If you were saying this is the most effective form for cost then I would be fine with it. deliberately making things ugly is how you get soviet brutalist architecture. hard pass on that.
I want brutalist architecture on government buildings, and
only government buildings. No one should respect a government building or like to look at it. Each one is a stain and should look like a scar on the face of our nation. I don't want evil to look pretty, simple as.
One of the reasons brutalism is so hated isn't just that it's ugly: it's that we all know it stands for something evil, so we call it ugly. There's no way for a KGB building to
be pretty. If it looked like the Taj Mahal, it would just make the Taj Mahal uglier for the association. So no, let's not poison architecture by associating it with government.
And the pole is just as featureless as the rest of it. Fact is, literally everything about today's society is ugly. The architecture, the infrastructure, the food, the people... modernity itself is the problem. It is literally the Communist logic of "blank slate" and interchangeable parts, of Homo Economicus.
Homo Economicus isn't the idea that a human is a blank slate. It actually is fully aware that people are different and have different wants. It's very
not samey. People get it just so wrong.
It's that a human selfishly and rationally (rigorously defined in a specific way, not some hyper smart person with cold rationality) pursues their desires, whatever those desires may be. Understand that rational to an economist is very different that rational as used colloquially. For example, a drug addicted man selling everything and making a very risk choices to buy their next hit? Entirely economically rational.
What isn't economically rational, and where does it break down? One major example are gift economies like Christmas, etc, especially where reciprocity is expected. It's also not a long term sort of function, and is best used in micro economics, IMO.
So, getting to the pole itself, sure it's featureless. I don't think it should be pretty. Pretty should be found in the things made consensually. The cars are gorgeous IMO. Different, but they try to be sleek and aggressive, and I like it. Phones have come a long way from their early cinderblock look.
Look, if you had come here complaining about a brutalist church, I would have been on your side. But this is a pole, and it needs to be a pole. It's pretty hard to pretty up a pole no matter how much you try. And on top of that, it's a government made pole. It should be ugly.
You know what place had really pretty infrastructure? Moscow. You should hear Bernie Sanders rave about how gorgeous the train station was, how nice it was that the subways had chandeliers. And he isn't lying, it was pretty. But it was built by slavery, and was an pretty veneer over an ugly truth that idiots buy into. So no, government built stuff should look ugly. That's a goal in and of itself. This means government built infrastructure, government built buildings, etc.
www.atlasobscura.com
