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  1. People tend to collect the things they admired in their formative years.

    I guess architects design according to the toys they played with as children.

    • Replies: @Chrisnonymous
    @bomag

    I think the point was not that it looks like Lego so much as that stepping on a Lego is extremely painful (ask any parent), as is seeing this building.

    , @Feryl
    @bomag

    The Lego castles and forts I made in the 1990's were much more aesthetically pleasing than brutalist crap, thank you very much.

  2. At least it was an Irish guy that said it.

    • Replies: @Old Palo Altan
    @Mike Tre

    Agreed.

    Giving us some hope that the Boston Irish who inflicted this monstrosity upon the city, partly as a satisfying way to spit in the eye of the already retreating Brahmins, have been at least partially replaced by descendants of finer sensibilities.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

  3. Mad Soviet monstrosities. The decks have already been painted red in expecatnce of the rivers of blood to come.

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

    There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs.

    I remember a particularly depressing book by a teenage drug user from Berlin. In between looking for a fix and doing tricks to obtain money, she complain about living in Gropiusstadt.

    In some cases, you need to round up the person responsible, lock them into their creations, then unleash orbital lasers.

    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those? Are East Asians mentally more ready for generational spaceflight?

    • Agree: John Regan
    • Replies: @Gimeiyo
    @El Dato


    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those?
     
    Depends which ones you're talking about. If it's the rows and rows of Seoul apartment towers, all alike, the exterior is bland and charmless, but the interior layouts of the units are sensible. And all the ones I've been in have been renovated -- very comfortable and pleasant.

    And perhaps more to the point, the high rises may look a little grim, but they have simply been constructed efficiently and without ornament. Not my cup of tea, but fundamentally different from a deliberate atrocity like Boston City Hall, which was designed to offend the senses.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    , @Chrisnonymous
    @El Dato


    Mad Soviet monstrosities. The decks have already been painted red in expecatnce of the rivers of blood to come.
     
    And the long stepped staircase allows you to throw bodies/heads down in Aztec Robespierre fashion.
    , @Harry Baldwin
    @El Dato

    these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse

    I agree they look as depressing American housing projects like Cabrini Green. On the plus side, if you have to ask your neighbor to turn down their music, it's less likely that you would get shot.

  4. As it happens, I just came across a rare case of modern architecture getting along with its neighbors. Seaside, Florida, where these townhouses cost several million dollars and many of the buildings are designed by ‘starchitects’.

    I wonder what the prevailing politics is like in that town.

    Obviously not the one with the marker, but two to the left.

    • Replies: @Wilkey
    @HammerJack


    I wonder what the prevailing politics is like in that town.
     
    On the one hand, Seaside is the kind of place that would normally attract liberals, because it’s policies are vaguely Communist (or maybe communalist).

    On the other hand, it’s in the Florida Panhandle, so there is that. And incidentally it was the filming location for “The Truman Show.”

    Rep. Matt Gaetz and his brother both live in Seaside, so I guess that answers your question.

    I visited Seaside several years ago and found it rather pretty, but unrealistic on a large scale.
    , @AnotherDad
    @HammerJack


    As it happens, I just came across a rare case of modern architecture getting along with its neighbors. Seaside, Florida, where these townhouses cost several million dollars and many of the buildings are designed by ‘starchitects’.
     
    Worry not.

    Since our reigning minoritarian establishment is determined to import all the world's detritus and "sun people" much prefer Florida to say, Montana, the children or grandchildren inheriting those pricey townhomes will be strolling down toward the beach through a sea of Haitians and Africans hawking crap.
    , @Romanian
    @HammerJack

    Celebration, Florida, is often held up as an example of New Urbanism, with nice architecture.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

  5. https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world#people-in-massachusetts-wanted-to-demolish-bostons-city-hall-before-its-construction-was-even-completed-1

    8 of the ugliest, most hated buildings in the world

    Of course, tastes differ, but I actually like that North Korean hotel; the Prague Žižkov tower would be to my liking, too -with those fugly gigantic crawling babies-smurfs removed ….

    • Thanks: Old Prude
    • Replies: @Barnard
    @Bardon Kaldian

    The Prague building with the babies is incredibly creepy. It is surprising it was ever allowed to be built in a city with such great buildings like Prague. I am surprised Frank Gehry didn't have anything on the list, his shopping carts having intercourse building is worse than all of those.

    , @Dumbo
    @Bardon Kaldian

    The Prague TV tower is not that ugly. I've seen it up close. Well, I mean, it's ugly, but it's a TV tower for f's sake. It's difficult to turn one into something pretty. The babies by that silly contemporary artist should be removed, I agree.

    I guess the only worse thing than contemporary architects, are contemporary public sculptors...

    Among starchitects, Frank Ghery is the worst. He also has a building in Prague, "the dancing building". It's ugly too, but Ghery made even worse things later on, so this one doesn't look all that bad now.

    I wonder, don't those people realize that what they build is ugly? Or they do realize, but they don't care? It's like a power trip for them to inflict those things on our eyes?

    Replies: @Rob McX

  6. Wait! What? Is this Byrne character saying the emperor has no clothes?

    What was the watershed moment where artists switched from trying to create something aesthetically pleasing to where “artists” began to create things that people need to be “taught” to appreciate?

    • Replies: @stillCARealist
    @Coemgen

    I remember a conversation in 1987 with an art student at UC Berkeley. Now she was a talented artist who could actually draw real stuff, left-handed and all, but she chose to paint ugly, abstract pictures about nothing. When I said my conception of art involved beauty... even describing paintings of nature... she looked at me like I just said I wanted to torture animals. Utter scorn and derision. That was completely wrong, outmoded, backwards, provincial, beneath contempt.

    Art, at that point at a UC, was all about your personal feelings and motivations. The real you and your fears and dreams. Anything resembling objective beauty was utterly forbidden. And here we are.

    , @ben tillman
    @Coemgen

    I'd reckon approximately November 22, 1963.

    , @Art Deco
    @Coemgen

    Around about 1920.

    Replies: @Coemgen

    , @2BR
    @Coemgen

    Prior to WW1, European public architecture was beautiful. 1918 to 1939, it was at least somewhat of a mixed bag. Post WW2, bad. Of course nothing matches our 1960s and forward brutalist architecture for ugliness, cruelty, contempt. It is designed to punish you, the viewer, it punishes you for having the effrontery to appreciate beauty.

  7. Where’s Godzilla when you need him?

    • Agree: ben tillman, Coemgen
  8. OT

    “Whadda we got this morning, Sheldon?” As soon as the words left his mouth, the Mayor regretted them. He knew what his tiny assistant would say. It was inevitable, and so he braced himself for the vile phrase, and sure enough, here it came. “Mainly plaques for blacks,” said Sheldon.

    In these troubled times, with the surveys going the way they were going, it was wise, and probably good, to single out as many black recipients of these trophies and rhetorical flourishes as possible, but it was not wise and it was not good for Sheldon Lennert, this homunculus with his absurdly tiny head and his mismatched checked shirts, jackets, and pants, to call the process “plaques for blacks.” Already the Mayor had heard a couple of people in the press office use the expression. What if some of the black members of the staff overheard it? They might even laugh. But they wouldn’t be laughing inside. But no … Sheldon continued to say “plaques for blacks.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/05/blue-plaques-in-london-black-people

    Blue plaques commemorating notable black figures still make up just 2.1% of the individuals honoured across London, according to a Guardian analysis.

    The scheme, which English Heritage has run since 1986, was started in 1866 with the purpose of commemorating figures who have lived, worked or stayed in buildings across the capital.

    More than 1,160 notable people are name-checked on the scheme’s 978 plaques. But of the those awarded plaques, 96% are white, while only 4% of figures have been from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background.

    Now this figure shouldn’t surprise anyone. If anything it’s much too high. There were only 7,000 black and “coloured” people in the UK before WW2, and only 40,000 in 1954, six years after the first Caribbean immigrants arrived. There were over 50 million Brits then, so they were less than 0.1% of the population.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/aug/06/past.politics

    David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of “coloured people” in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

    They are worried that the plaques commemorate musicians, but ignore all the engineers, soldiers and physicists!

    Disparities also exist within the categories by which black and non-black figures are recognised. Black nominees are overrepresented in the categories that primarily commemorate music and dance, which make up almost a third (30%) of all the plaques dedicated to black people, compared with just 8% of all honourees.

    • Replies: @bomag
    @YetAnotherAnon


    ...so they were less than 0.1% of the population
     
    The prevailing belief appears to be that they are 100 times as talented, so they should have gotten 10% of the plaques.
    , @The Alarmist
    @YetAnotherAnon

    So what you are sayin is that blacks didn’t build London nor Great Britain.

  9. Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop. Despite mechanical-electronic integration that is now beyond human capability, classic camera forms are still the most appealing. Phone cameras are an abomination of software functionality and physical emasculation. Just breathe on the damn thing the wrong way and it changes function! A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects. Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors. Architecture borne from the loins of laptop computers suffers from the same woke plague that ruins all utilitarian objects. Just take a look at a public bathroom soap dispenser with its feminine curves that would not be possible without CAD tools and plastic injection molding, and there is nothing restraining these fools from applying it to buildings.

    • Agree: J
    • Replies: @slumber_j
    @Elmer T. Jones


    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. [...]

    Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors.
     

    But Boston City Hall (and pretty much all of Brutalism) long predates the rise of CAD/CAM, and it's more or less the opposite of what you're talking about. These were guys doing actual drawings with actual pens at actual drawing boards, and other guys then executing those very rectilinear drawings with board-formed concrete--perhaps the least feminine material imaginable.

    I mean, the results almost invariably suck...just neither in the way nor for the reasons you indicate.

    , @epebble
    @Elmer T. Jones

    In fact, the design has an uncanny resemblance to a Chip Layout. e.g.

    https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VRixz9wC1I8/VF1PQY5HoSI/AAAAAAAAFI4/_KDnXf_e5U4/s1600/layout%2Bsram%2B8x4.PNG

    This was entirely created by algorithms to minimize time and space.

    , @Joe Stalin
    @Elmer T. Jones


    The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop.

    A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects.

     

    Enjoy this YT video where Ian visits the enterprise that makes the French special forces revolver MR-73, made with CNC and hand fitted.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v3oUU7uD14
    , @John Johnson
    @Elmer T. Jones

    It has nothing to do with the tools.

    It's the same old anti-symmetry/anti-Western post-modern garbage that convinces these architects that they are above the masses by creating something gaudy. It's the leftist version of the emperor has no clothes.

    Boston City Hall is nothing compared to a Frank Gehry.

    Have a look at this monstrosity:
    http://afasiaarchzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Frank-Gehry-.-The-Grand-.-Los-Angeles-1.jpg

    The style is anti-Rome/anti-European. It's not a coincidence that so many of these post-modern buildings are designed for governments.

    Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Romanian

    , @The Alarmist
    @Elmer T. Jones


    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints...
     
    One cannot fully appreciate the gravity of that statement until one flies something like a F-117A.
  10. These things are a Lego that steps on you and the bravest of people who understand The System as it is understand that the best they can do is complain on obscure corners of the internet.

  11. https://nypost.com/2021/10/04/why-boston-sucks-forget-it-losers-its-beantown/

    Oddly, City Hall didn’t make the list … but what do New Yawkers know?

    Go, Sox!

  12. Why buildings like this one exist? I’m afraid that Steve’s favorite explanation (western spiritual exhaustion following the two world wars) doesn’t hold water: wouldn’t the effect be proportional to the suffering caused by the world wars by a particular country? Did US suffer more than Russia? Sweden more than Poland? Also, one would expect that the effect will be strongest the close you are to the causing events. Yet, the 50s were a pretty normal times in the West.

    Instead, I’m afraid that the explanation offered by Ed Dutton (youtube channel: Jolly heretic) may be correct: spiteful mutants, i.e. increase in mutational load in modern western populations caused by the medical advances of the 19th (sanitation) and 20th centuries. I couldn’t think of any counter-arguments, in fact, I’m even more pessimistic than he is: he believes the things will right themselves out as people with high mutational load don’t have (many) children. The GWAS studies show that people with undesirable traits, unfortunately, have more children.

    • Replies: @J.Ross
    @Jamie_NYC

    It's a variant of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism, a resentful, genocidal loathing of beauty.

    , @Farenheit
    @Jamie_NYC

    Fully agree with your observation regarding "spiteful mutants". Sadly, I think they've infiltrated almost every institution in the land. (Lori Lightfoot, call your office!)

    Replies: @Father O'Hara

    , @Peterike
    @Jamie_NYC

    “ Instead, I’m afraid that the explanation offered by Ed Dutton (youtube channel: Jolly heretic) may be correct: spiteful mutants”

    Nah, it’s usually just Jews. Their mutational load was on purpose.

    The building in question was designed by two people, one of which was Jewish. No surprise.

  13. @YetAnotherAnon
    OT

    “Whadda we got this morning, Sheldon?” As soon as the words left his mouth, the Mayor regretted them. He knew what his tiny assistant would say. It was inevitable, and so he braced himself for the vile phrase, and sure enough, here it came. “Mainly plaques for blacks,” said Sheldon.

    ...

    In these troubled times, with the surveys going the way they were going, it was wise, and probably good, to single out as many black recipients of these trophies and rhetorical flourishes as possible, but it was not wise and it was not good for Sheldon Lennert, this homunculus with his absurdly tiny head and his mismatched checked shirts, jackets, and pants, to call the process “plaques for blacks.” Already the Mayor had heard a couple of people in the press office use the expression. What if some of the black members of the staff overheard it? They might even laugh. But they wouldn’t be laughing inside. But no … Sheldon continued to say “plaques for blacks.”
     
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/05/blue-plaques-in-london-black-people

    Blue plaques commemorating notable black figures still make up just 2.1% of the individuals honoured across London, according to a Guardian analysis.

    The scheme, which English Heritage has run since 1986, was started in 1866 with the purpose of commemorating figures who have lived, worked or stayed in buildings across the capital.

    More than 1,160 notable people are name-checked on the scheme’s 978 plaques. But of the those awarded plaques, 96% are white, while only 4% of figures have been from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background.

     

    Now this figure shouldn't surprise anyone. If anything it's much too high. There were only 7,000 black and "coloured" people in the UK before WW2, and only 40,000 in 1954, six years after the first Caribbean immigrants arrived. There were over 50 million Brits then, so they were less than 0.1% of the population.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/aug/06/past.politics

    David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

     

    They are worried that the plaques commemorate musicians, but ignore all the engineers, soldiers and physicists!

    Disparities also exist within the categories by which black and non-black figures are recognised. Black nominees are overrepresented in the categories that primarily commemorate music and dance, which make up almost a third (30%) of all the plaques dedicated to black people, compared with just 8% of all honourees.

     

    Replies: @bomag, @The Alarmist

    …so they were less than 0.1% of the population

    The prevailing belief appears to be that they are 100 times as talented, so they should have gotten 10% of the plaques.

  14. @Bardon Kaldian
    https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world#people-in-massachusetts-wanted-to-demolish-bostons-city-hall-before-its-construction-was-even-completed-1

    8 of the ugliest, most hated buildings in the world

    Of course, tastes differ, but I actually like that North Korean hotel; the Prague Žižkov tower would be to my liking, too -with those fugly gigantic crawling babies-smurfs removed ....

    Replies: @Barnard, @Dumbo

    The Prague building with the babies is incredibly creepy. It is surprising it was ever allowed to be built in a city with such great buildings like Prague. I am surprised Frank Gehry didn’t have anything on the list, his shopping carts having intercourse building is worse than all of those.

  15. What a piece of garbage.

    You walk around it on your way to Faneuil Hall (which you discover is just another tourist meme) and you recognize the ugliness, even if you don’t know what the building is. It simply doesn’t belong there, whatever it is. You know that, and everybody knows that.

    So, why is it there?

    • Replies: @Coemgen
    @Buzz Mohawk

    Maybe it's a case of absence makes the heart grow fonder but my parents and grandparents expressed fond memories of "Old" Scollay Square (which was razed then replaced with the City Hall monstrosity). If "Old" Scollay Square was appealing to the provincials (my family absolutely!), well then, of course it had to be destroyed and replaced with a monstrosity.

    Btw, Faneuil Hall is a historic building. It pre-dates tourism. I saw the Chieftains perform there back in the 80s. Half the crowd were illegals from Connemara stomping their feet along with the jigs and reels. It was a great performance and experience. For the outah-townahs, Faneuil is pronounced: Fan-you-ull).

    Aside, Massachusetts: it's a state, a commonwealth, an Indian tribe, and a language. Yes, Massachusetts is a language with a dictionary, grammar, and bible. It's also the origin of the PBS flagship station call sign of WGBH. Yes, the GBH of WGBH stands for Great Blue Hill which is the literal translation of Massachusetts.

    Now, my K-12 education was strictly in Massachusetts. I've spent endless hours watching and listening to WGBH. Both the state (commonwealth) and the PBS station have neglected to inform us of the true meaning of Massachusetts. Neither have taught us the least bit of the Massachusetts language. They've been to busy forcing Spanish on us for some unknown reason. It would have been nice if they'd deigned to teach us some Massachusetts - not only for sentimental reasons but for practical reasons - even Massachusetts natives don't know how to pronounce the names of many of the local landmarks (myself included - I regularly drive on a road whose name I have no idea how to pronounce).

  16. Black History Month in the UK (it’s when kids are settled into school again after the summer), and the trichologists are on the case.

    https://www.voice-online.co.uk/lifestyle/sponsored-lifestyle/2021/10/04/black-history-month-hair-webinars/

    We have long-since known that women with afro textured hair experience a type of permanent central hair loss predominantly seen in black women. Research has shown that up to 1 in 20 black women could be affected. The condition is called Central Centrifugal Cicatricial Alopecia (CCCA) and very little research had taken place until recently when world leading dermatologist, Prof Dlova and her international colleagues carried out research and discovered that there was a genetic link.

    Here in the UK, we continue to raise awareness of issues affecting the hair of black women and went along to the House of Commons back in 2019 to discuss the perception of a rising epidemic of hair loss in black women.

    The webinars are free if anyone wants to sign up.

    Meanwhile in the Global City

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/town-centre-met-police-squads-to-ease-fears-women-safety-b958873.html

    The Met has revealed how they will deploy an extra 650 officers in London in response to fears over the safety of women and girls.

    Some 500 officers will form “town centre” squads in 19 areas across the capital, including Westminster, Camden, Brent, Lewisham and Greenwich.

    A further 150 officers will join existing patrolling ward officers — or “bobbies on the beat”. It comes after the Met announced at the weekend that hundreds of new officers would be deployed into busy public places, “including those where women and girls often lack confidence that they are safe”.

    Now given that UK town and city centres on weekends are full of young women so drunk they can barely walk, I’m not convinced of this epidemic of worried women. And knowing UK police, a pretty heterosexual bunch, one or two of the officers will ensure the safety of drunk girls by seeing to them themselves. But on the other hand…

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/regent-street-hammer-attack-london-b958607.html

    A man has been charged with attacking and sexually assaulting women in a Friday night attack in Regent Street. Morteza Ahmadi, 38, of no fixed address, has been charged with two counts of grievous bodily harm, two counts of causing actual bodily harm, two counts of sexual assault by touching and for being in possession of the hammer. Ahmadi is to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday.

    Police had said a man used a hammer to hit two women – one aged in her 30s and one in her 20s – in the popular shopping district on Friday night. They added the man then entered a pub in Glasshouse Street where he is alleged to have hit a man in his 50s and a woman in her 40s. One of the women and another woman at the scene, who was not injured, also reported they had been sexually assaulted. The victims were taken to hospital but their injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.

    I’m pretty sure Regent Street didn’t use to be like this.

  17. In most of America, the most noticeable and maddening aspects of idiocracy in engineering/design/architecture are commercial/institutional parking lot layouts.

  18. The other day I rode past the construction site for this, “the tallest residential tower south of Manhattan”:

    Meh.

    • Replies: @Joe Stalin
    @Stan Adams

    Too bad it's residential... you could put full color LED lighting in it and have a stack of Rubik's Cubes in constant motion...

  19. They demolished Scollay Square, an area described as sleazy but fun, to build City Hall Plaza including that monstrosity. A few blocks west around the same time the poor but “vibrant” (I believe it was mostly ethnic whites who lived there) West End neighborhood was demolished for “urban renewal,” which is a bunch of tall ugly apartment buildings along the Charles River at the end of Storrow Drive along with the expansion of Mass General Hospital. There was, maybe there still is, a sign in front of the apartment buildings that said something like “If you lived here you’d be home now,” referring to the frequent traffic backups.

    • Replies: @anon
    @Ripple Earthdevil

    yes the brahmans had to put a lid on this sorid part of town, hence the oil cap GC.
    this part of down town did have a very sorrid, violent, disgusting history according to Aaron Hiltner in his book "Taking Leave Taking Liberty".

    Anyway, it and the Combat Zone do not exist anymore.

  20. “It simply doesn’t belong there…”

    Does any of it? Seems as though it’s at least somewhat about perspective.

    city-hall

    • Replies: @Bill Jones
    @danand

    Try this monstrosity.
    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.

    known locally as Paddy's WigWam.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePorn/comments/9ptrmy/liverpool_metropolitan_cathedral_uk_749x961/

    Replies: @additionalMike, @Reg Cæsar, @RadicalCenter

  21. @Jamie_NYC
    Why buildings like this one exist? I'm afraid that Steve's favorite explanation (western spiritual exhaustion following the two world wars) doesn't hold water: wouldn't the effect be proportional to the suffering caused by the world wars by a particular country? Did US suffer more than Russia? Sweden more than Poland? Also, one would expect that the effect will be strongest the close you are to the causing events. Yet, the 50s were a pretty normal times in the West.

    Instead, I'm afraid that the explanation offered by Ed Dutton (youtube channel: Jolly heretic) may be correct: spiteful mutants, i.e. increase in mutational load in modern western populations caused by the medical advances of the 19th (sanitation) and 20th centuries. I couldn't think of any counter-arguments, in fact, I'm even more pessimistic than he is: he believes the things will right themselves out as people with high mutational load don't have (many) children. The GWAS studies show that people with undesirable traits, unfortunately, have more children.

    Replies: @J.Ross, @Farenheit, @Peterike

    It’s a variant of Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism, a resentful, genocidal loathing of beauty.

  22. It’s an office building for bureaucrats. Does it serve that purpose well? Why does the traffic court need or deserve more than a, so called, Lego block?

    To me the building says Boston has such a huge debt and pension overhang to be paid off from an aging and dwindling tax base under constant pressure from the federal government and foreign competition that Boston cannot find the resources for something grandiose.

    Where it all started in 1560:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffizi#History

    Laser light shows projected on to buildings are nifty, and I suspect the bare concrete of this one will make it comparatively easy to do.

  23. Beauty may be skin deep but ugly goes all the way to the bone!

  24. anon[357] • Disclaimer says:

    NEW: The Texas State Board of Pardons and Paroles has recommended a posthumous pardon for #GeorgeFloyd for a 2004 drug conviction, after the arresting police officer was charged with crimes. According to documents I received today from the board, their vote was unanimous. pic.twitter.com/dfDm5vCuZ5— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) October 5, 2021

  25. Crushingly ugly modern buildings do serve a vital purpose — as establishing exterior shots for movies or TV shows. Add a little ominous music and the soulless architecture instantly tells you that the people inside, whether government or corporate, are inherently soulless and evil themselves.

    • Replies: @Alfa158
    @Known Fact

    The “wings” on each side of the upper story windows can also be functional in the manner of arrow slits. They would stop incoming lateral small arms fire, while riflemen in the windows could still control the field of fire directly in front of each window.

  26. @Elmer T. Jones
    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop. Despite mechanical-electronic integration that is now beyond human capability, classic camera forms are still the most appealing. Phone cameras are an abomination of software functionality and physical emasculation. Just breathe on the damn thing the wrong way and it changes function! A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects. Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors. Architecture borne from the loins of laptop computers suffers from the same woke plague that ruins all utilitarian objects. Just take a look at a public bathroom soap dispenser with its feminine curves that would not be possible without CAD tools and plastic injection molding, and there is nothing restraining these fools from applying it to buildings.

    Replies: @slumber_j, @epebble, @Joe Stalin, @John Johnson, @The Alarmist

    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. […]

    Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors.

    But Boston City Hall (and pretty much all of Brutalism) long predates the rise of CAD/CAM, and it’s more or less the opposite of what you’re talking about. These were guys doing actual drawings with actual pens at actual drawing boards, and other guys then executing those very rectilinear drawings with board-formed concrete–perhaps the least feminine material imaginable.

    I mean, the results almost invariably suck…just neither in the way nor for the reasons you indicate.

    • Agree: Charon
  27. It would be an interesting building to walk up to in the middle of a forest of trees up to the cantilever. Like an alien spaceship.
    They must have thought the red brick would warm and soften the concrete, but the effect is horrible.

    • Agree: ben tillman
  28. @Elmer T. Jones
    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop. Despite mechanical-electronic integration that is now beyond human capability, classic camera forms are still the most appealing. Phone cameras are an abomination of software functionality and physical emasculation. Just breathe on the damn thing the wrong way and it changes function! A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects. Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors. Architecture borne from the loins of laptop computers suffers from the same woke plague that ruins all utilitarian objects. Just take a look at a public bathroom soap dispenser with its feminine curves that would not be possible without CAD tools and plastic injection molding, and there is nothing restraining these fools from applying it to buildings.

    Replies: @slumber_j, @epebble, @Joe Stalin, @John Johnson, @The Alarmist

    In fact, the design has an uncanny resemblance to a Chip Layout. e.g.

    This was entirely created by algorithms to minimize time and space.

  29. OFF TOPIC—TRIGGER WARNING —

    Work on complex systems, including Earth’s climate, wins the physics Nobel Prize

    Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi each found hidden patterns in disordered systems visualization of ocean surface currents in the oceans around the Americas.

    Where are the trans womyn of color?!?!?! What can we do to fix this?!?!

  30. • Replies: @Prester John
    @Paleo Retiree

    Without having even read the article yet, I like the title already. "Mental disorders" indeed!

  31. it’s a sophisticated building, you already dead and replaced whites just don’t get the concept

  32. @El Dato
    Mad Soviet monstrosities. The decks have already been painted red in expecatnce of the rivers of blood to come.

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

    There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs.
     
    I remember a particularly depressing book by a teenage drug user from Berlin. In between looking for a fix and doing tricks to obtain money, she complain about living in Gropiusstadt.

    In some cases, you need to round up the person responsible, lock them into their creations, then unleash orbital lasers.

    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those? Are East Asians mentally more ready for generational spaceflight?

    Replies: @Gimeiyo, @Chrisnonymous, @Harry Baldwin

    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those?

    Depends which ones you’re talking about. If it’s the rows and rows of Seoul apartment towers, all alike, the exterior is bland and charmless, but the interior layouts of the units are sensible. And all the ones I’ve been in have been renovated — very comfortable and pleasant.

    And perhaps more to the point, the high rises may look a little grim, but they have simply been constructed efficiently and without ornament. Not my cup of tea, but fundamentally different from a deliberate atrocity like Boston City Hall, which was designed to offend the senses.

    • Agree: ben tillman
    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Gimeiyo



    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those?
     
    Depends which ones you’re talking about. If it’s the rows and rows of Seoul apartment towers, all alike...

    And perhaps more to the point, the high rises may look a little grim, but they have simply been constructed efficiently and without ornament.
     
    Cities along the East Asian littoral such as Seoul and Hong Kong, or on the (once-) volcanic islands of Japan, have an advantage-- a stunning mountain backdrop. Indeed, bland buildings can be preferable in this context, especially if they are all slightly different from one another. They won't compete with nature. No one cares what is the tallest building in Rio or Cape Town or Lisbon or its twin, San Francisco.

    Flat coastal cities like Boston, Chicago, Dubai, or anything in Florida depend more on their skylines for their identity. Of course, you can go too far in the other direction, throwing up shards and cheese graters and gherkins and cans of ham and the like (damn, now I'm hungry) as has a certain city which shall remain nameless.
  33. @Elmer T. Jones
    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop. Despite mechanical-electronic integration that is now beyond human capability, classic camera forms are still the most appealing. Phone cameras are an abomination of software functionality and physical emasculation. Just breathe on the damn thing the wrong way and it changes function! A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects. Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors. Architecture borne from the loins of laptop computers suffers from the same woke plague that ruins all utilitarian objects. Just take a look at a public bathroom soap dispenser with its feminine curves that would not be possible without CAD tools and plastic injection molding, and there is nothing restraining these fools from applying it to buildings.

    Replies: @slumber_j, @epebble, @Joe Stalin, @John Johnson, @The Alarmist

    The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop.

    A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects.

    Enjoy this YT video where Ian visits the enterprise that makes the French special forces revolver MR-73, made with CNC and hand fitted.

  34. @HammerJack
    As it happens, I just came across a rare case of modern architecture getting along with its neighbors. Seaside, Florida, where these townhouses cost several million dollars and many of the buildings are designed by 'starchitects'.

    I wonder what the prevailing politics is like in that town.

    https://i.ibb.co/W0v83kd/Screenshot-20211004-025639-Zillow.jpg

    Obviously not the one with the marker, but two to the left.

    Replies: @Wilkey, @AnotherDad, @Romanian

    I wonder what the prevailing politics is like in that town.

    On the one hand, Seaside is the kind of place that would normally attract liberals, because it’s policies are vaguely Communist (or maybe communalist).

    On the other hand, it’s in the Florida Panhandle, so there is that. And incidentally it was the filming location for “The Truman Show.”

    Rep. Matt Gaetz and his brother both live in Seaside, so I guess that answers your question.

    I visited Seaside several years ago and found it rather pretty, but unrealistic on a large scale.

  35. @Elmer T. Jones
    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop. Despite mechanical-electronic integration that is now beyond human capability, classic camera forms are still the most appealing. Phone cameras are an abomination of software functionality and physical emasculation. Just breathe on the damn thing the wrong way and it changes function! A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects. Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors. Architecture borne from the loins of laptop computers suffers from the same woke plague that ruins all utilitarian objects. Just take a look at a public bathroom soap dispenser with its feminine curves that would not be possible without CAD tools and plastic injection molding, and there is nothing restraining these fools from applying it to buildings.

    Replies: @slumber_j, @epebble, @Joe Stalin, @John Johnson, @The Alarmist

    It has nothing to do with the tools.

    It’s the same old anti-symmetry/anti-Western post-modern garbage that convinces these architects that they are above the masses by creating something gaudy. It’s the leftist version of the emperor has no clothes.

    Boston City Hall is nothing compared to a Frank Gehry.

    Have a look at this monstrosity:
    The style is anti-Rome/anti-European. It’s not a coincidence that so many of these post-modern buildings are designed for governments.

    • Agree: Charon
    • Replies: @Chrisnonymous
    @John Johnson

    Some of Gehry's stuff is okay. These particular buildings, however, resemble favelas. Ugly as they are, I rather like the idea of government buildings being designed as favelas.

    Replies: @RadicalCenter

    , @Romanian
    @John Johnson

    You see that a lot of these buildings are presented as renderings, to make them more pleasing by showing them in the right light, without any patina of time or the grime that pollution produces. As soon as you build them, especially integrated in their surroundings, the crime is revealed.

  36. anon[307] • Disclaimer says:

    it’s sad that steve doesn’t get that the problem with such buildings isn’t their style of architecture/their architect(s). the problem is architecture per se. in an ideal world there would be no architects. there’d just be structural engineers etc…. form follows function means no fine art. the world would be a lot more beautful without fine art. Cynicism (with a capital C) is everything good and right and beatiful.

  37. Off topic:

    Steve

    Playboy Magazine was always about the moral collapse of America(as was Rock n Roll)..but behold Playboy’s new front cover…This is why the Taliban resisted the occupation of Afghanistan by Global-Homo….The Philippines was occupied by the US Military for decades…..And Playboy Magazine’s front cover are the consequences for Phillipino Society…

  38. Public Education style architecture. What, no barbed wire and sharpshooter lookouts?

  39. Meanwhile, while at home trying to attend UCLA…

    https://twitter.com/ChristianWalk1r/status/1445165345895899136?s=20

    • Replies: @Barnard
    @Anonymous

    Yes it is terrible and should be illegal, but he should have known better than to enroll for the fall semester. A 25-30% drop out rate would get their attention in a hurry. Why agree to pay sky high tuition prices for virtual learning?

  40. @Mike Tre
    At least it was an Irish guy that said it.

    Replies: @Old Palo Altan

    Agreed.

    Giving us some hope that the Boston Irish who inflicted this monstrosity upon the city, partly as a satisfying way to spit in the eye of the already retreating Brahmins, have been at least partially replaced by descendants of finer sensibilities.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Old Palo Altan

    They could ship it to Ashgabat, where the locals would happily clad it with shining white marble. Would it fit through the Suez?



    https://images.marinelink.com/images/maritime/w800/lustration-by-corona-borealisadobestock-121457.jpg

    Replies: @Dr. Krieger

  41. Boston City Hall is a Lego that you step on with your eyes.

    I don’t know. It has a very institutional detention center vibe, and if the designers are of the opinion that most politicians and city administrators belong in jail, maybe that’s the look they were going for.

  42. @HammerJack
    As it happens, I just came across a rare case of modern architecture getting along with its neighbors. Seaside, Florida, where these townhouses cost several million dollars and many of the buildings are designed by 'starchitects'.

    I wonder what the prevailing politics is like in that town.

    https://i.ibb.co/W0v83kd/Screenshot-20211004-025639-Zillow.jpg

    Obviously not the one with the marker, but two to the left.

    Replies: @Wilkey, @AnotherDad, @Romanian

    As it happens, I just came across a rare case of modern architecture getting along with its neighbors. Seaside, Florida, where these townhouses cost several million dollars and many of the buildings are designed by ‘starchitects’.

    Worry not.

    Since our reigning minoritarian establishment is determined to import all the world’s detritus and “sun people” much prefer Florida to say, Montana, the children or grandchildren inheriting those pricey townhomes will be strolling down toward the beach through a sea of Haitians and Africans hawking crap.

  43. The veterans of World War II were all for modernity. They hated everything that smacked of their horrible depression past. They hated Tiffany lamps (that’s why they’re rare), they hated hated trains (read: troop trains), they hated Victorian anything, and they loved clean. Any thing clean looking. Look at their yards. And if they are anything, these modernist monstrosities look clean. Maybe now that they’re almost all gone, another aesthetic will take hold. But their aesthetic has a long reach and a strong hold on later generations.

    Besides which, architects are just in a contest to make something different. Not livable. Just different. Not good-looking. Just different. Then they are ground-breakers. Visionaries. Fucking shits.

    • Agree: Romanian
    • Replies: @Rohirrimborn
    @obwandiyag

    I agree that your notion of clean is spot on. Young people can't understand the passion for clean and antiseptic that existed in the mid 20th century. My mother's family is a good example of why this was the case. My mother was born in Boston in 1922. She had 3 sisters. So my mother was born just a few years after the Spanish flu epidemic when coffins were piled in the streets of Boston because they couldn't be processed fast enough according to my grandmother who was there. My mother's oldest sister contracted polio and died around age 9. Another sister contracted polio at a young age and grew up stunted and deformed and died before reaching age 40 in an iron lung. The other sister contracted polio just around the time the vaccine was created and lost the use of one leg. She still managed to raise 7 children while confined to crutches. My mother was the only one of the four girls who did not contract polio. It's hard to describe the public's desire for clean antiseptic spaces at that time. The ideas of people like BF Skinner were wildly popular. He advocated raising children in antiseptic fish tanks. Buildings with white brick were all the rage because they were clean looking. Now that public health has improved it's hard to relate to the fear that existed at the time.

    Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ralph L

  44. It’s just another brick in the wall between humanity and good, truth, and beauty.

  45. @YetAnotherAnon
    OT

    “Whadda we got this morning, Sheldon?” As soon as the words left his mouth, the Mayor regretted them. He knew what his tiny assistant would say. It was inevitable, and so he braced himself for the vile phrase, and sure enough, here it came. “Mainly plaques for blacks,” said Sheldon.

    ...

    In these troubled times, with the surveys going the way they were going, it was wise, and probably good, to single out as many black recipients of these trophies and rhetorical flourishes as possible, but it was not wise and it was not good for Sheldon Lennert, this homunculus with his absurdly tiny head and his mismatched checked shirts, jackets, and pants, to call the process “plaques for blacks.” Already the Mayor had heard a couple of people in the press office use the expression. What if some of the black members of the staff overheard it? They might even laugh. But they wouldn’t be laughing inside. But no … Sheldon continued to say “plaques for blacks.”
     
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/05/blue-plaques-in-london-black-people

    Blue plaques commemorating notable black figures still make up just 2.1% of the individuals honoured across London, according to a Guardian analysis.

    The scheme, which English Heritage has run since 1986, was started in 1866 with the purpose of commemorating figures who have lived, worked or stayed in buildings across the capital.

    More than 1,160 notable people are name-checked on the scheme’s 978 plaques. But of the those awarded plaques, 96% are white, while only 4% of figures have been from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background.

     

    Now this figure shouldn't surprise anyone. If anything it's much too high. There were only 7,000 black and "coloured" people in the UK before WW2, and only 40,000 in 1954, six years after the first Caribbean immigrants arrived. There were over 50 million Brits then, so they were less than 0.1% of the population.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/aug/06/past.politics

    David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

     

    They are worried that the plaques commemorate musicians, but ignore all the engineers, soldiers and physicists!

    Disparities also exist within the categories by which black and non-black figures are recognised. Black nominees are overrepresented in the categories that primarily commemorate music and dance, which make up almost a third (30%) of all the plaques dedicated to black people, compared with just 8% of all honourees.

     

    Replies: @bomag, @The Alarmist

    So what you are sayin is that blacks didn’t build London nor Great Britain.

  46. It features quite a lot in The Friends of Eddie Coyle – a suitably depressing cityscape for a depressing film.

    • Replies: @additionalMike
    @jimmyriddle

    Relics of a bygone era in the look, characters, and script of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, e.g., when the guy selling illegal guns says to a buyer, a reptilian Hippie Revolutionary-Bill Ayres-type: "This is why I don't like dealing with people like you. You're not honest."

    The book was written by a former federal prosecutor, who really seemed to understand the criminal type.

  47. A public building should be “monumental yet affectionate.” This City Hall is not affectionate. If you do an image search for City Hall architecture, you find that basically none of them is affectionate. The reason for this is that the architects, either consciously or unconsciously, were fitting the design to match the unaffectionate, foreboding sensibility of the bureaucrats who will be “serving” the public. As the old saying goes, there is a reason why “no trespassing” signs are not written in wedding-invitation script.

  48. @Elmer T. Jones
    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints, which thus lose aesthetic appeal because people cannot grasp or inhabit them. The early Leica camera designs are a pleasure to hold because Barnak crafted them by hand in a machine shop. Despite mechanical-electronic integration that is now beyond human capability, classic camera forms are still the most appealing. Phone cameras are an abomination of software functionality and physical emasculation. Just breathe on the damn thing the wrong way and it changes function! A hetero man needs knobs and gears to drive objects. Modern design is just part of the entire sweeping trend towards feminization of all endeavors. Architecture borne from the loins of laptop computers suffers from the same woke plague that ruins all utilitarian objects. Just take a look at a public bathroom soap dispenser with its feminine curves that would not be possible without CAD tools and plastic injection molding, and there is nothing restraining these fools from applying it to buildings.

    Replies: @slumber_j, @epebble, @Joe Stalin, @John Johnson, @The Alarmist

    Much bad design is due to computer tools and fabrication techniques that provide means to create structures that are beyond human physical constraints…

    One cannot fully appreciate the gravity of that statement until one flies something like a F-117A.

  49. Modern architects seem to be arrogant and arguably lazy. Or perhaps a better word “untalented” or “unskilled”.

    Architecture should ideally
    a) serve the intended function
    b) create a pleasant space for the people using it
    c) work well–fit in, look good–with the surrounding geography
    d) be nice to look at

    Doing all this may not be easy–especially in certain urban locations–but that the job. It takes talent to do it well … and work.

    Lots of modern architecture seems to be just “look at me!” (Some guy’s version of what the girls do on social media.) The hard work–and deference–to serve the actual client is missing.

    And, of course–like so much that’s gone wrong in modernity (arts, social sciences, government) where there’s an absence of a hard empirical check–much of this suffers from lack of feedback, with architectural arrogance and laziness approved by people spending other people’s money.

  50. Steve, you posted a link to a Rick Beato video earlier. I’m pretty sure I was the first commentator to mention him on here, so if you’re enjoying him now as much as I do and I had something to do with that, I’m happy!

    Anyway, YouTube in general has really flowered for me during the lockdown and one of the things the wife and I enjoy watching together now are virtual “walk videos”- basically travel TV, but done in a highly deliberate, slow, first-person POV style as if you were actually there walking around. This sounds boring, but we like it as it does a really really good job of simulating what it would be like to be on vacation there. This suits me as personally I zone in on the little details of even the most famous of world monuments, like the remains of a brick smokestack which you see as you approach the Eiffel Tower, part of the original on-site (coal-age) industrial infrastructure necessary to first build the thing. It may sound philistine, but after watching several of these walk videos (especially watching several different ones of the same location/monument from different perspectives) I’m pretty much “good” on the whole European vacation thing, as all I’m really missing is the humidity, sore feet, and waiting-in-line part of the experience. Not saying I do not want to eventually visit, only that I’m much more likely to avoid the tourist traps and choose a food/general ambience sort of experience.

    Anyway, while watching a walking tour of Palermo, Sicily, the narrator mentions “the Rape of Palermo”, a little-known incident in the 60’s in which mob-owned construction companies siphoned off lots of public money in order to tear-down the city’s charming, historic architecture and replace it with ugly, brutalist, concrete shells of probably criminally-shoddy quality:

    http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art176.htm

    For those who think the Italian mafia is anything like the operatic anti-heroes depicted in THE GODFATHER, this used car salesman-like exercise in petty venality and tack should be a wake-up. And yet Italians- sophisticated and ancient and grounded- keep making their North Sea cousins look like the comparative children that they are, no matter how many self-driving BMW’s and high-speed rail systems that run on time the latter are able to produce. For Italians at least know the ugly concrete buildings exist only because of a scam, a rip-off. North Sea European and their Western Hemisphere descendants, however, will happily nod along to the architecture critic telling them these monstrosities are really beautiful and sophisticated and breathtaking and innovative, just as they accept all other sorts of ugliness and brutality in their lives- BLM, transgenderism, Pakistanis grooming their daughters and Afghans raping their sons. So long as there’s a credentialed authority at the other end of the lie, they’ll swallow it. Sad.

    • Thanks: Dumbo
    • Replies: @Abe
    @Abe

    “the Rape of Palermo”:

    http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art176.htm

    , @Buffalo Joe
    @Abe

    Abe, in Buffalo there is a recent, disgusting habit of preceeding everything with "Mafia". Bills fans are the Bills' Mafia. The latest local vodka is "Mafia" sauce. I read the book the "Last Godfathers" about the mafia criminal empire in Italy. If you think strangling kidnap victims and then disolving their remains in acid or bombing a historic art gallery which killed the curator, her husband and infant son is cool, you are effn sick.

    Replies: @Bostonvegas, @Mike Tre

  51. What is beauty? If it’s form and proportion and all that, then modernist architecture fits the bill.

    Nope, it’s not just form and proportion.

    Gleick explained beauty best in his book, Chaos.

    “Scale” is his standard.

    He compares the Paris Opera House with any random skyscraper.

    Stand far yonder from the Paris Opera House. It looks one way. Get closer. It looks another way. Get closer, it’s aspect changes again. And so on. Scale creates its variety and its beauty.

    Any random skyscraper, on the other hand, looks the same up close, far, and yonder. Just one scale. No beauty.

    Complexity creates scale creates beauty.

  52. @Jamie_NYC
    Why buildings like this one exist? I'm afraid that Steve's favorite explanation (western spiritual exhaustion following the two world wars) doesn't hold water: wouldn't the effect be proportional to the suffering caused by the world wars by a particular country? Did US suffer more than Russia? Sweden more than Poland? Also, one would expect that the effect will be strongest the close you are to the causing events. Yet, the 50s were a pretty normal times in the West.

    Instead, I'm afraid that the explanation offered by Ed Dutton (youtube channel: Jolly heretic) may be correct: spiteful mutants, i.e. increase in mutational load in modern western populations caused by the medical advances of the 19th (sanitation) and 20th centuries. I couldn't think of any counter-arguments, in fact, I'm even more pessimistic than he is: he believes the things will right themselves out as people with high mutational load don't have (many) children. The GWAS studies show that people with undesirable traits, unfortunately, have more children.

    Replies: @J.Ross, @Farenheit, @Peterike

    Fully agree with your observation regarding “spiteful mutants”. Sadly, I think they’ve infiltrated almost every institution in the land. (Lori Lightfoot, call your office!)

    • Replies: @Father O'Hara
    @Farenheit

    Lori is currently in a nasty public feud with the odious Kim Fox. Seems a group of youths had a very public shootout in Dear Leaders old stomping grounds,the west side,and no one has been charged!
    Light foot is livid. Fox is nonplussed.

  53. @danand
    "It simply doesn’t belong there..."

    Does any of it? Seems as though it's at least somewhat about perspective.

    https://flic.kr/p/2mxCxJv

    Replies: @Bill Jones

    Try this monstrosity.
    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.

    known locally as Paddy’s WigWam.

    Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, UK. [749×961]
    byu/richardrichard190 inArchitecturePorn

    • Replies: @additionalMike
    @Bill Jones

    For real?

    Jesus wept.
    Do severed heads roll down those steps at Lent?


    The contrast between the Church I knew growing up and the Church today is mind-boggling.

    , @Reg Cæsar
    @Bill Jones


    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.
     
    Four of fish and finger pie.
    , @RadicalCenter
    @Bill Jones

    I wonder if the Muslims taking over formerly-great formerly-Britain will tear down the cathedral entirely or try to improve it when it’s turned into a mosque.

  54. @Coemgen
    Wait! What? Is this Byrne character saying the emperor has no clothes?

    What was the watershed moment where artists switched from trying to create something aesthetically pleasing to where "artists" began to create things that people need to be "taught" to appreciate?

    Replies: @stillCARealist, @ben tillman, @Art Deco, @2BR

    I remember a conversation in 1987 with an art student at UC Berkeley. Now she was a talented artist who could actually draw real stuff, left-handed and all, but she chose to paint ugly, abstract pictures about nothing. When I said my conception of art involved beauty… even describing paintings of nature… she looked at me like I just said I wanted to torture animals. Utter scorn and derision. That was completely wrong, outmoded, backwards, provincial, beneath contempt.

    Art, at that point at a UC, was all about your personal feelings and motivations. The real you and your fears and dreams. Anything resembling objective beauty was utterly forbidden. And here we are.

  55. Between Boston City Hall & the large empty plaza that surrounds it that footprint of land is worth upwards of 100 million dollars to the city of Boston, at least.

    It will get knocked down sooner or later. There’s been talk of building the new city hall over in the evolving Seaport District.

  56. Anonymous[267] • Disclaimer says:

    What is your take on this Steve? What is the future of Texas and California?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/texas-census-united-states.html?

    Texas Is the Future of America
    By Steven Pedigo The New York Times6 min
    View Original

    Credit…Eric Gay/Associated Press
    Mr. Pedigo has written extensively about economic development and placemaking in Texas and other cities in North America and across the world.

    AUSTIN, Texas — California is “America on fast-forward,” it is often said. Liberals quote the maxim with pride, pointing to the state’s diversity and its outsize share of economic output, technological innovation, venture capital and growth. Conservatives put scare quotes around it, warning about the dystopia that awaits if America becomes any more like California, with its high taxes and housing costs, challenged schools, dwindling water supply, devastating wildfires and permanent Democratic majority.

    But if you’re really looking for a bellwether state that offers a glimpse into the country’s economic future and engines of growth as well as its political fault lines in the long run, it’s not California. It’s Texas.

    That’s what the 2020 census tells us, along with the last 20 years of economic and demographic data. Many Americans are moving to cities; Texas is urbanizing even faster than California. And we hear a lot of talk about what will happen to our politics when the United States becomes a majority-minority country, but like California, Texas has already reached that demographic horizon. Its present brand of politics may offer clues to the future of struggles across the country between a grasping after mythology and the shifting demographics of America.

    I understand that the very idea that Texas could be a herald of the national future is terrifying for many liberals and moderates, given the Texas G.O.P.’s assaults on voting rights and reproductive liberty, the state’s new open carry laws and our governor’s hostility to mask and vaccine mandates.

    But given the changes in Texas’s demography, economy and urban geography, it’s fair to say that its conservative lawmakers are even more frightened of what the future may hold for themselves. They are so scared, in fact, that they are throwing sand into that growth engine’s gears.

    Here is what you have to understand about Texas. First, it is growing. It added 4.2 million residents between 2000 and 2010, and another four million in the last decade for a growth rate of almost 40 percent — double that of the country as a whole.

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    • Replies: @Hangnail Hans
    @Anonymous


    conservative lawmakers are even more frightened of what the future may hold for themselves. They are so scared, in fact, that they are throwing sand into that growth engine’s gears.
     
    That's the NYT all right. Anyone who objects to being replaced by 95% POC is just being "scared" and "frightened" like the badwhite weenies they are.

    And now they're trying to sabotage our Brave New World! And steal our wealth for themselves! We mustn't let them do this, friends! Have I mentioned January 6th? How about Jim Crow? Emmett?

    Here is what you have to understand about Texas.

     

    The NYT will tell you how to think about this, friend!

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.
     
    'Race Replacement' is just another conspiracy theory from scared and frightened white weenies. You don't want to be like them, do you?

    Besides. It's pretty much done now.

    , @Muggles
    @Anonymous


    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.
     
    More Fake News.

    I doubt this is true.

    Even including subcons, east Asians, MENAs, Nigerians, Hispanics of various hues (some of course White!). And blacks.

    I would be surprised that even just counting non Europeans/non European Americans, that this percentage is more than 40%.

    Of course fudging the "facts" has never been a problem for the Old Gray Lady's propagandists.

    I don't think the Haitians are planning on sticking around Texas either. Delaware sounds pretty nice though...
    , @Truth
    @Anonymous


    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.
     
    Hey, that's nothing, Old Sport. The scary part is that the other 5% are liberal Honkees from California...

    https://youtu.be/0WtDmbr9xyY?t=55
  57. We’ve come a long way from the Greco-Roman architecture that was the common design of public buildings in this country in the 19th and early 20th century.

    This building is simply one of the ugliest public buildings I have ever laid eyes on.

  58. @Abe
    Steve, you posted a link to a Rick Beato video earlier. I’m pretty sure I was the first commentator to mention him on here, so if you’re enjoying him now as much as I do and I had something to do with that, I’m happy!

    Anyway, YouTube in general has really flowered for me during the lockdown and one of the things the wife and I enjoy watching together now are virtual “walk videos”- basically travel TV, but done in a highly deliberate, slow, first-person POV style as if you were actually there walking around. This sounds boring, but we like it as it does a really really good job of simulating what it would be like to be on vacation there. This suits me as personally I zone in on the little details of even the most famous of world monuments, like the remains of a brick smokestack which you see as you approach the Eiffel Tower, part of the original on-site (coal-age) industrial infrastructure necessary to first build the thing. It may sound philistine, but after watching several of these walk videos (especially watching several different ones of the same location/monument from different perspectives) I’m pretty much “good” on the whole European vacation thing, as all I’m really missing is the humidity, sore feet, and waiting-in-line part of the experience. Not saying I do not want to eventually visit, only that I’m much more likely to avoid the tourist traps and choose a food/general ambience sort of experience.

    Anyway, while watching a walking tour of Palermo, Sicily, the narrator mentions “the Rape of Palermo”, a little-known incident in the 60’s in which mob-owned construction companies siphoned off lots of public money in order to tear-down the city’s charming, historic architecture and replace it with ugly, brutalist, concrete shells of probably criminally-shoddy quality:

    http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art176.htm

    For those who think the Italian mafia is anything like the operatic anti-heroes depicted in THE GODFATHER, this used car salesman-like exercise in petty venality and tack should be a wake-up. And yet Italians- sophisticated and ancient and grounded- keep making their North Sea cousins look like the comparative children that they are, no matter how many self-driving BMW’s and high-speed rail systems that run on time the latter are able to produce. For Italians at least know the ugly concrete buildings exist only because of a scam, a rip-off. North Sea European and their Western Hemisphere descendants, however, will happily nod along to the architecture critic telling them these monstrosities are really beautiful and sophisticated and breathtaking and innovative, just as they accept all other sorts of ugliness and brutality in their lives- BLM, transgenderism, Pakistanis grooming their daughters and Afghans raping their sons. So long as there’s a credentialed authority at the other end of the lie, they’ll swallow it. Sad.

    Replies: @Abe, @Buffalo Joe

    “the Rape of Palermo”:

    http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art176.htm

  59. @Paleo Retiree
    Classic article:

    https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/

    Replies: @Prester John

    Without having even read the article yet, I like the title already. “Mental disorders” indeed!

  60. @Abe
    Steve, you posted a link to a Rick Beato video earlier. I’m pretty sure I was the first commentator to mention him on here, so if you’re enjoying him now as much as I do and I had something to do with that, I’m happy!

    Anyway, YouTube in general has really flowered for me during the lockdown and one of the things the wife and I enjoy watching together now are virtual “walk videos”- basically travel TV, but done in a highly deliberate, slow, first-person POV style as if you were actually there walking around. This sounds boring, but we like it as it does a really really good job of simulating what it would be like to be on vacation there. This suits me as personally I zone in on the little details of even the most famous of world monuments, like the remains of a brick smokestack which you see as you approach the Eiffel Tower, part of the original on-site (coal-age) industrial infrastructure necessary to first build the thing. It may sound philistine, but after watching several of these walk videos (especially watching several different ones of the same location/monument from different perspectives) I’m pretty much “good” on the whole European vacation thing, as all I’m really missing is the humidity, sore feet, and waiting-in-line part of the experience. Not saying I do not want to eventually visit, only that I’m much more likely to avoid the tourist traps and choose a food/general ambience sort of experience.

    Anyway, while watching a walking tour of Palermo, Sicily, the narrator mentions “the Rape of Palermo”, a little-known incident in the 60’s in which mob-owned construction companies siphoned off lots of public money in order to tear-down the city’s charming, historic architecture and replace it with ugly, brutalist, concrete shells of probably criminally-shoddy quality:

    http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art176.htm

    For those who think the Italian mafia is anything like the operatic anti-heroes depicted in THE GODFATHER, this used car salesman-like exercise in petty venality and tack should be a wake-up. And yet Italians- sophisticated and ancient and grounded- keep making their North Sea cousins look like the comparative children that they are, no matter how many self-driving BMW’s and high-speed rail systems that run on time the latter are able to produce. For Italians at least know the ugly concrete buildings exist only because of a scam, a rip-off. North Sea European and their Western Hemisphere descendants, however, will happily nod along to the architecture critic telling them these monstrosities are really beautiful and sophisticated and breathtaking and innovative, just as they accept all other sorts of ugliness and brutality in their lives- BLM, transgenderism, Pakistanis grooming their daughters and Afghans raping their sons. So long as there’s a credentialed authority at the other end of the lie, they’ll swallow it. Sad.

    Replies: @Abe, @Buffalo Joe

    Abe, in Buffalo there is a recent, disgusting habit of preceeding everything with “Mafia”. Bills fans are the Bills’ Mafia. The latest local vodka is “Mafia” sauce. I read the book the “Last Godfathers” about the mafia criminal empire in Italy. If you think strangling kidnap victims and then disolving their remains in acid or bombing a historic art gallery which killed the curator, her husband and infant son is cool, you are effn sick.

    • Thanks: Abe
    • Replies: @Bostonvegas
    @Buffalo Joe

    I think the appeal to me(while acnowledging it is crazy to glamorize these psychopaths) is how they seem less affected by the grind of bureacracy than the rest of us..Atleast until they get killed or locked up.

    , @Mike Tre
    @Buffalo Joe

    The term "pimp" is now a positive association. I remember 20+ years ago in the Marines we had what was known as the Lance Corporal mafia. I believe gangster rapping negroes of the 80's and 90's are responsible for making both terms seem cool.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

  61. @Anonymous
    Meanwhile, while at home trying to attend UCLA…

    https://twitter.com/ChristianWalk1r/status/1445165345895899136?s=20

    Replies: @Barnard

    Yes it is terrible and should be illegal, but he should have known better than to enroll for the fall semester. A 25-30% drop out rate would get their attention in a hurry. Why agree to pay sky high tuition prices for virtual learning?

  62. Steve-O, speaking of municipalities, EXCELLENT news!

    https://worldstar.com/video.php?v=wshh46Aea1j253PhWgQ1

    • Replies: @Joe Stalin
    @Truth

    Hopefully, the new Black owners will start paying property tax so they can feel the JOY OF DEMOCRAT TAXES!

    Replies: @fish

  63. @Bardon Kaldian
    https://www.insider.com/the-ugliest-most-hated-buildings-in-the-world#people-in-massachusetts-wanted-to-demolish-bostons-city-hall-before-its-construction-was-even-completed-1

    8 of the ugliest, most hated buildings in the world

    Of course, tastes differ, but I actually like that North Korean hotel; the Prague Žižkov tower would be to my liking, too -with those fugly gigantic crawling babies-smurfs removed ....

    Replies: @Barnard, @Dumbo

    The Prague TV tower is not that ugly. I’ve seen it up close. Well, I mean, it’s ugly, but it’s a TV tower for f’s sake. It’s difficult to turn one into something pretty. The babies by that silly contemporary artist should be removed, I agree.

    I guess the only worse thing than contemporary architects, are contemporary public sculptors…

    Among starchitects, Frank Ghery is the worst. He also has a building in Prague, “the dancing building”. It’s ugly too, but Ghery made even worse things later on, so this one doesn’t look all that bad now.

    I wonder, don’t those people realize that what they build is ugly? Or they do realize, but they don’t care? It’s like a power trip for them to inflict those things on our eyes?

    • Replies: @Rob McX
    @Dumbo


    I wonder, don’t those people realize that what they build is ugly? Or they do realize, but they don’t care? It’s like a power trip for them to inflict those things on our eyes?
     
    Kingsley Amis wrote that architecture provides a special opportunity for people to inflict ugliness on the masses. A book like Finnegans Wake, he said, can be just ignored and left to sit on the shelf. But the architect has the great advantage over the writer in that people can't pretend his work doesn't exist.
  64. Boston Loves Baseball And Beer And Russell Earl Born-In-Georgia BUCKY Dent!

    • Replies: @Brutusale
    @Charles Pewitt

    The Yankee$ are zero-for-October against the Red $ox since they started rolling out one-hit wonder Dent for cheap thrills. As someone pointed out, it has been 40 years since the Yankee$ made the World Series without Mariano Rivera on the roster.

    2004 changed everything. Yankee$ fans got their own version of Bucky "Fucking" Dent.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYxSZJ9GZ-w
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu-m2CYHW4Y

    As was commented on in this story, $334 million for 2 shitty innings is definitely a sign of Biden inflation.
    https://nypost.com/2021/10/06/the-red-sox-are-officially-the-yankees-daddy/

  65. @Known Fact
    Crushingly ugly modern buildings do serve a vital purpose -- as establishing exterior shots for movies or TV shows. Add a little ominous music and the soulless architecture instantly tells you that the people inside, whether government or corporate, are inherently soulless and evil themselves.

    Replies: @Alfa158

    The “wings” on each side of the upper story windows can also be functional in the manner of arrow slits. They would stop incoming lateral small arms fire, while riflemen in the windows could still control the field of fire directly in front of each window.

  66. @Anonymous
    What is your take on this Steve? What is the future of Texas and California?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/texas-census-united-states.html?


    Texas Is the Future of America
    By Steven Pedigo The New York Times6 min
    View Original

    Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press
    Mr. Pedigo has written extensively about economic development and placemaking in Texas and other cities in North America and across the world.

    AUSTIN, Texas — California is “America on fast-forward,” it is often said. Liberals quote the maxim with pride, pointing to the state’s diversity and its outsize share of economic output, technological innovation, venture capital and growth. Conservatives put scare quotes around it, warning about the dystopia that awaits if America becomes any more like California, with its high taxes and housing costs, challenged schools, dwindling water supply, devastating wildfires and permanent Democratic majority.

    But if you’re really looking for a bellwether state that offers a glimpse into the country’s economic future and engines of growth as well as its political fault lines in the long run, it’s not California. It’s Texas.

    That’s what the 2020 census tells us, along with the last 20 years of economic and demographic data. Many Americans are moving to cities; Texas is urbanizing even faster than California. And we hear a lot of talk about what will happen to our politics when the United States becomes a majority-minority country, but like California, Texas has already reached that demographic horizon. Its present brand of politics may offer clues to the future of struggles across the country between a grasping after mythology and the shifting demographics of America.

    I understand that the very idea that Texas could be a herald of the national future is terrifying for many liberals and moderates, given the Texas G.O.P.’s assaults on voting rights and reproductive liberty, the state’s new open carry laws and our governor’s hostility to mask and vaccine mandates.

    But given the changes in Texas’s demography, economy and urban geography, it’s fair to say that its conservative lawmakers are even more frightened of what the future may hold for themselves. They are so scared, in fact, that they are throwing sand into that growth engine’s gears.

    Here is what you have to understand about Texas. First, it is growing. It added 4.2 million residents between 2000 and 2010, and another four million in the last decade for a growth rate of almost 40 percent — double that of the country as a whole.

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    Replies: @Hangnail Hans, @Muggles, @Truth

    conservative lawmakers are even more frightened of what the future may hold for themselves. They are so scared, in fact, that they are throwing sand into that growth engine’s gears.

    That’s the NYT all right. Anyone who objects to being replaced by 95% POC is just being “scared” and “frightened” like the badwhite weenies they are.

    And now they’re trying to sabotage our Brave New World! And steal our wealth for themselves! We mustn’t let them do this, friends! Have I mentioned January 6th? How about Jim Crow? Emmett?

    Here is what you have to understand about Texas.

    The NYT will tell you how to think about this, friend!

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    ‘Race Replacement’ is just another conspiracy theory from scared and frightened white weenies. You don’t want to be like them, do you?

    Besides. It’s pretty much done now.

  67. Francis Collins resigning is like a lego that gives you myocarditis.

  68. @Jamie_NYC
    Why buildings like this one exist? I'm afraid that Steve's favorite explanation (western spiritual exhaustion following the two world wars) doesn't hold water: wouldn't the effect be proportional to the suffering caused by the world wars by a particular country? Did US suffer more than Russia? Sweden more than Poland? Also, one would expect that the effect will be strongest the close you are to the causing events. Yet, the 50s were a pretty normal times in the West.

    Instead, I'm afraid that the explanation offered by Ed Dutton (youtube channel: Jolly heretic) may be correct: spiteful mutants, i.e. increase in mutational load in modern western populations caused by the medical advances of the 19th (sanitation) and 20th centuries. I couldn't think of any counter-arguments, in fact, I'm even more pessimistic than he is: he believes the things will right themselves out as people with high mutational load don't have (many) children. The GWAS studies show that people with undesirable traits, unfortunately, have more children.

    Replies: @J.Ross, @Farenheit, @Peterike

    “ Instead, I’m afraid that the explanation offered by Ed Dutton (youtube channel: Jolly heretic) may be correct: spiteful mutants”

    Nah, it’s usually just Jews. Their mutational load was on purpose.

    The building in question was designed by two people, one of which was Jewish. No surprise.

  69. @El Dato
    Mad Soviet monstrosities. The decks have already been painted red in expecatnce of the rivers of blood to come.

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

    There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs.
     
    I remember a particularly depressing book by a teenage drug user from Berlin. In between looking for a fix and doing tricks to obtain money, she complain about living in Gropiusstadt.

    In some cases, you need to round up the person responsible, lock them into their creations, then unleash orbital lasers.

    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those? Are East Asians mentally more ready for generational spaceflight?

    Replies: @Gimeiyo, @Chrisnonymous, @Harry Baldwin

    Mad Soviet monstrosities. The decks have already been painted red in expecatnce of the rivers of blood to come.

    And the long stepped staircase allows you to throw bodies/heads down in Aztec Robespierre fashion.

  70. @bomag
    People tend to collect the things they admired in their formative years.

    I guess architects design according to the toys they played with as children.

    Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Feryl

    I think the point was not that it looks like Lego so much as that stepping on a Lego is extremely painful (ask any parent), as is seeing this building.

  71. @John Johnson
    @Elmer T. Jones

    It has nothing to do with the tools.

    It's the same old anti-symmetry/anti-Western post-modern garbage that convinces these architects that they are above the masses by creating something gaudy. It's the leftist version of the emperor has no clothes.

    Boston City Hall is nothing compared to a Frank Gehry.

    Have a look at this monstrosity:
    http://afasiaarchzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Frank-Gehry-.-The-Grand-.-Los-Angeles-1.jpg

    The style is anti-Rome/anti-European. It's not a coincidence that so many of these post-modern buildings are designed for governments.

    Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Romanian

    Some of Gehry’s stuff is okay. These particular buildings, however, resemble favelas. Ugly as they are, I rather like the idea of government buildings being designed as favelas.

    • Replies: @RadicalCenter
    @Chrisnonymous

    I like the idea of government thugs being physically thrown out of the buildings, stripped of their bullshit positions and power over us, and left to live in poverty in favelas. Is that similar? ;)

  72. Built by the same Marxist trash to make government seem boring and confusing and therefore make people ignore it or give up on it. Psychology of the eyes.

    N.B.: If you ever listen to the old folk classic “Charlie on the MTA”, its about the Boston subway system. In many versions they mention the “Scully Square station.” Scully Square was the section of Boston where this monstrosity now stands. The marxist pigs deliberately destroyed Scully Square to make this crap.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @R.G. Camara


    In many versions they mention the “Scully Square station.” Scully Square was the section of Boston where this monstrosity now stands.
     
    Scollay. Somewhere I have a Polaroid of a sign which said "Scollay Under". It was indeed under the platform still in use, and still accessible (in 1976-7) if not necessarily legal.


    Well, hey... whaddya know!


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv5XfNnAQJU
  73. @Coemgen
    Wait! What? Is this Byrne character saying the emperor has no clothes?

    What was the watershed moment where artists switched from trying to create something aesthetically pleasing to where "artists" began to create things that people need to be "taught" to appreciate?

    Replies: @stillCARealist, @ben tillman, @Art Deco, @2BR

    I’d reckon approximately November 22, 1963.

  74. A 2016 Boston Globe essay about “Boston flops, flubs, and failures” said City Hall was “cracking internally like a dead molar waiting to be pulled.

  75. @Coemgen
    Wait! What? Is this Byrne character saying the emperor has no clothes?

    What was the watershed moment where artists switched from trying to create something aesthetically pleasing to where "artists" began to create things that people need to be "taught" to appreciate?

    Replies: @stillCARealist, @ben tillman, @Art Deco, @2BR

    Around about 1920.

    • Replies: @Coemgen
    @Art Deco

    Yeah, 1920 is around the time that Joyce's Ulysses was published. Joyce was a "jackeen" trying to get ahead of the English suicide cult.

    The date doesn't explain the events though. What changes occurred where art went from being a pursuit of producing something aesthetic to a pursuit of creating monstrosities that people feel (or are) forced to accept?

  76. @Coemgen
    Wait! What? Is this Byrne character saying the emperor has no clothes?

    What was the watershed moment where artists switched from trying to create something aesthetically pleasing to where "artists" began to create things that people need to be "taught" to appreciate?

    Replies: @stillCARealist, @ben tillman, @Art Deco, @2BR

    Prior to WW1, European public architecture was beautiful. 1918 to 1939, it was at least somewhat of a mixed bag. Post WW2, bad. Of course nothing matches our 1960s and forward brutalist architecture for ugliness, cruelty, contempt. It is designed to punish you, the viewer, it punishes you for having the effrontery to appreciate beauty.

  77. @Gimeiyo
    @El Dato


    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those?
     
    Depends which ones you're talking about. If it's the rows and rows of Seoul apartment towers, all alike, the exterior is bland and charmless, but the interior layouts of the units are sensible. And all the ones I've been in have been renovated -- very comfortable and pleasant.

    And perhaps more to the point, the high rises may look a little grim, but they have simply been constructed efficiently and without ornament. Not my cup of tea, but fundamentally different from a deliberate atrocity like Boston City Hall, which was designed to offend the senses.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those?

    Depends which ones you’re talking about. If it’s the rows and rows of Seoul apartment towers, all alike…

    And perhaps more to the point, the high rises may look a little grim, but they have simply been constructed efficiently and without ornament.

    Cities along the East Asian littoral such as Seoul and Hong Kong, or on the (once-) volcanic islands of Japan, have an advantage– a stunning mountain backdrop. Indeed, bland buildings can be preferable in this context, especially if they are all slightly different from one another. They won’t compete with nature. No one cares what is the tallest building in Rio or Cape Town or Lisbon or its twin, San Francisco.

    Flat coastal cities like Boston, Chicago, Dubai, or anything in Florida depend more on their skylines for their identity. Of course, you can go too far in the other direction, throwing up shards and cheese graters and gherkins and cans of ham and the like (damn, now I’m hungry) as has a certain city which shall remain nameless.

  78. @Old Palo Altan
    @Mike Tre

    Agreed.

    Giving us some hope that the Boston Irish who inflicted this monstrosity upon the city, partly as a satisfying way to spit in the eye of the already retreating Brahmins, have been at least partially replaced by descendants of finer sensibilities.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    They could ship it to Ashgabat, where the locals would happily clad it with shining white marble. Would it fit through the Suez?

    • Replies: @Dr. Krieger
    @Reg Cæsar

    That kinda looks like a container ship full of gigantic Rubik's Cubes.

  79. @Buffalo Joe
    @Abe

    Abe, in Buffalo there is a recent, disgusting habit of preceeding everything with "Mafia". Bills fans are the Bills' Mafia. The latest local vodka is "Mafia" sauce. I read the book the "Last Godfathers" about the mafia criminal empire in Italy. If you think strangling kidnap victims and then disolving their remains in acid or bombing a historic art gallery which killed the curator, her husband and infant son is cool, you are effn sick.

    Replies: @Bostonvegas, @Mike Tre

    I think the appeal to me(while acnowledging it is crazy to glamorize these psychopaths) is how they seem less affected by the grind of bureacracy than the rest of us..Atleast until they get killed or locked up.

  80. @Reg Cæsar
    @Old Palo Altan

    They could ship it to Ashgabat, where the locals would happily clad it with shining white marble. Would it fit through the Suez?



    https://images.marinelink.com/images/maritime/w800/lustration-by-corona-borealisadobestock-121457.jpg

    Replies: @Dr. Krieger

    That kinda looks like a container ship full of gigantic Rubik’s Cubes.

  81. @Buffalo Joe
    @Abe

    Abe, in Buffalo there is a recent, disgusting habit of preceeding everything with "Mafia". Bills fans are the Bills' Mafia. The latest local vodka is "Mafia" sauce. I read the book the "Last Godfathers" about the mafia criminal empire in Italy. If you think strangling kidnap victims and then disolving their remains in acid or bombing a historic art gallery which killed the curator, her husband and infant son is cool, you are effn sick.

    Replies: @Bostonvegas, @Mike Tre

    The term “pimp” is now a positive association. I remember 20+ years ago in the Marines we had what was known as the Lance Corporal mafia. I believe gangster rapping negroes of the 80’s and 90’s are responsible for making both terms seem cool.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
    @Mike Tre


    The term “pimp” is now a positive association.
     
    Blaxploitation is retro.


    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B000053VWF.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

    Replies: @Stan Adams

  82. @Stan Adams
    The other day I rode past the construction site for this, “the tallest residential tower south of Manhattan”:

    https://i.ibb.co/PzJ42MX/A223-CE94-BAAC-40-B6-897-F-B89-B967-E8-CAB.webp

    Meh.

    Replies: @Joe Stalin

    Too bad it’s residential… you could put full color LED lighting in it and have a stack of Rubik’s Cubes in constant motion…

  83. @Truth
    Steve-O, speaking of municipalities, EXCELLENT news!

    https://worldstar.com/video.php?v=wshh46Aea1j253PhWgQ1

    Replies: @Joe Stalin

    Hopefully, the new Black owners will start paying property tax so they can feel the JOY OF DEMOCRAT TAXES!

    • LOL: Truth
    • Replies: @fish
    @Joe Stalin

    Taxes?


    Can’t get them to pay for water, or car insurance, or support for multiple spawn from multiple Troofy Mamas.....!


    Pay taxes.....that’s funny....!

  84. Why are we punished with these hideous buildings?

    It must be obvious to everyone by now that the globalist Ruling Class hates us and wants to punish us however they can. This is just one of the many ways they do it.

  85. @R.G. Camara
    Built by the same Marxist trash to make government seem boring and confusing and therefore make people ignore it or give up on it. Psychology of the eyes.

    N.B.: If you ever listen to the old folk classic "Charlie on the MTA", its about the Boston subway system. In many versions they mention the "Scully Square station." Scully Square was the section of Boston where this monstrosity now stands. The marxist pigs deliberately destroyed Scully Square to make this crap.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    In many versions they mention the “Scully Square station.” Scully Square was the section of Boston where this monstrosity now stands.

    Scollay. Somewhere I have a Polaroid of a sign which said “Scollay Under”. It was indeed under the platform still in use, and still accessible (in 1976-7) if not necessarily legal.

    Well, hey… whaddya know!

    • Thanks: R.G. Camara
  86. @Buzz Mohawk
    What a piece of garbage.

    You walk around it on your way to Faneuil Hall (which you discover is just another tourist meme) and you recognize the ugliness, even if you don't know what the building is. It simply doesn't belong there, whatever it is. You know that, and everybody knows that.

    So, why is it there?

    Replies: @Coemgen

    Maybe it’s a case of absence makes the heart grow fonder but my parents and grandparents expressed fond memories of “Old” Scollay Square (which was razed then replaced with the City Hall monstrosity). If “Old” Scollay Square was appealing to the provincials (my family absolutely!), well then, of course it had to be destroyed and replaced with a monstrosity.

    Btw, Faneuil Hall is a historic building. It pre-dates tourism. I saw the Chieftains perform there back in the 80s. Half the crowd were illegals from Connemara stomping their feet along with the jigs and reels. It was a great performance and experience. For the outah-townahs, Faneuil is pronounced: Fan-you-ull).

    Aside, Massachusetts: it’s a state, a commonwealth, an Indian tribe, and a language. Yes, Massachusetts is a language with a dictionary, grammar, and bible. It’s also the origin of the PBS flagship station call sign of WGBH. Yes, the GBH of WGBH stands for Great Blue Hill which is the literal translation of Massachusetts.

    Now, my K-12 education was strictly in Massachusetts. I’ve spent endless hours watching and listening to WGBH. Both the state (commonwealth) and the PBS station have neglected to inform us of the true meaning of Massachusetts. Neither have taught us the least bit of the Massachusetts language. They’ve been to busy forcing Spanish on us for some unknown reason. It would have been nice if they’d deigned to teach us some Massachusetts – not only for sentimental reasons but for practical reasons – even Massachusetts natives don’t know how to pronounce the names of many of the local landmarks (myself included – I regularly drive on a road whose name I have no idea how to pronounce).

    • Thanks: Buzz Mohawk
  87. Anon[157] • Disclaimer says:

    OT: More news that Biden is not aware of what’s going on in the world.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/whos-running-show-kerry-tells-french-tv-biden-literally-not-aware-international-spat

    Unlike a lot of people, I think this is a deliberate policy on the part of the Democrats.

    Democrats have finally reached a point where they want to change our political system into one with with a weak-type president in our country. They want the president to be a figurehead who doesn’t get in the way of powerful Democratic oligarchs like high-level government employees, congressmen, and city mayors.

    Obama was the first weak figurehead president elected under this scheme. Only those who were not paying attention missed the fact that the Democratic oligarchy ran wild under him, and blundering Biden was chosen to continue the system. This is why the Democrats went berserk when Trump was elected. Trump was his own man who wouldn’t play along and be weak. He made his own decisions. A man like Trump is no longer the type of president the Democrats can tolerate because they have too many self-interests they’re trying to serve, and Trump got in the way.

    Democrats want a one-party state where they can keep their hand permanently in the till. They can’t survive financially without it. Our cities are great, ever-growing maws of financial need, and to keep them solvent, the Democratic party has become a Robocracy, based on the notion of looting the state.

  88. I failed to mention that the massive, empty plaza around Boston City Hall is an epic wind tunnel, as one can imagine. I’ve been blown across that expanse more than once when I’ve had to do business in the area.

  89. @jimmyriddle
    It features quite a lot in The Friends of Eddie Coyle - a suitably depressing cityscape for a depressing film.

    Replies: @additionalMike

    Relics of a bygone era in the look, characters, and script of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, e.g., when the guy selling illegal guns says to a buyer, a reptilian Hippie Revolutionary-Bill Ayres-type: “This is why I don’t like dealing with people like you. You’re not honest.”

    The book was written by a former federal prosecutor, who really seemed to understand the criminal type.

  90. @Bill Jones
    @danand

    Try this monstrosity.
    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.

    known locally as Paddy's WigWam.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePorn/comments/9ptrmy/liverpool_metropolitan_cathedral_uk_749x961/

    Replies: @additionalMike, @Reg Cæsar, @RadicalCenter

    For real?

    Jesus wept.
    Do severed heads roll down those steps at Lent?

    The contrast between the Church I knew growing up and the Church today is mind-boggling.

  91. @Farenheit
    @Jamie_NYC

    Fully agree with your observation regarding "spiteful mutants". Sadly, I think they've infiltrated almost every institution in the land. (Lori Lightfoot, call your office!)

    Replies: @Father O'Hara

    Lori is currently in a nasty public feud with the odious Kim Fox. Seems a group of youths had a very public shootout in Dear Leaders old stomping grounds,the west side,and no one has been charged!
    Light foot is livid. Fox is nonplussed.

  92. @Art Deco
    @Coemgen

    Around about 1920.

    Replies: @Coemgen

    Yeah, 1920 is around the time that Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Joyce was a “jackeen” trying to get ahead of the English suicide cult.

    The date doesn’t explain the events though. What changes occurred where art went from being a pursuit of producing something aesthetic to a pursuit of creating monstrosities that people feel (or are) forced to accept?

  93. @El Dato
    Mad Soviet monstrosities. The decks have already been painted red in expecatnce of the rivers of blood to come.

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

    There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs.
     
    I remember a particularly depressing book by a teenage drug user from Berlin. In between looking for a fix and doing tricks to obtain money, she complain about living in Gropiusstadt.

    In some cases, you need to round up the person responsible, lock them into their creations, then unleash orbital lasers.

    OTOH, these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse, does anyone complain about those? Are East Asians mentally more ready for generational spaceflight?

    Replies: @Gimeiyo, @Chrisnonymous, @Harry Baldwin

    these serial super-high apartment complexes from East Asia look even worse

    I agree they look as depressing American housing projects like Cabrini Green. On the plus side, if you have to ask your neighbor to turn down their music, it’s less likely that you would get shot.

  94. @Mike Tre
    @Buffalo Joe

    The term "pimp" is now a positive association. I remember 20+ years ago in the Marines we had what was known as the Lance Corporal mafia. I believe gangster rapping negroes of the 80's and 90's are responsible for making both terms seem cool.

    Replies: @Reg Cæsar

    The term “pimp” is now a positive association.

    Blaxploitation is retro.

    • Replies: @Stan Adams
    @Reg Cæsar

    I shouldn’t … really, I shouldn’t. But I will.



    https://i.ibb.co/VVn3GDs/28084-E5-A-441-E-4-DCE-97-B8-92-FE5-A9-F920-B.png

    Replies: @El Dato

  95. @Bill Jones
    @danand

    Try this monstrosity.
    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.

    known locally as Paddy's WigWam.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePorn/comments/9ptrmy/liverpool_metropolitan_cathedral_uk_749x961/

    Replies: @additionalMike, @Reg Cæsar, @RadicalCenter

    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.

    Four of fish and finger pie.

  96. @Reg Cæsar
    @Mike Tre


    The term “pimp” is now a positive association.
     
    Blaxploitation is retro.


    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B000053VWF.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

    Replies: @Stan Adams

    I shouldn’t … really, I shouldn’t. But I will.

    [MORE]

    • Replies: @El Dato
    @Stan Adams

    There is even the song of that on YouTube.

    Years ago I got censored by iSteve about that. It's on my little list!

  97. @Bill Jones
    @danand

    Try this monstrosity.
    The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.

    known locally as Paddy's WigWam.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePorn/comments/9ptrmy/liverpool_metropolitan_cathedral_uk_749x961/

    Replies: @additionalMike, @Reg Cæsar, @RadicalCenter

    I wonder if the Muslims taking over formerly-great formerly-Britain will tear down the cathedral entirely or try to improve it when it’s turned into a mosque.

  98. @Chrisnonymous
    @John Johnson

    Some of Gehry's stuff is okay. These particular buildings, however, resemble favelas. Ugly as they are, I rather like the idea of government buildings being designed as favelas.

    Replies: @RadicalCenter

    I like the idea of government thugs being physically thrown out of the buildings, stripped of their bullshit positions and power over us, and left to live in poverty in favelas. Is that similar? 😉

  99. @Stan Adams
    @Reg Cæsar

    I shouldn’t … really, I shouldn’t. But I will.



    https://i.ibb.co/VVn3GDs/28084-E5-A-441-E-4-DCE-97-B8-92-FE5-A9-F920-B.png

    Replies: @El Dato

    There is even the song of that on YouTube.

    Years ago I got censored by iSteve about that. It’s on my little list!

  100. anon[249] • Disclaimer says: • Website
    @Ripple Earthdevil
    They demolished Scollay Square, an area described as sleazy but fun, to build City Hall Plaza including that monstrosity. A few blocks west around the same time the poor but "vibrant" (I believe it was mostly ethnic whites who lived there) West End neighborhood was demolished for "urban renewal," which is a bunch of tall ugly apartment buildings along the Charles River at the end of Storrow Drive along with the expansion of Mass General Hospital. There was, maybe there still is, a sign in front of the apartment buildings that said something like "If you lived here you'd be home now," referring to the frequent traffic backups.

    Replies: @anon

    yes the brahmans had to put a lid on this sorid part of town, hence the oil cap GC.
    this part of down town did have a very sorrid, violent, disgusting history according to Aaron Hiltner in his book “Taking Leave Taking Liberty”.

    Anyway, it and the Combat Zone do not exist anymore.

  101. @obwandiyag
    The veterans of World War II were all for modernity. They hated everything that smacked of their horrible depression past. They hated Tiffany lamps (that's why they're rare), they hated hated trains (read: troop trains), they hated Victorian anything, and they loved clean. Any thing clean looking. Look at their yards. And if they are anything, these modernist monstrosities look clean. Maybe now that they're almost all gone, another aesthetic will take hold. But their aesthetic has a long reach and a strong hold on later generations.

    Besides which, architects are just in a contest to make something different. Not livable. Just different. Not good-looking. Just different. Then they are ground-breakers. Visionaries. Fucking shits.

    Replies: @Rohirrimborn

    I agree that your notion of clean is spot on. Young people can’t understand the passion for clean and antiseptic that existed in the mid 20th century. My mother’s family is a good example of why this was the case. My mother was born in Boston in 1922. She had 3 sisters. So my mother was born just a few years after the Spanish flu epidemic when coffins were piled in the streets of Boston because they couldn’t be processed fast enough according to my grandmother who was there. My mother’s oldest sister contracted polio and died around age 9. Another sister contracted polio at a young age and grew up stunted and deformed and died before reaching age 40 in an iron lung. The other sister contracted polio just around the time the vaccine was created and lost the use of one leg. She still managed to raise 7 children while confined to crutches. My mother was the only one of the four girls who did not contract polio. It’s hard to describe the public’s desire for clean antiseptic spaces at that time. The ideas of people like BF Skinner were wildly popular. He advocated raising children in antiseptic fish tanks. Buildings with white brick were all the rage because they were clean looking. Now that public health has improved it’s hard to relate to the fear that existed at the time.

    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    @Rohirrimborn

    The introduction of penicillin in 1945 had huge cultural impact.

    I wrote about the white food fad here:

    https://www.takimag.com/article/white_food_steve_sailer/

    , @Ralph L
    @Rohirrimborn

    The irony was that it was improving hygiene that made polio more common. People weren't being exposed to the virus until after they'd lost the immunity they'd inherited from their mothers at birth.

  102. @Dumbo
    @Bardon Kaldian

    The Prague TV tower is not that ugly. I've seen it up close. Well, I mean, it's ugly, but it's a TV tower for f's sake. It's difficult to turn one into something pretty. The babies by that silly contemporary artist should be removed, I agree.

    I guess the only worse thing than contemporary architects, are contemporary public sculptors...

    Among starchitects, Frank Ghery is the worst. He also has a building in Prague, "the dancing building". It's ugly too, but Ghery made even worse things later on, so this one doesn't look all that bad now.

    I wonder, don't those people realize that what they build is ugly? Or they do realize, but they don't care? It's like a power trip for them to inflict those things on our eyes?

    Replies: @Rob McX

    I wonder, don’t those people realize that what they build is ugly? Or they do realize, but they don’t care? It’s like a power trip for them to inflict those things on our eyes?

    Kingsley Amis wrote that architecture provides a special opportunity for people to inflict ugliness on the masses. A book like Finnegans Wake, he said, can be just ignored and left to sit on the shelf. But the architect has the great advantage over the writer in that people can’t pretend his work doesn’t exist.

  103. @bomag
    People tend to collect the things they admired in their formative years.

    I guess architects design according to the toys they played with as children.

    Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Feryl

    The Lego castles and forts I made in the 1990’s were much more aesthetically pleasing than brutalist crap, thank you very much.

  104. @Rohirrimborn
    @obwandiyag

    I agree that your notion of clean is spot on. Young people can't understand the passion for clean and antiseptic that existed in the mid 20th century. My mother's family is a good example of why this was the case. My mother was born in Boston in 1922. She had 3 sisters. So my mother was born just a few years after the Spanish flu epidemic when coffins were piled in the streets of Boston because they couldn't be processed fast enough according to my grandmother who was there. My mother's oldest sister contracted polio and died around age 9. Another sister contracted polio at a young age and grew up stunted and deformed and died before reaching age 40 in an iron lung. The other sister contracted polio just around the time the vaccine was created and lost the use of one leg. She still managed to raise 7 children while confined to crutches. My mother was the only one of the four girls who did not contract polio. It's hard to describe the public's desire for clean antiseptic spaces at that time. The ideas of people like BF Skinner were wildly popular. He advocated raising children in antiseptic fish tanks. Buildings with white brick were all the rage because they were clean looking. Now that public health has improved it's hard to relate to the fear that existed at the time.

    Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ralph L

    The introduction of penicillin in 1945 had huge cultural impact.

    I wrote about the white food fad here:

    https://www.takimag.com/article/white_food_steve_sailer/

  105. @Rohirrimborn
    @obwandiyag

    I agree that your notion of clean is spot on. Young people can't understand the passion for clean and antiseptic that existed in the mid 20th century. My mother's family is a good example of why this was the case. My mother was born in Boston in 1922. She had 3 sisters. So my mother was born just a few years after the Spanish flu epidemic when coffins were piled in the streets of Boston because they couldn't be processed fast enough according to my grandmother who was there. My mother's oldest sister contracted polio and died around age 9. Another sister contracted polio at a young age and grew up stunted and deformed and died before reaching age 40 in an iron lung. The other sister contracted polio just around the time the vaccine was created and lost the use of one leg. She still managed to raise 7 children while confined to crutches. My mother was the only one of the four girls who did not contract polio. It's hard to describe the public's desire for clean antiseptic spaces at that time. The ideas of people like BF Skinner were wildly popular. He advocated raising children in antiseptic fish tanks. Buildings with white brick were all the rage because they were clean looking. Now that public health has improved it's hard to relate to the fear that existed at the time.

    Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ralph L

    The irony was that it was improving hygiene that made polio more common. People weren’t being exposed to the virus until after they’d lost the immunity they’d inherited from their mothers at birth.

  106. @Anonymous
    What is your take on this Steve? What is the future of Texas and California?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/texas-census-united-states.html?


    Texas Is the Future of America
    By Steven Pedigo The New York Times6 min
    View Original

    Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press
    Mr. Pedigo has written extensively about economic development and placemaking in Texas and other cities in North America and across the world.

    AUSTIN, Texas — California is “America on fast-forward,” it is often said. Liberals quote the maxim with pride, pointing to the state’s diversity and its outsize share of economic output, technological innovation, venture capital and growth. Conservatives put scare quotes around it, warning about the dystopia that awaits if America becomes any more like California, with its high taxes and housing costs, challenged schools, dwindling water supply, devastating wildfires and permanent Democratic majority.

    But if you’re really looking for a bellwether state that offers a glimpse into the country’s economic future and engines of growth as well as its political fault lines in the long run, it’s not California. It’s Texas.

    That’s what the 2020 census tells us, along with the last 20 years of economic and demographic data. Many Americans are moving to cities; Texas is urbanizing even faster than California. And we hear a lot of talk about what will happen to our politics when the United States becomes a majority-minority country, but like California, Texas has already reached that demographic horizon. Its present brand of politics may offer clues to the future of struggles across the country between a grasping after mythology and the shifting demographics of America.

    I understand that the very idea that Texas could be a herald of the national future is terrifying for many liberals and moderates, given the Texas G.O.P.’s assaults on voting rights and reproductive liberty, the state’s new open carry laws and our governor’s hostility to mask and vaccine mandates.

    But given the changes in Texas’s demography, economy and urban geography, it’s fair to say that its conservative lawmakers are even more frightened of what the future may hold for themselves. They are so scared, in fact, that they are throwing sand into that growth engine’s gears.

    Here is what you have to understand about Texas. First, it is growing. It added 4.2 million residents between 2000 and 2010, and another four million in the last decade for a growth rate of almost 40 percent — double that of the country as a whole.

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    Replies: @Hangnail Hans, @Muggles, @Truth

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    More Fake News.

    I doubt this is true.

    Even including subcons, east Asians, MENAs, Nigerians, Hispanics of various hues (some of course White!). And blacks.

    I would be surprised that even just counting non Europeans/non European Americans, that this percentage is more than 40%.

    Of course fudging the “facts” has never been a problem for the Old Gray Lady’s propagandists.

    I don’t think the Haitians are planning on sticking around Texas either. Delaware sounds pretty nice though…

  107. @Anonymous
    What is your take on this Steve? What is the future of Texas and California?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/texas-census-united-states.html?


    Texas Is the Future of America
    By Steven Pedigo The New York Times6 min
    View Original

    Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press
    Mr. Pedigo has written extensively about economic development and placemaking in Texas and other cities in North America and across the world.

    AUSTIN, Texas — California is “America on fast-forward,” it is often said. Liberals quote the maxim with pride, pointing to the state’s diversity and its outsize share of economic output, technological innovation, venture capital and growth. Conservatives put scare quotes around it, warning about the dystopia that awaits if America becomes any more like California, with its high taxes and housing costs, challenged schools, dwindling water supply, devastating wildfires and permanent Democratic majority.

    But if you’re really looking for a bellwether state that offers a glimpse into the country’s economic future and engines of growth as well as its political fault lines in the long run, it’s not California. It’s Texas.

    That’s what the 2020 census tells us, along with the last 20 years of economic and demographic data. Many Americans are moving to cities; Texas is urbanizing even faster than California. And we hear a lot of talk about what will happen to our politics when the United States becomes a majority-minority country, but like California, Texas has already reached that demographic horizon. Its present brand of politics may offer clues to the future of struggles across the country between a grasping after mythology and the shifting demographics of America.

    I understand that the very idea that Texas could be a herald of the national future is terrifying for many liberals and moderates, given the Texas G.O.P.’s assaults on voting rights and reproductive liberty, the state’s new open carry laws and our governor’s hostility to mask and vaccine mandates.

    But given the changes in Texas’s demography, economy and urban geography, it’s fair to say that its conservative lawmakers are even more frightened of what the future may hold for themselves. They are so scared, in fact, that they are throwing sand into that growth engine’s gears.

    Here is what you have to understand about Texas. First, it is growing. It added 4.2 million residents between 2000 and 2010, and another four million in the last decade for a growth rate of almost 40 percent — double that of the country as a whole.

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    Replies: @Hangnail Hans, @Muggles, @Truth

    But even more striking is what all those new Texans look like. Since 2010, over 95 percent of them have been people of color.

    Hey, that’s nothing, Old Sport. The scary part is that the other 5% are liberal Honkees from California…

  108. @Charles Pewitt
    Boston Loves Baseball And Beer And Russell Earl Born-In-Georgia BUCKY Dent!

    https://youtu.be/ubeFmHEVzQ0

    Replies: @Brutusale

    The Yankee$ are zero-for-October against the Red $ox since they started rolling out one-hit wonder Dent for cheap thrills. As someone pointed out, it has been 40 years since the Yankee$ made the World Series without Mariano Rivera on the roster.

    2004 changed everything. Yankee$ fans got their own version of Bucky “Fucking” Dent.

    As was commented on in this story, $334 million for 2 shitty innings is definitely a sign of Biden inflation.
    https://nypost.com/2021/10/06/the-red-sox-are-officially-the-yankees-daddy/

  109. @Joe Stalin
    @Truth

    Hopefully, the new Black owners will start paying property tax so they can feel the JOY OF DEMOCRAT TAXES!

    Replies: @fish

    Taxes?

    Can’t get them to pay for water, or car insurance, or support for multiple spawn from multiple Troofy Mamas…..!

    Pay taxes…..that’s funny….!

  110. As was commented on in this story, $334 million for 2 shitty innings is definitely a sign of Biden inflation.

    I say:

    The one Cole HR gopher ball was 97 mph at belly height over the middle and the lefty batter pulled it into the rightfield bleachers and the other was a seeming offspeed pitch at 89 mph that the batter bashed over the centerfield wall and that Cole guy is 31 years old and he made 36 million for the season.

    2004 got rid of Ruth Curse and 2021 got rid of Russell Earl O’Dey BUCKY Dent Curse.

    INFLATION is a monetary policy tool deployed by plutocrats and the top ten percent loot holders to inflate an asset bubble to benefit those who own the assets and beer and natural gas price inflation and much inflation else besides pounds the Yellow Vest types and lower middle class and middle class and regular US people.

    The Ruling Class of the American Empire controls the monetary policy and the immigration policy and they are connected. How?

    Inflation in wages has been suppressed by the use of mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration. Central bankers have used nation-wrecking mass immigration as a monetary tool to prevent the wage inflation that would normally occur during bouts of monetary extremism. Carney at the Bank of England came damn close to directly admitting it, but he shut up about it because the ruling class in England don’t want to tell the truth too much.

    WHIP

    INFLATION

    NOW!

    HOW?

    Raise the federal funds rate to 6 percent and fire sale the Fed’s bloated balance sheet and stop the quantitative easing and go quantitative tightening. Quantitative tightening will pop the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate and inflation will go away along with the great expectations of the greedy ones benefiting from current global monster asset bubble.

    1981 and Dodgers vs Yankees and tall guy at Fed whips inflation by raising the federal funds rate to 20 percent thereby popping the asset bubbles and sets the stage for debt binge to coincide with maturation of baby boomers.

    https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1390345067811024898?s=20

  111. @HammerJack
    As it happens, I just came across a rare case of modern architecture getting along with its neighbors. Seaside, Florida, where these townhouses cost several million dollars and many of the buildings are designed by 'starchitects'.

    I wonder what the prevailing politics is like in that town.

    https://i.ibb.co/W0v83kd/Screenshot-20211004-025639-Zillow.jpg

    Obviously not the one with the marker, but two to the left.

    Replies: @Wilkey, @AnotherDad, @Romanian

    Celebration, Florida, is often held up as an example of New Urbanism, with nice architecture.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

  112. @John Johnson
    @Elmer T. Jones

    It has nothing to do with the tools.

    It's the same old anti-symmetry/anti-Western post-modern garbage that convinces these architects that they are above the masses by creating something gaudy. It's the leftist version of the emperor has no clothes.

    Boston City Hall is nothing compared to a Frank Gehry.

    Have a look at this monstrosity:
    http://afasiaarchzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Frank-Gehry-.-The-Grand-.-Los-Angeles-1.jpg

    The style is anti-Rome/anti-European. It's not a coincidence that so many of these post-modern buildings are designed for governments.

    Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Romanian

    You see that a lot of these buildings are presented as renderings, to make them more pleasing by showing them in the right light, without any patina of time or the grime that pollution produces. As soon as you build them, especially integrated in their surroundings, the crime is revealed.

  113. Boston City Hall Plaza will always be remembered in history as the site of the nation’s first Straight Pride rally & demonstration. Never did City Hall look so beautiful!

    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIey_XnMOtE)

    • Replies: @Brutusale
    @unwoke

    It was also the location where one of the most famous photos from the Busing Wars was taken.

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2019/10/14/what-was-ted-landsmark-thinking

  114. @unwoke
    Boston City Hall Plaza will always be remembered in history as the site of the nation's first Straight Pride rally & demonstration. Never did City Hall look so beautiful!

    (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uIey_XnMOtE)

    Replies: @Brutusale

    It was also the location where one of the most famous photos from the Busing Wars was taken.

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2019/10/14/what-was-ted-landsmark-thinking

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