When is the revolution in architecture coming?

The survivorship bias argument has two major problems:

1) There are many older cities in Europe where the entire city center is beautiful. Paris, for example, or Tallinn. These aren't just rare 'survivors.'

2) Where are buildings from the last 40 years that will be the 'survivors' of the future? In NYC alone dozens of beautiful buildings were built in the 1920s and 30s. Where are the dozens of modern equivalents?

It is easy to agree with the sentiment of this article, but the fundamental premise of this is wrong in modern architecture. That premise is that it is the architect that is in control of the final aesthetic of the building. Architects get work by participating in competitions against other architects for limited budgets. In a few, rare cases (usually public buildings and museums) an extraordinary budget may be approved that goes to funding truly radical buildings that break from the status quo, but in the overwhelming majority of cases architects play a fine line within the following constraints:

1. Planning regulations (in the UK at least, it's very hard to propose buildings that differ significantly from neighbouring buildings)

2. Materials -- building custom window frames / door frames is incredibly expensive. The first thing that tends to get cut as budgets are inevitably squeezed are any custom items

3. Client expectations -- most new large buildings are built with a projection of future occupants. Developers want to be able to make apartments as saleable as possible so usually take the most risk-averse options

While I applaud concepts with more colour, detail and originality, you must also consider where you would like to live. Most people (I think) want to build out their own custom surroundings as their home grows on them. Bland buildings make this easier because it is a blank canvas upon which you can begin to construct your own projection of your ideal home. Being locked inside a giant multicoloured artwork conceived of by somebody else might sound appealing to start off with, but will quickly become an aesthetic prison of somebody else's personality.

The question is what cost are we willing to pay for buildings and cities to be more beautiful?

The author doesn’t address cost at all and it is one of the primary inputs to buildings. Not just the construction cost but the operating costs especially the ongoing energy consumption.

Productivity and efficiency matters. At the city scale, these have a measurable impact on quality of life. A city that wastes gigawatt-hours of energy every year will be poorer than its neighbors that do not.

But perhaps you would pay something extra to live in that beautiful but massive energy sink of a city. How much extra? No one wants to live in a perfectly efficient yet ugly building or city. So the question is, what is worth for buildings to be aesthetically pleasing?

P.S. This is not a symptom of capitalism, IMO, as the author incorrectly asserts and the end. Productive use of energy is an equation of life not any particular economic system.

Most of the beautiful normal buildings in Europe are quite simple in design. It isn't like Italianate design isn't particularly expensive: urban American buildings used to be built in that style a lot up until the 1930s.

Modern urban buildings use the same materials and could easily replicate the Italianate design aesthetic. Designers just choose to build with a more boring, minimalist style.

> People are so functionally blind they can’t even imagine any other way. Surely, you must have cars.

At this point, depending where you live, you must have cars. I lived in the big Texas cities, and outside of a few places close to the city centers, it's literally impossible to live without a car. The cities are designed around cars, and unless we tear them up and rebuild them from the ground up, you simply must have a car.