It's sad to walk in an european city

Hello,

civilizations are born and die, and It's always sad to walk in an european country, because the beautifull, which is often the old, meet the ugly, which is too often the new.
There is a lot of softeness and poetry in old buildings. New buildings look too often like prisons.



Yes, I took two famous building, but even in smaller cities, with more modest buildings, you have this feeling.

It's sad, even depressing, because by seing this contrast, you realize that your civilization don't belong anymore to the civilization who build this buildings.

The same thing happened to painting and other visual arts :
Sculpture went from this :

To this :


It make you rememnber what happened to european civlization as a whole, in every artistic domain :




Somehown it give the feeling to always walking into the corpse of a civilization. The beautifull belong to the past, and you have to live in the present time, the time of ugliness and vulgarity.

There is something I can't stand with that epoch, I'm allergic to it.

 

Architecture and art, like humanity itself, is always evolving. Conceptions of beauty also change. The well-known phrase in architecture is form follows function. I think that while that has always been the case there is more functionality than decoration in architectural design these days. Thus buildings look far less decorative than they used to be. But sometimes even the decoration is functional. Take gargoyles for example. Decorative - certainly not pretty nor meant to be - but also functional in that they could keep water from the side of the building.
As long as you can keep the beautiful old buildings and allow them to exist alongside the more functional, less decorative ones I think that's not a bad thing. You have history and beauty but you have modern and function just so you know you're not living in a museum.

Similar with art. That's too big a subject and I'm not knowledgeable enough about it to make too many points but it seems to me that it is about expression, it's just the ways it's done has changed. Certainly some contemporary art is hideous. But then some art from previous ages is wooden and expressionless and perhaps isn't art at all,, just excellent draughtsmanship.

 

Do we make an effort to preserve the old? or at least some of the old, for the sake of posterity?

If things change, is it always because the new is better?

 

All the above is exactly the sort of art and civilization that Wahhabi jihadists are determined to destroy.

 

Everything change, yes, not always for the better.

Things change is logical, it's so. Time do its work.

Becoming different doesn't mean being worse or better, sometimes, it just mean to be different, sometimes it mean to be worse or better;

I don't think that european civilization aged well, we're living the last days of it anyway.

 

Posterity is one reason for preservation but only one. If something is worthy of preservation then I think there must be more reasons for preservation then posterity.

The new is not automatically better. If it replaces something that isn't as good then it's better.

 

The death of European civilisation has long been forecast. It has gone through tempestuous times and recovered stronger. Europe is the intellectual engine of western civilisation. Its strength is in its diversity, not monoculturalism. It looks like last days, it's actually gradual change.

 

Thanks to 'the useful idiots' of all the affected countries, especially the Nordic ones, it's now too late. The 'barbarians' aren't at the gates, they're through them?

 

In a way, it was all due to a cultural weakening. None of this could have happened in the first place if it wasn't for what had transpired to the culture over several decades.
Like AIDS, it doesn't necessarily kill the body itself but it weakens the body's immune system to any outside threats.
People simply became complacent, with an entire generation of peace and relative prosperity. How many political leaders are there who actually lived during WW2 or the preceding depression? That was 79 years ago. Ironically the ones who appreciate the achievements of Europe the most are some of the immigrants themselves, who have seen first hand what things are like in the societies they fled from, places where things are completely horrendous, and have been that way for many centuries. We're talking about places where people have no future, where being in fear for one's safety is common day occurrence, where there is so much corruption people can't trust their own police, societies that simply do not have the resources to hand out free things to everybody, like much of the European population has come to take for granted.

Remember, Europe went through the horrendous pains of WW2, which left an indelible mark on the collective psyche. The past is bad, there is an inclination towards thinking. Europe has to progress as fast as it can away from that history.
What they forget of course is many of the underlying economic problems that, if not sowed the seeds, at least made the ground very fertile for the war in the first place. Today Europe forgets those preceding problems. (And you'll never read this in the history books but three decades of large scale migration was one of the contributing causes to the outbreak of conflict as well)

Let's not pretend the problem is all migration though. This whole thing sprung up out of culture. The classical European culture is becoming extinct, and likely would have done so even were it not being replaced by a one from foreign lands. The culture had simply decayed. I'd say this is a Europe-wide continent problem, even though the Eastern half has obviously had a very different experience from the Western one. Even though the Eastern half isn't decaying at as fast a pace today, it was irreparably damaged by Communism (I'm talking in a cultural sense here). When was the last time we saw something like St. Basil's Cathedral built?



You can often tell a Golden point in a society's past history by its architectural landmarks.

I'm not even just talking ancient history either. Try just 120 years ago, or maybe even 50 years ago, to a lesser extent. I predict the type of buildings that popped up in Europe in the 90s we're not going to see again. Even that will be regarded as impractically unaffordable construction in the decades that follow, the same way that people view a lot of 120-year old structures today.

 

One strengh of european civilization had to have rather homogenous state-nation. Multi ethnic countries end up most of the time in civil war (central african republic, democratic republic of congo, yugoslavia, lebanon, syria).

Civilizations may disappear at some moment, no matter how old they are, the mayan and roman empire show us that.

 

Look what happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It split apart.

Or look at the tactics Soviet Russia used to cement their control over outlying areas, "Russifying" them with mass movements of their people (and forcing all the intelligentsia in the target nation into exile in Russia). Those effects have had long lasting effects even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Just look at what recently happened in Crimea for example.

In the case of the Romans emulating Greek culture, well that was easy since many historians believe the Etruscan and Latin peoples may have originally descended earlier from Greek settlers. The Roman genepool also made a fairly large contribution to England (estimated at somewhere around 15%).

 

Countries who lasted often had linguistic unification policies. For instance, in France, we have very few separatist, despite having people speaking celtic (Britanny), germanic (Alsace), Italian (Nice), it's because there were in the 19th century a heavy linguistic unification, and today very few people speak local dialects.

But even with a common language, the difference of colour of skins, cultural differences and the worst by far religious differences can lead country to civil war.

 

There are still some tensions between the Northern and Southern parts of Italy, with even some calls to break apart, although it is more a continuum than clearly delineated cultural difference.

Some parts of Europe are much more closely related than other parts.

 

Empires have been mentioned. The problem with empires is that they are enforced on people who may have little in common. Same thing in Africa, Europe carved it up and cut across previous tribal boundaries without regard for the locals wishes. Of course empires and Africa have blown apart, once the forces that hold people down are removed, for whatever reason, the old boundaries find themselves.

Language and culture are tightly knit and reinforce one another. After all language is only an expression of culture itself. It's natural for people of similar languages and cultures to group together and to be suspicious of others.

VotreAltesse, as you are only too aware France itself is a recent composition. I say recent but that's in historical terms. Once the English lost their lands in what we know now as France it was easier for coalescence. The wars with Spain, Prussia, Britain and the rest (there are quite a few) helped reinforce the notion of France, wars do that.

Since the end of the Second World War Europe has been quite at peace with itself, apart from the odd blow-up and colonies taking on the mother countries for independence. Watch Russia though.

 

Traditionally Spain hasn't been that different from France. They are both romance countries after all. They would probably have coalesced together back in history if not for the active interventions of the English trying to keep their enemies across on the other side of the channel divided. (They came very close to being unified during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701)

 

This is the Lloyd's building in London, completed in 1985 having been designed by famous architect Richard Rogers and has been Grade 1 listed because of its

the sad fact is that now its in a pretty crusty state...the internals are out of date and its hard to get up to date comms equipment in there because its difficult to shuffle everything around. There are three mobile electrical generators parked outside in a side street becuase the power demand inside cannot be accomodated by the out of date internal infrastructure. The air-con is seriously crap and cannot be upgraded - in summer it gets pretty hot inside and dress code demands suits and ties! There are external lifts which are almost non-functional albeit they have just completed a major upgrade which lasted 3 years - they are just as bad as they always were. The concrete is begining to degrade so its in need of a serious amount of work to stabalise it. It looks great but its a heap and needs to come down...trouble is its a listed building so it can't as you say posterity is great but if you have to work in these places its a bummer

 

Little bit off topic but I've been watching El Ministerio del Tiempo on Netflix. Fascinating and it reveals to me my own profound ignorance of Spanish history. I now watch each episode with the tablet open on Wikipedia. I'm still profoundly ignorant of the subject but I'm better informed now.

 

However, there is a big difference between spanish and french, the pronunciation of french is closer of celtic language, when the pronunciation of spanish is close of the latin pronunciation, both language originated from latin.
About english, I'm a norman, so it might influence me, but we had close ties with them too. English were ruled by the norman for 300 years, and ironically, I heard there is more text in french in england during middle age than in France, because a lot of french people prefered to write in latin or in occitan (a french language who was much closer of spanish and italian, today almost disappeared).

Both of our languages share the similarity to not fit exactly a category, french is from latin origin but is pronunced like a celtic language, and is heavily influenced by a germanic language (frankish one), english language has a big base of germanic language but with a huge extensive latin and french influence.

 

Indeed. The Normans didn't just rule Anglo-Saxon England, they actually completely changed it. When William took the throne he began the march to a unified kingdom and a single legal system. On language, the English legal system developed because of the Normans. I think it wasn't until the 19th C that the pleadings in English courts was done in English rather than French and even now the language of the legal system is peppered with French words and phrases, Latin as well. My own ancestors came from Normandy and were granted land in Somerset in the west of England by William.

Just as an aside (again) apparently the famous "We have nothing to fear..." speech by FDR used all Anglo-Saxon words, devoid of any French influence. Just a coincidence I'm sure.

The origins of English are interesting. Apparently it's base is Friesian and it evolved from there. It's a mongrel language, with various influences in its history and a lot of borrowing words. And fiendishly difficult to learn. I'm just glad I was born to it, I could never have learned it otherwise.

 

It's neither hard, neither easy to learn. When you're french, you have the advantage to have a lot of common words, but most of us aren't good at learning english.

 

Why would they put a butt plug to honor? Don't get it?

What a monument to the homosexuals!

 

US artist Paul McCarthy, the brainchild behind the 80-foot installation called “Tree”, which was fully approved by city authorities before it went up ahead of the FIAC international art festival which begins next week, has caused some upset.

McCarthy was even slapped in the face by one passer-by as the artwork was unveiled on Thursday.

http://www.france24.com/en/20141017-us-artist-erects-giant-green-butt-plug-paris-france-art

This strange object was created by American artist Paul McCarthy. It was on display only for the duration of the international art festival.

 

Modern architecture is dreadful, both visually and sustainability. Much older buildings will outlast the modern junk many times over.

The most amazing European city I've been to was Barcelona.

 

Looks like you've got your very own Anthony Gormless(sic)? He clutters up our beautiful landscapes with his gauche self-indulgent monstrosities.