Why did past societies build so much "useless" beauty everywhere — and why did we stop?
It might be a measure of a culture's health... (thread) 🧵 https://t.co/nAGC31zyzl
Why did past societies build so much "useless" beauty everywhere — and why did we stop? It might be a measure of a culture's health... (thread) 🧵 https://t.co/nAGC31zyzl
The whole aesthetic economy is being rapidly altered, and what will replace it? Aside from glib tailored entertainments—that is, works that placate the surface itch without making us confront the deeper needs and purposes. This is an enormously important question: Can we live without addressing those?
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
One of the weirdest things about modern urbanism, and the Microwave Economy in general, is that we build the opposite of what we like. We adore Europe’s narrow and car-less streets, but build skyscraper-lined cities with sterile shopping malls and six-lane roads, where pedestrians are always on edge. But the Microwave Economy is most visible in arc... See more
David Perell • The Microwave Economy
The new ugliness is defined in part by an abandonment of function and form: buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them. New York City is a city increasingly in quotation marks, a detailed facsimile of a place.