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Comment by trgn | Hacker News Reader

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old.

Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an anti-establishment fervor after WW1.

Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

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> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1

Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.

"Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from actually-old designs.

My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been through more wars than this".

She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!

The "ugly $NATIONALITY" trope goes both ways, and isn't just for Americans visiting other countries. I don't know why tourists think it's a competition.

It's an accurate critique though. The Alamo is up at the top in the competition for World's most disappointing tourist destination.

> My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. ...

heh what was she expecting? It's an old mission built on the frontier eventually used by the military for storage and barracks. It effectively was a warehouse. The building isn't the reason why it's historic, what happened there is what's important.

American old is as old as the people who have lived here- there are still signs of the native americans who lived here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't killed almost all the natives, some of those locations may still have people living in them.

“The difference between a Brit and an American is that the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.”

Yes but how many people in Europe actually live in houses older than two centuries (about when American immigration really popped off, so let’s arbitrarily pick then)? It’s a significant minority.

I live in a mid sized European city with a city center containing buildings that go back to the 12th century, but the house I grew up in was built in 1890. It’s one of the older houses on the street too, and pretty uninspiring to be honest. The place I live in now, very near downtown, is like 20 years old.

Sure, most American homes are probably less than 50 years old, but on the scale of a couple hundred of years, does that make Europe that much more sophisticated and “cultured”, generally speaking?

We do, in a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside. A large log-house construction, the building was first erected somewhere in the late 1600's/early 1700's on the other side of the hill. It was moved to its current location during the land reform of 1823-1827 when farmers moved out to the land they worked, before that they each worked several small strips of land spread around the hamlet they inhabited.

> Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

An unenlightened idiot only operates on the level of seeing which things are beautiful and which things are ugly. It requires an intelligent, educated person to get involved in sophisticated games of signaling and countersignaling, like pretending to like ugly things in order to seem more sophisticated than unenlightened idiots.

Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.

> America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture.

Sure, there are places like this. Desirable old neighborhoods with interesting houses and walkable infrastructure. But those are mostly from about 100 years ago or more. What's been happening more recently?

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