i drive through ugliness every day on my way to work. i get angry every other day (numb the days between), but also understand that i am complicit in the creation of this ugliness, having accepted a job in an industrial park outside the urban ring road despite the fact that i live in the city.
a friend of mine lost his job at a large corporate fast food company a few years ago and made what seemed like a risky decision to move to italy. his wife finished her art history phd while there and he used his severance package to learn how to make and serve gelato. they now have a 3mo/yr gelato business here in the states and live the rest of the year in a small town in italy.
when asked recently whether they would move back, answer 1 was, 'that would be too easy!'. the life they've created for themselves is dodgy, financially unstable, and difficult to sustain.
but answer 2, two beats later, was, 'no. it's just so ugly here and so beautiful there. how could you give up a life of such beauty once you've experienced it, even if it is more difficult?'
...which has made me even more determined to figure out: what can we do to turn the tide? how can we combat the extreme ugliness that we are making, building, buying, leaving every day? i'm not talking sustainability here in the normal sense, though there are certainly sustainability implications in making the choice to live in a place we haven't used up and thrown away.
i was told at breakfast on sunday that it's simply unattainable. a single person has no power against the flow of vinyl siding, asphalt, cooking grease, and gatorboard signs at intersections. [sigh]
with less than 3% of billings for construction in the A/E/C industries, it is hard to see how architects will have much of a difference in terms of typical practice. however, if we are truly motivated by this issue (and its associated issues) architects have to get more involved with the actual decisions in terms of policy and planning. (i am afraid that architects are merely the decorators of codes, policies, and proformas made elsewhere AND we seem entirely content in doing that.)
when we assume occurs in the configuration of a plan or a facade, we have missed the boat. if we want to ammend the tipped-over trash can that we call out cities, we have to drop our mytholiges about design and deisgners.
it is always easier to do nothing or move to italy though.
Your post hits on many levels. There is the visual (jesus, that's just BAD), the environmental (vinyl does NOT decompose!!!), and the spatial (o lawd, we are gonna run outta space!)
I just try to:
a) ignore alot of it- and try to think "to each his/ her own"
b) live my own life thinking about the consequences of what you speak about above
c) live in a place that I consider beautiful, or visually interesting at the least.
d) try to do work that is the same
e) get involved somehow to do something.
f) i try not to drive.
g) wonder if i should be in the constructing world, and instead in the recycle world or something
Its tough. I also put myself in the shoes of others with differnet occupations, such as a dietician (sp) for example. If I was one, it would probably drive me crazy to see all these heavy dinners walking around eating mcdonalds, etc.
There is only so much you can do, and your passions influence what you see and what you think the world should be like.
But I hear ya, its like trying to stop the ocean from lapping up to the beach.
I think most people don't know or really care about the visual, that's our cross to bear. For others its what they hear, or worrying about how others spend money.
What bothers me most are the people that are just completely disregarding that decisions they make impact many things for our generation and the next.
" It is men, provided they are really men, who make and unmake history... “Keep your eye on just one thing: to remain on your feet in a world of ruins.
what sort of tide would you turn it into though? i am not sure empowering gehries and morphosises to build more in place of little capitalist boxes with parking lots will make it florence like and trying to make it florence might make it into a las-vegas kind of ugly (or pretty if you see it that way). if ugly is what you have, then u can't always dismantle ugly or dress it with a paper thin veneer i guess. its more interesting to use it as a base, as in the more thoughful side of industrial buildings/estates conservation.
tk- is the latter not a form of the former? banality/homogenization in the form of good attractive thoughtful environments would be fine. it's the ubiquity of the lcd factor, though, gives us thoughtLESS development in the form of willy-nilly asphalt and dressed-up steel sheds for every purpose as far as the eye can see - with development-code-required landscape buffers, of course.
(i also am consistently amazed that the industrial park in which my office is situated - a place chock full of engineering firms - has such poor civil engineering that it won't drain for days after a rainfall.)
Maybe that view up top is like the Tom Waits of architecture in comparison to Italy's Rossini?
I mean, Tom Waits has a certain charm if you're in the right mood and there's boring bits to Rossini's operas.
I mean, Italy ain't all beautiful: it's got its fair share of edge of town stuff too: go to Venice then see neighbouring Mestre, for example. Admittedly, though, Italians do have this awesome sense of visual style...
But without crappy road architecture there'd be no nighthawks at the diner.
but then again, the representation of those spaces reveals the removed solipsist unprettily objective beauty. italian neo-realist films moved from the realist seeing the poor, the pathetic, the rundown ie ugly to a fetishism of seeing the poor and the pathetic ie the alienating beauty. where do u draw the line between the beautiful and the ugly?
if there were away to affect the attitudes of people, make them not want to accept ugly, there may not be a need to draw a line. people's tastes vary, obviously, but if the question of ugly-or-not is at least brought to bear in every development decision, you'd get somewhere without having to draw that line.
Steven- maybe a small town is in order? Some might call it a cop out or escapism, and you'll still have all of the same issues. But it's on a scale that can be managed, and one person CAN make a difference. The trick is finding the right one- a community that shares your (design) values and is open to your sense of beauty interacting with and improving their's. You won't be changing the whole world, you'll just be choosing a small corner to call your 'everyday' world, and you'll be able to make as much of a difference as you have the energy for. But I've never been much of a city guy (love to visit, but then love to leave), so if you thrive on the city this will never work for you.
since i grew up in a town of 500, i know where you're comin' from, fro. i have, for better or worse, adopted city life.
i get just as frustrated in small towns anyway. the general rural attitude that it's much easier to pave the whole area in front of your store rather than maintain any landscape, yielding no separation between parking lot and street for 100' frontage. the use of bastardized colonial for ANY building type. a lot of our projects are in rural counties and it's heartbreaking because i know that my little town (which i haven't visited since the early 90s) has probably been treated as badly as these places have.
no, in fact, it's in urban neighborhoods that work that i still have hope.
there's big box ugly, strip mall ugly, block after block of strip mall ugly, suburban tract house ugly, fast food ugly, suv ugly, fat nascar ugly, trucker hat ugly, dive bar ugly, wall street ugly, thug ugly, oma ugly, frank gehry ugly, peter eisenman ugly, emergent ugly...its fugly out there...
to start off, just a quote which at the time i found particularly enlightening:
'people spends their lives in jobs they hate to buy shit they don't need'. (fight club)
I also struggle with the idea that i find myself complicit with a system with which i often disagree. One has to put bread on the table after all, but it is true that sometimes the level of compromission seems too high a personal price to pay. This is a very paradoxical situation, how can we be at the same time part of system and also succeed in influencing some of the decision process that shapes it? True, a single person has no power against the system, however i firmly believe that some simple individual actions added collectively can change our environement (by environment i mean social, urban, professional etc.) and in the long term, improve it.
Last summer i decided to go and work for a small, up and coming company. This means that i now work much longer hours for the same amount of money, but that's a concession i was ready to make as my previous company was doing crap work and i did not believe in what i was doing there at all. I felt truly depressed for playing a role in the design of a number of architectural horrors which eventually made my position there untenable and prompted my resignation. i feel quite happy about that move now.
I travel by public transports and I don't own a car (not because i'm against cars but i don't need one and being european i believe that european cities were never designed with the car in mind, no wonder they are constantly congested these days...). I rent a car when i need to leave London, it's just as easy. I try to recycle as much stuff as possible. Before bying something i ask myself the question if i really need it. I don't see myself as a model citizen (far from it) and i would hate to be seen as preaching but we all have to start somewhere and as individuals in a free society we can all make our own informed decisions and to a certain extent refuse to be part of things we don't believe in (whatever they might be).
From last Friday's page-a-day calendar:
"I think it's really important to maintain a positive attitude. It might not solve all your problems, but keep it up long enough and it will piss off enough people to make it worthwhile." Margot Black
Steven, usually you are the optimistic one! The world is not going to hell in a hand-basket.
Think of how the beautiful old industrial areas of the 1890's intrigue us (me) today. Can't we find beauty in the uncommon?
When I saw that picture in the Gallery, Steven, I also was struck by its ugliness and the fact that big box retailers do this so often: they destroy a piece of land, use it for a few years, then move on to another piece of land and leave an asphalt crumbling lot behind.
One of the things I've mentioned here before is that I put together a proposal to teach an "architecture appreciation" class at my local art center. The general ugliness of the built (strip) environment would be a big topic for me in this class (if it gets approved, which I haven't heard about yet). I do think most people just don't see how ugly things are, because it is the norm. I am as guilty of this as many people - despite having studied urban design issues intensely when I was in undergrad, when I came back from six months in Europe I was totally overwhelmed at how truly ugly the strip environment in our country is.
But even on a small scale, I think people just have no basic training in visual harmony. All those pictures of bad holiday decorations on modern buildings that I posted in the Best of 2006 thread are proof of that: people might see a cute wreath, but have no notice of the fact that it is out of scale, unevenly hung in a spot that makes no sense, and cheaply made of plastic. We see discreet objects, not overall context, and that overall view is what is so depressing.
But Strawbeary's point is really interesting. Can suburban strips ever be seen as beautiful relics of an exciting past?
I disagree with switters whilst architects may only take 3% (sometimes more ;) we are administer 100% and perhaps more to things that have no measure. And here I'm refering to our works as the intevention. I'm of course not taking a glib view of things - but we have the ability to uplife our communities and it is perhaps more than that being our professional responsibility
Aestheticize it. Late afternoon light on a big blank wall, a tangle of powerlines against the sky, a line of tailights after an early winter evening ... there are always these moments in environments like these that are the more exciting and novel because they haven't been planned or designed by anyone intentionally, they just are.
Or look for the hidden patterns and systems that underlie the apparent thoughtlessness and accumulation of seen things: the intricate movements of logistics and distribution that gets all that stuff from around the planet to the local big box, the webwork of politics, economics and social reality that's constructed to support invisible zoning patterns that feed this kind of growth.
The only way to change your perceptions about your immediate environment is to see more things, awareness of the hidden and the invisible can make the banality of the immediately apparent come to life, and you can convince yourself that you love what you hate, which is sometimes the only way to stay sane.
This may be why people think I'm tuned out to much of life, but it's what I have to do to get by. I'm either completely tuned out, or searching for the smallest scrap of beauty anywhere it might be.
oddly enough, the only thing you really need to do is move to someplace that you like, or that you think is beautiful.
this kind of reminds me of one of the old lessons from my sales career. there's lots of things that are important to do but you need to look past them and stick to the key tasks. on the one hand, yes, money is important...but then on the other hand it sounds to me like your friends in italy have identified one of their keys, that is, to live someplace they feel is beautiful
since i no longer have a car, i rarely deal with much of the sprawl & its latent "ugliness" but back in the day when i used to commute to work one of my favorite coping techniques was just to scream while i was driving around in my car. literally, i used to just scream my lungs out as much as possible. it just seemed absurd to me that no one else could hear this. and i liked to imagine that maybe everyone else was screaming too.
One comment related to 765's comment: I grew up in the west, and now live in the midwest. I've had to adjust my appreciation of the natural environment away from basking under the hulking immovable mountain on the horizon to seeking tiny quiet moments: low sun on bare treetops, lovely fall colors, ducks.
But appreciating the bits of beauty one can find in an otherwise aggravating and demeaning landscape can only sustain one for so long.
puddles, I did scream too!
at 70 mph you can truly scream your lungs out and I thought that was pervesely beautiful because nowhere else I could be so completely alone.
but I no longer have a car and I don't need to scream anymore either.
Architects are usually in absentee or play the advocate for the developer when it comes to the very boring and very unglamorous policy decisions in local government. The people that fills the voids to make these very real decisons are citizens made up of insurance brokers, school teachers, lawyers, and other people who are generally not trained in planning first and foremost, let alone in the architectual nuances of what constitutes as beauty and ugliness. If you want things to change around you...you can't expect others to do it.
There is so much I would like to add to this discussion, but I feel that this in a way is tied to all of the other blogo-bitch sessions that seem to occur on Archinect. In the end, I think we as a professional group are not capable of taking care of our own business. We just can't decide what to call ourselves, we can't seem to convince anyone to compensate us more, and we can't seem to have any real influence on the poor planning and development decisions that go on around us...just to name a few.
I don't think these are problems. I think that are symptoms of a profession that is dying and completely irrelevent to the society that WE THINK we contribute to.
"I think people just have no basic training in visual harmony" liberty bell
but does it not go deeper than a consequential visual disharmony or perception psychology? you don't just expect someone to change the expression on their face simply because deem it not pretty, no matter how many feel-good tapes she has or occasional sojourns to venice and barcelona she takes. a box and a parking lot are (seen to be) the most 'economical' expression of consumerism that is really no longer just an american cartel. the ugliness is not only seen, it is part of the rubric of a life which turns the city into a bigger factory. now a factory in itself is not of course a bad thing, that depends on the owner
and in the american context of things, i can't help but imagine the non-natives that came in and took over land, they took it so much ... the sins of the fathers and all.
you don't just expect someone to change the expression on their face simply because deem it not pretty
noctilucent, I'm not sure I know what you are getting at, but it makes me think of how things are beautiful for reasons beyond the visual (so I may be shooting my own previous argument in the foot, here.) When I see a person laughing in absolute gleeful joy - showing real happiness on their face - that is beautiful, regardless of the "visual harmony" of the actual face. Similarly, corrugated metal siding on a building that is, let's say, in the inner city, built with green technologies, on a lot that had been vacant and full of garbage, with the intent of being a contributing member of the social and physical landscape for the long-term - that corrugated siding is more beautiful then the same material on an exurban WalMart.
Strip development offends me both visually and consciously, I guess is my point, but now I have to get to work so I can't carry the thought any further.
Darnit, well, I tried posting an image, but I guess I don't know the trick yet...
Steven, I think this is a good question, and it hit home for me too. I live in the city of Cambridge, Ontario, where my school of architecture founded a satellite campus a few years ago, and I too get angry quite often at the environment. It's mostly a sprawling industrial town and bedroom community that was poorly planned and features as its crowning disaster Hespeler Road/Highway 24, an anarchical stretch of big-box stores, parking lots and business signs that serves as the effective "main street". Within this mess, though, are the cores of 3 towns, Preston, Hespeler, and Galt, that the provincial government amalgamated together in the 60's or 70's to form Cambridge.
The school is located in Galt, by far the most beautiful of the 3 old towns - or at least, it once was. Galt is a Scottish town founded along a river in a valley that became an industrial centre in the late 1800's, and it still bears a number of beautiful buildings that demonstrate the pride that was clearly felt for this place at one time. Nevertheless, since the amalgamation of Cambridge, a number of beautiful buildings and factories in old Galt have been torn down, replaced by parking lots, cheap vinyl-clad garbage, or some disastrously ugly (and now empty) malls. Many yards have been asphalted over, and 2 flophouses have been emptied out in as many years (most recently, the one "hotel" near my house suffered a fire). Some buildings have been well-maintained and many restored, but several others languish, and the town is pock-marked with empty lots. This is not to mention the problems of poverty, drug abuse and poor mental and physical health at a scale I find shocking for a city of only 100,000.
Meanwhile, a lot of the locals just don't seem to get it; the city is building a fairly sensitively-inserted Civic Admin. Building (can't they just call it a City Hall?) in Galt by a very good firm, and though the mayor and council may not have done the best job of approving this project, a lot of the local griping about the project shows a lack of vision (it eliminates a parking lot, it costs money, it's "too close" to historic buildings, why is it in Galt and not along Hespeler Road?). A lot of people here seem to be blind to the visual and social problems in Galt; most people seem to think that more parking lots are necessary (I seldom see a full parking lot in Galt), and that if it's slightly run-down, it's just not worth keeping. Cambridge frequently appears as a tragic mess, and often I get infuriated walking around this city and seeing how much beauty is ruined by crap. One of the justifications for the School moving here was the architectural lessons offered by Galt. I often can't help but feel that the lesson here is the futility of building beautiful architecture.
I think there's some possibility in recovering the civic pride that once made places like Galt, though it is a bigger task than any single architect can perform. However, although we can blame politicians and developers and private businesses for a lot, the fact remains that architects are also complicit in much of what has happened. I am NOT a Howard Roark hero-type, nor do I like that paradigm at all, but I sense that if more architects stood up for the quality of the buildings they produced, rather than throw their hands up in dismay at their clients and worry that they'll never earn a fee again if they even suggest something better, things might start to change. The forces of banality are formidable, but has it occured to anyone that when we shrug our shoulders and "give in", that's EXACTLY what a lot of those who hire us want us to do? I mean, if enough of us put our foot down, it may not suddenly fix everything, but people might start to take us seriously. This is also contingent, though, on architects actually delivering beautiful buildings, which frankly we may not all be prepared to do.
This can't address everything, since not all buildings even involve an architect; cultural changes need to occur as well. But how can a broad discussion about the visual environment occur when all but a small number of the very guardians and experts of that beauty seem apathetic about it? If most architects are willing to accept the cynical lie that beauty is a hindrance to wealth and efficiency, when architects are willing to produce lame projects rather than pursue any ambition no matter how much they may really care if you talk to them, then why should the general public act differently? Pride requires inspiration, and we need to somehow inspire them for more - and I think it's possible to do it while paying the bills and not relying on slave interns.
Sorry for the long post. So much for my New Year's resolution to be more pithy!
Two brothers - one a hopeless pessimist, the other a helpless optimist.
Its Christmas, and the Pessimist received a hundred gifts of all sizes from his family and friends to try to cheer him up. The optimist received a sack of shit.
Optimist: "Hey brother, what did you get for christmas?".
Pessimist: "Well I must be dying of a deathly disease that everyone else knows about and wont tell me because I'm disliked by everyone - I got too many gifts...", says the Pessimist. "Why, what did you get?"
Optimist says "A horse, but he's hiding somewhere around here!"
alright, i just wanted to open up with that joke.
optimism is directly related to my opinion however, so i guess it applies. yasee, i live in a part of new jersey that never quite survived the late 70's in terms of....well everything. i work in nyc/Stat Isle, and everyday i have to trudge through my route looking at both urban and suburban "sacks of shits" on the way. The issue here is that we as architects were given the misfortune of being able to decipher very quickly the quality of construction in conjunction with the amount of necessity for certain "architectural" features of homes (sans: doric columns on a mcmansion) and compare that to the beauty of the project as a whole. while most people may just say "oooh - its a nice biig house with little bricks just on the front and a chimnay!", we see....well, a mcmansion with a faux-brick facade. and we know whats in it and what could have been bought/made with the same (usually less) budget the buyer paid for it.
and i agree with lb "visual harmony" is something that the public lacks in understanding. what i disagree with lb is trying to "teach" this, for its an inherent sense of balance and scale that is one of the most difficult things to comprehend without having it already.
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I considerchallenging<i>, or visually interesting at the least."</>
and with challenging, i could at least raise more awareness that we're here not only to please the public's eye and make one smile in admiration, but to make it wince a little and make the mind question why it is that they've accepted anything lesser.
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I consider challenging, or visually interesting at the least."
some interesting new comments to which i want to respond but can't at the moment. thehoule mentioned parking, though, so i'll drop this:
alex krieger wrote, in his piece in the collection of writings that came out of one of the mayors' institute shindigs, that the perception will always be that there is never enough parking until everyone can park in the spot right by the front door. i think he's brilliant.
that said, louisville's metro area has over 8 parking spaces for every car.
I guess one could be like Paulo Solari, and find a vacant piece of Desert and Destroy it with a new mega community. I recall everyone saying this place is so cool......it is the future.....well what happened to the future.....pretty damn ugly when you turn around and look at it from the desert. The empty desert in all its harshness is damn beautiful and should be left alone.
noctilucent's observations were interesting - a kind of relativism of ugliness - but i think liberty's response is where i'm coming from.
there is the 'less nice' that comes from neglect, entropy, outdatedness, etc. sometimes a loved place can be down-trodden but you can tell that it is a place that is loved, or at least that is hospitable to people. this is what you see in a lot of the urban community.
then there is what i was originally referring to as the ugly development of the exurban landscape - the stuff that was made the way it is on purpose, but with little regard for quality of life. the 80'/80'/80' traffic triangle by which i stop for a redlight every morning could easily have been a permeable surface: grass, landscape, or otherwise. instead it's asphalt because it's cheaper and easier and 'who would care?' so it collects glass from thrown bottles, cigarette butts, shiny red plastic and reflective glass from car lights after accidents, hub caps...
if i took a series of pictures of urban decay and exurban car-focused development and showed them side by side, i think you'd see that a under-maintained storefront is still about people and the traffic triangle described above is against people. ironically, both are places where pedestrians try to walk. guess in which place they are safer: city or suburb?
There are pedestrians in the suburbs? I thought those people were just "what the hell are they doing out heres".
I read a book not too long ago by Joel Garreau:
[url=http://www.link.com] edge city
[/http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/dp/0385424345/sr=1-1/qid=1168002190/ref=sr_1_1/104-1618229-4817566?ie=UTF8&s=books]
I used to see the suburbs, especially the exurbs as a wasteland, now I TRY to look at is as a project in process.
It also made me realize that if I want to change anything I have to become a huge developer. And that aint happening anytime soon.
ugliness
i drive through ugliness every day on my way to work. i get angry every other day (numb the days between), but also understand that i am complicit in the creation of this ugliness, having accepted a job in an industrial park outside the urban ring road despite the fact that i live in the city.
a friend of mine lost his job at a large corporate fast food company a few years ago and made what seemed like a risky decision to move to italy. his wife finished her art history phd while there and he used his severance package to learn how to make and serve gelato. they now have a 3mo/yr gelato business here in the states and live the rest of the year in a small town in italy.
when asked recently whether they would move back, answer 1 was, 'that would be too easy!'. the life they've created for themselves is dodgy, financially unstable, and difficult to sustain.
but answer 2, two beats later, was, 'no. it's just so ugly here and so beautiful there. how could you give up a life of such beauty once you've experienced it, even if it is more difficult?'
...which has made me even more determined to figure out: what can we do to turn the tide? how can we combat the extreme ugliness that we are making, building, buying, leaving every day? i'm not talking sustainability here in the normal sense, though there are certainly sustainability implications in making the choice to live in a place we haven't used up and thrown away.
i was told at breakfast on sunday that it's simply unattainable. a single person has no power against the flow of vinyl siding, asphalt, cooking grease, and gatorboard signs at intersections. [sigh]
gotta go to work.
steven,
with less than 3% of billings for construction in the A/E/C industries, it is hard to see how architects will have much of a difference in terms of typical practice. however, if we are truly motivated by this issue (and its associated issues) architects have to get more involved with the actual decisions in terms of policy and planning. (i am afraid that architects are merely the decorators of codes, policies, and proformas made elsewhere AND we seem entirely content in doing that.)
when we assume occurs in the configuration of a plan or a facade, we have missed the boat. if we want to ammend the tipped-over trash can that we call out cities, we have to drop our mytholiges about design and deisgners.
it is always easier to do nothing or move to italy though.
i feel your pain, Steven.
nothing more to add at the moment.
Steven,
Dude, I totally catch what your throwin.
Your post hits on many levels. There is the visual (jesus, that's just BAD), the environmental (vinyl does NOT decompose!!!), and the spatial (o lawd, we are gonna run outta space!)
I just try to:
a) ignore alot of it- and try to think "to each his/ her own"
b) live my own life thinking about the consequences of what you speak about above
c) live in a place that I consider beautiful, or visually interesting at the least.
d) try to do work that is the same
e) get involved somehow to do something.
f) i try not to drive.
g) wonder if i should be in the constructing world, and instead in the recycle world or something
Its tough. I also put myself in the shoes of others with differnet occupations, such as a dietician (sp) for example. If I was one, it would probably drive me crazy to see all these heavy dinners walking around eating mcdonalds, etc.
There is only so much you can do, and your passions influence what you see and what you think the world should be like.
But I hear ya, its like trying to stop the ocean from lapping up to the beach.
I think most people don't know or really care about the visual, that's our cross to bear. For others its what they hear, or worrying about how others spend money.
What bothers me most are the people that are just completely disregarding that decisions they make impact many things for our generation and the next.
I am going to think about this all day....
Hey Steven,....
" It is men, provided they are really men, who make and unmake history... “Keep your eye on just one thing: to remain on your feet in a world of ruins.
--"Men among the Ruins" , Baron Julius Evola
...we are ugly but we have the music.
...in our own cars, driven alone, four songs each way (unless there's traffic, in which case we get more songs).
what sort of tide would you turn it into though? i am not sure empowering gehries and morphosises to build more in place of little capitalist boxes with parking lots will make it florence like and trying to make it florence might make it into a las-vegas kind of ugly (or pretty if you see it that way). if ugly is what you have, then u can't always dismantle ugly or dress it with a paper thin veneer i guess. its more interesting to use it as a base, as in the more thoughful side of industrial buildings/estates conservation.
is it uglyness
-or-
banality/homoginazation of the lowest common denominator that is the true war?
morphoses, huh?
tk- is the latter not a form of the former? banality/homogenization in the form of good attractive thoughtful environments would be fine. it's the ubiquity of the lcd factor, though, gives us thoughtLESS development in the form of willy-nilly asphalt and dressed-up steel sheds for every purpose as far as the eye can see - with development-code-required landscape buffers, of course.
(i also am consistently amazed that the industrial park in which my office is situated - a place chock full of engineering firms - has such poor civil engineering that it won't drain for days after a rainfall.)
people in their cars are too busy talkin on the phone to notice the ugliness around them...
Maybe that view up top is like the Tom Waits of architecture in comparison to Italy's Rossini?
I mean, Tom Waits has a certain charm if you're in the right mood and there's boring bits to Rossini's operas.
I mean, Italy ain't all beautiful: it's got its fair share of edge of town stuff too: go to Venice then see neighbouring Mestre, for example. Admittedly, though, Italians do have this awesome sense of visual style...
But without crappy road architecture there'd be no nighthawks at the diner.
isn't it the job of car designers to make us not care what is outside of the car?
but then again, the representation of those spaces reveals the removed solipsist unprettily objective beauty. italian neo-realist films moved from the realist seeing the poor, the pathetic, the rundown ie ugly to a fetishism of seeing the poor and the pathetic ie the alienating beauty. where do u draw the line between the beautiful and the ugly?
if there were away to affect the attitudes of people, make them not want to accept ugly, there may not be a need to draw a line. people's tastes vary, obviously, but if the question of ugly-or-not is at least brought to bear in every development decision, you'd get somewhere without having to draw that line.
Steven- maybe a small town is in order? Some might call it a cop out or escapism, and you'll still have all of the same issues. But it's on a scale that can be managed, and one person CAN make a difference. The trick is finding the right one- a community that shares your (design) values and is open to your sense of beauty interacting with and improving their's. You won't be changing the whole world, you'll just be choosing a small corner to call your 'everyday' world, and you'll be able to make as much of a difference as you have the energy for. But I've never been much of a city guy (love to visit, but then love to leave), so if you thrive on the city this will never work for you.
since i grew up in a town of 500, i know where you're comin' from, fro. i have, for better or worse, adopted city life.
i get just as frustrated in small towns anyway. the general rural attitude that it's much easier to pave the whole area in front of your store rather than maintain any landscape, yielding no separation between parking lot and street for 100' frontage. the use of bastardized colonial for ANY building type. a lot of our projects are in rural counties and it's heartbreaking because i know that my little town (which i haven't visited since the early 90s) has probably been treated as badly as these places have.
no, in fact, it's in urban neighborhoods that work that i still have hope.
there's big box ugly, strip mall ugly, block after block of strip mall ugly, suburban tract house ugly, fast food ugly, suv ugly, fat nascar ugly, trucker hat ugly, dive bar ugly, wall street ugly, thug ugly, oma ugly, frank gehry ugly, peter eisenman ugly, emergent ugly...its fugly out there...
Great post
to start off, just a quote which at the time i found particularly enlightening:
'people spends their lives in jobs they hate to buy shit they don't need'. (fight club)
I also struggle with the idea that i find myself complicit with a system with which i often disagree. One has to put bread on the table after all, but it is true that sometimes the level of compromission seems too high a personal price to pay. This is a very paradoxical situation, how can we be at the same time part of system and also succeed in influencing some of the decision process that shapes it? True, a single person has no power against the system, however i firmly believe that some simple individual actions added collectively can change our environement (by environment i mean social, urban, professional etc.) and in the long term, improve it.
Last summer i decided to go and work for a small, up and coming company. This means that i now work much longer hours for the same amount of money, but that's a concession i was ready to make as my previous company was doing crap work and i did not believe in what i was doing there at all. I felt truly depressed for playing a role in the design of a number of architectural horrors which eventually made my position there untenable and prompted my resignation. i feel quite happy about that move now.
I travel by public transports and I don't own a car (not because i'm against cars but i don't need one and being european i believe that european cities were never designed with the car in mind, no wonder they are constantly congested these days...). I rent a car when i need to leave London, it's just as easy. I try to recycle as much stuff as possible. Before bying something i ask myself the question if i really need it. I don't see myself as a model citizen (far from it) and i would hate to be seen as preaching but we all have to start somewhere and as individuals in a free society we can all make our own informed decisions and to a certain extent refuse to be part of things we don't believe in (whatever they might be).
From last Friday's page-a-day calendar:
"I think it's really important to maintain a positive attitude. It might not solve all your problems, but keep it up long enough and it will piss off enough people to make it worthwhile." Margot Black
Steven, usually you are the optimistic one! The world is not going to hell in a hand-basket.
Think of how the beautiful old industrial areas of the 1890's intrigue us (me) today. Can't we find beauty in the uncommon?
When I saw that picture in the Gallery, Steven, I also was struck by its ugliness and the fact that big box retailers do this so often: they destroy a piece of land, use it for a few years, then move on to another piece of land and leave an asphalt crumbling lot behind.
One of the things I've mentioned here before is that I put together a proposal to teach an "architecture appreciation" class at my local art center. The general ugliness of the built (strip) environment would be a big topic for me in this class (if it gets approved, which I haven't heard about yet). I do think most people just don't see how ugly things are, because it is the norm. I am as guilty of this as many people - despite having studied urban design issues intensely when I was in undergrad, when I came back from six months in Europe I was totally overwhelmed at how truly ugly the strip environment in our country is.
But even on a small scale, I think people just have no basic training in visual harmony. All those pictures of bad holiday decorations on modern buildings that I posted in the Best of 2006 thread are proof of that: people might see a cute wreath, but have no notice of the fact that it is out of scale, unevenly hung in a spot that makes no sense, and cheaply made of plastic. We see discreet objects, not overall context, and that overall view is what is so depressing.
But Strawbeary's point is really interesting. Can suburban strips ever be seen as beautiful relics of an exciting past?
drink more
urban beer goggles
MDLER: [3D URBAN BEER GOGGLES]
I disagree with switters whilst architects may only take 3% (sometimes more ;) we are administer 100% and perhaps more to things that have no measure. And here I'm refering to our works as the intevention. I'm of course not taking a glib view of things - but we have the ability to uplife our communities and it is perhaps more than that being our professional responsibility
Aestheticize it. Late afternoon light on a big blank wall, a tangle of powerlines against the sky, a line of tailights after an early winter evening ... there are always these moments in environments like these that are the more exciting and novel because they haven't been planned or designed by anyone intentionally, they just are.
Or look for the hidden patterns and systems that underlie the apparent thoughtlessness and accumulation of seen things: the intricate movements of logistics and distribution that gets all that stuff from around the planet to the local big box, the webwork of politics, economics and social reality that's constructed to support invisible zoning patterns that feed this kind of growth.
The only way to change your perceptions about your immediate environment is to see more things, awareness of the hidden and the invisible can make the banality of the immediately apparent come to life, and you can convince yourself that you love what you hate, which is sometimes the only way to stay sane.
7-6-5 you sound like dr. zhivago ago-go!
I just try to tune it out.
This may be why people think I'm tuned out to much of life, but it's what I have to do to get by. I'm either completely tuned out, or searching for the smallest scrap of beauty anywhere it might be.
vado - I don't know Zhivago, had to look him up, I'm more of a Strangelove fan myself.
i'll have oneJulie Christie please....
i thought this was a thread about garpike...sorry
oddly enough, the only thing you really need to do is move to someplace that you like, or that you think is beautiful.
this kind of reminds me of one of the old lessons from my sales career. there's lots of things that are important to do but you need to look past them and stick to the key tasks. on the one hand, yes, money is important...but then on the other hand it sounds to me like your friends in italy have identified one of their keys, that is, to live someplace they feel is beautiful
since i no longer have a car, i rarely deal with much of the sprawl & its latent "ugliness" but back in the day when i used to commute to work one of my favorite coping techniques was just to scream while i was driving around in my car. literally, i used to just scream my lungs out as much as possible. it just seemed absurd to me that no one else could hear this. and i liked to imagine that maybe everyone else was screaming too.
One comment related to 765's comment: I grew up in the west, and now live in the midwest. I've had to adjust my appreciation of the natural environment away from basking under the hulking immovable mountain on the horizon to seeking tiny quiet moments: low sun on bare treetops, lovely fall colors, ducks.
But appreciating the bits of beauty one can find in an otherwise aggravating and demeaning landscape can only sustain one for so long.
A DO OVER PERHAPS?
puddles, I did scream too!
at 70 mph you can truly scream your lungs out and I thought that was pervesely beautiful because nowhere else I could be so completely alone.
but I no longer have a car and I don't need to scream anymore either.
I would have to echo the comments of "switters".
Architects are usually in absentee or play the advocate for the developer when it comes to the very boring and very unglamorous policy decisions in local government. The people that fills the voids to make these very real decisons are citizens made up of insurance brokers, school teachers, lawyers, and other people who are generally not trained in planning first and foremost, let alone in the architectual nuances of what constitutes as beauty and ugliness. If you want things to change around you...you can't expect others to do it.
There is so much I would like to add to this discussion, but I feel that this in a way is tied to all of the other blogo-bitch sessions that seem to occur on Archinect. In the end, I think we as a professional group are not capable of taking care of our own business. We just can't decide what to call ourselves, we can't seem to convince anyone to compensate us more, and we can't seem to have any real influence on the poor planning and development decisions that go on around us...just to name a few.
I don't think these are problems. I think that are symptoms of a profession that is dying and completely irrelevent to the society that WE THINK we contribute to.
"I think people just have no basic training in visual harmony" liberty bell
but does it not go deeper than a consequential visual disharmony or perception psychology? you don't just expect someone to change the expression on their face simply because deem it not pretty, no matter how many feel-good tapes she has or occasional sojourns to venice and barcelona she takes. a box and a parking lot are (seen to be) the most 'economical' expression of consumerism that is really no longer just an american cartel. the ugliness is not only seen, it is part of the rubric of a life which turns the city into a bigger factory. now a factory in itself is not of course a bad thing, that depends on the owner
and in the american context of things, i can't help but imagine the non-natives that came in and took over land, they took it so much ... the sins of the fathers and all.
noctilucent, I'm not sure I know what you are getting at, but it makes me think of how things are beautiful for reasons beyond the visual (so I may be shooting my own previous argument in the foot, here.) When I see a person laughing in absolute gleeful joy - showing real happiness on their face - that is beautiful, regardless of the "visual harmony" of the actual face. Similarly, corrugated metal siding on a building that is, let's say, in the inner city, built with green technologies, on a lot that had been vacant and full of garbage, with the intent of being a contributing member of the social and physical landscape for the long-term - that corrugated siding is more beautiful then the same material on an exurban WalMart.
Strip development offends me both visually and consciously, I guess is my point, but now I have to get to work so I can't carry the thought any further.
What tends to happen with great architecture is someone comes along and dumbs it up! I'm sure everyone has examples of this happening.
^ yep. they even have a name for that: they call it 'value engineering'
windowview.jpg
Darnit, well, I tried posting an image, but I guess I don't know the trick yet...
Steven, I think this is a good question, and it hit home for me too. I live in the city of Cambridge, Ontario, where my school of architecture founded a satellite campus a few years ago, and I too get angry quite often at the environment. It's mostly a sprawling industrial town and bedroom community that was poorly planned and features as its crowning disaster Hespeler Road/Highway 24, an anarchical stretch of big-box stores, parking lots and business signs that serves as the effective "main street". Within this mess, though, are the cores of 3 towns, Preston, Hespeler, and Galt, that the provincial government amalgamated together in the 60's or 70's to form Cambridge.
The school is located in Galt, by far the most beautiful of the 3 old towns - or at least, it once was. Galt is a Scottish town founded along a river in a valley that became an industrial centre in the late 1800's, and it still bears a number of beautiful buildings that demonstrate the pride that was clearly felt for this place at one time. Nevertheless, since the amalgamation of Cambridge, a number of beautiful buildings and factories in old Galt have been torn down, replaced by parking lots, cheap vinyl-clad garbage, or some disastrously ugly (and now empty) malls. Many yards have been asphalted over, and 2 flophouses have been emptied out in as many years (most recently, the one "hotel" near my house suffered a fire). Some buildings have been well-maintained and many restored, but several others languish, and the town is pock-marked with empty lots. This is not to mention the problems of poverty, drug abuse and poor mental and physical health at a scale I find shocking for a city of only 100,000.
Meanwhile, a lot of the locals just don't seem to get it; the city is building a fairly sensitively-inserted Civic Admin. Building (can't they just call it a City Hall?) in Galt by a very good firm, and though the mayor and council may not have done the best job of approving this project, a lot of the local griping about the project shows a lack of vision (it eliminates a parking lot, it costs money, it's "too close" to historic buildings, why is it in Galt and not along Hespeler Road?). A lot of people here seem to be blind to the visual and social problems in Galt; most people seem to think that more parking lots are necessary (I seldom see a full parking lot in Galt), and that if it's slightly run-down, it's just not worth keeping. Cambridge frequently appears as a tragic mess, and often I get infuriated walking around this city and seeing how much beauty is ruined by crap. One of the justifications for the School moving here was the architectural lessons offered by Galt. I often can't help but feel that the lesson here is the futility of building beautiful architecture.
I think there's some possibility in recovering the civic pride that once made places like Galt, though it is a bigger task than any single architect can perform. However, although we can blame politicians and developers and private businesses for a lot, the fact remains that architects are also complicit in much of what has happened. I am NOT a Howard Roark hero-type, nor do I like that paradigm at all, but I sense that if more architects stood up for the quality of the buildings they produced, rather than throw their hands up in dismay at their clients and worry that they'll never earn a fee again if they even suggest something better, things might start to change. The forces of banality are formidable, but has it occured to anyone that when we shrug our shoulders and "give in", that's EXACTLY what a lot of those who hire us want us to do? I mean, if enough of us put our foot down, it may not suddenly fix everything, but people might start to take us seriously. This is also contingent, though, on architects actually delivering beautiful buildings, which frankly we may not all be prepared to do.
This can't address everything, since not all buildings even involve an architect; cultural changes need to occur as well. But how can a broad discussion about the visual environment occur when all but a small number of the very guardians and experts of that beauty seem apathetic about it? If most architects are willing to accept the cynical lie that beauty is a hindrance to wealth and efficiency, when architects are willing to produce lame projects rather than pursue any ambition no matter how much they may really care if you talk to them, then why should the general public act differently? Pride requires inspiration, and we need to somehow inspire them for more - and I think it's possible to do it while paying the bills and not relying on slave interns.
Sorry for the long post. So much for my New Year's resolution to be more pithy!
Two brothers - one a hopeless pessimist, the other a helpless optimist.
Its Christmas, and the Pessimist received a hundred gifts of all sizes from his family and friends to try to cheer him up. The optimist received a sack of shit.
Optimist: "Hey brother, what did you get for christmas?".
Pessimist: "Well I must be dying of a deathly disease that everyone else knows about and wont tell me because I'm disliked by everyone - I got too many gifts...", says the Pessimist. "Why, what did you get?"
Optimist says "A horse, but he's hiding somewhere around here!"
alright, i just wanted to open up with that joke.
optimism is directly related to my opinion however, so i guess it applies. yasee, i live in a part of new jersey that never quite survived the late 70's in terms of....well everything. i work in nyc/Stat Isle, and everyday i have to trudge through my route looking at both urban and suburban "sacks of shits" on the way. The issue here is that we as architects were given the misfortune of being able to decipher very quickly the quality of construction in conjunction with the amount of necessity for certain "architectural" features of homes (sans: doric columns on a mcmansion) and compare that to the beauty of the project as a whole. while most people may just say "oooh - its a nice biig house with little bricks just on the front and a chimnay!", we see....well, a mcmansion with a faux-brick facade. and we know whats in it and what could have been bought/made with the same (usually less) budget the buyer paid for it.
and i agree with lb "visual harmony" is something that the public lacks in understanding. what i disagree with lb is trying to "teach" this, for its an inherent sense of balance and scale that is one of the most difficult things to comprehend without having it already.
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I consider challenging<i>, or visually interesting at the least."</>
and with challenging, i could at least raise more awareness that we're here not only to please the public's eye and make one smile in admiration, but to make it wince a little and make the mind question why it is that they've accepted anything lesser.
stupid html...
and jbrl said it well, but i have a correction for my own purposes "c) live in a place that I consider challenging, or visually interesting at the least."
some interesting new comments to which i want to respond but can't at the moment. thehoule mentioned parking, though, so i'll drop this:
alex krieger wrote, in his piece in the collection of writings that came out of one of the mayors' institute shindigs, that the perception will always be that there is never enough parking until everyone can park in the spot right by the front door. i think he's brilliant.
that said, louisville's metro area has over 8 parking spaces for every car.
I guess one could be like Paulo Solari, and find a vacant piece of Desert and Destroy it with a new mega community. I recall everyone saying this place is so cool......it is the future.....well what happened to the future.....pretty damn ugly when you turn around and look at it from the desert. The empty desert in all its harshness is damn beautiful and should be left alone.
Steven:
I hear your pain; nothing of interest to add but this image below.
If you look beyond the obvious, it speaks to what your discussion asks(IMHO).
noctilucent's observations were interesting - a kind of relativism of ugliness - but i think liberty's response is where i'm coming from.
there is the 'less nice' that comes from neglect, entropy, outdatedness, etc. sometimes a loved place can be down-trodden but you can tell that it is a place that is loved, or at least that is hospitable to people. this is what you see in a lot of the urban community.
then there is what i was originally referring to as the ugly development of the exurban landscape - the stuff that was made the way it is on purpose, but with little regard for quality of life. the 80'/80'/80' traffic triangle by which i stop for a redlight every morning could easily have been a permeable surface: grass, landscape, or otherwise. instead it's asphalt because it's cheaper and easier and 'who would care?' so it collects glass from thrown bottles, cigarette butts, shiny red plastic and reflective glass from car lights after accidents, hub caps...
if i took a series of pictures of urban decay and exurban car-focused development and showed them side by side, i think you'd see that a under-maintained storefront is still about people and the traffic triangle described above is against people. ironically, both are places where pedestrians try to walk. guess in which place they are safer: city or suburb?
There are pedestrians in the suburbs? I thought those people were just "what the hell are they doing out heres".
I read a book not too long ago by Joel Garreau:
[url=http://www.link.com] edge city
[/http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/dp/0385424345/sr=1-1/qid=1168002190/ref=sr_1_1/104-1618229-4817566?ie=UTF8&s=books]
I used to see the suburbs, especially the exurbs as a wasteland, now I TRY to look at is as a project in process.
It also made me realize that if I want to change anything I have to become a huge developer. And that aint happening anytime soon.
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