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.
The problem with building ugly buildings is, you can do it only once in a neighborhood. Then everyone *will* notice and tell any subsequent developer to piss off. If you're building human living space you must have some minimal respect for aesthetics.
And lo, even though Noah frames it otherwise, IMO his example of a Texas apartment building is a reasonably OK looking building. A lot of modern buildings, especially from the late 20th century, are aggressively ugly in comparison.
Sure but then I believe we could also get into a beauty is in the eye of the beholder conversation. Often one form of architecture (brutalism is often lampooned but has its fans nonetheless) is pretty while someone else thinks it’s ugly. So any kind of effort to build housing that’s attractive will be unattractive to someone else
Yeah true, but you do have to make a basic effort. A lot of Modernism is unattractive to *everyone*, and this is intentional. Modernism was about breaking with the past just for the heck of it. That pandering to human vagaries was for losers. Why do we need things like decorations? Etc. But it turns out that actually we build cities *for humans*. Oops. I also think this is why explicitly discouraging older styles was a big mistake. If you have a mix with different styles in a city then it is unlikely that everyone will hate every new building.
+1 for pointing out that we're totally sleeping on Brutalism, you can do super cool stuff with that. But it is also really easy to do poorly.
May I ask how much AI assistance was used in crafting these comments? The cadence and sentence structure and certain phrasing all appear to be strongly consonant with LLM output.
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.
Unfortunately, US cities and towns as a rule hate Urbanism, with its mixed-use Japanese or EU-style neighborhoods. More specifically, American *builders*--whose donations and political clout deeply influences local and state zoning--hate Urbanism. Buffalo, NY and Berkeley, CA and Miami, FL are modern outliers to our historical status quo, that will hopefully encourage imitators.
It would be interesting if Noah did a deep dive into why our increasingly concentrated building sector so abhors Urbanism.
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.
There are many more architecturally interesting houses and buildings in Japan than in most countries I’ve seen. Even single family homes, which are usually mass produced by big builders like Sekisui House have various styles and cladding (like the tiny rectangular tiles that aren’t common elsewhere), and in older neighborhoods you’ll see very stylish modern homes mixed in with old traditional farmhouses. Japan has the highest per capita number of architects because the laws aren’t restrictive and. Most buyers of existing houses do tear downs and rebuild instead of fixups.
One thing that would be a big improvement in older city neighborhoods would be to get rid of the rats nests of overhead power and communications lines, and the poles that block sidewalks.
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 agree to some extent, but Tokyo is also an exception. We're talking about new builds here, and almost certainly tall multistory. And set back by the trees and broad sidewalks that everyone uses to justify ugly buildings. If you put that in a Tokyo street there'd be no place for the people to walk! But I agree, Tokyo does have its distinctive charm
Almost all of Tokyo is famously new builds since they knock down structures as soon as they reach a few decades old; that aside it points to the real problem, which Noah also alludes to - that you can’t pave over bad urban form with pretty buildings.
I don’t think it’s such an exception if you’re in urban scenery in other places that are as they are because they were mostly destroyed during World War 2, like Warsaw or much of western Germany. A modernist/brutalist square in Warsaw or Gelsenkirchen is maybe not as appealing as the typical Tokyo street. But it’s far more attractive and liveable than many American new developments, to the point Noah is making
Yes, the problem is that people looking at Sejong don't know that it's pretty okay on the ground. And that's Jongchon-dong 30 000 people on 1.15 km2, full of cafés and bus stops (and buses going every 15-20 minutes to everywhere).
And Korea is nowhere near as rich as Tokyo (or California), if they want they can choose to make this nicer, build faster transit options, and so on.
Can someone explain the reasoning behind the ban on street-level shops?
I mean, ever since Antiquity, it was absolutely logical to have shops and other services accessible from the street for both the residents and visitors.
Who did suddenly decide that entire streets should be residential only and how did the idea spread?
Dude, I looked into Sejong city, it actually looks amazing. Fine that it is not everybodies cup of tea, but can we at least have a few Sejong cities in America?
The incredible persistence of the two-stairs mandate in the US, even in the face of major technological developments which made daily use of open fire much rarer, detection of an unwanted fire much faster and its extinguishing much more efficient, is a testament to the power of inertia.
In the discussion threads that discuss reform, more than a few people will react with "OMG there will be an apocalypse of horrible deaths in fire, all because evil corporations want to save some money!"
In practice, the vast majority of the developed world does not require two stairs and deaths from structural fires have become exceedingly rare anyway. Modern concrete buildings with smoke detectors and fire alarms everywhere just aren't the death traps that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory once was.
In peacetime conditions, your highest chance of burning to death are usually related to traffic, not buildings.
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.
Your point about Tokyo is correct. Ornamentation is not the point, rather it is mixture homes and shops, and narrow safe walkable streets, plus good public transit. In Japan I have seen that most modern building are ho him or even ugly. But it does not matter.
I tend to agree it’s the built environment that matters. Mark Brown has a lot of good posts like that. I Iive in old, dense New York.
When I see new apartment buildings in other cities, the reason they are ugly is not necessarily the building themselves but because they look like isolated, grey blocks with nothing around them.
There is no commerce, natural vegetation, or walk spaces, around them. They are next to ugly parking lots or abut four lane highways with no curb strips or trees that cut the building off from other areas.
They are simply too far away from other buildings or amenities. It’s the unnecessary Soviet-ness of the whole landscape.
Maybe we need MORE zoning to ensure that new buildings add density in an organic-looking way, like something you would want to step out of and go for a walk, rather than step out of of it and immediately hit the parking lot to grab your car.
Excellent article. I think your reforms listed are sensible. Although many apartment buildings in Paris may look nice, the upper units are often tiny, degraded, and uninhabitable. Americans will like dense housing if it is high quality, beautiful, built to last, and situated in a walkable fun city. It’s doable.
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.
The cleanliness (except on garbage days when the crows start ripping up trash bags left for pickup) is more notable because of the lack of public trash cans. The only trash cans you’ll see (even in busy train stations) are in public restrooms (mainly to prevent disposal of trash in toilets and urinals) or small ones with can shaped openings next to vending machines (which are usually stuffed full). Carrying home your own trash, and shopkeepers sweeping or hosing down the public sidewalks in front of their businesses are the norm and would be hard to export without the culture.
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 strongly agree that urban design (ie the way buildings relate to each other, the way a place *functions*) is critical and architecture is not. Tokyo has great urban design and mostly bland architecture, and it doesn’t matter.
Culturally this is difficult in America. First of all, most people here don’t even know that urban design is a thing, or what it is. Sincere “urbanists” will mistakenly talk about the “architecture” of Paris or Tokyo when they mean the urban design.
But actually it’s worse than that. We actually have lots of good architecture that’s on islands surrounded by parking lots and highways. Americans *really* focus on the details of an individual building, and are culturally blind to how that building relates to the things around it. So in Houston you get a nice Hilton hotel by the Toyota Center that has a grand lobby and beautiful stairwells etc, but they put their garbage loading docks at the terminated vista.
I think this is possibly downstream of our individualism. Our entire architecture and urban planning establishment operates this way, worrying a lot about the atriums and balconies, and how a building looks from a drone camera overhead, and literally don’t even consider for a moment how it relates to what’s around it. The surrounding context isn’t in the plans, it isn’t in the renderings, it isn’t a consideration.
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.
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.
The problem with building ugly buildings is, you can do it only once in a neighborhood. Then everyone *will* notice and tell any subsequent developer to piss off. If you're building human living space you must have some minimal respect for aesthetics.
And lo, even though Noah frames it otherwise, IMO his example of a Texas apartment building is a reasonably OK looking building. A lot of modern buildings, especially from the late 20th century, are aggressively ugly in comparison.
Sure but then I believe we could also get into a beauty is in the eye of the beholder conversation. Often one form of architecture (brutalism is often lampooned but has its fans nonetheless) is pretty while someone else thinks it’s ugly. So any kind of effort to build housing that’s attractive will be unattractive to someone else
Yeah true, but you do have to make a basic effort. A lot of Modernism is unattractive to *everyone*, and this is intentional. Modernism was about breaking with the past just for the heck of it. That pandering to human vagaries was for losers. Why do we need things like decorations? Etc. But it turns out that actually we build cities *for humans*. Oops. I also think this is why explicitly discouraging older styles was a big mistake. If you have a mix with different styles in a city then it is unlikely that everyone will hate every new building.
+1 for pointing out that we're totally sleeping on Brutalism, you can do super cool stuff with that. But it is also really easy to do poorly.
I’m with you on the “baseline matters” point.
I just think the line is fuzzier than we admit because taste fragments faster than standards can keep up.
Brutalism is a good example. It was widely embraced before it became widely rejected.
Which is probably why cities that allow a mix tend to age better than ones that enforce a single aesthetic.
May I ask how much AI assistance was used in crafting these comments? The cadence and sentence structure and certain phrasing all appear to be strongly consonant with LLM output.
I believe you mean consistent.
And I’m not LLM’ing you
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
.
Unfortunately, US cities and towns as a rule hate Urbanism, with its mixed-use Japanese or EU-style neighborhoods. More specifically, American *builders*--whose donations and political clout deeply influences local and state zoning--hate Urbanism. Buffalo, NY and Berkeley, CA and Miami, FL are modern outliers to our historical status quo, that will hopefully encourage imitators.
It would be interesting if Noah did a deep dive into why our increasingly concentrated building sector so abhors Urbanism.
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.
There are many more architecturally interesting houses and buildings in Japan than in most countries I’ve seen. Even single family homes, which are usually mass produced by big builders like Sekisui House have various styles and cladding (like the tiny rectangular tiles that aren’t common elsewhere), and in older neighborhoods you’ll see very stylish modern homes mixed in with old traditional farmhouses. Japan has the highest per capita number of architects because the laws aren’t restrictive and. Most buyers of existing houses do tear downs and rebuild instead of fixups.
One thing that would be a big improvement in older city neighborhoods would be to get rid of the rats nests of overhead power and communications lines, and the poles that block sidewalks.
Yes to livable urban environments.
And also yes to attractive architecture.
And the second is a *lot* easier to achieve in the short run than the latter. Yes, it's not "one weird trick" but it's a lot nicer to look at.
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 agree to some extent, but Tokyo is also an exception. We're talking about new builds here, and almost certainly tall multistory. And set back by the trees and broad sidewalks that everyone uses to justify ugly buildings. If you put that in a Tokyo street there'd be no place for the people to walk! But I agree, Tokyo does have its distinctive charm
Almost all of Tokyo is famously new builds since they knock down structures as soon as they reach a few decades old; that aside it points to the real problem, which Noah also alludes to - that you can’t pave over bad urban form with pretty buildings.
I don’t think it’s such an exception if you’re in urban scenery in other places that are as they are because they were mostly destroyed during World War 2, like Warsaw or much of western Germany. A modernist/brutalist square in Warsaw or Gelsenkirchen is maybe not as appealing as the typical Tokyo street. But it’s far more attractive and liveable than many American new developments, to the point Noah is making
Also Korea and Taiwan both have pretty unappealing architecture and both feel very pleasant to be in.
Yes, the problem is that people looking at Sejong don't know that it's pretty okay on the ground. And that's Jongchon-dong 30 000 people on 1.15 km2, full of cafés and bus stops (and buses going every 15-20 minutes to everywhere).
And Korea is nowhere near as rich as Tokyo (or California), if they want they can choose to make this nicer, build faster transit options, and so on.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jongchon-dong,+Sejong-si,+South+Korea/@36.5043233,127.2484107,3a,75y,335.3h,93.51t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sCIHM0ogKEICAgIDqhZ2KKg!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2Fgpms-cs-s%2FABJJf520ih7u8F0stHxIf1CU1gKi2C_QOBrnAQdH-auNo-OZKfhpJEx7x7v8yKhpjAPk3tJwutnVfoUBllwm_e7bC5eL4CqSVTSe7Maec3ozycq9VDlomEe27Xl90GWHb6OgKhO8wyJi%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi-3.5127991276549153-ya268.3017528075903-ro0-fo100!7i5632!8i2816!4m6!3m5!1s0x357acba5948b83f3:0xf72fdde1cb058527!8m2!3d36.5034388!4d127.2473306!16s%2Fg%2F113qbh40h?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDQwOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Can someone explain the reasoning behind the ban on street-level shops?
I mean, ever since Antiquity, it was absolutely logical to have shops and other services accessible from the street for both the residents and visitors.
Who did suddenly decide that entire streets should be residential only and how did the idea spread?
Dude, I looked into Sejong city, it actually looks amazing. Fine that it is not everybodies cup of tea, but can we at least have a few Sejong cities in America?
The incredible persistence of the two-stairs mandate in the US, even in the face of major technological developments which made daily use of open fire much rarer, detection of an unwanted fire much faster and its extinguishing much more efficient, is a testament to the power of inertia.
In the discussion threads that discuss reform, more than a few people will react with "OMG there will be an apocalypse of horrible deaths in fire, all because evil corporations want to save some money!"
In practice, the vast majority of the developed world does not require two stairs and deaths from structural fires have become exceedingly rare anyway. Modern concrete buildings with smoke detectors and fire alarms everywhere just aren't the death traps that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory once was.
In peacetime conditions, your highest chance of burning to death are usually related to traffic, not buildings.
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.
Your point about Tokyo is correct. Ornamentation is not the point, rather it is mixture homes and shops, and narrow safe walkable streets, plus good public transit. In Japan I have seen that most modern building are ho him or even ugly. But it does not matter.
I tend to agree it’s the built environment that matters. Mark Brown has a lot of good posts like that. I Iive in old, dense New York.
When I see new apartment buildings in other cities, the reason they are ugly is not necessarily the building themselves but because they look like isolated, grey blocks with nothing around them.
There is no commerce, natural vegetation, or walk spaces, around them. They are next to ugly parking lots or abut four lane highways with no curb strips or trees that cut the building off from other areas.
They are simply too far away from other buildings or amenities. It’s the unnecessary Soviet-ness of the whole landscape.
Maybe we need MORE zoning to ensure that new buildings add density in an organic-looking way, like something you would want to step out of and go for a walk, rather than step out of of it and immediately hit the parking lot to grab your car.
Excellent article. I think your reforms listed are sensible. Although many apartment buildings in Paris may look nice, the upper units are often tiny, degraded, and uninhabitable. Americans will like dense housing if it is high quality, beautiful, built to last, and situated in a walkable fun city. It’s doable.
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.
The cleanliness (except on garbage days when the crows start ripping up trash bags left for pickup) is more notable because of the lack of public trash cans. The only trash cans you’ll see (even in busy train stations) are in public restrooms (mainly to prevent disposal of trash in toilets and urinals) or small ones with can shaped openings next to vending machines (which are usually stuffed full). Carrying home your own trash, and shopkeepers sweeping or hosing down the public sidewalks in front of their businesses are the norm and would be hard to export without the culture.
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 strongly agree that urban design (ie the way buildings relate to each other, the way a place *functions*) is critical and architecture is not. Tokyo has great urban design and mostly bland architecture, and it doesn’t matter.
Culturally this is difficult in America. First of all, most people here don’t even know that urban design is a thing, or what it is. Sincere “urbanists” will mistakenly talk about the “architecture” of Paris or Tokyo when they mean the urban design.
But actually it’s worse than that. We actually have lots of good architecture that’s on islands surrounded by parking lots and highways. Americans *really* focus on the details of an individual building, and are culturally blind to how that building relates to the things around it. So in Houston you get a nice Hilton hotel by the Toyota Center that has a grand lobby and beautiful stairwells etc, but they put their garbage loading docks at the terminated vista.
I think this is possibly downstream of our individualism. Our entire architecture and urban planning establishment operates this way, worrying a lot about the atriums and balconies, and how a building looks from a drone camera overhead, and literally don’t even consider for a moment how it relates to what’s around it. The surrounding context isn’t in the plans, it isn’t in the renderings, it isn’t a consideration.
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.