archive.today • Why Is Everything So Ugly? | Issue 44 | n+1 | The Editors
After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city's 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white. Again environmental concerns necessitate this scale of change, and again we wonder why, when it comes to its light bulbs, New York has chosen to back the blue.
Inertia, disinterest, thoughtlessness, yes, but also the promise of increased police vigilance. Still, what is most striking about New York's ominous glow-up is the sense that the city has been estranged from itself: the hyperprecise shadows of every leaf and every branch set against every brick wall deliver a Hollywood unreality. New York after hours now looks less like it did in Scorsese's After Hours and more like an excessive set-bound '60s production.
The new ugliness is defined in part by an abandonment of function and form: buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them. New York City is a city increasingly in quotation marks, a detailed facsimile of a place.
MTA to install bright, white lights in every NYC subway station - Gothamist
I know the environmental and health aspects but explain me more about the aesthetic ones
I feel like its pretty straightforward, lighting shapes how things looks majorly, I mean a bright red car can look gray under the right sodium lamp... And with LED streetlamps, things are lit almost as bright as day, often with an unnaturally cool light, bluer than sunlight. This makes everything look sterile and weird, and the cool color temperature makes it feel less like night time and more like a well lit hospital basement. A warm, more yellow light, is more like that from a flame, so it isn't perceived like daylight, or surreal blinding blue-white. Basically warm colors giving way to bright blues ruins the night-time candlelight vibes and makes everything look worse (in part because the bright white reveals more details, though also the stark contrast between the black of night and the bright white of the lamp means instead of everything having a nice dim glow, you can mostly only see what is lit by the LED and your night vision is utterly ruined so you can't see out of the bubble of the streetlamp into the world around, there's too much contrast