> In every survey conducted, over 60 percent of the respondents have favored traditional architecture, with many revealing over 85 percent support. This preference is surprisingly unaffected by age, gender, politics, socioeconomic class and nationality. The results are not definitive, but they suggest that there is substantial public discontent with the dominant trends in modern architecture. Perhaps the anecdotal impressions of Summerson and von Eckardt were not so far off after all.
This is of no surprise to me. There are folks doing work [1] where you can measure things like stress, hormones, how the eye moves, and more and when you look at modernist architecture or even "traditional" suburban homes you find that eye tracking is weird - folks can't find the door, stress levels rise, and more.
The human brain is genetically wired a certain way. We find symmetry for example to be pleasing. Specific heights, setbacks, ornamentation, and more were much more carefully used in older buildings than they are today because today is more about cost efficiency than it is building something impressive.
Some will join this thread and talk about how today's modernist architecture will be tomorrow's traditional architecture, how what we see today is only the best stuff left standing, or they'll downright refuse to admit the evidence before them "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but they're wrong and each of those specific points can be refuted.
First, while architectural patterns do change over time bad ideas were discarded and became unused even if momentarily popular. It's why Oxford shoes will continue to be popular while Crocs will ultimately fade into obscurity as a trend.
Related to "only the good stuff is left standing" - sure. So now that we know what the good stuff is we should build more of it.
While beauty is arguably in the eye of the beholder (I think everyone has a valid opinion but not all opinions are equal, and beauty is likely something that can be objective even if we today lack the ability to describe how or why) we can look at other things to help inform those opinions. We're reaching the stage now where not only do we have tests of taste, we have tests of science or even tourism to help inform what people actually enjoy.
ericmay•20m ago
The human brain is genetically wired a certain way. We find symmetry for example to be pleasing. Specific heights, setbacks, ornamentation, and more were much more carefully used in older buildings than they are today because today is more about cost efficiency than it is building something impressive.
Some will join this thread and talk about how today's modernist architecture will be tomorrow's traditional architecture, how what we see today is only the best stuff left standing, or they'll downright refuse to admit the evidence before them "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but they're wrong and each of those specific points can be refuted.
First, while architectural patterns do change over time bad ideas were discarded and became unused even if momentarily popular. It's why Oxford shoes will continue to be popular while Crocs will ultimately fade into obscurity as a trend.
Related to "only the good stuff is left standing" - sure. So now that we know what the good stuff is we should build more of it.
While beauty is arguably in the eye of the beholder (I think everyone has a valid opinion but not all opinions are equal, and beauty is likely something that can be objective even if we today lack the ability to describe how or why) we can look at other things to help inform those opinions. We're reaching the stage now where not only do we have tests of taste, we have tests of science or even tourism to help inform what people actually enjoy.
[1] No affiliation at all but I find Ann's work to be incredibly interesting. It's sort of the Walkable City by Jeff Speck, but for architecture: https://www.routledge.com/Cognitive-Architecture-Designing-f...