We begin with a characteristically tasteless execution from Network School. The presenter flops around barefoot in a half-empty furniture showroom in Chinese-built ghost city in BALAYSIA: https://x.com/James_of_Arc/status/1975085579965714815
Pic related shows a better version. If you want to steelman the art style, it's that.
What is it? What does it represent? Nothing.
Utopia Slop is the aesthetic of indefinite optimism. It is the visual manifestation of Number Go Up. "Just one more doubling bro, just one more." But the promise never materializes. Utopia slop is demoralizing insofar as it is FAKE, condemning us to the decel hell of the eternal present.
Left-leaning utopia slop is called "solarpunk". Further right you see Grecoroman elements and giant statues. Praxis is (or was?) Utopia Slop. Atelier Missor, as much as I love them--their AI renders are archetypal of the genre.
We find ourselves mired in slop.
The only way out is through DECISIVE TASTE and VISION. Haussman's Paris was a decisive vision. The Art Deco megaprojects of the 1930s were a decisive vision. These things were visibly futuristic, controversial, new, coherent and in time iconic. This is the mission. Today the field is fallow and we must plant. DEATH to SLOP.
I think this general style must come from eighteenth century images of Babylon and the Near East in general, which were themselves fanciful interpretations of classical sources and early modern archeology. These images were also put to utopian political purposes, even if that context wasn't transmitted with as much clarity in the fantasy art that picked up the visual language. But at this point, with the Italianate romance touches and cues from Venusian floating castles and anime, it becomes nothing in particular. It can't offend anyone. It represents elsewhere but nowhere. Precisely because it is such a mucky puddle of visual cues, it seems interesting at a glance, but any serious inspection reveals it to be shit.
Well. Isn't that the definition of slop! It can't withstand serious attention. But so, the problem is both that nobody can devote their attention to this sort of thing, but also the aesthetic and symbolic poverty we are faced with, which makes it impossible to do anything but make slop.
Again, without any irony intended, I recommend reading North Korean architecture and city planning magazines! These are less disconnected from reality (the projects get built: "new"); they are built to symbolic or ideological code ("coherent"); they are not perhaps immediately appealing to either the Western viewer, nor, I assume, those that built the Stalinist city and the Korean neo-classical city (this might qualify as "controversial"); and they are certainly "visibly futuristic."
I disagree with this pessimism. It is better to have some aesthetic preferences than none at all, and these preferences must be compared against an alternative. You seem to fall short of actually endorsing Haussmann or art deco. Just criticizing somebody’s aesthetics as “utopia slop” without stating what you prefer is not useful.
I agree sometimes you can notice something is uniquely ugly and having nothing at all or something drab and utilitarian is preferable. Is that the claim you’re making about utopia slop?
>>4523 > having nothing at all or something drab and utilitarian is preferable. Is that the claim you’re making about utopia slop?
Not at all. "Drab and utilitarian" is the enemy.
My beef with Utopia Slop is that it's fake, and therefore fails to defeat the enemy. It has generated zero new buildings in the real world. It's also fake in the sense that it does not show original thought or aesthetic preference. See the first image--"Tuscan villa, but floating in the sky".
Finally, it's fake in the same vein as the recurring lib-news bit "Young Scholar Invents Amazing Machine that turns Banana Peels into Eco Fuel"--a feel-good illusion of invention in form of SLOP that is neither practical nor original; kayfabe futurism.
I wholeheartedly endorse the Haussman aesthetic, Art Deco, and other coherent styles. These are beautiful, physically-realizable aesthetics that you can go out and build. They have rules, materials, pattern books, Pantone colors, blueprints.
My claim is simply that we need a new one. Greek Revival, Spanish Revival, Neoclassical, Neo Art Deco--all of these continuations that start with "neo" or end in "revival" have their place, but are insufficient. We live in an accelerating world. Our built environment should reflect this. The future must look like the future.
>>4528 If you want to understand what is wrong with the modern building aesthetic, you need to learn about building codes and labor costs. They provide the constraints that lead to the same uniform, standardized, plain, prefabricated, compliant boxes that everyone builds. It's literally too expensive to build anything else.
I know all about the idiocy of modern American building regulations—double staircase, setbacks, FAR etc. They’re bad but not the main story.
There is nothing in the law that says you have to paint your building ugly colors, and yet people do. There is nothing that says your building cannot have a nice arched entryway, yet they don’t. There is a deeper structural problem where most buildings are built by myopic NOI spreadsheet optimizers without pride, vision, or taste.
> My claim is simply that we need a new one. Greek Revival, Spanish Revival, Neoclassical, Neo Art Deco--all of these continuations that start with "neo" or end in "revival" have their place, but are insufficient. We live in an accelerating world. Our built environment should reflect this. The future must look like the future.
Absolutely, well put.
I have to admit I like the idea of a sort of brutalist monumentalism in the vein of Harkonnen (someone mentioned this in another thread, I like the example), where you have a mix of modernity's post-scarcity in absolute scale and visual impression, but hosting ancient motifs, reliefs on the walls alluding to old epics, frescos...
I can see how that could border on the sloppy. It would take some building up to. On a more immediate time scale, anything that is not oriented to visually concealing post-1880 technology just doesn't feel sufficiently revolutionary or new to me. I want a high-tech world underneath an Arcadian paradise at the rural extreme, Naboo at the urban extreme, with limited and specified areas of extreme industrial capacity. What we've got now makes that all possible.
The Bay being the most beautiful and perfect place on the planet, it's only right that the billionaire on this forum try out my idea somewhere there with a few hundred acres
> I have to admit I like the idea of a sort of brutalist monumentalism in the vein of Harkonnen
No. Absolutely not. A spray bottle on my desk for every time someone says Real Brutalism Has Never Been Tried.
It's been tried. It is 1% Architecture Magazine art projects and 99% inhuman garbage, the personification of Kafka's Apparat, the blank concrete face of the enemy.
the problem, >>4538, is that that is not actually monumental to the scale I was talking about. it looks like a 60's civic building shoved into some nice americana town. and i did say "sort of brutalist," because of course that's not quite right
i was talking about something that is fitting for the capital of a true star-treading civilization, which i imagine as ultimately being sleek, high, severe.
> fitting for the capital of a true star-treading civilization
This is a good prompt. What should the architecture of the Aerospace Republic look like?
A helipad on every major building. Streams of autonomous aircraft splitting and recombining in the sky. Open courtyards, balconies, roof decks. Awe-inspiring airports. Downtown, a well-ordered grid of lively street life. New forms in the spirit of Art Deco reaching skyward and exhalting progress. The Boulevard. The Agora. Triumphal arches. Timeless Western architectural forms modernized and amplified to the needs and aspirations of technological civilization.
> which i imagine as ultimately being sleek, high, severe.
I don't buy this. Especially not the "severe" part.
The idea that a space-faring civilization should build in CONCRETE BRUT comes from last-century brainworm afflicted boomers. Look at Starfleet Academy from the original Star Trek. It looks like shit. Star Trek was the original Utopia Slop. Then our culture drifted increasingly anti-tech, leading to Dystopia Slop like Blade Runner (full of SEVERE architecture) and, yes, Dune. This cursed era, starting right after WW2 and growing into an all-consuming affliction in the 1970s, was defined by a mass rejection of Western culture. It is the hangover we are trying to wake up from.
PS--Dune draws heavily on Muslim culture, both for protagonists (muh dusty religious fundamentalist freedom fighters) and antagonists. Much like the Harkonnens they helped inspire, Islamic dictators love SLEEK, HIGH, SEVERE architecture designed to impress and intimidate the peasants. "Islam" means Submission.
This is a fundamentally foreign tradition from Western architecture, which invites the public, honors both individual and collective greatness without subjugating one to the other, and respects the citizen.
The TWA terminal is a work of art. It's an airport hotel nowadays, and I had the privilege to spend a night there. Very well executed.
That said, it is a period piece, an homage. Great old architecture is useful as inspiration, but in absence of great new architecture it becomes a trap. It serves as a kind of ambient NIMBY propaganda, reinforcing the belief that the only good building is an old building and its decel corollary--the idea that beauty is a matter of restoration and preservation.
This idea of an aerospace republic deserves further exploration. It demands industrial capacity. The culture and aesthetics are excellent, a natural antidote to all forms of soy. Autonomous aerospace forms a north star that unites the most interesting threads of technological development across software and hardware. The United States of American invented the airplane, beat the commies to the moon, and we will take aerospace to its apotheosis.
