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.

I absolutely love neoclassical architecture.

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.

"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.

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 sex drive disappear with enough brainwashing?

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.

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.

The missing part is that traditional building used to be cheap (in fact the cheapest way of building things).

What changed is labour costs in western countries relative to the cost of materials and other physical things

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.

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.

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.

Am I hot or not architecture edition?

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.

There is a nice youtube channel called The Aesthetic City. There are some really nice new projects done with traditional architecture in Europe.

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.

My theory is they end up preferring buildings that are easy to draw in AutoCAD.

Akin's Law 38: "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say."

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.

Classical and in a sense neoclassical architecture literally stood the test of time.

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.

Many of the architectural styles didn't get enough time to stand the test of time!

"Man fears time. Time fears only the pyramids."

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.

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'm kind of counting on normal being in the minority here.

> That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject

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.

Casual racism paired with elitist arrogance? Who knew HN could get so bad.

Do better.

I'm a pretty strong candidate for having my picture in the dictionary next to the definition of white guy. So I must be self-loathing or whatever the explanation must be that I'm not lamenting that you can't say the N-word and that your boss might be a woman. I must be some kind of race traitor, right?

This feels frustrating.

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.

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?

> 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.

Also there is survivorship bias.

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.

The worst architecture is a combination of cost optimization and aiming for looking traditional-ish. That's a recipe for future blight.

So new buildings ignore externalities in the economic sense but also very literally.

Perhaps counter intuitive but beauty standards are not simply just sentiment.

>In the old days, buildings were made to impress

Google "survivorship bias".

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.

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.

I don't think a single building in those postcards is beautiful. Most of them are incredibly forgettable run down old buildings.

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. Ooh wow another government building in the classical revival style with big tall roman pillars making up a Portico made from white stone, how original, never seen that before. And are you really telling me the building on the left here actually looks good? That's the kind of building you'd love to walk past every day, the kind of building you'd want to spend all day inside? These buildings look like they're covered in tons of nasty soot and gunk and generally don't seem like clean places to be.

https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...

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. It lets you see outside instead of just constantly feeling like you're trapped in a jail cell.

Its not even like I really hate old architecture, I just think a lot of these examples given suck. I like this, for example (although it is getting close to overstylized for my taste):

https://www.adventuresofacarryon.com/wordpress/wp-content/up...

Buildings like this as well, although definitely not as much natural light. Notice its actually nice, clean, and maintained compared to the other examples given. Still kind of old and boring though in the end.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Dallas_C...

> how original, never seen that before.

If you're defending modern architecture, you have NO place complaining about originality, when 99% of it is steel & glass basic geometric shapes.

> 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?

Buildings like this have way more originality than all those brick buildings in the postcard I linked, other than the one featured center in that postcard. Or yet another white stone government building with roman columns in front and endless small windows. And I don't even consider it that original.

https://img.imageboss.me/concrete-assets/width/3072/format:a...

I'm not saying all modern designs are good. I'm also not saying all older designs are bad. I'm not even saying those classical revival government buildings are inherently bad, they're consistent and unoriginal for a reason. 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.

> 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.

>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).

Brutalism isn't cheaper. Not even in the secondary market. Brutalist masterpieces like the Barbican are highly desirable residences.

Why, indeed.

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.

> 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.

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? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.

The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/

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.

You must also be part of the "80%" to think the Babylon Bee is funny.

Plenty of old people now grew up in a phase in history where we were building ugly cheap things

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.

> ... that's how humans were intended to live

Humans weren't meant to be packed like ants. Wrong species.

You might like Athens, in that case.