This is interesting although a couple things raised questions for me.
One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago were making decisions based on zoning in Boston. For this argument to work, I would need to see more specific evidence that for each of a number of cities, downzoning in an individual city took place before modern architecture began to make inroads in that city. Also, ideally this would not be about "modern" architecture but just about "buildings that people thought were ugly".
Second, the article makes several references to how lots of buildings were torn down and replaced throughout history, but we only see opposition to it more recently. An obvious explanation for this is that it is only relatively recently that democratic decision-making (including at the city level) became widespread and entrenched enough that individual citizens could influence such matters at all. Until relatively recently large-scale development was often a matter of backroom negotiations between politicians and wealthy developers who ran roughshod over the wishes of ordinary folks (and before that it was even worse, for instance in systems where most land was owned by nobles). The NIMBY movement can be seen in part as a reaction to this.
People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.
This is addressed in the article, ugliness probably isn't causing NIMBYism, but it is contributing to conservationism, which is a slightly different thing, and affects house-building in different ways (most conservationist concerns are not quite NIMBY, as most of the proponents of conservationism don't live in the neighbourhood being conserved).
Most new single home construction in Germany is in the form of cubes with flat roofs, absolutely ugly and will look like crap in 30-50 years (for me it looks like crap now already), see e.g. [1]. Insanity but for the builder it makes sense as it’s the cheapest way to conform to the energy saving requirements and maximize living room per lot size which is restricted due to idiotic zoning laws. I don’t get how this can be considered sustainable… And each of these houses costs more than 1 MM EUR.
> And each of these houses costs more than 1 MM EUR.
That's the other big problem with restrictive zoning laws (other than ugliness). It leads to unaffordable housing. By saying that a house must conform with X, Y, and Z you're essentially saying "anyone who doesn't have enough money to pay for X, Y, and Z can't buy a house".
Sometimes restrictions are necessary (e.g. safety rules). Other times they sound good on paper but just end up being elitist (e.g. house must have X number of parking spaces, Y minimum size for rooms, Z minimum outdoor space). Yes, those things are nice to have. But we shouldn't price out people who can't afford them. It's better that someone starting out in life be able to buy a house with smaller rooms, than not be able to buy anything at all. We've become so obsessed with raising standards across the board that we've forgotten that the people we exclude from those standards end up with worse standards.
Also, not everyone has the same priorities. Some people might like their bedroom to be huge. Others might just see it as a place to sleep and would rather spend their money on living in a good location, or some other priority. Restrictive zoning laws remove options by making buildings converge on a limited range of designs.
It's placeless architecture and not exactly sustainable since they'll need replacements sooner and a stupid amount of the co2 cost of a building is in it's construction and the fabricaiton of it's materials.
And then there's runoff from the roof with the sun exposure. I kind of expect this will end up a bigger issue than we make it out to be at the rate we're building these.
When it comes to the UK, I think this diagnosis that people lost trust that new buildings would beautify rather than uglify their towns and cities, is definitely a strong part of the picture.
But the story is wider than this because even when we look at domestic housing, we find that people in general prefer the older housing, and it's not only because of the looks. It's a bigger picture of pervasive enshittification.
Pre-war housing often has higher ceilings and larger rooms. Houses built around the 1930s often have thicker walls as well and just feel better made. Usually they are on more generous plots. By contrast newer houses are built on as little space as the developer thinks they can get away with, are seemingly made of sellotape and cardboard and usually have far smaller rooms with lower ceilings.
Couple this with ugly (and if we're talking post-war, blocky, concrete) town and city centre developments, and it's easy to see why people are turned off a lot of new development.
I also wanted to address this -
> Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities.
Well, AFAICT in Australia that's what people want, and with the amount of landmass we have, I don't really see why that shouldn't be allowed to continue. Unfortunately the forces of enshittification are at work here too, with new houses now being built almost to the very edges of much smaller plots, even at the outer edges of the cities.
If you compare a house built in 1910 to one build in 1950 you are on balance often right. These days most new houses I see have larger rooms, thicker walls. The modern house often does feel worse made, but as an engineer I know enough to look beneath the covers and it is very clear that the worst modern house is significantly higher quality than the best old ones - but this often doesn't translate to "feelings", and so the poorly insulated house that just barely stands (and is a fire hazard) feels better even though it is inferior in all structural ways.
When I look at the streetcar suburbs of my city (1880s) I see lots are on average about the same size as lots today, and houses were generally much smaller. But the lots were deeper and narrower so how they feel is different.
Fully agree with this in the UK, the king (then Prince Charles) was on the money when he said that unlike the post-war town planners, the Luftwaffe can't be accused of replacing our buildings with anything more offensive than rubble!
The idea that ornament is a crime has done more visual damage to our buildings than any other single factor in my opinion, the fact we still regularly poll as preferring Victorian and Georgian buildings is an indictment of those responsible for our stock of them; I prefer those buildings but it depresses me that we've made things worse rather than better aesthetically for the last century or so when we didn't have to.
Modern new builds are bleak things for the most part; oppressively low ceilings, tiny postage-stamp sized windows as the enshittified way to comply with energy efficiency legislation, styling which looks like it was done by ChatGPT, and build quality that makes British Leyland cars look like epitomes of careful manufacturing. While if it were up to me I'd replace our discretionary planning system with a rules-based one and remove a lot of incumbent NIMBY vetos, I can see why NIMBYs exist in such enormous numbers given the race to rock bottom on everything except price when it comes to housing.
The problem is that this equates two very different way of building houses, and lumps them together.
For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.
In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.
Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.
I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"
If it happened, it wasn't in all of Innsbruck. I was there earlier this year and it seems a good chunk of the historical center hasn't been replaced by more modern buildings.
I skimmed three articles of this publication: one saying the more permittent zoning policies on historic urban areas would allow more growth and more environmentally sustainable buildings; other saying Europe is falling behind its auto-manufacturing and does not have its own Tesla, because they cannot kick out workers fast enough; third that Australia stopped asylum seeker by simply preventing boats coming in (and breaking international law?) and eu should do the same. So basically all of them are just lib news media feel-good “progressive yay!” style used to sell conservative capitalist ideas. Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes, kick out the workers and smash the unions so we can pay ourselves bigger dividends and stop the asylum seekers escaping the horrid conditions of ex-colonial nations we created over centuries regardless of whether they deserve an asylum or not.
Here’s my pitch for an article: “Why You Not Using Your Democratic Power And Letting The Billionaires Decide On Everything Is Good, Actually”. How much do they pay per sentence?
The problem with that worldview is that it's always the same look from the same perspective that is, the economic machine is an extractive system (top <- bottom) and the colonial system is entirely responsible for the current state of the countries a lot of people are trying to leave.
Your perspective ignores the fact that some of "us, the people" are actually benefiting from this economic machine/collective organization. In industrialized societies, it's been decades that even the people at the bottom of the social ladder have "more to lose than their chains". And no matter how morally responsible ex-colonizing nations are, it is a fact that newcomers have to be somewhat integrated economically and culturally and that no society knows how to do that at the scale of arrivals. It turns out reality is not as simple as our moral world is and it takes time and thankless work to figure out what's happening. Morality is somewhat well-equipped at handling relationships and at maybe detecting the economic/political systems failure modes but it is not well-equipped at solving societal issues.
The truth is that it is easy to attribute merit and blame but har to actually trying to make relevant change. Our vision of History is somewhat biased because we remember people who were responsible for positive change as people with the "right" position but it is often forgotten how much strategy, technical issues they've had to solve fort those to prevail :
> Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes
I'm not sure I took that away from this article so much as "Architects and planners need to stop building ugly-ass monstrosities so people might actually celebrate urban renewal again".
> Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created.
Since they’re mostly talking about the US, the thesis here is wrong. Almost all NIMBYism of the era was borne of redlining and white flight in the post-war era, which drove whites out of the cities to the burbs because there were too many “coloreds.” So basically, Americans were - and still are - racist no matter what SCOTUS says.
I'm sure some NIMBYism can be attributed to that, but I think too often it's described as the only reason, ignoring the real problems that come with new and denser development, many of which could be mitigated.
The point about conservationism being not a thing until 1950s seems a bit blunt/misleading to anyone who's heard about Viollet-le-Duc and co. Conserving ancient building was definitely a huge thing in 19th century Europe. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc and Hugo's endless ramblings about medieval buildings in Notre-Dame https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris/Livre_tro...
This is interesting although a couple things raised questions for me.
One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago were making decisions based on zoning in Boston. For this argument to work, I would need to see more specific evidence that for each of a number of cities, downzoning in an individual city took place before modern architecture began to make inroads in that city. Also, ideally this would not be about "modern" architecture but just about "buildings that people thought were ugly".
Second, the article makes several references to how lots of buildings were torn down and replaced throughout history, but we only see opposition to it more recently. An obvious explanation for this is that it is only relatively recently that democratic decision-making (including at the city level) became widespread and entrenched enough that individual citizens could influence such matters at all. Until relatively recently large-scale development was often a matter of backroom negotiations between politicians and wealthy developers who ran roughshod over the wishes of ordinary folks (and before that it was even worse, for instance in systems where most land was owned by nobles). The NIMBY movement can be seen in part as a reaction to this.
I don’t think this is true.
Opposition is not really related to aesthetics.
People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.
This is addressed in the article, ugliness probably isn't causing NIMBYism, but it is contributing to conservationism, which is a slightly different thing, and affects house-building in different ways (most conservationist concerns are not quite NIMBY, as most of the proponents of conservationism don't live in the neighbourhood being conserved).
Most new single home construction in Germany is in the form of cubes with flat roofs, absolutely ugly and will look like crap in 30-50 years (for me it looks like crap now already), see e.g. [1]. Insanity but for the builder it makes sense as it’s the cheapest way to conform to the energy saving requirements and maximize living room per lot size which is restricted due to idiotic zoning laws. I don’t get how this can be considered sustainable… And each of these houses costs more than 1 MM EUR.
1: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/169220882?referrer=H...
> And each of these houses costs more than 1 MM EUR.
That's the other big problem with restrictive zoning laws (other than ugliness). It leads to unaffordable housing. By saying that a house must conform with X, Y, and Z you're essentially saying "anyone who doesn't have enough money to pay for X, Y, and Z can't buy a house".
Sometimes restrictions are necessary (e.g. safety rules). Other times they sound good on paper but just end up being elitist (e.g. house must have X number of parking spaces, Y minimum size for rooms, Z minimum outdoor space). Yes, those things are nice to have. But we shouldn't price out people who can't afford them. It's better that someone starting out in life be able to buy a house with smaller rooms, than not be able to buy anything at all. We've become so obsessed with raising standards across the board that we've forgotten that the people we exclude from those standards end up with worse standards.
Also, not everyone has the same priorities. Some people might like their bedroom to be huge. Others might just see it as a place to sleep and would rather spend their money on living in a good location, or some other priority. Restrictive zoning laws remove options by making buildings converge on a limited range of designs.
Aren't flat roofs at strongly increased risk of leakage? And need to be sealed very, very carefully?
More than just looking crap in 30 years (agreed they do now) I worry, what about massive renovation required in 15 years?
And that is an insane cost for a small, ugly building.
Same here in Belgium.
It's placeless architecture and not exactly sustainable since they'll need replacements sooner and a stupid amount of the co2 cost of a building is in it's construction and the fabricaiton of it's materials.
And then there's runoff from the roof with the sun exposure. I kind of expect this will end up a bigger issue than we make it out to be at the rate we're building these.
When it comes to the UK, I think this diagnosis that people lost trust that new buildings would beautify rather than uglify their towns and cities, is definitely a strong part of the picture.
But the story is wider than this because even when we look at domestic housing, we find that people in general prefer the older housing, and it's not only because of the looks. It's a bigger picture of pervasive enshittification.
Pre-war housing often has higher ceilings and larger rooms. Houses built around the 1930s often have thicker walls as well and just feel better made. Usually they are on more generous plots. By contrast newer houses are built on as little space as the developer thinks they can get away with, are seemingly made of sellotape and cardboard and usually have far smaller rooms with lower ceilings.
Couple this with ugly (and if we're talking post-war, blocky, concrete) town and city centre developments, and it's easy to see why people are turned off a lot of new development.
I also wanted to address this -
> Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities.
Well, AFAICT in Australia that's what people want, and with the amount of landmass we have, I don't really see why that shouldn't be allowed to continue. Unfortunately the forces of enshittification are at work here too, with new houses now being built almost to the very edges of much smaller plots, even at the outer edges of the cities.
If you compare a house built in 1910 to one build in 1950 you are on balance often right. These days most new houses I see have larger rooms, thicker walls. The modern house often does feel worse made, but as an engineer I know enough to look beneath the covers and it is very clear that the worst modern house is significantly higher quality than the best old ones - but this often doesn't translate to "feelings", and so the poorly insulated house that just barely stands (and is a fire hazard) feels better even though it is inferior in all structural ways.
When I look at the streetcar suburbs of my city (1880s) I see lots are on average about the same size as lots today, and houses were generally much smaller. But the lots were deeper and narrower so how they feel is different.
Fully agree with this in the UK, the king (then Prince Charles) was on the money when he said that unlike the post-war town planners, the Luftwaffe can't be accused of replacing our buildings with anything more offensive than rubble!
The idea that ornament is a crime has done more visual damage to our buildings than any other single factor in my opinion, the fact we still regularly poll as preferring Victorian and Georgian buildings is an indictment of those responsible for our stock of them; I prefer those buildings but it depresses me that we've made things worse rather than better aesthetically for the last century or so when we didn't have to.
Modern new builds are bleak things for the most part; oppressively low ceilings, tiny postage-stamp sized windows as the enshittified way to comply with energy efficiency legislation, styling which looks like it was done by ChatGPT, and build quality that makes British Leyland cars look like epitomes of careful manufacturing. While if it were up to me I'd replace our discretionary planning system with a rules-based one and remove a lot of incumbent NIMBY vetos, I can see why NIMBYs exist in such enormous numbers given the race to rock bottom on everything except price when it comes to housing.
Unrelated to the article: The drawings in the top image are beautiful. What's the name of the style for it? I would love to learn this technique.
Etching?
The problem is that this equates two very different way of building houses, and lumps them together.
For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.
In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.
Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.
I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"
did that really happen to Innsbruck?
If it happened, it wasn't in all of Innsbruck. I was there earlier this year and it seems a good chunk of the historical center hasn't been replaced by more modern buildings.
I skimmed three articles of this publication: one saying the more permittent zoning policies on historic urban areas would allow more growth and more environmentally sustainable buildings; other saying Europe is falling behind its auto-manufacturing and does not have its own Tesla, because they cannot kick out workers fast enough; third that Australia stopped asylum seeker by simply preventing boats coming in (and breaking international law?) and eu should do the same. So basically all of them are just lib news media feel-good “progressive yay!” style used to sell conservative capitalist ideas. Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes, kick out the workers and smash the unions so we can pay ourselves bigger dividends and stop the asylum seekers escaping the horrid conditions of ex-colonial nations we created over centuries regardless of whether they deserve an asylum or not.
Here’s my pitch for an article: “Why You Not Using Your Democratic Power And Letting The Billionaires Decide On Everything Is Good, Actually”. How much do they pay per sentence?
The problem with that worldview is that it's always the same look from the same perspective that is, the economic machine is an extractive system (top <- bottom) and the colonial system is entirely responsible for the current state of the countries a lot of people are trying to leave.
Your perspective ignores the fact that some of "us, the people" are actually benefiting from this economic machine/collective organization. In industrialized societies, it's been decades that even the people at the bottom of the social ladder have "more to lose than their chains". And no matter how morally responsible ex-colonizing nations are, it is a fact that newcomers have to be somewhat integrated economically and culturally and that no society knows how to do that at the scale of arrivals. It turns out reality is not as simple as our moral world is and it takes time and thankless work to figure out what's happening. Morality is somewhat well-equipped at handling relationships and at maybe detecting the economic/political systems failure modes but it is not well-equipped at solving societal issues.
The truth is that it is easy to attribute merit and blame but har to actually trying to make relevant change. Our vision of History is somewhat biased because we remember people who were responsible for positive change as people with the "right" position but it is often forgotten how much strategy, technical issues they've had to solve fort those to prevail :
https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/Waging-Good-War-Thomas-Ricks/dp/1...?
> Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes
I'm not sure I took that away from this article so much as "Architects and planners need to stop building ugly-ass monstrosities so people might actually celebrate urban renewal again".
[flagged]
> Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created.
Since they’re mostly talking about the US, the thesis here is wrong. Almost all NIMBYism of the era was borne of redlining and white flight in the post-war era, which drove whites out of the cities to the burbs because there were too many “coloreds.” So basically, Americans were - and still are - racist no matter what SCOTUS says.
I'm sure some NIMBYism can be attributed to that, but I think too often it's described as the only reason, ignoring the real problems that come with new and denser development, many of which could be mitigated.