When is the revolution in architecture coming?

- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria

- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...

Lots of potential discussions on why we're stuck with "ugly" modern architecture (is it due to materials/construction costs, environmental/safety regulation, architect's desires to be different...), and generally a more enjoyable piece than this one.

Plus there's a brief discussion on a hilarious conspiracy theory.

Modernism hated art-noveau and previous such schools, like baroque, and esp. rokoko (late baroque), the typical l'art pour l'art extremist schools.

Nobody takes them too serious, so they get angry easily. And they usually work in US or British academia.

I suppose it is the lack of imagination of top-end architecture that these techniques, some of the hallmark technologies of our age, that there isn't a healthy market in their use in architecture.

The employment of these things all seems focused in mass production and cost reduction (which isn't a bad thing), and seems to ignore the possibilities that programmable manufacturing and production could have on architecture (which could push the state of the art).

It might also be that being an architect kinda sucks these days. Not enough jobs, and those jobs are paying worse, to cover the costs of schooling.

So there aren't the true geniuses anymore? Maybe it's just that the iron rule of finance has drained the budgets from every large scale project, and the ultra-rich are now no longer artistically inclined, they are either concerned with the magnitude of their fortune in numbers rather than edifices.

We have lots of evidence from paintings and photographs that it's not just survivorship bias, that things have gotten on average uglier.

> If you go to New York City there’s beautiful stuff from the early 20th century (think Chrysler Building) and plenty of unremarkable stuff still standing (think pre-war walk ups).

Still more aesthetically pleasing than a large majority of what's built now.

> Maybe one in a hundred of the older buildings is remarkably beautiful.

Not being actively ugly is pretty good too and a great deal more common in older buildings than newer ones. There are many, many more neighbourhoods that people will travel to just to walk around and appreciate that were built before wWW2 than after, in every country that was developed before then, and almost all that weren't.