Column | Why is everything so ugly?

Not all children become lawyers. I read that on a banner on the fence of a construction site. ‘Not every child will later become a doctor or lawyer. Teach your kids that it’s okay to work with your hands and build cool things.” Building cool things, yes, that’s a major goal.

With their banner – ‘building fence banner’ – the contractors want to ensure that young people start working in technology or construction. That they are doing something real. So that everyone doesn’t hang around the office all day, make superfluous rules or virtual financial products that are far removed from reality. In this the contractors are right, they are at most mistaken in the work of doctors, dentists, surgeons, whose hands also help to build the cosmos.

Good. What’s cool? Suppose the campaign succeeds and the children flock to the workshop: what things would you like to see built? In the current mood, everyone insists on building, but perhaps you should first think about what and especially how to build. Data storage centers? Distribution areas? What should the children learn?

„We live in undeniably ugly times”, writes the editors of the American literary magazine n+1 in the winter issue. “Our built environment overwhelmingly leans towards the insubstantial, the flat and the grey, interrupted here and there by some childish scribbling.” The problem is in just about everything, says the magazine, from cities and buildings to electronics, from home appliances to commercial graphic design. Why is everything so ugly?

It is primarily an American problem. Every cultural critic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has already denounced the cult of the ugly, the desire for disfigurement in America. The Europeans have never known so much ugliness and we cannot take the lamentation of the Americans for granted here. But also with us, the rise of efficient construction techniques has led to the disappearance of traditional professional skills, about which n+1 grumbles.

Hence the construction fence. There is a need for trained professionals. And that raises the question of what the children have to learn in order to make things that are cool. If they need to make something real, something non-virtual, maybe we should teach them the traditional skills. Or is that a thought that brings us dangerously close to Romanticism and a conservative nostalgic look back at beauty that never existed?

Here the issue becomes precarious. If you ask me what the kids should make, I’ll answer willow tree fountains, pomegranate fountains, because I’m a dubious romantic. Ever since I saw a tree fountain on the Chatsworth estate, I think the fountain is the most delightful thing that human hands can ever build.

The water at Chatsworth spouts, not from a dolphin’s mouth or a nymph’s lap, but from the branches of an iron willow tree, spraying up into the sunlight, breaking in the sunbeams in rainbow colors and crashing down to the rocks below, from where it rises again and flows through the branches; it’s kitsch, of course, it’s illogical, the critics say, and it’s great, it’s a cool thing, it’s exactly what you wish you could make yourself.

Magazine n+1 nags a bit, grumbling about flat buildings made of obscure materials and about furniture that you buy in flat packages, about the interchangeability of interiors, about the generic, the non-ornamental, the shoddy reproducibility of everything. And that may sound like the outdated sound of disappointed baby boomers, or the rightness of aesthetes in the disfigurement of the United States, but the magazine still has a practical British argument up its sleeve.

In 2020, the Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab in London analyzed photographs of consumer objects taken between the 1800s and today. That analysis showed that things have become less colorful over time: as if they want to resemble the industrial raw materials from which they are built as closely as possible. Things are more colourless, less ornamental, less detailed, in short, they have become demonstrably less cool.

And with this we have a useful addition to the construction fence cloth. Teach your children not only to work with their hands, teach them to add music and soul to each square and movement to the immobility of the architectural environment.

Because when the color disappears from life, the detail, people look for excitement and romance elsewhere.