I hate pro-bughive channels

[jje100010001]

Because modern architecture can't admit that a majority of their output negatively impacts the quality of a cityscape, and is one of the reasons why heritage preservation is so anal nowadays about protecting literal working class hovels, because there is a wellfounded fear that whatever is replacing what's currently on site is not going to be any better than what's currently there, leading to essentially the cessation of any natural neighborhood evolution and intensification process that would have naturally addressed most of the current housing needs in North America.

This is an interesting junction that I think intersects with a lot of ongoing urban movements, including those of urban intensification, zoning, NIMBYism, and modern vs traditional architects. It's funny as I sometimes see people on Twitter freaking about on why a 100-year old neighbourhood of single family brick houses is protected under heritage laws, but then I see whatever they post as 'acceptable intensification' and it's all literal glass-concrete-steel boxes.

On this, an interesting little essay on how modernism by the 60s was already reduced to a vehicle for corporations and big architect egos. Some passages of note below:

Hitler’s Revenge​

Once formidable, now forgotten, the mid 20th-century critic Sibyl Moholy-Nagy merits new attention.

One of the battlefronts is clearly evident in “Hitler’s Revenge,” the essay I have chosen for Future Archive. In this 1968 critique, published in Art in America, Moholy-Nagy responded to what she (and others) viewed as a ludicrous proposal by Marcel Breuer to erect a skyscraper atop Grand Central Terminal in New York City. 2 She begins her review by paraphrasing a famous quip attributed to Walter Cook, founding director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, which saw its faculty greatly enriched by distinguished European scholars fleeing Nazi Germany; Cook boasted that “Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” 3 The talent thus harvested by America included Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s own husband, the multi-faceted artist and Bauhaus-teacher László Moholy-Nagy, who emigrated first to London and then to Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus (later School of Design), today a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

If Walter Cook’s remark conveys a sense of triumph — America’s glorious artistic bounty of refugee talent — Sibyl Moholy-Nagy wants to alert the reader to a different, less heroic narrative. In the second line of her Art in America review, she writes: “In the best of Satanic traditions some of this fruit was poisoned, although it looked at first sight as pure and wholesome as a newborn concept.” She identified the poison as formulaic functionalism: modern architecture stripped of its early spiritual and idealistic aims and transformed into the dehumanized servant of technology and big business. The “Johnnies” who spread this toxic “appleseed” were her husband’s former Bauhaus colleagues — Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer — aided by “converts,” such as Philip Johnson. In her view, they had killed off the evolution of the indigenous skyscraper, which had given the nation’s cities “a uniquely American profile.” Breuer’s proposal for a modernist tower squatting on Grand Central Terminal epitomized for Moholy-Nagy the aggressive alienation of what she calls the Grauhäusler — a play on the term Bauhäusler, substituting the term “grau,” meaning grim or dreary — and their dismal impact on the American urban landscape.

Hitler’s Revenge (196​

by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy

In 1933 Hitler shook the tree and America picked up the fruit of German genius. In the best of Satanic traditions some of this fruit was poisoned, although it looked at first sight as pure and wholesome as a newborn concept. The lethal harvest was functionalism, and the Johnnies who spread the appleseed were the Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer. Recoined by eager American converts as ‘‘The International Style,” functionalism terminated the most important era in American public architecture. Ever since Louis Sullivan’s plea for “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1896, the best of American architects had applied their talent to the esthetic impact of the vertical symbol of economic power on the cityscape. An unbroken evolutionary continuity links the 1890 Wainwright Building in St. Louis with the 1932 Philadelphia Savings Fund tower by Howe and Lescaze. Following Sullivan’s advice, the skyscraper designers “took care of the extremities” and provided the centers of urban progress with a uniquely American profile. For the first time in its history, this country was on the way toward an architectural self-image. Gradually the eggshells of historical styles dropped from the vertical shafts and there emerged a native delight in articulation, ornamental detail and terminating form, born from steel and concrete. The Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Chicago’s Palmolive Building still stand as witnesses. The function of American functionalism was form.

Perhaps America would have awakened to the plain paucity of actual buildings turned out under this formula by Mies van der Rohe and the Gropius-Breuer team if the financial straits of the 1930s had continued. But after the non-building war years, the greatest building and speculation boom since the 1850s sent city cores sprouting upward like overfed asparagus fields, and covered millions of farmland acres with federally subsidized unit houses. Architectural schools proliferated as the building tide spread across the continent, their curricula derived from the Harvard program which combined three unbeatable prestiges: Ivy League pedigree, a genuinely imported ideology, and the adaptability of a credit-card system. Everything that was “functional” could be charged to Harvard. Mies van der Rohe’s undeviating curtain-wall module, mixed with liquid capital, was sure to result in an Instant Architecture that was unassailable because the original product had been certified for its refinement, scale, and the obvious fact that “God is in the detail.” The Gropius T.A.C. team, so anonymous that it has left to its leader the glaring spotlight of world publicity, dutifully turned its pencils in the same groove of a stuck conceptual record. But it was only fitting that Marcel Breuer, youngest of the “Grauhäusler,” should present to the world an apotheosis of the Functionalist Era. The Grand Central Tower he has designed has the architectural relevance of a Harvard Design Thesis of 1940, and the browbeating symbolism of a negative ideology that was already bankrupt when the dying German Republic unloaded it on America.

https://placesjournal.org/article/future-archive-hitlers-revenge/?cn-reloaded=1

 

[Akari Is My Wife]

I think this stuff is being pushed from on high somewhere, and some gullible/bitter people pick it up and run with it. I saw almost no "car culture" stuff until the WEF started pushing it hard, and suddenly it's everywhere online, but only appears IRL among life's losers.

 

[WelperHelper99]

The people I'm talking about typically can't afford to buy a house in the first place.

You really think someone that can't afford a car can afford something as expensive as a house?

Even now getting a car in the 4-5 grand range isn't impossible, it's quite doable in fact if you accept its not the latest and greatest but it works and is reliable. If you have a stable job and good credit, a loan shouldn't be impossible.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Part of me hates whenever these youtube channels use Cities Skylines as a "source" for their argument

That's...not good. I can go on and on about the borked traffic simulator or the scale or whatever unrealistic shit there is.

Interestingly, even if you have a city with maybe four square blocks, people will drive everywhere and jam the streets 24/7. If you drive through any small town, the main highway thoroughfare has fairly consistent traffic but the rest of the streets are largely empty.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

You know, the whole idea of "one bus equals 20 cars" is complete bullshit if you are within a big city. When you use your car then you just get from point A to point B, while buses go through the entire fucking alphabet until you reach your destination. Besides that buses have have far easier time shutting down the entire traffic by barging into an intersection while there isn't enough space to actually enter the road, especially on a turn. Finally, when cities give buses their own lane, what happens in practice is that they will drive everywhere but their fucking lane.

 

[Duke Nukem]

You know, the whole idea of "one bus equals 20 cars" is complete bullshit if you are within a big city. When you use your car then you just get from point A to point B, while buses go through the entire fucking alphabet until you reach your destination. Besides that buses have have far easier time shutting down the entire traffic by barging into an intersection while there isn't enough space to actually enter the road, especially on a turn. Finally, when cities give buses their own lane, what happens in practice is that they will drive everywhere but their fucking lane.

I went on a class trip to Chicago once and I saw one of those posters on a passing bus. Now on its face it kinda makes sense if you want to, say, go out drinking that night and don't want to risk a DUI (Lord knows why those are still a thing with so many options besides your personal vehicle) or you live in a big city where the parking is ass, but I really hate the delusional "but muh environment" people because those people seriously have no idea how much idle time there is or how far they'll go when they're not even at half capacity.

"You don't need a car, the bus goes where you need it to"

I kinda hate this argument too for a variety of reasons.