The Cities We Build
We spend most of our lives in cities. Walking past buildings, working inside them, commuting between one another. Cities are the background of our civilization.
And yet, something fundamentally changed about how we think about them during the 20th century.
Take Penn Station in New York. The original, built in 1910, had vaulted ceilings modeled after Roman baths. Marble columns rose to meet enormous arched windows that flooded the space with light. It made you feel that arriving in New York meant something.
They demolished it in 1963 and replaced it with an underground hub. Low ceilings, fluorescent lights, narrow corridors. Some call it New York’s most hated building.
Same city. Same purpose. Sixty years apart.
What’s strange isn’t just that we replaced something beautiful with something ugly. It’s that this happened everywhere, roughly between 1940 and 1970. Train stations, schools, churches, apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods.
We changed how we build things.
Why?
It Wasn’t Capitalism
The easiest explanation is capitalism. When profit-driven private individuals build without accountability in a free market, we get soulless, boring things.
Except this doesn’t hold up.
Look back to the 19th century, when capitalism was raw and unregulated. Victorian London, with its iconic row houses and grand stations, was built by profit-driven developers.
In New York, Frank Woolworth commissioned his Gothic skyscraper in 1913, during the Gilded Age. Peak capitalism. Maximum inequality. He paid for beauty because it boosted his brand and legacy.
Beauty sold then, just as it does now. Apple is one of the world’s most valuable companies, and they sell the opposite of cheap and soulless.
Then there’s socialism to compare. Soviet Khrushchyovkas were mass-produced concrete boxes, as ugly as anything capitalism produced in the 1960s.
Berlin is the perfect test case. East Berlin was managed by communists, West Berlin by capitalists. Both sides built the same bland blocks. The economic system didn’t matter.
Something else drove the transformation. Something ideological.
The Industrial Revolution
For most of history, life didn’t change much. Your grandfather’s world looked much like yours.
Until suddenly it didn’t.
Over the course of the 19th century, Europe got trains, electricity, telephones, cars, x-rays, and radios. Your son, helping you with farming in your little village, could move to a city with millions of people and work in a factory. You could see a photo of Tokyo without leaving London.
This transformation brought unprecedented wealth. Private individuals suddenly had fortunes greater than kingdoms of the past. They poured fortunes into beautiful Victorian buildings mixing architectural elements from different historical periods.
We romanticize those buildings, but it’s easy to forget how bad it was for most people living through it.
Factories brought assembly lines. Millions migrated to cities for work. Hundreds of workers packed into dark airless rooms with shared toilets in hallways. Cholera outbreaks killed thousands at a time. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death. Children worked in factories, breathing air thick with coal smoke. In places like Manchester, the working poor could hardly expect 25 years of life. Even the mighty Thames got so polluted that the local government declared an emergency to deal with the “Great Stink” of 1858.
The beautiful Victorian buildings existed alongside grimy slums.
By the early 1900s, thinkers across Europe started questioning this chaos. The lavish Victorian designs, with their fake historical flourishes slapped onto cheap mass-produced bricks felt dishonest. Reformers looked at ships, factories, and machines with their clean, functional lines. If this was what modern beauty looked like, why were we still copying Greek temples? Decoration, they argued, is primitive and wasteful. Advanced, enlightened civilizations should embrace scientific and rational design.
This was the start of modernism. But it was still just an idea, confined mostly to theory and small experiments.
Then came World War I.
Breaking Free From the Past
World War I was the first global conflict. Fifteen million people died with industrial efficiency. Much of Europe lay in ruins. Kings, generals, and politicians had led Europe into hell.
After 1918, people wanted more than reconstruction. They wanted a clean break, not just from war, but from everything associated with the old order that had failed so catastrophically.
The architectural styles of the pre-war era became wrapped up with the political and social systems that had produced the war. If you wanted to build a new world, you needed new architecture.
Three Men and a Movement
In 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany. A design school that combined art, craft, and industrial production.
Germany in the 1920s was chaotic. Hyperinflation, political violence, traumatized veterans. The Bauhaus wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was trying to build a new kind of society.
Bauhaus members believed quality design should be accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy. Mass production could make good housing affordable. Function over decoration meant spending money on better materials and safety instead of ornamental details for wealthy patrons.
From their perspective, traditional architecture was part of the problem. It served the elite, required expensive craftsmen, and was slow to build when millions needed housing immediately.
Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect, proclaimed that “a house is a machine for living in.” He thought buildings should be standardized like automobiles. Cities should be organized rationally: towers in parks, separated by function.
In 1925, he proposed demolishing the historic center of Paris and replacing it with 18 identical 60-story towers housing 3 million people. It was never built, but his ideas shaped a generation of architects.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a German who worked with Gropius, redefined modernism aesthetically. His designs proved that radical simplification could be elegant, not just efficient. “Less is more” is one of his famous principles.
Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier held a revolutionary exhibition in 1927 alongside other prominent modernist architects to demonstrate modern architecture. The goal was an existence proof for modernism’s promises: inexpensive, simple, efficient, and good-quality housing.
Around 1928, modernist architects formed CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture. The scattered individual architects transformed into a coordinated movement with shared principles and manifestos.
Their framing was simple: modernism equals progress, science, health, democracy. Traditional equals nostalgia, disease, authoritarianism.
Even the early Soviet Union invited modernist architects, seeing rationalist planning as compatible with communist ideals.
Modernism Arrives in America
The Nazis hated modernism. They called it “degenerate art” and shut down the Bauhaus. Many of its architects, often left-wing or Jewish, fled to North America.
Walter Gropius went to Harvard. Mies van der Rohe went to the Illinois Institute of Technology. Other Bauhaus architects spread across American universities.
This was a crucial moment. America in the 1940s and 50s saw itself as modern, progressive, and scientific: the perfect soil for modernist ideology to take root. American universities competed to hire these famous European intellectuals who were fleeing fascism.
MoMA’s 1932 “International Style” exhibition, featuring works of Le Corbusier and Mies, had already established modernism as sophisticated and cultured in American minds. Now the masters themselves were here, ready to train the next generation.
Meanwhile, World War II had flattened even more cities than WWI. Entire city centers were gone. There was urgency to rebuild, and blank slates to build on.
The war had just proven with tanks, planes, and ships that mass production could work at enormous scale. Why not buildings?
The total war economy mindset carried over into postwar reconstruction. Modernist architecture fit perfectly: it was rational, planned, efficient, and standardized.
Traditional building was slow, required skilled craftsmen, was expensive. And importantly, the Nazis had rejected modernism, which tainted traditional architecture by association. Modernism became the architecture of democracy.
By 1950, Gropius and Mies had trained a generation of American architects. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you studied with them. They taught that decoration is dishonest. Form follows function. Less is more.
Architecture schools stopped accepting traditional designs. Professional journals, architectural awards, planning departments, and licensing boards were all led by people aligned with modernist principles. It became the official style of American power and education.
When Mies designed the Seagram Building in 1958, it became a template copied in every major city worldwide.
Lock-In
Here is where it gets interesting.
Modern zoning rules started as early as 1916, but most were implemented in the decades after World War II.
The people writing zoning codes in the 1950s had all been trained by modernists. That’s what everyone learned in architecture school. So the codes embedded modernist assumptions.
Separation of uses. Wide streets for cars. Minimum parking requirements. Buildings needed to be set back from streets. Height limits and floor-area ratios favored simple geometries.
These rules weren’t written to ban traditional architecture explicitly. They were written to solve practical problems: avoid factories next to homes, ensure enough light and air, stop overcrowding.
But the solutions made traditional urbanism nearly impossible.
You can’t build a mixed-use building with shops below and apartments above. Use separation forbids it. You can’t build to the sidewalk edge, forming a continuous street wall. Setback requirements prevent it. You can’t create traditional street grids with small blocks. Road width and parking requirements make it unworkable.
Parking minimums were especially destructive. Traditional neighborhoods relied on walking and transit. New codes required two parking spaces per unit, making that density impossible.
Fire codes were developed with concrete and steel in mind. You could technically build in wood or masonry, but you had to shoulder the burden of proving safety yourself.
This created a self-reinforcing system. Only modern buildings could easily get permits. Architecture students learned to design what could actually be approved. Planning departments only knew how to evaluate modern designs. Traditional building skills disappeared because no one needed them anymore.
By 1970, the system was locked in.
Under most current regulations in most cities, it is literally illegal to build Paris or Amsterdam.
What We Have Now
Why the history lesson?
As Winston Churchill said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
Modernism solved real, terrible problems. Slums in 1900 were disease-ridden deathtraps. The housing shortage after WWII was desperate. Within a few decades, we developed efficient systems for building. Modern apartments are dramatically safer, cleaner, and warmer than 19th century houses.
The only reason we can stop and wonder why cities don’t feel right anymore is because modern codes work so well at the material level that we can’t even imagine how dangerous things used to be.
But.
Walk through a city built after the 1950s. Everything works. Nothing is broken. The buildings are safe and the systems are efficient. But nothing feels like it’s for you.
Buildings don’t acknowledge your presence. They could be anywhere, Phoenix, Frankfurt, Singapore. They belong to no place and no one.
Historic cities are different. They have layers of different eras visible at once. Buildings at human scale. When you pay close attention, you notice rewarding little details, like layers in your favorite music. Streets shaped for lingering, not just passing through. The city tells you: people were here before you, and people will be here after. You’re part of something continuous.
This isn’t nostalgia. When people travel, they overwhelmingly prefer historic cities. Prague, Florence, old Montreal. Not because people are “stuck in the past” but because those places feel alive in a way modern cities don’t.
Modern cities often tell you: you’re a functional unit in an efficient system.
What Next?
It’s 2025, but we’re living in cities shaped by ideas from 1960.
Ideas developed under different circumstances, with different needs, different technologies, different constraints. Ideas that seemed obviously correct then, but we now know were incomplete. Ideas shaped by disease, war, and poverty. Ideas that aren’t mandated by laws of nature, economics, or history. Do these ideas still serve us?
People often assume that boring cities are the inescapable price of progress. Capitalism’s iron logic. Are they?
The constraints that created soulless cities have changed. We have materials and methods that previous generations couldn’t imagine. Digital fabrication, advanced engineering, new materials that outperform anything from the past. The technical barriers are lower than they’ve ever been. Construction technology today would seem like alien magic to Michelangelo designing Saint Peter’s Basilica back in the 16th century.
The question isn’t whether to rebuild old Paris. It had too many problems that we worked too hard to solve. And there are still problems to solve, enough to make you miserable if you think about all of them at once.
But life cannot only be about solving one problem after another. There has to be more than that. Cities can’t be just infrastructure. They’re where we spend our entire lives. Where our children will grow up. What we leave behind. They don’t just shape how efficiently we move from place to place, but how we feel, what we notice, what we remember.
History’s greatest cities understood this. They had figured out things about human psychology and social dynamics that we forgot to include in our attempt to redesign everything from scratch. Like teenagers rebelling against their parents, we threw out things that actually worked along with things that didn’t.
We can build cities that inspire again. Places we’re excited to wake up in, proud to show visitors, honored to pass on.
The future doesn’t have to look like the past. But it also doesn’t have to look like a parking lot.
Key Inspiration:
Cultural Tutor, especially his first YouTube video.
Monumental Labs and their vision.
Altissia from FFXV.
The magnificent cities that we used to build when we were vastly poorer and technologically primitive than we are now.
Lots of good stuff here. A few things I'd add:
1. While Le Corbusier's towers-in-a-park didn't get built in Paris, they did get built in NYC, a city's whose public housing--as marshaled by LC devotee Robert Moses--are close to facsimiles of LC's designs. Countless row-houses were razed to make way for these towers.
2. You touch on cars with things like parking minimums, but it should be said that post 1950 cities mean cities built around the car. Virtually every successful city around the world had its core built before the car, hence why they retain their human scale, not car scale.
3. I can't help but think the diminished value of religious life has some part in this. Pre Industrial Revolution, the Church was the main social and spiritual force in peoples' live, and church architecture was a means by which a city expressed its faith (and wealth). But as industriousness and wealth replaced faith and piety as top human priorities, buildings became rational edifices for increasing industrial output, aesthetics and service to the soul be damned. This shift got even worse in the age of real estate as a financial product. In earlier modern days, a building's economic value was a function of what happened in that building. Now, the building is the value--something to appreciate and trade, not necessarily use.
This is, increasingly the cities built after 1960 don’t work and they are breaking. They can’t scale like middle density places do. Worse, with digital addiction, they’re compounded all sorts of economic and societal problems.