I think more colourful buildings would genuinely make a positive change to how a lot of urban environments look and feel. However, I disagree it used to be any better, particularly if the claim is it used to be better because more cars were blue.

Pic related. I especially like the billboard taken straight out of They Live in this photo.

>>458920
The world is indeed getting greyer.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c

Fiat is apparently doing something about that, though.

>>458922
I think there's two things you have to acknowledge here beyond the location itself being grim:

1. Photographs of past always washout colours. The turquoise lorry in particular would be a lot more striking in real life.

2. It also doesn't help that around the 1970s and 80s you had earth tones taking hold which now look disgusting to us in our world of harsh blacks and whites.

>>458924
Weirdly, the no-cost colour option on my new car was red. Maybe Kia think the same. Maybe they just have a shitload of spare red paint timing out.

That image is from, at the earliest, the late 1980s. That model of Scania lorry didn't exist prior to then. I'm sure a real petrolhead could ID some of the others and give us an even better timeframe. Whilst the image appears faintly yellowed, it's not massively altering the colour pallete, as all the people in the image look quite natural in complexion. Also stop nitpicking the image and explain what you mean by "How come things aren't colourful anymore?". When was this country all colourful and bright? We could do a lot of things to make this country's urban brickscapes nicer to look at, but what you suggesting? A GTA style spray shop on every street? A turqoise Scania isn't doing much to roll back decades of social atomisation and economic dissatisfaction, which is the real issue with this country.

This post was supposed to be acompanied by an image of Manchester's Market Street from two different decades, but Brian keeps telling me the "413: request entity is too large" so I'm trying without it.

>>458929

I can't get a good look at the other numberplates, but the one on the wagon is a G prefix, which confims 1989 at the earliest.

>>458929
>When was this country all colourful and bright? We could do a lot of things to make this country's urban brickscapes nicer to look at, but what you suggesting? A GTA style spray shop on every street? A turqoise Scania isn't doing much to roll back decades of social atomisation and economic dissatisfaction, which is the real issue with this country.

Don't hold back, lad. Tell us how you really feel.

The past was shit.

>>458936
So is the present.

>>458936
>Rehousing enquiries

Imagine that. Not only giving the poor a terrace house but also the chance to apply for a modern high-rise.

>>458926

> It also doesn't help that around the 1970s and 80s you had earth tones taking hold which now look disgusting to us in our world of harsh blacks and whites.

The early episodes of shows like Dallas are a convincing testament to that.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNe_4Pfa7yA


I'm not a big fan of today's minimalist black and white, or white and black design language. At least not without reservations. Yes, it can look incredibly sleek, but it always has kind of a sterile, antiseptic quality to it.

There'll probably be a time when people will want to liven it up a bit again.

>>458934
I don't really understand why you've said that. That's the kind of thing you say when someone's really pissed off, not expressing an opinion about the effects of neo-liberalism on the UK. An opinion you're entitled to disagree with, but I think it holds more water than "if we painted cars yellow we'd be happy".

I wonder if my Market Street thing will upload as a .jpg.

>>458938

A terraced house with no heating, no insulation and no bathroom, but plenty of rats and cockroaches. Those old terraces were utterly squalid and the high-rises that replaced them were often scarcely better.

>>458942
I was looking into it earlier and one theory about the earthy tones of the 1970s was as a natural progression towards nature as a form of environmentalism that was in the popular consciousness. It's an interesting thing to think about with all the wood panelling compared to our plastics and glass.

It makes you wonder if there's something of an ideological undertone to it all on our end. Obviously we care more about the environment than back then but I don't think nature as a concept has as much resonance.

>>458944
You're being a boring windbag. Yes, it's all miserable and grey and always has been, how cool it is to be a tedious misanthrope. I'm glad you're taking time away from answering your many party invitations to speak with us this evening.

>>458946

>It makes you wonder if there's something of an ideological undertone to it all on our end. Obviously we care more about the environment than back then but I don't think nature as a concept has as much resonance.


Not necessarily ideological. The sterility of today's visual design to me also has to do with the fact that we're surrounded by highly advanced technology that in a very real sense would seem like pure science fiction to somebody from the 70s stepping out of a time machine into our world today.

Maybe in that respect it's been coming full circle, because in some ways it's exactly how the 1960s and 70s predicted the future to be. An orgy of minimalist black and white sterility. From films like 2001 and many budget space movies to Star Wars and others.

What we have today is not a design movement that's entirely new to the 2010s or 2020s. In more recent times, it started with things like Men In Black and its retro-futurism which back-referenced that same kind of 1960s and 70s sci fi aesthetic. The only difference is that today's design it's even more pared back and minimalistic.

Take this music video from 1995, which shows its kinship to Men In Black which came out two years later, but really doesn't look vastly different from today's aesthetic. Granted, you've got 30 year old computer CGI in it that looks comically dated now, but it's still significant for that point in time and some things that came after it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P4A1K4lXDo

>>458946
>You're being a boring windbag. Yes, it's all miserable and grey and always has been, how cool it is to be a tedious misanthrope. I'm glad you're taking time away from answering your many party invitations to speak with us this evening.
Feel free to tell me what this thread was meant to be about then? Or where I engaged in anything resembling mysanthropy? There are reasons the urban environments of 2023 can feel quite miserable, but if you don't want to talk about it, don't make threads about it. The OP said "things used to be more colourful" and then implied that's why towns felt less shit in the past, but that's not why. However, if commercial rents weren't so high, if public transport wasn't so shit and the social fabric itself not so frayed, maybe that would be a difference maker.

But perhaps you're right. If we paint over all the closed shop fronts and get people driving cars on credit that are blue instead of silver, that'll make all the difference.

>>458928
If you look at some timelines, red used to be the most common non-shade, and at one point was the most common colour on the road. Those were good times for colourful cars.

Some of you might like to browse through the Aesthetics Wiki - https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/By_Decade
If you can bear the teenage identity stuff, there're some interesting articles about design styles through the recent ages.

I'd be interested in reading from a better source, if anyone has one.

I saw a metallic brown car the other day. Of all the colours in the world for a car, why would you go brown?

There's been a couple of home renovations on my street. They've both gone for the most soulless and bland grey shit you can imagine. One has a black BMW and the other a white 4x4.

>>458958

It's a new kind of brutalism that's practically everywhere these days. Everything's just big white and black boxes. They've been raising a new block of luxury or upmarket flats around here, and it honestly looks like somebody threw together a bunch of shoe boxes.

People are just afraid of colour. There's no individuality, it's all just conformist.

With cars, at least you could argue that some colours just have better resale value because they're a certain kind of neutral colour that will find a buyer quickly. Most commercial fleet vehicles are white, grey, or black because that way you won't have to worry much about selling on a bright green or otherwise garishly coloured car.

But maybe that kind of thinking extends to buildings and homes as well. Where people now like to keep it neutral to help increase its value. And where breaking with conformity jeopardises that.

It's also been called investor's architecture. Where everything is streamlined to maximise profit. No quirks, no edges, just bland inoffensive designs that you can flip at a premium.

>>458958
There's a house near me, a semi on a corner. The whole house is rendered and painted grey. The waist high walls around the front garden are rendered and painted grey. The floor of the front garden is entirely concreted and painted grey. It looks hideous. It's well maintained, and I guess technically well done, but it looks shite compared to the red brick houses on the rest of the street.

Also the trend of white rendered walls with grey roof, grey door, and greyish/charcoalish window frames. Reeks of new money and shit taste.

>>458958
Same trend here, most new renovations are grey, white and black.
A decade ago it used to be all brown houses. Brown bricks, brown windows and if the home owner was tacky enough, some of thise shitty plastic pillars in brown.

>>458920

I think a longer and more roundabout explanation goes back to the boomer generation. Everything that came from their parents was dreary and dull because there was little choice back then, but then as they come of age into the new industrial era suddenly the choice of consumer goods and the availability of colours explodes and this goes hand in hand with the rise of hippie culture, and this carries on into the 70s and 80s.
But then as millenials have came on to the scene, they see their parents, and their grandparents things, and the decades of accumulated Stuff is such a horrible mis-matched mess (as well as the newest generations being unbelievably spoilt for choice) that there had been a desire to wipe the slate clean of all that and start fresh with a sterile minimalist look.
I think give it another decade and we'll see colours start to come back

I personally think that building materials count just as much, possibly more. Buildings assembled from rendered breeze blocks or premade panels over a steel frame, windows which just have one panel and metal or plastic frames, those kind of things are so lifeless and dreary. They age worse than wood, or brick, or masonry in that they either get covered with gunk really quickly when their only appeal was that they looked all pristine when new, or they don't change appearance at all and have this bloodless, computer-generated look.

When they do add colour to these things they either go for purple or teal, which is the colour of corporate logos, or they go for 'tasteful' restrained colours, which only look good when they naturally occur, and otherwise look incongruous or just dull.

So yeah we've fucked it basically, fat chance of stone or brick blockwork coming back.

>>458922

Where is this photo from? Because there's an awful lot of places around where I live where you could have taken that photo yesterday and the only real difference would be the models of the cars.

I suspect the same can be said of almost everywhere in Britain, and the only places you can really call nice are either a handful of really old posh towns like Edinburgh, York or Colchester or whatever, or extensively regenerated chunks of city centres, which are inevitably still surrounded by places just like that photo if you walk ten minutes down the road.

The essay “Refinement Culture” is a good read on this. While every car is grey, sports have done similar- less variation, for more wow. The same with films and music.