Building or Dying - a reality written on the landscape

Tell Me How This Ends ^ | 11 Oct, 2025 | Chris Bray

[MtnClimber]

This is important, and at some point you should slow down for fifteen minutes to watch it carefully:

Youtube: How did the world get so ugly?

Just give him the first 1:30, and you’ll begin to see where he’s headed. But then keep going, because he expands on the point. We tell a story about ourselves with the things we choose to build, and the built environment we choose to inhabit. We communicate our respect for ourselves, and for others, by the reality of our stuff. Who are we? What’s the significance of our lives? What do we deserve? Screenshot:

So:

How interesting that societies full of ugliness are experiencing demographic decline. How interesting that the most wonderfully progressive places are full of trash and decay.

At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, every few months I drive a couple hundred miles to stand on the steps of this building:

The Inyo County courthouse is Eastern California’s “only example of monumental Neoclassical Revival public architecture,” built in 1921 by an agricultural county of a few thousand people. Inyo now has a population of a little under 19,000 people, in a county that’s bigger than Vermont, and a just a bit smaller than Massachusetts. The place lacks resources. I was across the street from this courthouse last year just after a serious traffic accident, talking to a business owner about how hard it had been to pull together some volunteer firefighters to respond to the crash; eventually, the VFD down the highway in Lone Pine sent an engine. Lightly populated, lacking in wealth, full of thoughtful beauty and dignity.

The hallways of the courthouse are lined with the pictures of the people who have occupied positions of responsibility in the county:

The interiors are layered with OSHA-compliant modern features and cheap office furniture, but you can see the history in the features:

And so of course the State of California, which centralized authority over courthouses in 2002, is working to replace the Inyo County courthouse. This building will eventually be “vacated” in favor of a “new modular courthouse.”

History is cyclical, and it’s not that hard to figure out where we are in the cycle. Here’s the place in Los Angeles that would later be renamed MacArthur Park:

Same neighborhood, currently:

How wonderfully progressive. It’s a huge relief that we’ve defeated the darkness of what America used to be.

[MtnClimber]

FYI, Architecture

[sauropod]

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[ProtectOurFreedom]

Good post. Thanks.

We vacationed in the UK at the end of August through early September and I walked the River Thames from Westminster to The Tower of London. I had the same reaction as the narrator — so much gorgeous and monumental architecture going back centuries juxtaposed to the horrific “modern” architecture which is close to brutalism.

It’s funny the narrator chose to initially focus on lamp posts. Our little town on the San Francisco peninsula recently undertook a program to upgrade its lampposts. We had gorgeous mid-century classical lampposts throughout town. The city swapped all the ones mid-block for a contemporary sleek and very “blah” design. I was appalled at the city’s decision to do that, just as the narrator is.

The thing that gets me is that our classical architects designed beautiful buildings, bridges, public works, and monuments with only paper, pen and ink drawings and no modern electric tools, diesel powered machines, or CAD systems. Yet, the more we use modern systems and the easier it becomes to design and build things, the uglier things get.

I was unaware of the push to standardize California courthouses. What a shame to lose the Inyo County classical courthouse. I hope the preservation people can prevail.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I find it a bit ironic that Sheehan Quirke is the arbiter of beautiful and ugly.

[ClearCase_guy]

Bfl

[faucetman]

The guy was a very good speaker (narrator). But he needs a haircut or at the very least, a comb.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Wow. Sobering difference. Degradation.

[spintreebob]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some think complex, intricate in beauty. Some think simple, bold is beauty. Some think appearance that gives comfort, security is beauty. Some think that beauty is to be made uncomfortable with challenges to what we have always accepted.