needed to kill the communities that gave the poor their social strenght. Not just beautify their own hoods and hope for the best.

Which is why modern suburbs and projects are ugly on many levels.

[Donna]

The desire-propaganda of the Simulacrum is also a blind initiator. People need to outgrow it. They need to learn that fulfillment is fleeting. There must be a return to the theological. Only when the human spirit has lifted itself above earthly appetites will humanity be able to imagine - rather than fantasize about - a world beyond capitalism, beyond ideology itself.

[Stormsmith]

The architecture did change at the start of will, and it seems to have stayed that way for a long while afterward, but some of today's houses are quite nice with extensive use of windows, doors, mouldings and indivual blue prints. Pricey, even if you build you own.

[QatzelOk]

The architecture did change at the start of will, and it seems to have stayed that way for a long while afterward, but some of today's houses are quite nice with extensive use of windows, doors, mouldings and indivual blue prints. Pricey, even if you build you own.

Some individual homes are attractive in a stand-alone way. But these houses are usually on streets filled with multiple styles, sizes, and orientations. So the overall look of these neighborhoods is... catolog of housing types. Which is ugly.

And the construction techniques are often as cheap as Hollywood movie sets. So McMansions don't age well.