May 30, 2023

Exposed concrete: the American architectural style's defining material, from Frank Lloyd Wright through Brutalism and beyond

I had no idea how backwards the history of architecture & design from the 20th C. and after has been, until I began researching American ethnogenesis and its cultural reflections. This has led me to an Americanist defense of Brutalism, which will be an ongoing series.

The standard cluelessness from back-East academics (and their media-ite confreres), who are trapped in the least American region of the country, is that there is no such thing as a distinctive American culture, and that we inherited or imported everything from the Old World, primarily the Early Modern empires of Western Europe -- including in their degenerate collapsing stages, such as Cubist paintings and Bauhaus architecture and design.

The reality is that American pioneers beat the stultified Europeans to the punch, usually by several decades, and that Americans developed the superior standard of that form, whereas the Europeans could only manage an inferior copy of it, or didn't adopt it at all.

That's not a knock against European culture -- they just had their ethnogenetic heyday centuries before we did, so they already developed their own impressive standard forms. And as we see now, as the American Empire enters its degenerate collapsing stage of life, we too will become stultified non-creators having to either preserve / revive our previous foundational styles, or try to imitate others around the world if they are dynamic.

However, there are no other ascendant empires in the near future, undergoing an intense ethnogenesis, so there is in fact no one else for us to copy, as the Europeans finally managed to do with Midcentury Modern design (imported from America during the Pax Americana). So that leaves Americans with the task of preserving, reviving, canonizing, and celebrating what we have already made, and to limit any degenerate and warped extensions of it during our collapsing-empire stage of life.

* * *


One major example of the backwards thinking about 20th-C. architecture & design is the nature of Brutalism, which the received cluelessness of back-East cerebrals holds to be European. They may bicker over whether its parent is Swiss (Corbusier) or British (the Smithsons), but it's definitely -- and distinctly -- European, in their view. And they place the birth in the post-WWII 1950s time period.

They never overtly argue against an American origin, and not for cynical reasons -- like, they would have to give up their silly initial views -- but because "American culture" is simply a non-force in their model of historical dynamics. Because America has no culture of its own, it could not have influenced anyone else, let alone the Europeans, whose combined forces exceed everything else out there. So why even bother exploring that hypothesis?

As far as the time period of its birth, they might allow an earlier "influential" stage -- as long as it were European, e.g. Bauhaus practitioner Mies van der Rohe in the late 1920s (Barcelona Pavilion). They would never entertain the possibility of an American influence in that decade, let alone earlier -- earlier, in fact, than any other European contemporary in a Modern style.

But just cuz back-East ignoramuses wear these ideological blinders, doesn't mean we have to. We owe no allegiance to a sector of society whose raison d'etre is supposedly "figuring things out," yet who not only come up with the wrong answer, but sanctify it into unarguable dogma. Nor do we owe cultural deference to anyone from back East, the black hole of culture in America. They simply do not get American culture, and perhaps have never been exposed to it in their lives, outside of movie portrayals -- or a visit to Disney World, but that's the topic of another post on primitive futurism in American design, and Brutalism specifically.

* * *


While the exact criteria for Brutalism may vary somewhat, most people from any background agree on the central role played by the materials used -- and in particular, concrete, especially if it is exposed, i.e. not clad behind marble, ceramic tiles, brickwork, stucco, heavy coats of paint, or other materials that would disguise what the building is mainly made out of. It also cannot be assembled in such a way as to suggest it's not concrete -- e.g., if concrete is poured into individual blocks the size of traditional stone blocks, and those blocks are laid as in traditional masonry. That would be concrete imitating or disguising itself as masonry.

That is what this post will focus on, not other aspects of the style -- but those are distinctly American in origin as well, which contrast with European traditions, and which were pioneered in America long before they caught on among the avant-garde in Europe who were trying to rebel against their own centuries-old traditions (which we were not encumbered by in America, being a young nation undergoing ethnogenesis). For example, the blocky assemblage of masses, the rectilinear nature of lines, the relative sparseness of superficial ornamentation, the rough-hewn nature of shaping mass rather than delicate finesse -- these all go back to Chicago in the 1890s, not Berlin in the 1920s.

And so it is with the use of exposed concrete as not simply a utilitarian building material, which could be hidden by other ornamental materials, but as a surface-level one contributing to the aesthetic value on its own.

We'll start our exploration by exploding two related myths from the clueless back-Easterners -- from both the fanboys and the haters of the style. One, that Brutalism was an elitist style that only college graduates appreciated, or that was confined to their everyday territory. And two, more importantly, that it was pioneered by Europeans in the 1950s.

If you went to any park anywhere in America over Memorial Day weekend, you likely saw one of these, a drinking fountain made of concrete with its aggregate exposed, and whose metal parts are given a gleaming chrome finish, making it a textbook example of primitive futurism, something that looks like it's partly from the Stone Age and partly from the Industrial or Space Age:


It does not resemble European drinking fountains at all. They use metal (stone if fancy), and work it into fine-level shapes. The American style requires a more blocky, pure simple geometric volume, and the avoidance of European materials -- because we are not European, and had to create a new material for our new culture in our new empire.

Technically, the Romans created concrete 2000 years before we did -- and they did leave it exposed as an architectural / aesthetic element, and they even used it in a lattice of repeated simple geometric shapes (the coffered ceiling in the dome of the Pantheon, which the vaults of the Brutalist DC Metro stations perfectly resemble). But they did not expose the aggregate -- theirs looks like fairly smooth concrete, while ours has all those small pebbles adorning its surface.

Concrete is somewhat like masonry, where a large number of solid stones are held together by a connective network of binding material (cement for concrete, mortar for masonry). The main differences are the scale of the stones -- pebbles you can pinch between your fingertips, vs. stones hefty enough that you can only hold one in your hand.

And the assembly is totally different -- masonry lays down the stones (with or without mortar) in a planned, calculated, deliberate fashion. They don't have to be of uniform size and laid in a simple pattern (like rows of uniform height), but their placement is deliberate as each stone is set into the whole assembly. Whether you're looking at a brickwork facade of a house, or the impenetrable walls of Macchu Pichu, you can tell that the arrangement of individual stones into the whole was decided by human actors the whole way through.

The placement of individual stones within concrete is the opposite -- not even a single one was deliberately placed where it is, after deliberating about the others around it in the existing whole and where future ones would be placed after it. Rather, the stones are mixed up like balls in a hopper during the mixing process, and as the whole composite mass is poured (or sprayed or whatever else), the arrangement of stones does its own thing before settling into its hardened final state. Workers are not intervening to move this stone here, that stone over there, before the whole thing hardens. They wind up wherever they wind up.

And so, although the whole thing was made from human civilized technology, it has the look and feel and impression of a natural rock like sedimentary conglomerate. It doesn't look artificial because it is not artificial -- we introduced natural randomness during the mixing process, and did not intervene during the pouring and hardening process. It's somehow natural and the output of human technology at the same time -- maybe geological husbandry, like animal husbandry, not designing animals in a laboratory or factory.

At any rate, when the aggregate (the small gravel stones) in concrete is exposed, it looks like a Stone Age material, not an Industrial Age material -- not even a Metal Age material. It looks just as prehistoric in age, natural in formation, and organic in shape and texture, as traditional rocky materials like marble, granite, etc. But it's actually new, created by America -- not even the Romans exposed the aggregate like we do. We needed an ancient material to establish our primeval connection to this land, so we invented one that did just the job!

* * *


These days, you can't go to any public space in America without seeing at least one example of exposed aggregate concrete -- drinking fountain, trash can, cigarette ash receptacle, wall / column support, bench, sidewalk / pavers, curb, etc.

And you *won't* find those things in Europe or anywhere else in Ye Olde Worlde. Theirs are made out of metal or stone.

This material is not only distinctly American, it is ubiquitous in America. We take it for granted that any random strip center in any ol' American suburb will have a trash can made from this material, and that the drinking fountains in the same suburb will be made from it as well. No material is more all-American than exposed aggregate concrete.

This also shows how populist and popular the material is -- it is not restricted to elite university environments, appreciated only by eggheads, or expensive to use. It's very affordable, suitable for mass use.

In fact, as I mentioned earlier, the desecration of the American architectural traditions and standards, especially the anti-Brutalist iconoclasm, has been a crusade led by the professional class for the professional class, in blue states and blue cities, by government bureaucrats and academics and pharma research labs, and by women rather than men. It's every conceivable demographic that lives in order to carry out the will of the neoliberal Democrat party.

The only wrinkle is the meta-ethnic frontier one -- West Coast Democrats are far more conservationist of American culture than East Coast Democrats (Boston / Massachusetts being ground zero for Brutalist demolition). They're closer to the historical, defining frontier against the Indians, while the back-Easterners were never shaped into Americans by that frontier, so why would they want to preserve its cultural output? They're pseudo-European, and they want their culture to be that way, and stay that way.

* * *


However, we can't say that these ubiquitous concrete drinking fountains owe their existence to Brutalism -- that was just one stage within American architectural ethnogenesis. It goes farther back -- back to Frank Lloyd Wright himself! It's amazing, I don't plan to discover his foundational influence in everything I look into (like the swivel chair and cantilever chairs generally), but he really was America's first-mover genius. American architecture & design is just footnotes to Frank Lloyd Wright -- and that includes all areas absorbed into our empire over the 20th C., like Europe and Japan.

The work in question is the Horse Show Fountain from -- where else? -- Chicago, dating back to -- when else? -- 1909. Not Berlin, not London -- and not New York, for that matter. Not 1919 or 1929 or 1939 or 1949. Both the original and the current replica (made in 1969) are made from reinforced concrete, which is not clad behind any other material. It's a drinking fountain, for people and originally horses too.

Although the Wiki article claims that only the current replica has the grainy exposed aggregate surface (ubiquitous by the '60s), a gallery of images of the original, both photographic and illustrated, make it look about as aggregate-y as the later replica. Maybe in some areas more than others, like around the edge of the basin, where there are square indentations, but still, it doesn't look radically different and perfectly smooth.

And in fact, Wright used the exposed aggregate finish in the same year of 1909 in the same city of Chicago, for the Unity Temple. So, hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe the original fountain had some exposed aggregate as well.

Before getting to the Unity Temple, though, we have to consider earlier structures built elsewhere in America and Europe that claim to be the "first concrete / reinforced concrete buildings".

In 1853 in Denis, France, Francois Coignet built a reinforced concrete house -- but it was not exposed as an architectural element. Looks like it was covered by plaster (now peeling off in sheets), which was then painted. Because it did not take the material in a bold new direction, it spawned no imitators or movement within France. If you wanted painted plaster on the facade, you didn't have to use concrete underneath it -- any material from the French tradition would do.

Then in 1873, using a process designed by Coignet, the Coignet Stone Company Building in Brooklyn, New York used concrete blocks without any cladding. However, by casting them into blocks meant to resemble the cut stones of traditional masonry, and then either laid into place in arrangements also from traditional masonry -- or poured into molds meant to mimic that arrangement -- the concrete doesn't really show itself. If you didn't know beforehand, the viewer would probably think it was any ol' stone building. This is apart from the overall style being a Euro-LARP-ing style rather than a new American style. The raw material itself, and its assembly into the whole -- whatever style it is -- does not look new or different from European stonework.

The William E. Ward House of the same time period and metro area, has the same problems with it being the "first" in an ethnogenetic sense. It is made of reinforced concrete, which is not clad behind another material, but the material has either been cut and laid into place, or poured into a mold meant to resemble, the processes of traditional masonry. On the lower two stories, the corners where walls meet have simulated quoins, the most glaring example of trying to disguise its concrete nature as traditional masonry. Again, this is apart from the matter of the overall style being a Euro LARP.

The Highland Cottage from the same time and place has the same problems, and then some. Aside from simulating traditional masonry, the concrete is faced in stucco. Unlike the Ward House, this one is not reinforced concrete. The Coignet Stone Company Building has a reinforced basement, but not above that level. Wright's fountain and Unity Temple are reinforced. However, I don't think reinforcement is central to the development of a new American style and material vocabulary. It's not visible, and is only relevant on the utilitarian level -- allowing greater-scale structures to be built.

Aside from being in the wrong place for American ethnogenesis (back East), these three New York buildings are also from the wrong time -- still mired in the integrative civil war phase of imperial growth, which included the Reconstruction era. It wasn't until the 1890s that the winner of the civil war -- the industrial Midwest -- could hit the ground running with its creation and dissemination of a new national culture, after internal divisions had been sewn up. This would spread westward along with the meta-ethnic frontier, although places back East ended up adopting it to some extent as well. But it wouldn't last as long back East since they have always been reluctant participants in American culture.

In the right place at the right time -- Chicago in the first decade of the 1900s -- Wright built the Unity Temple. It was not only a new overall architectural style -- American Block Symphony, not Gothic, Baroque, etc. -- it used a new material, concrete with the aggregate exposed. The volumes do not resemble traditional blocks from masonry, are not laid into place in masonic ways, and do not simulate or mimic them via the molds into which the concrete is poured. Just monolithic slabs of concrete, of varying size, with more or less ornamentation built into the mold's shape. Not hidden behind anything else.

In addition to not hiding the concrete, and not mimicking masonry, the exposure of the aggregate within the concrete is a milestone in the history of American architecture. Now the material looked more like granite or marble or some other Stone Age material with patterns and textures within it -- not requiring their addition through mosaic techniques. It no longer looked so smooth and uniform and monolithic.

The techniques used to expose the aggregate are not relevant to its final state, but in this case the workers used wire brushes to gently grind away the outermost layers of the cement binder, like using a fork to flake away the outermost layer of a fruitcake to expose the individual globs of fruit suspended in the flour-y binder.

Like the Horse Show Fountain, the original Unity Temple showed signs of wear by circa 1970, and it was restored (not replicated) with an exposed aggregate finish (and then another major restoration in the 2010s, still using the exposed aggregate finish). But the original back in the 1900s had an exposed aggregate finish as well, as shown by contemporaneous pictures and Wright's own words (likening the appearance to granite). This makes me believe the original Horse Show Fountain also had a similar degree of exposed aggregate finish as its later replica.

* * *


By the time of a 1986 article from Concrete Construction Magazine, "Unity Temple: the Cube That Made Concrete History," the neoliberal backlash against the Progressive and New Deal eras had begun, as well as its cultural expression in the perversion, slandering, or outright demolition of America's distinctive culture. The central target for neoliberals was Brutalism -- too American instead of whatever Olde Worlde LARP / pastiche they preferred, too populist instead of elitist (affordable concrete vs. expensive masonry), too ubiquitous instead of confined to the bi-coastal top zip codes.

In that context, the authors cannot use the term Brutalism or refer directly to the 1960s and '70s as the extension of the history begun by the Unity Temple. The reader is left to fill in the blanks, but that's what they're getting at -- American Block Symphony styles, using exposed aggregate concrete, trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright, in Chicago, at the turn of the century.

They also do not overtly state what this means for other boneheaded theories -- like the myth that Brutalism as a camp, or the use of unhidden concrete, or blocky assemblages of volumes, grew out of Europe somewhere between the '20s and the '50s. Nope -- it's as American as apple pie, from the Midwest (and later, further out West), from the turn of the 20th century, from the American architectural Plato himself, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Europeans were simply a non-entity in endogenous cultural creation after their 18th and 19th-century plateau. They descended into chaos in the early 20th C, along with their empires collapsing in WWI, limping through the interwar period before the remaining fragments were then scooped up by the American Empire -- both politically and culturally. If they wanted to join the American camp, they were more than welcome, and by the Midcentury Modern moment, they were all aboard Team America.

Blaming Bauhaus for anything outside of Europe in the interwar period is just a cope -- and if you're American, a cope to hide your thinly veiled anti-American attitude toward our culture. "Wah, I identify as an 18th-C. Euro aristocrat / ancient Roman villa-owner" -- too bad you're just some American suburban-raised schlub from the 20th and 21st centuries. You're no more of a Baroque aristocrat than a man is a woman. Remember, if you're outside of Europe:

>ywn be European

And here in America, we have nothing to apologize for or feel embarrassed about. I do feel sorry for some parts of Europe, in Britain and Germany mainly, where "Brutalism" was de facto Bauhaus eking out another few decades of comatose existence, while wearing a concrete disguise in order to blend in with the new American style that was anything but Bauhaus-y.

But charmingly Stone Age meets futuristic chrome drinking fountains adorning and providing a public good at parks all over America? Sublimely primitivist yet futuristic buildings that connect us with the primeval grounded past, while somehow simultaneously enticing us through a portal to the optimistic utopian future? No, that is to our *credit* as Americans, with our own cool badass culture. There is no "blame" to go around in the first place.

If you hate on Brutalism, you hate on the entire American tradition, from Frank Lloyd Wright to public parks to our ultimate architectural activity-place -- the malls. Oh yeah, I'm just getting started on this crusade to vindicate Brutalism. All you faggy mall-haters better pack up and leave now. But just as a preview: both malls and Brutalism proper were derided and demolished during the same time period, by the same camp of people, with the same complaints, whereas the appreciation / celebration / nostalgia came from a similar group of people (opposed to the first camp).

* * *


To conclude this exploration into the origins of exposed concrete as America's defining building material, let's take a whirlwind tour through some major milestones along the way, between the Unity Temple and Brutalism in the '60s and '70s. To not stray too far from the main topic, and because he really was the one who organized everything into its major channels, we'll stick with good ol' Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the 1920s, he put in a stint in Los Angeles, where he built several houses using concrete blocks that were cast on site, but not in a recognizable Euro / Roman / Olde Worlde form. Rather, their rectilinear geometric impressions were inspired by Mayan temples and other New World civilizations.

The blocks were then arranged into place like usual masonry, in horizontal courses or stacked into columns, all contributing to the synthesis of Mayan step-pyramids and his own American Block Symphony styles. But they were clearly made from concrete, not stone that had been cut and carved, and not bricks. The designs are intricate and are used in a large number of blocks -- clearly telling us that they were all cast from a single, intricately shaped mold, not intricately carved each time. The latter would've taken so much labor, it could only be built by a legion of slaves for a monument for an imperial ruler -- not a house for a typical affluent American household.

You can watch a documentary on this episode of his career for free on YouTube. These buildings are the Storer House, the Millard House, the Samuel Freeman House, and most famously the Ennis House.

These blocks were later reincarnated, still in California but spreading elsewhere, in the decorative breeze blocks of Midcentury architecture. See here for an overview of the breeze block phenomenon -- one of the most identifiably American decorative elements, something unseen in Europe, but are everywhere out West (and somewhat back East), down to the most lowly apartment buildings, not restricted to elite circles. As you can see from the close-ups here, already in the '20s Wright used versions of his blocks that were perforated to allow light and wind to pass through, in addition to the totally solid versions.

In the 1930s, his Fallingwater house used massive horizontal cantilevered slabs of concrete, which although it has a slight sandy pigment to it, is still recognizable as concrete -- not clad in stucco, not employing or mimicking masonry, etc. The entire building is not made from concrete, but these slabs are its defining features.

Finally, and most important to establish the link to Brutalism, is the Guggenheim Museum, which was planned & revised during the late '40s and early '50s, and was built between '56 and '59. It is made from concrete that was poured -- or rather, sprayed from a gun -- in place, not cast into individual blocks used for masonry. It is not clad in any other material, nor was it hidden under heavy paint (although it did receive a light beige coat at first, which was later changed to white).

In fact, the paint is thin enough that you can still see with the naked eye the woodgrain impressions left by the boards that acted as the boundary or container ("formwork"), onto which the concrete was sprayed from the inside. See this post for the details. At first Wright wanted a smoother surface, but the head of construction argued that it was not only impossible, but that the impressions showed off the material better -- it's not stone, it's not going to look like stone.

Leaving the impressions of the formwork became a staple of Brutalism, and as far as I can tell, it all started (as always) with Frank Lloyd Wright, well into his senior career. Indeed, when first built the Unity Temple showed a kind of horizontal banding left by the various stages ("lifts") in which the concrete was poured from lower to upper heights (for the photo, see p.3 of the Concrete Construction Magazine article linked earlier).

Small-scale impressions of woodgrain, up to seams between successive lifts in the pouring process, are just like the natural imperfections in animal skins or quarried stone, and courses of masonry that are not perfectly level all the way across. It gives the concrete a primitive Stone Age feel, not a lab-perfected ultra-modern material with no variation of any kind or any seams.

So, Brutalism's "openness" about its construction process traces back to Wright, in the first decade of the 1900s -- not to Mies van der Rohe, who used no concrete at all in the Barcelona Pavilion several decades later, nor to any other Bauhaus-adjacent boogeyman / hero (depending on whether the clueless academic is a hater or lover of Bauhaus).

And not only did Wright pioneer the openness of the concrete construction process in the Guggenheim Museum, he also made the building a large-scale sculpture out of a few pure geometric volumes, and they're arranged into an asymmetric grouping to make for some movement of attention and off-kilter dynamism -- without warping the fabric of space, using distorted points-of-view, or fragmentation of the components, as would happen during the neoliberal era, most notably by Frank Gehry in another Guggenheim Museum (the one in Bilbao).

These defining traits of Brutalism were all there in the late '50s in America, but not in the '50s apartment blocks by Corbusier or the Smithsons, which are utilitarian Bauhaus boxes that use concrete instead of some other material. BFD -- it's still Bauhaus, not the style pioneered in America and later called Brutalism.

* * *


To reflect on where we started with exposed aggregate concrete, that not only became a staple in those ubiquitous drinking fountains, trash cans, benches, columns for shopping center covered walkways, etc. Exposed aggregate running in vertical corduroy bands was a staple in Paul Rudolph's buildings, e.g. the Yale Art & Architecture Building from the early '60s and the Boston Government Service Center from the early '70s. Much of the facade of the Xerox Tower (by Brutalist superstar Welton Becket from the late '60s) is exposed aggregate.

There is no such thing as the "good Brutalism" that was for a popular audience, and had the charming familiar exposed aggregate, vs. the "bad Brutalism" that was for elites and had clinically smooth texture and perfectionistically uniform color. The latter-day American Stone Age material, with aggregate exposed, adorns so many of the structures that the clueless haters never bother to look at, and just assume that because it's concrete, it looks like dried cement.

Nope, it has lots of texture, pattern, and color from all the various stones revealing their faces. They may not come in neon or jewel tones, but there's plenty of earthy yellows, reds, oranges, browns, blacks / grays, sometimes shading into blue tones. And that's the type of "color" that the haters have in mind anyway -- a brick facade, marble, etc. If it counts as colorful for standard red brick and marble, it counts for exposed aggregate concrete.

Why don't they know what these buildings look like? Because they've never experienced them. If they've been up close to one IRL, their senses are too weak to perceive what is right in front of their faces. But mainly they are into hating on Brutalism as one part of their Olde Worlde LARP, and because Brutalism is distinctly American, that's a ripe target. It doesn't matter if its facades are as colorful as brick and marble facades -- just tell a lie that it's uniform gray, and don't bother to look closely at pictures to tell for yourself, and trust that everyone else in the LARP will do likewise.

The "why no color?" complaint is really rich, given that another complaint from the clueless haters is that Brutalism ignored the desires and wills of those who actually utilized the buildings, and only pleased the distant cultural elite who viewed them through photographs in slick magazines.

Actually, it's the haters who only look at these buildings in far-away-shot photos over the internet! Any close-up photo would show the texture, color, variety of stones, etc. But they image searched the building, got a zillion copies of the same shitty stock photo shot from a million miles away, and that's all they need -- close-up shots might contradict their preconceived hate, so please, anything but close-ups! And definitely no IRL visits to see it unmediated -- it would contradict your beliefs, and put you so physically close to a contaminating heretical substance -- Americanism! Why, all that American stuff might just melt away years of effort to cultivate your Olde Worlde LARP -- can't risk the exposure!

But as I said before, most Americans don't hate Brutalism, concrete, or its exposed aggregate form. We take it for granted, as the physical stuff itself as well as its creation of a primitive-futurist environment that we as Americans find irresistible. That mood makes us comfy and familiar, because it's so deeply ingrained into our culture by this point.

It's only managerial-professional-class Euro LARP-ers who get incensed over these defining traits of our culture, for obvious reasons of status insecurity when they belong to a non-European culture. Sadly for our heritage, though, they do wield disproportionate decision-making influence, so they can and already have begun a campaign of anti-American desecration and demolition, particularly on the East Coast.

That is as good as any predictor for the boundaries of the future states of the post-collapse American Empire. Where they're demolishing the distinctive architecture of our nation / empire, they're clearly seceding. Where they're neither fighting to demolish it, nor pro-actively guarding it, is a border region. Where they're conserving it long in advance, will be part of the core of the new American state, post-empire.

Concretely, as it were, that means the whole back East region will secede, with central-southern Florida being a wild card that could become a somewhat reduced nation of Florida unto itself, or a non-contiguous piece of America, while the north of Florida joins the secession. The Midwest will mostly stay, although Ohio could be a wild card that would join the secession. Not surprisingly, Florida and Ohio are both the two constant swing states in presidential elections.

Obviously California will stay and become the new political core (it's already been the main cultural core for most of our ethnogenetic growth period, after Reconstruction). But other parts of the Southwest will stay, too, for the same reasons -- Vegas (AKA Nevada), Arizona, all of Mormonland, Texas, all of it.

In fact, Mormonland provides the most intense counter-signal to the back-East demolishers of American Block Symphony buildings. Mormons have standardized Block Symphony as the style for their temples, the most important building type for them (not the weekly meeting houses, but the ones where weddings, initiations, and so on, take place).

Mormon elites did eliminate the Midcentury / Space Age (not Brutalist) design of the Ogden and Provo temples (in 2014 and early 2020s), but they replaced them with Block Symphony designs from the American Modern period and geographic origin. Not glass-and-steel fishbowl flexspace abominations like the East Coasters have done post-demolition, nor an Olde Worlde LARP that the trad haters of Brutalism would want (but would never actually get, and would settle for getting cucked by a glass-and-steel Silicon Valley kindergarten instead, because they hate the New Deal politics and culture even more).

The last group in the world to make the contradictory concept of "Greco-Roman" architecture their standard would be the Mormons, whereas it would be the go-to for many East Coasters. That tells you all you need to know about who is gonna make it into the post-imperial-collapse nation of America, and who will be inhabiting small breakaway states riven by mutual mistrust, bitterness, and sinking deeper into the cultural black hole that they've always been.

43 comments:

  1. Americans would probably be called the "concrete people" by future archaeologists.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So what about Missouri? Will it also secede from the United States?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Church Office Building in Salt Lake City deserves an honorable mention here. Once the tallest building in Utah, it's a fine example of concrete architecture with simple rectilinear lines. We're currently redoing the hardscape on the surrounding grounds, but for years they featured exposed aggregate.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Midcentury playgrounds were demolished in the same way that Brutalism and malls were. Exact same people, exact same time -- neolibtard Karen killjoys insecure about their cultural status score.

    Those playgrounds often had a Space Age structure or two -- spaceship, rocket, UFO, etc.

    Literally every aspect of the Midcentury material culture is being systematically targeted for demolition by the anti-American scum.

    The unifying theme seems to be lowering standards for what counts as "progress". Because our elites failed to deliver, or even approximate the continued progress that people of the '50s, '60s, and '70s imagined would come sometime by the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, today's elites want to erase all memory of those expectations and hopes having ever set the standard for "progress".

    They can't only hype up the current garbage, because it's so underwhelming -- streaming porn in HD over a smartphone for free. BFD. They also have to eliminate the competition in the contest of goals, ideals, and hopes.

    Easy to do when those competitors are dead and can't defend themselves -- but that's where the conservationists and nostalgicists come in. We remind everyone how much better the world used to be, and how much higher our expectations were, so the current wicked parasitic elites don't get off for their failures. We won't let them shift the goal-posts in order to give themselves a trophy. They deserve the penalty box, not a trophy.

    I wonder if they'll come after the non-material culture, as well -- can't let people see the original Star Wars trilogy, or Star Trek: the Next Generation, marked by social optimism. Audiences should only be allowed to see the bitter, pessimistic dystopian ones, lest their expectations exceed our ability to meet them.

    Reminder that even immaterial culture is stored in physical media -- better go scoop up those second-hand copies of the original Star Wars etc. on DVD, before they're pulled from the streaming services for whatever bullshit rationalization the Millennial PR flak comes up with.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The Canadians back east will probably also end up seceding from Canada - Quebec and Newfoundland and the Atlantic provinces are so different culturally from the rest of Canada.

    ReplyDelete
  6. On the decline of architecture in Europe

    https://unherd.com/2023/05/the-performative-emptiness-of-the-venice-biennale/

    ReplyDelete
  7. Fixed the link for breeze blocks, which was supposed to be this, with a nice variety of pictures (rather than a few basic drawings):

    https://la.curbed.com/2018/2/13/16936656/palm-springs-midcentury-breeze-blocks-photos

    Don't know why google gave me the wrong answer. I googled "curbed what to know breeze blocks," and it still returned the wrong answer ("An Illustrated Guide...") instead of the one whose title begins "What To Know..."

    A timely reminder that AI gets dumber and more broken over time, no matter what its performance was at the exciting optimistic outset.

    Sometimes it's outright censorship, but there are tons of cases like this one, where ideology plays no role. Maybe a worthless QE recipient at Google got paid to improve their algo, which means break it. So maybe they're weighting by number of pageviews / popularity, or recent-ness (wrong answer is only 1 year more recent anyway), rather than figuring out what I meant from the words I typed into the search bar.

    That's what AI is supposed to do -- figure things out. Google has gotten dumber at figuring out what I mean over time, to the point where it almost refuses to even attempt to understand what I meant, and just goes with pre-conceived -- by human programmers -- notions of metrics that matter more than what the searcher actually fucking said.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Over ten years ago, Google also directed one to a far larger number of blogs and stylized personal websites.

      Now it is mostly commercial sites and big, famous websites more generally.

      ...and DuckDuckGo isn't much better.

      Delete
  8. Wow! Cobblestone-sized aggregate in Yale's Brutalist Ezra Stiles & Morse colleges, by Eero Saarinen circa 1960. Another one of America's most creative architects & designers. I don't think I've seen any other examples that use this scale of aggregate, along with the usual two scales used in concrete (the gravelly pebbles, and the fine grains of sand).

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Yale_University%2C_Samuel_F.B._Morse_and_Ezra_Stiles_Colleges%2C_New_Haven%2C_Connecticut%2C_1958-62._Exterior_-_00707v.jpg

    https://conserve-art.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/9.1.7-Constantino-Nivola-1962-Stiles-College-Yale-University.-Site-specific-sculpture-with-Eero-Saarinen-architecture.-640x480.jpg

    https://hiddenarchitecture.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/morse-stiles_032-768x1024.png

    Gallery showing them in duskier lighting, bringing out the contrasting colors more than when everything is blown-out-white from sunlight:

    https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~SULLIVANM/nhsaar/nhsaar.html

    ReplyDelete
  9. Supposedly, the inspiration was the hill community of San Gimignano in Siena, Tuscany:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Gimignano

    Perhaps for the overall layout, as well as the Romanesque traits of large hulking masses, relatively windowless, serious / reflective / sublime mood, no busywork on the seams, blocky grouping of volumes, etc.

    But definitely *not* for the material. The Italian city is entirely built from masonry, where each stone has been put into its final place by human decisions, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, with or without mortar to bind them stronger.

    Also, each individual stone in Italy has had its mass shaped at least somewhat by human decisions / technology -- some are finely dressed ashlar, others may be rough-hewn but still carved to achieve their final shape.

    In the Saarinen buildings, the opposite was done. Not a single one of those cobblestones was shaped by human decisions -- their final shape is as they were found, resulting only from organic geological processes. Ditto for the gravel-scale stones, and obviously the grains of sand -- imagine cutting itty bitty grains of sand to fit better with each other!

    And more importantly, their arrangement into the whole was not a result of human decisions. No one decided that this stone should be put here, and that stone over there, and this other stone way over there. Deciding how every stone should be laid in its final place is like putting puzzle pieces together -- and the suspension of units within a larger connected medium looks nothing like an intricate puzzle that's been solved through human ingenuity.

    Fruitcake doesn't look like puzzle pieces put together.

    If you look at the concrete, you can see all sorts of places where a human actor would have oriented the stones differently, put them closer together, etc., if the goal were to solve a puzzle. But because the binder is filling so much space around the stones, they don't need to fit together like puzzle pieces, or be ideally oriented with respect to one another.

    Rather, their orientation and spacing looks like they were deposited into the Earth's crust through sedimentation forces, then some other material bubbled up and crystallized all around them to bind them together.

    It looks prehistoric, not civilized. Stone Age Modernism!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Contrast the buildings with the stone pavers below -- night and day difference. Each of the paving stones was shaped to fit better with its neighbors, and they were spaced and oriented like puzzle pieces. *That* looks civilized, the result of human technology, engineering, and cerebral ingenuity.

    The buildings achieve the completely opposite effect!

    Maybe nobody notices this contrasting assembly techniques, assuming that "rocky material is rocky material". But I think we pick up on it unconsciously -- wild random free-flowing nature, vs. carefully ordered human planning.

    Mind-blowing when you notice it consciously!

    And again, I'm sorry for the non-Americans who don't have cool stuff like this lying all around your country, but don't take it out on America or Brutalism. We rock! (heh)

    ReplyDelete
  11. According to this brief interview, the cobblestones (AKA rubble) were dumped into the cavity of the formwork, along with the concrete being poured in. When the cement hardened, the forms were taken away, and -- voila! -- there are now huge cobblestones mixed randomly into the whole as well!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAnulTyJgwk

    This is just a sped-up-by-humans version of natural geological processes, where individual stones settle down into the Earth's crust, some binding agent works its way upward to fill in all the gaps around them, hardens / crystallizes, and then you have a conglomerate!

    By haphazardly dumping the cobblestones into the cavity to be filled, along with pouring the concrete and its cement binder, the final arrangement of stones is in nature's hands -- not human hands. It looks way more random, organic, and natural compared to any form of masonry (ancient, Medieval, or Modern, rough-hewn or finely dressed, varying size blocks or uniform, even-height rows or zig-zagging ones, etc.)

    So, it looks like the builder dug up a huge slab of conglomerate from the Earth's crust, and only applied a little human touch -- to cut the outermost surface into the intended shape, and to place these humungous volumes where they're supposed to go in the layout of the entire campus. It doesn't look like any human technology or handicraft went into the construction of each monolithic slab itself. Amazing!

    And also an impossible feat if they wanted to do that for real -- conglomerates don't cut very evenly or bear weight very well, so there's no way you could unearth a huge mass of conglomerate, and then cut it into a rectangular box to make a wall, for every wall / ceiling / etc. in the complex.

    It looks like a prehistoric material -- more primeval than stones arranged through masonry, which is only as ancient as civilization -- and yet it's totally modern!

    Reminder that this was technologically possible in ancient Roman times. They could have used striking tools to chip away the cement in order to expose the aggregate -- but they did not. Concrete was novel enough to distinguish their culture from other cultures.

    And they could have mixed cobble-sized stones into the whole thing as well. Most Americans did not go that far, for that matter! Apparently only Saarinen did, in these twin buildings.

    Only ethnogenesis and asabiya matters, not technological sophistication.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Eero Saarinen: "You think I'm overrated? Well let's take away our formwork and see whose aggregate is bigger."

    ReplyDelete
  13. "Obviously California will stay and become the new political core (it's already been the main cultural core for most of our ethnogenetic growth period, after Reconstruction)."

    I wonder if that's why so many people are shitting on California in the media - the media, both conservative and liberal, are based back east and thus have an anti-American bias.

    ReplyDelete
  14. The high granularity exposed aggregate concrete of which you speak is instantly recognized by Europeans as "motorway rest stop concrete". I always wondered why this material was chosen as default for sidewalks, picnic benches and garbage cans despite how unsuited for purpose it was - the rough, uneven surface making it impractical for walking and sitting on. It makes sense that the foreignness of this imported American lifestyle (mass automobile long-distance travel) would also be reflected in the architectural style of its dedicated infrastructure.
    This material was largely ripped up and replaced with wood, metal and smooth fine concrete in the 2010s.
    pictures: https://ibb.co/4Z1j6gJ
    https://ibb.co/vH32FXT

    ReplyDelete
  15. Here's an interesting article on the history of optimism/pessimism/neutrality in headlines.

    https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/pessimism-in-news-media-headlines

    Not surprisingly, optimism peaks in the mid-20th Century, the peak of confidence/influence of the Greatest "Accentuate the Positive" Generation.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Moom's spirit knew I'd be visiting a certain thrift store today, and put something there to remind me of her. One Direction's Up All Night tour on DVD -- and don't even lie, Moom, you *know* you had that! Maybe even two copies, if you wore the first copy out. ^_^

    I didn't get it, though, left it for someone like Moom to revisit her adolescence and indulge in a nostalgia trip. :)

    I did finally get the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack on CD -- the original Crawford / Brightman one ("selections from..."). My family went to see that in the early '90s and we had the cassette version. I even got a t-shirt from the merch stand (the one with the fractured glass logo) and wore it like crazy. All part of my budding vampire ways, hehe.

    Moom, I have an idea if you want to still want an outlet for your zatsu rants, without having to stream. You could do a "Dear Diary" / journal / blog format. Journowl? Moomin Diaries? Something like that.

    Whatever pops into your lovably ADHD mind, just type it out, send it out, bam, done. You could do a twitter thread, and keep adding to it as long as some topic interested you, like a zatsu chatting sesh. Or a post on your YT channel? I dunno.

    Do you have a real journal? You could hand-write in it, take a pic, and upload it to your twitter. Reading your oshi's cute handwriting? -- now there's an extra bit of fan service.

    Your audience might not even know how to read handwriting, though, hehe. The ojisans would kill to see it, though. I really miss getting handwritten notes / letters / etc. from gurrrrllllzzz. Texts, emails, social media comments -- just not the same.

    :::Moom:::

    ReplyDelete
  17. If you have a copy of your bday journal, you could also shill some merch. I'm sure it's not available anymore, but just as a reminder to "buy our merch before it's gone," "isn't our merch one-of-a-kind?" "i just love hololive merch," etc.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Did Zoomers draw on their binder covers, book covers, inside of their notebooks, etc.? Or did the creative types all get too used to digital drawing, touch pads, styluses, etc., that they never bothered drawing in a physical medium, even just to doodle while bored in class?

    That's another thing the Hoomans would love to see every now and then while their owlshi is on vocal rest break -- a few doodles. Cursed, cute, anything in between. ^_^ Drawn without streaming, of course, then just posted to Twitter.

    You're going to get bored like crazy while visiting family, and that's fine, it's worth it to stay in touch with family. But for when you have some downtime there, you can doodle and share it with your Hooman friends. :)

    Are these your grandparents on Mother Owl's side, BTW? I'm picturing three generations together, all wearing glasses as thick as hockey pucks, even the 20-something granddaughter. Cute and wholesome. ^_^

    ReplyDelete
  19. Fort Worth Water Gardens by Phillip Johnson (1974) has nothing but exposed aggregate. First gallery gives a good overall look at the place, and the second is close-up shots from someone making their way through it, with much greater detail (just ignore the helicopter parent exposition).

    https://www.minniemuse.com/articles/musings/fort-worth-water-gardens

    https://www.bowerpowerblog.com/water-gardens-travel-journal/

    The aggregate here is bigger than pea gravel, more on the river rock scale, or even a bit bigger than that. You can see each individual stone from a good 20 feet away, and they don't blur or swirl together.

    Warm earthy red color to the terraced section. Lots of water flowing. Interactive, inviting, fun, exciting, energetic -- and sublime, a bit dangerous like crossing a busy river on stepping stones.

    This is what Brutalism is -- and you can tell how widely beloved and fascinating it is to masses of normies and chuds from all over America, not a tiny bi-coastal elite of egghead architecture PhD's. The Water Gardens are a year-round tourist destination, couples take engagement and wedding photos there all the time, and local families enjoy it like a playground.

    It was used in sci-fi classic Logan's Run, shot just a couple years after the park opened -- it already looked futuristic! And yet the material looks positively primitive. That's the American style, primitive futurism.

    Even today it looks like something from a more advanced civilization from outer space in the distant future. Not because it uses advanced technology, but because it has that utopian feel -- it's the kind of thing that would be planned and built and used in a perfect society of tomorrow, when social and political and economic troubles had been solved.

    How else do we answer someone who asks, "Why don't they build stuff like that today?" It's not because we lost the complex tech that went into building it. It is because the American utopia has been fractured over the past 40 years, and now we are plunging into outright dystopia. Nothing we built could ever have that feel again -- just the same reason why we're demolishing the malls, Midcentury playgrounds, and office parks, over the past 20 and especially past 10 years.

    The woketard 2010s went on a crusade to demolish all traces of the American Midcentury utopia. The neolibs and neocons had already dismantled the economic and political basis for that utopia beginning with Reagan. The cultural aspect of it was not as important to the elites, so it waited until later. The woketards are just the cultural foot soldiers of the whole neoliberal agenda, laying waste to the cultural reflections of the Progressive and New Deal eras.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There was some cultural animosity too towards the mid century even before the woke era though it was purely destructive and had no real alternative utopian ideal to replace it with. Mostly it damned the great compression and mid century Americanism as “square” and “conformist” and “boring” before things really ramped and the whole era became literally rape and handmaid’s tale style oppression.

      Delete
  20. Yeah, it's telling what seemingly unrelated constellation of things they began hating on during the neolib era -- malls, Brutalism, and cubicles / office parks. Space Age playgrounds never got that much performative hate, cuz they were just for kids, but they were quietly bulldozed and replaced with weird anti-American crap instead, slowly then quickly.

    IIRC, Gura talked about having a dinosaur on one of her childhood playgrounds -- that was definitely an old-school thing by the time she was widdle. It connects with the prehistoric side of our primitive-futurist identity as Americans. Jurassic Park bringing those two sides together in a single work, central to American identity, just like the original Star Wars trilogy.

    There was plenty of "warts and all" realism about Midcentury utopian living, at the time, like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Apartment, etc. But it was humanizing them, looking at how people cope with the downsides of living in a Midcentury American utopia. It didn't say this whole society sucks, is rotten to the core, must be overthrown, dismantled, slandered, sold off, and then have its grave spat on to boot.

    Mad Men (at least up through season 4, what I saw) took the same tone, not the "burn it all down and sell it all off" attitude of the Boomer yuppie Reaganites. Of course Mad Men is one of those uber-Gen-X shows, tapping into our lifelong curse of trying to pick up the mess left by the Boomer wreckers who came before us, whether our parents or otherwise.

    There was a minority of Gen X that was / is spiritual Boomers, seeking to take what the Boomers did and wreck society 100 times harder. Anything that slandered cubicle office parks, in favor of "agile" "dynamic" "disruptive" "flexible spaces" and other Silicon Valley bullshit terms. In a way, those Gen X-ers like Zuckerberg were just trying to ride on Steve Jobs' Boomer coattails.

    And at least Jobs made physical things -- one of the only tech companies to bounce back during the 2000s post-Dot-Com Bubble crash, because they manufactured the iPod, iMac, macbook, the iPhone, opened Apple Stores IRL, etc. They didn't get into social media or Web 2.0.

    Your typical Gen X-er would way rather commute 30 minutes to a suburban office park built in a pop Brutalist style, get married / stay married, have a few kids, and not want to climb over a pile of other people's skulls like the yuppie striver Boomers did, in order to bleed society dry of its accumulated physical and social capital like a bunch of parasites. They'd gripe about office politics, the monotony, etc., but would cope with those downsides rather than blow the whole thing up and wind up with nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Old but relevant post on the transition from the Great Compression / New Deal era to the neoliberal era, during the Me Generation of the '70s, dealing with the architecture and aesthetics of sci-fi dystopia between the two eras.

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2017/10/is-dystopia-bright-lush-harmonious-or.html

    Most of us would kill to live in the '60s & '70s environments these days...

    ReplyDelete
  22. Speaking of late examples of the "bright lush harmonious dystopia," there was a first season episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation ("Justice"), that was just like that. It was made in 1987, when the show was still trying to copy the original series from the '60s.

    Google image search "star trek tng justice".

    Not the greatest episode -- most of the first season is forgettable. But good to see how well the old style could still be copied and preserved. Over 35 years later, we have no idea of a society that *over*-enforces the law and social harmony -- breaking the law is overlooked, and disharmony is openly encouraged.

    And to match the moral tone of that episode, they had to copy the visual code of dystopias from the old order -- bright, lush, harmonious (to a fault, in the "liberate your desires" crowd that ended up wrecking our society for their own selfish indulgences).

    ReplyDelete
  23. Two last thoughts on the aesthetics of Star Trek: TNG. First, the Borg is another clear example of the neoliberal era's view of "dystopia = dingy, dark, decaying ruins". Their ship, the look of the individuals, etc. The only difference from Blade Runner, RoboCop, etc., is that the Borg are another super-collectivist society, as there would've been back in the '60s and '70s dystopias. They're not fragmented.

    And second, TNG nailed American aesthetics better than the original series, due to its inclusion of a massive woodgrain panel to end all woodgrain panels, smack dab in the middle of the bridge itself:

    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/3/3d/Galaxy_class_bridge_security.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130811192617&path-prefix=en

    Aside from combining the primitive with all the other obviously futuristic elements, as Americans require, it also shows the craze for bentwood in modern styles. Talk about a bend -- it curves all the way around the three central chairs to provide a cozy enclosure. That central area would otherwise feel isolated in the expanse of the huge room.

    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/8/82/Galaxy_bridge_empty%2C_2364.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120820021437&path-prefix=en

    TOS' bridge was more crammed and high-pressure, like they were scrappy tight-budget underdogs dogfighting in outer space, vs. the TNG flagship having consolidated American (er, Terran) supremacy, and getting to enjoy the fruits of their earlier conquests -- large comfy bridge, less pressure, more relaxing.

    And the TOS' bridge did not have any kind of primitive element -- only futuristic. It makes it less relatable of a space, whereas the woodgrain panel into which a bunch of gauges and action buttons are set -- it's not so different from the dashboard of a car (made in the right time, in the right place, that is).

    If you've never watched TNG, start with season 3 or 4 and go from there. It's the best TV show of the '90s, which itself was the high point for the TV medium. Adventure, drama, action, sci-fi, romance, soap opera -- and the only show after the Twilight Zone of 30 years prior to explore, and even perfect, the "trippy / surreal high-concept" episode.

    Plus TNG had way more eye candy on a regular basis. It wouldn't have made sense on TOS -- legions of hot chicks would never want to spend their lives aboard a crammed dogfighting vehicle whose success was highly uncertain. By the time of TNG, the universe had been more conquered, alliances formed between old rivals, etc. Now it's more safe, secure, and tempting for babes to go searching for pink-collar jobs while traveling to exotic locations.

    Easily the most memorable being statuesque stunner Famke Janssen playing an intergalactic Manic Pixie Dream Girl ("The Perfect Mate", season 5). The Dutch mega-babe was 26, a few years before becoming a Bond Girl baddie in Goldeneye.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You should do a post on the evolution over time of the portrayal of pink-collar jobs.

      Delete
  24. Sorry (not sorry), some more observations on the American Mod look of the TNG bridge, and how it looks more Mod than the TOS predecessor (even though TOS was made in the '60s at the height of these phenomena).

    The focal area of the TNG bridge is sunken in from the less important areas, which are raised in elevation behind it. The transition has that nice bentwood enclosure -- it's a '70s conversation pit!

    On TOS, the captain's chair is a bit higher than the others, and the floor plan is pretty flat overall, more suitable to a military ship, the captain being literally above the others, removed from them somewhat. The TNG environment is for close convos and consensus, since it's generally a diplomatic mission they're on to consolidate their earlier conqusts, not further war.

    The control consoles at the Comms station are heavily cantilevered, with only their outer side receiving direct support from the upright section. You can see the consoles leaning slightly because of that. The TOS Comms console is a single unit, supported in the center -- technically a bit cantilevered toward either unsupported edge, but it's far less "wowie-zowie" than the asymmetric kind of TNG. Americans love our cantilevers.

    The three main chairs are also cantilevered. Some look like their back is bolted to the sunken wall behind, with no support underneath. Other times, they have a single support beam attached toward the rear of the seat, which goes downward and back toward the floor. Not the heaviest cantilever, but a clear reminder of the swivel chairs that have defined American offices for over a century -- making this great big flying office in outer space instantly relatable to Earthbound audiences of the '90s, before office parks were dismantled in favor of flex-spaces.

    And the color palette is also '70s Mod -- medium-dark brown wood, warm butterscotch leather upholstery (with some brown two-tone accents), tan console shells, taupe -- with brown tones, *not* the dull heavy gray of the 2010s -- for the metallic panels (much like my '70s Steelcase bookcases), and an orange-y pink for part of the carpeting. Very earthy, primitive, warm, inviting, yet distinctly modern at the same time.

    Light-years more American-looking than the Star Trek 2009 movie's bridge, which is a Silicon Valley group masturbation flex-space. Not so much the bright-and-white look itself, but the agoraphobic open plan (with lots of see-through glass, which is not a partition at all), the Panopticon feeling that everyone is passive-aggressively monitoring everyone else, etc. Barf.

    On the TNG bridge, only the futuristic touch panels are lit up in bright colors -- not the entire environment, including the furniture. It makes it look more mature and sober, bright lights only where needed. The Star Trek 2009 bridge looks like an Apple Store kindergarten, where ADHD kiddies just want a laser-light show all the time, instead of focusing on anything important.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Apple Store kindergarten is how much of the whole world looks now unfortunately:

      https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

      Delete
  25. Just a reminder that the Trump executive order on civic architecture specifically whines about the "large-scale use of exposed poured concrete" to define Brutalism.

    https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/

    And "massive block-like appearance" with a "rigid geometric style" -- you're whining about American architecture itself, you damn bowtie-sporting Euro-LARP-ing trad fags. What's the opposite of what they're hating on? Slender weight, open and airy, curvilinear, delicate finesse, with anything but concrete. AKA Rococo or whatever.

    >ywn be an 18th-C. French imperial aristocrat

    It's not just Brutalism that these dorks hate on when they define their target that way -- that's basically the whole of our native, distinctive style of building and designing things, all the way back to Frank Lloyd Wright at the turn of the 20th C., right through the Brutalist phase proper, including the Fort Worth Water Gardens -- one of the coolest and most beloved works of civic architecture that violates every one of that executive order's directives, to the max.

    That's why it's so awesome, sublime, and all-American -- finally some relief for the common American people, to not have to be subjected to some back-East Euro-LARPer's sad and pathetic and anti-American imposition of foreign styles on our native culture. They're perfectly fine in their own place, and we can appreciate them -- but as tourists, not by trying to graft their culture onto ours, uprooting our own rich heritage in the process.

    The "Greco-Roman" (non-existent, contradictory) LARP is the funniest part of the order, because there has never been any popular demand in America for either Ancient Greek or Roman styles. It's just "that stuffy ancient-looking style" that GOP-voting lawyers and doctors want for the government buildings where they work.

    Malls never looked Greco or Roman, neither did department stores, diners, restaurants, amusement parks, or literally anything that is all about popular demand among the flyover American working and middle classes.

    Whenever a small biz owner could build their own little building with whatever character they wanted, a la the "roadside vernacular" out West, they never did Greco or Roman, as though finally free from their Brutalist oppressors in the elites.

    Quite the opposite: those buildings that are "a restaurant in the shape of a giant cowboy boot" are much closer to Brutalism than to any trad LARP style. They're treating the entire building as a large-scale sculpture -- it's more instantly recognizable what the reference shape is, and it's representational rather than abstract, but then lots of Brutalist sculptural buildings are representational or lifelike as well.

    That violates the fundamental tenets of those Classical styles, where sculpture was something separate from, smaller than, and subordinate to building itself.

    Imagine counter-signaling roadside vernacular and Brutalism, and by implication the bulk of the American tradition -- while claiming to be the most pro-American! You can't get any more anti-American than that.

    Stick to your back-East country clubs, and let real Americans conserve the American tradition.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Sometimes the representational shape was the same between the roadside vernacular and Brutalist. Like a frog's head, viewed from below, with a grim or frowning or otherwise weird / menacing / darkly whimsical expression.

    Toed Inn, L.A., ca. 1931:

    https://d3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net/uploads/2022/03/25091225/Toed_Inn_circa_1931-e1648228398751.jpg

    "Frog head" from Boston Government Services Center, early '70s:

    https://i.pinimg.com/236x/61/8e/59/618e597e334e3bf6749f909564a510b3--paul-rudolph-hurley.jpg

    Yet another example of high-low horseshoe theory!

    75 IQ: "I'm gonna make my building look like a giant frog!"

    175 IQ: "I'm gonna make my building look like a giant frog!"

    105 IQ: "NOOOOoOooOOoOoOOOO, you can't just make the entire building a sculpture, that's a category error, buildings and sculptures are separate things, DOES NOT COMPUUUUTE!!!"

    Hehe, luv me giant frog buildings, simple as.

    ReplyDelete
  27. I knew it! Ancient Egyptian, but not Greco or Roman, in L.A.'s roadside vernacular (AKA programmatic or mimetic). Sphinx Realty Company of the 1920s, with a giant sphinx head, camel sign, and small pyramid signs. From this gallery / timeline:

    https://waterandpower.org/museum/Programmatic_Style_Architecture.html

    THAT is what Americans think of when "ancient" comes to mind -- NOT Greeks, NOT Romans, but Egypt and the Levant (including Israel for Christians -- "Biblical times"). Have any of these GOP country-club lawyers and doctors ever seen Raiders of the Lost Ark? This core work of American collective identity is not set in Rome or Athens...

    We don't even think of ancient Anatolians or Persians or Indians -- it has to be from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, so Americans can maximize our distance from Europeans (and by extension, the Indo-Europeans).

    How many separate Egyptian revivals have there been in America, at the *popular* level? Too many to count. "Walk Like an Egyptian" -- not like an Athenian. Greek revival or Roman revival has never been a popular-level phenomenon, aside from Caesars Palace in Vegas -- the city where every other culture around the world is brought into one central place for us to visit them touristically, without having to leave our own country.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Roman Vegas is light-years beyond the stodgy blinkered LARP-ing from back-East lawyer buildings, BTW. Because Vegas is popularly driven. The Forum Shops at Caesars -- one of the coolest malls ever (malls being distinctly American, this one just has a Roman skin). The 2004 addition is the sole example in all of Classical Greco or Roman LARP-ing in America that actually features caryatids -- absolutely massive beauties who are carved completely around, and also act as columns for structural support.

    That form was more Greco than Roman (most prominently at the Acropolis). But it never appeared in Classical revivals because it's too cool, and Greco-Roman LARP-ers are usually lamewads. The form also appears in the Babylon nightclub in Scarface (exterior as well as interior). Way cooler than the Trump exec order-writers. And it combined contrasting-color neon lights, for the vaporwave look of Classical (not primitive) meets Modern.

    Why don't LARP-ers like caryatids? Cuz they're nerds, and they get a category error about sculpture being separate from the building's fundamental structure. They might not print an error message if there were just a suggestive motif running up and down a column -- but to carve a column all the way around to represent something from the real world, like the human form? DOES NOT COMPUTE.

    These are the same people who were scandalized to learn that the real Romans garishly painted their statues -- and yet no calls from the trads to erect new painted statues, or to garishly paint for the first time those Classical-inspired statues that have already been erected. The LARP-ers are just lame copers, and have already flushed those discoveries down the memory hole. They don't actually care what Rome was like, it's just an inspiration to them (never a fruitful one, though).

    But in good ol' high-low horseshoe theory fashion, when the only Roman-themed mall on Earth opened up in Vegas, it wasn't long before it got four caryatids next to spiral escalators. THAT is what a popular Greco-Roman Revival style would look like in America. But why do Greco-Roman when we already have Egyptian? It's even more cool and exotic, and by this point, familiar and traditional to us.

    We aren't even familiar enough with Greece and Rome to know which one had the arches and domes, and which one had the sculpted-babes-as-columns.

    But we sure as hell know which civilization had the pyramids, obelisks, sphinxes, hieroglyphics, mummies, gods with bird heads / jackal heads / etc., and so on and so forth. The average American couldn't tell you much about a single Greek or Roman god, or identify some writing as being in the Greek alphabet, or anything about their funerary practices, religious rituals, etc. They can't even name the major river (or seas) of Italy or Greece, unlike the Nile!

    ReplyDelete
  29. A truly American executive order on Classical architectural influences would have to specifically exclude Greek and Roman, and only allow Egyptian or other Saharo-Arabian cultures (like Akkadians, Babylonians, ziggurats, etc.). New buildings could be obelisks a la the Washington Monument, but no more like the Capitol Building.

    If we're talking further into the 1st millennium AD, it would allow Frankish / Romanesque, Byzantine, and Mayan, all very different from the late Medieval / Early Modern Euro imperial styles that we have always endeavored to differentiate ourselves from as Americans. And all with a rich tradition in America, especially the Mayan revival at the popular level -- there were tons of Mayan revival movie theaters, but not Greco or Roman ones.

    Movie theaters are all-American, unlike country clubs, so there's no way the Greco or Roman LARP would ever infect that setting. But Egyptian and Mayan did, like crazy! But if you're a lawyer or doctor from Pennsylvania or Tennessee, how would you know?

    ReplyDelete
  30. The Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo NY also has caryatids in a Classical-inspired building. From 1905. That makes 2 examples in all of American Greco or Roman LARP-ing.

    ReplyDelete
  31. King Tut's death mask is more iconic in American culture than any Greco or Roman sculptural portrait, mask, etc.

    Ditto for the Easter Island moai -- the originals are from the early 2nd millennium AD. But in the American imagination, they signal "primitive" or "ancient", only from the New World rather than Old World.

    Why don't Republican country-club lawyers and doctors call for moai in American civic architecture? The Japanese video game designers who made the Gradius series have a better sense of what's iconically American (they also put King Tut's death mask in Life Force).

    Outer-space ship shooter video game -- with moai and King Tut. Primitive / Ancient Futurism!

    ReplyDelete
  32. America's obsession with ancient aliens is also refracted mainly through the lens of Egypt, not Europe (in any of its civilizations or primitive societies).

    The best that we can preoccupy ourselves with in Europe is Stonehenge, and that comes in a very distant 2nd behind the Egyptian pyramids.

    The Freemasons, Shriners, all these elite secret societies in America, have traced their mythological roots and iconography to Egypt and the ancient Levant, not Europe. That's why there's a pyramid, not Greek temple or Roman triumphal arch, on the back of our $1 bill (released in 1935, well after our integrative civil war had concluded and American ethnogenesis began for real).

    ReplyDelete
  33. tl;dr -- if you resonate with Ancient Greco or Roman vibes more than Ancient Egyptian vibes, you are not American. You're LARP-ing as an 18th-C. Euro imperial aristocrat, during their Neoclassical phase.

    >ywn be European

    ReplyDelete
  34. The Psychology Building in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is another example of a building in the style of American architecture:

    https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Department+of+Psychology/@40.1074841,-88.2305962,18z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x880cd73eeca9acbf:0x1f4e76efabb48f89!8m2!3d40.1074841!4d-88.2299558!16s%2Fg%2F12cppqd25?entry=ttu

    Very blocky and made predominantly with concrete.

    Now compare that to any of the newer buildings of the University of Illinois, like the Computer Instructional Facility built in 2020. The CIF is very Bauhaus in that it is made predominantly of black steel and glass:

    https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Campus+Instructional+Facility+(CIF)/@40.1128083,-88.2275,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipMwjhi2TNYbgoGcv5i7oM6cxZutuLyH8Q5l6u8O!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMwjhi2TNYbgoGcv5i7oM6cxZutuLyH8Q5l6u8O%3Dw203-h152-k-no!7i4032!8i3024!4m7!3m6!1s0x880cd76d134f9943:0xe67002a644efa20f!8m2!3d40.1124436!4d-88.2283419!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F11rb5x95w4?entry=ttu

    ReplyDelete
  35. A decade ago Americans were obsessed with the Mayan calendar and the prediction that the world was going to end on December 21, 2012. But you didn't see the same obsession in Europe.

    ReplyDelete
  36. I'm glad that Ame lives in SoCal, so when Kiara visits, she gets to see the real America (Midwest out to the West Coast), and not some sad Euro-wannabe dump like New York.

    Going out to Denny's (born in L.A., naturally), interacting with a little girl at her roadside lemonade stand, shooting guns (airsoft)... why, that would make even a Canadian break out into a chant of "USA! USA!" ^_^

    During last year's visit, the whole gang got to hang out at a massive arcade, with video games, air hockey, the works. :)

    Although you're surrounded by all types of American architecture in L.A., I wonder how Kiara would react to America's interpretation of European architecture that hardly exists anymore in Europe.

    In Europe, Frankish / Byzantine / Romanesque was largely replaced by Gothic, then Baroque, etc. But that's the main Euro style that America revived. The best concentration in L.A. is at UCLA -- Royce Hall and Powell Library. You'd have to go to provincial areas in Europe to find that style still standing. Near the centers of wealth, power, and cultural innovation, it was replaced by Gothic etc.

    Or the "storybook houses", like the Spadena House in Beverly Hills or the Hobbit House in Culver City. Even more humble and antiquated than Romanesque, like a setting for Hansel and Gretel. Post-Roman Empire, but pre-Gothic, similar time period as Frankish / Romanesque, but more of a peasant home than a community's cathedral.

    Kiara has to travel all the way to L.A. to see a Europe that no longer exists -- how romantic. ^_^

    Speaking of, she and Ame should watch L.A. Story from 1991 (not necessarily a watchalong for their channels). One of the most iconic Manic Pixie Dream Girls -- SanDeE* might remind Kiara a lot of herself. Hehe.

    Most of Ame's old watchalongs were action / sci-fi / horror movies, so she might hate rom-coms, but even guys love L.A. Story, it's not a chick flick. Great new age soundtrack as well.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Ame and Kiara blasting blink-182 and Jimmy Eat World out the car windows as they cruise around L.A. visiting the iconic high schools that Kiara has seen in American teen movies and TV shows.

    Torrance, Venice, John Marshall, here we come, ready or not! ^_^

    ReplyDelete
  38. And Occidental College, to visit the world of Clueless!

    ReplyDelete
  39. The Spadena House made a cameo in Clueless! Small world, but then they're both set in Beverly Hills.

    https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/g29191069/clueless-film-locations-la-tour/

    Luv the past two nights of Kiwawa streams. As an extrovert, she really comes alive when she gets to play off of another person or group IRL, even if they're introverts.

    I think Irys is the only other extrovert in Hololive EN. She was critical for making introvert Mumei blush while being ASMR'd by Irys, Fauna, and Reine. And I'm sure was crucial to the fun night out with "my ladiiiieeezzz" that Fauna still talks about, hehe.

    Somebody's gotta draw these introverts out of their shells, right? Kiara and/or Irys should be at all of these IRL collabs. :) Too bad they both live outside North America, though...

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."