Could not agree more with the point that layout and urban planning matters more than building design. This is revealing when you actually look at what is being built in the Paris region, which smokes most of the Anglosphere in terms of new starts.
The big new housing development on the other side of the park I live next to here in the southern Parisian suburbs isn’t a Haussmann pastiche at all. It’s fairly blocky modern development, like most Paris-region new builds. But it’s still clearly going to be an attractive place once it’s finished because it’s human-scale, centred around a nice tree-lined square, near a big park, tram, and suburban mass transit station, with mixed-use development including a new supermarket, pharmacy, bakery, and bike shop.
After having lived here for a while, I think the developments being mixed use is esp. important for local buy-in. The development isn’t just a bunch of new neighbours who will compete with me for services and resources. Instead, it’s providing me with new services I now have access to. It’s way easier now for me to get a snack or bottle of wine to take for a picnic to the picturesque southern side of the park. I also have an alternative pharmacy if I know something is unavailable in the one next to me.
These commercial businesses, or at least the anchors, like supermarkets and pharmacies, often open before the development is fully opened up too. This gives you a nice little preview of how it will improve your life.
What I appreciate here is that you are pushing back on the idea that prettier buildings are some hidden master key that suddenly makes people love housing.
That always felt a little too easy.
The Tokyo comparison is especially useful because it breaks the lazy equation between ornamental architecture and lovable urban life. A city can be architecturally plain in isolation and still feel deeply human, walkable, lived-in, and worth inhabiting. That gets much closer to the real issue.
I do think aesthetics matter at the margin because ugly, cheap-feeling development can make people feel like something is being done to them rather than built with any care. But I think your bigger point is the right one: people experience systems, not facades. Streets, transit, safety, mixed use, and the overall texture of daily life do a lot more to shape how a place feels than cornices alone ever could.
Strong piece. The Haussmann-on-a-stroad thought experiment especially made the argument click.
Do we know how Haussmann developments were received by 19th-century Parisians? I’m going to guess that many contemporaries rejected them as too modern and oppressively large—cheesy even. Perhaps in 2176 people in Washington, DC and Austin will be falling all over themselves for an apartment in a charming, classic early-2000’s 5-over-1.
IIRC the most prevalent criticism of the actual architecture, rather than the urban planning, was that it was uniform and monotonous. Paris had a bunch of very distinctive and cobbled-together neighbourhoods before the 1860s. In the new style, the buildings looked pretty much the same wherever you were in Paris, and still do to some extent.
But that reception changed with time, and eventually even these uniform-looking neighbourhoods developed their own distinctive characters. The vibe even in close-by quartiers like some in the 9th and 11th arrondissements can be totally different, even if the buildings mostly look the same.
I think this gets at a common reason why newer styles of architecture are so heavily criticised, and why they soften over time. In the first instance they're often implemented in a very uniform and totalising fashion. But over time this dampens out, because people use the space in new and different ways, and buildings are eventually added to or replaced by new ones.
I'm' sure I'll be in a minority but I think appearance is incredibly important. And I think there is a very strong consensus that attractive buildings stopped being built around 1940. And that's the problem. There has been a century long gap where architects decided they were bored with buildings people actually liked and saddled the country with eyesore after eyesore. And how do we go back to attractive architecture without it looking like a Disney recreation of the olden days? The ugliness of new buildings is what keeps me firmly in the NIMBY camp. Just like architects who got bored a century ago and foisted ugliness on us, they should take up a new challenge and produce a distinctive take on traditional architecture. I don't know what that is, but i'm not an architect.
Have you visited Tokyo before? Might challenge your assumptions, as Noah relates.
Of course I like a pretty building as much as anyone else does, and that makes traveling to Europe very pleasant. But living in Tokyo, I’ve never felt that drab architecture was a real problem, and after visiting some of the most ornate cities in Europe I still overall prefer Tokyo’s charm, even taking into account the vast chasm in architectural quality.
I think the answer is 'yes', because this sentiment that new buildings are always soul destroyingly ugly acts like a force amplifier for NIMBYs. It is really easy to rally opposition to anything, no matter how inanely mundane the proposal. You can't replace condemned buildings because everyone and their cat will be screaming about how much worse the new building will look even compared to whatever trash is there now.
That Texas example looks like a pretty dignified building to me, tbh. It is not trying to be the most impressive beautiful building ever, but regular apartments don't have to do that. But it also isn't stupidly ugly. It doesn't look like an unfinished pile of building materials. It doesn't do stupid things with windows. It has a modicum of decoration. Some basic aesthetic sensibility goes a long way.
That Tokyo example is a portal into an entire separate rabbit hole of "return" urbanism. Not the RETVRN to Classical style, but the return to traditional urbanism. Narrow streets, fine grained buildings, etc. And I think fine grained small buildings are much more forgiving for aesthetics than large monolithic buildings.
Incidentally we know that old buildings being prettier (or at least not aggressively ugly) is not a survivorship bias. We know because there exist medieval towns, that declined for some reason, but they are in an area that doesn't have earth quakes to wipe old stuff out. So then they just sat there for a few centuries until tourism came in. For example, Bruges.
There is a good rational reason why you *should* expect buildings to sort of look similar to older buildings: they have the same function as 100 years ago. Or 1000. Create habitat for humans. Keep the elements out. Don't fall apart due to the local climate.
My wife and I talk about this all the time. We'd love to be able to walk to a grocery store or grab ice cream or coffee without getting in the car, but everything is so spread out. The Tokyo point nails it. Nobody cares about the facades there. The streets are walkable, the shops are mixed in, and it just works. That's what makes a neighborhood feel alive, not the architecture. Great read, Noah.
Great article, but I tend to reject the juxtaposition of beautiful facades and great urban design. Do we really have chose between the two? Wouldn’t both be better than either one in isolation? I’ve been to Tokyo (and absolutely loved it like many others), but would I love it even more if the drab residential neighborhoods had more color and architectural beauty? I would, and I daresay, so would many Japanese.
Agree on all your points. Sterile urban/suburban layouts seem designed to keep people inside their homes and away from the community writ large, just as cars keep everyone ensconced in their private shuttles. I get the charm of privacy and individualism, being super-introverted myself, but it does make for very claustrophobic neighborhoods (even with the wide lawns and box-like apartments with only a 3-4 stories each).
Speaking of Japanese cities, the other major thing I love about Tokyo and similar cities is the cleanliness. Living in Washington, DC, every other day some piece of plastic food wrapping or a beer bottle comes to visit me to say hello from my front lawn or sidewalk. Ambling to the local cafe is like wading through a trash heap (ok, that's hyperbolic, but still...). There are plenty of (unfortunately not fully enclosed) trash cans around, but no one seems to use them much. Our neighborhood isn't overrun by encampments; it's just local folks being rude. I wish we had more respect for our neighborhoods. In Tokyo or Seoul, there are densely packed buildings with nary a stray soda can in sight.
So the fabric of the city and the underlying social and cultural system supports liveability, not the architecture of a particular building or style?
Sounds right, but that's the hard part for Americans, balancing the public vs private good. An individual developer has a single parcel to build on, so that's the unit they think at. And draws political attention to their welfare.
wide walkways, tree-shaded, small accessible parks, curved streets, wheelchair and cane-friendly pedestrian routes (even golf-cart routes for senior housing areas), walkable shops and cafés, windows that are generous and that open, matter. Some people would think the visual noise and clutter of Tokyo streets a misery (as some think living in downtown Manhattan a misery), others thrive in the color and bustle. But I haven't met anyone who would really relish living in a flat block of hundreds of tenement apartments on a treeless traffic-laden thoroughfare next to dozens of identical buildings if they had another choice.
I’d love to see more beautiful architecture, but a return to Haussmann style would be chintzy and out of place, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most architects agree with me. That Collison thinks this is a good idea speaks to his lack of taste. To be clear I share his dislike of the blandness of modern architecture, and I’d love to see ornamentation, but it can’t be the same old shit.
Unfortunately, I think that Collison is not alone in having bad taste. Most people have bad taste in everything, hence the, on average, low quality of superhero movies, romance novels, bubble gum pop, and pretty much everything else. At least some of current bland architecture is due to neighbors objecting to anything in the least bit different or interesting.
I agree it's more urban planning than visuals, but I think the main reason why the NIMBY movement rose when it did was that 20th century architecture sucked. I live in NYC and the clearest case is when Jane Jacobs talks about the destruction of the lower east side. It's a good example because a good chunk of the lower east side survived and is now one of the best neighborhoods in the city. But so much of it was destroyed and you can still see it today. You walk two blocks from a vibrant neighborhood to a nearly dead one. This is mostly because of bad urban planning, with all the points that you mention, but the architecture is also so much worse. And this is saying a lot because the alive part is tenement buildings, not exactly fancy.
Of those two stark contrasts, worse city planning and worse architecture, visible in such a short distance, which one is stronger? In my mind it's no doubt that architecture made people more angry. Because the places that NIMBYs moved to, with their suburban sprawl, also had terrible urban planning and this didn't bother the NIMBYs.
Could not agree more with the point that layout and urban planning matters more than building design. This is revealing when you actually look at what is being built in the Paris region, which smokes most of the Anglosphere in terms of new starts.
The big new housing development on the other side of the park I live next to here in the southern Parisian suburbs isn’t a Haussmann pastiche at all. It’s fairly blocky modern development, like most Paris-region new builds. But it’s still clearly going to be an attractive place once it’s finished because it’s human-scale, centred around a nice tree-lined square, near a big park, tram, and suburban mass transit station, with mixed-use development including a new supermarket, pharmacy, bakery, and bike shop.
After having lived here for a while, I think the developments being mixed use is esp. important for local buy-in. The development isn’t just a bunch of new neighbours who will compete with me for services and resources. Instead, it’s providing me with new services I now have access to. It’s way easier now for me to get a snack or bottle of wine to take for a picnic to the picturesque southern side of the park. I also have an alternative pharmacy if I know something is unavailable in the one next to me.
These commercial businesses, or at least the anchors, like supermarkets and pharmacies, often open before the development is fully opened up too. This gives you a nice little preview of how it will improve your life.
Yes. Having convenience shops in neighborhood.
There's not going to be a one sized fits all taste, but conveience is a major human commonality
.
What I appreciate here is that you are pushing back on the idea that prettier buildings are some hidden master key that suddenly makes people love housing.
That always felt a little too easy.
The Tokyo comparison is especially useful because it breaks the lazy equation between ornamental architecture and lovable urban life. A city can be architecturally plain in isolation and still feel deeply human, walkable, lived-in, and worth inhabiting. That gets much closer to the real issue.
I do think aesthetics matter at the margin because ugly, cheap-feeling development can make people feel like something is being done to them rather than built with any care. But I think your bigger point is the right one: people experience systems, not facades. Streets, transit, safety, mixed use, and the overall texture of daily life do a lot more to shape how a place feels than cornices alone ever could.
Strong piece. The Haussmann-on-a-stroad thought experiment especially made the argument click.
Do we know how Haussmann developments were received by 19th-century Parisians? I’m going to guess that many contemporaries rejected them as too modern and oppressively large—cheesy even. Perhaps in 2176 people in Washington, DC and Austin will be falling all over themselves for an apartment in a charming, classic early-2000’s 5-over-1.
IIRC the most prevalent criticism of the actual architecture, rather than the urban planning, was that it was uniform and monotonous. Paris had a bunch of very distinctive and cobbled-together neighbourhoods before the 1860s. In the new style, the buildings looked pretty much the same wherever you were in Paris, and still do to some extent.
But that reception changed with time, and eventually even these uniform-looking neighbourhoods developed their own distinctive characters. The vibe even in close-by quartiers like some in the 9th and 11th arrondissements can be totally different, even if the buildings mostly look the same.
I think this gets at a common reason why newer styles of architecture are so heavily criticised, and why they soften over time. In the first instance they're often implemented in a very uniform and totalising fashion. But over time this dampens out, because people use the space in new and different ways, and buildings are eventually added to or replaced by new ones.
I'm' sure I'll be in a minority but I think appearance is incredibly important. And I think there is a very strong consensus that attractive buildings stopped being built around 1940. And that's the problem. There has been a century long gap where architects decided they were bored with buildings people actually liked and saddled the country with eyesore after eyesore. And how do we go back to attractive architecture without it looking like a Disney recreation of the olden days? The ugliness of new buildings is what keeps me firmly in the NIMBY camp. Just like architects who got bored a century ago and foisted ugliness on us, they should take up a new challenge and produce a distinctive take on traditional architecture. I don't know what that is, but i'm not an architect.
Have you visited Tokyo before? Might challenge your assumptions, as Noah relates.
Of course I like a pretty building as much as anyone else does, and that makes traveling to Europe very pleasant. But living in Tokyo, I’ve never felt that drab architecture was a real problem, and after visiting some of the most ornate cities in Europe I still overall prefer Tokyo’s charm, even taking into account the vast chasm in architectural quality.
I think the answer is 'yes', because this sentiment that new buildings are always soul destroyingly ugly acts like a force amplifier for NIMBYs. It is really easy to rally opposition to anything, no matter how inanely mundane the proposal. You can't replace condemned buildings because everyone and their cat will be screaming about how much worse the new building will look even compared to whatever trash is there now.
That Texas example looks like a pretty dignified building to me, tbh. It is not trying to be the most impressive beautiful building ever, but regular apartments don't have to do that. But it also isn't stupidly ugly. It doesn't look like an unfinished pile of building materials. It doesn't do stupid things with windows. It has a modicum of decoration. Some basic aesthetic sensibility goes a long way.
That Tokyo example is a portal into an entire separate rabbit hole of "return" urbanism. Not the RETVRN to Classical style, but the return to traditional urbanism. Narrow streets, fine grained buildings, etc. And I think fine grained small buildings are much more forgiving for aesthetics than large monolithic buildings.
Incidentally we know that old buildings being prettier (or at least not aggressively ugly) is not a survivorship bias. We know because there exist medieval towns, that declined for some reason, but they are in an area that doesn't have earth quakes to wipe old stuff out. So then they just sat there for a few centuries until tourism came in. For example, Bruges.
There is a good rational reason why you *should* expect buildings to sort of look similar to older buildings: they have the same function as 100 years ago. Or 1000. Create habitat for humans. Keep the elements out. Don't fall apart due to the local climate.
My wife and I talk about this all the time. We'd love to be able to walk to a grocery store or grab ice cream or coffee without getting in the car, but everything is so spread out. The Tokyo point nails it. Nobody cares about the facades there. The streets are walkable, the shops are mixed in, and it just works. That's what makes a neighborhood feel alive, not the architecture. Great read, Noah.
Great article, but I tend to reject the juxtaposition of beautiful facades and great urban design. Do we really have chose between the two? Wouldn’t both be better than either one in isolation? I’ve been to Tokyo (and absolutely loved it like many others), but would I love it even more if the drab residential neighborhoods had more color and architectural beauty? I would, and I daresay, so would many Japanese.
Agree on all your points. Sterile urban/suburban layouts seem designed to keep people inside their homes and away from the community writ large, just as cars keep everyone ensconced in their private shuttles. I get the charm of privacy and individualism, being super-introverted myself, but it does make for very claustrophobic neighborhoods (even with the wide lawns and box-like apartments with only a 3-4 stories each).
Speaking of Japanese cities, the other major thing I love about Tokyo and similar cities is the cleanliness. Living in Washington, DC, every other day some piece of plastic food wrapping or a beer bottle comes to visit me to say hello from my front lawn or sidewalk. Ambling to the local cafe is like wading through a trash heap (ok, that's hyperbolic, but still...). There are plenty of (unfortunately not fully enclosed) trash cans around, but no one seems to use them much. Our neighborhood isn't overrun by encampments; it's just local folks being rude. I wish we had more respect for our neighborhoods. In Tokyo or Seoul, there are densely packed buildings with nary a stray soda can in sight.
Downtown Coral Gables suggests that yes voters will trade taller buildings for traditionalist design
So the fabric of the city and the underlying social and cultural system supports liveability, not the architecture of a particular building or style?
Sounds right, but that's the hard part for Americans, balancing the public vs private good. An individual developer has a single parcel to build on, so that's the unit they think at. And draws political attention to their welfare.
Great use of AI for mockups BTW.
wide walkways, tree-shaded, small accessible parks, curved streets, wheelchair and cane-friendly pedestrian routes (even golf-cart routes for senior housing areas), walkable shops and cafés, windows that are generous and that open, matter. Some people would think the visual noise and clutter of Tokyo streets a misery (as some think living in downtown Manhattan a misery), others thrive in the color and bustle. But I haven't met anyone who would really relish living in a flat block of hundreds of tenement apartments on a treeless traffic-laden thoroughfare next to dozens of identical buildings if they had another choice.
I’d love to see more beautiful architecture, but a return to Haussmann style would be chintzy and out of place, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most architects agree with me. That Collison thinks this is a good idea speaks to his lack of taste. To be clear I share his dislike of the blandness of modern architecture, and I’d love to see ornamentation, but it can’t be the same old shit.
Unfortunately, I think that Collison is not alone in having bad taste. Most people have bad taste in everything, hence the, on average, low quality of superhero movies, romance novels, bubble gum pop, and pretty much everything else. At least some of current bland architecture is due to neighbors objecting to anything in the least bit different or interesting.
I agree it's more urban planning than visuals, but I think the main reason why the NIMBY movement rose when it did was that 20th century architecture sucked. I live in NYC and the clearest case is when Jane Jacobs talks about the destruction of the lower east side. It's a good example because a good chunk of the lower east side survived and is now one of the best neighborhoods in the city. But so much of it was destroyed and you can still see it today. You walk two blocks from a vibrant neighborhood to a nearly dead one. This is mostly because of bad urban planning, with all the points that you mention, but the architecture is also so much worse. And this is saying a lot because the alive part is tenement buildings, not exactly fancy.
Of those two stark contrasts, worse city planning and worse architecture, visible in such a short distance, which one is stronger? In my mind it's no doubt that architecture made people more angry. Because the places that NIMBYs moved to, with their suburban sprawl, also had terrible urban planning and this didn't bother the NIMBYs.