Why does modern life have to be so ugly? I am speaking of the masses of chrome and glass skyscrapers, the plethora of storage buildings, taquerias, car washes, malls, institutional buildings, strip malls, Pac&Go's, dry cleaners, etc., etc., etc. Our society may need vast amounts of buildings (or may not) but does it have to be UGLY? Why can't a car wash be charming? Why?

Howard Spring on the loss of charm in his English countryside:

"Money, in those days, could buy anything, destroy it in an hour, and cause to spring up, where some beauty of our race had been the cheap and spurious simulacrum, common to cheap and spurious men everywhere. Our woods and forests were cut down, our choicest agricultural land was gashed with roads and smeared with houses whose ugliness was an offence to earth and heaven."

"...think more than twice when moneyed corporations come along--or for that matter, rural and urban district councils--asking for permission on the one hand to destroy the remaining vestiges of the beauty we have, and, on the other, to add to the eczema of ugliness that has been allowed to spread in the name of housing."

"So it will go on -- destruction of beauty on the one hand and the creation of loathsomeness on the other--after the war as before it, unless some national overriding authority puts a brake on local vandals."