Category: Modernism

Kim’s Hell

Architecture, Modernism

This is what happens when I get curious about stuff and set out to explore.

Last week, I read that former Spain- and Real Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas (one of the best goalies ever, btw) has divorced his journototty wife Sara:

…and moved to a “Japanese-style” penthouse in La Finca.

Where dat?

Not being familiar with Spain, I eventually found out that it’s a swanky suburb of Madrid.  (I should also mention that I caught the giggles because I first read “Finca” as “Fica” — the Italian slang for “pussy” — but I recovered and went on.)

I should have stopped upon learning that La Finca was a Madrid suburb.  But noooo, I had to see what it looks like.  Casilla’s penthouse apartment (see here) should have given me a clue, but when I DuckDucked it, I saw stuff like this… endless examples of foul glass and concrete boxes modernity:

       

I could go on, but I think you get the drift.  (If you want to see bigger pictures — gawd help you — just DuckDuck “La Finca Madrid”.)

As a rule, I quite like traditional Spanish architecture — especially the Catalonian style:

 

…and as for apartments and public buildings:

 

Compared to those, La Finca Horrible doesn’t even come close:

I think I need to look at something beautiful, just to recover from that hideousness.  Here’s Paz Vega:

Now that’s some classic Spanish architecture for you.

Hates

Deep Thoughts, Marxists, Modernism

Bill Bryson (yes, him again) suggests that everyone should be able to have ten things (people, concepts, activities, whatever) that they can hate, without apology or explanation.

Longtime Readers will know that I would have difficulty keeping the list to ten — as Insty would say, I really need a bigger blog to contain all the things that truly make my trigger finger itch — but if I can create universal categories of hatred, I might be able to give it a try.  Let’s see how this goes, and in no specific order, my ten hates are:

  1. Anyone affiliated with the Democrat Party since 1880
  2. The music recording industry
  3. Modern architecture (brutalism, Bauhaus etc.), its creators and practitioners (Le Corbusier, Van der Rohe, Jahn, Pei etc.)
  4. All music composed and released since 2005 — performers, producers, composers, whatever
  5. Automotive design since 1990
  6. Google — everything about it
  7. Journalists, almost without exception
  8. Anarchism and anarchists
  9. Large corporations (referred to as Global MegaCorp on these pages)
  10. Wokism.

Note that I have excluded mere irritants like astrology, veganism, libertarianism, cyclists, the 9mm Europellet and similar nonsense from the above list, because they are largely the result of stupidity rather than actual evil.

As for the list itself, however, I put it to you that if by some kind of magic all ten of those things were to disappear tomorrow, the world would be a far better place to live in.

Feel free to add your own hates, in Comments.  Remember:  no explanation or justification is necessary.

Boring And Gray

Modernism, Real Estate

I know that colors tend to come and go as fashion statements, and maybe soon it will all change.  But I have to agree with the people complaining about this trend (now referred to as the “Grey Plague”):

‘Tasteless’ homeowners have been slammed over a trend of ruining pretty homes with dreary paint-jobs, supersized fences and Astro-turf lawns, dubbed the ‘Grey Plague’.
A number of examples have been shared online in recent weeks, showing how once picturesque white houses, often dating back centuries, have been transformed into ugly, grey mountains stripped of greenery and often with imposing front features.

Here’s an example:

Yes, that’s the same house.  The picturesque, somewhat eccentric Victorian cottage has been turned into some neo-Bauhaus nightmare, the shrubbery replaced with… concrete, and the family dwelling has come to resemble the offices of a small architectural firm.  To call the change “ugly” is to understate the matter.

I know, I know:  it’s a private property issue, so all you librarians can go back to reading Lysander Spooner or Atlas Shrugged.  Of course you should be able to do what you want with your property — but as it’s in the public domain (being oh-so visible from the street), I likewise have the right to express my opinion that it looks like shit.

The other bitch about a modern trend has to do with this fascination for the color gray / grey (depending on which side of the Atlantic you live;  both are correct).  From the linked article, look upon this foul eyesore, and despair:

For those who’ve never been to Britishland, allow me to mansplain.

Both these pics were taken on a sunny summer’s day — but, as the old joke goes, that’s not the way to bet when it comes to British Weather.  At least 80% of the time, it looks like this:

…cold, damp and dreary.  In a word: gray.

Now use your imagination and add a gray day to the white house in the pic on the left-hand side, and to the gray house on the right.  That’s right:  putting a gray house into a gray day turns “dreary” into “gloomy”.  Kinda like Edinburgh on any day, come to think of it:

(That was taken from my hotel room just after lunch, in October 1999.)

I don’t really mind gray — light gray — as an interior color, although I think it tends to make the room feel a little cold.  In fact, the walls in our current apartment are light gray and while we’d pick a different color (e.g. pale blue or a very light tropical-beach-sand color) if we had our druthers, the gray doesn’t offend.  However, the outside of our apartment complex is a dark gray, similar to the gray Victorian above, and that makes me want to bring the dynamite, especially when (like today) it’s overcast, chilly, drizzly and as New Wife calls it, “positively British”.  Here’s what I’m talking about (taken at about midday yesterday):

Change that to white walls with gray accents, and we’re talking turkey.  As it is… ugh.

Anyway, as I said at the top, maybe the fashion will change and gray will be replaced with some other color.

My luck, it will be avocado green.  Then there will be murders.

Night Follows Day

Crime, Gummint, Modernism, Vermin

From Knuckledragger, talking about his old neighborhood (happens to be in California, but could have — and has — happened anywhere):

The shooting happened in the 200 block of Semple Street, I used to live at 238 Kimble, one street over. Most of the houses there were built in the 1920s.
…
When I first moved there in 1996, it was a nice neighborhood – quiet with a lot of older folks that would sit out on their front porch in the evening drinking tea and talking with other neighbors that were out for their evening walk. As time went by, those folks either died or sold their homes to go into retirement communities or whatever and younger folks moved in. Then they opened up an apartment complex on Johnson, 2 streets over, to Section 8 [low-income] housing and shit really went downhill after that.

One of the biggest failures of “progressive” philosophy is the “magic dirt” theory:  that transplanting people from a bad place to a better place will somehow magically make them change, and act more like the people in the better neighborhood than they did in their old one.

As any amateur* student of human nature will tell you, that’s completely wrong.  Instead, the transplantees will bring all their old behaviors to the better place, and infect it with thuggery, crime and general lawlessness, to the point where the original inhabitants of that (no longer) “better” area simply pack up and move.  Then that’s referred to derisively by the “planners” as “White flight” or, to be more accurate, as “middle-class flight” (which is what it is).

Then the neighborhoods go to shit, as Kenny observes, the schools start to fail, businesses also leave and voilà!  a shithole is created where no shithole existed before.  By social redistributionism.  (In this case, not of wealth but of antisocial behavior, to make it somehow more “fair”.)

And no matter how often it fails, the Leftists (as always) continue the practice, again and again, because Leftist activity only concerns itself with intentions, and outcomes are always the fault of others rather than of the basic Marxist principle.  (The “others”, of course, being “capitalism”, “greedy businessmen”, “bankers” or, more recently, “racism”.)

*the “professional” students of human behavior are the ones who initiate and perpetuate this foolishness, reminding me of the (paraphrased) expression that so stupid and wrongheaded a precept could only have been produced by an academic — academia, of course, never having to live with the consequences of their folly.

Back To The Classic

Modernism

Thanks to Alert Reader SeanF, I see that I am not alone in my hatred of Modernist architecture:

A new study finds 72 percent of Americans prefer traditional architecture for U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings, including majorities across political, racial, sex, and socioeconomic categories. The survey was conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of National Civic Art Society and polled more than 2,000 U.S. adults.
These findings come in light of the possibility of a Trump administration executive order, appropriately named Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, that would require that new office buildings in Washington, D.C. be classical in design. Among other things, the order would revise the 1962 “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture,” which forced modernism to be the official government building style.

Indeed, the picture in the article states it better than anything:

Needless to say, the Ungodly have set about trying to stop this most worthy cause:

In response to the leak of the potential order, a bill entitled the “Democracy in Design Act” was proposed by House Democrats to overturn it.

…which simply reminds us that winning back the House in November is Job #2.

One of the most heartening things about this website comes from people who write to me and say, “I thought I was the only one who believed in this kind of thing” , and who were astonished to find a kindred soul in both my writings and the support of my Readers.

Now it’s the Federalist ‘s turn to do it for me.  How gratifying.

King Midas In Reverse

Bad News, Marxists, Modernism, Two-Minute Hate

No, not the awful Graham Nash song.  This is a clear and concise look at how the Left has turned everything it touched — and eventually controlled — into shit.

The hard Left believes its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.

Of course, Victor Davis Hanson is too much of a gentleman to say what I said, bless him.  But “petrified” means “turned to stone” (hence his title of the article), and academia, Hollywood, urban centers, sports and the military’s leadership have not been thus transformed.  Turned into stone — at any stage before, say, 2002 would have been fine;  but now it’s all gone to shit, and we have the Left to thank for it.

Read the whole thing.