I don't think the ugliness is anything philosophical either. We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture.
This bears repeating.
The amount of people who have to contend with a building will always far outnumber the number of people who inhabit or profit from the building.
How should we build, knowing that?
painters are free to create ugly works of art all they like, to a first order of appoximation we are in a position to ignore them
not so with the built environment
a long conversation...
Have a look at where architects live and compare it to what they design. You'll find that many if not most - architects or otherwise - prefer to live in classical buildings which in nothing resemble the concrete-glass-steel(-wood) style of modern architecture. There are exceptions but they are in the minority, at least among the architects I know.
I do wonder if there is a bit of survivorship bias here. The pretty objects survive, the ugly ones do not. Though there are also changes in taste. In the UK people today like the rows or terraced houses. They were built to be the cheapest possible dwellings, but the style is now popular.
I also disagree that most buildings will or should be used for 100 years.
I am quite of a fan of one generational building. Mostly because a lot of people will move around anyway. Unless you are really wealthy family that can afford to stay in place for generations.
Well it is cheaper to stay for generations in some village than in city center.
But most kids will probably move to the city anyway.
So building something fancy is in my opinion waste of resources and most likely having bad impact on environment.
Building something that can be easily replaced- even if not as nice - has the advantage.
> building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade
A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to.
> We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture
What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?
It's famous enough that it has a website dedicated to it: https://mcmansionhell.com
It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago.
I mean anyone can order something from https://www.goldeneagleloghomes.com today and it'll have some kind of a style.
But it would look out of place in a modern subdivision.
If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.
Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at this.
Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. Most streetcar suburbs are shockingly beautiful, from the utilitarian carriage houses all the way up to the mansions and large public buildings. It all predates WW1. The reason truly is psychological. At the elite level (public institutions, taste makers), it was an infatuation with European iconoclasts wrapped up in an anti-establishment fervor after WW1.
Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.
Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.
I live in a mid sized European city with a city center containing buildings that go back to the 12th century, but the house I grew up in was built in 1890. It’s one of the older houses on the street too, and pretty uninspiring to be honest. The place I live in now, very near downtown, is like 20 years old.
Sure, most American homes are probably less than 50 years old, but on the scale of a couple hundred of years, does that make Europe that much more sophisticated and “cultured”, generally speaking?
She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!
heh what was she expecting? It's an old mission built on the frontier eventually used by the military for storage and barracks. It effectively was a warehouse. The building isn't the reason why it's historic, what happened there is what's important.
An unenlightened idiot only operates on the level of seeing which things are beautiful and which things are ugly. It requires an intelligent, educated person to get involved in sophisticated games of signaling and countersignaling, like pretending to like ugly things in order to seem more sophisticated than unenlightened idiots.
Sure, there are places like this. Desirable old neighborhoods with interesting houses and walkable infrastructure. But those are mostly from about 100 years ago or more. What's been happening more recently?
I think claiming that building things to a budget is some kind of unsophisticated Nouveau riche mentality is overlooking the experience of the vast majority of people. The US median household income (usually two people) is $78,075. The majority of people don't have the resources to care about satisfying your aesthetic requirements.
Plywood and vinyl and 2x4s are inexpensive and good enough, a combination that is generally exactly the optimal solution when you're considering personal survival. Sophistication is a luxury that doesn't come for free.
In this environment? Citation needed. Building materials of all sorts are difficult to source, often with long lead times, and are multiples of what they were a few years ago. Labor has gone up as well. Builders are lucky to get 20% margins.
It doesn't matter the environment, when we are talking about margins. Increased costs to the builder are passed along to the end customer.
> Labor has gone up as well.
Which makes any possible savings in materials contribute even more interesting as a way to increase the margin.
I frequently see people complain about how traffic is so bad, gas prices are so high, their local drivers are insane, and how dare they have to pay tolls and parking fees. Wow, I wish there were some form of spatial displacement that didn’t involve any of that!
So the freedom is one-way.
Example: almost all of SF bans building apartments
Everything is either an aggressively ugly concrete bunker[1], a generic cubish cement or brick and glass mishmash[2] or a glass and steel monolith, maybe with extra facets[3].
You just have to look at what the old Imperial Institute[4] was replaced with[5] and the charmless glass box they plugged onto it later[6].
Nearly every building that has been modified this century has gotten unashamedly uglier. Even cathedrals grow tumors.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hove_Town_Hall
[2]: basically any mid rise residential which can be like this https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low-rise_flats,_Turv... to more recent variations on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Low_Rise_Apartme...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard
[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1903-11-04_front_Imp...
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherfield_Building,_...
[6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_College_Lon...
I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of person exists, "parvenu."
Europe is too, it's just that a lot of the older things survived. You can see brutalist and similar architecture that sprang up in the Soviet bloc. I don't think Europeans are that much more "sophisticated" than Americans or anyone else. It's more of an inheritance by happenstance.
Europe (in general) didn't have the wealth to build car-only infrastructure so it never really suburbanized and mass-manufactured homes like America did.
The factors influencing aren't quite the same. Amsterdam is a popular case [1]
I generally agree with your post, though. The caveat is that it's less about capitalism and more about lack of ability to make choices in the market (lack of capitalism and markets). You can't anywhere in America choose a new home that's built in a walkable neighborhood. It's simply not for sale (new). You can only buy existing homes in neighborhoods that survived demolition after the 1920s, and of course those are the most expensive homes by median in the country because of a lack of additional supply.
[1]https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amster...
Western Europe had the wealth to, it just refused, sometimes with mass protests. A good example is Amsterdam Jokinen Plan.
Yeah, I think this is more the real reason. Nothing is intended to last. Shopping centers come and go - restaurants get built and then torn down and replaced 10 years later with some other restaurant building (actual example in my neighborhood - why didn't they just reuse the original restaurant building?), the old Montgomery Wards was torn down to build a Home Depot and a Chuck E Cheese. None of this has any permanency.
The companies that DON'T knock down are always a bit cheap.
> Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost
It’s really just the second. No need for anything else
America is young, Europe is old.
Sure it unified again only in the 19th century, but it has had a great degree of cultural union throughout its entire history. It is actually one of the most homogeneous countries in terms of language, religion and culture. Italians like to think otherwise for some reason. Sorry for the digression!
The differences in language and in culture were definitely reduced only in very recent years AFAIK, and still remain noticeable.
About language, you have to consider how many Italians are (still today) effectively bi-lingual, Italian and local dialect, with the latter ranging from very similar to very different from Italian.
Additionally, dialects were never the language of higher culture anywhere in Italy, all intellectuals have always used a common language and had a nationwide audience even when the country was politically fractured in many states. Said common language being Latin for many centuries after the fall of the Roman empire and Italian from around year 1500.
The above is the hypothetical case of two unschooled people, as said before most if not all italians are bi-lingual with their own dialect and switch automatically to italian (possibly with some local peculiar forms or accent) that is the common language when talking to some "foreigner".
As you say, italians can usually understand (in written form) a dialect because of the common roots, but for what it matters an Italian with some good Latin knowledge can usually get the overall sense of written text in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and possibly French.
The unification of language to Italian has been a process that went on for decades, through schooling and later radio and television, when Italy was re-united in the decade 1860-1870 it was a tower of Babel.
Imagine the conversation between a (unschooled) soldier from Friuli attempting to interact with a (as well unschooled) farmer in Sicily in the early years of the unified state.
Plumbing and electrical is "simpler" to run than it may seem, but it does result in unexpected locations for bathrooms, etc, as those were often added wherever they could fit them in.
Remember that given the population growth, the vast majority of the people living in Europe are not living in 300+ year old buildings.
Insulation is a more complicated topic - if you're going to do it you need to do it differently, since modern new-builds and modern insulation is designed around making everything air & water tight, which will make an old house very damp and rotten (which will lead to woodworm/boring beetle) - the structure needs to 'breath'.
1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are usually the most interesting thing in a city core.
2. > Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.
Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of stone veneer
Every “adult” generation always hates 50-100 year old architecture, because that was what was slightly old and starting to show its age when they were kids.
Gen-X/Millenials associate brutalism with non-renovated stuffy classrooms, empty downtown office buildings, and dirty public plazas.
Then a bunch get torn down (usually the lowest effort versions) and people adaptively re-use the best ones and everyone remembers the original intent of the style and falls in love with it again.
Seriously, people in the 60’s thought Victorian homes were a blight on San Francisco.
Are you sure that was the opinion of the average person or was it the opinion of someone writing a column on architecture in a magazine?
The neighborhoods with Victorians were either torn down or became low income in the 1950s (ever wonder why hippies flocked to Haight Ashbury?)
Then why hasn't that happened with brutalism? It was hated in the '90s, '00s, and '10s, and it's still hated now. And why is the "international style" so much better regarded despite being the same age?
International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.
And the brutalism point confuses me, since plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.
My point is you saw a lot less of people complaining about how ugly the style was.
> plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.
Bet most people will still think it's ugly, even in 60 years.
If anything, architecture seems to have been almost entirely captured by the avant-garde; people more interested in “new and different” than “classic and beautiful”.
I don’t think modern audiences are suddenly falling in love with brutalist architecture; even the best examples look like dystopian-future prisons or mental hospitals.
Interesting, it seems to me that brutalist architecture is actually pretty appealing aesthetically.
I might go so far as to say that objective beauty and taste simply does not exist and anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.
Or maybe you haven't given enough thought to what "beauty" might mean such that it could be objective. Not everyone means by "beauty" "that which I find appealing". Some mean "the will's response to truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals
A wonderful example of this is given in _All Hallows Eve_ by Charles Williams:
> "Over here," Jonathan said, and took his friend round to the other side of the room. A second easel was standing back to back with the first, also holding a canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look at it.
> It was of a part of London after a raid—he thought, of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of St. Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was of a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting, and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so governed the painting that all other details and elements were contained within it. They floated in that imaginary light as the earth does in the sun's. The colours were so heightened that they were almost at odds. Richard saw again what the critics meant when they said that Jonathan Drayton's paintings "were shrill" or "shrieked", but he saw also that what prevented this was a certain massiveness. The usual slight distinction between shape and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Colour was more intensely image than it can usually manage to be, even in that art. A beam of wood painted amber was more than that; it was light which had become amber in order to become wood. All that massiveness of colour was led, by delicate gradations almost like the vibrations of light itself, towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards towards their source. It was then that the style of the painting came fully into its own. The spectator became convinced that the source, of that light was not only in that hidden sun; as, localized, it certainly was. "Here lies the east; does not the day break here?" The day did, but the light did not. The eye, nearing that particular day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of the light behind. It was everywhere in the painting—concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colours of those lesser limits. It was universal, and lived.
~ All Hallows Eve: II. — THE BEETLES by Charles Williams https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400061h.html
See also: * _Beauty as a transcendental in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger_ by John Jang for University of Notre Dame Australia at https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
Relativists replace the moral imperative of “good for everyone” with “interesting to people like me”, and think they’ve stumbled onto a more sophisticated or accurate view of the world, instead of just vapid sophistry.
It’s hard to see the air when it’s the environment we’ve lived in our entire lives.
https://www.abc.net.au/cm/lb/4285602/data/manifesto-of-futur...
yes
> when it comes to architecture that is almost always subjective.
no
Touche.
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If don't have the money to build, then you bid over whatever is on the market; whatever some developer and architect duo thought would differentiate themselves ten or twenty years ago. People prioritize commute, distance to family, distacne to the grocery, school zones, number of bedrooms and space, kitchen/bath vintage, and price way, way before what a home actually looks like on the outside. No one really wants to live in a McMansion, but outward appearance is so far down on the priorities that it doesn't matter.
But I would disagree with one aspect: part of it is that they like it. We don't have fine taste anymore and we don't have a desire to impress in a classical way. It used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner and everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.
When money is king, everything else is demoted.
Because anyone can do that, it's not impressive. You don't need to have studied Latin to know a Latin phrase. We have google translate and the entire internet. It's no longer an "exotic" thing. Hell, I see people still do things like that, with Latin or some other relevant language. It's weird to think that's impressive.
That has transitioned to being good-looking, along with the amount of your wealth and how you spend it. Education and intellectual endeavors are no longer in the mix.
Although I do think it's an influential factor, I don't think money is the primary issue. If anything having more money and making more money gives you access to "finer" things and more experience. It's much more complicated than that. It reminds me of the anecdote about Tik Tok (which should be banned IMO) that shows funny videos and 'dumb' content to Americans and shows chess championships and educational materials to the Chinese. That's what we're dealing with here at a societal level.
Great post, David. :)
Yes, you can enjoy pistachio ice cream; feel free. But the Louvre doesn't choose what it puts on its walls randomly. The curators don't shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, I mean, it is relative."
The fact is that we literally do not design homes in the US; over 90% of homes were just built by someone. That someone does not stop to consider design, aesthetics, ergonomics or joy. House developers are more or less doing enterprise sales. They just go by a checklist and the developer with the most checks wins. "Upgrades" merely change the quality of the thing on the checklist (formica -> granite), but thats the extent of it.
1. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1714 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufmann_Desert_House 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stahl_House
The ugliest campuses to me are either the ones that create a faux old world feel or just opt for business park chic.
Same goes for neighborhoods. I love seeing neighborhoods from the 60s or 70s that took a more brutalist/abstract inspiration. Large windows, backless stairs, conversation pits, etc.
To me it looks a whole lot nicer than modern home construction trying to mix southern porches with Victorian styles, all on top of a sears foundation.
That's one of the most interesting and depressing parts of post-WW2 architecture (it's present in certain "high culture" architecture before, but not as ubiquitous). It seems narcissistic, entirely focused on what the architect thought would look cool, and completely detached from the individuals who would actually be using the space.
There's a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building near hear, and the usage of space is simply terrible. It's only a few stories tall, and you have to either wait a long time for the slow and unpleasant elevators to arrive, or rummage around several sets of doors behind them to find the hidden stairs. There's another "urban renewal project" nearby designed by I.M. Pei, and it's a huge deadzone in the middle of a bustling area. It feels almost like finding a dead city from a Lovecraft story - you have these empty huge expanses of concrete that seem much too large for humans. Places where people would congregate, like retail, is deliberately placed underground and away from the road, making the whole area feel abandoned.
Say what you will about modern architecture, but I find it much more pleasant than the stuff that was coming out post-war.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-buildings-learn-what-happen...
Maybe you meant architects like him, but not "him"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright
he was born in 1867. Much of his important work was done before WW I.
Have you ever been to Taliesyn or Fallingwater? Those are not "bunkers that blended in with nature." Blending in with nature was completely his aesthetic, so much so that Taliesyn in Wisconsin was uninhabitable in the winter.
Most of the rest of your post, I agree with.
> When you do a city hall, it has to convey an image of the people, and this had to represent the people of Dallas ... The people I met – rich and poor, powerful and not so powerful – were all very proud of their city. They felt that Dallas was the greatest city there was, and I could not disappoint them. – I.M. Pei (architect)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_City_Hall
Despite best intentions this building feel intimidating. Just walking up to it, it hangs over your head, and feels like the weight of government is about to be inflicted upon me and I just want to file a permit for my home security alarm. Just pointing out, the artists themselves have trouble making their designs match their intentions.
I hit that scenario a couple times a year. Basic stuff that a city should do online, Dallas does not.
But don't we need that passion (and hope) before we can become a space faring civilization? We kind of had that space-faring passion back in the 60s when the US/NASA did the Apollo program - at that point the general feeling was that the government was capable of doing good things. That general feeling has been gone for a while now and has been replaced with a general distrust of institutions like government. To some extent it seems like you need some level of hope before you can trust.
We are building for the shareholders and the market. They are our new gods.
But actually they tend to be just as expensive as beautiful buildings.
No, we're in a capitalist mental model. It's the same in the UK.
It's build cheap, maximise profit, and a race to the bottom.
Want that bas-relief from a master stonemason? No chance. Two reasons - profit. Second reason, so few master stonemasons because... the chase for profit and cheap buildings has removed any superfluous detailing, and hence destroyed a profession.
I can't envisage a new Chrysler building being built in the US (or UK) in the near future, or any of the 20-30s skyscrapers with ornate detailing up on the 40+ floor. Yes, I know we're all about steel and glass, but that doesn't stop elegant design and innovation.
It's the same on residential housing in the UK. You can just see it evolve over the last century from well built bricks and mortar with detailing, to modern (often grey) boxes, using the cheapest materials erected in the fastest time.
Heavy metal doors with perfectly smooth-operating hinges. Marble everywhere—floors, counters, stairs, [edit: hell, even the walls!], everywhere, and this was not in an area that mined marble, it was surely imported from at least several hundred miles away, and likely much farther. Thick, ornate brass doors on the PO Boxes. Serious- and heavy-looking metal light fixtures. I loved going there as a kid. It seems silly, maybe, but that post office felt magical.
Similar story for older libraries (including the one in that same town), older university buildings (ditto), older bank buildings even. They're all so nice to be in, and embody a confidence in some kind of permanence and continuity.
Now all that shit's in strip malls or buildings that are otherwise intended to have a 50-year lifespan at most. Cheap low-pile carpet on plywood, comically fake ornamentation if they bother to have any at all.
What's so weird is that we built basic public buildings like we were rich, back when we were, relatively speaking, paupers, but now that we're wildly rich we build everything like we're paupers. It'd be inconceivable for anyone to get half the budget it'd take to build a post office like that one, for a new post office building these days.
Hell, even my Grandparents' cheap, small post-WWII house in a cheap rural town had details that are rarely found outside luxury homes today—the heavy solid-wood front door and extremely solid-and-smooth-feeling metal doorknob, nice metal switch-plates and heavy-feeling, satisfying switches, that kind of thing. I bet you'd have to special-order a storm door to get one with more than half the metal in it that theirs had and it'd cost a fortune, and god, all that stuff felt so nice, and held up to years and years of use without being the worse for it. Their whole working-class neighborhood was built like that.
Part of it is that carpet and plywood are fabricated materials. Prefabricated plywood and wall-to-wall carpeting weren't really things until ~1930s. The older materials seems more luxurious now, but that's because the newer materials have become cheap. It's like how aluminum was once more expensive than gold, but is now ubiquitous because the material itself has become much cheaper.
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-history-of-plywood-in-ten-o...
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/flooring/21017998/all-about-wal...
Tiles were ~1" thick: https://archive.org/details/TheBookOfVermontMarbleAReference...
Using an 1889 price book, it cost ~$0.25/ft2 of tile. Add $0.70/ft3 for shipping to St Louis, which is $0.06/ft2 of tile @ 1" thick. That's ~$0.30/ft2 total in materials. https://archive.org/details/pricelistrutland00verm/page/16/m...
50' x 50' x 10' building, (floor:(50 x 50) + walls:(4 x 50 x 10)) = 4.5k ft2, which @ $0.30/ft2 is $1,350 of marble.
For comparison,
- Average annual wages look like ~$700: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002738212&vi... - A 50'x50' 2 story house was probably $4-5k: https://archive.org/details/gfbarber1905/page/n20/mode/1up
So adding the marble interiors may have been 25-33% of the price of a house. If the average US house today is $400k, then that's $100-130k for the marble interior.
I think it's less about economic models though and more about a lack of societal awareness and understanding. Really we need more capitalism and more free markets in this space in particular to provide actual market choices and competition to bring prices down. It's a tough problem. A home builder making a profit on suburban homes with car-only infrastructure is more of a symptom than a cause.
Unless the customer (e.g. Apple and their giant do(ugh)nut) specifically ask for something that isn't structurally significant, a construction firm isn't going to add it.
Sorry I'm not following the point here. Can you elaborate?
> Unless the customer (e.g. Apple and their giant do(ugh)nut) specifically ask for something that isn't structurally significant, a construction firm isn't going to add it.
That's my point. There isn't any competition in the marketplace or any options for customers.
There are roughly 0 firms today that offer everyday people the ability to live in any new construction that isn't an asymmetrical suburban house built in a car-only development. A few have popped up, granted, but these are a tiny fraction of a fraction of new development in America at least.
Apple made beautiful products to become the most valuable company in the world.
That wouldn't be bad at all, but at the same time we are facing a humanistic crisis too. We don't respect the gods to create things for them, and we don't respect the people to create things for them.
We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.
World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted into the present day where we build very weird, stressful objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and call it art.
I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that either the environmental movement or our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.
There's also no point in building a very beautiful building that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to change their location priorities and invest in their current homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible. But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via new offices, garage gyms, etc.
I'm really disappointed in our financial overlords who haven't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall