Unrelated but while scrolling, when I scrolled up, the asterisk thingy appeared on the top right corner and I thought it was a spider or some glitch and had a mini freakout before realizing it was the actual branding

Sort of a recap for normies of Scott Alexander's Whither Tartaria from 2021: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria

It is also interesting to read about the Amsterdamse School, an early 1900's style with "mass appeal" of which you can see many beautiful examples throughout the city, which were also only built thanks to strong support from the political sphere. https://architecture-history.org/schools/AMSTERDAM%20SCHOOL....

Sagrada Família is an amazing building. Going inside it is an awesome experience.

But it is a _lot_. Putting aside the artistic skill and construction cost of it, I'm glad I don't live in a city where everything is like that. I feel like it'd be overstimulating much like an analog version of the Las Vegas strip.

I'm lucky to live in an Art Nouveau City :) (Oradea, Romania)

Not mentioned in the article - Helsinki has a large collection of Art Nouveau ("Jugend") buildings, though not quite matching Riga.

https://www.myhelsinki.fi/visit/helsinki-art-nouveau-archite...

"Helsinki is indeed a unique city of Art Nouveau architecture on the global scale, boasting no less than 600 “Jugend” buildings – more even than in Barcelona or Brussels."

I went to Sagrada Familia and then to Mies van Der Rohe Pavilion.

The latter had a bikini fashion shoot ongoing.

Maybe something to do with it. The world and society completely transformed. Mass media, fashion, loss of religiosity, sexual liberation, globalization, social mobility...

I think the part of this post that is a push back at the “trad critique” doesn’t really work: at a point the author basically says that modernism has its hold due to being a (and I’m paraphrasing uncharitably here) cheap and easy shot at architectural respectability, which is not only not a defense of it, but pretty much the point of the “trad critique”

I think the answer to this question is deeply uncomfortable in 2026.

Softly put, it's discipline, focus and a sense of greater purpose, far above the monetary value of things, fame and fortune.

In other words, exactly what our current, consumer-oriented society lacks. (for better or worse)

One thing nobody ever mentions, probably because it's not fashionable, is that all these buildings require maintenance after getting built. Maintaining a modernist block, with its flat surfaces and straight lines, is utterly trivial compared to more decorative styles - where you have to constantly fight pigeons and the elements to not appear derelict. Also, it is typically complicated to fix decorative pieces when they break, as they often do.

I do understand and share the view that the current mainstream is utterly boring, but I also acknowledge the (somewhat) irresistible forces that shape it: money, time, effort. And I don't believe AI can do anything to counter them in a significant manner, sadly.

I think contemporary architecture is perfect:

Cheap, soulless, forgettable, replaceable metal and glass rectangular prisms filled with cheap, soulless, forgettable, replaceable workers. Form follows function!

That old architecture implied things like spirit, transcendence, community, beauty. Outmoded concepts for sure!

https://architizer.com/projects/tiktok/

Read from bauhaus to our house, by tom wolfe. In america we had the Arts & Crafts movement (e.g. greene & greene) as a native folk form.

It was all killed because two dynamics came together to push "the yale box": corporate america's love of cheap buildings (although the buildings are cheap to build but often nightmares to maintain and use... somebody else's problem) and the ideological purity spiraling post WW2 driven by the academic environment and the rise of abstract architectural criticism over the practical building arts.

post modernism acknowledged the failure of the yale box but, because going back to traditional building forms was unthinkable (of course), had to do ironic kitsch instead

I have architect friends. They can't draw, they can't sculpt, they have no clue about art history. Or color theory, if you want to go that far. Usually golden ratio/Fibonacci is kinda where it ends. One of them is a professor of architecture, no less.

That said, I'm sure there are architects today for which some or all of this is not true.

Most of the above are subjects an architect student would have had to learn about and demonstrate profienciency in, to earn their degree, a 100 years ago.

I'm sure the change in architecture's priorities played a role in this too. Industrial materials, construction efficiency. The need to mass produce housing, costs and new social ideals, yadayadayada.

And ofc the modernist rejection of any ornament; even that which is there historically, on existing architecture.

My hope is that in a future where we 3D-print buildings or construct them with robots we will see a renaissance of non-functional[1] beauty/sculpture/texture/color in architecture because the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistend.

But then, architecture is also always a mirror of the period. And from that pov it's not looking so great for beauty making it back any time soon.

[1] Yet functional because how can the happiness/joy of the perceiver of architecture be removed from what should count as functional, in architecture?