> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.
I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
I've seen plenty of examples of Brutalism in architecture (in the UK) first hand and to most people it looks like ugly concrete blocks with hole in it.
Sometimes being "ugly" is the point. You want to bring out emotions - the building can be grandiose, imposing, surprising, but, if you look closely, it's a carefully crafted work of art that's also highly functional.
I don't care for this argument at all. There are functional buildings where I live from the Industrial Revolution that look quite nice. I want things to look nice where I live. I don't want them to be ugly and demoralising.
As for the building you showed me. I think it looks awful. It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium.
We really need to understand why people who study a subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding would show a clear preference for something...
>But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
It's probably some combination of the subculture effect (i.e., subcultures tend to develop their own in-group aesthetics) and as a functional shibboleth (i.e., being able to "appreciate" things average people don't has an in-group signalling function).
I am a fan of brutalism, but there is also some survivorship bias at work - I'm sure some brutalist hellscapes were demolished because nobody wanted to live in them.
brutalism doesn't refer to the architecture being "brutal".
it refers to "béton brut" - french for 'raw concrete'. in this case, brutalism could be more readily understood as 'rawism'. it also emerged during (and is a descendant of) the modernist architectural period, which is well known for those boring, non-descript office towers.
there's nothing wrong with the simplicity of raw concrete. but just like other architecture, it can be done well and it can be done poorly. it can be done for utility, and it can be done for extravagance.
I think many people think of non-descript office towers when they think of brutalism, rather than all of the interesting things that can be done with a single material (shapes, textures, designs, etc. it's a very versatile + strong medium!).
> But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
Because they study architecture. The article is profoundly anti-intellectual. This discourse, that colleges indoctrinate people and, thus, cause them to disagree with some form of "truth" that the uneducated masses know.
If the architecture they're studying is divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? They may as well be studying their own butts.
> divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares?
Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.
Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.
If survivorship bias had anything to do with it, you would not have old villages where every house is in the same style, and they're all beautiful. There's simply no evidence that old buildings were randomly ugly or beautiful, and only the beautiful ones survived.
Almost all the buildings in those postcards look old, plain, and boring to me. Some look decent. The Radio City Music Hall building, while definitely impressive for 1932, just looks old and worn out and it's and old postcard.
Personally I'd prefer to spend my time in and around a building like this than any of those:
To me a building like this looks a lot more interesting. Lots of mixtures in materials, textures, and colors. And as mentioned before, this building lets in a lot of natural lighting.
> you have NO place complaining about originality,
I can definitely complain about a lack of originality for works which lack originality.
Modern designs can often lack originality, I agree. Classical designs can lack originality as well. A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things. Its not good to put yourself in a camp and act like everything in group A is good without question, everything in camp B is bad without question.
You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting? Are you really saying you'd prefer to actually be in and use one of the buildings in that postcard image I pointed out?
I'm not saying all modern designs are good. I'm also not saying all older designs are bad. I am saying I am a human being and like to have some sunlight and see trees and the horizon from time to time, and that's more important to me for a building than some little intricate stonework that I can't even really make out because its three stories up and the whole exterior facade is covered with black gunk because its too expensive and fragile to actually maintain.
> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
Personally I'd rather spend my time in the building with large windows and tons of natural light than holed up in that dark old castle thing.
That prison building is overly stylized to my taste. And given how complex the exterior is and seeing it's state it's obvious it's hard to maintain. Unless you like all the gunk growing all over the building all the time.
Is the old building "fancy"? Sure. So is that fragile china that's kept in the fancy vitrine but rarely actually used because it's such a pain to maintain and actually use.
Then you're part of the 20% of people who prefer modern styles, for whom 99% of buildings are built. You have plenty of choices, while the rest of us are lied to about why buildings look like they do and why we can't have what we want.
I think the prison looks better from the outside, but if you asked me which building I wanted to spend time in I'd pick the school without hesitation (assuming they were both being repurposed for the same non-school/prison use).
There is a clear preference for other people to build in traditional styles, but as soon as you have to care about more than what the facade looks like from the outside people choose the uglier functional option.
The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.
All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.
Always seems weird to me that "classical" is stark white columns and sculptures. The original Greek buildings were quite colorful, it's only the intervening millenia that are responsible for wearing away their paint.
Well then. The solution is obvious: we need to educate the public so that it attains the correct tastes. It's doable: after all, the architecture students do manage to obtain the taste for the modernist architecture during their time in the college/university.
Or maybe do nothing, it's not like the public opinion really matters in the technocratic settings.
I can't tell if this is serious or sarcastic. I'm going to err on the side of serious though. Maybe the majority is actually correct, and traditional architecture is just plain better. I certainly find it more welcoming than the modern concrete and glass box jungle.
I do actually like the "concrete jungle" style like the Barbican and Salk Institute (by all accounts a pleasantly human place to work despite the famously stark-looking courtyard).
I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly. Whereas even quite dilapidated neo-classical-ish buildings look innately reasonably pleasing.
>I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly.
There's a trend in some Eastern European countries to paint older brutalist concrete buildings as a cost-effective measure to reduce concrete spalling and do thermo-modernization. It's actually pretty amazing how much nicer some of these buildings look even with just a uniform white paint job (others involve more color).
Architects seem to be largely opposed, seeing it as an erasure of the material honesty that brutalism was supposed to represent, but IMHO it suggests that a lot of the core issue with these designs wasn't the shape or creativity of the buildings themselves but just the way the concrete look quickly aged.
Well, let's try crank the knob yet another notch then.
> Maybe the majority is actually correct
What a horrible thing to say. The liberal democracy, may it be known to you, is about protecting and empowering the minorities of various kind, and the aesthetical minority exists, and its tastes matter.
If you're really looking for causes, the largest one is price optimization.
But, I think one missing piece between architects and the general public is how architecture students are taught to design (and thus, see) buildings first through the lens of massing [0]. When you compose a building primarily by shaping the different masses, you lose sight of the ornamentation and complex decoration that sets old buildings apart. Then, you add air conditioning and modern building systems and the need for high ceilings and windows with airflow also disappears.
What you are left with is a sealed box. Essentially, architecture has ceded too much design space to engineering in the name of cost optimization and there isn't much 'art' left in it. But look around - that's true across our society.
Nah I think modern architecture is popular among many architects and unpopular with almost all of the public for the same reason modern art is: it justifies their existence.
It gives them some clever thing to know that normal people don't know anything about. If King Charles is right about architecture (he is), then what new experimental architecture can you research? You can't, because we've basically already discovered what people like.
I fully agree! And if they still disagree, perhaps we could open special camps where we could forcefully reeducate them!
After all, there is but one correct design language for buildings and it's a hideous slab of concrete that our ancestors would weep when if they could see.
There's more to architecture than just the façade, which is what people are rating when they are just looking at photos of the exterior. The interiors, structure, and services, etc. of modern building are often far superior to older ones, and i suspect many 'ordinary' people would agree.
If it's my building, e.g. the building that I live in - I care more about the ease of maintenance and repair than any facade.
Because I spend 80% of my time indoors, and 20% working in the garden, so frankly don't even care what the building looks like.
Maybe only care that the property looks neat when it's time to sell.
As it stands, these studies are just cherry-picked navel gazing with extra steps. You can't design a study like this well. There are hundreds of thousands of buildings, and tens of thousands of variations of subjective preference. And all of those go out of the window as soon as practical concerns (like affordability) arise.
Nonetheless, I think it is a failure of architecture that modern design is ugly. It shouldn't be impossible to make good looking, practical, cost-effective buildings with all the options of materials and engineering that is available.
So let's start as the baseline of these 77 to 23 blowout victories by traditional architecture.
Now gradually substitute other modern designs until you can get more of a 50/50 agreement at least, and hopefully 60/40 in favor of modernism.
You could be right. Some of these might be cherry picked bad modern designs. From the article one of them looked like it should have the wicked witch of the West telling her pretties to fly out from their caves to go attack Dorothy. Another one looks like a massive collection of missile launch tubes.
Some designs I almost have to laugh at, when almost similarly disjointed mcmansion hell type monstrosities are snootily dismissed.
Yes, every time people get grumpy about modern architecture and look over to see if I agree I tell the story about how I used to work at a company in Boston which moved from a beautiful 19th century building to a soulless Modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper. And thank fucking god: the old building was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, had too little natural light, and was too cramped. The Modernist building was better to actually be in in every way. Buildings are there to be used, not just looked at in pictures.
I'm pretty sure that some kind of hybrid can be found where the exterior could look nice and the interior would be very nice as well.
Now, not every modern building has to look like a glass and steel colorless brick.
For example, I really like the look of Oodi [0], Helsinki's new library: it reminds me of wood covered with snow, and the interior is exactly what you would expect from a modern building (built in 2018).
It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities. I have a 1920s home and with like a few days of work it lives like a modern place. This is not some dichotomy.
Right but that's not because modern architectural style has made the interiors better. It's mainly technological improvements that allow larger windows, bigger space, better insulation, etc.
You can totally have a traditional style building with a modern interior without a hint of brutalism or concrete.
When I was a child I saw Blade Runner. Ever since that day I've had a weakness for concrete jungles. Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai- that's how humans were intended to live.
Unfortunately my European brothers and sisters prefer to live in open air museums. However slowly but surely skyscrapers have been creeping up into the Netherlands- you just can't beat the efficiency.
Something fascinating that you may not know: traditional architecture is one of those things that is simultaneously:
a) Genuinely widely preferred, with many articles on this, ranging from aesthetic preferences through to scientific studies of how eyes move and what causes fatigue. There is genuine value to architecture before modern architecture -- and...
b) A stalking horse for right-wing thinking.
It's really interesting how this happens and it mirrors other right-wing techniques. A common way to get people into right-wing thinking is to find something that is genuinely unpopular or that people have concerns about, yet which has constrained discourse. Examples: lower incomes. You then talk about the good old days, and reframe it: lower incomes becomes, 'people taking your income, agh those immigrants'. Architecture becomes, '1940 and before were better, oh and everyone was white then'. You get the idea.
Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism, disguised in the neutral or even interesting format of ancient history.
Once you recognise this, you see it everywhere.
But don't let this fool you re older architecture having genuine value. We just have to avoid saying people have no taste, or referring to their preferences as 'pabulum'. That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject of architecture, they pay attention to what else that person says.
> The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond
When politics exclude a group, or a group feels excluded, it's easy to lure the group into supporting anti-politics, which is a nice way to say "fascism".
This is kind of where we are now, with the far-right preying on the most vulnerable people that feel ignored by politicians.
Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".
The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.
It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.
I might object that being right-wing, or having fear of the effects of immigrants even, does not necessarily entail racism. But it would be more interesting to say that they are related, and that valuable ideas about nice traditional architecture and nostalgia for the good old days are also genuinely related to racism and colonialism and fascism, which means that there's something of value to extract from all that garbage before you can do a clean separation of the ideas. Mercifully I don't have time to write this comment right now, but it was probably going to include the word "culture" in several places.
"Traditional" isn't really defined here, but seems to mean "first half of the 20th century," which feels like a relatively narrow tradition. Not a lot of preference for teepees and yurts.
People definitely like teepees and yurts (and thatched roofs, dry stone walls, log cabins, etc.), it's just that at some point the practicality gap becomes too wide to contemplate.
But this is a reasonable point to raise. Although both would serve their purpose a concrete viaduct is much cheaper to build than a masonry one, to the point that it may be difficult to justify the latter no matter how strong the public preference is for it.
Not to mention their comparison, modernist architecture, is just mid-century. There is post-modern architecture after that and arguably also contemporary architecture further after that (however vaguely defined).
Cost is a big factor, but so are modern building codes. Some classic architectural features are outright illegal to build in 2026. Others might be allowed, but there's almost no one left who knows how to do it (e.g. plaster walls or ceilings).
Robots are not going to bring any of this back because robots will just create a new set of optimizations and constraints needed to make robotic construction cheaper and easier. If modern cars (which are the result of similar optimization) are anything to go by, this will result in output that's easy to build but hard to maintain or modify - so largely a continuation of existing trends.
Take a look at "3d printed" houses for an imperfect example of this kind of optimization for automation in action. Better robotics will bring about a more balanced version of this trade-off (walls will probably be possible to modify, unlike 3d printed ones) but the incentives remain the same.
Edit:
Trivial example: One of the easiest way to autonomously insulate a house will probably be with spray foam insulation - you can get a robot arm to hold the sprayer and move it in a specific, continuous motion pretty readily even today. But spray foam insulation is hard to modify after the fact. Removing it is time-intensive compared to removing insulation "batting" and applying it again requires specialized tools, PPE, and perhaps licensing.
Next thing you're gonna tell me that English speakers overwhelmingly prefer novels written in English.
Cultures have visual languages just the same as they have written and spoken (and signed) languages. The crucifix symbol has an understood meaning in most European cultures, because of how foundational Christianity is to their cultures. Is it really so surprising that people prefer buildings in a visual language they already understand?
There's also this paragraph at the very end:
>If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.
In a world where we've seen nothing but modernist designs for 70 years, is it really that surprising that people might prefer novel designs? Especially novel designs in a style they are repeatedly told is better, or references a more refined time?
Seems to me that your positions are in opposition to each other.
1. There’s a traditional visual language that people instinctively prefer.
2. Modern architectural sensibilities have superseded traditional visual language through repetition.
I’m reading this to mean something like “people like their own traditional foods but since they've been drowning in pizza for the last 70 years, they’ve forgotten about their traditional foods.”
How can a basal, instinctive preference just disappear? Can the see drive disappear with enough brainwashing?
I'm not claiming that people instinctively prefer anything. I'm saying that they've been socialized to believe that "traditional" architecture is some indicator of societal excellence. I don't think its weird that people report a bias they've been taught to have.
The article even seems aware of this possibility when it mentions that architecture students prefer modernism (with the semi-covert implication that their education is poisoning their aesthetic sensibilities). I claim its at most partially because they've been taught to prefer modern designs, but mainly because they've been taught to think about visual languages consciously, so they are able to recognize what a given architect is trying to do, in a way that a layperson might not. That's certainly why Thomas Kinkade gets as much hate as he does (that and the dodgy business practices...).
I'm also not claiming that people have been starved of traditional architecture entirely, just that nobody is building things in the traditional style now. They're not tearing them down either, the White House East Wing not withstanding. This is a novelty bias, nothing more. If you only ever see neoclassical architecture in buildings that are designated as "fancy" or "special" or "august", and all these modern, ordinary buildings do not, you're going to assume that the style itself, and not simply the age and intent at construction are what contributes to that.
I mean, 39 out of 50 US state capitol buildings have domes, as does the nation's capitol building. I think anybody in the US can be forgiven for thinking that dome = legitimate seat of authority. Certainly, that was the hypothesis behind the design decision.
Speaking only for myself, I found Washington DC, which is all neo-classical all the time, just really boring. All the buildings look the same, and I couldn't escape the sense that I was in museum that hadn't been updated in a long time. Chicago's Fields Museum has the same quality.
It’s interesting how many studies were performed that confirmed this, and yet most (all?) of the time, the modernist building was built anyway. What was the point?
It seems like these comparisons are more "expensive traditional design vs low cost modern design." None of their examples had what I would consider a single expensive and nice modern design. But every single example of "traditional" design was essentially luxury pricing.
In public spaces I have no doubt this is the case.
I'm more curious about residential though - see huge interesting in MCM over the last decades. I am biased but I think there is a great deal of interest in warm, modernist spaces with ideas like natural materials and lots of natural lighting, especially when compared to the beige boxes of American home building.
Indeed, the beige boxes are neither modernist nor classicist.
My family lives in a MCM house built around 1960. We bought it in a "hot" market where you couldn't be particular about anything. We chose a house based on location and the interior.
Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production. The aesthetic is more of a side-effect of those limits. Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy. It may come as a surprise but it required years of cultural development and education for most people to accept the work of Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production. It's only recently, (with designs like the Ferrari EV for instance) that people are starting to see how limited our aesthetic language has become. Modernism is too cheap to replace so the "beauty" of soulless minimalism will likely endure in the zeitgeist, but it's not a very interesting environment to be in.
That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas.
So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.
This is sort of a just-so story that isn't completely true. Stalin pushed "socialist classicism" [1] as an aesthetic, and it wasn't until his successors took over that modernist architectural ideas imported from the West became a hallmark of actually-existing socialism.
I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.
I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.
And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t
The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.
And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?
I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.
The units are basically commodities. Same floor plans same amenities same building about the same rent. True across the country for these sort of newer buildings, only real difference is the pool doesn't close for the season for those in milder climates.
It is designed to be this way for investors more than consumers. Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all. The consumers have no choice really but to be in this market if they want to be sheltered at all. It isn't like you really can exercise free market selection for something necessary like shelter. You have to take what has been made available and you cannot do without.
There is therefore no incentive to make a smart building that is favoring the tenant since this doesn't grow the potential pool of tenants in the area, that pool remains the same size as it was. It is unlike a lot of other markets where having a better product might actually grow the customer base of the product segment overall.
If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.
My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
Unfortunately only custom homes can afford to care about beauty. Developers are building for cheapest possible and letting the long term owners deal with the consequences.
>Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.
> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production.
That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain.
Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.
Literally had nothing to do with "NIMBYism." That's anachronistic bullshit. It had to do with the desire to remake the country into Garden Cities with lawn-based neighborhoods filling the spaces between shopping malls.
The people in the places where these neighborhoods were built didn't get a say, they were removed and new middle-class "YIMBYs" were moved in to be little lords on their little lots.
Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment.
But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.
Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful.
But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.)
The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.
The bathtub curve is not the most optimal however.
I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun?
Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill.
Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?
> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy.
I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.
What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.
I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.
You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, retreat and regressive. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!
I think a lot of the reflexive distaste for the modern would be softened if we were still able to build in The Old Way, whatever that might be. People like these older brick mid rise buildings with the bit of trimming decoration. But, they just don't get built. Sometimes in NYC or chicago someplace you might see a more recent build where they tried to get those old elements down. They used brick and made it square and tried to do a little decoration, but something is missing. They didn't do the thing where they use nicer brick on the street facing side of the structure, or they didn't do the actual cement formed decorative trim pieces throughout. All the brick is laid the same instead of having some lines on the top edge turned out in a decorative way for example. The whole thing feels severely value engineered even if on paper it's actually a quality building with modern amenities and comforts.
Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.
>Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that.
It very much does, unfortunately. In the US, the places with the highest housing shortages are mired with endless red tape, discretionary reviews, parking requirements etc. that substantially increase costs. This leaves little room for anything else, including aesthetics.
Developers have gotten very good at navigating this, but it has also led to them sticking to basic "good enough" designs like the five-over-ones we see when new apartments are built.
I think that's an essential point, though maybe for a different reason.
I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?
Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.
Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?
There's a converse effect too, though - because conservatives tend to attack modernist and postmodernist art, liberals tend to defend even things that are too ridiculous to be seriously defended.
It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana. It's just common sense. But if you insist that everyone who does so is secretly motivated by some kind of bigotry, you end up pushing them towards the right wingers anyway.
Ugly is in the right of the beholder when it comes to individuals, but societies also have collective preferences.
> It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana.
Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:
> too ridiculous to be seriously defended
Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.
How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)
In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)
> It's just common sense.
Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:
- First they laugh at you (ridicule you)
- Then they say it's not in the orthodoxy (if ridicule fails,
you go from being ridiculous to being a threat to norms)
- Then they say they knew it all along (you're now within norms)
The same happens with social change, like women working - Ridicule, then a threat to norms, then normalized. What was absurd becomes normalized. In art, Impressionists were once objects of ridicule; now of course it's arguably the most popular style of painting in human history.
> societies also have collective preferences
They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.
Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.
If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.
At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)
White or grey are grossly over represented in Australia.
It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.
I grew up near a house that was painted an odd combination of purple with pink trim (shutters, etc). Nobody else followed suit because all anybody thought of it was "the ugly house".
Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal.
What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.
If I lived in Australia, I would have the exterior of my house to be very white (except solar panels), so as to reflect most of the visible and IR light, and stay cooler.
Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.
In Europe we had this minor disagreement in 1914, which we would prefer not to talk about.
One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades.
Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture.
There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on.
Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day.
In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad.
There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK).
Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years.
Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day.
The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from.
Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce!
The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car.
The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it.
The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the ...
> The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
And now it's used for bungee jumping.
The US equivalent is the Hunter's Point crane.[1] This was built to do a very specific job - lifting battleship turrets. It's not used any more.
The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.
Not really. That may have been true in the past, but it would be so cheap to CNC carve or extrude or injection-mould some ornamentation. Certain materials have gotten more expensive, but I think most of modernism was driven by materials progress and a boredom with previous trends
I wish more people were building brand new, modern neoclassical buildings that are truly beautiful in a Haussmannian way, yet as practical as modern skyscrapers.. something like 1 Mayfair in London or 150 East 78th Street in New York.
You see the same thing in literature, where modernism has crowded out of other styles. As one example, you see way less description today than in older books.
I'm not a hater on modernism -- I like stripped down literature and architecture (though I wish concrete buildings were cleaned more regularly). But there does seem to be some truth in this idea that "the elite critics" have dominated these fields, resulting in the production of art (and buildings) that are broadly unpopular. I think the overriding goal of these critics is avoiding kitsch, which they see in classical forms.
Now try 1970s public housing in Paris and Vienna, socialist blocks in Poland or projects in Chicago. It will be a lot more balanced because these places were designed for people to live in, not as radical statements. They are simple to save costs but there is no "artistic" movement behind them doing it on purpose.
Abstract modernism with random shapes and obsessively minimalist design is only the worst case scenario where all the hate is justified. It's what happens when architects design for each other and not the rest of us.
Architecture schools don't really teach you the pragmatic side of the trade. Their projects are building those sorts of abstracted models, talking about forms and voids. It is just so far abstracted from the sort of practical architecture that leads to stuff like built in cupboards in a Sears catalog home. Something to also consider is while these young architects are getting trained they aren't really living like adults either. They are in their early 20s after all, still perhaps lashing out in reflexive opposition from their suburban upbringing, and probably don't understand why a built in cupboard would be so exciting.
Many have never seen a really, truly beautiful high modern home, and it shows. Lots of both traditional and modern slop out there, with gems on both sides every once in a while.
the tragedy is that architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable. the other tragedy is before 'regulations' normies designed buildings - they didn't have architecture degrees. don't know if that's still possible anymore.
& buildings shape lives.
the only way to reverse the modernist trend is to have laws that incentivize classical buildings otherwise we gonna keep getting ugly buildings.
> architects (experts) prefer the modernist buildings. while common people prefer the classical buildings which makes cities more livable.
Good architects match modernism with livability. A couple months back I visited the Barbican Centre in London and it never ceases to amaze me how thoughtful is every little design item.
202 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 42.9 ms ] threadI might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
One great example from the city where I grew up: https://hicarquitectura.com/2024/09/lina-bo-bardi-sesc-pompe...
As for the building you showed me. I think it looks awful. It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium.
https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-architectural-revie...
It's probably some combination of the subculture effect (i.e., subcultures tend to develop their own in-group aesthetics) and as a functional shibboleth (i.e., being able to "appreciate" things average people don't has an in-group signalling function).
Now, as a contrast, another masterpiece from the city where I grew up: https://www.scribd.com/document/955270807/g10-Cultural-Cente...
it refers to "béton brut" - french for 'raw concrete'. in this case, brutalism could be more readily understood as 'rawism'. it also emerged during (and is a descendant of) the modernist architectural period, which is well known for those boring, non-descript office towers.
there's nothing wrong with the simplicity of raw concrete. but just like other architecture, it can be done well and it can be done poorly. it can be done for utility, and it can be done for extravagance.
I think many people think of non-descript office towers when they think of brutalism, rather than all of the interesting things that can be done with a single material (shapes, textures, designs, etc. it's a very versatile + strong medium!).
Because they study architecture. The article is profoundly anti-intellectual. This discourse, that colleges indoctrinate people and, thus, cause them to disagree with some form of "truth" that the uneducated masses know.
If the architecture they're studying is divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? They may as well be studying their own butts.
Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.
Classic butt-guy response.
Google "survivorship bias".
Look at 1950s New York - almost every building is beautiful, and every building is more beautiful than modern ones: https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2020/01/31/new-york-city-i...
That's not survivorship bias, that's going from near-uniformly beautiful to uniformly-ugly.
Personally I'd prefer to spend my time in and around a building like this than any of those:
https://labs.utdallas.edu/mems/files/2021/08/nserloutside.jp...
To me a building like this looks a lot more interesting. Lots of mixtures in materials, textures, and colors. And as mentioned before, this building lets in a lot of natural lighting.
If you're defending modern architecture, you have NO place complaining about originality, when 99% of it is steel & glass basic geometric shapes.
I can definitely complain about a lack of originality for works which lack originality.
Modern designs can often lack originality, I agree. Classical designs can lack originality as well. A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things. Its not good to put yourself in a camp and act like everything in group A is good without question, everything in camp B is bad without question.
You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting? Are you really saying you'd prefer to actually be in and use one of the buildings in that postcard image I pointed out?
I'm not saying all modern designs are good. I'm also not saying all older designs are bad. I am saying I am a human being and like to have some sunlight and see trees and the horizon from time to time, and that's more important to me for a building than some little intricate stonework that I can't even really make out because its three stories up and the whole exterior facade is covered with black gunk because its too expensive and fragile to actually maintain.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me...
This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG...
> Not remotely cost effective.
This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC...
Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
That prison building is overly stylized to my taste. And given how complex the exterior is and seeing it's state it's obvious it's hard to maintain. Unless you like all the gunk growing all over the building all the time.
Is the old building "fancy"? Sure. So is that fragile china that's kept in the fancy vitrine but rarely actually used because it's such a pain to maintain and actually use.
There is a clear preference for other people to build in traditional styles, but as soon as you have to care about more than what the facade looks like from the outside people choose the uglier functional option.
The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.
All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.
I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?
Or maybe do nothing, it's not like the public opinion really matters in the technocratic settings.
I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly. Whereas even quite dilapidated neo-classical-ish buildings look innately reasonably pleasing.
There's a trend in some Eastern European countries to paint older brutalist concrete buildings as a cost-effective measure to reduce concrete spalling and do thermo-modernization. It's actually pretty amazing how much nicer some of these buildings look even with just a uniform white paint job (others involve more color).
Architects seem to be largely opposed, seeing it as an erasure of the material honesty that brutalism was supposed to represent, but IMHO it suggests that a lot of the core issue with these designs wasn't the shape or creativity of the buildings themselves but just the way the concrete look quickly aged.
Well, let's try crank the knob yet another notch then.
> Maybe the majority is actually correct
What a horrible thing to say. The liberal democracy, may it be known to you, is about protecting and empowering the minorities of various kind, and the aesthetical minority exists, and its tastes matter.
> traditional architecture is just plain better
It's unsustainable [citation not needed].
Akin's Law 38: "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say."
But, I think one missing piece between architects and the general public is how architecture students are taught to design (and thus, see) buildings first through the lens of massing [0]. When you compose a building primarily by shaping the different masses, you lose sight of the ornamentation and complex decoration that sets old buildings apart. Then, you add air conditioning and modern building systems and the need for high ceilings and windows with airflow also disappears.
What you are left with is a sealed box. Essentially, architecture has ceded too much design space to engineering in the name of cost optimization and there isn't much 'art' left in it. But look around - that's true across our society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massing
It gives them some clever thing to know that normal people don't know anything about. If King Charles is right about architecture (he is), then what new experimental architecture can you research? You can't, because we've basically already discovered what people like.
After all, there is but one correct design language for buildings and it's a hideous slab of concrete that our ancestors would weep when if they could see.
Because I spend 80% of my time indoors, and 20% working in the garden, so frankly don't even care what the building looks like.
Maybe only care that the property looks neat when it's time to sell.
As it stands, these studies are just cherry-picked navel gazing with extra steps. You can't design a study like this well. There are hundreds of thousands of buildings, and tens of thousands of variations of subjective preference. And all of those go out of the window as soon as practical concerns (like affordability) arise.
Nonetheless, I think it is a failure of architecture that modern design is ugly. It shouldn't be impossible to make good looking, practical, cost-effective buildings with all the options of materials and engineering that is available.
So let's start as the baseline of these 77 to 23 blowout victories by traditional architecture.
Now gradually substitute other modern designs until you can get more of a 50/50 agreement at least, and hopefully 60/40 in favor of modernism.
You could be right. Some of these might be cherry picked bad modern designs. From the article one of them looked like it should have the wicked witch of the West telling her pretties to fly out from their caves to go attack Dorothy. Another one looks like a massive collection of missile launch tubes.
Some designs I almost have to laugh at, when almost similarly disjointed mcmansion hell type monstrosities are snootily dismissed.
Now, not every modern building has to look like a glass and steel colorless brick.
For example, I really like the look of Oodi [0], Helsinki's new library: it reminds me of wood covered with snow, and the interior is exactly what you would expect from a modern building (built in 2018).
[0]: https://oodihelsinki.fi/en/
The article reads like the author picked a conclusion and made things fit his opinion.
In my experience, the biggest issue is natural light - it's hard to beat glass walls when you need a structural skin with some windows where possible.
You can totally have a traditional style building with a modern interior without a hint of brutalism or concrete.
Unfortunately my European brothers and sisters prefer to live in open air museums. However slowly but surely skyscrapers have been creeping up into the Netherlands- you just can't beat the efficiency.
Humans weren't meant to be packed like ants. Wrong species.
This whole newsletter is a white guy advocating for a 1950s world. But with flock cameras.
a) Genuinely widely preferred, with many articles on this, ranging from aesthetic preferences through to scientific studies of how eyes move and what causes fatigue. There is genuine value to architecture before modern architecture -- and...
b) A stalking horse for right-wing thinking.
It's really interesting how this happens and it mirrors other right-wing techniques. A common way to get people into right-wing thinking is to find something that is genuinely unpopular or that people have concerns about, yet which has constrained discourse. Examples: lower incomes. You then talk about the good old days, and reframe it: lower incomes becomes, 'people taking your income, agh those immigrants'. Architecture becomes, '1940 and before were better, oh and everyone was white then'. You get the idea.
Another popular one on social media is the Greek and classical world, especially its comparative lack in modern education compared to, say, 1900. That's an easy intro to colonialism and racism, disguised in the neutral or even interesting format of ancient history.
Once you recognise this, you see it everywhere.
But don't let this fool you re older architecture having genuine value. We just have to avoid saying people have no taste, or referring to their preferences as 'pabulum'. That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject of architecture, they pay attention to what else that person says.
And that is why all the pollsters were caught flat-footed by Trump in 2016. The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond.
When politics exclude a group, or a group feels excluded, it's easy to lure the group into supporting anti-politics, which is a nice way to say "fascism".
This is kind of where we are now, with the far-right preying on the most vulnerable people that feel ignored by politicians.
The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.
It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.
Do better.
It reads uncomfortably close to an anti-intellectual discourse so popular in the far-right.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But this is a reasonable point to raise. Although both would serve their purpose a concrete viaduct is much cheaper to build than a masonry one, to the point that it may be difficult to justify the latter no matter how strong the public preference is for it.
They are comparing "same buildings" with AI but I would imagine they are not controlling cost.
Imagine gargoyles and metal dragons on drainpipes and all the ornamentation now and how much that would cost.
People prefer ancient dry stone walls over fences but they cost orders of magnitude differently.
I wonder if with robots and what not if we will see a resurgence in detail and ornamentation and other kinds of expensive but nice constructions.
Robots are not going to bring any of this back because robots will just create a new set of optimizations and constraints needed to make robotic construction cheaper and easier. If modern cars (which are the result of similar optimization) are anything to go by, this will result in output that's easy to build but hard to maintain or modify - so largely a continuation of existing trends.
Take a look at "3d printed" houses for an imperfect example of this kind of optimization for automation in action. Better robotics will bring about a more balanced version of this trade-off (walls will probably be possible to modify, unlike 3d printed ones) but the incentives remain the same.
Edit:
Trivial example: One of the easiest way to autonomously insulate a house will probably be with spray foam insulation - you can get a robot arm to hold the sprayer and move it in a specific, continuous motion pretty readily even today. But spray foam insulation is hard to modify after the fact. Removing it is time-intensive compared to removing insulation "batting" and applying it again requires specialized tools, PPE, and perhaps licensing.
Cultures have visual languages just the same as they have written and spoken (and signed) languages. The crucifix symbol has an understood meaning in most European cultures, because of how foundational Christianity is to their cultures. Is it really so surprising that people prefer buildings in a visual language they already understand?
There's also this paragraph at the very end:
>If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.
In a world where we've seen nothing but modernist designs for 70 years, is it really that surprising that people might prefer novel designs? Especially novel designs in a style they are repeatedly told is better, or references a more refined time?
1. There’s a traditional visual language that people instinctively prefer.
2. Modern architectural sensibilities have superseded traditional visual language through repetition.
I’m reading this to mean something like “people like their own traditional foods but since they've been drowning in pizza for the last 70 years, they’ve forgotten about their traditional foods.”
How can a basal, instinctive preference just disappear? Can the see drive disappear with enough brainwashing?
The article even seems aware of this possibility when it mentions that architecture students prefer modernism (with the semi-covert implication that their education is poisoning their aesthetic sensibilities). I claim its at most partially because they've been taught to prefer modern designs, but mainly because they've been taught to think about visual languages consciously, so they are able to recognize what a given architect is trying to do, in a way that a layperson might not. That's certainly why Thomas Kinkade gets as much hate as he does (that and the dodgy business practices...).
I'm also not claiming that people have been starved of traditional architecture entirely, just that nobody is building things in the traditional style now. They're not tearing them down either, the White House East Wing not withstanding. This is a novelty bias, nothing more. If you only ever see neoclassical architecture in buildings that are designated as "fancy" or "special" or "august", and all these modern, ordinary buildings do not, you're going to assume that the style itself, and not simply the age and intent at construction are what contributes to that.
I mean, 39 out of 50 US state capitol buildings have domes, as does the nation's capitol building. I think anybody in the US can be forgiven for thinking that dome = legitimate seat of authority. Certainly, that was the hypothesis behind the design decision.
Speaking only for myself, I found Washington DC, which is all neo-classical all the time, just really boring. All the buildings look the same, and I couldn't escape the sense that I was in museum that hadn't been updated in a long time. Chicago's Fields Museum has the same quality.
I'm more curious about residential though - see huge interesting in MCM over the last decades. I am biased but I think there is a great deal of interest in warm, modernist spaces with ideas like natural materials and lots of natural lighting, especially when compared to the beige boxes of American home building.
My family lives in a MCM house built around 1960. We bought it in a "hot" market where you couldn't be particular about anything. We chose a house based on location and the interior.
So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture
I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.
And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t
The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.
And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
It is designed to be this way for investors more than consumers. Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all. The consumers have no choice really but to be in this market if they want to be sheltered at all. It isn't like you really can exercise free market selection for something necessary like shelter. You have to take what has been made available and you cannot do without.
There is therefore no incentive to make a smart building that is favoring the tenant since this doesn't grow the potential pool of tenants in the area, that pool remains the same size as it was. It is unlike a lot of other markets where having a better product might actually grow the customer base of the product segment overall.
My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.
This is true, but usually fewer people die in the construction of those utilitarian housing projects
In China buildings are built faster.
That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain.
Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.
The people in the places where these neighborhoods were built didn't get a say, they were removed and new middle-class "YIMBYs" were moved in to be little lords on their little lots.
But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.
Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful.
But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.)
The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.
It's far more common than it should be.
> The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
The economic of bathtub curves incentivises designs nobody hates, even if at the cost of nobody loving them.
I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun?
Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill.
Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?
I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.
What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.
This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your statements at all?
I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.
You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, retreat and regressive. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!
Instead it just feels like some knowledge was lost to time and we lost the plot along the way, because there is a refusal or inability to just do what used to be done all the time in the past. Yes building codes are different, but stuff like trim or brick work or generally curb appeal shouldn't affect that. No one is asking for no sprinkler system or no hvac, just a better looking building from the outside. Many of those old buildings do get gutted and end up modern inside but maintain the old facade. People want more of that facade I think without it being a diminishing resource.
It very much does, unfortunately. In the US, the places with the highest housing shortages are mired with endless red tape, discretionary reviews, parking requirements etc. that substantially increase costs. This leaves little room for anything else, including aesthetics.
Developers have gotten very good at navigating this, but it has also led to them sticking to basic "good enough" designs like the five-over-ones we see when new apartments are built.
I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?
Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.
Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?
It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana. It's just common sense. But if you insist that everyone who does so is secretly motivated by some kind of bigotry, you end up pushing them towards the right wingers anyway.
Ugly is in the right of the beholder when it comes to individuals, but societies also have collective preferences.
Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:
> too ridiculous to be seriously defended
Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.
How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)
In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)
> It's just common sense.
Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:
The same happens with social change, like women working - Ridicule, then a threat to norms, then normalized. What was absurd becomes normalized. In art, Impressionists were once objects of ridicule; now of course it's arguably the most popular style of painting in human history.> societies also have collective preferences
They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.
Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.
If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.
At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)
It’s like people visit the remains of the forum in Rome and picture the colours being as they are today instead of the ridiculously bright/strong colours they would have been when erected/used.
No one else on my street has followed my lead though.
I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.
It’s easy to sell grey, white, and black cars. So it’s what you buy.
This assumes no purchase is longterm. Which is its own indictment.
I should add: I love that you broke this idea. Can you (safely for the internet) share any photos?
Standing out doesn't really help if it isn't more desirable than the boring normal.
What I personally dislike is the recent trend of all black siding and trim. I have no idea why people are doing this on new construction near me, other than perhaps cooling is cheaper than heating in our climate. It's certainly (IMHO) hideous though.
One consequence of this was the decimation of skilled craftsmen. Millions of them were sent off to become machine-gun fodder, to never return to their respective trades.
Along with them was their craft. The next generation of apprentices never had the mentors they needed, hence that was that, the end of what you might call traditional architecture.
There was another minor disagreement that began at various times depending on one's nationality. In the UK this meant 1939, and with it a second 'double tap' on the skilled craftsmen that the building trade used to rely on.
Many of the survivors did get to work on war memorials, and every village has one, carved in stone, and often kept in immaculate condition to this day.
In my local station there are two memorials, and I struggle to hold it in as I walk past. Needless to say, we lost a lot of good railway workers too. Sad.
There wasn't a lot of money after each of these minor disagreements and heavily blitzed cities still bear the scars. There can be a wonderful parade of shops with flats above, with wonderful craftsmenship, which is truly wonderful considering they didn't have motorised vehicles as we know them, or cherry pickers, or any machine that is big and yellow (JCB in the UK).
Nowadays there can be a huge 1870s building, with four storeys, all with big rooms and high ceilings, next to some 'rubbish' that was built in the post-disagreement years.
Some places were physically removed from the map. A 500 bomber raid on the special crane used to hoist big guns onto the ships of the Royal Navy happened one night. They completely missed the crane to destroy the entirety of Clydebank, a district of Glasgow. People are sore about that to this day.
The crane still stands, albeit idle, since shipbuilding went to Asia in the post-disagreement years. That crane, once the largest and most capable in the world, has a soul. It speaks of sorrow to me.
So yes, you are correct, but there is more to the story than just a Modernist story of cheap mass production. The limit was not resources as you can see the quarries that were abandoned after the first minor disagreement, and there is enough stone in any given mountain to make millions of homes. The limit was the loss of men as well as the loss of European colonies, on which the wealth of European cities came from.
Moving swiftly on, I am no Ferrari fan under normal circumstances, however, Lewis Hamilton currently drives for their Formula One team and he is a hero of mine. Hence I am willing to defend the loathed Luce!
The Luce does have Mr Ive's design input and I don't think anyone is critical of the interior. It is well understood that serious tax avoidance vehicles need to stay away from having big screens on the dashboard since they are not going to age well (and F1 cars don't have such things). Having four seats rather than just the two makes sense to me, since the car needs to have some length to it for high speed stability and there is no need for a massive red V12 engine in the middle of the car.
The Luce brings much from the world of F1, including high performance cooling systems that cost 100x the price of the radiators in your car. People like older cars because they can tune them, the Luce is the first EV that is what you might call tune-able, with the owner able to set the car up for a given track or just the road, with them also able to do what they want with it.
The aerodynamic package is ahead of its time, and, as such, it will draw criticism. We have been here before, notably in the UK with the Ford Sierra. This was a 'jelly mould' shaped version of the three-box saloon that had gone before, the Cortina. Initially the press hated on the Sierra and people did have genuine misgivings. However, it did not take long before the Sierra rose to the top of the sales charts to set the trend for the 'jelly mould' look, these being the ...
And now it's used for bungee jumping.
The US equivalent is the Hunter's Point crane.[1] This was built to do a very specific job - lifting battleship turrets. It's not used any more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter%27s_Point_crane
The Dana-Thomas House, designed and executed by Frank-Lloyd Wright, spared no expense in an age when skilled craftsmen were affordable.
Are there seeds of the Guggenheim in New York between these two buildings?
https://www.ourchanginglives.com/springfields-dana-thomas-ho...
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60763-d108687...
I wish more people were building brand new, modern neoclassical buildings that are truly beautiful in a Haussmannian way, yet as practical as modern skyscrapers.. something like 1 Mayfair in London or 150 East 78th Street in New York.
I'm not a hater on modernism -- I like stripped down literature and architecture (though I wish concrete buildings were cleaned more regularly). But there does seem to be some truth in this idea that "the elite critics" have dominated these fields, resulting in the production of art (and buildings) that are broadly unpopular. I think the overriding goal of these critics is avoiding kitsch, which they see in classical forms.
Abstract modernism with random shapes and obsessively minimalist design is only the worst case scenario where all the hate is justified. It's what happens when architects design for each other and not the rest of us.
& buildings shape lives.
the only way to reverse the modernist trend is to have laws that incentivize classical buildings otherwise we gonna keep getting ugly buildings.
Good architects match modernism with livability. A couple months back I visited the Barbican Centre in London and it never ceases to amaze me how thoughtful is every little design item.