I'm in Europe (in Germany to be more precise), but believe you me, new buildings that I would describe as "beautiful" are few and far between here too. I think most of it is due to what I would call cookie cutter mentality. For most architects, a building is just a job. They don't realize that even the most unassuming building is something that may be used for 100 years and more, that will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse), and deserves to be treated as such.

I think architects are certainly aware of the importance of architecture, and most would love to make beautiful quality architecture. But in the end architects are hired by someone who decide the budget, and cookie-cutter is just cheaper.

It seems the options are mostly at the extremes. Cookie cutter and Statement architecture, but maybe not much in the middle.

> even the most unassuming building […] will influence the lives of thousands of people (if only because they see it and seeing it makes their day a bit better or worse)

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?

this makes architecture particularly important, in a way that other forms of art is not

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...

Architects certainly realise that a building is more than just a job but they also get pulled along in the strife for change for change's sake since any architect who just repeats or refines whatever has been done before is unlikely to find him- or herself chosen by the top agencies.

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.

There are road bridges I pass in the UK where I think, wow that is really nice. These aren't big things, but they are beautifully designed non the less. They were of course built many years ago.

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.

Most buildings in Greece are build by civil engineers. Architects are not needed and rarely involved. The result is very small houses with many rooms and "spaces" but all very small and ugly. For example, it's common to have 3 bedroom in 120m².

Wait, since when is 120m2 considered small for 3 bedrooms? That's quite a large apartment.

Since forever. The 3 bedrooms are box-size, there just enough space for a bedroom, a closet and an office - you can't walk around without bumping.

I love people nagging about architecture of buildings that they are not paying for.

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.

New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that look like they could survive a bombing, but they're actually fragile and cheap buildings.

> 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?

$10m might be getting into actually architected houses, but certainly down in the $2m you find absolute junk.

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.

There’s always been a lot of shit built. The good things will last 100’s of years and the shit will be ripped down in 40. The examples linked here are garden variety crap mainly. The 1970’s-1990’s in particular had a lot of bad stuff built. Especially if you want 6k sq feet and don’t understand that to build that inside and out at quality will cost a few million + land costs.

If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.

>https://mcmansionhell.com

Thank you for this. I've had an absolute blast looking at this.

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old.

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.

> Obviously wrong. America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture. [...] It all predates WW1

Your comment shows the difference between American "old" and European "old". In Europe, there are people who live in homes far older than that.

Yes but how many people in Europe actually live in houses older than two centuries (about when American immigration really popped off, so let’s arbitrarily pick then)? It’s a significant minority.

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?

We do, in a 17th century farm in the Swedish countryside. A large log-house construction, the building was first erected somewhere in the late 1600's/early 1700's on the other side of the hill. It was moved to its current location during the land reform of 1823-1827 when farmers moved out to the land they worked, before that they each worked several small strips of land spread around the hamlet they inhabited.

My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. We have furniture at home that is older, prettier, and has been through more wars than this".

She's right, too. I did not translate her comment to English for my local friends though!

> My grandma went to San Antonio to visit one time and said of the Alamo, "This looks like a warehouse. ...

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.

The "ugly $NATIONALITY" trope goes both ways, and isn't just for Americans visiting other countries. I don't know why tourists think it's a competition.

It's an accurate critique though. The Alamo is up at the top in the competition for World's most disappointing tourist destination.

“The difference between a Brit and an American is that the Brit thinks 100 miles is a long way and the American thinks 100 years is a long time.”

American old is as old as the people who have lived here- there are still signs of the native americans who lived here and built massive civilizations. The cave dwellings in Mesa Verde were populated around 1190. THere are signs of civilization from 700CE. If the europeans hadn't killed almost all the natives, some of those locations may still have people living in them.

"Old" is quoted for a reason. They are copied from actually-old designs.

> Ironically, it's the unenlightened idiots in America that clung/cling most to archaic, conventional notions of beauty and comfort.

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.

Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.

> America has an enormous amount of beautiful "old" architecture.

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?

>Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost, so we end up building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade.

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.

The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials. It's the developer that is trying to cut as much as possible, because this means he gets increased profit margins.

>The cost of a home has almost nothing to do with the materials.

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.

> In this environment?

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.

This is plainly and patently false. Materials are (more or less) fully half of the cost of building. If you use nonstandard materials that goes up because you need specialized labor in addition.

I've got to think a utilitarian culture would say something like "huh, maybe we should build homes that are easily served by transit." But American culture is much more strongly opposed to this than most those in most other countries.

One thing you notice if you've been in an airplane is that there's a lot of room to spread out if people want to.

And then those people will want things like “electricity” and “a network of wide paved roads” and “Internet” and “drinking water” and “sewage” and “timely package delivery to their front door” and “big box stores with parking lots the size of two city blocks” - and those things at that density have absolutely terrible unit economics and environmental externalities.

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!

Heh everything you mention there is available in thousands upon thousands of small towns across the US - basically anywhere there's a Walmart that isn't a city.

Yes, and those have terrible unit economics and environmental externalities! We should not be looking at the unsettled land in between as an opportunity to stretch ourselves even thinner!

If you want to spread out you can do it without robbing the people who didn't to pay for your roads and utilities, and then banning them from building mid rise or transit.

As they should, but a thing that needs planning maps and isn't visible from an airplane is that those who don't want to spread out can't not spread out.

So the freedom is one-way.

Example: almost all of SF bans building apartments

What people want is of far less moment than what real-estate agents, collectively, want. They drive local government and planning almost everywhere in the US, to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

Europe has been building modernist and post-modernist monstrosities gleefully for 80 years.

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...

> Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture

I recently learned that a word for precisely this sort of person exists, "parvenu."

Not sure what you mean by "precisely this sort of person", but a "parvenu" is better thought of as the inverse of a "pariah" -- someone from an outgroup who has achieved special acceptance, status, and celebration.

> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not?

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...

> 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.

Western Europe had the wealth to, it just refused, sometimes with mass protests. A good example is Amsterdam Jokinen Plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokinen_Plan

And Western Europe had that guy called Le Corbusier with his ideas about ideal cities where utilitarian and ugliness was the entire strategy - just because. As ridiculous it might sound, just go to Zurich and you'll see his hideous legacy everywhere: no new building is anything else than a gray rectangle, even the brand new building of the art museum. It might be garbage but it's our garbage (Swiss motto)

Europe has unmatched heritage, but I would argue the modern buildings in Italy suffer from the same problems described in the article. There is an Italo-French author called Phillipe Daverio, art critique but in reality polymath, who has discussed these problems in Italy at length.

> It's more that we are an utterly utilitarian culture. We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old. Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost,

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.

Commercial buildings in the US are incredibly cheap boxes, and knocking an old one down and rebuilding to spec is how the land-owners get new leases.

The companies that DON'T knock down are always a bit cheap.

Was the GP talking about the US? Because all of it is applicable to all over the world.

> We have nothing old, and cannot imagine that anything might become old.

> Our goals are to maximize profits while minimizing cost

It’s really just the second. No need for anything else

> How is it that America can still be traumatised from the world wars architecturally but europe is not?

America is young, Europe is old.

USA is nearly 250 years old. Most European states are younger, even though European peoples and cultures are indeed old. Italy is young, Rome is old.

Italy is old. It was founded in 7 bc by Augustus: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regioni_dell%27Italia_augustea...

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!

As an Italian, I would like to learn how you measured the level of homogeneity of language and culture (on religion I agree with you).

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.

All italian dialects derive from a single language, with very low influence from the outside. Most Italian dialects are actually intelligible to an Italian speaker in written form and become difficult to understand only because of pronunciation. Try reading a few Wikipedia articles in different Italian dialects and you'll realize you understand at least 90% of text for all of them, possibly with the only exception of Sardinian.

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.

Dialects are rarely written, they are spoken and while (obviously) usually someone natively speaking a given dialect can talk with someone from another near region, dialects from the north (say Lombardia or Veneto) are so different from those of the south (say Campania or Sicilia) that they are effectively distinct languages.

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.

My European house is older.

Side question - always been curious. Surely these houses were not designed for plumbing, electrical, efficient insulation, etc. Do they just bodge these things onto the outside of walls, or how does that work?

I've lived in a couple of houses built in the mid 1700s with parts even older than that. They were cob cottages, one with a thatched roof, so very thick walls instead of insulation. Plumbing and electrics were just added over the years. Windows were single glazed, so not very efficient. But pretty comfortable nevertheless, provided you remember to duck when going under beams. Houses this old are not unusual where I live in Devon, but most are more recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)

Many of them are basically not insulated; the vast majority of "old Europe" is in more temperate climates for obvious reasons. And in the colder areas, you have the immense thermal mass of brick/stone buildings. Sealing air gaps provides some help.

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.

Mixed, but sometimes there's trunking on walls yes. I have a little bit of that (for something disused actually, plan to remove, I've not long moved in) but it's mostly under floorboards. (There are also would-be exposed pipes in the kitchen, hidden behind counters, I believe - but they probably would have done that anywhere, that's a relatively modern extension.)

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'.

Indeed. There are many houses in Europe that survived 3-4 different states claiming the land on which they stand.

Well, I live in England, so unless we count devolution (of some powers in other UK constituents) or changes of royal household, just the one in my case ;)

England is pretty stable. Some places on the continent, not so much, esprcially to the east and south of modern Germany.