buildings

4/3/2023

So... Has anyone else noticed how ugly everything is? I mean, I don't want to sound like a little cunt, but I swear to God, everywhere I look, it's visual vomit. Every building in America is a big box nowadays unless you live in one of those historic cities, and if you're not in a wealthy neighborhood, even the old buildings look like soot-covered piles of stucco shit.

I just think it's lame that architecture in America is so ugly. Not to generalize, I mean, obviously not all of it is ugly here, but in general, our buildings are nothing special. I work in a building on the Mississippi River. There are windows along the west side that look out onto the skyline. When the sun gets low, the sun paints the landscape gold, and I survey the horizon and see… boxes. Boxes at golden hour are still ugly.

Maybe my perspective is warped by TV or whatever, but I get the feeling that architecture is better anywhere else. America just has the very worst of it. We don't have any beautiful, traditional styles that are widespread beyond, like, New England. We don't put details in places just to look pretty. We don't have decorated homes or beautifully embellished squares or towering filigreed apartment blocks. Instead, we have McMansions, concrete, and austere shoebox tenements.

There isn't much beauty in this world we've created. It's great that America doesn't have a monarch who commands the proles to build painstaking artful facades everywhere to satisfy their hedonistic urges, or whatever, but it would be nice if contractors and architects stopped focusing so much on utility and a little more on aesthetics. Like most problems, this is probably the fault of capitalism. Anyone will buy a plain, boxy house, but you'd have to spend more time looking for a buyer to purchase a house with any sense of character. You want your house to be prettier? Put a flower box in the window or something.

It would just be nice if my walks outside were accompanied with some nicer scenery. I live in a city, so there's not like a wealth of natural beauty around, just this excess of unnatural un-beauty. This whole country needs a power-wash and a renovation.