I enjoyed the observations in this essay, but I missed the answer to the question in the title. I have a few thoughts in that direction.
Neutral colors like greige are fitting for our hypernetworked, hyperconformist age, where eccentric behavior, unconventional views, and standing out generally get you odd looks at best, surreptitiously filmed and socially shunned at worst. Being boring is an aesthetic survival mechanism, and entirely apt. As is the flimsy built environment.
Clothing is subject to fashion cycles so rapid, why would anyone make anything to last when it’s likely to be discarded and replaced in a year anyway?
Another banal observation, but architecture is subject to survivorship bias. Most of the mediocre buildings of the past have long since been demolished and replaced. We’re mostly familiar with successes. But the fact that buildings today are generally cheaper, uglier, and flimsier is true. And yet, people were making the same observation 100 years ago. And for decades before that.
General aesthetic degradation has been a more or less continual process since industrialization. It’s put more goods in the homes of more people, and the price is more uniformity and more ugliness. And it is relative. Our ugly present environment will possibly be an aesthetic high water mark to future generations, as midcentury aesthetics, derided for their ugliness in their time, seem to us today.
Neutral colors like greige are fitting for our hypernetworked, hyperconformist age, where eccentric behavior, unconventional views, and standing out generally get you odd looks at best, surreptitiously filmed and socially shunned at worst. Being boring is an aesthetic survival mechanism, and entirely apt. As is the flimsy built environment.
Clothing is subject to fashion cycles so rapid, why would anyone make anything to last when it’s likely to be discarded and replaced in a year anyway?
Another banal observation, but architecture is subject to survivorship bias. Most of the mediocre buildings of the past have long since been demolished and replaced. We’re mostly familiar with successes. But the fact that buildings today are generally cheaper, uglier, and flimsier is true. And yet, people were making the same observation 100 years ago. And for decades before that.
General aesthetic degradation has been a more or less continual process since industrialization. It’s put more goods in the homes of more people, and the price is more uniformity and more ugliness. And it is relative. Our ugly present environment will possibly be an aesthetic high water mark to future generations, as midcentury aesthetics, derided for their ugliness in their time, seem to us today.