alt Hacker News> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.
I might be missing something but isn't this all a bit of a no-brainer?
In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Not remotely cost effective.
Today, buildings are typically functional, or at least financial considerations are top of mind. And cheaper tends to be uglier. Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? It's all the same to the workers inside.
And of course for older folks, older buildings are closer to what they grew up with. Even if only a bit. Seems a natural effect for older people to enjoy older architecture.
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I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?
The worst architecture is a combination of cost optimization and aiming for looking traditional-ish. That's a recipe for future blight.
> Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it?
But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
>In the old days, buildings were made to impress
Google "survivorship bias".
Perhaps counter intuitive but beauty standards are not simply just sentiment.
> In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive.
Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern.
This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me...
This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG...
> Not remotely cost effective.
This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC...
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Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get.
The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose.
Plenty of old people now grew up in a phase in history where we were building ugly cheap things
So new buildings ignore externalities in the economic sense but also very literally.
Also there is survivorship bias.
The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.