Yet not everything during the dreary years of authoritarian power was without visual merit.
Everything about her dreary life aggrieves her: her childlessness, the grinding work, the deprivation, her bumpkin of a husband.
Now preserved in aspic, hosting exhibitions and the occasional group of postgraduate students, it sadly calls to mind what Oskar Schlemmer first noted when he arrived in Dessau in 1925: "Everything so bleak and dreary.
Yes, if the government runs everything, you get a dreary Soviet-style morass that makes almost everyone poor.
Instead, everything boils down to a dreary revolutionary faith, which, like the chandelier, is merely a tragic dream, cumbersome and impractical.
Peter Wright, a marketing manager for Ikea's U.K. branch, told The Huffington Post the commercial was merely a "light-hearted" way of showing a family defying "the ultimate embodiment of everything that's tired and dreary about British gardens - the garden gnome".
And your face is so fat!" before she, along with her misanthropic husband and understandably sullen children, treats them to a masterclass in dysfunctional marriage and parenting – Allison Janney delivering her excruciating lines with a jolting energy that makes everything that comes after seem slightly dreary.
The firm injected into the project Mr. Holl's long-simmering ideas about urbanism, tapping the earth underneath for geothermal energy, and fixing everything it saw wrong with the dreary Soviet-inspired high-rises in Chinese cities. "We thought they'd say, 'You're crazy, forget it,' and we'd walk away," Mr. McVoy says.
Ultimately, it's hard to decide which grates more – the insanely happy upbeat songs or the wistful, dreary ones, but the truly excruciating chorus of "Everything Is Sound (La La La)" just clinches it for the former.
Freewheeling Beirut, where almost everything short of murder and rape is allowed, feels more like Hong Kong or Amsterdam than dreary Damascus or Cairo.
