This is Not My Beautiful House

Room-temp seltzer and the fluorescent-lit basement gallery of the Center of Architecture inadvertently underscored the theme of a panel discussion convened by n+1 coeditors Mark Krotov and Lisa Borst. The sold-out event, “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” recapitulated their 2022 essay of the same name, which excoriated the insipid aesthetics of contemporary film, buildings, and interior décor. When the pair projected a collage of neon signs, all reading “THIS MUST BE THE PLACE” in various coworking spaces/coffee shops, the audience writhed with laughter.

Positioned as instigators, Krotov and Borst ended up ceding a lot of speaking time to their interlocutors—the architectural historian Mariana Mogilevich, film editor and writer Blair McClendon, and painter Dushko Petrovich Córdova. Everyone was comfortable enough diagnosing the production side of things. Vinyl flooring is ubiquitous everywhere because it’s cheap; ditto composite metal cladding. Ugliness, it was agreed, is “downstream” from poor labor conditions, and noting this makes us good Marxists. But why, I wondered,…