[theamk]

Nope, the article specifically addresses your point:

> consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre

[quadrangle]

NotJustBikes and StrongTowns have addressed all of this. For just one of zillions of examples: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfo...

Neither source just simplistically says "it's the fault of cars", both are deeply thought-out perspectives on what is really going on. It's not just cars, it's certain engineering and bureaucratic decisions that were made around cars. It's also the scale of development, i.e. governments that are set up to work with large-scale developers and are too hard for small-scale developers to deal with, and the general trend toward all-at-once top-down development, and I could go on and on. StrongTowns has successfully diagnosed the entire systemic pattern. It's not just blame-the-cars.

Check out the actual resources, don't just assume they are only the simple thing the poster had to say to make any point at all.

[milkytron]

> Check out the actual resources

If anyone is interested in what's being discussed here and in Strong Towns, I'd highly recommend reading it[0]. I had been a fan of Strong Towns for a long time, but just finally read the book recently.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/strong-towns-book

[tortarga]

These are most likely two separate problems. Car based urban planning which requires large wide roads, giant carparks and 'boxey houses' due to garages can overwhelm any other aesthetically pleasing design (notably green space).

Admiring the old brick styles of the ivy leagues is simple confirmation bias due to their academic prestige. There are plenty of beautiful Modernist buildings, it comes down to if the college is willingly to pay for it.

[tomjen3]

I would like to see some pictures of beautiful Modernist buildings.

I live in an apartment, but the house I grow up in had more lawn space than was used by the car.

[ironmagma]

Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.

[JadeNB]

> Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.

I suspect that there is considerable survivor bias going into that. There were plenty of bad aesthetic choices in the past, too; we just recognise and remember the good ones.

Similarly, there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today—it's just that, as in any age, there are many more bad ones, and those are the ones that are easier to call to mind. A lot of good modern aesthetic choices borrow from the past, but that, too, is true of any age; the choices of the past we admire were not born ab novo, but were themselves inspired by still older design.

This is not to make the ridiculous claim that nothing is changing, only that "we look to the past for cues to good design" is not in and of itself an indictment of some fallen modern age.

[ironmagma]

> we look to the past for cues to good design

But by your very logic, we also look to the past for cues to bad design. There are plenty of ugly old towns and cities in the US. Regardless, the most beautiful cities in the US: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Charleston, New Orleans, Boston, Seattle are also some of the oldest.

> there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today

With how restrictive the building and city planning codes are, the amount of creativity is extremely limited.

[UnFleshedOne]

Might be related to the way modern art is ugly by design. Since it became easy to create beautiful things at scale, the "art" appreciation scene moved into ugly stuff, because only sophisticated art experts can appreciate the stuff, thus separating themselves from the common rubble.

[ironmagma]

I definitely think the ugliness of modern art is related to the economics. Why invest a lot of time or thought into something, when you can convince someone to believe that those don't matter?