On Architecture and Lost Empires

The real story behind how we design today

I've come across a number of articles recently purporting to describe a fascinating new conspiracy theory about a lost empire known as Tartaria. Unlike most other recent conspiracy theories, however, this one happens to center around architecture.

The idea is that the grand architecture which remains standing today in many places around the world was constructed by a lost global empire whose tragic fall ushered in today's degraded era of boring utilitarian buildings and bland, uninspiring architecture.

An Empire of Dreams (Ecosophia)

John Michael Greer points out that these buildings are mainly artifacts of European imperialist expansion beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing to roughly World War One. He gives the standard reactionary¹ arguments against modernism, complete with the de rigeur cherry-picked photographs of Brutalist buildings (it's always Brutalism which is the stand-in for all of modern design, of course). Remarkably in this era of NIMBYs and BANANAS², he tells us that common people are helpless victims with no control over their built environment, and that elites (most likely of the PMC variety) are arrogantly shoving modernism down people's throats—a standard reactionary trope. More disturbing is this passage:

...if someone were to walk out into a public square in some midwestern American city tomorrow, raise the black and gold banner of Great Tartary, proclaim the rebirth of the Tartarian Empire, and call for young men to join the imperial legions, it’s pretty likely that he’d get a substantial response—especially if tearing down every scrap of modern public architecture and replacing it with neoclassical buildings was part of his platform.

Of course, that exact thing happened back in the 1930s, except it was—er—a slightly different flag that disaffected youth were rallying to, as Greer is no doubt aware. And they were indeed quite fond of Neoclassicism, although stripped classicism was their preferred style of choice (and were, in fact, not completely opposed to modernism altogether).

More circumspect is this post from Astral Codex Ten, which uses the Tartaria theory as a jumping off point for discussing the changes in design and aesthetic styles that have taken place more broadly in the last hundred years or so. Why, he ponders, did we stop designing buildings in historical styles when—if polls are to be believed—people prefer those styles to current modernist designs by wide margin? Why is minimalism so popular? And why do artistic movements today seem to be much more austere and recondite (designed for insiders to talk to each other rather than the general public)?

Given the fact that I usually write about things I have no specific knowledge of or particular qualifications in, I couldn't overlook this opportunity to write about something I'm technically qualified to write about (although I'm an architect and not specifically an architectural historian). In any case, having to listen to people who've never had any hand whosoever in the building design and construction process pontificate on these issues as though they were experts is simply too much to bear.

So here are my very disjointed preliminary thoughts on the matter.

1. Culture

To some extent, those antique buildings were the product of a completely different culture and society. But it wasn’t some lost Central Asian empire.

There's a saying that politics is down stream from culture. But that's true for a lot of things, including the arts. Architecture is downstream from culture. Architecture is not a pristine object that can be understood in isolation like planets by astronomers or atoms by physicists. It is embedded in a specific cultural context and can only be understood in that wider context. That's where a lot of the commentary misses the mark.

We may pine for things like Chartres Cathedral or the Taj Mahal, but clearly those are not the types of buildings designed and built in an era where quarterly profit rules all. Those particular buildings were built in a fundamentally different social order than the one we now inhabit—one was an expression of a society’s highest spiritual values; the other was built by a bereaved despot as a tomb for his beloved. I don't think budgets were an issue. These buildings were expressions of a particular culture. Today's "boring" buildings are just as much an expression of a particular culture—the culture of globalized late stage monopoly capitalism.

For example, the Astral Codex Ten article laments the ordinariness and blandness of the headquarters for Google and Facebook. But these companies are all about transcending the physical world in favor of a world consisting solely of bits and atoms (c.f. Facebook’s madcap “metaverse”). One might even go so far as to say that these companies are antagonistic to the real, physical world. Why then, would anyone expect them to care about what their headquarters look like beyond pure utilitarianism? They are self-contained campuses expressly designed to exclude common people like you and me rather than engage with the wider society. It is an architecture of exclusion. After all, the ideal server farm would be an underground bunker filled with machines.

The pinnacle of the social order in times past were hereditary aristocrats and prosperous merchants who wanted to impress each other and the people they lorded over as bosses and rulers. That was a cultural phenomenon. Today's masters of the universe are the sociopathic Wall Street financiers, narcissistic CEOs, self-aggrandizing billionaires more obsessed with outer space than with anything on this planet, and autistic computer nerds who never leave their glowing screens and dream of becoming immortal cyborgs. A building is simply a necessary inconvenience to them rather than a way to engage with the wider society. All they really care about is the numbers on the balance sheet going up every single quarter, forever.

The core features of the society of late stage capitalism are individuality and impermanence. Entire industries rise and fall within a single lifetime. Skills become out of date by the time people graduate from college. Technology is advancing at a feverish pace. Modernist architecture is a response to this rapidly changing world. Many of the buildings of, say, Classical Style, were expressly designed to convey a sense of permanence and stability that has no relevance in today's schizoid social order. When cultures built monumental architecture in past societies, there was a sense that the society in the distant future would be much the same as it was in the present. That's not the case anymore.

A perfect example is the Woolworth building in New York City, the "Cathedral of Commerce" and one of the most spectacular surviving examples of Tartarian architecture. Like Tartaria, Woolworth’s isn’t around anymore, but it wasn't wiped out by a sea of mud. It was killed off by plain old capitalist "creative destruction." This provides an object lesson. Why, in this sort of rapidly changing world, would you invest the massive sums of money to construct something like the Woolworth Building today when your business might not be around even a few decades from now? Or bought up by a competitor?

As for individuality, it’s clear that people today try to stand out as much as possible rather than blend in. Just look at a street photo of people today compared to a hundred years ago. Back then everyone dressed more-or-less alike—in dark, muted colors with white starched shirts and dark coats, hats and ties. Look at a street photo today and no two people are dressed alike—everyone is comfortably clad in colorful, garish "fast fashion." Everyone wants to stand out, express themselves and be a star—the next American (or wherever) Idol.

Novelty, uniqueness and self-expression rule the day. Why would we not expect our architecture to reflect that? Today’s phenomenon of "starchitects" is simply an outgrowth of that. Every starchitect tries to develop hos or her own unique style, distinct from everyone else they are competing against for high-profile commissions. Commissioning a building from one of them is as much a status symbol as a buying a product or artwork from any famous brand-name fashion designer or visual artist in any industry. This wasn't the case for architects even in the recent past, at least not to the same degree. In the past, your skill was primarily determined by how well you executed an existing style rather than constantly having to create novel and unique building forms from scratch every single time. That’s just the way business has gone in every industry. In today’s world, everyone needs to stand out from the crowd.

2. The Origins of Modernism

Modernism developed out of a sense that new construction technologies, new building typologies, new building materials, increased technical demands, and the sheer amount of buildings required under industrialization called for a new approach to building design and construction than those which had existed in the past. And on the face of it, that’s not too unreasonable an assumption.

Monumental architecture of the past was primarily built out of durable materials like brick or stone, or a combination of both as in Roman classical architecture (there are exceptions of course—in Northern Europe heavy timber buildings could be built to last for centuries before the old-growth forests started to disappear). Most of these buildings were designed to emphasize the permanence and importance of the state and/or the predominant religion (which was often connected with the state).

Those buildings were load-bearing buildings, in which the form of the building itself carried its weight to the ground. Neither stone nor brick can effectively span long distances which is necessary to enclose interior space. Greek and Egyptian temple architecture did use stone lintels, but this meant that columns had to be spaced closely together (Greek temples were based on earlier wooden structures whose timbers could span longer distances). Pyramids and ziggurats, for example, were effectively artificial mountains made of of mud-brick and stone³.

This led to the development of the arch. An extruded arch is known as a vault, and a rotated arch is known as a dome. Two vaults interesting is known as a groin vault. From these basic elements, then, all of classical architecture was constructed. These inherent structural limitations, however, meant that building expression came from things like the articulation of the stonework along with decorative elements like frescoes, engravings, carvings and mosaics (for example). This is where the elaborate, highly ornate style of traditional buildings comes from.

With the arrival of steel erector set construction, architects were freed from the limitations of load-bearing construction for the first time. Efficiency needs also encouraged the use of mass-produced materials like panelized curtain walls which hung off the building’s structure (hence the term “curtain”). For the first time the form of the building and its exterior expression could be totally separate. This is a big reason why modern buildings look so different compared to older ones. They were also free from the limitations of material itself—you could clad a building with almost any imaginable material independent of the structural form. The skin was merely decoration. Brick, precast concrete, stone, terra cotta, wood, metal panels, and of course glass and aluminum curtain walls were all on the table. This led to a period of experimentation, not all of which was successful in retrospect (like blobitecture).

I think people often forget just how recent much of this stuff is, and how revolutionary. While the Industrial Revolution is often dated to the first efficient steam engine by James Watt in 1776, when it came to building techniques it was not until the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that these new building techniques began to be widely used. Before then they were used on only a handful of experimental projects in a few select locations. Some of the reinforced concrete techniques were not even well understood until the 1940s and 1950s (shell structures for example) and large expanses of glass were only made possible by the Pilkington float process perfected in the 1950s.

Many of the new construction techniques were developed by civil engineers who blurred the line between design and engineering while building things like dams, bridges, tunnels, and railway stations. Big names include Isambard Kingdom Brunel in England, Gustave Eiffel in France, and William Le Baron Jenney and Ernest L. Ransome in the United States.

The first steel frame skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building by Jenney built in 1884-1885 in Chicago. The Reliance Building, also in Chicago, was the first skyscraper whose facade consisted mostly of plate glass windows and was completed in 1895. The first reinforced concrete skyscraper was the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati completed in 1903; prior to 1902, the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world was only six stories high.

The modernist aesthetic derived largely from factory buildings which featured large, open plans with high ceilings, an exposed structure and expansive gridded glass windows flooding the interior space with light. A lot of those early buildings were load-bearing masonry with heavy timber joists or trusses spanning the interior; later concrete structures replaced the brick and heavy timber due to its lack of combustibility. Of course, heating was not a concern for factory buildings since the equipment housed inside produced excess heat (lighting costs were a bigger concern hence the expansive windows).

The entire Eastern seaboard and Midwest of the United States—along with other places in the industrialized world like the English Midlands and the Ruhr valley—were dotted with industrial buildings like factories, offices and warehouses long before modernism developed as any sort of coherent design philosophy. This functional, utilitarian aesthetic can clearly be seen in the Fagus Factory designed by Walter Gropius, which was the precursor for the famous Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany.

Another major influence were the tuberculosis sanitariums of Europe. Tuberculosis became epidemic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to rapid urbanization, overcrowding, and poor sanitation. Since antibiotics had not been invented yet, sanitariums were places where patients would go to convalesce. They were designed to be uncluttered and minimalist, with large amounts of fresh air and natural daylight (which was necessary for treating TB).

The interior spaces of these buildings were a clear contrast with the often dark, cluttered and ostentatious spaces of the preceding Victorian era (think smoke-filled gambling dens in men's clubs). Open air schools were also designed to deal with TB outbreaks. These buildings had a huge effect on modernist design, and modernism in turn became associated with cleanliness, hygiene, and social progress as Lloyd Alter describes:

After the First World War, a new form of modern architecture appeared, modelled after the new tuberculosis sanitariums where they fought disease with design. They didn't have antibiotics, but they had light, fresh air and openness...This is how we got modern architecture and minimalism...

The Open Air School movement expanded rapidly, and..architects "enthusiastically adopted the latest ideas about the hygienic benefits of light and fresh air in educational buildings, eager to exploit the newly developed structural techniques and materials which made it possible to employ very large areas of glass, cantilevered concrete balconies, and flat floors roofs [sic] that could support roof terraces."

These are, of course, the same elements that were key to the modern movement in architecture, and the roots of minimalism. One of the most famous examples is Jan Duiker's Cliostraat Open Air School in Amsterdam from 1927. Duiker designed the influential Zonnestraal Sanitarium with Bernard Bijvoet, who went on to work with Chareau on the Maison de Verre, neatly tying together the medical, educational, and residential modern movements.

Overy notes also that Duiker compared his "new functionalism in architecture" with the wearing of light hygienic clothing such as T-shirts, "popular among young people." He claimed that "a strong hygienic power is influencing our life; one which will develop into a style, a hygienic style!"

New Study Confirms That Modernists Were Right About Sunlight – It Is the Best Disinfectant (Treehugger)

Bring Back the Open Air School (Treehugger)

Minimalist aesthetics were also imported from other cultures. The Ho-o-den, or Phoenix Palace, was a Japanese temple erected at the World's Colombian Exposition in 1898. This building had a profound influence on the subsequent design philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose designs in turn influenced European architects when his portfolio was published in Europe by Ernst Wasmuth in 1910. Unity Temple—constructed of concrete—was especially influential, and has been called the first modernist building.

An intriguing possible influence may also have been the First World War itself. Ann Sussman has made the case that many of the early modernists were World War One veterans who were suffering from PTSD (which was unknown at the time), and that this profoundly influenced their design philosophy. Sufferers of acute PTSD exhibit a compulsive desire to erase the past and make a clean break from it, which is a major theme in modernist writings and design. They were also heavily influenced by military architecture—sturdy, sparing, utilitarian structures of unadorned concrete featuring long horizontal ribbon windows (the better to see and fire upon an enemy). It's no coincidence that people often describe modernist buildings as looking like a bunker. This design aesthetic can be seen in Gropius' own house in New England, for example:

This combination—proliferating industrial buildings, tuberculosis outbreaks, the trauma of the First World War, new construction techniques derived from civil engineering, deskilling (see below), and new mass-produced materials like concrete, steel, and plate glass—combined together to create the new "modernist" movement which was not just about buildings, but an all-encompassing design aesthetic and social philosophy.

3. New Building Types

It's also important to note that there are far more building types today than there were in the past.

In previous eras, as I've mentioned, grand monumental architecture tended to be large civic and ecclesiastical buildings. Just about every other activity was done out of people's residences, as Witold Rybcynski describes in Home using the example of a Norwegian bookbinder named Frederik Jacobsen Brun:

Brun was a bookbinder, and he worked at home. A two-story half-timbered building contained the bindery, a stable, a barn, a hayloft, and many storerooms grouped around a courtyard. The dwelling itself faced the street. The Bruns had bought the house as newlyweds and had enlarged it by adding a second floor. The original structure consisted of a large room flanked by a small kitchen and a single adjacent room. The new extension was more ambitious: it included two rooms on either side of a larger selskapssal (party room). The house, which was the size of a small modern bungalow (about fifteen hundred square feet) and would have been a tight squeeze for the Bruns and their eight children, actually housed fifteen persons; in addition to the Brun family, there were three employees and two servants.

The Brun home is an example of what Philip Ariès called a "big house," which was the way that the prosperous bourgeoisie lived not just in the seventeenth but also in the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. A chief characteristic of the big house was its public character. Like its medieval antecedent, it was the setting for all aspects of life—business, entertainment, and work. It was always full of relatives, guests, clients, friends, and acquaintances...

Home: A Short History of an Idea, pp. 44-45

All sorts of building types simply didn't exist in the preindustrial era. Where were the medieval corporate headquarters? Where were the ancient Roman office buildings? Where were the factories, elementary schools, hospitals, medical office buildings, libraries, hockey rinks, baseball stadiums, strip malls, swimming pools, shopping malls, and post offices? Where were the power plants, warehouses and prisons? Where were the bus stations, train stations and parking garages? Where were the airports and art museums?

The rapid proliferation of new building types engendered by industrialization naturally led to the idea that a new design philosophy was required instead of trying to shoehorn traditional building styles that were obviously developed for the fairly limited range of buildings in times past. This idea continued to gain momentum as the twentieth century dawned.

4. Modernism Becomes the Dominant Paradigm

Despite that, modernism only became the dominant style after the Second World War.

How did modernism emerge from being an upstart philosophy to being the dominant trend? And why did the earliest industrial buildings still resemble the buildings of previous eras decked out with all sorts of superfluous filigree and ornamentation?

I think it boils down to two reasons. One is a change in the way architecture was taught. Architecture used to be an apprenticeship profession where you learned how to design buildings from your employer in a master/apprentice relationship. How your employer did it was how you did it, and he did it was the way his employer taught him to do it (most architects at the time were men, although the Bauhaus did have a large number of female students). This naturally encouraged a high degree of conservatism in building design.

After the Second World War, however, architecture became a subject studied in universities under tenured professors rather than apprenticeship. In the United States in particular, those professors were often modernists who had fled fascism in Europe and were welcomed with open arms at elite American universities:

The Nazis had forced the closure of the Bauhaus school in Dessau in 1932 and in Berlin in 1933. In the United States, however, the red carpet was rolled out for the style pioneers from Germany. [Walter] Gropius, head utopian Bauhaus designer, was immediately appointed professor at Harvard University. One year later, he took over as head of the architecture department at the Graduate School of Design...

The emigrants from Germany were stars even before they reached the New World. Alfred Barr, one of the co-founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, gave a frenetic speech on the Bauhaus as early as 1929. He wanted to introduce the ideas of the Bauhaus into American culture.

Alfred Barr had already been to Europe to gain his own impressions of the new architectural style. Convinced that the new movement in architecture that gained renown in the early 1920s was something important, the director of the MoMA, together with architectural historian Henry-Russel Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson, undertook several trips to Europe in 1930 and 1931 to investigate the phenomenon.

They came to the conclusion that "this contemporary style, which exists all over the world, is uniform and inclusive, not fragmentary or contradictory like so much of the work of the first generation of modern architects," as it says in the catalog published to accompany the first "International Style" exhibition in New York in 1932.

In this book, Hitchcock and Johnson define the uniformity of this global form of design by way of three criteria: the emphasis on pure volume, modular regularity and the avoidance of superimposed decoration. "This is how the current style differs from the styles of the past," they wrote. Color was also frowned upon; instead, "natural facade materials and the shades of the metal profiles" were to be highlighted...

Barr, Hitchcock and Johnson were the first to so categorically identify and define this new style of building. The Bauhaus exiles quickly found a new home in the US: famous students such as Andreas Feininger, Herbert Bayer and Xanti Schawinsky were even permitted to show their work in the American pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, representing the US.

Gropius and his comrades-in-arms had ensured their own fame. They rigorously promoted their own work — giving radio interviews, writing manifestos and publishing numerous texts about their visions. The first testimonials to their "New Objectivity" form of design were by Gropius and [Marcel] Breuer, who built small villas with flat roofs and strip windows in immediate vicinity of one another in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Both of these "masters' houses in American style" were to be prime examples for potential customers. Soon enough, in the 1950s, customers were lining up for the Bauhaus creations. Gropius was commissioned with building the Pan American World Airlines Building in New York, as well as countless other office towers.

The Bauhaus idea quickly found footing not only in New York, but also in other cities in the United States...

Bauhaus abroad: How a utopian idea spread (Deutsche Welle)

The design geniuses who fled turmoil (BBC Culture)

In order to be an influential architect, you need to get your ideas built, and in order to get them built you need to have access to people who have the money and resources to make them a reality. The upper-class architecture students who attended elite universities naturally became friends with the people who would go on to lead the mammoth industrial corporations that would dominate the global economy in the subsequent Postwar period.

These executives commissioned their college buddies from Harvard and Yale who studied under the European modernists to design the buildings that would express American political and economic might from 1945-1979. These buildings were not designed to evoke previous forms, but instead to reflect the modern, rationally planned, technocratic, bureaucratic society shepherded by big corporations and democratic governments. The Modernist aesthetic was tailor-made for telegraphing this message. A lot of people think modernism is plain and unadorned, but modernist aesthetics emphasized the use of careful detailing, tectonics, materiality and massing rather than applied ornamentation. Modernist designs were intended to express the structure and high-tech nature of modern commercial construction instead of hiding it beneath a false facade.

The other thing to note is is that in the history of any technology, the initial design always looks like the previous thing that it replaced. The first automobiles looked like horse-drawn carriages. The first telephones resembled telegraphs. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. But over time, objects tend to become increasingly utilitarian and stripped of superfluous design features. That's how we ended up with efficient, streamlined cars and phones that fit into your pocket. Buildings are no exception.

So even when steel, concrete and glass arrived on the scene, older traditional building styles were still emulated even though a lot that ornamentation had become superfluous. That’s why early skyscrapers had gargoyles on them like Gothic cathedrals. But over time, modernism became predominant because it was much more suited the new industrialized techniques of building and engineering, as well as burgeoning mass production. It was also easier and more economical to design and build.

5. Building Boom

The Postwar period created an unprecedented need to build a massive amount of new buildings quickly to house the world’s exponentially growing population. Concurrently, Americans fled the cities for the suburbs, encouraged by the Interstate Highway System, high union wages, and subsidized home loans. The build-out of the Postwar American suburbs coincided with the emergence of modernism as the preeminent design curriculum in American universities. The suburbs and modernism are inherently intertwined. Architectural graduates found themselves in high demand and many went on to start firms that still exist today.

Modernism was tailor-made for suburbia. Relatively cheap, efficient, and easy to construct, these buildings could quickly be put together with unskilled labor, and thus this style gradually displaced all other styles. Modernism was also amenable to the increasingly strict regulatory atmosphere regarding parking, accessibility, and fire protection. Budget-conscious suburban politicians were more likely to approve a Modernist civic center, for example, then an elaborate traditional style from ages past (even if one particular style could be agreed upon by a building committee). I would hazard a guess that 95-99 percent of all buildings that have been built in the history of our species have been constructed since the beginning of the twentieth century, and the vast majority of them since World War Two.

The urbanization of the global population is an even more recent phenomenon, and one that is accelerating. For the first time ever in 2008 more people lived in cities than outside them.

The pace of urbanization is staggering. Since 2003, China has poured more cement every three years than the US managed in the entire 20th century. “Forty years ago, four in five Chinese lived in the countryside; now three in five live in homes and workplaces made of glass, cement and steel. The movement of 250 million rural Chinese into cities to take up jobs in its rapidly growing manufacturing sector between 1979 and 2010 was the single largest migration event in human history.” (James Suzman, Work; pp. 282-283). Clearly the elaborate traditional building styles of past eras were not up to this monumental task.

Rivers of [concrete] were poured after the second world war, when concrete offered an inexpensive and simple way to rebuild cities devastated by bombing. This was the period of brutalist architects such as Le Corbusier, followed by the futuristic, free-flowing curves of Oscar Niemeyer and the elegant lines of Tadao Ando – not to mention an ever-growing legion of dams, bridges, ports, city halls, university campuses, shopping centres and uniformly grim car parks. In 1950, cement production was equal to that of steel; in the years since, it has increased 25-fold, more than three times as fast as its metallic construction partner.

Debate about the aesthetics has tended to polarise between traditionalists like Prince Charles, who condemned Owen Luder’s brutalist Tricorn Centre as a “mildewed lump of elephant droppings”, and modernists who saw concrete as a means of making style, size and strength affordable for the masses.

Concrete: the most destructive material on earth (The Guardian)

...of all the features of concrete that might be considered revolutionary, what has perhaps been the most important has been its use to bring about rapid change. When sudden or urgent transformations were called for, whether it was five-year plans in the Soviet Union, the New Deal in the USA, the Great Leap Forward in China, or post-second world war housebuilding in Europe, concrete was pressed into service.

Each of these political programmes anticipated infrastructural work on a wholly new scale, beyond existing industrial and labour resources. Concrete, because its raw materials were easy to find and relatively cheap and because, in theory, much of the work could be done with unskilled labour, promised to make possible the otherwise impossible. When in 1956 the Soviet Union set a seven-year target to “catch up and overtake the USA”, concrete construction was a vital component. Two years earlier, Nikita Khrushchev’s first major speech after the death of Stalin had been on the advantages of concrete.

It lasted three hours. No head of state before or since has delivered such a lengthy or detailed speech about concrete, nor made concrete the subject of such a politically explosive address: Khrushchev used it to announce his break with Stalinism. He did so by criticising the inefficiencies of the craft methods of construction favoured by Uncle Joe, and arguing instead for the benefits of prefabricated concrete construction that would draw upon Russia’s vast resources of unskilled labour.

'Concrete? It's communist': the rise and fall of the utopian socialist material (The Guardian)

6. Increasing Technological Requirements

Today we expect the buildings we inhabit today to keep us warm and dry and to maintain a constant indoor temperature of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit (22° C) in both the hottest and coldest climates on earth. We expect plenty of natural light, and for interior spaces to not be dark, cramped or moldy. We expect water from the tap on demand and our sanitary needs to be easily met without having to go outside. We expect to able to prepare any type of food we want quickly and easily, and to store that food in temperature controlled boxes and heat it up in other temperature controlled boxes. We expect plenty of space not only for ourselves but also for the huge amount of consumer goods that we buy. We expect an abundance of conveniently located electrical outlets to plug our endlessly proliferating digital gadgets into. We demand privacy, and are willing to sue if we don’t get it.

Older buildings may be aesthetically pleasing, but they are often, cold, drafty, dark, cramped, moldy, acoustically inferior, unsanitary, inaccessible for the disabled, flammable and hard to reconfigure. There was no insulation, and often no flush toilets, no running water, and no mechanical heating and cooling. The need to conform to modern standards, coupled with the increasingly strict regulatory atmosphere of modern construction, lends itself to modernism with its open, free-flowing ad hoc aesthetic as opposed to the straightjacket of traditional design.

As modernism became more and more dominant, it became the industry standard and the accepted way to build. If you wanted to build something in an earlier traditional style (which we still do, by the way), it would be the exception rather than the norm. And because our design and construction industry has become accustomed to building modernist buildings, it would take additional time, money, and effort to design buildings in those earlier architectural styles, which is why it’s done less often. Making new buildings look old isn't the default anymore; it’s now a deliberate choice. Today’s tight budgets, accelerated building schedules, technological demands, and regulatory atmosphere (including increasingly strict energy efficiency requirements) all push back against using traditional building styles and point towards modernism as the path of least resistance.

No conspiracy required.

7. Deskilling

It’s worth noting that the professional architect as lone shaper of the building is a modern convention. Building construction in past eras was intimately bound up within a dazzling array of highly-skilled craftsmen including stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, woodcarvers, painters and plasterers, not to mention sculptors, painters, weavers, drapers, and so forth. Their knowledge was passed down from generation to generation from the medieval period onward. Construction was an ongoing and evolving dialogue between those various trades, without which traditional architecture as we know it would not have been possible.

The architect shaping a building in a vacuum and then handing off a set of instructions for an unrelated entity to build is a fundamental transformation in the way that buildings are designed and built which started with the Industrial Revolution. However, this was a process that unfolded over time as the technical requirements of building and construction became ever more complex and demanding. You can see this process reflected as buildings became more utilitarian and less elaborate as capitalism became predominant.

In past eras, the knowledge of how to construct a building was parceled out among the hands and brains of countless people throughout the various building trades. Borromini, Bernini, and Bramante (for example) could not have have built what they built without that complex ecosystem of skills—an ecosystem that is all but gone today except in the field of historic preservation (which is preoccupied with refurbishing existing buildings rather than building new ones).

It's also important to note that in the preindustrial world, most of these occupations were guild occupations. Guilds were not only responsible for passing down skills for these various trades, but also for ensuring that wages remained high and that their members could make a decent living. This led them to gradually become insular and exclusionary—insider's clubs, basically—which hastened their demise as mass production beckoned.

Modern society has no use for guilds, and so many of these crafts simply disappeared. Those elaborately carved entablatures and lovingly crafted wooden handrails that reactionaries long for were as much a product of those guilds as any individual architect. Yet architects get the sole blame for their disappearance rather than the profound social, economic and technological changes that have taken place over time.

Remarkably, not one of these commentaries mentioned deskilling! The death of the guild system was major blow to the kind of bespoke, handcrafted buildings that reactionary critics of modern architecture pine for. Trade unions as we know them today are a different animal with distinct origins and are not the direct descendants of earlier guild systems.

A number of comments mentioned Baumol's Cost Disease. BCD is the observation that certain sectors of the economy can become much more efficient over time due to things like assembly lines, interchangeable parts, outsourcing, automation, and so forth; while laying bricks, for example, takes just about as much time as it always did. But wages have to be roughly equivalent across industries, because workers in every sector of the economy have to make a living—to pay for food, clothing, shelter medical care, retirement, and so forth. Therefore certain activities become "overpriced" relative to others, especially those that are less amenable to assembly lines, automation, and mechanization.

While construction efficiency has certainly gone up over time, every building is designed to solve a unique problem and therefore is less amenable to mass production techniques in its creation. Most of the efficiency gains in construction have come from better tools, improved communication, and offsite prefabrication⁴.

Not to mention the simple fact that for all of human history until the Industrial Revolution, labor was cheap and materials were expensive. In today's world it’s the opposite—labor is much more expensive than materials. That, too, is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, the impetus is to minimize labor costs as much as possible, especially highly skilled labor. The preindustrial world was not as subservient to the imperatives of the almighty balance sheet as is today's world. In fact, many large civic projects were deliberately designed to use as much labor as possible as make-work programs to keep people busy. The building trades were a major source of employment in past societies. The Roman emperor Vespasian even rejected labor-saving technology on building projects, remarking, “You must allow my poor haulers to earn their bread.”

Outside of grand civic and ecclesiastical buildings, the vast majority of buildings were vernacular. They were built out of common, everyday materials like wood, earth, stone and thatch, often by non-professional builders, and were not designed to be permanent, unlike civic and religious structures. They would be frequently by torn down and rebuilt over time, as any archaeologist digging in an urban area can tell you. In fact, most ordinary buildings were nothing special:

The poor were extremely badly housed. They were without water or sanitation, with almost no furniture and few possessions, a situation which, in Europe at least, continued until the beginning of the twentieth century. In the towns, their houses were so small that family life was compromised; these tiny one-room hovels were little more than shelters for sleeping. There was room only for the infants—the older children were separated from their parents and sent to work as apprentices or servants. The result of these deprivations, according to some historians, was that concepts such as "home" and "family" did not exist for these miserable souls. To speak of comfort and discomfort under such circumstances is absurd; this was bare existence.

Witold Rybczynski, Home, p. 24

So the majority of buildings that have survived to the present day are buildings of exceptional quality and character that embodied civic pride in some way, and therefore a lot of effort went into their creation. Again, recall that in this world labor is cheap and materials are expensive. These buildings were also designed to telegraph the power and authority of the state—especially its power to command labor—and therefore were highly detailed and elaborate for propagandistic as well as aesthetic and make-work purposes.

A number of comments also mentioned survivorship bias. The buildings that have remained standing today are indeed ones of exceptional design quality, craftsmanship and civic importance. Around them, the vast majority of vernacular buildings have long since been torn down and replaced, or destroyed by earthquake, floods, and fires. We don't see them around anymore. We therefore get the mistaken impression that every ancient building must have been a masterpiece. But, in fact the vast majority of preindustrial buildings were unremarkable. Their character came more from the surrounding urban context than from any particular design excellence.

And the fact that there was a surrounding context cannot be overlooked. If you plucked an average building from any European capital and set it down in a cornfield in suburban America surrounded by a sea of asphalt, it would look a lot less impressive. In fact, most of the structures in these cities are rather mundane; it is the surrounding urban fabric that animates them and gives them their charm and character—an urban fabric which is sadly lacking in the United States where most people live in amorphous suburban sprawl and will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it that way. That's not a conspiracy and no single architect can rectify that on his or her own.

There is a discontinuity in our knowledge of how to make old buildings. It wasn't caused by a fallen empire or a mudslide, but a century of unprecedented social, cultural, economic and technological changes. Like reviving an extinct language or religion, bringing back those techniques involves making a series of conscious choices, and it will not be an exact replica of what had existed before, but something new and altogether different.

8. The Real Conspiracy

I think like all these conspiracies ultimately boil down to one thing.

We are constantly told that capitalism is a perfect, infallible system. That it's responsible for everything we enjoy today. That any kind of change—even minor change—will lead to downfall and chaos. That there is no alternative.

Yet a lot of people are looking around and seeing a society they don’t like very much. People are working longer hours for less and less. It takes two incomes in a household to make ends meet. Anxiety and depression are rising. People are burdened by skyrocketing automobile, mortgage, and educational debt. Homelessness is epidemic. We are plagued by surfeits and shortages. Our business and political leaders are feckless and out of touch.

How do we resolve this state of cognitive dissonance? Since we can’t blame capitalism, we therefore need to come up with some other explanation for why society seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams. Therefore we look for someone to blame—the Communists, the Socialists, the Jews, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the globalists, the Deep State, the PMC, lizard people, or an international cabal of satan-worshipping pedophiles—anything to avoid confronting the elephant in the room of late stage capitalism which is looking increasingly untenable.

The fact that the built environment looks like crap due to things like deskilling, high labor costs, economic imperatives, the automobile, stringent building codes, mass production and suburban sprawl is just too boring to contemplate. It’s much more appealing to blame the disappearance of some imaginary kingdom than to face the humdrum reality that the current social order increasingly doesn't seem capable of producing the kind of society that most of us want to live in anymore.

1. Note that I’m not using this label in a pejorative sense, but merely as a descriptive label. Wikipedia defines a reactionary this way: “In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.” In this case, I feel that label is apt.

2. NIMBY = “Not in my backyard.” BANANA = “Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody.” PMC = “Professional managerial class.”

3. The pyramids, with their smooth surfaces and austere Platonic forms, could be considered early examples of minimalist modernism--ironic for some of the world's oldest existing buildings. I.M. Pei famously copied their form for his entrance to the Louvre.

4. A good resource for this is Brian Potter’s Substack newsletter Construction Physics