Totally nailed so many things!

Hunh. I'm depressed now.

I put it in my "to read" pile. I am used to only 140 characters at a time. Tee hee. Also, more pictures needed! Seems a funny argument to make sans pictures.

Oh, I love that article. Pal, I think you probably agree with so much of it! With your spirit for remodeling with sensitivity to the era and design integrity. A few things made me actually laugh.

I found myself identifying with a lot of the article. Like sitting in a Tesla is like being inside an iphone, haha.

I noticed recently that in the tiny waiting rooms of the local hospital clinics, that they have installed giant video screens in place of the art that used to hang there. Now, pleasant images are streamed (but only a limited number of them), and I couldn't help but think: Don't they have better things to spend money on than more video screens? Just to display photographs? When they had perfectly nice art there before? And these screens require energy, too....

I guess it's "progress". But the more time I have spent in the forums here, the more I appreciate the traditional styles and the craftsmanship, both in architecture and decor.

I think you can visualize most things in the article without specific photographs.

This was very thought-provoking. Unfortunately I am a slow thinker, and this article is going to be percolating around in my head for awhile.

This hit home for me - it was nice to read confirmation of what I intuitively knew to be true..

"They’re also really gray. The Josh’s steel railings are gray, and its plastic window sashes are a slightly clashing shade of gray. Inside, the floors are made of gray TimberCore, and the walls are painted an abject post-beige that interior designers call greige but is in fact just gray. Gray suffuses life beyond architecture: television, corporate logos, product packaging, clothes for babies, direct-to-consumer toothbrushes. What incentives — material, libidinal, or otherwise — could possibly account for all this gray? In 2020, a study by London’s Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab used image processing to analyze photographs of consumer objects manufactured between 1800 and the present. They found that things have become less colorful over time, converging on a spectrum between steel and charcoal, as though consumers want their gadgets to resemble the raw materials of the industries that produce them."

I have often said I feel like I'm living in a black and white movie, but it's real life.

This is sort-of what I was talking about in Jinx's thread on the HGTV house du jour. I don't hate grey, per se. In the right application it's ok for some people. But good golly Miss Molly - where did all the color GO in this world?!

I know where the color went, Ally. I HAVE ALL OF IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:)

I got through more of half the article before I got bored with its petty mean-spiritedness. It started fun...

Yeah - they certainly took their main point and pounded it into the ground.

And then ran over it.

And then blew it up.

But aside from that...

I'm still letting it all run through my head. I'm taking their main point and now trying to figure out why this is happening...

I can sum it up (as far as I got, anyway):

gray is trendy right now. We, the authors, don't like it. We shall cleverly take the trend towards gray as a symbol for the downfall of human culture.

(We also look down on anyone who does like it, or who has to shop at IKEA. Society sucks, and everyone else made it that way. Not us, to be clear. Please don't underestimate our disdain for y'all.)

Disdain aside, they aren't really saying much that is actually incorrect.

Speaking to the comments about color: In particular I have noticed how few cars on the road are anything besides gray/silver, white, or black. Rows of cars passed in front of me at a stoplight, and there were dozens of these, and eventually I did spot a blue car.

I find it sad... It is our choices. We have choice over the color of our cars, but so many times we don't choose color! Why are cars so blah appearing anyway? Why don't we "decorate" them like homes are personalized and decorated?

Guess I'm back to the inside of a Tesla feeling like the inside of an iphone, which is a clever way to put it.

Edited to add: maybe it's a California thing, where I'm from.

Mrs. S, In Austin, you would be amazed at how many orange and beige cars you would see. I don't know if it's just because of UT or a Texan propensity for earth tones in general, but gray cars look great to me compared to earth tones ;-)

PS Tesla makes one of my favorite shades of red for a car.

College Station has a lot of maroon trucks (not cars teehee).

I have black cars because "new" (just counted the years since I bought one...maybe not so new) cars have so much black plastic trim that black paint is the only way to make it look less jarring.

Regarding cars, from someone who has not owned one in a couple decades, I think in the currently rather hostile traffic environment, it may be best to have a car that is as anonymous as possible. I would never have an easily remembered vanity plate either.

Thanks, Pal, you just crushed my new red car plan. I also had a new bright green car plan, but here you come along making sense.

It's funny, back in the late 70s my family bought a silver Audi and that color really stood out at the time.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the repetition. I had to abandon the article about 2/3rd of the way in.... but red the footnotes.

Nothing is untrue, and the key points do extend beyond simply the color palette, though to other elements of design. I personally feel that the pervasive MCM influence has started to progress in the period to a point in the original period where there was quite a bit of ugly, sometimes made worse by variations that fight against the original ispiration (where ugly-beautiful turns into ugly-ugly)..

On the color point, a saw this quote "slightly clashing shade of gray" and had to smile. Every day we get shown new examples of this.

Red oxidizes. 😁

If you have the choice of buying a spatter painting or a landscape...which would you purchase? Trends are consumer driven.

I think I'd go spatter (if I liked them equally). I have sooooooooo many landscapes already.

When it comes to certain things, I don't think it is purely consumer-driven, I think someone comes up with it first, then there are adapters, then there are a bunch of people who go along because they don't want to stand out in any way, then there are people who just buy what's available.

I don't think the finned car was something that originated with the consumer, I think designers came up with it, some people thought it was really cool, and a whole bunch of people bought cars with fins because they needed a new car.

It's going to be the same thing with consumer goods, with furniture and so forth. Most people are going to buy what is available and what they can afford that is available, whether they love it or not. And with the commodification of houses, people are going to buy what they think they might have to sell, soon. And with disposable furniture there is less commitment. You can have taste outside the mass-offering, it's just going to cost you.

This car was produced in 1956-57. It was unlike any other American car on the market those years. But it cost $10,000 --$108,000 today.

In comparison, this car, also from Ford Motor Company, cost $2760. We know which one people bought more of, but why?

Heh heh. Remember back when headlights had to be round?

Also, chrome matches everything. Still.

Remember Merryl Streep as Miranda Priestly upbraiding Anne Hathaway for the remark about the ’blue’ sweater and the intended-to-be-impressive story about where that blue came from?

to each their own. *shrug*

as each generation ages, many grow to resent the styles of younger people. this is not new information. personally I love modern art and architecture from the past century up to today. I love "weird" art, and even brutalism.

what I do think is "ugly" is how cheap so many things are now. our world is being overrun with falling apart architecture decorated with cheap crap from home goods and hobby lobby. it's the "fast fashion" of the design world and I just wish it would all end already.

The article didn't answer the question for me. I was reminded to read that piece this morning after Allsion posted about her former house and the violence done to it. I don't understand the infatuation with not having any style, with taking all personality and ornamentation out of the equation. For public spaces, perhaps the endless approval process is to blame, along side the lack of workmanship and the desire to not spend money. But for personal spaces, what explains wanting the same boring gray interior landscape? Trends usually come to an end at some point, but I have a friend who is building a new house and her kitchen features all the same things kitchens have been featuring for the past decade. I bit my tongue and kept myself from saying, Perhaps we are at the tail end of this looks reign of terror? You may want to look for what is around the corner.

PS I deleted the video I had included at first, because the narrator uses a lot of foul language. He makes some great points, but Yowza ...

I just had this conversation with DH today. I asked him why this country has gone colorless? Are we all depressed? Everything seems to be grey or beige. Cars and trucks? Black, white & grey with an occasional pop of red. I am done with it! I am picking a color scheme for a room!

I had trouble slogging through the article and I've started to post here a couple times and deleted. In my mind there are a couple of factors driving "ugly".

One is profit, whether it's builders or manufacturers or retailers. Craftsmanship and artistry is typically expensive and can be taste-specific. It's more profitable to build generic buildings, furniture, decor, etc that appeals to masses and has a high profit margin. How many people are lucky enough to live in a custom home that wasn't built for profit by a developer? Or buy furniture or art made by a real craftsman/woman or artist rather than what was within a budget or mass produced?

Another one is fear or aprehension driven by what sure feels like a powerful marketing force in so many industries. First it's a matter of resale. Don't customize your home too much or you won't be able to sell it some hypothetical time in the future. Don't buy that yellow or orange car because white or silver is more generically appealing. Don't do the wood finish on the cabinets that you like because it might go out of style. Don't buy that bright blue or green sofa because you might want to change your color scheme or sell it or offend someone. I feel like as consumers we are being pushed to mass appeal rather than personal preference. I don't think nearly as many people concerned themselves with resale in the 1950s or 60s or 70s as they do today. (I could be wrong. Please tell me if I am.) It was more about making a comfortable and personalized home. Now marketing pushes us to choose something "neutral" or "timeless" (eyeroll). Plus we are constantly bombarded with messaging telling us that things are "dated" so people end up buying (consuming) more over time than perhaps past generations.

Also, I want to state for the record that I like gray. And I think that's ok. You don't have to like gray and I'm sorry that it's everywhere and a nuisance to people. Personally I was happy to see the transition out of "neutral beige" and into gray because the cooler neutrals are more appealing to me. I think it's like any popular color at any era of design. It can be done tastefully and beautifully in a well designed space (or on a well-designed vehicle) or it can look really ghastly if it's designed haphazardly and without real thought.

Now marketing pushes us to choose something "neutral" or "timeless" (eyeroll). Plus we are constantly bombarded with messaging telling us that things are "dated" so people end up buying (consuming) more over time than perhaps past generations.

And people don't seem to note the contradiction and fully espouse both concepts. I have been here long enough that people are posting things they did when I first got here, saying how "ugly" they are.

"Ugly" meaning more than about 10-15 years old.

buying (consuming) more over time than perhaps past generations.

repeating this last part for a different reason.

We are also buying more over time because things are engineered to wear out a lot faster.

It's doubtful you could buy a refrigerator that lasted forty years if you tried, no matter what you paid for it. Between my parents and grandparents I grew up surrounded by refrigerators that made it to forty.

The article is verbose, self important, and and, ultimately, ridiculous. I picked out a paragraph AT RANDOM to illustrate my point:

“Surveying a suite of candy-colored bongs, we reflect on the primacy of LEDs. (One of the bongs is bedecked with LEDs.) The shift to cold lighting in recent years was borne of urgent environmental necessity, and we accept that climate change requires concessions. We’re prepared to make those: we will eat crickets and endorse, if necessary, the blockage of the waterfront park around the corner by a giant seawall. We will even help build the seawall! Change is inevitable. But LEDs can appear in many colors, as demonstrated by our new light-up bong. So why this atomic, lobotomizing white?”

Lobotomizing prose, more likely. Another example of someone with what they think is a clever solution looking for a problem. I wasn’t familiar with the site but know I will never return to it 😎

LOL @Kswl! I also completely agree with your assessment of the writing in the article. I love reading and I had a hard time slogging through this article. I was bothered by the arrogant tone.

I do think the overall topic is an interesting one. Is everything becoming more "ugly"? I do find myself drawn to some older architecture and products. But maybe that's because I'm drawn to the high quality items that have lasted the test of time. When time and craftsmanship has been invested in the creation of a structure or in the creation of a piece of furniture, then inherently it will likely last longer and be more appealing. Yes, there's a lot of mass produced garbage (architecture and consumer goods) now, but there are still some fine examples out there. They're just not as common.