This is one of those like hardcore aesthetics philosophy thing dev from 100r.ca shared and they usually have good taste so lets see!
starts with a very strong g. k. chesterton excerpt lol. ooh its written as a 1st person narrative. i like that framing.
re public spaces: “if we are richer today, why are we not routinely surpassing the shared spaces we were able to create one hundred years ago” -> yaxu, said: “now that we have cranes and stuff, why aren’t we building loads of henges anymore :(” -> I, thought: “it being hard was part of the point”
public things used to be richly ornamented, what did people think of that at the time? minimalism -> less ornamented public things. if you like ornamented things, this is sad. is ornament automatically than non-ornament (oh no, my quaker is showing). there’s no accounting for taste?
that’s a good point, if we were so poor that we had to fetch water by hand, why did we take the expense to build the fountains so beautifully. oh, well. history provides that answer: fountains were not ordered or designed by the people fetching the water. i really like the blouse that woman in the photo is wearing.
“i think today we do not know how to go about building a water fountain. what we know is how to build one thousand water fountains. but not how to build one.” hmm, good point!
commodity: an interchangeable good within its category
but that which is unique, breaks. when finished objects become commodities they break, but they are easily replaced. chair for chair. we can make thousands of chairs! but if something unique breaks, we might mend. mending also teaches you how to build. if we don’t mend, we might build in perverse ways, say thousands and thousands of times.
hmm okay i bet these ppl are really prickly straightedge anarchists.
mending is on the scale of a single person. okay sure we all hate high-rise dense housing but that’s literally the only option to house lots of people if you don’t want to consume all the environment around you. see jenn.site on greenfield and brownfield development.
the more commodities we make, the less opportunity you have to become a creator. yeah, that makes sense. i wanted to make a linen shirt like bernadette banner, but then i remembered that it would be wasteful for me to buy virgin linen, and learn how to make a shirt, when there’s thousands of used linen shirts being sold for pence online. do you know how much water and labour making a yard of linen takes?
machines cannot teach. each pair of hands must learn from another. if we rely on machines to make thousands of it, can we trust the operators will be able to design the next one, or mend it once it breaks. not everything is as unimportant as lace.
caring for a graden vs. planting a new one. we are yet to incorporate our love of craft into the technological revolution of the last three centuries. if we commodify objects, does it make us start to commidify people and places too? they all exist together in an ecology.
hmm okay, that was quite strong. good expression of a sentiment, argued with like metaphors and stuff that’s cool. i broadly agree. i think it tended a bit isolationist/c’mon-we-need-high-density-housing-to-solve-the-housing-crisis but i liked it overall! loads of beautiful photos and woodcuts!