> <jbujes at covad.net> wrote:
>
>> decadent Capitalism
>
> One of the most notable features of American capitalism today is how much
> stunning ugliness it produces - hideous strip malls, suburban
> developments, etc. Wal-Mart is an organized aesthetic crime. The point
> was brought home to me a few years ago: a mile or two inland from the
> Oregon coast, surely one of the more beautiful natural landscapes on
> earth, I stopped at a convenience store that was made of corrugated tin.
> The ugliness emerges right out of the American culture and political
> economy - a Protestant suspicion of beauty and pleasure combined with
> cost minimization and lowest common denominator marketing. Against that,
> the pursuit of beauty is a political act.
Reminds me of Tom Wolfe's idiotic _From Bauhaus to Our House_, where he blamed boxy glass towers and those hideous layer-cake office-parks on aesthetics as Gropius and Mies Van Der Rohe. Now, I hate their styles, personally (I'm more a fan of Wright, the Greene brothers, Sullivan, and Gaudi), but they're not to blame. Those big boxy structures are, frankly, more "efficient." They're simple, they use materials easy to mass-produce in regular shapes, and usually, you can convert those buildings for other uses-- offices into hospitals, for example.
So I wouldn't blame it on capitalism per se. Beautiful buildings have been made within feudalism (castles, the Kremlin), religion (Gaudi cathedral), socialist idealism (any number of WPA buildings during the Deco period), and even capitalism (the Greene brothers' houses, the Empire State Building, Sullivan's skyscrapers). And repulsive buildings have come out of these as well. But Doug's right because these repulsive things turn up despite the _claims_ made for capitalism (the freedom, the luxury, the overall quality-of-life).