Most of these aesthetic criticism people are just conservative people. They don't like change. The world was best when they arrived somewhere.
That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.
That's pretty much it. SF is full of a similar kind.
Many more people admire Taj Mahal or Ancient Greek/Roman buildings than, say, brutalist architecture. Heck, even Art Deco, while distinctly modern, seems to be likeable.
I am fairly conservative myself, but I like some new Czech buildings, such as the Masaryčka project by Zaha Hadid. It has a soaring soul that is hard to describe, but nevertheless you can feel the positive vibe of the structure when you walk underneath it.
https://www.masarycka.com/cs/o-projektu/
On the other hand, Le Corbusier architecture (mostly older than me, so I should have been used to it) looks like deliberate insult to anything human: look at this concrete prison I made for you and weep and gnash your teeth because there is no escape from its rotting ugliness, you worm.
Fortunately, the American version of this view will be smashed in the next two decades and we will enter an era of creation once again.
This is how I feel about the watergate, in which I work.
I live in Boston and there was a similar freakout about the gas lamps in Beacon Hill being replaced by LEDs. Not a single person I talked to about it knew that the gas lamps were only added to the neighborhood in the late 70s to make it look more quaint and historic.
It's not that I have a problem with this. It's just that I personally don't want to be considered historic in my mid 30s.
Though I do like the idea of forcing everyone to keep their iPhone 13 for the next 20 years so that it can become old enough to be historic.
The other thing, about the "McCentury Modern" architecture, has been proven time and again over the last decade. Flat shapes without detail with random splashes of colour cause anxiety because the human mind needs visual definition and coherency. There are ongoing studies about whether or not modern architecture causes depression because so many people have noticed. At least in the past the cheapest stuff used bricks for facades, but developers think even those are too expensive now. That and the proliferation of grey is entirely about money, because it's easier to sell the lowest common denominator without a hint of individuality. This is especially true when it comes to market instability, because when tenant turnover is in the range of months grabbing the cheapest thing and throwing together the least personable environment to rope in anybody at all will keep you from having a vacancy of longer than a few weeks.
The films thing is just... Nobody actually looks at physical examples anymore, so they have no idea how things should look. With practical effects you were manipulating and testing what already existed instead of trying to recreate it as an approximation. There's a surrealist level of detail in almost anything created via CG, only worsened by the lighting needing to be flattened to cover up the unfinished work done because of an impossible schedule and masked with digital colour correcting. Real waves don't have that much foam, real diamond weave cloth doesn't have that specular profile, real explosions don't have such low luminosity and so many particles, so on and so forth.
A lot of people realize things are very wrong with the world, they just don't have the expertise or the vocabulary to explain it. So they point at things they know other people will innately understand as examples. Don't say they hate change because of that limitation.
Lights can transform the feel of a place and they have their purpose.