Most people prefer traditional architecture

Hyper-modernism is fine too, it’s just rare to see this especially in mid size or smaller buildings. Most new buildings look like this: https://weburbanist.com/2019/11/28/restyling-blandmarks-thos...

And most new single family housing is similarly generic.

> It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana.

Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:

> too ridiculous to be seriously defended

Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.

How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)

In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)

> It's just common sense.

Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:

  - First they laugh at you (ridicule you)
  - Then they say it's not in the orthodoxy (if ridicule fails,
    you go from being ridiculous to being a threat to norms)
  - Then they say they knew it all along (you're now within norms)

The same happens with social change, like women working - Ridicule, then a threat to norms, then normalized. What was absurd becomes normalized. In art, Impressionists were once objects of ridicule; now of course it's arguably the most popular style of painting in human history.

> societies also have collective preferences

They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.

Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.

If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.

At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)

If I lived in Australia, I would have the exterior of my house to be very white (except solar panels), so as to reflect most of the visible and IR light, and stay cooler.

I think the problem can be traced back to the fact that we've failed to develop a popular design language since pre-WW2^1.

That in itself could be traced back to the professionalization of building manufacturing - the small-scale building and design that happened before this industrialisation of construction did away with all the little vernacular architectural decisions that would have been part of a building's design. Far more of the labour-force was involved in building construction, and less was done with pre-fabricated materials (probably just bricks and mortar), and certainly not as much was done on a mass-scale with the same homogenous approach^2, and with much less concern for the labour costs associated with those little details that add "character" to an older building^3.

I'm starting to find small examples of lower-scale construction projects in my home city (Sydney) that seem to return some interesting elements to newer building construction, like variation in materials such as perforated shading or different colours or textures of prefab cladding, using brick for feature walls in other pre-fabricated concrete buildigs, more external hanging gardens, etc). This is better, and I'm happy to see it, because while the older federation terraces in Sydney are nice to look at, they're hopelessly underdesigned for the climate (too hot in summer, too cold in winter, too dark in a country that is blessed with natural light, and often with damp and mould problems that shouldn't exist on a building post 1900).

^1 popular in the sense that its widespread amongst the general population, not the way modernism is popular with architects, both for its cost and the way its become part of the popular taste of architects as a profession

^2 the treasured old neighbourhoods in cities that are preserved and made "heritage" are the results of hundreds of individual decisions by dozens of individual builders and tradespeople, which although similar, contain enough difference to convey a sense of character. Compare that with a small team of planners working for a single construction company remaking a block or entire suburb.

^3 I could be wrong, but I would have thought labour costs were a much lower component of building construction then, or at least there was far more labour hours that go into a building's construction, allowing more time for the little details that give an older building its little characteristics like lacing, fancy brickwork or unusual reliefs.

Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.