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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

If you think this started with Trump, go to Newport, RI and visit some of the mansions. Trump's (and Vanderbilt's) style reflects a single narrative manifested at many different levels of abstraction: "Look at me, I'm rich!" And it never ceases to fill people with awe: if a person has enough money/power to commission this sort of thing, what else could they do with it?!

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And that is a very specific purpose of such houses rather than the author's hypothesised "insecure egotist". The same thinking goes in to making houses of worship or government beautiful and intricate.

The point is to hit people with jaw-dropping opulence to get them into a frame of mind where they are small and they are dealing with something large. It is easier to convince them to do things they would not ordinarily do, and it makes them much more likely to see their host as important and able to provide unforeseeable opportunities.

Showing off is fun, but billionaires are canny and strategic people or they don't get to stay as billionaires. There are probably a few layers of thinking beyond being crass when pictures of their homes are pushed out into the public sphere.

To me, buildings with decor are pretty human-scale and relatable. But the decor-less brutalism, which came as a reaction to that style, really succeeded at making people feel small. I grew up in Moscow, and even as a child I hated being around concrete boxes, but loved being around the Seven Sisters - the kind of imperial buildings that OP doesn't like.

Brutalism is a different kind of making you feel small: the "you are an insignificant insect and will be crushed flat without even a moment's consideration" kind. I'm quite sure Brutalist architecture inspired the design of the Vogons' buildings and spaceships in various Hitchhiker's Guide visual media, for this reason.

I would say this stuff is fairly independent of human scale. Birds eye views of table models and renders + car culture ruin scale, not gaudiness.

In fact, I'd say that much 18th century baroque is too human scale: when you zoom out all the tiny ornaments blur together. I was immediately impressed by Saint Peter's basilica in the Vatican when I entered it for being a baroque building that defied this problem: the massive columns balance the small details and keep it interesting at all scales.

This is an interesting point although I suspect the canny billionaires are the ones keeping their wealth to themselves rather than flaunting it.

Trump is another matter of course.

It’s precisely Fussell’s position in his Class that old-money families learned some time in the early 20th century to live invisibly—an old-money house will be so far off the road you can’t see it from there, modestly protected by a gate and perhaps fence. He hardly treats of these people at all, as they’re rarely encountered by those outside their social circles and a little less prone to homogeneity than most of the other classes, aside from a general “calling attention to oneself is NOT what one does”.

Under Fussell’s analysis Trump’s displayed taste in decor and clothes are about as Middle as could be, thought not a small amount of Fussell’s Proles’ taste creeps in in his clothes and food. Imitating the baroque and “living large” while wearing expensive clothes that don’t fit is what one might expect from a high-dollar lottery winner who used to hold some middle position at a bank branch.

The ideas you put on display are part of the form you bring to the world. The Christians did a lot of converting with well designed testaments to the ideas contained within. Immortalizing the stories of old in stone shows a society works and means something better than intimidating the poor with wealth.

Coating your cities in a large cloth of meaningful idea is art that lives and effects the world. Dead art ends up in museums. The symbols and ideas put into these buildings will be a beacon for thinking about the future and what the shape of the world will be. You will feel new feelings in these forms and find a different place to install a hierarchy of competence around a central idea.

Building a maxamilist tower around citigroup or the avengers creates a tree of floors that can be imbued with productive action around that idea, company and collective set of people.

Reducing architecture to showing off is hot right now and misses most of architecture's effect on a human.

> Showing off is fun, but billionaires are canny and strategic people or they don't get to stay as billionaires.

No this is not true. Once you are billionaire you get so much interest its rather difficult to not stay one.

I totally agree that the projection of wealth is not always sign of weakness, but lets not kid ourselves about the economics.

Even recently (before Trump today) you say ridiculous, gaudy developments in the form of McMansions, with excessive, nonsensical architectural features for the sake or showing off.

Trump’s aesthetic is if you pumped tens, if not hundreds of millions into one of those structures.

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