The Uniform Uglification of American Life

If walls could talk, they would tell stories about historical turmoil, beauty, wealth, and the uglification of architecture. Trends come and go but people forget the history behind such trends, whether they were long or short-lived.

The evidence is out in the open, for all to see. People are busy and overlook the ugliness surrounding them, an ugliness which is meant to be depressing and demoralizing.

Beautiful architecture is happy and exalting. That is why we visit art museums, palaces, European churches, and art galleries. For a few minutes of our lives, we want to experience beauty, creativity, and unimaginable opulence.

In 1960s America, many beautiful and historical buildings were torn down, replaced by ugly concrete and steel towers, utilitarian and easy to maintain. A quick search reveals that historic buildings were demolished across the United States because of “economic pressures, urban renewal policies, shifting architectural tastes, and limited preservation awareness.”

About the same time, the Soviet-controlled Iron Curtain countries also destroyed historical buildings and replaced them with ugly concrete blocks of utilitarian communist Bauhaus architecture, a resilient, simple, ugly, grey concrete and steel buildings, monuments to the Bolshevik communist revolution, no elements of former bourgeois society despised by uneducated communist agitators and rulers.

Bauhaus architecture was the child of Walter Gropius in Weimar and the German Bauhaus school founded by him in 1919. Depressing and plain, made of glass, steel, and concrete, it was Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) which became part of the modernist architecture exported all over the world.

Bauhaus existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Then there is former President Obama’s library, a modernist form of ugliness, a cross between a high security prison and a Star Wars movie set.

Significant and beautiful buildings from various monarchies in Europe were destroyed by Bolsheviks to make room for their hideous communist-style architecture which was depressing and demoralizing to look at. The destruction was called systematization of society, testing how much the population was willing to accept the communist oppression before they snapped.

After the Covid lockdowns I noticed the emergence of a dispiriting trend of change of all the formerly happy buildings of fast-food restaurants. The building remodeling was the same, shades of grey, light grey, dark grey, black, and brown, all dispirited and depressive colors. It was a twenty-first century form of minimalism and sophistication, I told myself. But mood is mood and I could not argue in a positive way about the blanket of grey.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color grey because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were grey, beige, black, and more grey. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was grey.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were grey, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all grey. There was so much grey to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color grey was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our happy and colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry. I recognized the bothersome uniformity from my previous twenty years of life under communism.

Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, light grey, medium grey, with barely lit stores as if to conceal the stains of grey misery.

After the lockdowns public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to various shades of grey, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in grey and it was cheap?

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that homes and cars painted in less showy colors sell much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.” Rich Americans call those who like bright colors, Lilly Pulitzer people. The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store, which was always decorated with red, white, and green way before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the uniform uglification of architecture is just one way to do so.