“Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor, but they couldn’t possibly all have good taste.”

Marie (a.k.a. Carrie Fisher)
“When Harry Met Sally”

By Jarret Liotta

WESTPORT — Everybody talks about aesthetics, but nobody does anything about them.

That is to say, while people broadly welcome things they find aesthetically pleasing — things that resonate with them and invoke feelings often reserved for the runoff of good art, they generally remain at a loss of how to find or recognize those things, let alone do their part to encourage their life.

Last week I had a conversation with a historian from a nearby town. She continues to work diligently in her community to preserve places of history, including old buildings.

Why Even Preserve?

But amidst the rudiments of straight-forward preservation efforts, to augment her work she must simultaneously strive to get the public to understand — and appreciate — the value of aesthetic intangibles, otherwise there’s ultimately no real motivation to preserve anything.

As she explained, it’s one thing to advocate for the preservation of a particular historic house or structure merely because it’s antiquated, but it’s another to inspire members of the public to understanding of the bigger picture as it relates to their physical environment — the mood and quality of their surroundings — not just in relation to concrete history, but also more subtle things like taste, aesthetics, communal mood and the like.

To a large extent architecture is where we, as a community, share broad aesthetic sensibilities. Unfortunately, despite tepid overtures about what a particular community is valuing or striving for, efforts to artistically — aesthetically — produce (and preserve) structures, and neighborhoods of structures, that achieve these subtle goals are grossly lacking.

What’s That Horrible Taste?!

Let’s face it — many people, including far-too many designers, architects and developers, have absolutely rotten taste!

Most new houses and commercial buildings designed today are simply ugly, lack all aesthetic interest and the subtle qualities of art in design. They’re lazy cookie-cutter crap — most of them — and their primary worth lies in their ability to make the developers and builders fast big money.

Beyond that, however, it’s the juxtaposition of so many unsightly and mis-sized new structures that have really damaged the beauty and related subtle aesthetics of local communities like Westport.

It’s easy to criticize the proliferation of the notorious mega-mansion — the gluttonous dwellings we’ve so-often watched crunched onto small lots of land — and say that we as a community don’t like them. (Or perhaps we admire them. Perhaps, because they’re so large and expensive and imposing, we look at them and think, “Wow, that’s just terrific! So opulent and big, it just reeks of quality!”)

Yes, Size Matters!

Like what you like, but my primary issue with the new mansions is their size relative to property and adjacent properties. If you have four acres to spare, that’s one thing, but to see so many of these enormous structures plunked willy nilly onto parcels that leave them looming over a neighborhood that was never designed for houses of such size — this just makes the whole thing an extraordinary visual mess and — if we can take pause to sense it — simply feels wrong.

My historian friend speaks passionately about the scope of buildings in relation to neighborhoods and communities — something remarkably overlooked and ignored during the past decades in Westport and other places. More importantly, she explains that without a conscious — conscientious — focus on how a neighborhood or commercial village looks and FEELS, in its entirety — planners, designers, architects and residents especially miss the big picture.

This begs the bigger questions of planning for a town — both commercially and residential-wise. The biggest, however — and perhaps the saddest — is whether (following more than four decades of arbitrary unchecked construction) it’s too late for a town like Westport to reclaim its aesthetic soul, sensibility, beauty and bounty.

But Why Not Casino-like Design?!

Of course, some people like Las Vegas and — politics aside — what has traditionally been associated as a Donald Trump-type style of aesthetics.

That’s all fine, but let’s not pretend we’re crafting Westport as a quaint little New England community when we’re not. It’s actually a somewhat confusing combination of self-conscious historic struggling to survive amidst an ever-expanding barrage of cheap taste.

Not that it’s grown to the gaudy limits of the Mohegan Sun, but it’s getting to where you have to put on blinkers in order to see the limited sections that are still evocative of not simply a small town sensibility, but an aesthetically pleasing, tasteful one.

In too many places it’s getting so you have to squint your eyes to focus on some remaining samples of good-taste architecture, scope-sensible structures, and little portions of neighborhood that still feel like they have soul and aren’t clogged by the heavy presence of over-sized looming out-of-place structures, tacky facades, cheap cookie-cutter construction and the like.

From a planning perspective, does this town have any limits, and do any of those in power have the good taste required to envision an aesthetically lovely town?

And perhaps more importantly, Where are the wealthy land owners who actually have good taste?

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