Freddie deBoer considers the all-too-frequent social media wave of real or performative nostalgia for the more appealing styles of older buildings followed by the inevitable anti-nostalgic backlash:
There’s a meme, of sorts, that pops up on Twitter from time to time: why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore? The sentiment is associated with a more general yearning for the past, the kind that asserts that America or Western civilization or human culture are in decline. There certainly must be a lot of people who harbor similar concerns, as evidenced by how these tweets tend to rack up thousands of “likes”. They’ll share a picture of some beautiful old building — Art Deco classics like the Chrysler Building are common, but also Gothic buildings, and neoclassical, and others — and ask why we don’t, or can’t, or won’t make beautiful buildings anymore. They’ll point to the aesthetic qualities of older buildings, remind us that we have vastly more advanced technology and are far richer today than when those beautiful buildings were built, and wonder why we don’t build for beauty these days.
Why are so many new fancy buildings generic and forgettable works of brushed steel and glass? Why so many new ordinary buildings cookie-cutter rectilinear jobs, almost entirely free of embellishment or decoration, all flat roofs and sharp edges, and neutral in both color and effect? Why do they all look like … that? You know what I mean by “that”. Sometimes the style is referred to as Late International or The Glass Box Style, but perhaps the term Value-Engineered Modernism is more apt. Whatever you call it, this kind of building is the architectural equivalent of a default font, a soul-crushing assembly line of sterile glass monoliths that erases local identity in favor of the numbing, cookie-cutter uniformity of global bureaucracy. It’s the corporation in building form.
As is true with all social media phenomena, there is a counter-chorus, and it expresses itself in condescending, sighing, superior tones. Part of this is related to the fact that the accounts lamenting the death of public aesthetics are often right-coded; certainly a lot of the complaints are coming from Twitter users with Greek statues for profile pictures. And really, any sentiment that’s repeated often enough on social media will attract mockery in time. But a good deal of the derision comes from the online side of the YIMBY movement, which in the last decade or so has become something like the caricature mainstream Dems made of the Bernie Sanders online army back in 2016 — that is, snarky, self-righteous, and fundamentally concerned with achieving in-group status through the mechanism of arguing about politics. YIMBYs are an imperfect but important force in a country that desperately needs to build more housing and which has all manner of stupid and sclerotic zoning rules. It’s generically true, though, that the more online you get the less useful any given political movement becomes, and Twitter YIMBYs seem absolutely attached to representing all of the worst elements of that group — they’re incurious, rude, reductive, averse to basic best practices of messaging, and above all else, tribal. (Politics gets stupid when politics becomes a way to belong rather than a way to to do things.) And they’ll have you know that lamenting the death of beautiful buildings is dumb, lol lol lol lol.
The Twitter YIMBYs tend to treat concern for aesthetics as a decadent demand in a world where we need to JUST BUILD. And their particular tactic is to insist that we don’t build attractive buildings anymore because doing so is just too expensive, and really, what’s more important, the unconquerable human desire to live surrounded by beauty, or our need to put people in homes??? Case closed! But not really. It turns out that it’s simply not true that building stylish and ornamented buildings is relatively more expensive today than it was in eras past. Read all about it. Yes, Baumol’s cost disease is real, and construction is a manpower-intensive industry, but almost a century after the Empire State Building was erected, we’ve got the benefit of modern logistics and supply chains and automated production of essential parts and so on. The cost of labor cannot explain the death of decoration in modern building design. And increasingly, there seems to be an acknowledgment that it’s easier to move the public to accept new construction when said new construction is inspiring. King YIMBY Matt Yglesias had a good post on this recently; as he says, we can look at the premium people will pay to live in townhouse neighborhoods where most of the construction happened 100+ years ago as a clue to what people actually like. Housing is expensive in both Park Slope and Hudson Yards, but there’s no question that the former is an aspirational bourgie vision that has stood the test of time while the latter is barely tolerated. And aesthetics plays a large role in that.
We’re wired to pursue beauty. We are not, however, wired to pursue authenticity.
