Why are buildings so ugly? Blame the process.
Blame politics, economics, and technology for everything, ugliness included
I feel a natural defensiveness when I hear contemporary buildings criticized for their beauty. I am not an architect, but I received a professional degree in architecture. Some of the buildings that draw public ire were designed by friends, contemporaries, or former employers. I can look at almost any building so criticized and still see the evidence of their attempts to make a mark on the world, to make spaces for people to live and work.
I have to admit, though, that a lot of them really are ugly. And I have some ideas about why.
But first, a gentle push-back: Such complaints, if they go beyond mere criticism, are almost always built on the basis of comparison to older buildings. Rarely does a critic set out a standard for what a beautiful building looks like except by showing us another building and insisting that it is beautiful, instead.
But our impression of the built environment of the past is made up only of those buildings which were so extraordinary, so timeless, and so beautiful that they have not been demolished to make way for better buildings, but have instead been preserved and updated, often at great cost, for us to appreciate them. This is survivorship bias in action. We judge the past on its greatest and most time-tested wonders, but the present on its worst and cheapest examples.
Were ugly, temporary, and poor-quality buildings built in the past? They certainly were, but by now they have mostly been torn down and replaced. Any critique of the present (or veneration of the past) must acknowledge that there have always and will always be a spectrum of buildings built in any era. Most of them will be fit for purpose only temporarily. A few precious buildings will stand the test of time and be with humanity still in a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years. And those will all almost certainly be the most remarkable, useful, and beautiful of any era's buildings.
So while there may be unique reasons now why buildings built now are uglier than those built in the past, the survival of the most beautiful will always alter our impression of the past. We must take care not to judge the quality of the past on its palaces and great works of civic or sacred architecture, and judge the present only by its warehouses, faddish follies, and cheap housing.
But yes, a lot of contemporary architecture is ugly. But I think that it is dangerous to dismiss a building at a glance. Understanding why ugliness arises in the built environment can help us both to develop some sympathy for these blighted boxes we must all live and work in, and also to help us create a society that produces more beautiful works of architecture.
In Part 1, I want to look at the political, technical, and economic reasons why ugly buildings are built. In a future installment, I will write on the cultural, historical, and architectural trends which contribute.
Political
The United States, the land of the free, nevertheless regulates the built environment very stringently. These restrictions take several forms.
Zoning restrictions exert drastic control over the city as a whole. They govern the distribution and scale of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, and therefore control what cities look and feel like in the macro scale. If you have ever wondered why many American cities lack the sense of a central place, with a mix of shops and businesses, residences, and recreational spaces within close proximity, this kind of macro zoning takes at least part of the blame.
A city made up of many single-use zoning plots will, when viewed from above, resemble a complex organism dissected, with its pieces laid out in orderly rows on a table. That this dissection renders it lifeless and functionless seems obvious enough for the organism, but drive through one of these new cities (there is no other easy way to traverse it) and one cannot help but gain the impression that the same is true of the city.
This dissected city must still function, however, and therefore needs a circulatory system. Once all means of transportation but the car have been made inefficient and obsolete, entire swaths of each city must be carved away to serve as storage for the several-ton pods of steel and plastic required to navigate it, or more properly, to transport people from one distinct and hermetic pod of life to another between a liminal wasteland. We end up not traveling to and through a “place”, but between “places” separated by a harsh and forbidding landscape of asphalt and nominally accessible sidewalks.
But when you arrive at some new place, you have to also store your car while you go about your business. The aesthetic blight of parking is obvious, and made even more so by the fact that zoning codes tend to prescribe parking minimums, not maximums. We instead have developed the common aphorism, 'build the parking lot for Christmas Eve', yielding whole square miles of empty pavement that blanket the modern American city on the other 364 days. Hardest hit are small to medium cities in flat landscapes which grew quickly in the age of the automobile. They saw whole downtown neighborhoods bulldozed over time to make room for surface parking lots, hollowing out the life and vibrancy that attracted motorists in the first place.
The sheer value of downtown land has begun converting these lots into buildings in the past decades. But peel away the envelope of these modern buildings and you'll often see that they rest on two to eight stories of structured parking, often with even more in the basement.
The car brings a whole new kind of life to downtown streetscapes. Not only does car dependence bring more cars into the center of the city, filling the city with traffic, noise, and danger to pedestrian life, but it changes the aesthetics of the buildings which rest on these parking garages. The facades of these parking buildings are blank and artificial. The light and life which animate their envelopes are not busy balconies or glowing family room windows, but the glare of headlights as cars buried deep in the building roar to life. On the street level, the doors which open up to the street from the building do not reveal bustling shops but a cavernous down-sloping ramp and further interruption to sidewalk life from cars passing in and out. Zoning, having profoundly changed the regulatory environment around which buildings are built, changes also the aesthetic and social character of the buildings built under its regime.
There is another type of regulation with profound impacts on the built environment which bears mentioning. While you will find many critics of zoning in the United States, you will not find as many who rail against life safety regulations. Many of these rules are sensible and responsive to legitimate risk, but many others serve lesser purposes and yet have profound effect on the beauty of the over-cautious buildings they create.
Take the example of egress requirements. Being able to escape safely from a building in case of fire or other emergency is important. But some rules have unintended consequences. One example is the exit remoteness requirement. A fundamental principle of fire safety is that occupants of a building should have two or more ways to escape. But the building code takes it a step further and requires the typical two fire escape stairs to be physically remote from each other, even if the layout of the building is such that every occupant will still have multiple escape routes. This seemingly simple incentive has profoundly altered both the external and internal character of multi-family residences in the United States, adding cost and blight without a significant improvement in life safety.
Practically, what exit stair remoteness leads to is what you might experience in a typical hotel: two stairwells, one on each side of a long, straight corridor, with hotel rooms (apartments or condos) flanking it on each side. This ruthless internal logic, in turn, leads to long, attenuated volumes, sometimes twisting into L, U, or the even more ruthless "Texas doughnut" shapes.
Living in a place that resembles an anonymous and generic hotel erodes the feeling that one is living in a neighborhood, among neighbors. The long double-loaded corridor feels like yet another liminal and transitory space, similar to the car-dominated roads outside, fit only for moving through quickly and furtively. And on the outside, these buildings can resemble monoliths, as the only shape that yields apartment units more efficiently than a short bar is a longer bar.
If, on the other hand, exit stairs could be consolidated into single cores but maintain remote exits, apartment buildings could return to more familiar and traditional forms where a small number of units were clustered around a central lobby with stairs, having impacts both on the look and feel of apartments and on the building itself. On the inside, far more units as a percentage could be built on corners, yielding light and views at more times throughout the day and year, and allowing the light to shine deeper into units. On the outside, point access blocks can be economically built in a much smaller horizontal form factor, making for buildings that satisfy the demand for space without as imposing a visage.
This macroscopic view is necessary to understand the difficult and restrictive environment into which design enters. But consider also that these and other restrictions narrow the funnel through which all projects must pass. A smaller window of possibility increases financial risk, and developers, in order to maintain their margins, pass up on more projects — and maintain tighter control over those that survive. The complex and onerous requirements we place on buildings in turn makes the profession conservative and risk-averse. When something like exit remoteness can completely change the internal and external shape of a building, it is no wonder that beauty is a secondary consideration.
Supply Chain and Construction Technology
But it is not only regulatory limitations which yield the peculiar aesthetics of modern American construction. Advancements in the 'means and methods', the technology, of construction, and the industrialized supply chain and labor force which furnishes the materials and expertise it needs, have changed dramatically. It is no wonder that buildings look different now: they are built out of different materials, using different techniques, supplied because of different economic considerations.
Fundamentally, we build now out of different stuff than we used to. Industrialized construction materials include plastics, gypsum wallboard, foam, reinforced concrete, steel, and aluminum. Each of these materials is combined in a thousand different ways to mass produce reconfigurable building materials that satisfy the demand for predictable cost, availability, performance, and dimensions.
Much has been claimed about the failure of modular construction to deliver on what many imagined construction would look like in the future. Companies like Veev and Katerra have collectively taken billions in investor funds without ultimate success. But modular construction already won. Whether in Anchorage or Tampa, Bangor or San Diego, I can order any building products to exact specifications and expect, very reasonably, that each of these products will fit together and perform in entirely predictable ways.
Consider how production home builders like Lennar or PulteGroup use the wide availability of foam insulation and decorative elements, concrete, stucco, dimensional lumber (or cold-formed steel) to rapidly build hundreds or even thousands of homes at a time. They have a formula that is successful not just because of business model or economies of scale, but because they minimize variation and risk by relying on the modularity and homogeneity of the building products they use.
Modular construction also raises its head in commercial construction, where these same means and methods gave rise to cheap ways to refit an office: the drop ceiling, modular mechanical fit-out, and non-load-bearing interior partitions, allowing commercial tenants to refit a space in a large building with wide structural spans to their liking.
It is difficult to overstate how dramatically this has all changed in one hundred years. Modern construction must deal with at least two new kinds of demands: scale and performance. Explosive population growth has completely changed how we we build, even as the percentage of the population engaged in construction has diminished. We build far, far more, and with less help, than we did before the advent of industrialized construction material supply chain. While we used to produce building materials in small quantities from local materials by local craftsman, today we build from predictable and homogeneous materials. It’s also worth noting that buildings just work better now than they used to. Buildings are far better-insulated, designed to much tighter tolerances, and are far more robust against natural disaster than they ever have been. But like with other safety requirements, these too have aesthetic costs.
It is difficult to compare buildings of the past with buildings in the present because we build them so much faster, at such a greater scale, with fewer workers by percentage, with completely different materials, and with completely different purposes and performance requirements. It is no wonder that they look different!
Economic
As building systems have grown more complex, so too have the ways in which they are financed. With financing comes incentives, and those incentives are often not primarily aesthetic. A developer may want the project to proceed as quickly as possible, to minimize the risk of material price fluctuations and pay fewer months of construction loan premiums. If they are flipping the project, they may be less interested in the long-term durability or appropriateness of the project and more interested in whatever will make it more attractive to potential buyers. If they are accepting certain types of funding, such as city, state, or federal credits, they may be required to achieve sustainability or affordability goals whose expense requires them to economize elsewhere. And instrumentalizing financial incentives through debt, equity, or public programs makes projects deal more conservatively with questions of aesthetics. To avoid rocking the boat, parts of a building may be designed by committee, or by consultant. The whole building, in the end, will be overly careful, unfocused, limited in its ambitions, more a store of financial value than a part of the urban fabric or material culture of a civic society.
It is worth also considering that, oftentimes, large projects explicitly exclude aesthetic considerations except in prominent areas. Design, above and beyond the barest utilitarian needs, becomes just another line item in the budget that can be struck out during value engineering. I have heard project teams describe "architecture" like it was an optional luxury, as in "let's save some room in the budget for a little architecture in the main atrium." Architectural design is seen not as a design practice that shapes the building as a whole, but as a fundamentally optional decorator to be sprinkled over the top as the budget allows. It is no wonder that many building products are marketed as "architectural" when their use or look is applied and ornamental — in other words, architectural as opposed to functional. In the face of this dismissive view of the use and importance of architectural design, it is no wonder that the aesthetic outcome of this process is often bad. The controlling interest in the transaction places a value on it, and that value is often too low.
In this installment, I have only given some material and technical explanations for why so many buildings are ugly. But this is far from the whole story. There are plenty of projects given every chance to succeed: large budgets, local materials, committed designers and builders. And despite this, the projects turn out ugly. What kind of historical context and design culture would give rise to ugliness despite every advantage? It is to this question I will turn next month.
Until then, now knowing how difficult it is to create a beautiful building, do not wonder that so many ugly buildings exist. Wonder instead that anything beautiful is made in the first place.