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Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:27 pm**

Pthug wrote:You are also being hilariously blinkered about this. The 19th century was a great era of slum-construction (which is all about housing "the greatest number of people at the expense of craftsmanship or architecture" as well as maintenance, overcrowding, etc.) but all you care about is bourgeois architecture. This makes your acceptance of the narrative of progress all the more amusing since if durability could be made widespread again anywhere, it would be among the bourgeois who are free to talk about "being able to build a better house" as though they were the ones carrying the hod.

Even among non-bourgeois homes there is a markedly more quality construction in 19th century homes than today's homes. Even a 900 square foot bungalow from 1890 is miles ahead in terms of quality, and even asthetic design, than a 1500 square foot newly constructed two story home today. Since we used local labour and local suppliers and people took pride in their work, homes of this period are simply superior in quality to their equivalent homes today, you cannot argue this. Today's homes couldn't last a fraction of the time older homes could.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:31 pm**

great, way to ignore my point and address points I totally didn't make!

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:32 pm**

Yes. But not everyone can be upper-middle class.

Quite. It sounds to me, Viktor, like you are overlooking the needs and concerns of the average joe in favor of some romanticized upper class paradise. Rather like all those fantasy fans who gush over the Middle Ages or the antebellum South without having any idea what sort hardships and horrors the majority endured.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:34 pm**

Eddy wrote:
Yes. But not everyone can be upper-middle class.
Quite. It sounds to me, Viktor, like you are overlooking the needs and concerns of the average joe in favor of some romanticized upper class paradise.

More I'm saying everyone should be able to enjoy, on some reduced scale, the quality and beauty that characterises upper class homes and that it is wrong to skimp on quality and design in favour of housing the greatest number at the least cost.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:35 pm**

Viktor, no. Having lived in a lot of houses, including ones from the 1890s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s, my experience is that most houses are simply better constructed than older ones.

(You may say, "Ha! That house was 100 years old - clearly it must have been good to last that long!" but it was an expensive house and it was still in a very bad state when we moved in.
And how many 1860s workers' terraced houses are still around in the UK? Not many; either they fell apart, or were demolished simply because they were so crap.)

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:35 pm**

Eddy wrote:
Yes. But not everyone can be upper-middle class.
Quite. It sounds to me, Viktor, like you are overlooking the needs and concerns of the average joe in favor of some romanticized upper class paradise.

no, he's romanticising that too. What makes the house great is the use of "local labour, ... local suppliers and [workers] who took pride in their work".

see, now we have PROGRESS and PROGRESS means that those things don't exist anymore. if only we could have Good Old Joe back, there'd be proper houses built again!

Unless, of course, Viktor really just wants to *play* at being bourgeois and so can only afford grandfather's hand-me-downs, but that can't be right.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:37 pm**

Benjamin Franklin wrote:The Golden Age never was the present age.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:41 pm**

thedukeofnuke wrote:Viktor, no. Having lived in a lot of houses, including ones from the 1890s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s, my experience is that most houses are simply better constructed than older ones.

(You may say, "Ha! That house was 100 years old - clearly it must have been good to last that long!" but it was an expensive house and it was still in a very bad state when we moved in.
And how many 1860s workers' terraced houses are still around in the UK? Not many; either they fell apart, or were demolished simply because they were so crap.)

You can have your opinion, of course, but mine is still different and you won't convince me elsewise. Having worked with houses and examined their construction on a daily basis, and having lived in a house built in the 20s and one in the 60s, I believe there is a marked quality difference between non-upper class post-modern homes to modern and traditional homes.

Those terraces probably were crap, but I'd be willing to bet they were still stronger than crap public housing built today.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:42 pm**

Viktor77 wrote:More I'm saying everyone should be able to enjoy, on some reduced scale, the quality and beauty that characterises upper class homes and that it is wrong to skimp on quality and design in favour of housing the greatest number at the least cost.

Haha, what now? You can't get quality on a reduced scale -- that is *lack of quality*. You want quantity so that you can have a piece of the sweet sweet middle class pie without paying the proper cost for it. It seems the middle class is getting exactly what it wants to me.

This is like the servant thing all over again -- local labour would demand a living wage now, but you can't even afford a single manservant to put in it once it's finished so what hope do you have of being able to afford that? Decent material would be expensive, but you can't really afford that either. Design needs an architect, but he's middle class himself and is going to want as much as any number of labourers...

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 12:58 pm**

You know, I can imagine a business catering to this kind of thing: mass-produced pseudo-victorian houses at affordable prices, that you can pay in 480 comfortable monthly payments. xD I can just see the endless streets of cloned victorianesque little chalets.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:01 pm**

Viktor77 wrote:You can have your opinion, of course, but mine is still different and you won't convince me elsewise. Having worked with houses and examined their construction on a daily basis, and having lived in a house built in the 20s and one in the 60s, I believe there is a marked quality difference between non-upper class post-modern homes to modern and traditional homes.

Those terraces probably were crap, but I'd be willing to bet they were still stronger than crap public housing built today.

Modern housing may not be especially pretty, but at least it has running water and sewers. You know that in the Victorian Black Country life expectancy fell below 18 years? For fuck's sake, the working class had living conditions a lot worse then than now. Even in Glasgow it's 69 these days; obviously healthcare and better labour laws have had a big impact, but seriously, it must have been terrible.

Oh, and if I'm not going to convince you, why are you even bothering to read my posts?

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:02 pm**

thedukeofnuke wrote:Oh, and if I'm not going to convince you, why are you even bothering to read my posts?

viktor wrote:And BTW, your opposition to me has only strengthed my views, and alotted me an outlook on the types of opposition out there. So may I say owned? Or pwned to stress the change of language.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:04 pm**

Thanks, I didn't spot that.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:04 pm**

well it was from 2008 so...

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:07 pm**

In that case I'm not surprised.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:13 pm**

You know that in the Victorian Black Country life expectancy fell below 18 years? For fuck's sake, the working class had living conditions a lot worse then than now.

Less than 18 years? How did they even survive to reproduce?

Even in Glasgow it's 69 these days; obviously healthcare and better labour laws have had a big impact, but seriously, it must have been terrible.

Whoa, that's incredibly low for a modern country, worse than many Latin American countries even.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:16 pm**

maybe he's thinking of dogs

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:16 pm**

Eddy wrote:
You know that in the Victorian Black Country life expectancy fell below 18 years? For fuck's sake, the working class had living conditions a lot worse then than now.
Less than 18 years? How did they even survive to reproduce

Life expectancies are usually heavily skewed by infant mortality when infant mortality rates are high, and thus they do not necessarily accurately reflect the life expectancy of individuals who reach adulthood. On the other hand, though, infant mortality in and of itself is a very important measure of the quality of health care and of living conditions in general in any given place in the first place, indicating that such were very, very poor in the Black Country at the time.

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:20 pm**

Which is why demographers use "life expectancy at age 1"

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:44 pm**

Eddy wrote:
You know that in the Victorian Black Country life expectancy fell below 18 years? For fuck's sake, the working class had living conditions a lot worse then than now.
Less than 18 years? How did they even survive to reproduce?

Even in Glasgow it's 69 these days; obviously healthcare and better labour laws have had a big impact, but seriously, it must have been terrible.
Whoa, that's incredibly low for a modern country, worse than many Latin American countries even.

Both of those figures are at birth and so are strongly affected by child mortality. Perhaps also significant is that they are for men only, and that in both Victorian Birmingham and modern Glasgow women live some years longer than men. Still... it does make you wonder how the population was maintained. Early marriages and as many children as possible?

I think that the low life expectancy in Glasgow is largely due to massive consumption of cigarettes and deep-fried pizza. And a culture that encourages beatin' fuck oot each other.
[/stereotype]

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:45 pm**

buckfast buckfast
makes you want to fuckfast

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 1:47 pm**

If you ever play Mount&Blade, I strongly recommend the Gangs of Glasgow mod. Bucky bottles and Buckfast Tonic Wine feature prominently as weapons and supplies

Posted: **Wed May 19, 2010 11:59 pm**

I have to say I enjoyed Viktor's post, though.

Posted: **Thu May 20, 2010 8:12 am**

Skomakar'n wrote:I have to say I enjoyed Viktor's post, though.

Which one?

Posted: **Fri May 21, 2010 10:58 am**

Viktor77 wrote:
Skomakar'n wrote:I have to say I enjoyed Viktor's post, though.
Which one?

The long one about the old houses.

I finally got my new monitor today, so I was creative enough to put it up, alongside with its twin, onto the wall! My room is starting to look pretty damn nice!

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