Architect here. First time watching one of your videos. Very well done dipping into architectural theory and speaking with authority. A follow up point I would add: after about a century of Modernism stripping architectural education down to a technical exercise, there are very few of us who are actually able to draw, or even imagine, anything more ambitious than a beige rectangle.
The most beautiful part of unique and detailed design is knowing that that beautiful handrail is a piece of a persons life made physical. We have very limited time on this earth and to know that someone spent some of their time making this functional thing into something beautiful is really powerful.
I absolutely love ecobrutalism. When done properly it's a beautiful contrast of harsh, angled, solid, bleak concrete with the lush greenery of the plantings and can create really cool urban areas especially in warmer climates.
There's an interview with Stephen Fry in which he discusses similar ideas: “If you look out of the window in the continental United States and in North America generally, everything is stunningly beautiful that nature has done, and that’s true in the world, whatever it is, in nature, it seems to us incontestably and unconditionally lovely. We find it simply beautiful. And the only things we ever see that are ugly when we look out are things we have made. And if generations of children grow up believing that they belong to a species that can only uglify, that has no role in making things beautiful, that cannot with its own hands and its own ingenuity make things that are lovely, only things that are at best serviceable and at worst hideous and an imposition and a blot and an insult to the nature into which we were born, then there’s a guilt, there’s a self oppressing guilt that the entire species feels, that we all feel because we feel that we are a worthless race. We don’t beautify. We uglify. And there is no excuse for that.” I grew up and still live in an old European town with XVIII-XIX century architecture. Only with age I gained an understanding of how lucky I am to be able to enjoy this beauty daily. I also thought that I might not be smart enough/do not have a good taste to understand 'modern architecture' aka concrete and glass boxes. Good to know that disdain for these buildings is quite common.
There's a similar phenomenon happening with the historic "brown bars" in the Netherlands-- they keep getting bought up by international chain corporations who gut them and put ugly generic crap in their place. There is a movement to grant them protected status as monuments, which I really hope continues to gain support.
This video unearthed a buried memory from elementary school, I remember in art class we had this new young teacher who was trying to teach us about yarn bombing, if you haven't heard of it it's basically a knit or crochet installation in a public space, kind of like yarn graffiti. I wish more people knew about it and practiced it! She showed us this one of someone putting a sweater on the rocky statue in Philly. It's a really cool way to combat and bring color to these corporate flat spaces. I always enjoy your in-depth looks!
This one dude bragged about being so minimalist on Reddit recently: "My Wife and I just had our yearly "ebay day" where we try sell basically everything we dont need on ebay. While my wife is a heavy consumer, I am the absolute opposite. When i first met her i had absolutely nothing in my apartment except a kitchentable, a 10 year old TV, my old xbox one and my Queensize bed. Today my wife offered around 100 articles on ebay. I only added 4 articles. All books and a watch i dont wear anymore. I feel great not owning anything at all except a bed, two motorbike helmets and still the same kitchentable." They have a cat too (which comes with toys and dishes and brushes. And a kitchen and bathroom, etc. etc.... Guess who "owns", cleans, and presumably buys all the stuff for him to live a pleasant and cozy life and eat meals and pet his cat and exist comfortably in the modern world... It definitely isn't Mr Minimalist here.
I was born after the 2000s and even I’ve noticed this. In ausytalia in the more run down streets like sunshine theres little areas with a milkbar with a faded sign and even that is something i can look at and be like “this feels nostalgic”
Thanks for doing this video man- for anyone else reading the comments; this is a good companion piece to Mr Spinks' photography site. Lot of good photos in there of culturally interesting architecture etc.
This form of bad minimalism (un-purposeful demising of detail) also reminds me of the internationalism movement in design involving Le Corb. He really appreciated modernity for the sake of its contrast against classicism and took design details form everywhere to make a style t hat would be efficient, and generic.
as soon as i have my own space to live i plan on decorating it as colorfully and as full of my interests as i can tolerate. i want my home to feel like it's lived in and cared about and it feels like a way to fight back against how frustrated minimalist design and the ideals it can represent makes me
I think we’ve also been gaslit as a society into believing that the beauty of everyday things is infeasible. Hypothetically, what are we saving this money for? When do we see the return on turning all future development into utilitarian shit no one wants or cares for?
Thank you so much! I seriously thought it was only me. I see this all the time in Sydney. The classic architecture of the huge, old Victorian houses are being bulldozed for concrete block duplexes, painted grey and white (to give dimension as there are few windows). I seriously thought it was just me. I noticed it and kept noticing it after my cousin came back from Abu Dhabi. She paid to have her furniture sent over because she couldn’t bring herself to sell it. To this day, the craftsmanship and the character of it is just so striking… I don’t see anything like it in anyone else’s house. That is what I want, not some of the mass produced, bland, boring, “straight line” designs…
im a woman of sheer laziness if anything else so my dorm room has for awhile looked minimalist and bland, but as i've lived here longer and longer things are being hung up on walls, trinkets decorate the top of my dresser and accumulated books and papers litter my desk. I run out of surface space for things so i buy a shelf to put them on, its a plain open rack shelf so i can see everything i could possibly need thats on it, my drawers are full of clothes but since ive started bringing more clothes from home i buy hangers to actually use my closet space. i've gotten back into painting so i hang my shitty paintings up to dry more than anything but they stay there long after. etcetera etcetera... All of this is to say is that despite thinking myself as a minimalist just because i dont immediately have an aesthetic, doesn't mean i am. Ive watched my dorm room transform into a space where theres proof i actually live here. To say that blank minimalism is more practical would mean that it would be easier for me to throw out all my things, or shove them into closed boxes that would need to be hidden sight. You have to put active effort in to live like that, to hide any evidence of your existence in your own damn home. i think thats why i wasn't too surprised when you linked minimalism to fascism or racism. To value a sleek unidentifiable space over anything visually interesting means you dont see value in creativity or individuality. You would rather everything look uniform than to risk something offending you. i dont know how to end this besides saying thank you for the video, you make great points that really put the general publics disdain for sad beige minimalism into words.
I'm a car guy and most car guys I know either fully hate modern cars or like very few of them, we got four-door BMW ripoffs in grey, black or if you're feeling daring, red. I don't count the bros with lambo or Tesla pictures as car guys. At all. They're just overall obnoxious about things they do, they're not interested in cars as anything more than an status symbol. And they're bad at it because exotic supercars are the Funko pops of cars they're dime a dozen. Hell there's this following of more guys appreciating 2000s and 90s daily drivers because of how unique and full of character they used to have.
This makes me think of when George Lucas said he designed the prequel trilogy to have a more romantic feel to the architecture and no straighr lines in the designs of the space ships. He did that to contrast the original trilogy where the Empire ruled and everything was massed produced, cheap, and had straight edges.
Another great video!! Original takes on important topics that nobody else is discussing - I'm crossing all my fingers for your view counts going up. You deserve it!
I've been collecting little bon mots about the Cybertruck, like the lack of mirrors and stuff, and had somehow missed the "single series wiring" concept (tho I knew how vulnerable to getting wet the supposedly "off-road capable" thing was.) Now I know exactly why the bitch shorts after driving thru a muddy ditch, so thanks for that!
As a carpenter and alive person i notice a behavior of begrudging how much things cost (including the taxes that go into the department of bollards) while also reaching for status via possessions. I reckon this may bias toward more, cheaper shit. Less money paid to craftspeople and manufacturers to make better shit that will be valued further into the future. Not an aesthetic comment but maybe a little bit related to the shallow rewards of consumption vs the increased peace of doing the harder internal work. I appreciate the perspective you bring, maybe be conscious of the ratio of cynicism vs a forward looking proactivity. As a participant i can hear about a problem for a bit and then lose interest if we are not redirecting toward action (thanks for the call to action at the end). Maybe I'm avoiding feeling doomy. All this is hopefully not taken as a personal criticism. Keep writing man :)
Rich people have their own sort of minimalism. “I need to flex really hard about how much money I have, but can’t be bothered if some millennials apartments layout makes my place look like a junkyard.”
My hometown has a very famous brutalist city hall which actually is very interesting to see. The interesting part, I think, is that it's a brutalist building surrounded by non-brutalist buildings. If it was ALL brutalist it'd be awful. But by adding it to a varied style of buildings it actually improves the whole. I think it's the same with minimalism. If it's a style among styles it's fine. If it's ALL minimalism, it's terrible.
One of your best essays. This is a topic to discuss over beverages. Suggestion, give credit to the tiktokers you share in your video. Maybe a graphic or in the description.
Yes, indeed. Nice video. While I sometimes find ornate designs pretty, pompous, kitschy and cheezy, I've learned to love them. After more than a decade (!) of soulless, clinical, minimalist chromatic design you start to appreciate details in older designs again. Maybe that kitsch had its place and we've lost something. Also for the love of god, bring back colors!
It makes me so depressed how style-absent and soulless our modern era is. It echoes how superficial everything else has become> Rampant consumerism, following, monetizing everything, homogeny.... I hate seeing beautiful buildings and spaces redesigned as a big gray concrete space wasting square footage... we're all lonely and I think we need to redesign EVERYTHING about our towns and cities. If life's just working and buying, that sounds hellishly dystopian and it LOOKS that way. I'd love to see more crazy 80s Memphis group design again!
Great post! I'm so bored of minimalism, the trend that won't die and makes everything ugly and the same. Every indie coffee shop regardless of the city is identically bland...
We have this happening in Vancouver. Although they try to work their way around the corporate minimalist asthetic by slapping up wacky neon lights or putting up giant bird statues.
I agree with this so much! Going absolutely anywhere that's been recently developed is mindnumbing. These miserable facades are then only made more depressing by the landscaping choice to include "decorative" plants that are unsuited for a given area's climate. Nothing makes a constitutional more enjoyable than walking past block after block of gray boxes with dying foliage in smaller gray boxes! /s
Right there with you, I've been saying this for 20 years now at least. This lazy minimalist design has overrun every single aspect of our lives. The world has always had its problems to cause depression, but I don't think it's ever been as aesthetically ugly and depressing as it is now.
Omg- it's been driving me crazy who you remind me of & I just realized it's the love interest from "Just one of the guys". You even kind of dress the same. Eyebrows especially.
I get where you're coming from with the minimalism equates with industrial society and the critique of that sort of USSR Soviet brutalist style. Isn't it also valid to equate minimalism and efficiency with a sort of anti-consumerist ethic? The other end of the spectrum could be said to be hoarders who cram every inch of their space full of knick knacks and useless junk ordered off of the home shopping network. In some ways I think the millennial generations embrace of minimalism is somewhat of a pendulum swinging back away from an older generation who were so overwhelmed with all of the choices of things they could buy compared to the scarcity of their childhood that they tended to over consume. It's all interesting food for thought and could be interpreted in multiple ways. I think there's a lot of good reasons to pursue efficient designs these days, what with our crumbling infrastructure and as you mentioned the shortage of building materials and resources, coupled with our growing population. But I also agree that there's very little care given to the aesthetics of public spaces and it does destroy the everyday experience of moving through a modern city. I think a lot of this has to do with poor civil planning as much as it has to do with architectural and decorative styles.
I will Apple some credit, the first couple of iMac designs were at least unique. The iconic colored bubble shape and then the one that looked like a lamp.
I love cars, old cars are so great. Not trying to say my 90s Honda is a work of art, but it does look good! It has character, and even the way it drives has character. A lot of new cars just feel… numb. I don’t have aspirations of owning any newer car, I just hope I can buy a Datsun 240z someday
Oh you're lucky to have five-over-ones. My district only allows 3-high greige residential made of sticks, so you hear every footstep of your neighbors, and you gotta drive to get q-tips.
And greige is two colors of paint: an olive-grey off-white for the plaster, and a bright white accent for wood trim. I was established at the dawn of Martha Stewart with any pastel, and then desaturated around 2014 for Grey Plank.
so i used to be really into minimalism and honestly i think the appeal of it is just the possibility. It's so exciting to have a new clean space because of all of the potential it holds for life to unfold and make its marks on. it's exciting to travel with only a backpack because of all the adventures you will go on and the memories you will imbue into the few items that you carry. but true minimalism robs us of that and in a really sort of sneaky way robs us of hope. Hope that our spaces can be anything other than a cool toned gray and white box that houses anything other than cool toned gray and white box furniture and hope that our lives could amount to anything other than the work potential that capitalist overlords see in us. I feel like that might sound like a really extreme extrapolation, but i feel like the aesthetic discourages us from interacting with material reality for fear of making it less pristine, which I think leads down some really sad and dark lines of thinking. (Ope, just got to the point in the video where you say almost exactly that)
super niche but to anyone who lives in Gwinnett, Georgia: are you also tired of all the big gray warehouses they keep tearing down trees to build?? but also are inexplicably like always empty?
May I make a tiny request? When the "from the desk of Harland Spinks" citation cards come up, can they stay on the screen a bit longer? I usually consider myself a speed reader but I never get to look at all of the content bc I get distracted with the esthetic of "official documentation markings" I mean I can pause it also but it would be much easier to digest if possible
I don't know if I'm the only one who remembers it this way, but the 80s was sepia toned (practically), with hideous brown architecture and everything smelled like a cigarette butt ( the new construction anyway, I grew up in New York city so all the art deco architecture is not included)
I've been hating on the new prescriptive brand of Apple "minimalism" for 10 years lol. While I can understand the appeal on a superficial level, what it became was a strict prescriptive design language/lifestyle devoid of color, warmth, and culture - unless you were exciting and went for greige instead. And if got really bad, it became a pissing contest of how few possessions one had instead of reflecting on what was personally/culturally valuable. Those folks were the most obnoxious. I guess it's comparable to how "aesthetics" became a thing divorced from something substantive, like a subculture or lifestyle. Minimalism moved from a philosophy to something more based in appearance. On a related note, I really hate the term "Japandi" bc the Scandi style was initially influenced by Japanese zen Buddhism. And then for some reason, the zen aesthetic became shorthand for Japanese visual culture altogether? Even though, like any other culture, Japanese culture is also rich with sumptuous color, decoration, and ornamentation and zen Buddhism is only one niche aspect of it. I still think it's still possible to be minimalist while honoring one's culture, having color, warmth, texture and ornamentation, etc., without falling into it's previous pitfalls by approaching it more as a philosophy instead of a strict "aesthetic".
It’s proven that colorful and beautiful surroundings are essential to the child’s development, which is why children’s museums look like…that. It’s borderline unethical to create public spaces devoid of aesthetic value.
I'm failing to think of something more petty and less consequential to care about than this. You're basically a Karen crying to the HOA about not liking the look of a house that doesn't belong to you.
Apologies in advance for the long winded comment. I work with interior design, and minimalism/mid-century modern drives me batshit. Having to get exact color matches for fucking GREY... "The grey is a little too blue. Mine is more teal." No joke, this is what I have to deal with. Folks are WAY too concerned with how others view the interior of our most personal setting. Fucking backwards as hell. The "tastemakers" can find a long pole to bounce on. Gladly, it's reached it's zenith (at least in my opinion). Really hoping traditional furnishings in rugs and furniture makes a comeback sooner than later. Or even Bohemian is better. Find something that's enjoyable to look at. It might actually spark that joy everyone keeps trying to remove.
Um, ACTUALLY 🤓 The TARDIS isn't a normal phone booth but a police box. The phone is accessible from the outside and often had a direct line to the police station, while the inside could be used by cops for a small break, to read or fill in reports, or to stow suspects while waiting for backup.
i'm a minimalist, but i didn't give anyone money to teach me how. in fact, i stopped giving money to most people altogether. that's an important part of it. how many more things do i need to buy? how much of what is made to purchase is worth buying in the first place? a lot of my furniture and furnishings are secondhand, so while i have a desired aesthetic, it's come together slowly and piecemeal. it's not like i've hired a designer to throw away all of my lights and shapes. sometimes i ask midjourney to design rooms for me. it's easy to overindulge in something like that, which also isn't very min. (that's what minimalists (mins) call minimal. we don't have so much time for wordiness, as i'll get to later on.) sometimes, i might look at a mag on the rack at the market, but usually it's to laugh at how sterile and soulless it all is. i just don't like a lot of things. we live in a period where i can have ten thousand books on my computer, as well as all other forms of media. but, if I needed to have ten-thousand books on hand, that might be a different story. i have interesting things around - books and photos and things. it's not consistent. i am prone to redesigning my space on a whim, based on what is coming in and going out. of course, i don't have kids. i might. that changes things a little bit. but it doesn't change things as much as the baby/kid industry would like you to believe. remember in two to three years ago when similac killed those kids and nestle had to come to the rescue after the baby formula recall; or when j&j baby powder gave people cancer; or four years ago when beechnut and nestle and walmart and happy valley and a bunch of others tested way over the limit for arsenic and heavy metals in their baby foods and people foods? i know harland isn't suggesting people rush to the store to buy these things. i just get a little whatever sometimes. these people profit immensely from engineered obsolescence. it's actually obscene. it's obscenescence, probably. i knew a guy who once told me he liked the f*scist aesthetic, but didn't really go further. i do remember that he hated the outdoors, and had some affinity for brutalism. this individual had an outwardly "progressive" veneer (no race hatred or discrimination of minorities, bigotry, womanizing or misogyny, interest in discussing postmodern philosophy---meaning no reason to think him a staunch reactionary), but it was no surprise to me a few years later when he told me he was a hardcore anti-china hawk, in those exact terms. his min is dumb and ugly, just like his dog. car design died with the homer. what's more dangerous? not-legally-cars or not-legally-cheese? as far as outside aesthetics goes, well, rational and democratic social planning will play a large role in reshaping the way we interact with the world. ideally, we seek harmony and homeostasis. capitalism is the enemy of harmony. first we must remove our fetters, and that's gonna take priority in the immediate future. we'll rebuild the world after we win it from the people holding it hostage from us. it requires a political program based on the experiences of socialism in the twentieth century. the lesson learned is not that socialism was tried and failed. even so, the period of the bourgeois supplantation of feudalism by capitalism took the better part of a millennium, all told. the lesson is that there was and is an alternative to the filth that is stalinism and maoism, and all reactionary insidious anti-worker movements that have latched like ticks onto the movement for socialism, and which threaten to suck it completely dry, that its brittle husk may never again challenge the boardroom or the war room. read the world socialist web site. the bauhaus was just for you :)
Don't pick on Allbirds, they're the closest to a "good' show brand that I've dealt with in ages. Just grab something from Balenciaga. They're a goldmine.
I wonder if people would stop complaining about "modern architecture" (which I cannot stress enough, it sounds like "reject modernity and embrace tradition but make it leftist" which is. Not a good thing.) if there were simply more color involved. I honestly have never liked the overly-complex and dysfunctional designs. It's not about minimalism, it's about moving away from gaudy spiky BS and making something that actually does look good. I've literally never understood why this "fuck modern buildings" thing is so common on the left, especially when a lot of the "modern" buildings being claimed about literally aren't modern - either by being too old to count, or by literally being brutalist, which isn't modern, and the people whining about what they pretend is modern, nearly without fail, say they like brutalism. Hot take: A big gray rectangular prism is not "modern aesthetic" - just because something looks like a robot doesn't make it modern. That's not what modern means lmao
Every rich TH-camr has that same bland white-person house with white walls, one or two movie posters on the wall, basic-ass couch, table... an utter waste of space for someone with zero style or originality, again a great analogy for how unoriginal, tasteless, bland and empty modern culture and design is... I agree with all of this. Its so sad....
I like your video essays but i think they would be better if it didn't carry a tone of know-it-all/preachy. Like just a slight shift in tone and tempo could help
I know politicizing minimalism makes for good TH-cam content, and perhaps there is a major thread of "politics" running through the design style, but the reason that "minimalism" has taken the world by storm because it's cheaper to build. Period. It's always about money. I know the minimal aesthetic has been co-opted by the rich, and everything "minimal" is expected to be expensive. However, in architecture, having less details is always going to be cheaper.
I would really like your video as i agree with the design thing but you dropping a leftist parole every 30 second turns me off. Its ok i got it, you dont like trump, elon musk and everyone is rascist..god damn
The irony of writing FOUR books on minimalism
Damn you beat me to it. well I'm too lazy to delete my comment. I'm satisfied with being a copy cat.
Architect here. First time watching one of your videos. Very well done dipping into architectural theory and speaking with authority.
A follow up point I would add: after about a century of Modernism stripping architectural education down to a technical exercise, there are very few of us who are actually able to draw, or even imagine, anything more ambitious than a beige rectangle.
The most beautiful part of unique and detailed design is knowing that that beautiful handrail is a piece of a persons life made physical. We have very limited time on this earth and to know that someone spent some of their time making this functional thing into something beautiful is really powerful.
This was beautifully put!
Just want to say this is one of my new favorite channels. Long live the messy garage.
"Nature is the original Maximalist Designer" goes incredibly hard as a phrase
That 'citation' card is class, an excellent way to display info and sources. Keep up the killer work my guy.
Fr it looks so good
Brutalism catching some strays in this one.
I absolutely love ecobrutalism. When done properly it's a beautiful contrast of harsh, angled, solid, bleak concrete with the lush greenery of the plantings and can create really cool urban areas especially in warmer climates.
@@JamesConollyLives5353 SO BASED
This was a really interesting topic. I never thought about minimalism having a connection to racism.
read James Baldwin "On Being White and Other Lies" Whiteness is an ideology of minimalism
There's an interview with Stephen Fry in which he discusses similar ideas: “If you look out of the window in the continental United States and in North America generally, everything is stunningly beautiful that nature has done, and that’s true in the world, whatever it is, in nature, it seems to us incontestably and unconditionally lovely. We find it simply beautiful. And the only things we ever see that are ugly when we look out are things we have made. And if generations of children grow up believing that they belong to a species that can only uglify, that has no role in making things beautiful, that cannot with its own hands and its own ingenuity make things that are lovely, only things that are at best serviceable and at worst hideous and an imposition and a blot and an insult to the nature into which we were born, then there’s a guilt, there’s a self oppressing guilt that the entire species feels, that we all feel because we feel that we are a worthless race. We don’t beautify. We uglify. And there is no excuse for that.”
I grew up and still live in an old European town with XVIII-XIX century architecture. Only with age I gained an understanding of how lucky I am to be able to enjoy this beauty daily.
I also thought that I might not be smart enough/do not have a good taste to understand 'modern architecture' aka concrete and glass boxes. Good to know that disdain for these buildings is quite common.
There's a similar phenomenon happening with the historic "brown bars" in the Netherlands-- they keep getting bought up by international chain corporations who gut them and put ugly generic crap in their place. There is a movement to grant them protected status as monuments, which I really hope continues to gain support.
This video unearthed a buried memory from elementary school, I remember in art class we had this new young teacher who was trying to teach us about yarn bombing, if you haven't heard of it it's basically a knit or crochet installation in a public space, kind of like yarn graffiti. I wish more people knew about it and practiced it! She showed us this one of someone putting a sweater on the rocky statue in Philly. It's a really cool way to combat and bring color to these corporate flat spaces. I always enjoy your in-depth looks!
As a Philly girl, stay away from our Rocky statues.
This one dude bragged about being so minimalist on Reddit recently:
"My Wife and I just had our yearly "ebay day" where we try sell basically everything we dont need on ebay. While my wife is a heavy consumer, I am the absolute opposite. When i first met her i had absolutely nothing in my apartment except a kitchentable, a 10 year old TV, my old xbox one and my Queensize bed.
Today my wife offered around 100 articles on ebay. I only added 4 articles. All books and a watch i dont wear anymore.
I feel great not owning anything at all except a bed, two motorbike helmets and still the same kitchentable."
They have a cat too (which comes with toys and dishes and brushes. And a kitchen and bathroom, etc. etc.... Guess who "owns", cleans, and presumably buys all the stuff for him to live a pleasant and cozy life and eat meals and pet his cat and exist comfortably in the modern world... It definitely isn't Mr Minimalist here.
I am all for rejecting overconsumption, but damn, I can't imagine a life without any creature comforts. That sounds miserable.
I was born after the 2000s and even I’ve noticed this. In ausytalia in the more run down streets like sunshine theres little areas with a milkbar with a faded sign and even that is something i can look at and be like “this feels nostalgic”
Thanks for doing this video man- for anyone else reading the comments; this is a good companion piece to Mr Spinks' photography site. Lot of good photos in there of culturally interesting architecture etc.
This form of bad minimalism (un-purposeful demising of detail) also reminds me of the internationalism movement in design involving Le Corb. He really appreciated modernity for the sake of its contrast against classicism and took design details form everywhere to make a style t hat would be efficient, and generic.
as soon as i have my own space to live i plan on decorating it as colorfully and as full of my interests as i can tolerate. i want my home to feel like it's lived in and cared about and it feels like a way to fight back against how frustrated minimalist design and the ideals it can represent makes me
I think we’ve also been gaslit as a society into believing that the beauty of everyday things is infeasible. Hypothetically, what are we saving this money for? When do we see the return on turning all future development into utilitarian shit no one wants or cares for?
Thank you so much! I seriously thought it was only me. I see this all the time in Sydney. The classic architecture of the huge, old Victorian houses are being bulldozed for concrete block duplexes, painted grey and white (to give dimension as there are few windows). I seriously thought it was just me. I noticed it and kept noticing it after my cousin came back from Abu Dhabi. She paid to have her furniture sent over because she couldn’t bring herself to sell it. To this day, the craftsmanship and the character of it is just so striking… I don’t see anything like it in anyone else’s house. That is what I want, not some of the mass produced, bland, boring, “straight line” designs…
im a woman of sheer laziness if anything else so my dorm room has for awhile looked minimalist and bland, but as i've lived here longer and longer things are being hung up on walls, trinkets decorate the top of my dresser and accumulated books and papers litter my desk. I run out of surface space for things so i buy a shelf to put them on, its a plain open rack shelf so i can see everything i could possibly need thats on it, my drawers are full of clothes but since ive started bringing more clothes from home i buy hangers to actually use my closet space. i've gotten back into painting so i hang my shitty paintings up to dry more than anything but they stay there long after. etcetera etcetera...
All of this is to say is that despite thinking myself as a minimalist just because i dont immediately have an aesthetic, doesn't mean i am. Ive watched my dorm room transform into a space where theres proof i actually live here. To say that blank minimalism is more practical would mean that it would be easier for me to throw out all my things, or shove them into closed boxes that would need to be hidden sight. You have to put active effort in to live like that, to hide any evidence of your existence in your own damn home.
i think thats why i wasn't too surprised when you linked minimalism to fascism or racism. To value a sleek unidentifiable space over anything visually interesting means you dont see value in creativity or individuality. You would rather everything look uniform than to risk something offending you. i dont know how to end this besides saying thank you for the video, you make great points that really put the general publics disdain for sad beige minimalism into words.
Hahaha the prison cell had more furniture.
This subject is super important to me and I agree with everything you said.
I'm a car guy and most car guys I know either fully hate modern cars or like very few of them, we got four-door BMW ripoffs in grey, black or if you're feeling daring, red.
I don't count the bros with lambo or Tesla pictures as car guys. At all. They're just overall obnoxious about things they do, they're not interested in cars as anything more than an status symbol. And they're bad at it because exotic supercars are the Funko pops of cars they're dime a dozen.
Hell there's this following of more guys appreciating 2000s and 90s daily drivers because of how unique and full of character they used to have.
my favorite decade for cars has to be the 60's !! i hate how theyre all so similar now
This makes me think of when George Lucas said he designed the prequel trilogy to have a more romantic feel to the architecture and no straighr lines in the designs of the space ships. He did that to contrast the original trilogy where the Empire ruled and everything was massed produced, cheap, and had straight edges.
Another great video!! Original takes on important topics that nobody else is discussing - I'm crossing all my fingers for your view counts going up. You deserve it!
I've been collecting little bon mots about the Cybertruck, like the lack of mirrors and stuff, and had somehow missed the "single series wiring" concept (tho I knew how vulnerable to getting wet the supposedly "off-road capable" thing was.) Now I know exactly why the bitch shorts after driving thru a muddy ditch, so thanks for that!
As a carpenter and alive person i notice a behavior of begrudging how much things cost (including the taxes that go into the department of bollards) while also reaching for status via possessions. I reckon this may bias toward more, cheaper shit. Less money paid to craftspeople and manufacturers to make better shit that will be valued further into the future.
Not an aesthetic comment but maybe a little bit related to the shallow rewards of consumption vs the increased peace of doing the harder internal work.
I appreciate the perspective you bring, maybe be conscious of the ratio of cynicism vs a forward looking proactivity. As a participant i can hear about a problem for a bit and then lose interest if we are not redirecting toward action (thanks for the call to action at the end). Maybe I'm avoiding feeling doomy. All this is hopefully not taken as a personal criticism.
Keep writing man :)
Borned in the 80s, things seemed to be more lively. Now, it's concrete blocks and lazily planned.
Rich people have their own sort of minimalism. “I need to flex really hard about how much money I have, but can’t be bothered if some millennials apartments layout makes my place look like a junkyard.”
My hometown has a very famous brutalist city hall which actually is very interesting to see. The interesting part, I think, is that it's a brutalist building surrounded by non-brutalist buildings. If it was ALL brutalist it'd be awful. But by adding it to a varied style of buildings it actually improves the whole. I think it's the same with minimalism. If it's a style among styles it's fine. If it's ALL minimalism, it's terrible.
One of your best essays. This is a topic to discuss over beverages.
Suggestion, give credit to the tiktokers you share in your video. Maybe a graphic or in the description.
Thanks for this video. Putting into words a lot of things in my mind on the daily.
Yes, indeed. Nice video. While I sometimes find ornate designs pretty, pompous, kitschy and cheezy, I've learned to love them. After more than a decade (!) of soulless, clinical, minimalist chromatic design you start to appreciate details in older designs again. Maybe that kitsch had its place and we've lost something. Also for the love of god, bring back colors!
So interesting and gave me so much to think about! Thank you!
Remember that billionaires dorm room design??? Minimalizm
New subscriber!! Awesome video
It makes me so depressed how style-absent and soulless our modern era is. It echoes how superficial everything else has become> Rampant consumerism, following, monetizing everything, homogeny.... I hate seeing beautiful buildings and spaces redesigned as a big gray concrete space wasting square footage... we're all lonely and I think we need to redesign EVERYTHING about our towns and cities. If life's just working and buying, that sounds hellishly dystopian and it LOOKS that way. I'd love to see more crazy 80s Memphis group design again!
I blame Ikea.
IKEA ties in with the idea that minimalism is a capitalistic wet dream because it’s easy to mass produce.
I never liked their furniture. 😒
I never liked their furniture. 😒
Great post! I'm so bored of minimalism, the trend that won't die and makes everything ugly and the same. Every indie coffee shop regardless of the city is identically bland...
We have this happening in Vancouver. Although they try to work their way around the corporate minimalist asthetic by slapping up wacky neon lights or putting up giant bird statues.
I agree with this so much! Going absolutely anywhere that's been recently developed is mindnumbing. These miserable facades are then only made more depressing by the landscaping choice to include "decorative" plants that are unsuited for a given area's climate.
Nothing makes a constitutional more enjoyable than walking past block after block of gray boxes with dying foliage in smaller gray boxes! /s
Yeah I’ll take the that’s so raven bedroom over this tbh:/ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Like your way of quoting), quite unique
Also at first I thought that the garage was part of the staitment against overt minimalism xD
Right there with you, I've been saying this for 20 years now at least. This lazy minimalist design has overrun every single aspect of our lives. The world has always had its problems to cause depression, but I don't think it's ever been as aesthetically ugly and depressing as it is now.
Thank you Harland, very cool
Omg- it's been driving me crazy who you remind me of & I just realized it's the love interest from "Just one of the guys". You even kind of dress the same. Eyebrows especially.
Artistry and good old-fashioned hard work went out the window when "Maximized profits" took over.
I get where you're coming from with the minimalism equates with industrial society and the critique of that sort of USSR Soviet brutalist style. Isn't it also valid to equate minimalism and efficiency with a sort of anti-consumerist ethic? The other end of the spectrum could be said to be hoarders who cram every inch of their space full of knick knacks and useless junk ordered off of the home shopping network. In some ways I think the millennial generations embrace of minimalism is somewhat of a pendulum swinging back away from an older generation who were so overwhelmed with all of the choices of things they could buy compared to the scarcity of their childhood that they tended to over consume. It's all interesting food for thought and could be interpreted in multiple ways. I think there's a lot of good reasons to pursue efficient designs these days, what with our crumbling infrastructure and as you mentioned the shortage of building materials and resources, coupled with our growing population. But I also agree that there's very little care given to the aesthetics of public spaces and it does destroy the everyday experience of moving through a modern city. I think a lot of this has to do with poor civil planning as much as it has to do with architectural and decorative styles.
I will Apple some credit, the first couple of iMac designs were at least unique. The iconic colored bubble shape and then the one that looked like a lamp.
Great video!
I love cars, old cars are so great. Not trying to say my 90s Honda is a work of art, but it does look good! It has character, and even the way it drives has character. A lot of new cars just feel… numb. I don’t have aspirations of owning any newer car, I just hope I can buy a Datsun 240z someday
Oh you're lucky to have five-over-ones. My district only allows 3-high greige residential made of sticks, so you hear every footstep of your neighbors, and you gotta drive to get q-tips.
And greige is two colors of paint: an olive-grey off-white for the plaster, and a bright white accent for wood trim. I was established at the dawn of Martha Stewart with any pastel, and then desaturated around 2014 for Grey Plank.
so i used to be really into minimalism and honestly i think the appeal of it is just the possibility. It's so exciting to have a new clean space because of all of the potential it holds for life to unfold and make its marks on. it's exciting to travel with only a backpack because of all the adventures you will go on and the memories you will imbue into the few items that you carry.
but true minimalism robs us of that and in a really sort of sneaky way robs us of hope. Hope that our spaces can be anything other than a cool toned gray and white box that houses anything other than cool toned gray and white box furniture and hope that our lives could amount to anything other than the work potential that capitalist overlords see in us. I feel like that might sound like a really extreme extrapolation, but i feel like the aesthetic discourages us from interacting with material reality for fear of making it less pristine, which I think leads down some really sad and dark lines of thinking. (Ope, just got to the point in the video where you say almost exactly that)
To cheer you up! There is this church called La Sagrada familia in Barcelona Spain that is being built right now and will be completed in 2026.
super niche but to anyone who lives in Gwinnett, Georgia: are you also tired of all the big gray warehouses they keep tearing down trees to build?? but also are inexplicably like always empty?
This video is swank...I dug it!
are you talking about me??
If so, I...I will try to do better. 😢
Can we really return to artisan design without recreating the wealth disparities that existed back then?
DUDE!THIS SHIT HERE MAN! I swear shit all sucks...
May I make a tiny request?
When the "from the desk of Harland Spinks" citation cards come up, can they stay on the screen a bit longer? I usually consider myself a speed reader but I never get to look at all of the content bc I get distracted with the esthetic of "official documentation markings"
I mean I can pause it also but it would be much easier to digest if possible
Lovely essay. I love practical and efficient… but also love beautiful. Can’t it be both? 😅
I don't know if I'm the only one who remembers it this way, but the 80s was sepia toned (practically), with hideous brown architecture and everything smelled like a cigarette butt ( the new construction anyway, I grew up in New York city so all the art deco architecture is not included)
…right on right on…as usual…
God save the Wallpaper!
Bro. Keep it up
More youtubers should find a way to work the PS1 startup sound into their videos tbh
Best video so far.
I study fascism, this was so good. Thank you for mentioning the "little" things and idealogies that encourage fascist thinking.
I think you can combine minimalism with beautiful craftsmanship. Nothing beautiful about cheap mass produced clutter
I've been hating on the new prescriptive brand of Apple "minimalism" for 10 years lol. While I can understand the appeal on a superficial level, what it became was a strict prescriptive design language/lifestyle devoid of color, warmth, and culture - unless you were exciting and went for greige instead. And if got really bad, it became a pissing contest of how few possessions one had instead of reflecting on what was personally/culturally valuable. Those folks were the most obnoxious.
I guess it's comparable to how "aesthetics" became a thing divorced from something substantive, like a subculture or lifestyle. Minimalism moved from a philosophy to something more based in appearance.
On a related note, I really hate the term "Japandi" bc the Scandi style was initially influenced by Japanese zen Buddhism. And then for some reason, the zen aesthetic became shorthand for Japanese visual culture altogether? Even though, like any other culture, Japanese culture is also rich with sumptuous color, decoration, and ornamentation and zen Buddhism is only one niche aspect of it.
I still think it's still possible to be minimalist while honoring one's culture, having color, warmth, texture and ornamentation, etc., without falling into it's previous pitfalls by approaching it more as a philosophy instead of a strict "aesthetic".
let's see paul allens minimalist kill room
Every local city has a council and a planning commission that actually does have say over these things. Get involved if you hate this shit like i do!
"people like kim kardashian now live in monochromatic temples of nothingness" "these structures act as sparks of divinity" nothing but bangers
It’s proven that colorful and beautiful surroundings are essential to the child’s development, which is why children’s museums look like…that. It’s borderline unethical to create public spaces devoid of aesthetic value.
Just think about the bedrooms in the film for 1984
7:50
Ouch, Brutilist fans out here catching strays lol
Did you live in Minneapolis at some point? Great work, regardless
this vid slapped
I grew up in Sauget, so life was grey and noxious green in the womb.
Everything moves in cycles. People will tire of minimalist and brutalist design. You just wait. Art deco is due a comeback.
Yes! Thank you. Everything is so drab and ugly now. Ever watch Miami Vice? Everything was beautiful. Now it's bland and boring. Very depressing
4 books? a true minimalist would only need to write 1 book.
I'm failing to think of something more petty and less consequential to care about than this. You're basically a Karen crying to the HOA about not liking the look of a house that doesn't belong to you.
Apologies in advance for the long winded comment. I work with interior design, and minimalism/mid-century modern drives me batshit. Having to get exact color matches for fucking GREY... "The grey is a little too blue. Mine is more teal." No joke, this is what I have to deal with. Folks are WAY too concerned with how others view the interior of our most personal setting. Fucking backwards as hell. The "tastemakers" can find a long pole to bounce on. Gladly, it's reached it's zenith (at least in my opinion). Really hoping traditional furnishings in rugs and furniture makes a comeback sooner than later. Or even Bohemian is better. Find something that's enjoyable to look at. It might actually spark that joy everyone keeps trying to remove.
I also carry only a phone, some clothes and a Nintendo switch. Because I’m homeless lol
Um, ACTUALLY 🤓 The TARDIS isn't a normal phone booth but a police box. The phone is accessible from the outside and often had a direct line to the police station, while the inside could be used by cops for a small break, to read or fill in reports, or to stow suspects while waiting for backup.
The Sheetrockolypse
i'm a minimalist, but i didn't give anyone money to teach me how. in fact, i stopped giving money to most people altogether. that's an important part of it. how many more things do i need to buy? how much of what is made to purchase is worth buying in the first place?
a lot of my furniture and furnishings are secondhand, so while i have a desired aesthetic, it's come together slowly and piecemeal. it's not like i've hired a designer to throw away all of my lights and shapes. sometimes i ask midjourney to design rooms for me. it's easy to overindulge in something like that, which also isn't very min. (that's what minimalists (mins) call minimal. we don't have so much time for wordiness, as i'll get to later on.) sometimes, i might look at a mag on the rack at the market, but usually it's to laugh at how sterile and soulless it all is.
i just don't like a lot of things. we live in a period where i can have ten thousand books on my computer, as well as all other forms of media. but, if I needed to have ten-thousand books on hand, that might be a different story. i have interesting things around - books and photos and things. it's not consistent. i am prone to redesigning my space on a whim, based on what is coming in and going out.
of course, i don't have kids. i might. that changes things a little bit. but it doesn't change things as much as the baby/kid industry would like you to believe. remember in two to three years ago when similac killed those kids and nestle had to come to the rescue after the baby formula recall; or when j&j baby powder gave people cancer; or four years ago when beechnut and nestle and walmart and happy valley and a bunch of others tested way over the limit for arsenic and heavy metals in their baby foods and people foods?
i know harland isn't suggesting people rush to the store to buy these things. i just get a little whatever sometimes. these people profit immensely from engineered obsolescence. it's actually obscene. it's obscenescence, probably.
i knew a guy who once told me he liked the f*scist aesthetic, but didn't really go further. i do remember that he hated the outdoors, and had some affinity for brutalism. this individual had an outwardly "progressive" veneer (no race hatred or discrimination of minorities, bigotry, womanizing or misogyny, interest in discussing postmodern philosophy---meaning no reason to think him a staunch reactionary), but it was no surprise to me a few years later when he told me he was a hardcore anti-china hawk, in those exact terms. his min is dumb and ugly, just like his dog.
car design died with the homer.
what's more dangerous? not-legally-cars or not-legally-cheese?
as far as outside aesthetics goes, well, rational and democratic social planning will play a large role in reshaping the way we interact with the world. ideally, we seek harmony and homeostasis. capitalism is the enemy of harmony. first we must remove our fetters, and that's gonna take priority in the immediate future. we'll rebuild the world after we win it from the people holding it hostage from us. it requires a political program based on the experiences of socialism in the twentieth century. the lesson learned is not that socialism was tried and failed. even so, the period of the bourgeois supplantation of feudalism by capitalism took the better part of a millennium, all told. the lesson is that there was and is an alternative to the filth that is stalinism and maoism, and all reactionary insidious anti-worker movements that have latched like ticks onto the movement for socialism, and which threaten to suck it completely dry, that its brittle husk may never again challenge the boardroom or the war room.
read the world socialist web site.
the bauhaus was just for you :)
Im gonna start telling I'm maximalist.
LET HIM COOK
I’m more into Hoarderalism
Don't pick on Allbirds, they're the closest to a "good' show brand that I've dealt with in ages. Just grab something from Balenciaga. They're a goldmine.
I wonder if people would stop complaining about "modern architecture" (which I cannot stress enough, it sounds like "reject modernity and embrace tradition but make it leftist" which is. Not a good thing.) if there were simply more color involved. I honestly have never liked the overly-complex and dysfunctional designs. It's not about minimalism, it's about moving away from gaudy spiky BS and making something that actually does look good. I've literally never understood why this "fuck modern buildings" thing is so common on the left, especially when a lot of the "modern" buildings being claimed about literally aren't modern - either by being too old to count, or by literally being brutalist, which isn't modern, and the people whining about what they pretend is modern, nearly without fail, say they like brutalism. Hot take: A big gray rectangular prism is not "modern aesthetic" - just because something looks like a robot doesn't make it modern. That's not what modern means lmao
Every rich TH-camr has that same bland white-person house with white walls, one or two movie posters on the wall, basic-ass couch, table... an utter waste of space for someone with zero style or originality, again a great analogy for how unoriginal, tasteless, bland and empty modern culture and design is... I agree with all of this. Its so sad....
nordic prison chic
Because life has gotten more base and ugly.
The relationship mininal design = pick me culture 😢😢😢😢😢😢
I like your video essays but i think they would be better if it didn't carry a tone of know-it-all/preachy. Like just a slight shift in tone and tempo could help
I know politicizing minimalism makes for good TH-cam content, and perhaps there is a major thread of "politics" running through the design style, but the reason that "minimalism" has taken the world by storm because it's cheaper to build. Period. It's always about money. I know the minimal aesthetic has been co-opted by the rich, and everything "minimal" is expected to be expensive. However, in architecture, having less details is always going to be cheaper.
I would really like your video as i agree with the design thing but you dropping a leftist parole every 30 second turns me off. Its ok i got it, you dont like trump, elon musk and everyone is rascist..god damn