I love European architecture, and I generally detest US urban design, but this is a really unfair generalization.

I used to live in Berkeley. More recently, I lived in South Park, San Diego. Both places have beautiful homes. I would _love_ to be able to build an American Craftsman style home where I live now (Ireland) but it would most likely be deemed "out of character" with the surroundings and refused planning.

http://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/8VGRjHKhUkzpKVPCdeX9X...

Grand Central station in Los Angeles holds its own too http://kmetros.net/wp-content/uploads/galleries/post-95/full...

(Edit - the above was supposed to refer to Union Station in LA, not GCS in NYC.)

Even among modern architecture, there's something to be said for the aspiration, even if not the reality. There's a beauty in the colorful, low-slung storefronts in Ocean Beach, near San Diego. https://goo.gl/maps/tSaHPChSjLo Of course, I could do without the cars and parking lots. Maybe I'm biased by my history but dingy burger joints and head shops near the beach evoke a sense of relaxation I don't get much of in European cities.

Old brick buildings can be really depressing when they're not kept up. And Europe has plenty of unattractive housing projects (https://goo.gl/maps/KLRXsCrck8s )

Here's a ghastly shopping centre near my home in Dublin http://cf.broadsheet.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Phibsboro...

Maybe Europe's advantage was having more time to accumulate buildings, so over time the ugly ones got torn down. Of course, why don't we have more Native American architecture? A nomadic lifestyle combined with materials that generally degrade over centuries? (Notwithstanding that, of course, there may be Native American architects doing interesting work today. I don't know)

But really it's because fewer European cities have been destroyed by car-centric design. Those which have are about as ugly as US suburbia, but I struggle to think of too many examples. Outer neighborhoods of Dublin and Stuttgart come to mind.

>Old brick buildings can be really depressing when they're not kept up.

Brick dominates the UK, but the architecture in the continent in general is much more varied and interesting (see Paris, Rome, Prague, Cracow as examples).

True - and my favourite places in the world are medieval towns on the continent (Obernai, Colmar, Rothenburg ob Der Tauber, Riquewihr, etc. all hold enormous appeal for me). I was just trying to point out that the US isn't _all_ hideous and Europe isn't _all_ charming architecture.

> fewer European cities have been destroyed by car-centric design

Galway is pretty terrible, if you're talking about Ireland, and some of the former industrial heartland of England is pretty bad too (Coventry in particular)

Yup - #GalwayCityOfCars comes up a lot in Twitter for me, and they've fought any improvement for cycling until after getting an enormous motorway built, because clearly a 1 meter wide bike lane is the cause of their congestion issues.

Small note: Grand Central Station is in New York, not LA

Sorry, I meant Union Station, not Grand Central. Too much copy-pasting.

*terminal

Fair, that is the correct name, but you'll hear it called Station, Terminal, or the shortened "Grand Central".

The subway part of it is a station, but for all other trains it’s the last stop.