I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.

I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.

And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t

The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.

And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.

"The aesthetic is more or a side-effect of using cheaper resources and cheaper methods of production."

This is a really interesting argument and very much not the story I've heard. Can you cite any sources for any of your statements at all?

Industrial modernism is an aesthetic of distance, abstraction, predictability, and containment.

But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.

Minimalism isn't bad on its own, and the best minimal design really is beautiful.

But the abstraction and containment went too far, and the result is often functional (on a good day) and joyless even if it's a prestige product. And claimed efficiency is often purely decorative. (Which is ironic.)

The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.

If bespoke robotic manufacturing becomes a thing it will start being possible to build and make exotic, individual, decorative things at scale. Most of the results will be terrible, but some will stand out as examples of new aesthetics.

We are too rich to be able to afford things like Sears Roebuck houses now.

The influencer aesthetic. Why do people pay so much to look so boring?

> Modernism is the act of using cheaper resources and more standardized/cheaper methods of production.

That's how they sold it, but it's not true. By the end of the 19th century, all the building ornamentation that you can still see in European capitals, had been stadardized and was mass-produced, while the construction techniques using brick and mortar had been further refined, yielding building designs that were cheap to construct and easy to maintain.

Modernist buildings were, at the same time, more expensive to build and less durable because of the reinforced concrete which has a much shorter lifespan than stone or brick plus mortar. The only advantage they had was that of increased height, but that was only an issue due to the restrictive zoning in Anglo countries. Without NIMBYism that pushed towards sky-scrapers, NYC could well have ended up like Paris: replacing 1-3 stories buildings with 8-10 stories, but allowing mixed commercial/residential space everywhere.

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy.

I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.

What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.

That plus in the early days traditional/classical architecture was rejected as "bourgeois" or aristocratic by the socialist movements who pushed for modernist approaches. See: the early days of soviet architecture and even Bauhaus in Germany was based on left-leaning/utopian ideas.

So it had dual pressure, from economics because it was cheaper/efficient and from the cultural reform side.

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm

I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.

You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?

Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.

Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!