If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".
I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.
If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.
Here's the story that made sense to me: In the pre industrial age, visible ornamentation was symbolic of a craftsman's skill and attention to detail, when you couldn't inspect the invisible aspects of a product. For instance a violin has an ornately carved scroll, and features such as the "bees sting," whereas you can't take it apart to see if the neck mortise is precisely fitted. It is one of the few pre-industrial-age products whose aesthetics have not changed much.
Today, those features are no longer necessary, and we look for other measures of quality in products -- for better or worse.
I grew up in a "midcentury modern" house, and my family lives in one today. I find the modern decor to be comforting because in my case it reminds me of home. My mom claimed that the sparse decor was easier to maintain, for instance: "There are no knick-knacks to dust around." Truth be told, the house also happened to be available during a very frothy market, and my spouse would have chosen something more traditional.
It's also claimed that the simpler decor works in smaller houses.
We were not rich. The MCM houses in my 'hood, including ours, are certainly not clutter free, yet still feel pleasant and comfortable.
What are we talking about here? I didn't read the full article but I looked at the synopsis at the top: "Striped patterns, flickering lights, bright glare, and crowded visual environments such as supermarkets"
With the exclusion of striped patterns, this just sounds like a typical over lit commercial environments, probably overhead fluorescent lights, maybe lights and screens running at different refresh rates. That has nothing to do with home decor of any era or culture.
Also I'm guessing the acoustics are consistently horrible in these environments too. Air quality probably sucks too.
With all due respect, if you bought a house during a frothy market, and you use words like “mid-century modern, you are 100% part of the elite class, even if you don’t consider yourself rich. Maybe you are part of the top 10% instead of the top 1%, but that top 10% or 20% is exactly the class I was referring to.
TBF most ppl reading/posting on HN are part of the elite.
Elite doesn't imply "more money than I know what to do with" it simply means being closer to the upper end the of income and/or wealth distribution, or failing that, being part of some cultural generation that gives you more influence than the average bear, i.e. journalist, university prof etc. The cutoff for being in the 20% of household income in the US is $175K. From what I understand that's one entry level FAANG income.
Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence.
Ordinary folks when presented with an object have to perform a mental calculation over the cost/inconvenience of storage vs. disposal and if wanted again, replacement.
The rich also can afford to keep their minimalist modern spaces clean and clutter-free, through paying staff. These environments tend to look awful when not tended to continuously because a single out-of-place item is so clearly visible.
Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
> Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
that's wrong: my minimalist (in looks, not in equipment) all white kitchen looks completely fine even after a dinner party, because even then it doesn't look full, dirty or cluttered. The old one (and it wasn't that old, only there were more and darker colors and lines and objects) decidedly didn't. The art of designing modern spaces lies in the ability to make the space visually appealing (in my case minimal) while still able to function correctly. Too often the designers and their clients forget about the practical aspects.
They are awful to even look at, IHMO. Cold, sterile, tells something about people living in such fugly soulless places.
Which is fine to be honest, its nice to see clearly the type of person on the other side of the table, no need to dig through empty speech clutter for clues. But impressive it is not.
Lawns are for much more than just flexing. It's an outdoor part of your property which is flat and open enough to use for various activities and purposes. I don't know where people get such a cynical idea that this is THE reason anyone has lawns.
Yeah this is all very regional too. Row houses in London and brownstones in New York or whatever won’t have front lawns as a function of density, but may have back yards or gardens, which may or may not be a function of producing your own food, which is all tied up in different experiences of war, while certainly countryside estates are for form more than function, while post war housing in the midwestern US was in part a build-on-your-lot market with houses literally ordered from a Sears catalog…
There’s definitely more to the story and there are myriad factors.
One set of my grandparents had an expansive, well-cared-for yard with a swing, arches with climbing plants, secret little gravel paths through the trees lined with mosaic tiles featuring the likenesses of their grandchildren, a picnic table, a patio with a barbecue, and so on. I think if you want to have a yard like that, it is a fine hobby. But most people do not. Most people just have a grass rectangle that is a liability. My father has lived in the same house for 15 years and has never used the back yard except as throughfare and has never used the front yard for anything. You can't even see it yard from outside because of an eight-foot-tall fence. All he does is mow it - what's the point of that? It's pure liability. And I think this is how most people's yards are. And that's silly.
I've lived in a few row houses with fully paved outdoor areas. I don't really see the point of that either, but at least it doesn't require regular maintenance so it only has to be occasionally useful to come out ahead.
It wasn't just showing off land. It was showing off you had land that was completely unproductive and could even afford staff to maintain this completely useless plot. It's why they became increasingly large and ornate gardens.
It then took this association with rich and better and was used in the US to denote affluent and therefore segregated housing developments.
I believe in practice yes. It isn't a planned design choice - it's just a practical consequence that if you are moving around a lot, carrying possessions with you has a much higher cost than if you are staying in the same place. You'll be more averse to accumulating possessions. If you are staying in one place, you only have to reduce your possessions when you start running out of space.
Travel / multiple homes confuse the issue because nobody spends much time on their 5th house they use less than a month per year, so the decoration is mostly outsourced to 3rd parties.
The portion of rich people homes they actually use are often quite cluttered. The simple limitation of needing to walk to a room to use it means spreading out across a huge home gets annoying. Semi public spaces for guests on the other hand can look like hotels because that’s effectively what they are.
Space is a factor too. I toured the mansion one time a few years back because a friend of mine was remodeling it. The master bedroom was as large as my entire house. That's a single bedroom for the two people planned to live there. I saw it while it was still under construction and so completely unlivable and but you could quickly figure out which parts were intended for the people lived there to live in and which parts were semi-public most of the mansion was clearly public spaces where they would have parties.
> I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.
You should be. Modernism is an ideological design response: the aesthetics of the machine age and utilitarianism.
OP's opinion is not based on actual design and architecture history and (ironically) appears to be itself an ideological narrative: a posthoc criticism of Modern (yes with cap M) design which itself has its root in conservative reaction against the (asserted, alleged and possibly true) socialist tendencies of the elite social and design circles that gave birth to Modernism. Note, for example, the 'emotional' appeal to long lived in homes, etc.
This is a false dichotomy. The modern style is a reaction against a distinct and different design aesthetic from what the parent described. Neoclassical, Gothic Revival, and Rococo are more ornamental, but they not cozy or comfortable in the same way.
This being said, the title is accurate to the article but misleading. The subtitle is about "Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs". It isn't modern design, it's specific elements of modern design.
I'd suggest that the striped/patterned floors/LED points transcend styles, and would cause issues even in a more ornate/classical design. Style is individual, and I expect the diversities of brains and thinking patterns means that there is no right answer for what style is best for people.
The most interesting part of the article wasn't really reflective of style, it was visually crowded environments. They used the example of supermarkets, and that seems distinct from a visually rich style like the grandparent comment's home or Neo Gothic cathedrals. Being in a forest is visually crowded, too, but I'd expect it has the opposite effect the study measured. I think the fractal dimension of the detail, if they correlated it with the degree of distress, would be a factor.
Ornate and simple alternate back and forth in a reactionary preference cycle in history. We may be in a 'simple' phase but there is a nostalgic backlash happening with pre-digital aesthetics, and as evidenced here.
My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their house for 50 years. I can't comprehend how Americans keep moving for jobs or to upgrade or to get to a better school district. Surely you want some permanence? Get to know your neighbors?
Edit yes I did move around in my twenties, but that stopped at 30.
Remember people marry later if at all so you break the cohort developments of growing up and adulting.
I helped lead my local little league. It’s different than it used to be - it’s pretty typical to have tball parents in their 40s. A group of parents from 20s to 50s aren’t going to hang out, they don’t relate. I’m a late genx, most of my friends parents were in their 30s when I was a little leaguer.
The demise of old line churches is similar. We did CYO basketball in the same parish my wife did. It’s the last of what was 8-10 catholic parishes in my city. And unlike in my youth where you had good mix multigenerational parishioners… the parish survives based on the beneficence of 5-10 people in their late 60s and 70s, with few people rising to behind them. Mainline Protestant parishes are similar. The only growth in religious communities are independent Baptists, which are great but integrate into the broader community differently, because each church mostly stands alone and isn’t part of a bigger system.
Church groups, or at least an awful lot of them, were co-opted by groups like the Council For National Policy (parent group of the Heritage Foundation). I think a lot of younger folks see through the BS and don't want to send their time listening to hate speech discussed as gospel.
These churches chose thier path, and so did their parishioners.
The nightmare is not outgrowing the child version of 'how to morality'. It's moving past it without reaching the enlightenment of being moral because it's the best large scale and long term strategy.
Instead the grown psychopathic children all move for instant gratification and rewards in the now, damn the cost of society and civilization long term.
When you say you want to reach Orville, are you referring to the episode where everyone wears an upvote counter badge? Because I can see that one coming true.
What church(es) are you thinking of here exactly? I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life.
On the contrary, most folks in the 20-40 range are tired of “cafeteria Christian” denominations that pick and chose which parts of scripture to stand by and which go ignore based on ever shifting social trends, whether it be so-called woke churches hosting drag performers or Boomer-tier Endtimes preachers that can’t stop talking about their all expense paid Israeli “pilgrimage.”
> I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life.
I grew up in the South and distinctly remember the Southern Baptist preachings against interracial marriage based on selective (mis)readings of the Bible, against homosexuality based on selective readings of the Old Testament (pick and choose indeed; hate gays while eating your BBQ pork). I remember the constant calls for boycott of Disney parks because of “gay days”.
I don’t know what it’s like I’m a Southern Baptist church now, but I seriously doubt it’s changed much.
In regards to “miscegenation” we have Galatians which largely renders that point moot, highlighting everyone’s love of cherry-picking scripture.
In regards to homosexuality, you have Leviticus, I assume you’re referencing. Given the widespread practice of man-boy relations as famously highlighted by the Spartans and of course recent special military operations in Afghanistan I have an incredibly hard time believing this piece of scripture is at all misinterpreted.
Regarding BBQ, I assume that’s a presence to kosher law and subsequently an attempt at calling hypocrite on the congregation. In that regard we have quite a few pieces of scripture, e.g. in Mark, effectively redefining and negating much of kosher law thereby making that issue moot.
Overall - your assumption around Southern Baptists largely stands. Our last church, my wife had to constantly deal with snide remarks because of her having previously been married to a man that went and overdosed on fentanyl. Meanwhile half the grandparents in the congregation are raising their own grandchildren for the exact same reason…
Which leads to our currently being “unchurched” as they say, because the worst part of Christianity is the other Christians ;)
> Given the widespread practice of man-boy … I have an incredibly hard time believing this piece of scripture is at all misinterpreted.
I’m struggling with this statement. Are you saying that Leviticus is actually only anti-pedophile and not anti-gay (and so all these conservative Christian preachers are willfully misrepresenting it), or are you continuing the long tradition of falsely linking homosexuality with pedophilia? Is there some other interpretation I’m missing?
> Regarding BBQ, I assume that’s a presence to kosher law and subsequently an attempt at calling hypocrite on the congregation. In that regard we have quite a few pieces of scripture, e.g. in Mark, effectively redefining and negating much of kosher law thereby making that issue moot.
I mean, pork is only one of a million things forbidden in Leviticus that modern Christians ignore. Why is charging interest on loans okay now? Where’s the part where Mark says that’s cool? What about period sex? Seems that rule is gone, too. Where is the passage that says “Pretty much everything in Leviticus is irrelevant except the gay thing”?
If you read Mark and the entirety of New Testament in good faith you would know the answer :)
It’s your actions and not your culinary habits. If you chose to fornicate you’re sinning. Nothing in the New Testament reneges on that. Intentionally endorsing lifestyles that promote such acts are bad per the scripture.
If you don’t believe that and choose to”good feels” and statism as your God, that’s your choice.
That’s a very narrow reading. The parable was in response to the question “who’s my neighbor” in the “love thy neighbor” statement and Jesus basically said “even those you hate”(i.e. the Samaritans).
This claim hinges on the idea that homosexuality is a thing you do and not a part of who you are. You can love someone while hating a thing they do. You cannot love someone while hating who they are.
The conservative Christian notion that homosexuality is a choice to is honestly super weird to me because I certainly never chose heterosexuality. It’s one of those things that only makes sense while you’re in it and it’s constantly being beat into you, and with some distance you see that it’s ridiculous.
You’re free to believe whatever it is you like - that’s your belief system. I didn’t intend to start a theological debate ultimately. Only highlight as a counterpoint to the GP that going to church in the modern era really feels like you have to pick one side or another and that it’s simply an extension of politics rather than an higher-order thing.
My point here is that all Christians are “cafeteria Christians”. They all pick and choose the pieces they agree with and want to follow. They discard the inconvenient stuff as no longer relevant and claim the things that they believe are supported by the scripture.
So much of Christian belief is not in the bible no matter what particular sect you are a part of. I remember when those “Left Behind” book’s came out and I found out many of my friends believed in a physical rapture where those “saved” would literally disappear from the Earth. I had no idea this was even a thing because it’s not something my church taught and it’s not in the bible.
Most (all?) other groups have their own rules and beliefs that are not in the bible. I’m not sure it’s possible to be fully faithful to the Bible because it’s not entirely self consistent. Also the books of the bible themselves were chosen from many candidate texts. It’s not as if Jesus left a bibliography.
Oftentimes, they are in conflict. "I love you, my Samaritan neighbour: but I disagree with your practice of sacrificing to God upon the altar at Mount Gerizim, as opposed to the altar at Temple Mount, as is right and proper; and your copy of scripture differs from mine at thousands of points, for which I condemn yours as erroneous and heretical; and I disagree with your practice of speaking the Name on holy days, for we lost that tradition with our priesthood at the destruction of the Second Temple, and therefore you must also discard the practice, for those who speak the Name have no part in the world to come; and really I'd rather you stopped being a Samaritan altogether." Does that sound like love, to you?
"Even those you hate" is too strong a reading, in my view. "Even those you are bigoted towards", perhaps. (Jesus did say elsewhere to love your enemies, but I don't think this parable says that.)
So like, scripture has issue with drag performance? I read bible, actually, and can argue it does not mention it.
That being said, every single denomination picks and chooses. Especially more conservative ones. And in fact, you cant take it all literally and quite a lot is not applicable.
You are correct it neither endorses nor denigrates the specific practice. So why then do we have a church hosting the performances? It’s not relevant to the faith at all? Identity politics entered the chat, unfortunately.
Which leads back to my point, there is a hunger for churches that ignore the intentional blend of secular belief systems in any direction.
I'm not religious but just looking around it's pretty obvious that many unmarried adults act quite immature (delayed adolescence). Which way the causality runs is harder to determine, but when you're responsible for and accountable to a spouse that forces you to grow up a bit.
You describe it like it’s some kind of a treadmill chasing new. But if you have kids at 35, they start school when you’re 40.. were you thinking about the quality of the neighborhood schools when you bought your house at 25?
Or suppose you meet your spouse when you are 30, after you bought a house.
There’s inherently much less moving-around if you get married at 18 and have kids straight away - the plan is settled from the start.
Problem is, unless you happen to live in a relatively wealthy neighborhood, even if you stay put your neighbors and community probably won’t so you still won’t have much permanence.
I really don't want permanence, no! I start to feel fidgety and uncomfortable after I've spent too many years in one place. The idea of living in a single house for decades on end sounds like a kind of imprisonment.
I think of Seattle as "home", and once lived there for twenty-three years straight - but I had nine different addresses during that time. I am probably more of a nomad at heart than the average American, but perhaps Americans have more of a nomadic temperament than the average human.
Getting to know your neighbors can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you make a great new friend: sometimes you're stuck with an obstreperous busybody. It can be nice not having to spend your whole life dealing with the same people and the same conflicts.
Yeah tight communities are blessing, nightmare or both. Good luck with privacy, some people are nosy by default or simply self-centered... weirdos to be polite, gossip, looking down on differences, hard to integrate for newcomers, and one has to conform to unspoken rules, like them or not. Not exactly feeling of proper freedom, is it.
If you get into beef with your neighbor for something which is trivial over long time, now you are stuck with an asshole next door for next 30-50 years.
Its not just US, we moved in Switzerland from very cosmopolitan and international Geneva to small village in wineyards and all this applies at least as much.
Lay down roots, be part of a community, have meaningful connections.
My parents live in southern Italy, in the same small town my mother is from and the small town my father is from is like 5-6 km far.
Every time there is some kind of event (eg: somebody’s parents passing away) it so hearth-warming to see people come together and try and be close to people they’ve known all their life (60+ years).
I moved to a large town nowadays for work and i have a bunch of superficial connections, my peers lament pretty much the same.
I can see why somebody would like to stay 40 years in the same place.
This resonates with me. I enjoy being at my grandparents’ home. And it’s exactly as you mentioned, if I would describe all the stuff in the living room it’d be called “cluttered”. Yet it feels “homey” and I feel pretty relaxed whenever I sit there to read a book.
And then on my side, for the past 15 years I moved to a new place about every 2-3 years. Never really invested in making it feel “homey” because I’m not sure how much space I’d have in the next place I move to.
I see where you are coming from and I think this is an interesting observation. Especially when talking about companies and people moving apartments every year.
I grew up in a house full of the clutter that you describe as comforting, but for me it felt smothering. I recently inherited the house I grew up in and now have it set up much less cluttered. I don’t plan to live anywhere else anytime soon, but for me the lack of clutter and clear spaces are much more comforting.
I am definitely not a fan of crazy colors or patterns or bad lighting either though.
I think there's a lot of unappreciated benefits in "staying put." Of course if you're living in a bad situation that might not be true, and it might not be good for your career or for other material reasons, but it can be good for your mental health. My parents owned one house, and we never moved. I grew up there and I still own it. I don't live there currently but every time I am in that house I'm calm, relaxed, and comfortable almost immediately. It's nothing fancy, just a normal ranch house, but it's very familiar and full of memories.
The article is about office decor, not home decor. While I don't love "modern decor," I don't think offices are meant to feel comforting like a home owned for generations.
If anything, offices are likely designed to not feel comfortable so you are forced to focus on your screen and work. Otherwise, rooms were more comfortable than cubicles, cubicles were more comfortable than open benches, open benches will be more comfortable than whatever AI-adjacent abomination surely to come...
Really curious to imagine what these AI-adjacent abominations could be. Some sort of people conveyor belt we have to work on while rotating past other humans to achieve maximum 'collaboration' perhaps? Offices built into semi trucks so we get picked up and crammed together with our laptops and screens? When will it stop!
> The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did
The theory I subscribe to is a few fold:
1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize
2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value
3) Thus homes stay boring and generic
My dad's lived in the same house for over 15 years and probably expected as much when he moved in. He has a room with old books covering the walls, which he never reads. If he moved house every year, he'd have to throw out or donate the collection.
A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.
You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company!
There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint.
It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige.
That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic.
It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour.
"But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?"
He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.
I'm told that because so many cars are the ugly gray that cars have color are selling better nowadays. It may be only a minority that want color, but that minority is willing to pay for it and they look at their choices and your car is the only one they can go for.
I don't normally care about color myself, but I hate thr color my car is enough that I'm wondering if I should spend the several couple thousand dollars to put a decent coat of paint on it.
I don't need to drive, luckily, but I heard that cars cost so much these days that you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible. Cars cost what shitty houses used to cost, even adjusted for inflation.
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.
Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one.
1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with.
2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?)
Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.
The first point is solid. The loss of craftsmanship means that the labor cost of those who remain has skyrocketed. That's an irony of devaluing labor is that those who hold on to their craft end up in very high demand.
That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.
The "colonizer" rhetoric is just part of it, but it's more so as a piece of the puzzle that shows of an overall change in how we perceive ourselves and how we report on things in the public sphere.
It's unquestionable that ostentatious displays of wealth are met with revulsion and derision, therefore we don't show those displays. The downstream impact is that the masses have nothing to aspire to or look up to in this specific context of craftsmanship. Again, when was the last time "you" wore a suit? Was it tailored? Do you only wear it at weddings? Do you buy your clothing from Costco/Kirkland? Do you find yourself in the fast food line at Chik-fil-a or driving across town to Buc-ee's in your Jeep? These kinds of consumerist behaviors are good and accepted. If you tell someone you only eat at tasting menus or high end restaurants or something instead of those being celebrated as good you'll be met with incredulity or even be made fun of "you're so fancy" "ugh if only I could afford that", and then it devolves into mass-market "experiences" and so forth. (As you read the rest of this post remember that I'm critiquing capitalism here as well).
Because Wimbledon is ongoing and the ladies championship was today, how many complain about the players being required to wear all-white? How many have complained once the champion's dance was re-established? Do you think it's silly or stupid? You're part of the problem! It's considered classism - but without it, you get sterilization. Reduction to the lowest common denominator.
In general, leftist ideologies, so think communism and other sympathies, result in minimalist architecture and decor and art, because grand displays of wealth or even the concept of "rank" with respect to members of society evoke royalty, "white European male", and "let them eat cake". To flaunt your wealth or aspire to be part of a country club or to invent new social organizations and elite activities is to be on the receiving end of the social hammer. You can't have nice stuff because that goes against the doctrine. I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I think this is accurate. It's no accident that all of the best buildings were built under royalist regimes, monarchies, and more.
And because of the disgust and vitriol and crabs pulling other crabs down as they try to escape the bucket, now we are just left with wealthy losers who have forgotten their noblesse oblige.
> That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
I think this is just flatly false. You've probably just seen it so much and it has become so common to you that you've become less sensitive to it. Leftists in particular are very in-tune with class warfare. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, and I'm paraphrasing, culture wars are a distraction from the real war, class war. I see stuff like this all the time: https://www.amazon.com/American-Magnet-War-Class-Text/dp/B09... .
The Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations:
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
The article does explicitly state that the brain doesn't adapt to this.
From the article:
"And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse."
> And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse.
If the studies are of a person's initial exposure to these sorts of conditions, then that doesn't tell us anything about whether people adapt over time (and to be clear I have not read all the studies, but given the limitations listed I'm comfortable assuming they're not incredibly robust until someone tells me otherwise). I suspect the article's use of the word "adapt" is not the same as mine; from the context when they say the brain doesn't adapt they just mean that it shows a response at the time of the particular exposure they're measuring.
I think there were studies on this, leading to, among other things, painting control rooms seafoam green to reduce visual fatigue. This implies that people don't simply adjust (or that the studies were too limited).
The biggest revelation I've had regarding interior design is to stop using overhead lights. Anyone who has ever worked in the games industry will tell you that lighting is the most important element of what makes a scene look a certain way. The crazy thing about lamps is you can put them anywhere. They only use a constant amount of power regardless of scene complexity. Lighting in my GPU is definitely more expensive.
When everything in your house is illuminated from point lights stuck in holes in the ceiling, you only get a visual hierarchy along an axis you mostly cannot use (Y/up/down). When the lights are positioned at vertical midpoints, you get visual hierarchy on the X-Z (horizontal) plane which is generally how we are viewing our environment. The layering of shadow and highlights across a room are a lot less stressful to interpret. You can use a lot less total light and still convey required detail in the scene.
Its moves, and twice a day its nice and low like a lamp. In the middle of the day when its highest, its nice to shelter under a tree where there is dappled light filtering through the leaves.
"The optic cortex is the biggest area of the brain by far. When everything is saturated in fluorescent light, as it is in small studios many times, the fluorescent light is going on and off at 60 times a second, or ideally at 120, but more roughly 60 and it’s shutting off your brain 60 times a second. The brain is kind of a fluid thing and everything is coupled with everything else, and when this happens – no matter where you take the EEG – if the subject is looking at fluorescent light, you see 60 cycles from the fluorescent light."
I suppose it's worth double checking if the 60 Hz was just leaking into the measurement rig. Or autism, for that matter. But Don was great and I've always loved this interview, so I'm sharing.
One aspect that is often overlooked is a room acoustics - especially reverb time. Have you ever felt cosy in a large church?
Or, if you have ever been to a wedding and wondered why everybody started talking louder and louder and it's hard to understand, a room with too large reverb time is a very probable causes. This is very draining mentally.
The same goes for living spaces, especially since newer homes tend to use lots of smooth surfaces like glass, tiles and concrete, which increase reverb time a lot.
Book shelves, curtains and furniture will increase a room's diffusiveness and reduce reverb time, making rooms feel so much better.
We had this when we moved from an old brick office to a new bigger one full of glass panels. We had to fill the new office with random planters and other stuff or it was uncomfortably echoey
You don't need to live a consumerist lifestyle to have a home that's properly outfitted (curtains), comfy (rugs, chairs), and quiet (walls/divisions).
Also for a fun large-scale argument: we're relatively sheltered from global depressions. All we really have to do is convince Americans to keep spending money and it kinda works out, because the whole economy is structured around that anyways.
That's also why the economy is in the dumper right now (not counting tech companies), and why the consumer confidence index is so important to our various economists.
>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.
Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting is way out of natural balance, and for some people it can be exhausting.
"Visual complexity" is just wrong: simple black / hot pink stripes are visually exhausting upon immediate perception, whereas the monochromatically brown detail of a tree trunk is only visually exhausting on close inspection.
One characteristic that differentiates contemporary design from all our grandparents’ houses is transience rather than permanence. Design immediately following WWI was largely about calm and comfort; the emergence of the den, cottage-cozy, spaces for reading, listening to the radio, etc — stability, calm, people wanted everything the war wasn’t. Immediately following WWII was different in different parts of the world but especially in North America there were all these industrial manufacturers wanting to sell The Future, and you get on the one hand gleaming kitchen-forward spaces and two car garages and rooms for entertaining. Less built-in bookshelves, more built-in HiFi. And on the other hand, the sort of refuge or counterpoint, more integration with nature, more natural materials, exposed timber and vaulted ceilings and giant windows, frank lloyd wright. And in all these cases, the ideas were rooted in stability and permanence. The space was designed for its uses and its inhabitants.
More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.
Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters
A guy i know put a fancy cracked wooden floor in his rather large flat, a sofa, a coffee table, a bed, a closet for his cloths and the rest of the space was filled with the largest possible plants. Like half the size of a car. Lots of grow lamps on a 10 hour timer while he was at work. Enough green that one cant help but deeply inhale it.
> Many LED systems use a dimming technique that rapidly switches the light on and off (sometimes hundreds of times per second). While this is invisible as flicker to the naked eye under normal conditions, eye movements can expose it
This is what I've always felt too, but if you talk to any lighting "expert", they'll say "no that's simply not the case with LED lighting since the year... 2009 or whatever ...". Highly suspect.
I find it easy to detect. If I wave my hand in front of my face quickly, the movement looks choppy instead of being just a blur. I can often tell lighting is cheep LED even without doing this. Movement just feels off. It is mildly annoying, but I can mostly ignore it.
The trend to put acoustic panels or an imitation of their pattern on _everything_ is one of my pet peeves. They create some stroboscobe effect with my (not normal) vision. The result is that they mess with my 3D perception and break my brain a bit for that reason. I’d rather not have them put anywhere.
They are a fad, like many before, and not the best one due to copy&paste uniformity. Since its used so aggressively and so often, many places look weirdly similar like if many people bought exactly same Ikea furniture. Proper wood like oak can be very pretty in many forms but this is not.
In future it will clearly mark the era of (re)construction.
Similarly, one my uni professors wrote a paper arguing that the opposite - standing in nature - results in healthy neural activity.
He showed people photos of geometric patterns (plain lines, basic shapes), natural patterns (fractals), and photos of nature itself (trees, animals, etc.) while reading their mental activity. The conclusion was that both fractals and nature photos cause significantly more efficient, diverse, and healthy-looking brain activity. Our brains inherently expect the world to look fractal-like, and in some ways even need it to look that way to form creative thoughts.
Completely lost the link to that article; it was a good read.
Somehow we posted the same comment, I didn't even have a look on the whole HN comment list.
Yes, indeed, we are used to look at leaves/branches/trees with self-similar structures (and mountains/rivers and lightnings).
The stripey wood-and-black-rubber 'sound dampening' panels are all the rage these days and I don't really understand it.
Our management had the bright idea to put these things in all our meeting rooms on the wall with the TVs we use for remote calls. People started getting sea sick looking at them. Of course removing them would mean the management made a mistake, so they will stay there until the next bright idea hits.
Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
> ... could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc.
Which is why you can take my adblocker from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Much of the modern web is largely straight-up hostile without a proper adblocker these days.
I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. It makes a big difference in most cases. Readable font size and face, good contrast, and comfortable margins. I don't know why so many sites ignore good practices on this stuff.
> I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. ...
That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.
If it's any consolation this article was written by an LLM, so reading it is a waste of time regardless. HN should just autoblock this entire scumbag domain.
I really hate lighting in modern offices. If there was one thing that folks actively worked to improve I would choose lighting. Having lights with a broader spectrum would go a long way in reducing eye strain and general fatigue, while likely allowing the lights to actually be brighter. Unfortunately I don't see this changing anytime soon.
I so agree! As someone into photography, light is everything. It can even turn oversaturated fabrics into more uniform and less screaming colors. The diffusion of the light flattens things, but the interesting angles create interesting shadows and shapes. So much can be done with light, but so many offices have the boring flat ceiling lights. It seems to be hard for the office space designers to invest a bit of time into islands that can have lamps. What's interesting is that many libraries seem to be more accomodating in this regard.
Either way, light is everything, but it is treated like an afterthought.
Modern design, especially the modern architecture, is meant to simplify people's thinking, make it bland and uniform. Look at the gray cubism around you: does it inspire any creativity? Same for interior design, cars and even the so called modern art.
The flicker of some auto lighting systems is annoying. The switching frequency is so low that strobing is a real issue on the red and yellow lamps. Flicker in light bulb sized white LED lamps isn't so bad, because the LEDs drive phosphors with slow response times. Come on, auto people, get those switching frequencies up to a kilohertz or so.
It's not just decor but architecture as well. Look I've been to Europe, I've seen the old architecture and decor there. It's unquestionably better. I get the feeling that modernity, at least in this day and age is about cost cutting and non-offensiveness more than anything else.
The degree to which an environment is straining is possibly merely coincidentally related to the decor part.. and almost entirely rooted in architecture. Buildings with terrible architecture merely tend to simultaneously also be equipped with horrible color and texture choices.
I suspect besides objectively annoying flickering lights, the difference is primarily made in the immediate, subconscious and effortless recognition of ubiquitous patterns of function. Which happens in form and proportion first, and only to a lesser degree in color and contrast.
* this is the floor, this is the ceiling
* through there, there is the entrance / exit
* this is a reception desk
If it takes effort to filter out the noise, the glare to know such simple things, there is less capacity left in our brains to process other "essentially free" tasks.
But isn't that actually what modernism is about? I heard about Ornament and Crime in a university liberal arts class, and there really is this kind of problem. When you try to imitate natural forms, fractal structures are fundamentally difficult to mass produce, there are hygiene issues, and so the modernist approach became dominant. And as the saying goes, "form follows function", you cannot apply the artificial technologies that do not exist in nature the same way you would with old stone buildings.
In the same vein, contemporary art, like a Veronica, smashes form apart, and instead of concrete imitation of nature, it moves toward abstraction, geometry, and minimalism. But does not that come with a problem? It does not enter the brain directly the way natural forms do; you have to additionally recognize what it actually is. I do not think that is an incorrect observation.
I don’t buy this. Feels like a non-problem or a very first world problem to even analyse and with the exception of lights, nothing else seemed plausible
Really, you don't find it plausible that environment could affect mood?
I dont know if the hypothesis in the paper is correct, but it seems clear that environment can affect mood in some cases. There is a reason why night clubs and libraries are decorated differently. From there it seems very plausible other elements of environments could have an affect (perhaps subtle) on mood.
Oh really?? The disgusting childlike interiors the millennials put everywhere might actually be nauseating and headache-inducing? Who could have predicted that? (anyone with eyes)
I really hate shops, malls and supermarkets. I'm not easily overwhelmed and can handle being there fine. But it's just horrible there. Way too loud, bright and often too warm. Completely full of chaos and way too many useless products.
When I have to go I try to be out there as quickly as possible. I always thought that's weird, shouldn't those shops be designed in a way that makes me want to explore them, look at all the things they have, instead of just hunting down exactly what I need and leave as quickly as possible.
They make it hard to find what you want on purpose in hopes you will be distracted and buy other crap along the way. I think it must work on most consumers.
I get that they make it hard to find, so we also buy different stuff. But if I can't find what I'm looking for too often, I won't come back anymore.
Sometimes I really want/need something, and I have all the stores close by. But I still decide to buy it online, and accept waiting a few days, because stores/malls are such a bad experience.
i think theres something in peoples mindset or genetics that creates this difference. my experience is like the opposite of yours. i dont exactly love malls but its one of the things that can satisfy the part of my brain that just wants more.
never been diagnosed with adhd but i have this thing where most of life is not stimulating enough to keep me interested. to be clear this is not a screen addiction, i dont feel specific pressure to pull up my phone and i can go a long time without it. scrolling is only a fallback when im not talking with someone (that includes writing like right now), working on something interesting, outside with friends, playing games, working out, you get the idea.
creative things like coding and drawing almost always work. movies and football only if i care about it emotionally. alcohol helps some too. but a lot of activities like reading a book are just not enough. i would describe it as a non specific addiction to something that might be dopamine but that still wouldnt fully explain things.
when i go to the mall or the shopping street or a bar theres so much going on that i finally feel comfortable. on the other hand i almost never feel overwhelmed. my family is not like that (they absolutely hate shopping) but i think some of my friends are, never asked them about it. i dont know if its a type of neurodivergence or a learned behavior or something even stranger.
Whenever I go shopping for a single, most trivial item, I really need to psyche myself up. Those critical moments just upon entering the store are the key.
Because immediately upon walking in the door, you are immersed in a "shopping environment". Everything you smell, hear, see, touch is geared to making you spend more and purchase more and grab more useless stuff off the shelves.
Even in a Goodwill or similar thrift store you are subjected to these merchandising tricks.
I have found that keeping a very good household inventory on a spreadsheet is critical. If I have this spreadsheet on my phone and I refer to it, before venturing into aisles, then I know exactly what I need to purchase, and where to go to find it. Sticking to the shopping list, I can avoid the needless purchase temptations.
At Costco when I'd go with my parents, it was the custom of the cashiers to ask, "did you find everything alright?" and my father would always joke, that if enough people answered in the affirmative, that was their cue to rearrange the store and shuffle everything around, so that shoppers would get lost, and not being able to find what they want, would discover more useless stuff that they would pull off the shelves on impulse.
It also doesn't hurt to follow the advice of "never shop while hungry"!
Supermarkets are maybe a bit different, they are hard to avoid.
But I dislike malls so much, that I only get new clothes for example once it's really necessary. If it was more pleasant to shop there, I would probably buy more stuff.
I guess there are some people who fit into that environment, their tactics work well on them, and the shops/malls just ignore customers like me.
Supermarkets are abundant near me, and vary wildly in their experiences.
I could shop at a Wal-Mart or a Target for groceries, and thus be subject to all the same big-box shopping pitfalls.
I could shop at a farmers market style grocery store, and the major one near me has some great products and great foods, but mixed in with 90% ultra-processed foods, sugar bombs, and all sorts of unhealthy stuff, masquerading as organic or natural food. Also this "farmers market" has an extensive section with wine and beer, and personal health/hygiene products that are quite expensive.
At Trader Joe's I usually have no problem shopping for exactly what I need, and again, sticking to my spreadsheet with inventory and shopping needs. I usually pick up some fresh flowers here, because they're a bargain, and the coolest thing about Trader Joe's is that I can trust basically any product they've put on their shelves, and the limited selection, and restriction to food products only, helps narrow my shopping focus.
It is even possible to shop for groceries at the dollar stores nearby, which stock a lot of frozen foods, snack foods, beverages, etc. These bargain prices are generally justified by a lower bar of quality, or rapid expiration dates.
Another "grocery shopping" option is pharmacies or convenience stores. There is a major chain pharmacy nearby that really has a lot of good groceries, and is starting to stock some organic and natural brands as well. Its aisles are impeccable and the shopping experience is first-rate. Of course, as soon as I step in the door, the scent and sounds and feels assault me and begin to work on my consumer brain. Got to adhere firmly to that spreadsheet in my pocket!
I‘ve definitely noticed this over time as spaces (especially public ones like cafes, retail locations, and restaurants) started being designed as props for Instagram/TikTok.
This made a big contribution because vertical short-form video feeds require extreme stimuli to get anyone’s attention - but they add nothing to the actual experience and often detract from it.
This has also led to the absolutely horrific acoustics where even in non-nightclub bars and normal restaurants, you have to yell to understand each other because the decor is made of tile, tables and chairs are at odd angles that increase distance, etc.
Everything now is subordinate to the visual environment because that’s what gets shared on Instagram.
Not saying interior design doesn’t matter, but its point should be to create a great overall experience, not to be visually stimulating at the expense of the rest.
If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".
That's such a great insight. Thank you for sharing this.
I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.
If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.
Here's the story that made sense to me: In the pre industrial age, visible ornamentation was symbolic of a craftsman's skill and attention to detail, when you couldn't inspect the invisible aspects of a product. For instance a violin has an ornately carved scroll, and features such as the "bees sting," whereas you can't take it apart to see if the neck mortise is precisely fitted. It is one of the few pre-industrial-age products whose aesthetics have not changed much.
Today, those features are no longer necessary, and we look for other measures of quality in products -- for better or worse.
I grew up in a "midcentury modern" house, and my family lives in one today. I find the modern decor to be comforting because in my case it reminds me of home. My mom claimed that the sparse decor was easier to maintain, for instance: "There are no knick-knacks to dust around." Truth be told, the house also happened to be available during a very frothy market, and my spouse would have chosen something more traditional.
It's also claimed that the simpler decor works in smaller houses.
We were not rich. The MCM houses in my 'hood, including ours, are certainly not clutter free, yet still feel pleasant and comfortable.
What are we talking about here? I didn't read the full article but I looked at the synopsis at the top: "Striped patterns, flickering lights, bright glare, and crowded visual environments such as supermarkets"
With the exclusion of striped patterns, this just sounds like a typical over lit commercial environments, probably overhead fluorescent lights, maybe lights and screens running at different refresh rates. That has nothing to do with home decor of any era or culture.
Also I'm guessing the acoustics are consistently horrible in these environments too. Air quality probably sucks too.
Indeed, I'm a musician and the acoustics of most modern commercial environments suck.
People are responding to the title. Which I think is a bad summary. It's more like modern lack of design like the quote points out
With all due respect, if you bought a house during a frothy market, and you use words like “mid-century modern, you are 100% part of the elite class, even if you don’t consider yourself rich. Maybe you are part of the top 10% instead of the top 1%, but that top 10% or 20% is exactly the class I was referring to.
Sure, and today, it's like if you can buy a house at all.
Probably what makes the house less cluttered is that the elite class can afford to throw things away.
Keeping your house clean and neat is elite? I guess I'm elite lol finally.now what do I do about those bills?
TBF most ppl reading/posting on HN are part of the elite.
Elite doesn't imply "more money than I know what to do with" it simply means being closer to the upper end the of income and/or wealth distribution, or failing that, being part of some cultural generation that gives you more influence than the average bear, i.e. journalist, university prof etc. The cutoff for being in the 20% of household income in the US is $175K. From what I understand that's one entry level FAANG income.
Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence.
Ordinary folks when presented with an object have to perform a mental calculation over the cost/inconvenience of storage vs. disposal and if wanted again, replacement.
The rich also can afford to keep their minimalist modern spaces clean and clutter-free, through paying staff. These environments tend to look awful when not tended to continuously because a single out-of-place item is so clearly visible.
Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
> Cluttered old homes with lots of things all over the place make it a bit less jarring when there's a stack of work left out on a table.
that's wrong: my minimalist (in looks, not in equipment) all white kitchen looks completely fine even after a dinner party, because even then it doesn't look full, dirty or cluttered. The old one (and it wasn't that old, only there were more and darker colors and lines and objects) decidedly didn't. The art of designing modern spaces lies in the ability to make the space visually appealing (in my case minimal) while still able to function correctly. Too often the designers and their clients forget about the practical aspects.
They are awful to even look at, IHMO. Cold, sterile, tells something about people living in such fugly soulless places.
Which is fine to be honest, its nice to see clearly the type of person on the other side of the table, no need to dig through empty speech clutter for clues. But impressive it is not.
Only the rich can afford to own nothing/exert effort to have empty space without consequence.
Reminds me of the reason that grass yards exist: to show the world that one can afford land for the sake of owning it, rather than for growing crops.
Lawns are for much more than just flexing. It's an outdoor part of your property which is flat and open enough to use for various activities and purposes. I don't know where people get such a cynical idea that this is THE reason anyone has lawns.
Yeah this is all very regional too. Row houses in London and brownstones in New York or whatever won’t have front lawns as a function of density, but may have back yards or gardens, which may or may not be a function of producing your own food, which is all tied up in different experiences of war, while certainly countryside estates are for form more than function, while post war housing in the midwestern US was in part a build-on-your-lot market with houses literally ordered from a Sears catalog…
There’s definitely more to the story and there are myriad factors.
Sears stopped making homes in 1942. They were strictly pre-WWII.
One set of my grandparents had an expansive, well-cared-for yard with a swing, arches with climbing plants, secret little gravel paths through the trees lined with mosaic tiles featuring the likenesses of their grandchildren, a picnic table, a patio with a barbecue, and so on. I think if you want to have a yard like that, it is a fine hobby. But most people do not. Most people just have a grass rectangle that is a liability. My father has lived in the same house for 15 years and has never used the back yard except as throughfare and has never used the front yard for anything. You can't even see it yard from outside because of an eight-foot-tall fence. All he does is mow it - what's the point of that? It's pure liability. And I think this is how most people's yards are. And that's silly.
I've lived in a few row houses with fully paved outdoor areas. I don't really see the point of that either, but at least it doesn't require regular maintenance so it only has to be occasionally useful to come out ahead.
Wouldn't a non-grassy flat and open area serve the same purpose?
Not sure that I’d want to lie down with a book on a slab of concrete.
A dirt yard is sufficient if it was to show off land. Grass is not required
It wasn't just showing off land. It was showing off you had land that was completely unproductive and could even afford staff to maintain this completely useless plot. It's why they became increasingly large and ornate gardens.
It then took this association with rich and better and was used in the US to denote affluent and therefore segregated housing developments.
The grass is there to keep the dirt in place.
I believe in practice yes. It isn't a planned design choice - it's just a practical consequence that if you are moving around a lot, carrying possessions with you has a much higher cost than if you are staying in the same place. You'll be more averse to accumulating possessions. If you are staying in one place, you only have to reduce your possessions when you start running out of space.
Travel / multiple homes confuse the issue because nobody spends much time on their 5th house they use less than a month per year, so the decoration is mostly outsourced to 3rd parties.
The portion of rich people homes they actually use are often quite cluttered. The simple limitation of needing to walk to a room to use it means spreading out across a huge home gets annoying. Semi public spaces for guests on the other hand can look like hotels because that’s effectively what they are.
Space is a factor too. I toured the mansion one time a few years back because a friend of mine was remodeling it. The master bedroom was as large as my entire house. That's a single bedroom for the two people planned to live there. I saw it while it was still under construction and so completely unlivable and but you could quickly figure out which parts were intended for the people lived there to live in and which parts were semi-public most of the mansion was clearly public spaces where they would have parties.
'modernism' is a 20th century design concept.
> I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.
You should be. Modernism is an ideological design response: the aesthetics of the machine age and utilitarianism.
OP's opinion is not based on actual design and architecture history and (ironically) appears to be itself an ideological narrative: a posthoc criticism of Modern (yes with cap M) design which itself has its root in conservative reaction against the (asserted, alleged and possibly true) socialist tendencies of the elite social and design circles that gave birth to Modernism. Note, for example, the 'emotional' appeal to long lived in homes, etc.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230103-the-historical-...
Trends, status signalling?
This is a false dichotomy. The modern style is a reaction against a distinct and different design aesthetic from what the parent described. Neoclassical, Gothic Revival, and Rococo are more ornamental, but they not cozy or comfortable in the same way.
This being said, the title is accurate to the article but misleading. The subtitle is about "Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs". It isn't modern design, it's specific elements of modern design.
I'd suggest that the striped/patterned floors/LED points transcend styles, and would cause issues even in a more ornate/classical design. Style is individual, and I expect the diversities of brains and thinking patterns means that there is no right answer for what style is best for people.
The most interesting part of the article wasn't really reflective of style, it was visually crowded environments. They used the example of supermarkets, and that seems distinct from a visually rich style like the grandparent comment's home or Neo Gothic cathedrals. Being in a forest is visually crowded, too, but I'd expect it has the opposite effect the study measured. I think the fractal dimension of the detail, if they correlated it with the degree of distress, would be a factor.
Ornate and simple alternate back and forth in a reactionary preference cycle in history. We may be in a 'simple' phase but there is a nostalgic backlash happening with pre-digital aesthetics, and as evidenced here.
My parents lived in the same house for 40 years, my entire childhood was there. My grandparents (both sets) lived in their house for 50 years. I can't comprehend how Americans keep moving for jobs or to upgrade or to get to a better school district. Surely you want some permanence? Get to know your neighbors?
Edit yes I did move around in my twenties, but that stopped at 30.
Remember people marry later if at all so you break the cohort developments of growing up and adulting.
I helped lead my local little league. It’s different than it used to be - it’s pretty typical to have tball parents in their 40s. A group of parents from 20s to 50s aren’t going to hang out, they don’t relate. I’m a late genx, most of my friends parents were in their 30s when I was a little leaguer.
The demise of old line churches is similar. We did CYO basketball in the same parish my wife did. It’s the last of what was 8-10 catholic parishes in my city. And unlike in my youth where you had good mix multigenerational parishioners… the parish survives based on the beneficence of 5-10 people in their late 60s and 70s, with few people rising to behind them. Mainline Protestant parishes are similar. The only growth in religious communities are independent Baptists, which are great but integrate into the broader community differently, because each church mostly stands alone and isn’t part of a bigger system.
Church groups, or at least an awful lot of them, were co-opted by groups like the Council For National Policy (parent group of the Heritage Foundation). I think a lot of younger folks see through the BS and don't want to send their time listening to hate speech discussed as gospel.
These churches chose thier path, and so did their parishioners.
As a Nietzschean it is amusing, this argument that Christianity is losing favor because it is...not moral enough!
Truly our institutions are post-Christianity. The herd morality has out survived Christianity itself. Nietzsche's nightmare
The nightmare is not outgrowing the child version of 'how to morality'. It's moving past it without reaching the enlightenment of being moral because it's the best large scale and long term strategy.
Instead the grown psychopathic children all move for instant gratification and rewards in the now, damn the cost of society and civilization long term.
I want to reach Orville / Star Trek, thank you!
When you say you want to reach Orville, are you referring to the episode where everyone wears an upvote counter badge? Because I can see that one coming true.
What church(es) are you thinking of here exactly? I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life.
On the contrary, most folks in the 20-40 range are tired of “cafeteria Christian” denominations that pick and chose which parts of scripture to stand by and which go ignore based on ever shifting social trends, whether it be so-called woke churches hosting drag performers or Boomer-tier Endtimes preachers that can’t stop talking about their all expense paid Israeli “pilgrimage.”
> I’ve never heard of any such group in my entire independent Southern Baptist life.
I grew up in the South and distinctly remember the Southern Baptist preachings against interracial marriage based on selective (mis)readings of the Bible, against homosexuality based on selective readings of the Old Testament (pick and choose indeed; hate gays while eating your BBQ pork). I remember the constant calls for boycott of Disney parks because of “gay days”.
I don’t know what it’s like I’m a Southern Baptist church now, but I seriously doubt it’s changed much.
Well, that’s quite a bit of baggage to unpack.
In regards to “miscegenation” we have Galatians which largely renders that point moot, highlighting everyone’s love of cherry-picking scripture.
In regards to homosexuality, you have Leviticus, I assume you’re referencing. Given the widespread practice of man-boy relations as famously highlighted by the Spartans and of course recent special military operations in Afghanistan I have an incredibly hard time believing this piece of scripture is at all misinterpreted.
Regarding BBQ, I assume that’s a presence to kosher law and subsequently an attempt at calling hypocrite on the congregation. In that regard we have quite a few pieces of scripture, e.g. in Mark, effectively redefining and negating much of kosher law thereby making that issue moot.
Overall - your assumption around Southern Baptists largely stands. Our last church, my wife had to constantly deal with snide remarks because of her having previously been married to a man that went and overdosed on fentanyl. Meanwhile half the grandparents in the congregation are raising their own grandchildren for the exact same reason…
Which leads to our currently being “unchurched” as they say, because the worst part of Christianity is the other Christians ;)
> Given the widespread practice of man-boy … I have an incredibly hard time believing this piece of scripture is at all misinterpreted.
I’m struggling with this statement. Are you saying that Leviticus is actually only anti-pedophile and not anti-gay (and so all these conservative Christian preachers are willfully misrepresenting it), or are you continuing the long tradition of falsely linking homosexuality with pedophilia? Is there some other interpretation I’m missing?
> Regarding BBQ, I assume that’s a presence to kosher law and subsequently an attempt at calling hypocrite on the congregation. In that regard we have quite a few pieces of scripture, e.g. in Mark, effectively redefining and negating much of kosher law thereby making that issue moot.
I mean, pork is only one of a million things forbidden in Leviticus that modern Christians ignore. Why is charging interest on loans okay now? Where’s the part where Mark says that’s cool? What about period sex? Seems that rule is gone, too. Where is the passage that says “Pretty much everything in Leviticus is irrelevant except the gay thing”?
If you read Mark and the entirety of New Testament in good faith you would know the answer :)
It’s your actions and not your culinary habits. If you chose to fornicate you’re sinning. Nothing in the New Testament reneges on that. Intentionally endorsing lifestyles that promote such acts are bad per the scripture.
If you don’t believe that and choose to”good feels” and statism as your God, that’s your choice.
> If you read…
Nah. I will decline to (re)read several hundred pages to try to find the answer you cannot provide.
You didn’t even answer my straightforward question about what you meant with your seeming homosexuality-pedophilia link.
> If you chose to fornicate you’re sinning.
Then can I assume you support gay marriage?
You seem to be conflating Abrahamic religions.
"much of"?
> pick and chose which parts of scripture to stand by
OK. Next time you read the parable of the good Samaritan I want you to reframe it as "The Good Drag Queen". That's how you are meant to see it.
I read it as a take encouraging me to render aid to anyone in a dire emergency regardless of their background.
That’s a very narrow reading. The parable was in response to the question “who’s my neighbor” in the “love thy neighbor” statement and Jesus basically said “even those you hate”(i.e. the Samaritans).
I can love you and still disagree with the things you do and not endorse them. These are not in conflict.
This claim hinges on the idea that homosexuality is a thing you do and not a part of who you are. You can love someone while hating a thing they do. You cannot love someone while hating who they are.
The conservative Christian notion that homosexuality is a choice to is honestly super weird to me because I certainly never chose heterosexuality. It’s one of those things that only makes sense while you’re in it and it’s constantly being beat into you, and with some distance you see that it’s ridiculous.
You’re free to believe whatever it is you like - that’s your belief system. I didn’t intend to start a theological debate ultimately. Only highlight as a counterpoint to the GP that going to church in the modern era really feels like you have to pick one side or another and that it’s simply an extension of politics rather than an higher-order thing.
My point here is that all Christians are “cafeteria Christians”. They all pick and choose the pieces they agree with and want to follow. They discard the inconvenient stuff as no longer relevant and claim the things that they believe are supported by the scripture.
So much of Christian belief is not in the bible no matter what particular sect you are a part of. I remember when those “Left Behind” book’s came out and I found out many of my friends believed in a physical rapture where those “saved” would literally disappear from the Earth. I had no idea this was even a thing because it’s not something my church taught and it’s not in the bible.
Most (all?) other groups have their own rules and beliefs that are not in the bible. I’m not sure it’s possible to be fully faithful to the Bible because it’s not entirely self consistent. Also the books of the bible themselves were chosen from many candidate texts. It’s not as if Jesus left a bibliography.
Oftentimes, they are in conflict. "I love you, my Samaritan neighbour: but I disagree with your practice of sacrificing to God upon the altar at Mount Gerizim, as opposed to the altar at Temple Mount, as is right and proper; and your copy of scripture differs from mine at thousands of points, for which I condemn yours as erroneous and heretical; and I disagree with your practice of speaking the Name on holy days, for we lost that tradition with our priesthood at the destruction of the Second Temple, and therefore you must also discard the practice, for those who speak the Name have no part in the world to come; and really I'd rather you stopped being a Samaritan altogether." Does that sound like love, to you?
"Even those you hate" is too strong a reading, in my view. "Even those you are bigoted towards", perhaps. (Jesus did say elsewhere to love your enemies, but I don't think this parable says that.)
> Even those you are bigoted towards
I agree this is a better reading. Of course this makes it even more apt guidance for the Southern Baptists (and others) who preach bigotry.
So like, scripture has issue with drag performance? I read bible, actually, and can argue it does not mention it.
That being said, every single denomination picks and chooses. Especially more conservative ones. And in fact, you cant take it all literally and quite a lot is not applicable.
You are correct it neither endorses nor denigrates the specific practice. So why then do we have a church hosting the performances? It’s not relevant to the faith at all? Identity politics entered the chat, unfortunately.
Which leads back to my point, there is a hunger for churches that ignore the intentional blend of secular belief systems in any direction.
Not sure how to feel about your implication that unmarried people are neither grown up nor adults.
I'm not religious but just looking around it's pretty obvious that many unmarried adults act quite immature (delayed adolescence). Which way the causality runs is harder to determine, but when you're responsible for and accountable to a spouse that forces you to grow up a bit.
They are obviously Christian. Christians tend to have a dim view of anyone that doesn't marry and have children (unless they join the clergy).
Most religions do. For example I don’t think islam has a much better view of unmarried and kidless people.
You describe it like it’s some kind of a treadmill chasing new. But if you have kids at 35, they start school when you’re 40.. were you thinking about the quality of the neighborhood schools when you bought your house at 25?
Or suppose you meet your spouse when you are 30, after you bought a house.
There’s inherently much less moving-around if you get married at 18 and have kids straight away - the plan is settled from the start.
Problem is, unless you happen to live in a relatively wealthy neighborhood, even if you stay put your neighbors and community probably won’t so you still won’t have much permanence.
I really don't want permanence, no! I start to feel fidgety and uncomfortable after I've spent too many years in one place. The idea of living in a single house for decades on end sounds like a kind of imprisonment.
I think of Seattle as "home", and once lived there for twenty-three years straight - but I had nine different addresses during that time. I am probably more of a nomad at heart than the average American, but perhaps Americans have more of a nomadic temperament than the average human.
Getting to know your neighbors can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you make a great new friend: sometimes you're stuck with an obstreperous busybody. It can be nice not having to spend your whole life dealing with the same people and the same conflicts.
Yeah tight communities are blessing, nightmare or both. Good luck with privacy, some people are nosy by default or simply self-centered... weirdos to be polite, gossip, looking down on differences, hard to integrate for newcomers, and one has to conform to unspoken rules, like them or not. Not exactly feeling of proper freedom, is it.
If you get into beef with your neighbor for something which is trivial over long time, now you are stuck with an asshole next door for next 30-50 years.
Its not just US, we moved in Switzerland from very cosmopolitan and international Geneva to small village in wineyards and all this applies at least as much.
The world is so big, why spend 40 years in a single place?
As with many things, you can go broad, or you can go deep. Not both. You can go one and then the other.
I expect society is best with a mix of both types of people. It usually is.
Lay down roots, be part of a community, have meaningful connections.
My parents live in southern Italy, in the same small town my mother is from and the small town my father is from is like 5-6 km far.
Every time there is some kind of event (eg: somebody’s parents passing away) it so hearth-warming to see people come together and try and be close to people they’ve known all their life (60+ years).
I moved to a large town nowadays for work and i have a bunch of superficial connections, my peers lament pretty much the same.
I can see why somebody would like to stay 40 years in the same place.
Is it really an American thing? Every company's London office is filled with Germans, French, Italians and polaks/Russian. How'd they get there
Housing has gotten much more expensive in many places, and jobs less stable.
This resonates with me. I enjoy being at my grandparents’ home. And it’s exactly as you mentioned, if I would describe all the stuff in the living room it’d be called “cluttered”. Yet it feels “homey” and I feel pretty relaxed whenever I sit there to read a book.
And then on my side, for the past 15 years I moved to a new place about every 2-3 years. Never really invested in making it feel “homey” because I’m not sure how much space I’d have in the next place I move to.
I see where you are coming from and I think this is an interesting observation. Especially when talking about companies and people moving apartments every year.
I grew up in a house full of the clutter that you describe as comforting, but for me it felt smothering. I recently inherited the house I grew up in and now have it set up much less cluttered. I don’t plan to live anywhere else anytime soon, but for me the lack of clutter and clear spaces are much more comforting.
I am definitely not a fan of crazy colors or patterns or bad lighting either though.
I think there's a lot of unappreciated benefits in "staying put." Of course if you're living in a bad situation that might not be true, and it might not be good for your career or for other material reasons, but it can be good for your mental health. My parents owned one house, and we never moved. I grew up there and I still own it. I don't live there currently but every time I am in that house I'm calm, relaxed, and comfortable almost immediately. It's nothing fancy, just a normal ranch house, but it's very familiar and full of memories.
This explains a lot... I feel bad when I think about staying put. Forward always feels better. It's like one of the fundamental axes, I guess.
The article is about office decor, not home decor. While I don't love "modern decor," I don't think offices are meant to feel comforting like a home owned for generations.
If anything, offices are likely designed to not feel comfortable so you are forced to focus on your screen and work. Otherwise, rooms were more comfortable than cubicles, cubicles were more comfortable than open benches, open benches will be more comfortable than whatever AI-adjacent abomination surely to come...
Really curious to imagine what these AI-adjacent abominations could be. Some sort of people conveyor belt we have to work on while rotating past other humans to achieve maximum 'collaboration' perhaps? Offices built into semi trucks so we get picked up and crammed together with our laptops and screens? When will it stop!
> The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did
The theory I subscribe to is a few fold:
1) People like to buy "generic" homes that are easier to renovate/personalize 2) But then they don't end up personalizing, because they're afraid to tank it's market value 3) Thus homes stay boring and generic
What design trends can be attributed to people's desire to pick up and move at a moment notice?
Not having bookcases full of books, for example.
My dad's lived in the same house for over 15 years and probably expected as much when he moved in. He has a room with old books covering the walls, which he never reads. If he moved house every year, he'd have to throw out or donate the collection.
A lot of the new designs are actually practical.... be it striped carpets or patterned bus seats, they're designed to hide stains and wear. If eg. bus seats were made from white fabric, no one would want to sit in them after a month or two of use, same for eg. carpets in places with many people.
The article also doesn't touch on whether visually cluttered "traditional" decor is better for people affected by those conditions.
I found the office in the picture quite pleasant to look at. Not comforting and homey but suitable as a work environment.
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.
You see the same thing with cars. People choose to buy (or more commonly lease!) a car for a few years and before they've even decided to buy it they're planning to sell it. This is why there are so many sad grey cars on the road - pick a colour that's easy to sell! Don't get anything too wild, it might not sell! What if you can't sell it because it's red or blue?!!? Don't go too crazy with that very pale blue tinted grey, they might not be able to sell it for as much and you won't get much from the leasing company!
There's a guy in my town who has a Porsche 992, it's only a few years old. He bought it as his retirement present to himself when he packed in his job at the start of COVID. It has all the options, and it has custom paint.
It is what I can only describe as Budget-Conscious Prosthetic Limb beige.
That kind of pinky-beige colour for NHS hearing aid plastic.
It cost him 1500 quid to even get it mixed, thousands extra to have it sprayed that colour.
"But what if it doesn't sell?" people say to him, "What if people don't like the colour?"
He doesn't care, he's going to drive it for the rest of his life. It'll be someone else's problem to sell once he dies.
I'm told that because so many cars are the ugly gray that cars have color are selling better nowadays. It may be only a minority that want color, but that minority is willing to pay for it and they look at their choices and your car is the only one they can go for.
I don't normally care about color myself, but I hate thr color my car is enough that I'm wondering if I should spend the several couple thousand dollars to put a decent coat of paint on it.
I don't need to drive, luckily, but I heard that cars cost so much these days that you really have to be planning to get back as much money as possible. Cars cost what shitty houses used to cost, even adjusted for inflation.
> It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice.
Yes, but it's deeper than that. Two broad reasons, though your point here is a good one.
1. We don't, particularly in the west, have the skills, shops/craftsmen, or access to resources to make things like we used to. It's a positive network effect where prices go up, folks don't do the work anymore, and so prices go up, and things get more unaffordable, and so forth until there's only a handful of folks anywhere that can build the furniture, decor, or houses that you allude to. Companies can't make this stuff and as they chase never ending globalized supply chains and increasingly fewer commodities or natural resources they market and sell plainer and plainer things - modernist styles and modernist architecture. With so many people in the world competing for the same products and resources, it's incredibly expensive to build anything "real" or with much detail or thought. So companies just cheap out and create surrogate products which nobody is ever happy with.
2. The changes we see in style can be attributed to changes in politics and civilization. Who we are and what we think of ourselves. It's bad or even politically dangerous to build ornate buildings or purchase expensive or ornate pieces for your home. How could you build a beautiful building when there are people starving?!?! (you see a version of this with rocket companies - how can Jeff Bezos spend his money launching rockets when Social Security is underfunded!!?!?)
Any sufficiently famous building or person who liked nice shit was a "colonizer" and "bad person" in some form or because of some argument and then of course over time folks just hide their wealth (stealth wealth, millionaire next door) and we pride ourselves on appearing poor, acting poor, and naturally, we create poor civilizations without much to aspire to. When was the last time you wore a suit and tie? Better yet, who in your town can even make a suit? Who is going to die for strip malls and parking lots? Who wants to invest in their neighborhood when you know instinctively it's just a house and it's not something you will really pass down to your children (they will just sell that suburban home you have). Americans in particular spend thousands annually to travel to countries in Europe for example, and to visit their gardens and nice buildings, which themselves are vestiges of an age when western civilization aspired to more, and why do they only do that instead of investing in their own gardens and making their own nice places for people to visit? We do this of course to some extent - it's big country after all, but those who understand this and why it's important are fewer and further between.
The first point is solid. The loss of craftsmanship means that the labor cost of those who remain has skyrocketed. That's an irony of devaluing labor is that those who hold on to their craft end up in very high demand.
That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.
The "colonizer" rhetoric is just part of it, but it's more so as a piece of the puzzle that shows of an overall change in how we perceive ourselves and how we report on things in the public sphere.
It's unquestionable that ostentatious displays of wealth are met with revulsion and derision, therefore we don't show those displays. The downstream impact is that the masses have nothing to aspire to or look up to in this specific context of craftsmanship. Again, when was the last time "you" wore a suit? Was it tailored? Do you only wear it at weddings? Do you buy your clothing from Costco/Kirkland? Do you find yourself in the fast food line at Chik-fil-a or driving across town to Buc-ee's in your Jeep? These kinds of consumerist behaviors are good and accepted. If you tell someone you only eat at tasting menus or high end restaurants or something instead of those being celebrated as good you'll be met with incredulity or even be made fun of "you're so fancy" "ugh if only I could afford that", and then it devolves into mass-market "experiences" and so forth. (As you read the rest of this post remember that I'm critiquing capitalism here as well).
Because Wimbledon is ongoing and the ladies championship was today, how many complain about the players being required to wear all-white? How many have complained once the champion's dance was re-established? Do you think it's silly or stupid? You're part of the problem! It's considered classism - but without it, you get sterilization. Reduction to the lowest common denominator.
In general, leftist ideologies, so think communism and other sympathies, result in minimalist architecture and decor and art, because grand displays of wealth or even the concept of "rank" with respect to members of society evoke royalty, "white European male", and "let them eat cake". To flaunt your wealth or aspire to be part of a country club or to invent new social organizations and elite activities is to be on the receiving end of the social hammer. You can't have nice stuff because that goes against the doctrine. I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I think this is accurate. It's no accident that all of the best buildings were built under royalist regimes, monarchies, and more.
And because of the disgust and vitriol and crabs pulling other crabs down as they try to escape the bucket, now we are just left with wealthy losers who have forgotten their noblesse oblige.
> That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).
I think this is just flatly false. You've probably just seen it so much and it has become so common to you that you've become less sensitive to it. Leftists in particular are very in-tune with class warfare. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, and I'm paraphrasing, culture wars are a distraction from the real war, class war. I see stuff like this all the time: https://www.amazon.com/American-Magnet-War-Class-Text/dp/B09... .
The masses wear colorful t-shirts with selections of cool pictures and variety of decorated cloth.
If anything, suit is boring minimalist choice, every man looks exactly like the man next to him.
The leftist ideology in women leads to colorful hair styles, even more variety of clothing cause they integrate in unusual styles.
"colonizer" has a specific meaning, it doesn't mean "someone you don't like"
The Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations:
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
The article does explicitly state that the brain doesn't adapt to this.
From the article:
"And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse."
I assume you're referring to this:
> And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse.
If the studies are of a person's initial exposure to these sorts of conditions, then that doesn't tell us anything about whether people adapt over time (and to be clear I have not read all the studies, but given the limitations listed I'm comfortable assuming they're not incredibly robust until someone tells me otherwise). I suspect the article's use of the word "adapt" is not the same as mine; from the context when they say the brain doesn't adapt they just mean that it shows a response at the time of the particular exposure they're measuring.
Seems like the first half of that could be flipped as a disadvantage.
Imagine someone claiming the opposite causes dementia, evidenced by reduced oxygen usage and lowered brain activity…
I don’t think it needs to be “flipped”…that’s the plain reading, isn’t it?
I think there were studies on this, leading to, among other things, painting control rooms seafoam green to reduce visual fatigue. This implies that people don't simply adjust (or that the studies were too limited).
The biggest revelation I've had regarding interior design is to stop using overhead lights. Anyone who has ever worked in the games industry will tell you that lighting is the most important element of what makes a scene look a certain way. The crazy thing about lamps is you can put them anywhere. They only use a constant amount of power regardless of scene complexity. Lighting in my GPU is definitely more expensive.
When everything in your house is illuminated from point lights stuck in holes in the ceiling, you only get a visual hierarchy along an axis you mostly cannot use (Y/up/down). When the lights are positioned at vertical midpoints, you get visual hierarchy on the X-Z (horizontal) plane which is generally how we are viewing our environment. The layering of shadow and highlights across a room are a lot less stressful to interpret. You can use a lot less total light and still convey required detail in the scene.
I like this, but to play the devil’s advocate: How does that mesh with usually having just one giant overhead light (the sun) outdoors?
You mean one giant overhead light (the sun) during "work hours" and a soft reddish ground-level light (the campfire) during night?
Its moves, and twice a day its nice and low like a lamp. In the middle of the day when its highest, its nice to shelter under a tree where there is dappled light filtering through the leaves.
"The optic cortex is the biggest area of the brain by far. When everything is saturated in fluorescent light, as it is in small studios many times, the fluorescent light is going on and off at 60 times a second, or ideally at 120, but more roughly 60 and it’s shutting off your brain 60 times a second. The brain is kind of a fluid thing and everything is coupled with everything else, and when this happens – no matter where you take the EEG – if the subject is looking at fluorescent light, you see 60 cycles from the fluorescent light."
https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/don-buchla-pass...
I suppose it's worth double checking if the 60 Hz was just leaking into the measurement rig. Or autism, for that matter. But Don was great and I've always loved this interview, so I'm sharing.
One aspect that is often overlooked is a room acoustics - especially reverb time. Have you ever felt cosy in a large church?
Or, if you have ever been to a wedding and wondered why everybody started talking louder and louder and it's hard to understand, a room with too large reverb time is a very probable causes. This is very draining mentally.
The same goes for living spaces, especially since newer homes tend to use lots of smooth surfaces like glass, tiles and concrete, which increase reverb time a lot.
Book shelves, curtains and furniture will increase a room's diffusiveness and reduce reverb time, making rooms feel so much better.
We had this when we moved from an old brick office to a new bigger one full of glass panels. We had to fill the new office with random planters and other stuff or it was uncomfortably echoey
Possibly the first convincing argument I have ever heard in favor of the materialistic accumulative American lifestyle.
You don't need to live a consumerist lifestyle to have a home that's properly outfitted (curtains), comfy (rugs, chairs), and quiet (walls/divisions).
Also for a fun large-scale argument: we're relatively sheltered from global depressions. All we really have to do is convince Americans to keep spending money and it kinda works out, because the whole economy is structured around that anyways.
That's also why the economy is in the dumper right now (not counting tech companies), and why the consumer confidence index is so important to our various economists.
So many bars & restaurants don't care enough about this.
>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
Natural patterns are often fractal.
I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.
>I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye
That's precisely what they're wrong about.
Take a look at tree branches. A field of grass. A stone cliff.
Now take a look at human-made decor: drywall, plastic, laminated boards.
Which one has more visual detail?
Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting is way out of natural balance, and for some people it can be exhausting.
"Visual complexity" is just wrong: simple black / hot pink stripes are visually exhausting upon immediate perception, whereas the monochromatically brown detail of a tree trunk is only visually exhausting on close inspection.
God, what a useless website. I hate LLMs. The actual paper is here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34
One characteristic that differentiates contemporary design from all our grandparents’ houses is transience rather than permanence. Design immediately following WWI was largely about calm and comfort; the emergence of the den, cottage-cozy, spaces for reading, listening to the radio, etc — stability, calm, people wanted everything the war wasn’t. Immediately following WWII was different in different parts of the world but especially in North America there were all these industrial manufacturers wanting to sell The Future, and you get on the one hand gleaming kitchen-forward spaces and two car garages and rooms for entertaining. Less built-in bookshelves, more built-in HiFi. And on the other hand, the sort of refuge or counterpoint, more integration with nature, more natural materials, exposed timber and vaulted ceilings and giant windows, frank lloyd wright. And in all these cases, the ideas were rooted in stability and permanence. The space was designed for its uses and its inhabitants.
More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.
Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters
This website is straining my brain. Ads that bounce around? Sheesh.
I can’t decide if it’s obnoxious or beautiful irony that drives home the idea of the article.
It's time to start using an ad blocker, I don't see any ads on that page with Firefox and uBlock Origin.
A guy i know put a fancy cracked wooden floor in his rather large flat, a sofa, a coffee table, a bed, a closet for his cloths and the rest of the space was filled with the largest possible plants. Like half the size of a car. Lots of grow lamps on a 10 hour timer while he was at work. Enough green that one cant help but deeply inhale it.
> Many LED systems use a dimming technique that rapidly switches the light on and off (sometimes hundreds of times per second). While this is invisible as flicker to the naked eye under normal conditions, eye movements can expose it
This is what I've always felt too, but if you talk to any lighting "expert", they'll say "no that's simply not the case with LED lighting since the year... 2009 or whatever ...". Highly suspect.
I find it easy to detect. If I wave my hand in front of my face quickly, the movement looks choppy instead of being just a blur. I can often tell lighting is cheep LED even without doing this. Movement just feels off. It is mildly annoying, but I can mostly ignore it.
The trend to put acoustic panels or an imitation of their pattern on _everything_ is one of my pet peeves. They create some stroboscobe effect with my (not normal) vision. The result is that they mess with my 3D perception and break my brain a bit for that reason. I’d rather not have them put anywhere.
They are a fad, like many before, and not the best one due to copy&paste uniformity. Since its used so aggressively and so often, many places look weirdly similar like if many people bought exactly same Ikea furniture. Proper wood like oak can be very pretty in many forms but this is not.
In future it will clearly mark the era of (re)construction.
I'm thinking about Backrooms
> Striped patterns, flickering lights, bright glare, and crowded visual environments
Those things are also just ugly.
flickering lights are not "modern decor" but a broken (and possibly dangerous) appliance
Similarly, one my uni professors wrote a paper arguing that the opposite - standing in nature - results in healthy neural activity.
He showed people photos of geometric patterns (plain lines, basic shapes), natural patterns (fractals), and photos of nature itself (trees, animals, etc.) while reading their mental activity. The conclusion was that both fractals and nature photos cause significantly more efficient, diverse, and healthy-looking brain activity. Our brains inherently expect the world to look fractal-like, and in some ways even need it to look that way to form creative thoughts.
Completely lost the link to that article; it was a good read.
Somehow we posted the same comment, I didn't even have a look on the whole HN comment list. Yes, indeed, we are used to look at leaves/branches/trees with self-similar structures (and mountains/rivers and lightnings).
For those running into the ad-blocker blocker: https://archive.ph/LlAfO
Today’s style is a callback to the 60s, and we’re people making the same complaints then?
We are?
The moiré effect of vertically striped wood walls gives me a headache.
The stripey wood-and-black-rubber 'sound dampening' panels are all the rage these days and I don't really understand it.
Our management had the bright idea to put these things in all our meeting rooms on the wall with the TVs we use for remote calls. People started getting sea sick looking at them. Of course removing them would mean the management made a mistake, so they will stay there until the next bright idea hits.
Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
> ... could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc.
Which is why you can take my adblocker from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Much of the modern web is largely straight-up hostile without a proper adblocker these days.
I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. It makes a big difference in most cases. Readable font size and face, good contrast, and comfortable margins. I don't know why so many sites ignore good practices on this stuff.
> I use reader mode on most sites where it is possible. ...
That's my go-to solution on mobile devices almost every single time because on small screens even a good adblocker simply isn't nearly enough to overcome the other issues you mention in your comment here.
A clean reading experience appears to be a unique selling point these days
If it's any consolation this article was written by an LLM, so reading it is a waste of time regardless. HN should just autoblock this entire scumbag domain.
The paper itself is open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34
I really hate lighting in modern offices. If there was one thing that folks actively worked to improve I would choose lighting. Having lights with a broader spectrum would go a long way in reducing eye strain and general fatigue, while likely allowing the lights to actually be brighter. Unfortunately I don't see this changing anytime soon.
I so agree! As someone into photography, light is everything. It can even turn oversaturated fabrics into more uniform and less screaming colors. The diffusion of the light flattens things, but the interesting angles create interesting shadows and shapes. So much can be done with light, but so many offices have the boring flat ceiling lights. It seems to be hard for the office space designers to invest a bit of time into islands that can have lamps. What's interesting is that many libraries seem to be more accomodating in this regard.
Either way, light is everything, but it is treated like an afterthought.
Modern design, especially the modern architecture, is meant to simplify people's thinking, make it bland and uniform. Look at the gray cubism around you: does it inspire any creativity? Same for interior design, cars and even the so called modern art.
The flicker of some auto lighting systems is annoying. The switching frequency is so low that strobing is a real issue on the red and yellow lamps. Flicker in light bulb sized white LED lamps isn't so bad, because the LEDs drive phosphors with slow response times. Come on, auto people, get those switching frequencies up to a kilohertz or so.
It's not just decor but architecture as well. Look I've been to Europe, I've seen the old architecture and decor there. It's unquestionably better. I get the feeling that modernity, at least in this day and age is about cost cutting and non-offensiveness more than anything else.
The degree to which an environment is straining is possibly merely coincidentally related to the decor part.. and almost entirely rooted in architecture. Buildings with terrible architecture merely tend to simultaneously also be equipped with horrible color and texture choices.
I suspect besides objectively annoying flickering lights, the difference is primarily made in the immediate, subconscious and effortless recognition of ubiquitous patterns of function. Which happens in form and proportion first, and only to a lesser degree in color and contrast.
* this is the floor, this is the ceiling * through there, there is the entrance / exit * this is a reception desk
If it takes effort to filter out the noise, the glare to know such simple things, there is less capacity left in our brains to process other "essentially free" tasks.
For one it's not produced by artisans but by machines or processes.
But isn't that actually what modernism is about? I heard about Ornament and Crime in a university liberal arts class, and there really is this kind of problem. When you try to imitate natural forms, fractal structures are fundamentally difficult to mass produce, there are hygiene issues, and so the modernist approach became dominant. And as the saying goes, "form follows function", you cannot apply the artificial technologies that do not exist in nature the same way you would with old stone buildings.
In the same vein, contemporary art, like a Veronica, smashes form apart, and instead of concrete imitation of nature, it moves toward abstraction, geometry, and minimalism. But does not that come with a problem? It does not enter the brain directly the way natural forms do; you have to additionally recognize what it actually is. I do not think that is an incorrect observation.
I don’t buy this. Feels like a non-problem or a very first world problem to even analyse and with the exception of lights, nothing else seemed plausible
Really, you don't find it plausible that environment could affect mood?
I dont know if the hypothesis in the paper is correct, but it seems clear that environment can affect mood in some cases. There is a reason why night clubs and libraries are decorated differently. From there it seems very plausible other elements of environments could have an affect (perhaps subtle) on mood.
So you thibk light might affect, but something visual.. that we see does not?
Why do you think that? What knowledge/leaning do you have that would add weight to your opinion?
Oh really?? The disgusting childlike interiors the millennials put everywhere might actually be nauseating and headache-inducing? Who could have predicted that? (anyone with eyes)
So many people in this thread not understanding what a luxury and a privilege "staying put" for decades is in this era of layoffs.
I really hate shops, malls and supermarkets. I'm not easily overwhelmed and can handle being there fine. But it's just horrible there. Way too loud, bright and often too warm. Completely full of chaos and way too many useless products.
When I have to go I try to be out there as quickly as possible. I always thought that's weird, shouldn't those shops be designed in a way that makes me want to explore them, look at all the things they have, instead of just hunting down exactly what I need and leave as quickly as possible.
They make it hard to find what you want on purpose in hopes you will be distracted and buy other crap along the way. I think it must work on most consumers.
I have the same reaction to it as you.
I get that they make it hard to find, so we also buy different stuff. But if I can't find what I'm looking for too often, I won't come back anymore.
Sometimes I really want/need something, and I have all the stores close by. But I still decide to buy it online, and accept waiting a few days, because stores/malls are such a bad experience.
i think theres something in peoples mindset or genetics that creates this difference. my experience is like the opposite of yours. i dont exactly love malls but its one of the things that can satisfy the part of my brain that just wants more.
never been diagnosed with adhd but i have this thing where most of life is not stimulating enough to keep me interested. to be clear this is not a screen addiction, i dont feel specific pressure to pull up my phone and i can go a long time without it. scrolling is only a fallback when im not talking with someone (that includes writing like right now), working on something interesting, outside with friends, playing games, working out, you get the idea.
creative things like coding and drawing almost always work. movies and football only if i care about it emotionally. alcohol helps some too. but a lot of activities like reading a book are just not enough. i would describe it as a non specific addiction to something that might be dopamine but that still wouldnt fully explain things.
when i go to the mall or the shopping street or a bar theres so much going on that i finally feel comfortable. on the other hand i almost never feel overwhelmed. my family is not like that (they absolutely hate shopping) but i think some of my friends are, never asked them about it. i dont know if its a type of neurodivergence or a learned behavior or something even stranger.
sounds like a great lead for psychology research.
Whenever I go shopping for a single, most trivial item, I really need to psyche myself up. Those critical moments just upon entering the store are the key.
Because immediately upon walking in the door, you are immersed in a "shopping environment". Everything you smell, hear, see, touch is geared to making you spend more and purchase more and grab more useless stuff off the shelves.
Even in a Goodwill or similar thrift store you are subjected to these merchandising tricks.
I have found that keeping a very good household inventory on a spreadsheet is critical. If I have this spreadsheet on my phone and I refer to it, before venturing into aisles, then I know exactly what I need to purchase, and where to go to find it. Sticking to the shopping list, I can avoid the needless purchase temptations.
At Costco when I'd go with my parents, it was the custom of the cashiers to ask, "did you find everything alright?" and my father would always joke, that if enough people answered in the affirmative, that was their cue to rearrange the store and shuffle everything around, so that shoppers would get lost, and not being able to find what they want, would discover more useless stuff that they would pull off the shelves on impulse.
It also doesn't hurt to follow the advice of "never shop while hungry"!
Supermarkets are maybe a bit different, they are hard to avoid.
But I dislike malls so much, that I only get new clothes for example once it's really necessary. If it was more pleasant to shop there, I would probably buy more stuff.
I guess there are some people who fit into that environment, their tactics work well on them, and the shops/malls just ignore customers like me.
Supermarkets are abundant near me, and vary wildly in their experiences.
I could shop at a Wal-Mart or a Target for groceries, and thus be subject to all the same big-box shopping pitfalls.
I could shop at a farmers market style grocery store, and the major one near me has some great products and great foods, but mixed in with 90% ultra-processed foods, sugar bombs, and all sorts of unhealthy stuff, masquerading as organic or natural food. Also this "farmers market" has an extensive section with wine and beer, and personal health/hygiene products that are quite expensive.
At Trader Joe's I usually have no problem shopping for exactly what I need, and again, sticking to my spreadsheet with inventory and shopping needs. I usually pick up some fresh flowers here, because they're a bargain, and the coolest thing about Trader Joe's is that I can trust basically any product they've put on their shelves, and the limited selection, and restriction to food products only, helps narrow my shopping focus.
It is even possible to shop for groceries at the dollar stores nearby, which stock a lot of frozen foods, snack foods, beverages, etc. These bargain prices are generally justified by a lower bar of quality, or rapid expiration dates.
Another "grocery shopping" option is pharmacies or convenience stores. There is a major chain pharmacy nearby that really has a lot of good groceries, and is starting to stock some organic and natural brands as well. Its aisles are impeccable and the shopping experience is first-rate. Of course, as soon as I step in the door, the scent and sounds and feels assault me and begin to work on my consumer brain. Got to adhere firmly to that spreadsheet in my pocket!
Just go to Costco: they only stock 4,500 items compared to Walmart's 100,000 per store
Next Costco is approximately 7.000km away and would require some serious swimming skills.
this is the same thing we said about offices in the fluorescent era
has it gotten better in the LED era?
“Striped office floors. Flickering lights. Walls covered in repetitive geometric patterns.”
Not sentences. AI slop.
I‘ve definitely noticed this over time as spaces (especially public ones like cafes, retail locations, and restaurants) started being designed as props for Instagram/TikTok.
This made a big contribution because vertical short-form video feeds require extreme stimuli to get anyone’s attention - but they add nothing to the actual experience and often detract from it.
This has also led to the absolutely horrific acoustics where even in non-nightclub bars and normal restaurants, you have to yell to understand each other because the decor is made of tile, tables and chairs are at odd angles that increase distance, etc.
Everything now is subordinate to the visual environment because that’s what gets shared on Instagram.
Not saying interior design doesn’t matter, but its point should be to create a great overall experience, not to be visually stimulating at the expense of the rest.
The human brain it's used to the fractal details in neatures, such as branches/leaves.
Geometrical design (especially the ones with grids/vectors everywhere) are not minimalistic but tiring, really tiring.
just crazy-glue some cheap tacky Home Depot gold decor on every surface and you'll be fine, maybe even become leader of free world
In case you own the website:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access this resource. From Singapore.
First pic in article looks like fucking backrooms
Who needs science for that?