Milly Main

My blogs for @streetlevelaus are now up on our website. Read our latest perspectives here: streetlevelaustralia.org/blog

Sicily: Doors. Rural town, rather poor. Presumably these are standard doors, mass-produced

A reminder about this upcoming event! If you’ve ever wondered what a traditional summer school is like, it’s one to attend.

@CharlestonArchi This is bizarre. In Australia, this wouldn't be demolished if it was half bombed and riddled with black mould. Puzzling

R.I.P Clothworkers' Hall, London, born 1958.

@LyndonRosser @JeffAicher One tree, but no people!

@JeffAicher @MillyforBeauty You wouldn’t see the trees from that angle

What they promised versus what we got

@BDealingo63085 Yeah if you're playing the Sims with the camera setting on at exactly the right angle with the sunbeam setting on. Ha

@MillyforBeauty Unless I'm mistaken, the finished product looks pretty faithful to the design?

@theoldbuilding @culturaltutor Also no mention of scale-built traditional buildings like Georgian townhouses or Sears homes that served the exact same purpose. There is no trade-off between density and beauty or volume and beauty. Bad thread.

@culturaltutor Modernism gave a vehicle for sterile bland cheap architecture with little talent. It made it acceptable for architects to produce buildings the majority of the population dislike and find fault when they voice it. When buildings have all the human feel of a fridge freezer.

How Modern Architecture Saved the World (and also made it uglier) A fairly short thread...

Join Street Level Australia’s letter-writing workshop to have your voice heard by your local council, state and federal government representatives. Craft and write a letter to your chosen representative based on the issues that are most important to you. eventbrite.com.au/e/ask-for-beau…

These critics of Scandinavian style are fed up with buildings that look like "gigantic shoe boxes, toys, or accidents" trib.al/3M38M3m

My kingdom for an eave

@CarRelianceBC @clmarohn If someone can point me to the original thread I'll leave some suggestions there

My friend Jason is taking some heat for this, but he's not wrong. Most people think that "hope" means we take what we have and make it better. That's delusional. Most of what we have built is going away. It was never meant to endure. It was purely consumption. What emerges out of that transition can be better if we adopt a @StrongTowns approach and mindset, but we aren't promising to fix everything that is messed up. The Strong Towns project was initially about explaining how the post-war Suburban Experiment was a Ponzi scheme, one that gave us growth today in exchange for crippling long-term liabilities. I can't change that math, which is merciless. What I hopefully can change is how people process that (with compassion and optimism, not hate and division). We are trying to create an alternate model for prosperity, one that everyone can participate in, one that will create a broad renewal of our cities (see my first book). Cut Jason some slack. He's a good guy who is not cheering for doom. He's rightly struggling with the delusion gap between American beliefs/actions and reality. I struggle with that, too.

Ah, the ‘active frontage’

@clmarohn And there are things you can do, as @aesthetic_city has shown in the Netherlands in the recent Utrecht summer school there.

@clmarohn Watching it, you'd think you can have a place sometime like Amsterdam from making better zoning and transport planning decisions. The people who ‘designed’ Amsterdam were not utilitarian policymakers. Category error.

@TanyaSzendeffy Definitely! It's pretty terrible but also still more appealing than lots of newer buildings

@MillyforBeauty Not being facetious but is this not pastiche? The random mixing of styles?

Russian post-modernism (Caprom, or Капром – 'capitalist romance') is particularly egregious. The first thing you do after the fall of the regime is buy a Big Mac, inherit a state utility and build one of these