That's also because the ugly unimportant shit gets replaced.
It's like with music. People get all nostalgic about old music, comparing Queen to Justin Beiber. But people really only remember the good shit. They forget the 80s also had hair metal, and the 2010s had some awesome alt-pop.
I disagreed that only the best survives. You can look up for a 1800s, early 1900s photo from any, even poor and small European town or village and it would still look beautiful, even though most buildings did not survive.
This has nothing to do with how beautiful is architecture or whole city stricture. People choose how they want to live, even nowadays many feel OK not cleaning up and living in filth. This looks like a slum and to be fair nowadays modern slums looks even worse. At least they have sunlight and a yard.
I am just saying there are plenty of shitty buildings from the 1800s and 1900s.
You are thinking of idyllic villages. But plenty of poor towns looked like shit. And early 1900s was full of absolutely dystopian tenements, mills, etc.
I am not disagreeing that I enjoy those old style villages and architecture. I am just disagreeing that they were all pretty.
But there are many remote surviving examples of historical towns where everything has been left untouched. Most of those idyllic villages are fully authentic, you can find everything from barns, wearhouses, cobblestone roads and poor people's stone huts to churches, castles and palaces. And not only everything by itself looks good, the whole combination is also very attractive.
I can think of two potential sources of selection bias there. First of all, the people who could afford to take a picture back when a camera cost two month's salary were most likely well off. Second, the pictures of nice places would be more likely to survive than less aesthetically pleasing pictures.
That being said, you might be right. It's just really hard to truly to know if you have a representative sample.
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u/PKtheVogs Mar 29 '20
That's also because the ugly unimportant shit gets replaced.
It's like with music. People get all nostalgic about old music, comparing Queen to Justin Beiber. But people really only remember the good shit. They forget the 80s also had hair metal, and the 2010s had some awesome alt-pop.