Paul Graham: observation

Transcript context

…Wealthier than Britain in the old days. Even before the railway, you have large numbers of country homes, and most country homes being built when living standards were pathetically low. A country house has got to have a certain amount of land around it. You can’t just have them plastered down a street. It would look wrong. You want a different style of architecture or something like that. There is a place where they build big houses. You know what it is? It’s like when the Macintosh appeared, and you could have whatever font you wanted, right? Most people have bad tastes. In the old days, you had to have a classical-looking house because that was the only way to build houses. In the Victorian period, actually, was when things went wrong. You could have an Italian villa, or wait, no, it could be a Greek temple, or [laughs] something that looked like it was from the Tudor period. Take your pick and mix them together, Greek temple with Tudor bits. It was all over from that point on, really. It’s not like they build good houses in America either. No, neighborhoods are worse yet. There are nice individual homes, but is there any truly beautiful neighborhood built after 1950? Where would it be? In any country, put aside Asia?…

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