No essay this week. It was Good Friday yesterday and I thought it best to take some time off.
If you’re looking for something to read I would highly recommend The Age of Average by Alex Murrell.
Towards the end of last year I wrote a little about how our interconnectedness appears to be leaving us with less room to create distinctive cultures particularly when it comes to our architecture.
At the time of writing I was skeptical of my own arguments about the ties between globalisation and this cultural homogeneity however. I understand my own reasoning but even with the recent backlash against the globalised world I can’t help but feel that the process of interconnectedness is deeply bound up with so much of what has cultivated interest, dynamism, and love in my own life. So, I am hesitant to lay our cultural ills at its feet. Reading this essay made me think about the problem some more.
In his essay Murrell documents much more comprehensively how this homogeneity is spreading to interior design, architecture, media, fashion, user content and even people through cosmetic enhancements1.
The essay doesn’t really give a strong reason for why this might be the case except for a gesture at an underlying bland aesthetic preference amongst the crowd: “We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.”.
However, while I was reading through these examples it helped me to stitch together some of my other thoughts. Our cultural production seems to rely heavily on a vision of what could be and an attempt to move towards it vs. our ability to see the world around us.
Creating culture based on what we can see around us is an impressive feat but it is also by definition some kind of interpolation of what already exists, a movement from one to many2. A vision of the future on the other hand is a perspective on something that is completely different from today.
We have become very good at viewing the world around us. In fact the newest technologies mean that in some sense we have ‘solved’ this problem: “Generative AI puts some kind of simulacrum of a good designer in the hands of everyone with an internet connection.”3.
On the other hand visions of the future are few and far between. Until very recently our zeitgeist appears to have been ruled by a sense that we were approaching “The End of History” . In fact we have become so unskilled at having a vision we may not even believe it’s possible any more.
We need to make some plans for what our culture could be like:
See you next week.
There is perhaps some truth to this last one though anecdotally I think there may actually be some push away from this with more distinctive fashion. See the hanfu movement for an example.
Side note: It’s kind of nutty to see Sam Altman introduce Peter Thiel to a classroom of future entrepreneurs given everything that has happened since.
I think it’s helpful to distinguish between two cultural phenomena: increasing global homogeneity and the blandness of it. What if the emerging contemporary architecture was rich and beautiful? For example, Brooklyn is filled with blocks and blocks of similar looking Italianate row houses, it’s homogenous but beautiful. The same is never said about stretches of post-war tower blocks.
That is a really really good point. Also makes me think of art deco. There were some minor modifications between New York, Miami, London, and Shanghai that made those places recognizable but the overwhelming impression is of the beauty of the art deco style as such. It does not have the same problem though because as you say it is beautiful.
There’s some irony that the decline appears associated with self-consciously thinking about an international style: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Style_(architecture)