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Announcing: “The Modern World”

Why has there been such a decline in the quality (and beauty) of what we build?

Somewhere along the way, we traded beauty for efficiency, and I’m producing a video series about what's gone wrong.

Sheehan Quirke (who goes by The Cultural Tutor) is the narrator. I’m the producer. This is our shared vision.

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The problem of our aesthetic decline is so big that we’re blind to it.

The nicest cities are the oldest ones and the prettiest building in almost every city is bound to have been built before World War II. And it’s not just buildings. Just about everything you see on the streets these days — cars, signage, train stations, train tickets, benches, bollards, and lamp posts — have also lost their luster.

Logos, too.

Just last month, people were up in arms after Cracker Barrel changed its logo from something classic and interesting to something flat and generic. Gone was the old man. Gone was the hand-drawn feel. Gone was the charm. What replaced it was an insipid logo that looked like something an intern threw together in Canva.

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In the same week, the City of Austin did a similarly bland and uninspired rebrand.

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Both of those poor designs are part of a much broader trend of interesting logos being replaced by sterile ones.

You may be thinking: “Dude, it’s just a few buildings and a few logos. What’s the big deal?”

The style of a culture is a reflection of its inner spirit. If you want to understand a society, don’t listen to what it says about itself. Look at what it creates. Aesthetics, then, are not a trivial afterthought but the reflection of a culture’s essence: who we are, what we value, and what we believe about the good life.

This pre-pilot episode is the beginning of a much longer series called The Modern World, which, if all goes according to plan, you’ll eventually be able to watch on Apple TV, Netflix, or a streaming service of the sort.

For this pilot episode, we traveled to London to compare the modern world to the Victorian period of 19th century England. The differences were obvious. For the Victorian-era English, ornamentation was a way to show off technological progress. For us, progress looks sleek, minimal, and efficient.

The difference in values is exemplified by Crossness Pumping Station, a sewage facility built in the 19th century to process humanity’s least glamorous export. And yet, it’s prettier than most of the churches we build today. It’s prettier because the Victorians believed that ordinary objects could (and should) be beautiful.

Right next to Crossness Pumping Station is the modern sewage facility that was built to replace it, which reflects a different set of values: convenience and efficiency. These days, we want things to do their job. Functionality is the priority. Charm and delight are generally afterthoughts.

Our world could be much more delightful, if only we wanted it that way.

My point isn’t that everything needs to look like Versailles or that we should put chandeliers in Dunkin’ Donuts. That’d be ridiculous. But beauty, charm, and interestingness are worth pursuing.

Sure, it’s not the cheapest or fastest way to do things, but I submit that the material costs aren’t what's holding us back. After all, we have the wealthiest society the world has ever seen, and things are still getting uglier.

Why did this happen? What should we do about it? What do these changes reveal about our modern world? That’s what this series is all about.

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As I mentioned above, this is the beginning of something much much bigger and if you'd like to follow along, enter your email here.

And if you have thoughts about the above, please send them along in a reply to this email. I'm curious to hear.

— David

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