Ugly HOME?

LIVE! NOON! Thursday May 25! WPKN 89.5fm – STREAMING WPKN.org

Are There More Ugly Buildings?

The internet has exposed everything all the time: and the florid marketing language promoting designs washes over every self-promotion: and when the built reality is simply banal, arbitrary, even ugly the word hyperbole celebrates sad buildings. What you could drive by becomes a screaming posturing marketing shill:

Is this just the normal posturing of the trends of marketing and design cool that has happened since architecture became part of popular culture – or has the internet connection taken ideas of designers and instantly turned them into cliches to be cut-and-pasted into a building? Has the universal CAD drawing of everything made our buildings quilts of prefabricated images, versus a woven, interactive composition? Will Artificial Intelligence take the a-la-cart method of random tacking of hyped pieces so easy that our buildings first shock, then exhaust, ultimately become noise to our culture?

So, are there more ugly buildings being built, or are all buildings just fully promoted on the free and universal internet, where once editors, design juries and writers selected what we saw beyond our car?

There are palpable examples of using hype to market buildings, rather than spend the time (and money) to think about how our buildings change to adapt to the moment and each building’s context.

There are a growing number of spontaneous infections of black roof rashes of solar panels are disfiguring even the most quaint and cute homes all around us.

Black trim has become the Goth Mascara of unending homes as architectural make-up goes bold to get attention, and project a body image problem acting out in cosmetics.

The stick frame over podium box buildings have continued to metastasize and wedge themselves into neighborhoods that once had variety.

Our homes cannot contain the tumorous growths of garages that dominate the public face of new homes, once one, then two, now three gaping cankers are in full control of many home’s sites.

As with any Building Boom in America, the gentle, modest buildings that deferred to neighborhoods are being murdered, torn down and replaced by maxxed-out construction on steroids exploding in cacophonies of architectural cliches.

Exteriors that were once rational manipulations of a building’s shape have gone from simple skins to become enflamed with rashes of four, no, seven materials, colors, patterns – all in collision.

Join an incredible group of those who have thought long and hard about aesthetics and culture: historian and architect Witold Rybczynski- https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/ , Architecture Editor Martin Pedersen – https://commonedge.org/ , Home design writer and editor Peter Chapman, who was at Taunton Press for thirty years – https://www.taunton.com/ and architect and writer Steve Mouzon – https://originalgreen.org/ >