> What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color, and togetherness.
This is key, yet it highlights an important aspect largely missing from these critiques of popular aesthetics: Any style popular enough to become hegemonic will itself contain examples spanning a wide range of quality and taste. There are beautiful expressions of the AirBnB interior, the NHTSA-approved car, even the five-over-one low-rise, just as there is also a sea of mediocre variations on them.
A style alone does not make a designed object or space high-taste or low-taste, good or bad; it is the values of good design and craftsmanship that make it thus.
I think that's a bit reductive. Part of what's missing here is personality, or what I would call unique mediocrity. People who have no idea what they're doing just deciding to paint a wall yellow because they feel like it. The issue isn't just that some apartments have craftsmanship and others don't: it's that the high-skill and low-skill efforts look superficially the same.
Think about it with Marvel or Star Wars movies. There are some really good ones, and some really boring ones, and although you can definitely say "Thor Ragnarok" was better than "Iron Man: Age of Ultron", that doesn't change the fact that when you zoom out, it seems all we're getting is superhero and Star Wars movies, and maybe it would be nice to watch something else now and again.
We want more than just good craftsmanship. We need people of mediocre skill to be making things that are weird and interesting.
Weird and interesting are a part of individual behavior, and unfortunately our economy is trending towards more consolidation.
The urban streetscapes of older cities are dominated by very similar buildings, but often the differentiation is not just a result of the architecture but of the tenants. You have multiple buildings, multiple landlords, and multiple tenants, and the combinatoric permutations of all of them produce interesting variation on just a single city block.
These days, the modern five over one probably takes an entire block or at least half of one, and the relevant landlords or HOAs basically all but forbid tenant individuality. For example, I have a balcony, but I’m not allowed to hang clothes, or flags, or art, or anything, and so the only thing that is actually out there is some basic outdoor furniture. Businesses with storefronts in these buildings also have similar restrictions, because today’s corporate landlords are used to sterile, manicured environments like malls.
No, the five over one section mostly talks about architectural choices, which is important to a degree.
This is more of an elaboration; people don’t see architectural renders when they walk down the street, they see the combination of building and tenant.
The most obvious manifestation of this is storefront areas; in old shopping districts in New York you’ll see a variety of awning shapes and colors, whereas in newer developments if you are even allowed to have one they must match every other one on the building.
This is key, yet it highlights an important aspect largely missing from these critiques of popular aesthetics: Any style popular enough to become hegemonic will itself contain examples spanning a wide range of quality and taste. There are beautiful expressions of the AirBnB interior, the NHTSA-approved car, even the five-over-one low-rise, just as there is also a sea of mediocre variations on them.
A style alone does not make a designed object or space high-taste or low-taste, good or bad; it is the values of good design and craftsmanship that make it thus.