If the Situationists drifted through Paris looking to get defamiliarized, today a scholar of the new ugliness can conduct their research in any contemporary American city — or upzoned American Main Street, or exurban American parking lot, or, if they’re really desperate, on the empty avenues of Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Our own walk begins across the street from our apartment, where, following the recent demolition of a perfectly serviceable hundred-year-old building, a monument to ugliness has recently besieged the block. Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford. The words THE JOSH have been appended to the canopy above the main entrance in a passionless font.
The Josh is aging rapidly for a 5-month-old. There are gaps between the panels, which have a taped-on look to them, and cracks in the concrete. Rust has bloomed on surfaces one would typically imagine to be rustproof. Every time it rains, The Josh gets conspicuously . . . wet. Attempts have been made to classify structures like this one and the ethos behind their appearance: SimCityist, McCentury Modern, fast-casual architecture. We prefer cardboard modernism, in part because The Josh looks like it might turn to pulp at the first sign of a hundred-year flood. (...)
The urban building boom that picked up in the wake of the Great Recession wasn’t a boom at all, at least not by previous booming standards: in the early 2010s, multifamily housing construction was at its lowest in decades. But low interest rates worked in developers’ favor, and what had begun as an archipelago of scattered development had coalesced, by the end of the Obama years, into a visual monoculture. At the global scale, supply chains narrowed the range of building materials to a generic minimum (hence The Josh’s pileup of imitation teak accents and synthetic stucco antiflourishes). At the local level, increasingly stringent design standards imposed by ever-more-cumbersome community approval processes compelled developers to copy designs that had already been rubber-stamped elsewhere (hence that same fake teak and stucco in identical boxy buildings across the country). The environment this concatenation of forces has produced is at once totalizing and meek — an architecture embarrassed by its barely architected-ness, a building style that cuts corners and then covers them with rainscreen cladding. For all the air these buildings have sucked up in the overstated conflict between YIMBYs (who recognize that new housing is ultimately better than no housing) and NIMBYs (who don’t), the unmistakable fact of cardboard modernism is that its buildings are less ambitious, less humane, and uglier than anyone deserves.
They’re also really gray. The Josh’s steel railings are gray, and its plastic window sashes are a slightly clashing shade of gray. Inside, the floors are made of gray TimberCore, and the walls are painted an abject post-beige that interior designers call greige but is in fact just gray. Gray suffuses life beyond architecture: television, corporate logos, product packaging, clothes for babies, direct-to-consumer toothbrushes. What incentives — material, libidinal, or otherwise — could possibly account for all this gray? In 2020, a study by London’s Science Museum Group’s Digital Lab used image processing to analyze photographs of consumer objects manufactured between 1800 and the present. They found that things have become less colorful over time, converging on a spectrum between steel and charcoal, as though consumers want their gadgets to resemble the raw materials of the industries that produce them. If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit once offered a warning about conformity, he is now an inspiration, although the outfit has gotten an upgrade. Today he is The Man in the Gray Bonobos, or The Man in the Gray Buck Mason Crew Neck, or The Man in the Gray Mack Weldon Sweatpants — all delivered via gray Amazon van. The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital. “The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow,” wrote Hardt and Negri. What color does a blended rainbow produce? Greige, evidently.
A lot of ugliness accretes privately, in the form of household goods, which can make it hard to see — except on the first of the month. Today’s perma-class of renters moves more frequently than ever before (inevitably to smaller apartments), and on moving day the sidewalks are transformed into a rich bazaar of objects significant for ugliness studies. We stroll past discarded pottery from wild sip ’n’ spin nights; heaps of shrunken fast fashion from Shein; dead Strategist-approved houseplants; broken Wirecutter-approved humidifiers; an ergonomic gaming chair; endless Ikea BILLYs, MALMs, LACKs, SKUBBs, BARENs, SLOGGs, JUNQQs, and FGHSKISs. Perhaps this shelf is salvageable — ? No, just another mass of peeling veneer and squishy particleboard. On one stoop sits a package from a direct-to-consumer eyewear company, and we briefly fantasize about a pair of glasses that would illuminate, They Live–style, the precise number of children involved in manufacturing each of these trashed items, or maybe the acreage of Eastern European old-growth trees.
It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and below. Many of the aesthetic qualities pioneered by low-interest-rate-era construction — genericism, non-ornamentation, shoddy reproducibility — have trickled down into other realms, even as other principles, unleashed concurrently by Apple’s slick industrial-design hegemon, have trickled up. In the middle, all that is solid melts into sameness, such that smart home devices resemble the buildings they surveil, which in turn look like the computers on which they were algorithmically engineered, which resemble the desks on which they sit, which, like the sofas at the coworking space around the corner, put the mid in fake midcentury modern. And all of it is bound by the commandment of planned obsolescence, which decays buildings even as it turns phones into bricks.
Beyond the sidewalk, the street — which is mostly for cars, key technology of the 20th-century assault on the city. Barthes wrote that the 1955 Citroën DS marked a welcome shift in the appearance in cars toward the “homely,” meaning that they’d begun to carry the comfortable livability of kitchens and household equipment. Today’s automobiles, far from being “the supreme creation of an era,” are homely in the other sense of the word. A contemporary mythologist could sort them into either hamsters or monoliths. Hamster cars (the Honda Fit, the Toyota Prius) are undoubtedly ugly, but in a virtuous way. The monolith cars (the Cadillac Escalade, the Infiniti QX80) possess a militaristic cast, as if to get to Costco one must first stop off at the local black site. No brand has embraced the ethos more than Tesla, with its tanklike Cybertruck. Even Musk’s more domesticated offerings feel like they’re in the surveillance business: sitting inside a Tesla is not unlike sitting inside a smartphone, while also staring at a giant smartphone.
