Why We Don't Build "Beautiful" Buildings Anymore

As someone who’s renovating a historic villa in Italy, I was shocked at how affordable ornamentation is. Take a window, that classical decorative pediment above it is literally a slab of cement that’s cast on site in a mould. Wash and repeat per window. This is how ornamentation has been done in Italy since Roman times. I GUARANTEE it costs less than that silly modern cladding that the put all over buildings now.

The funny thing is, even those plain blocky buildings could look pretty nice if they just added window boxes and some planters on the terraces. It'd make the building a lot more pleasant to live in, too.

As an architect I can assure it's perfectly possible to build affordable and very nice looking contemporary architecture with modern materials & techniques. There are lots of projects just like that in several countries, especially Europe. That's just not as common as could be due to the factors Adam pointed out, commoditization of buildings and the damn car centric policies that rule our cities. But there are a lot of designers, planners and others battling to change that

What also bothers me is this "grey-trend". In my area (Austrian countryside) almost EVERY new house has either grey windowframes, grey roof, grey facades or at least a grey stripe of colour.... It looks so cold and sad... But of course that's also a question of individual taste, apparently some people like the look of it :///

The architecture of tomorrow shouldn't try to imitate old beautiful building styles but try to create new, unique buildings that combine function and aesthetics.

Ornaments were mass produced in the past. I live in a part of Nuremberg that was built in the late 1800s to house the workers of the factories and nearly every building has some kind of ornamentation or other decorations. If you look carefully while you walk through the city you will see the same gargoyles, eagles, arches, stone carvings and whatnot over and over again.

In my opinion, the bigger problem, at least in the U.S., is when new buildings are built, especially skyscrapers, they're so expensive that the commercial tenants can only be luxury stores or big chains. That's why you don't have "neighborhoody" stores in new development areas, which adds to the sterilized feel. It hits differently when you have a restaurant, niche coffee shop, a pub, and/or a little convenience store vs. new buildings that just have a Starbucks and a Coach store.

I would like to point out how important it is for a place to feel alive. This can be achieved in many ways and one of the more noticeable is having a building create shadows. Shadows change the way a building looks over the course of the day and add a natural element.

I think you missed one key point - banks won't lend on properties they don't believe will be viable. Banks are often pushing for more parking, oddly enough. It's hard to fight history and inertia.

"We don't mass produce classical ornaments." We used to. Developers would select them from pattern books and stick them on. Often you can see the change from one speculative builder on a plot of land to another on the next by the subtle differences in their choice of ornamentation.

Art Deco was an era that is severely underappreciated. It's the Gothic architecture of the 20th century and didn't last anywhere near as long as it deserved.

Also people stopped building things of lasting value, we don’t think about future generations, or about leaving a legacy. This was a major motivator of making buildings beautiful; to leave your mark and be remembered.

I wouldn't underestimate the first point: Fashion In Germany, before WW1 buildings usually were decorated with stucco. Looks nice nowadays, but back then it was actually quite cheap - as it was mass-produced in factories. After WW2, stucco was out of fashion. It was even common to remove the stucco (in German: "Entstucken"). Nobody would do this today! So if we'd have stucco as a new fashion trend and would start to mass-produce it again, I think we could do it. But we don't want to.

Another, smaller factor is also just plain survivorship bias. The past had its own bland, ugly, decrepit buildings just like today. It's just that those were usually first in line to be torn down and replaced, while the well-built, good-looking ones were more likely to be kept around and continually renovated.

Not only are they not building more, people have to fight like hell to keep what we still have. In my city, we have Union Terminal, a beautiful old art deco building that used to be a train station. It now houses a museum and a few other things, and citizens in the city have had to fight numerous times to prevent it being demolished.

Ornaments don't have to be made individually, they have never been so cheap to make since stone can be replicated beautifully in moulds out of cheaper materials. Openwork metal is super fast and easy to do too. Stained glass can even be done with vinyl stickers. They can't hide behind the cost excuse. They just don't care.

This is something way underappreciated in modern society. Humans need beautiful spaces, just like they need nature.

I once met a man whose father used to fabricate door knobs to Pashas in Egypt during the 30’s n 40s, he said his father would brake the mould in front of the customer after delivery so that he knows his door knobs are absolutely unique!!

It’s so weird that a building keeps being called “building” even after being built.

I agree with your conclusions. What depresses me is that I don’t see the factors changing any time soon, and I don’t have any faith we’ll see beautiful architecture become normal again any time soon. Tastes change and vary through time and region, but we all see the beauty in a Japanese pagoda, a Byzantine bazaar, and a Greek column even if we have our own preferences. What’s different today is that we aren’t making the modern equivalent. We’re devoid of any architectural opinion or taste at all. It’s all a soulless profit machine where so much property is developed by absent investors who couldn’t care less what is made on the land they will sell and forget about a year down the line, so long as it turns a profit. Add to that incompetent local authorities who are run rings around by corporations with higher-paid, smarter employees, and you get the bland civil engineering of the 21st Century. That was a rant, so apologies if it’s incoherent!