> If you built the ornate street lamps today, even if it was in style, it would likely be decried as "unnessecary spending".

I think this is one of the author's weaker points because ornate street lamps are still built and installed pretty regularly today. They're pretty common in the more pedestrian-focused parts of cities where people are actually looking at the street lamps, while the purely functional ones go in car-centric spaces.

Yes, I've seen some brand new ornate/decorative lighting, usually on pedestrian- and bicycle-focused construction projects with grant funding, as it's expensive.

Without those grants from regional/state agencies, a cash-strapped town could otherwise use the cheapest available option for lighting..

The built environment is a bad example. Because Victorians are cute and twee, you can't renovate or demolish them without exorbitant costs and delays. Because brutalist structures are not cute twee, despite being more rare and historically important, you can do whatever the fuck you want to them. So if I were building a home today, and I wanted to ensure that the buyer of this land would get the most value of it, I'd hope that the architecture of my home is just interesting enough to bring me and my community joy, but not so distinct that someone new coming into the community isn't bogged down by B.S.

If the author was more serious about this thread, maybe investigate why people don't have as many pictures of their family hanging on the walls as they used to. Sentimentality, not "decoration," is the thing we lost.

My part of London has an interesting solution to this problem - the government will install new "normal" streetlights unless the residents of the street want to pay for ornate Victorian street lights. The street can vote and pay for it however they want.

https://www.richmond.gov.uk/services/roads_and_transport/str...

My reading of the article was that the defence for why there aren’t more intricate details is because people think it’s more expensive due to complexity of production. He then went on to broadly say that shouldn’t be the case due to scale economy etc.

He actually also did mention that some things are simple yet still ugly.

The patterned china case though was precisely for arguing the more complex manufactured piece product being cheap AF.

I don’t think the author claimed it was bad to prefer simple, just that lots of public goods stuff are boring looking these days. I feel that way about a lot of concrete I see.

I would push back on “single most mainstream”. These decisions are not made by some voting mechanism. Many times it’s a local optima of loud complainers and opinionated decision makers. The most mainstream people actually can’t be bothered by most things, but would appreciate (IMHO) some intrigue from time to time.

Another related thing: HGTV disease. Where the house is all white everything…which I have a preference to now…but I do wonder if it’s just memetic influence of what people say looks nice.

I think it's still a large degree of fashion. In 2024 we spot the lone ornamented streetlamp that survived and think it looks nice or appreciate that its still standing, or walk past the an old decorated building that was maintained all these years think it looks elegant, but if you travelled back to 1920 when your entire environment was filled with cheaply manufactured fake ornamentation then the new simplistic modern designs would have been the things that demanded notice and been associated as the new hotness and an ornamented cast iron product would have carried an association as old and dated. For the same reason if you sold an avocado green kitchen appliance in 1988 you'd be viewed as out of fashion and still too early to be retro-cool. Not everything gets a retro-resurgence, but everything gets old.

Case in point: Eichler houses.

When I was young, they were cheap and cheerful and derided as "little boxes made of ticky-tacky".

Now that they're going for a million+, they are "mid century modern" and cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Eichler#Eichler_Homes

Some of that perceived value is the (wonderful) original Modernist attributes of simplicity, manufacturability, and form-follows-function, which are integral to the design philosophy of those homes.

The design work of the Eamses is another case: https://www.vitra.com/en-me/magazine/details/eames-potato-ch..., it’s just a magnificent use of the material.

Even the original Case Study homes were intended to be affordable, not made as mansions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Study_Houses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey_House_(Los_Angeles)#Des...)

Needless to say, I think OP is just not well informed about design.

Just as it might have been hard to make an ornate street lamp, it’s also hard to make a clean modernist home. There are reasons (personal, practical, philosophical) to prefer one or the other for a given use, but the author isn’t seeing those nuances.

I think the pattenrned china is not machine washable. Such concerns play in.