This is excellent. I'd love to read next about interiors. As an Edith Wharton scholar, I've been long interested in the ways that she narrates the transition from gas to electricity inside the most glorious of the buildings and how retrofitting displaced tenants. (Thus summer homes.) Also indoor plumbing and the decision to tear down and start anew or retrofit.
Interiors are very interesting to me, and something I know almost nothing about. However, I have never been motivated to explore them as intensely as facades, streets, cities, etc., because I just don't think they have gotten systematically worse. In fact, I think midcentury is one of the most popular *interior* design styles, loathed as it is by the public outside of the most rare ultrapremium elite cases (like $$$ villas and the best office towers) for facades.
Hi! I am so glad you are interested and I think the missing link is that non-architects and non-city planners simply don’t see interiors because why would they? But structural problems are seen in basements and buckling retainer walls and you have to imagine a lot a lot of developers saying “gut the whole thing and begin anew.” And also “when you begin again, I don’t care about the outside as long as everyone gets electricity and plumbing.”
Yes, I’m also fascinated by the Airbnb-effect of interiors. As someone who travels a lot, I find it incredibly hard to understand why every single apartment is white with gray furniture. Especially considering the ones with black walls and brass chandeliers and colorful carpets go for thousands of dollars more. These days I scroll until I find someone who painted and sometimes that takes pages to find! As with this article, it can’t be because of cost or that no one likes ornament/color etc.
On myth 3: I find it annoying when people say nimbys don't care about beauty because it just assumes that they're a homogeneous group with the same views and motivations (also usually assumed to be unreasonable) . If they're instead a political coalition, then ensuring that new buildings are beautiful could either 1) shrink the coalition a bit or 2) make some of them at least object less than they currently do. Both of those seem worthwhile in terms of getting stuff built.
Agree 100%. Even my version of the story is excessively reductionist. What's more, beautiful buildings could also grow the national coalition that is willing to override the local 'NIMBYs'
This is such a brilliant article - thanks! The question it raises for me is: why are so many buildings ugly, then? If we know they are, and we know people don’t like them, and they’re not much cheaper, and it’s not just a fashion thing, then … why are they being built? Without an answer to that, I can see why people reach for one of these eight myths to explain it. Any ideas?
Aha! Now that really IS the question. I assumed it must be one of these things too. But I don't think it can be. Samuel is working on an answer, but it will be his magnum opus.
I look forward to Samuel’s response! I've always assumed that ugly buildings are caused by the move from builders to developers? As in, the city owns this land and hires an architect to build an ornate building or the church owns land and hires a builder to build a beautiful cathedral or a company owns land and hires an architect to build its offices—all of this compared with a developer buying land and building to lease or sell. Isn't there more of an incentive to make the land you own and use beautiful? As opposed to a developer who isn't building for its own personal use but to buy or sell?
It's very nice to see these myths busted. In the long run, however, I suspect solving the housing problem--and many of our other problems too--will require busting another myth. It's a myth about practical reasoning that I call "direct design." See https://ourkarlpopper.net/2020/10/26/jonguze/
Among the reasons: architecture schools universally rejected tradition, and the modernist ethos was to prize novelty above all else. But as the essay points out, most architects are (by definition) average. In the past, most architects aspired to copy the prevailing patterns well and the main design work was adapting them to the particulars of a site or building occupant, today most architects are striving to avoid copying things they’ve done before, so each new building is a buggy beta version.
But cities have made this worse. Because most buildings today are ugly, most cities try to write rules to prevent ugliness, which ironically tends to result in sloppy compliance and profound mediocrity.
What about my pet theory? That now buildings have to go through committees, which are incapable of having good taste.
All big buildings (government and business) are commissioned by managers. All small ones (housing, retail development) have to be approved by the planning commission. And many need to go through both committees. Ugh.
I am interested in this theory, but I suspect that it is not the fundamental answer. I suspect we can find many excellent committee-designed buildings before 1930 and many poor non-committee-designer buildings after 1930, though I do agree it might be a variable. (It's also worth asking why we would turn to committees despite bad results! Discovering that committees were relevant might not end the investigation.)
Yes but.... terrible example. This is feedback from someone who lives in Sydney. Exception that proves the rule and maybe kicked off the current regime - picked on a vibe sketch by one genius architect, all design decisions needed to go through another genius architect, blew budgets and timelines by an unbelievable amount.
All true (except where I live), but a committee all the same. Isn't your theory that the committee has no taste? As far as I can tell, no committee constructs buildings, they call hire architects. Surely your theory is committees place unreasonable constraints on the people they hire that hinders good taste.
My theory (maybe Duncan agrees), and I'll grant you an important angle. I was thinking of corporate buildings or government agency headquarters. It seems like those used to be intentionally attractive and high quality, just because they reflected the reputation of the business. With the rise of managerial corporations, that gets harder.
But when the architecture itself is much of the status value, maybe committees step up, and you get the Chrysler Building and Johnson Wax and Meta hiring Gehry and Google hiring BIG.
I think modern American housing construction challenges the premises behind this article.
1. It's not modernist. Here's an example neighborhood near my house: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZKiJ5paAzJUa4rck6 There are a bunch of different styles here, it's very pastiche, there's basically no modernism of the kind described in the article.
2. It's ugly. No one would put that neighborhood in favorable comparison with the nice ones you showed.
3. It is preferred. This is an expensive neighborhood, these are relatively new-build houses, people made individual decisions to design them that way.
I think that the link there is a fairly nice, and that it would be popular with the public. I think that is an example of the market working fairly efficiently, and I don't think it's at all surprising that the main kind of development permitted at scale in the US is in roughly popular styles like that. (I don't think it is of exceptional quality, and I have some thoughts about why. But I don't think it is an example of the uglification people complain about. Most people would broadly like that.)
1. If you think this is genuinely attractive, in the way the classic buildings you showed are, then we just disagree pretty fundamentally on aesthetics.
2. This kind of architecture, both for single family homes and apartments, is extremely common in the US. (That neighborhood has SFHs, duplexes, and apartments.) But this has done nothing to reduce opposition to building homes. That specific development was opposed as too dense, new developments that are similar are opposed, etc.
I agree that it's not particularly high quality, but it's in a style that most people like, just done in a relatively inexpert way. It's not ugly, it's like a 3/10 or a 4/10 or something. But most people would say it was decent.
Have you read the post? The argument of the post is that local opposition is not much affected by beauty or ugliness. Mass market housebuilders generally just optimise for what their buyer would like, constrained by the cost of producing it.
I think I largely agree. Shopping in London, I was surprised at how small the premium for a beautiful home over an ugly one was - certainly less than 10%. Great for me, but surprising. I have no particular explanation for this in mind, but this is an area where people have a relatively measurable preference and we can estimate its strength accordingly.
I really appreciate your point of view but I do think there is balance to be found. What you call modernism - I'd call international style maybe - created more a sense of debasement and loss of roots and community that architects have to reckon with. But painting over this debasement with classicism is creating a false sense of virtue in the built world. Because a courthouse had columns doesn't make justice more fair or virtuous, although it helps hide injustice (a lot of debate in Paris around the new courthouse can somewhat center of this idea). I think modernism's neutrality in housing (like the examples you referred to) can be a problem; but so can creating tacky adorned housing complex for people who's lived experience is not reflected in the built world around them.
In the end, architects have to be more materialistic - give importance to materials, finishes, quality that will last and the implications of this - rather than consumeristic - focusing too much on building fast and cheap in a AI-like architectural approach. Otherwise you end up with Disneyland not Rome; "Luxury pre-fab apartments", not Chicago (which I think everybody can agree is a beautiful modernist city).
In terms of "balance of the two", I'd refer you to the instagram account @roam_antics that does an interesting job of photographing antique farmhouse vernacular furniture in combination with modern elements.
I can't recall whether Hughes has discussed this, but Christopher Alexander, in his multi-volume study *The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe* has a very ambitious attempt to get to the bottom of why some designs are good and others bad.
Alexander's books are full of illustrations of streets like the above.
He identifies "Fifteen Fundamental Properties" of good design:
(1) Levels of scale; (2) Strong centers; (3) Boundaries; (4) Alternating repetition; (5) Positive space; (6) Good shape; (7) Local symmetries; (8) Deep interlock and ambiguity; (9) Contrast; (10) Gradients; (11) Roughness; (12) Echoes; (13) The void; (14) Simplicity and inner calm; (15) Not-separateness.
"What makes a meaningful place? Evaluating Christopher Alexander's framework of natural order against essentialist and anti-essentialist qualities of urban spaces"
Yes, I read the post. I think the theory that changes in design tastes are responsible for large scale changes in how our society builds things predicts things that are not accurate about what happens in the US. Maybe it's true in the UK, y'all are weird.
This comment has appeared in a weird place, but I gather that it's replying to my one in the thread above. The important point in the post is that even if Samuel is right that the aesthetics of buildings matter for development, it is not through local zoning rules, it is mainly through national/broader/wider historic preservation.
An interesting honest article - thanks for giving us a peak into your mind.
Got me thinking about disposable architecture - in Australia business leases are getting shorter (far less than 3 years is now the norm). Sturdy houses built in the 70s are routinely demolished to be rebuilt in a new style. The first housing factory in Australia is being built, to mass produce houses to a high standard, but very fast (days vs months). In a world with an over supply of manufactured goods, do we need enduring architecture?
I've talked to some people who just jump between each of these myths as needed. It's like playing Whac-A-Mole. Having them all refuted in one place is helpful.
This is excellent. I'd love to read next about interiors. As an Edith Wharton scholar, I've been long interested in the ways that she narrates the transition from gas to electricity inside the most glorious of the buildings and how retrofitting displaced tenants. (Thus summer homes.) Also indoor plumbing and the decision to tear down and start anew or retrofit.
Interiors are very interesting to me, and something I know almost nothing about. However, I have never been motivated to explore them as intensely as facades, streets, cities, etc., because I just don't think they have gotten systematically worse. In fact, I think midcentury is one of the most popular *interior* design styles, loathed as it is by the public outside of the most rare ultrapremium elite cases (like $$$ villas and the best office towers) for facades.
Hi! I am so glad you are interested and I think the missing link is that non-architects and non-city planners simply don’t see interiors because why would they? But structural problems are seen in basements and buckling retainer walls and you have to imagine a lot a lot of developers saying “gut the whole thing and begin anew.” And also “when you begin again, I don’t care about the outside as long as everyone gets electricity and plumbing.”
I look forward to whatever you write!
Yes, I’m also fascinated by the Airbnb-effect of interiors. As someone who travels a lot, I find it incredibly hard to understand why every single apartment is white with gray furniture. Especially considering the ones with black walls and brass chandeliers and colorful carpets go for thousands of dollars more. These days I scroll until I find someone who painted and sometimes that takes pages to find! As with this article, it can’t be because of cost or that no one likes ornament/color etc.
On myth 3: I find it annoying when people say nimbys don't care about beauty because it just assumes that they're a homogeneous group with the same views and motivations (also usually assumed to be unreasonable) . If they're instead a political coalition, then ensuring that new buildings are beautiful could either 1) shrink the coalition a bit or 2) make some of them at least object less than they currently do. Both of those seem worthwhile in terms of getting stuff built.
Agree 100%. Even my version of the story is excessively reductionist. What's more, beautiful buildings could also grow the national coalition that is willing to override the local 'NIMBYs'
Create Streets has also had a profound impact on me
This is such a brilliant article - thanks! The question it raises for me is: why are so many buildings ugly, then? If we know they are, and we know people don’t like them, and they’re not much cheaper, and it’s not just a fashion thing, then … why are they being built? Without an answer to that, I can see why people reach for one of these eight myths to explain it. Any ideas?
Aha! Now that really IS the question. I assumed it must be one of these things too. But I don't think it can be. Samuel is working on an answer, but it will be his magnum opus.
I look forward to Samuel’s response! I've always assumed that ugly buildings are caused by the move from builders to developers? As in, the city owns this land and hires an architect to build an ornate building or the church owns land and hires a builder to build a beautiful cathedral or a company owns land and hires an architect to build its offices—all of this compared with a developer buying land and building to lease or sell. Isn't there more of an incentive to make the land you own and use beautiful? As opposed to a developer who isn't building for its own personal use but to buy or sell?
It's very nice to see these myths busted. In the long run, however, I suspect solving the housing problem--and many of our other problems too--will require busting another myth. It's a myth about practical reasoning that I call "direct design." See https://ourkarlpopper.net/2020/10/26/jonguze/
Interesting!
Among the reasons: architecture schools universally rejected tradition, and the modernist ethos was to prize novelty above all else. But as the essay points out, most architects are (by definition) average. In the past, most architects aspired to copy the prevailing patterns well and the main design work was adapting them to the particulars of a site or building occupant, today most architects are striving to avoid copying things they’ve done before, so each new building is a buggy beta version.
But cities have made this worse. Because most buildings today are ugly, most cities try to write rules to prevent ugliness, which ironically tends to result in sloppy compliance and profound mediocrity.
Yes. Of course, an important part of the Western tradition since the 1500s is the search for novelty. But it arguably went too far.
What about my pet theory? That now buildings have to go through committees, which are incapable of having good taste.
All big buildings (government and business) are commissioned by managers. All small ones (housing, retail development) have to be approved by the planning commission. And many need to go through both committees. Ugh.
I am interested in this theory, but I suspect that it is not the fundamental answer. I suspect we can find many excellent committee-designed buildings before 1930 and many poor non-committee-designer buildings after 1930, though I do agree it might be a variable. (It's also worth asking why we would turn to committees despite bad results! Discovering that committees were relevant might not end the investigation.)
Here's a more complete version of the theory
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/you-probably-own-this-7-eleven
Sydney Opera House design was chosen by a committee.
Yes but.... terrible example. This is feedback from someone who lives in Sydney. Exception that proves the rule and maybe kicked off the current regime - picked on a vibe sketch by one genius architect, all design decisions needed to go through another genius architect, blew budgets and timelines by an unbelievable amount.
Maybe this example kicked off the path of budget holders being unwilling to fund beautiful buildings???!!! https://timharford.com/2023/09/cautionary-tales-the-tragedy-of-sydney-opera-house/ . Listen to this summary, there are a lot more details if you live locally in NSW.
All true (except where I live), but a committee all the same. Isn't your theory that the committee has no taste? As far as I can tell, no committee constructs buildings, they call hire architects. Surely your theory is committees place unreasonable constraints on the people they hire that hinders good taste.
My theory (maybe Duncan agrees), and I'll grant you an important angle. I was thinking of corporate buildings or government agency headquarters. It seems like those used to be intentionally attractive and high quality, just because they reflected the reputation of the business. With the rise of managerial corporations, that gets harder.
But when the architecture itself is much of the status value, maybe committees step up, and you get the Chrysler Building and Johnson Wax and Meta hiring Gehry and Google hiring BIG.
Thank you for exercising my pet!
I think modern American housing construction challenges the premises behind this article.
1. It's not modernist. Here's an example neighborhood near my house: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZKiJ5paAzJUa4rck6 There are a bunch of different styles here, it's very pastiche, there's basically no modernism of the kind described in the article.
2. It's ugly. No one would put that neighborhood in favorable comparison with the nice ones you showed.
3. It is preferred. This is an expensive neighborhood, these are relatively new-build houses, people made individual decisions to design them that way.
I think that the link there is a fairly nice, and that it would be popular with the public. I think that is an example of the market working fairly efficiently, and I don't think it's at all surprising that the main kind of development permitted at scale in the US is in roughly popular styles like that. (I don't think it is of exceptional quality, and I have some thoughts about why. But I don't think it is an example of the uglification people complain about. Most people would broadly like that.)
1. If you think this is genuinely attractive, in the way the classic buildings you showed are, then we just disagree pretty fundamentally on aesthetics.
2. This kind of architecture, both for single family homes and apartments, is extremely common in the US. (That neighborhood has SFHs, duplexes, and apartments.) But this has done nothing to reduce opposition to building homes. That specific development was opposed as too dense, new developments that are similar are opposed, etc.
I agree that it's not particularly high quality, but it's in a style that most people like, just done in a relatively inexpert way. It's not ugly, it's like a 3/10 or a 4/10 or something. But most people would say it was decent.
Have you read the post? The argument of the post is that local opposition is not much affected by beauty or ugliness. Mass market housebuilders generally just optimise for what their buyer would like, constrained by the cost of producing it.
I think I largely agree. Shopping in London, I was surprised at how small the premium for a beautiful home over an ugly one was - certainly less than 10%. Great for me, but surprising. I have no particular explanation for this in mind, but this is an area where people have a relatively measurable preference and we can estimate its strength accordingly.
I really appreciate your point of view but I do think there is balance to be found. What you call modernism - I'd call international style maybe - created more a sense of debasement and loss of roots and community that architects have to reckon with. But painting over this debasement with classicism is creating a false sense of virtue in the built world. Because a courthouse had columns doesn't make justice more fair or virtuous, although it helps hide injustice (a lot of debate in Paris around the new courthouse can somewhat center of this idea). I think modernism's neutrality in housing (like the examples you referred to) can be a problem; but so can creating tacky adorned housing complex for people who's lived experience is not reflected in the built world around them.
In the end, architects have to be more materialistic - give importance to materials, finishes, quality that will last and the implications of this - rather than consumeristic - focusing too much on building fast and cheap in a AI-like architectural approach. Otherwise you end up with Disneyland not Rome; "Luxury pre-fab apartments", not Chicago (which I think everybody can agree is a beautiful modernist city).
In terms of "balance of the two", I'd refer you to the instagram account @roam_antics that does an interesting job of photographing antique farmhouse vernacular furniture in combination with modern elements.
I loved this summation of Samuel’s myths, and come away with so many questions about how to overcome the problem. Thanks Ben!
You are so welcome!
I can't recall whether Hughes has discussed this, but Christopher Alexander, in his multi-volume study *The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe* has a very ambitious attempt to get to the bottom of why some designs are good and others bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_Order
Alexander's books are full of illustrations of streets like the above.
He identifies "Fifteen Fundamental Properties" of good design:
(1) Levels of scale; (2) Strong centers; (3) Boundaries; (4) Alternating repetition; (5) Positive space; (6) Good shape; (7) Local symmetries; (8) Deep interlock and ambiguity; (9) Contrast; (10) Gradients; (11) Roughness; (12) Echoes; (13) The void; (14) Simplicity and inner calm; (15) Not-separateness.
"What makes a meaningful place? Evaluating Christopher Alexander's framework of natural order against essentialist and anti-essentialist qualities of urban spaces"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494426000538
The Classic Planning Institute led by Nir Buras works along similar lines:
https://www.classicplanning.org/team/nir-buras
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674919242
Yes, I read the post. I think the theory that changes in design tastes are responsible for large scale changes in how our society builds things predicts things that are not accurate about what happens in the US. Maybe it's true in the UK, y'all are weird.
This comment has appeared in a weird place, but I gather that it's replying to my one in the thread above. The important point in the post is that even if Samuel is right that the aesthetics of buildings matter for development, it is not through local zoning rules, it is mainly through national/broader/wider historic preservation.
Yes, sorry, this was intended to be a reply; sometimes the Substack app does that.
Your image is pretty nice. Try this from New Zealand and they are popping up everywhere https://www.reddit.com/r/auckland/comments/1pge9iu/these/?solution=24a1f0813b5a26fb24a1f0813b5a26fb&js_challenge=1&token=7afd7253fec22262ff1c52b1703fe9ec934e79f605daf0bcad61ae102ad51efe&jsc_orig_r=
Aha yes, those are rather mediocre. It's a crying shame.
An interesting honest article - thanks for giving us a peak into your mind.
Got me thinking about disposable architecture - in Australia business leases are getting shorter (far less than 3 years is now the norm). Sturdy houses built in the 70s are routinely demolished to be rebuilt in a new style. The first housing factory in Australia is being built, to mass produce houses to a high standard, but very fast (days vs months). In a world with an over supply of manufactured goods, do we need enduring architecture?
I don't think we need enduring buildings, no, but our temporary ones should probably be nice. Even takeaway food often comes in attractive boxes.
I've talked to some people who just jump between each of these myths as needed. It's like playing Whac-A-Mole. Having them all refuted in one place is helpful.
Thank you! That was my intention.