Dec

21

Chris Alexander on architecture (ugliness, beauty and a lot more) and why it matters to humans. He taught at Berkeley, California. The immediate surrounding (office, residential place) probably also influences how we view the world (even markets). (I always preferred City of London - the old square mile - vs the new Canary Wharf buildings etc.)

Gyve Bones writes:
H.L. Mencken wrote about this in the Baltimore Evening Sun, and the column was included in his Prejudices: Sixth Series (1927):

I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States….Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.

Nils Poertner responds:

imagine people would slow down a bit in their lives and appreciate some of the better architecture (it is not that we don't have it).

Larry Williams differs:

Right! Americans love ugly, hate beauty …that’s why we go to the Grand Canyon, Glacier, Yosemite, the beaches, and have great museums. Mencken must have had a very long nose to look down upon.

William Huggins comments:

Best view on neoism was Chris Beckwith in Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present where he identified the problem as the belief in constant revolution, that there was no future unless the old was destroyed. This morphs into a fetish for the new, regardless of its merit. He clearly loves the classics and hates to communists for their desire to cast aside beauty for revolutionary.


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  1. Mel on December 22, 2023 2:00 pm

    John Betjeman wouldn’t have agreed that all the unlovely towns are in the US… http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/intuition/Slough.html

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