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Why is modern architecture so bad, and more importantly why is it so common in spite of this?
The utter vacuity of modern architecture (and art) is probably not lost on many users around here. My distaste for modern architecture has been around for a while, but I never felt very strongly about it up until I visited Toronto and saw just what kind of effect that sort of construction had on the urban landscape - I found a city filled to the brim with ugly water-stained concrete-and-glass skyscrapers, some constructed by the likes of Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei; a city where traditional vernacular architectural styles were typically absent, found only in select areas like the Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market. It was an utterly depressing cityscape, and after I contrasted it with the very many examples of cosy and inviting vernacular architecture in South Korea - some of which were actually new traditional hanok neighbourhoods funded and supported by the South Korean government - I found myself deeply wanting to know why an entire society would willingly subject themselves to the pernicious and subtle form of psychological torture we call "modern architecture".
The gulf between what I perceive most people like and what architectural theorists like is truly incredible, and that shows up in many enthusiast forums. In true gatekeeping fashion, /r/Architecture seems to consider talking about the broad concept of "modern architecture" in a critical way as showcasing one's plebian-ness and disqualifying one from offering opinions on the topic. The general take seems to be that modern architecture is clearly too complex to broad-brush, after all post-war architectural styles span the range of heroic modernism, post-modernism, 60s space age, 70s modern, 80s neo-brutalism, 90s cookie cutter, contemporary, and so on. The blanket claim that one doesn't like all of it seems to be perceived as such a ridiculous and broad statement that no credence should be given to it whatsoever, then as a counterpoint people will recommend a piece of purportedly groundbreaking, humanistic modern architecture that... doesn't look substantially more pleasing to your average person than the concrete blocks people recall when they think of modern architecture.
This is because there is a broad common thread spanning most of these architectural trends, and among these are a "clean slate" philosophy, a conscious refusal to adopt local, pre-modern styles, focus on clean shapes and simplification and minimalism, and design and expressions meant to be adapted for the "age of machine". It's a trend that persists when you look everywhere from early pioneers like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to contemporary starchitects like Zaha Hadid, and even if certain architects weave in vernacular sensibilities every now and then, it will often be expressed within the larger context of this new post-war mode of architecture, for example in an ironic and highly simplified manner like is done in postmodernism. To engage in such obfuscatory pedantry so as to not properly engage with the critical opinions of laymen who aren't as well-versed in architecture-speak (whose opinions on what constitutes good architecture significantly differ from that of the academic world, and who often feel deprived of any say over the urban environments they live in) rubs me the wrong way. So for ease I'll refer to the phenomenon in question as "modern architecture", instead of listing out every single style it encapsulates.
I've seen a number of explanations posited to explain why "modern architecture" is so common, and I've attempted to look into them in order to investigate if they have any credence whatsoever.
1: The general public actually enjoys "modern architecture", and demands architecture in that style.
It is not uncommon for architects to suggest to detractors that the style of building is the client's fault, and not to blame the architect. So is this true, do clients actually ask for modern architecture? This is probably the explanation that is easiest to address - the literature is actually shockingly consistent on this: People hugely prefer traditional vernacular styles over post-war styles of architecture, and this preference is consistently found across groups regardless of political identification or race or sex.
This is practically a formality, but here goes. A 2007 poll of 2,200 random Americans conducted by the AIA found a strong preference for traditional styles after presenting them with a list of 248 buildings deemed important by AIA members, with participants strongly preferring buildings that evoked Gothic, Greek and Roman traditions. It is necessary to note that tastemakers did retort to this, with the rebuttal of urban design critic John King including the assertion that architecture cannot just be evaluated via a photo, as well as the assertion that the list did not reflect the ideas of architectural experts but the opinions of the general populace (this one I find somewhat funny, considering it's a tacit acknowledgement that the preferences of architects are out of line with the general populace). In a similar vein, yet another study of 2,000 US adults who were shown seven pairs of images of existing U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings (consisting of one traditional and one modern building) showed that 72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed). The preference for traditional architecture was also consistent regardless of what socioeconomic status the respondent belonged to, suggesting the disparity in prevalence of traditional architecture and general-populace preference for it isn't an issue of class divide where the richest people can specifically commission buildings and decide what gets built. Neoclassical buildings were most favoured, and brutalist buildings were most disfavoured. A British replication of this result can be found in a YouGov survey, which polled 1042 respondents asking them which building out of four they would prefer to be built in their neighbourhood - the result came out 77% in favour of traditional and 23% in favour of modern. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ruth Reed, responded to this with the assertion that traditional buildings are expensive and unsustainable (a point I will examine later).
But perhaps John King is correct that a photo doesn't properly capture how a piece of architecture actually feels - this is actually a critique I think holds water, there are many places I like far more in person than I imagined I would from a photo alone. Lucky for us, there's a study in Norway which used VR technology to partially circumvent that problem, capturing 360 degree videos of streets in Oslo then presenting them to participants by means of a VR headset. "It emerged that the places characterised by traditional architecture were appreciated considerably more than contemporary urban spaces. The traditional square Bankplassen got the best score, while the contemporary part of Toftes street in the generally popular district, Grünerløkka, came last." But if that, too, isn't a good enough facsimile of the actual experience of visiting a place, here is a Swedish thesis that details the results of a poll in the town of Karlshamn about what parts of their town residents like best, finding that that "the inhabitants make very unanimous aesthetic valuations of the buildings and that the wooden buildings, the small scale and the square are the most appreciated features. Studies in the field of environmental psychology find a general aesthetic preference for features that can be related to the traditional small town".
There are also other more informal polls which one can rely on, such as this bracket assessing readers' favourite buildings in Chicago - the bracket in question was populated via popular nomination, then whittled down to a final four. All of the final four are in traditional style, featuring the Tribune Tower, Carbide and Carbon Building, Wrigley Building, and The Rookery Building. It seems clear that the majority of the public, regardless of demography, prefers traditional architecture, and these results are robust and replicable across many different methodologies. And, well, water is wet. Sometimes it seems that architects are unpleasantly surprised with these results and are in disbelief/denial about the fact that the majority of the public might truly have these views, which brings me to my next possibility:
2: Architects like "modern architecture", the public does not; the excess of modern architecture represents the tastes of architects and not the general populace.
There is a somewhat convincing corpus of evidence showing that architects simply appreciate architecture in a different way from the general populace - as a starting point this study summarises some results from previous work on the topic. One study from 1973 suggests architects respond more to "representational meaning" in a building while the general layman prioritises "responsive meaning", with representational meaning having more to do with the percepts, concepts and ideas that a building conveys and responsive meaning being more of a judgemental view of whether the building is nice in a more immediate affective and evaluative way. Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography". The study in question reaffirms these findings, finding from an admittedly small sample that "non-architects gave more affective responses and descriptive responses to the physical features of the building in question, whereas architects commented more on ideas and concepts used to arrive at the physical forms".
This 2001 study showed a large discrepancy between architects' predictions of laypersons' preferences and their actual preferences. They presented a sample of 27 individuals without architectural training with colour slides of 42 large contemporary urban structures constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, and asked them to rate it from 1 to 10. 25 architects were then brought in to "predict or try to mimic a typical nonarchitect's global impression of each building". Low correlations were found between lay ratings of architecture and architects' predictions of lay ratings, and a slight trend towards less experienced architects making better estimations of lay ratings was found. Experience as an architect, if anything, seems to distance one further from the public's idea of "good architecture". While that study showed people contemporary buildings and doesn't directly touch on the traditional/modern dichotomy, it is notable that architects cannot predict lay preferences even within that narrow subset of architecture.
In addition, there are a number of studies which deal directly with that, though sample sizes are typically small. Devlin and Nasar (1989) report on the results of a study where 20 non-architects and 20 architects were shown a series of pictures of buildings which were categorised into general types: "High", which was characterised by fewer materials, more concrete, simpler forms, more white, and off-center entrances, and "Popular", which was characterised by use of more building materials, horizontal orientation, hip roofs, framed windows, centred entrances, and warm colours. Non-architects were more likely to evaluate "high" architecture as unpleasant, distressing and meaningless, while for architects the relationship between architectural style and evaluation was inverted. Small sample sizes, I know, there's not that much research on this, but the research that does exist tends to point in the same direction.
I consider it very likely that some architects (starchitects in particular) do build structures meant for their own self-edification, at the expense of the public and even the client - Peter Eisenman's House VI is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. But most architects are normal working people constrained by clients' preferences and requirements, so the assertion that architects' preferences are responsible for the proliferation of modern architecture feels a bit impoverished to me as an explanation. They may have come up with the style, but it's not clear how much decisive influence their preferences have on most building projects. Perhaps it is just a dictatorship of taste - maybe architects do utilise their monopoly on skill and expertise to push their preferences through, as this comment by an architect on Scott's post "Whither Tartaria" notes, or maybe another driving factor is responsible here.
3: Traditional architecture just costs more to build, and when asked to make a tradeoff between their design preferences and low costs clients would prefer the latter.
This is an often-forwarded explanation for the prevalence of modern architecture, and it was initially the explanation I found the most convincing and intuitive. However, the urban planner and author Ettore Maria Mazzola has put some work into trying to estimate the prices of traditional vs modern architecture, and he does so by using ISTAT (Italian Bureau of Statistics) data, illustrating a large number of buildings and their costs from the 1920s and 1930s and updating them to today's dollars. His findings are presented in his 2010 book on the topic, but that is hard to access so they are also outlined in this paper. According to him "[t]raditional buildings of the first decades of the 20th Century were built in average times ranging from 6 to 12 months, they cost up to 67% less than the current building, and, after all these years, they still have never required maintenance works". Of course, there are problems when you're comparing across different time periods since there are factors that differ between the 1920s/30s and now, such as differing labour costs and building regulations, and so this cannot be considered the last word on the issue.
For a far more illustrative modern-day comparison, there's this paper: "The Economics of Style: Measuring the Price Effect of Neo-Traditional Architecture in Housing" which attempts to study the price premium on neotraditional houses in the Netherlands. They investigate if the higher prices placed on neotraditional houses are due to the higher costs of construction, and from a preliminary investigation into that topic they find: "On our request they provided information on construction costs of houses that vary in style but are otherwise the same. The information provided by Bouwfonds shows that houses in different styles developed by Bouwfonds do not vary in costs. Terraced homes in the style of the 1930s have similar construction costs as houses designed in “contemporary” styles." In an analysis of 86 Vinex housing estates they find significant price premiums for neotraditional houses and houses that refer to neotraditional architecture (as compared to non-traditional houses), with a 15% premium for the former and 5% premium for the latter. They also investigate if differences in interior quality or construction costs could explain the price premium and find that the price premium barely reduces even in more homogenous samples with less room for differences in construction costs. Rather, what they find is that supply is the main factor influencing traditional architecture's prices - in the highly regulated Dutch environment there has been a lack of supply capable of meeting demand, and the price premium has been slowly eroded as more traditional housing has been manufactured overtime. As a result, cost doesn't seem to be the driver for the lack of traditional architecture, nor does it seem to be the case that the style of residential housing perfectly reflects consumer preference - there seems to be an undersupply of neotraditional housing, which then gets reflected in higher prices.
Such an analysis seems to be supported when looking at individual case studies - traditional architecture is not inherently more expensive than modern architecture. An interesting example of this is the Carhart Mansion in New York City, a traditional building which was constructed at "substantially the same unit cost as new Modernist luxury apartment buildings", according to Zivkovic Associates, the organisation that was responsible for the plans and elevations for the building. While it is true that this building was constructed as a luxury apartment building at a higher price point than many other housing markets, the fact that it features a similar unit cost as luxury modernist buildings still raises the question as to why there aren't more traditional buildings at this price point. Furthermore, it's hard to explain away the findings of the earlier Netherlands paper with the claim that traditional stylings are only cost-effective when building higher-end properties, since the similarity in cost seems to persist there too. However, there's an interesting aspect to the case of the Carhart Mansion which might explain the proliferation of modern architecture:
4: City planning boards and other approval committees strongly prefer modern architecture, and are more likely to approve modern-style constructions regardless of the wishes of end-users or architects.
The Carhart Mansion's design was opposed by many members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), with the LPC initially being skeptical about the proposed Classical design, and with many members making statements such as "You can’t do that – the façade has to be plain and simple." According to the source linked earlier, "[t]he LPC’s concerns seemed to focus on the question of how well the design would be executed – whether the quality of the craftsmanship in the new construction would do justice to the historic buildings around it. (Oddly, this did not seem to be an issue with the earlier Modernist design!)"
This quote from the very same source is also illustrative: "If you speak with architects and consultants who appear frequently before the LPC, they characterize their perceptions of the LPC’s decisions as follows: Designs for additions to landmarks or infill buildings in historic districts that do not violate the cornice lines and overall massing of neighboring protected buildings will likely win approval, even if aggressively Modernist in style, materials and details; but new traditional designs would have a harder time being approved on the basis of style alone. Accordingly, a number of prominent New York architects specializing in projects involving landmarks have advised their clients that new traditional designs employing actual historic architectural language, such as fully realized Classicism, would likely cost them a lot more in time and money in the review process. This perception has had a chilling effect on new traditional design in historic districts in New York City and in other cities where similar views prevail."
I'm not aware of any source that properly studies this, but it's probably not implausible that planning committees' preferences and tendencies surrounding architecture differ from the public. It's not necessarily the case that architecture granted planning permission reflects what the public wants - planners are a selected group of people with certain training, and this obviously skews the preferences of the people involved in planning.
Finally, a bonus:
5: People don't like modern architecture less than traditional architecture, it's just that the traditional architecture has been subjected to a selection process which filters out all the bad buildings.
Easily falsified - see above in part 1; even modern architecture selected for their importance doesn't fare as well against the traditional stuff.
Furthermore, here is the modern day Toronto City Hall. Here is the Royal Ontario Museum, with a large contemporary "crystal" built into the original neo-romanesque façade. Here are some old photos of Toronto. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else and maybe some users of this forum will find the current Toronto architecture to be scintillating pieces of art, but I can say it's quite clear to me - a plebeian - which of those looks more appealing, and the examples of modern architecture I've offered up are serious landmarks of the city, whereas the old photos in question are just normal streets in Old Toronto.
Anyway, it's a bit bizarre to me why architecture today seems to skew overwhelmingly modern, despite the public seeming to find these buildings worse than traditional styles. So far I think a combination of point 2 and point 4 is probably what's skewing the ratio, but I've not drawn any firm conclusions.
I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.
Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.
This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):
Focusing in on some specific examples:
I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
Nobody uses that term but fans of Strongtowns. Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory. Their priority isn't visual appeal, it's function. Quaint medieval (or in the US, imitations of same) town centers with narrow twisting alleys and hipster shops are very picturesque, but if you want to get some serious shopping done, not very practical. Bringing your SUV to your nearest commercial area, bisected by a "stroad", and hitting the Home Depot, Target, and then the grocery store... now that's more like it.
Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created. The issue is that people live in suburbs that have the greenery and freedom of a city while having the services of a rural area forcing people to drive places.
The car based city layout makes people obese, is ugly as sin, and isn't functional as it is incredibly demanding to maintain.
"Sensible cities and walkable environments" is code for "we want to force people to use public transportation because cars give you too much freedom". And you really do not want to be forced to use public transportation in America.
That’s an entirely circular issue. “We chose to cede our cities and public spaces to the underclass and mentally ill drug addicts, so now public transport is scary and unsafe” is a political choice, not an inevitability. There are many countries in which public transport is clean, safe, well-policed and used by all classes except the super rich, even where those very same people have cars or can afford to drive. Long road trips are tiring, and on public transport you can read, work, or relax instead of performing the labor of driving.
It is a circular issue. But the ceding of America’s public spaces to the Visigoth marauders is something no municipal administration will ever, ever fix. So when sensible Americans hear “we should abolish cars for walkable cities and public transportation” they correctly hear “please step inside the rape tube”
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