Microblog: A peak into Arch Education
The last time you walked past a 1920s brick apartment house and thought, “I wish they still built like that,” you were tasting the non-architect. That flavour is essentially unrelated to the taste of the architect.
Below is the post that inspired this short piece, since I couldn’t fit all of my thoughts into a tweet.
Why don’t we build more beautiful buildings? Barring the usual YIMBY-adjacent and economic problems (effects that shouldn’t be understated but lie outside this note) the average designer in America simply lacks the interest or the expertise to design things like this. Even given a functional blank check and no client direction toward the traditional look, this look would appear a trivial amount of the time.
Why is that?
In the mind of a young designer there are exactly two ways a building like this could be built.
First, it could be quite cheap: a faux-brick façade on otherwise standard steel or timber construction. This is a grave sin; the building becomes “materially/tectonically dishonest.” In school, materials have a natural way they want to represent themselves. Louis Kahn: “You say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’…” Being focused on surface finishes and faux materials is discouraged, seen as architecturally and intellectually dishonest.
Second, it could be built “for real.” That would be ruinously expensive or worse, it would be kitsch and repetitive. At a fundamental level the acceptable taste of architects is defined by other architects, not by laypeople. It has been more than a century since Adolf Loos declared “Ornament is Crime,” and the intellectually inbred styles of the architect have stayed mostly the same. So this publicly acceptable style is not taught, it is not encouraged, and by the time you get to touch a major design decision your aesthetic immune system has learned to reject what the average person finds appealing.
This is barring the fact that the whole dilemma is a false dichotomy. Yes, value-engineered plastic brick is universally disliked, and the full-tilt masonry price tag is absurd. But the average person doesn’t care about “material honesty.” A steel frame with a thin brick veneer gives the same silhouette, shadow line, and warmth as the real thing.
A quick aside on why Modern and Contemporary architecture looks so different from the buildings of old, courtesy of a recent conversation.
Both Stewart Brand and Christopher Alexander have touched on how buildings learn. Through most of history someone would make a minor change (successful or not) given local geography, materials, or social context. Future buildings copied the successes and dropped the failures. Sometimes a big stylistic or construction shift appeared, but it was in dialogue with the past. The familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis spiral kept buildings evolving to fit their context.
Starting around the 1920s architecture stopped taking its cues from past buildings and began borrowing from new industrial fields such as nautical or automobile manufacturing. You can see it most clearly in Le Corbusier’s “Towards a New Architecture,” where a house is described as a machine for living in.
So, in an age of industry we looked to industry for inspiration.
Unfortunately this not only abandoned the ancestral knowledge of architecture past, it copied only the surface philosophy of the new engineering fields. Smooth industrial-looking materials and geometries were encouraged because those were what the inspirational factories produced. Many Modern buildings even sport literal portholes. While copying efficient industrial concepts makes sense, we ended up copying the results rather than the processes. A building probably should be conceived as a machine for living, but the odds that the optimal machine for living in looks like the machine for moving in are low. We took the outcome of a process and tried to graft industrial mass-produced necessity onto an entirely bespoke craft. Le Corbu’s Villa Savoye is canonical, yet so awful to live in that he escaped a lawsuit only because a world war intervened. A philosophy of architecture focused on optimizing a machine for living would probably rediscover what the slow evolutionary process had already found and yet voices like Christopher Alexander’s pattern languages are drowned out by styles that function worse than buildings of yore and enjoy far less public affection.