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.
Robert Moses is a fascinating piece of history! Didn’t know about the LC connection.
Good point about the car. I’m wondering if there are cities that focused on public transport infrastructure instead as functioning counterexample existence proofs
Religion was a central unifying force for people across time and space. It made multi-generational thinking and action more common than it is now.
Financialization of real estate definitely affected the incentives around building. I think this one is the easier to change because it’s straightforward to understand the mechanics and incentives that influence it
I cannot think of any successful modern cities whose success stemmed from public transit infrastructure, but admittedly I have lots of knowledge gaps in Asian, African, and South American cities. One big reason old cities have endured is most, if not all, were geographically constrained. For example, my longtime home NYC was surrounded by water, necessitating the building density that enabled easy movement and social collisions. So many modern cities, by contrast, are placed in geographically unconstrained areas, e.g. Dallas, New Cairo, Dubai, Chinese ghost cities, etc. In these latter cities, mobility efficiency is a technological choice, not an environmental imperative. It's hard to correct this fundamental design flaw with better transit systems.
I like that you bring up multigenerational thinking, which also relates to the financialization topic. Because modern investor interests are so short-horizoned, most projects need to fit within 5-10 year timeframes to get built. Speedy returns on investment are highly correlated with ugly, low-quality buildings. Why make anything better when you're only trying to satisfy an impatient investor?
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.
I have a hot take, most of the cities in Europe also look fairly homogenous. Yes there are certain differences in Italian and German homes but its not as big of a delta as you would hope. I feel while modern buildings are ugly we are romanticising the past a bit too much. Every city within a European country has the same style of houses thus the standardization has been happening for a while. We are just bored of the current one.
Ha. I lived most of my life in Europe and a big chunk of my 20s in Germanic countries. They do look pretty similar.
I don't romanticize the past at all. This is a banger time to be alive. My biggest gripe with today can be summarized by this:
Florence Cathedral was funded primarily through public taxation. It took 140 years to build. Everyone who drafted the first drawings and laid the first stones knew they would never see it finished, but they did it anyway.
Unified by religion and civic pride, they believed Florence deserved a cathedral that would outlast them. Multi-generational thinking was common.
When was the last time you saw a building project designed to be completed in 2165?
With advances in technology and AI, we're about to have more building capacity than any previous generation.
Which is exactly why it's an interesting moment to reflect on what we've been building, and what we want to build.
I mean the Florence Cathedral was funded by Medici family as well. Infact everything over there was. To that argument I would say most of the White whale projects in Middle East count for that. Burj Khalifa, The Line City in Saudi Arabia
The Medicis rose in power right when the cathedral was completed! Not sure how that’s related though. But yes, South Arabia displays more multi-generational thinking than the West
Homogeneity is not synonymous with ugly or soulless. I lived in Brooklyn for many years, where brownstones line entire blocks. While homogenous (to a point, as there are great variations of form between units and blocks), they are not ugly or generic like a brand new, SIP-constructed 5 over 1 multifamily building--one that trades quality and aesthetics for ease-of-construction, code-conformity, and investor payouts. The same could be said about Haussmann's Paris, Amsterdam row houses, and other standardized historical architecture.
I dont agree with you completely. To me the red block houses feel super depressing. Its novelty that attracts the mind and why it sticks out so much when we see these old cities as if they are theme parks. But for people living in these places they are fascinated by the modern builds which is why so many asian cities are running towards it. I agree it makes everything look same and soul less but its also got to do with the aspirations
Novelty might attract the mind, but it doesn't capture the heart and body--that's what quality, rationality of design, and formal coherence are for.
It's funny you describe cities that grew organically over millennia as theme parks, but you'd probably defend modern mega-projects like NYC's Hudson Yards, that shot up in less than a decade and were funded by ill-gotten wealth and debt. Same goes with most of China's major downtowns, which became repositories for the world's most "novel" architecture--the kinds older cities would not allow. This same execution of novelty led PRC's president to ban "weird buildings." https://www.archdaily.com/559456/why-china-s-president-says-no-more-weird-buildings
Perhaps because you're in Dehli, you're also unaware of how hopelessly generic most new construction is in the US: huge tracts of butt-ugly single family houses; soulless, featureless glass and steel downtown towers; slapped together stick-over-podium multifamily buildings that don't have any relation to their environment; etc. I'll take a handful of well executed, rational architectural forms--like a Brooklyn brownstone--over this dreck any day of the week.
The older I've gotten, the more I value quality, usefulness, and enduring beauty over novelty.
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.
Robert Moses is a fascinating piece of history! Didn’t know about the LC connection.
Good point about the car. I’m wondering if there are cities that focused on public transport infrastructure instead as functioning counterexample existence proofs
Religion was a central unifying force for people across time and space. It made multi-generational thinking and action more common than it is now.
Financialization of real estate definitely affected the incentives around building. I think this one is the easier to change because it’s straightforward to understand the mechanics and incentives that influence it
I cannot think of any successful modern cities whose success stemmed from public transit infrastructure, but admittedly I have lots of knowledge gaps in Asian, African, and South American cities. One big reason old cities have endured is most, if not all, were geographically constrained. For example, my longtime home NYC was surrounded by water, necessitating the building density that enabled easy movement and social collisions. So many modern cities, by contrast, are placed in geographically unconstrained areas, e.g. Dallas, New Cairo, Dubai, Chinese ghost cities, etc. In these latter cities, mobility efficiency is a technological choice, not an environmental imperative. It's hard to correct this fundamental design flaw with better transit systems.
I like that you bring up multigenerational thinking, which also relates to the financialization topic. Because modern investor interests are so short-horizoned, most projects need to fit within 5-10 year timeframes to get built. Speedy returns on investment are highly correlated with ugly, low-quality buildings. Why make anything better when you're only trying to satisfy an impatient investor?
Here's one piece I found about the Robert Moses/Le Corbusier connection. https://www.6sqft.com/towers-in-the-park-le-corbusiers-influence-in-nyc/
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.
I have a hot take, most of the cities in Europe also look fairly homogenous. Yes there are certain differences in Italian and German homes but its not as big of a delta as you would hope. I feel while modern buildings are ugly we are romanticising the past a bit too much. Every city within a European country has the same style of houses thus the standardization has been happening for a while. We are just bored of the current one.
Ha. I lived most of my life in Europe and a big chunk of my 20s in Germanic countries. They do look pretty similar.
I don't romanticize the past at all. This is a banger time to be alive. My biggest gripe with today can be summarized by this:
Florence Cathedral was funded primarily through public taxation. It took 140 years to build. Everyone who drafted the first drawings and laid the first stones knew they would never see it finished, but they did it anyway.
Unified by religion and civic pride, they believed Florence deserved a cathedral that would outlast them. Multi-generational thinking was common.
When was the last time you saw a building project designed to be completed in 2165?
With advances in technology and AI, we're about to have more building capacity than any previous generation.
Which is exactly why it's an interesting moment to reflect on what we've been building, and what we want to build.
I mean the Florence Cathedral was funded by Medici family as well. Infact everything over there was. To that argument I would say most of the White whale projects in Middle East count for that. Burj Khalifa, The Line City in Saudi Arabia
The Medicis rose in power right when the cathedral was completed! Not sure how that’s related though. But yes, South Arabia displays more multi-generational thinking than the West
Homogeneity is not synonymous with ugly or soulless. I lived in Brooklyn for many years, where brownstones line entire blocks. While homogenous (to a point, as there are great variations of form between units and blocks), they are not ugly or generic like a brand new, SIP-constructed 5 over 1 multifamily building--one that trades quality and aesthetics for ease-of-construction, code-conformity, and investor payouts. The same could be said about Haussmann's Paris, Amsterdam row houses, and other standardized historical architecture.
I don't think this piece piece is about nostalgia, but about a trend towards devaluing aesthetics that started at the advent of the Industrial Revolution and went into overdrive (pun intended) post WWI. This piece expands on this trend. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/01/13/alain-de-botton-ugly-architecture-beautiful-buildings/
I dont agree with you completely. To me the red block houses feel super depressing. Its novelty that attracts the mind and why it sticks out so much when we see these old cities as if they are theme parks. But for people living in these places they are fascinated by the modern builds which is why so many asian cities are running towards it. I agree it makes everything look same and soul less but its also got to do with the aspirations
Novelty might attract the mind, but it doesn't capture the heart and body--that's what quality, rationality of design, and formal coherence are for.
It's funny you describe cities that grew organically over millennia as theme parks, but you'd probably defend modern mega-projects like NYC's Hudson Yards, that shot up in less than a decade and were funded by ill-gotten wealth and debt. Same goes with most of China's major downtowns, which became repositories for the world's most "novel" architecture--the kinds older cities would not allow. This same execution of novelty led PRC's president to ban "weird buildings." https://www.archdaily.com/559456/why-china-s-president-says-no-more-weird-buildings
Perhaps because you're in Dehli, you're also unaware of how hopelessly generic most new construction is in the US: huge tracts of butt-ugly single family houses; soulless, featureless glass and steel downtown towers; slapped together stick-over-podium multifamily buildings that don't have any relation to their environment; etc. I'll take a handful of well executed, rational architectural forms--like a Brooklyn brownstone--over this dreck any day of the week.
The older I've gotten, the more I value quality, usefulness, and enduring beauty over novelty.