alt Hacker NewsI guess the critique of the trad critique is that there is no single clear bright line between beautiful buildings everywhere and some sudden arrival of gray boxes everywhere. The beautiful buildings often had conflicting ideologies behind them, it was not a static landscape of eternal proportion and principle that was one day toppled when some evil people decided to bring misery to all. Of course this is an exaggeration.
The whole thing is anyway an ideological thing today as it was back then. The online trad architecture aesthetic is associated with the right wing, who see it as a return to order from today's decadence and overly guilt ridden elite zeitgeist. Urbanism and human scale architecture is associated with certain parts of the left who admire Nordic and Western European social democracies like the Netherlands and Denmark against what they see as the hegemonic capitalist state of the US.
The point is, architecture doesn't live in a vacuum, it is inextricably linked to political and ideological tribalism, and choices in architecture are expressions of what other tribe one rejects and consciously differentiates from etc.
My favourite example of this is a split between Italianate and Gothic forms for civic buildings in Britain in the 19th Century. Narrow and pointy windows signalled indigenous national styles, the Anglican church, tradition, and the Conservative party. Wide and rounded ones an internationalist mercantile outlook, the Enlightenment, Nonconformism in religion, and the Liberal party.
The amusing thing is that to modern eyes most of these grand expensive civic monuments speak much more to the era (definitively Victorian) than the motivations of the people who chose the designers. They have far more in common with each other, to my eyes, than they do with a Tudor mansion or a 1930s public library.