Finding an ugly building constructed before 1930 is a difficult task. Ben notes that a common explanation for this is survivorship bias. This theory suggests that societies demolished the ugliest buildings of the past and only kept the best ones. However, direct comparisons of urban changes often tell a different story. When an older building is torn down, the structure that replaces it is almost never described as more beautiful than the original.

I have never even seen someone make the argument that the building being demolished was uglier than the building replacing it. I've seen people make the argument that the building replacing it was more efficient, more modern, safer, bigger, had nicer mod cons. But I've never seen someone say this was great because we demolished an ugly old building and replaced it with a lovely new building.

Visual evidence from city transformations shows a consistent pattern of aesthetic decline. Ben points to comparisons of western cities before 1930 and after 1945. While new buildings might be more practical or safer, they often represent a significant worsening of the environment. This suggests that the quality of architecture has genuinely declined rather than just being a result of selective demolition.

Bright people often assume that survivorship bias explains why old buildings look better than new ones. They think we only see the beautiful structures today because the ugly ones were torn down. This is similar to the Lindy effect, where things like Shakespeare's plays continue to endure simply because they have already lasted so long. While this bias exists in areas like clothing or China patterns, Samuel argues it does not explain the history of architecture.

It can't really be the case that there weren't any ugly buildings. What an insane idea. And we've got so much more money. It's so much better at doing most things than we. And then survivorship bias springs up and looks like an ingenious explanation. I consistently find it's a thing that bright people approach this topic for the first time this model is presented to them, and then no one's ever systematically bothered to investigate it.

Evidence from historical archives contradicts the survivorship theory. The Britain from Above archive contains 90,000 aerial photographs of urban Britain taken before modernism and World War II bombings. These photos show entire cities and neighborhoods as they existed at the end of the traditional architectural era. If there were widespread ugly buildings, they would be visible in these records. Detailed surveys of London also document exactly what stood on almost every site. The supposed missing ugly buildings are simply not there.

History provides natural experiments through cities that faced economic decline. Dublin is a primary example. After the Irish Parliament was dissolved in the early 19th century, the wealthy moved away. The city center remained in its Georgian state for over a century because there was no money to rebuild it. This created a perfectly preserved merchant city. While these buildings might have been primitive or difficult to live in, they were not outwardly ugly. This pattern of beautiful traditional building seems to be a universal truth for almost all of humanity before 1830.

The missing, the ugly buildings that are supposed by the survivorship bias to have been there. You just can't see them. We have immense photo archives of the streets of English cities. We pretty much know which buildings were on which sites. The ugly buildings aren't there.

Finding truly ugly buildings from before the modern era is surprisingly difficult. While some might point to the gaunt, repetitive facades of 18th-century mills or the baroque brutalism of certain Hawksmoor churches, these examples rarely feel as aesthetically offensive as modern failures. Historical observers likely had a much higher baseline for beauty. They might have viewed a stark factory building as merely unfinished or utilitarian rather than inherently ugly because the materials, such as yellow ashlar stone, remained high quality.

The slums of Glasgow before they were being demolished are extremely good looking aesthetically from the outside. Obviously, if you were a Victorian looking at them, you would think this is a horrible place because in your head you could just think about the extreme poverty inside, the disease, and all that sort of stuff. But the actual building, divorced from that context, is a good building to look at.

The concept of survivorship bias plays a significant role in how we perceive the past. It is possible that the most unsightly structures, such as corrugated iron shanty towns or the makeshift townships that ringed early 20th-century Paris, were simply demolished and forgotten. However, even the most miserly Victorian workers' housing, with its minimal windows and hardscaping, only represents a borderline case of ugliness by contemporary standards. The fact that we can still identify a few old buildings as unattractive suggests that the floor for architectural quality was simply much higher in the past than it is today.

Architecture is often subject to the cycles of taste theory. This idea suggests that our appreciation for buildings depends on nostalgia and perception rather than inherent beauty. People often prefer the styles their grandparents grew up with. At the same time, elite critics tend to look down on the architecture of the recent past. History shows a pattern where Georgians disliked Gothic buildings, Victorians disliked Georgian ones, and modernists rejected Victorian styles. Today, this trend continues as many people look down on postmodern architecture.

The elite critics of any period will often look down on a lot of speculative or ordinary building because they'll have a set of ideal standards and the average stuff will usually not meet it. You'll often get bias against the recent past.

However, Samuel points out that these cycles do not fully explain current preferences. Public polling consistently shows that 70 to 90 percent of people prefer buildings from before 1914 over recent designs. Even when presented with a new building in an old style, the public still favors the traditional look. This suggests a persistent preference that goes beyond simple fashion cycles.

Aria notes that some styles eventually gain a new kind of appeal. While a 1970s building might be seen as tasteless for decades, it eventually reaches a point of retro appeal. A coherent package where the interior and exterior match can create a pleasant experience. This shift happens when a style becomes old enough to feel like a complete historical artifact rather than just an outdated fashion.

Samuel observes that the housing market for normal people remains stuck in traditional styles. While architecture schools hold these designs in contempt, buyers still prefer brick walls and pitched roofs. Historically, elite styles like Gothic or Classical architecture eventually spread to the general public. This cycle of taste worked for centuries but suddenly stopped in the 20th century. The mainstream market is now completely disconnected from elite architectural fashion.

The majority of normal people were like, yes, we know this is fashionable. Yes, we know this is high status, but it's unable to take over my preferences.

Aria highlights a study on music recommendations to explain this shift. Researchers found that if they repeatedly suggested unpopular songs to listeners, those listeners eventually gave up on the system. People are not as suggestible as we often think. If elite taste becomes too disconnected from what people actually find beautiful, the public simply stops trusting elite recommendations. They stick with what they know they like.

Ben argues that some trends are purely cyclical because they have no binding to reality. Baby names change constantly because they have no functional content. However, things like music and buildings affect our daily lives directly. People are less likely to follow an elite trend if it makes their environment less pleasant. When a choice has real consequences, personal preference outweighs the desire to be fashionable.

The more it has content that actually affects your life, the less you are going to actually be kowtowed by the cycle.

Fashion is largely driven by a social sense of what is cool. Ben predicts that baggy trousers will soon disappear, replaced by high-waisted, tight trousers reminiscent of the 1970s. As people get older, their social intelligence antennae tend to wither. While they can still identify what trendy people are wearing, they lose the internal mechanism that makes them actually care about or enjoy those trends.

Everyone knows that what looks good to you is basically entirely driven by your sense of how cool it is. And then you lose that sense as you grow older. Your social intelligence antennae usually drop, wither and die. And then you don't even care.

Architecture follows similar fashion cycles, though they move much more slowly than clothing. Historical perspectives often soften our judgments. Styles once dismissed as primitive or barbarous, such as the Gothic style, eventually become interesting or even objectively good once there is enough distance from the era. Only extreme poverty prevents people from achieving these aesthetic goals. Otherwise, what remains is the variation in fashion.

There is often a divide between elite and popular tastes. In some fields, like contemporary classical music, the elite world has completely divorced itself from the public. Most people have no idea what the major trends in classical music have been for decades. In contrast, architecture and names remain connected. Elite preferences in these areas eventually ripple down to the rest of society because buildings and names are shared public experiences that cannot be completely disentangled.

Public interest in elite cultural milestones is declining. Fewer people can name recent Oscar winners or Pulitzer Prize recipients. This suggests a growing gap between what critics celebrate and what the general public actually follows. While some art forms allow for this disconnection, architecture is different because it is a part of everyday life. We are forced to remain connected to the buildings around us.

There are arts where we are disconnected and there are arts where we are connected. Architecture is one where we are connected. The elites are doing cycles without us being affected by them.

Some argue that our perception of ugliness is simply part of a cycle of taste. They suggest that buildings we dislike today will be considered beautiful in a hundred years. While there is some truth to this, it does not explain the whole problem. It is an overstatement to use this theory to dismiss current concerns about the uglification of the world. The cycle of taste theory only accounts for a small fraction of why modern designs are often rejected by the public.

The concept of pastiche in architecture involves creating new buildings in the styles of previous eras. Samuel acknowledges that there is a legitimate social reason to avoid this, which he calls the fancy dress effect. Because fashion acts as a social language, breaking its rules can make a person or a building look like they are wearing a costume. While there is no deep moral law against looking out of place, most people have practical reasons to avoid appearing as though they are heading to a costume party.

You do get a fancy dress effect if you break fashion rules, because fashion is a social language. And on the whole we have reasons not to look like we're going to fancy dress parties. Not like deep moral law reasons, but reasons of some kind.

However, there are times when it is necessary to be defiantly unfashionable. Samuel points to the nineteenth century rational dress movement as a parallel. Women during that period began wearing loose corsets that were considered socially odd but were far healthier and more functional. They defied fashion for fashion independent reasons. If modern architectural styles fail to satisfy human tastes or make people unhappy, then architects have a similar reason to ignore current trends. By remaining defiantly unfashionable, a new style might eventually become the new standard.

If we take seriously the arguments about how people are unhappy with the fashions that they're being given in architecture, then we might think it's time for people to be defiantly unfashionable. And if enough people are defiantly unfashionable, then that will become the new fashion.

Critics often argue against pastiche by claiming it is inauthentic or that buildings must express their modern materials, like showing a concrete core on a facade. Samuel finds these elite arguments less convincing than the simple social argument regarding fashion. Ironically, the fashion argument is a stronger reason against pastiche than the typical claims about structural honesty, even if elites find the topic of fashion too superficial to discuss.

A common explanation for the disappearance of architectural ornament is the rise in labor costs. This theory suggests that as technology made other sectors more productive, the manual labor required for intricate carvings became prohibitively expensive. This is often called Baumol's cost disease. However, the shift away from decoration might actually be an alliance between elite fashion and a bureaucratic desire to save money. Public bodies usually seek the cheapest building that is still socially acceptable. Modernism provided a justification for stripping away detail while claiming it was a sophisticated design choice rather than just a budget cut.

The fashion arrived and then joined forces with a perennial instinct to cut cost and enabled people who maybe didn't care much about the fashion to express their natural desire to cut frills by going to cheaper kinds of buildings.

Historical evidence contradicts the idea that ornament became too expensive to produce. Samuel points out that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cost of architectural decoration was actually falling. Most ornament was not carved by hand but was mass produced in factories using molds and casting techniques. This mechanization allowed for more elaborate designs than in previous centuries. Even today, mass market homes often feature more decorative elements than high end architectural projects. This suggests that the lack of ornament in modern buildings is a result of changing elite tastes rather than economic necessity.

Aria suggests that modern aesthetic preferences might stem from Puritan morality. In the past, colors like navy blue and dark green were chosen for Ivy League schools because they were seen as more moral than bright heraldic colors. Even the use of black was once restricted to the elite because it was considered too attractive. This culture of plainness eventually defined good taste in America, favoring simple New England styles over more ornate designs.

Samuel observes that while there is a clear visual link between the white boxes of Reformation churches and modernism, the history is not a straight line. Many 19th-century Protestant cities were actually quite decorative. However, both mindsets share a deep mistrust of ornament and color. Samuel mentions a 1950s architect who felt modernism was a natural fit for non-Anglican Protestants because their traditions had always been similar in sensibility.

Modernism is pretty good news for non-conformist Protestants because our architecture has always been a bit like this. It is obviously quite close to us in sensibility.

Proving a causal link is difficult because modernism happened only once in history. The evidence is also conflicting. Modernist cities like Brasilia and Chandigarh were built in places with very different religious traditions. Furthermore, many early modernists were Catholic, and the movement reached the United States relatively late. While Protestantism may have influenced the debate, the connection to modern architecture is not fully supported by the evidence.

One theory suggests that modernism arose because architectural ornament became too cheap. In the past, carving stone was an expensive way to show wealth. As mass production made ornament more accessible, it lost its status. Elites needed a new way to distinguish themselves from the poor. They adopted modernism because its minimalist style required elite training to appreciate. This created a barrier that normal people could not easily cross.

The world was getting richer and the cheapest buildings are the ones that retain ornament the most. The alternative theory is ornament got too cheap. In order to distinguish ourselves we need to do something else, and that is cultivate very elite taste. No normal person can be expected to understand why this ugly building is actually beautiful.

This idea was common even during the rise of modernism. Critics at the time attacked mass-produced stucco as debased and low quality. However, this theory faces challenges because modernism happened in music, literature, and painting at the same time. It is hard to say if the same cost-based causes worked everywhere. In music, for example, recorded music was considered low status in the early 1900s while expensive live performances remained prestigious.

In the world of painting, a similar shift occurred regarding technical skill. Painters became so skilled that it was difficult to tell them apart. When high skill levels become common, the status of that skill can actually decrease. The focus then shifts to authenticity and character rather than pure technical mastery. This transition resembles a system where the rules change just as everyone starts to master the old ones.

Another factor might be the rate of turnover within the elite class. If the group of wealthy people is changing rapidly, the established elite need stronger ways to identify who belongs. They create complex cultural barriers to protect their social standing. Modernism may have served as a tool for social exclusion during a time of significant economic change.

Modernism may have been a reaction to the rapid turnover of the social elite. In the 19th and 20th centuries, economic shifts and the First World War opened many slots in the upper class. By 1914, 80 percent of the British peerage had been created since 1800. This meant the elite was largely comprised of new money. For an established class to maintain its status, it needed ways to distinguish itself from these interlopers. This theory suggests that modernism provided a cultural barrier that was difficult for newcomers to mimic.

I am arguing that it's not one of these supply side changes like cost disease. It is a cultural change. We have a model for how material change in the 19th century economy would affect culture. Elite incentives can then affect the way that the arts develop.

The rise of mass literacy also played a role. When coal miners began visiting libraries and cinemas gained more attention than the opera, the old intelligentsia felt threatened. They needed an art form that clearly marked them as separate from the masses. Modernism served this purpose perfectly because it was often difficult to enjoy. It created a high cost of entry that the general public was unlikely to pay. This helped the elite signal their refined taste and education.

Sure, they've got theater, they've got literature, they've got music, but it's not the real thing. We can create a barrier to entry which is that they're going to hate this. They're really not going to enjoy it at all.

This process does not require a conscious conspiracy. It functions more like the distinction between U and non-U words in British English. People naturally gravitate toward behaviors that distinguish them from those they consider below them in status. Once a group adopts a difficult aesthetic like modernism, it becomes a lasting marker of status. Ben notes that it remains effective today. An educated person can praise a controversial building like the Hayward Gallery and immediately separate themselves from the sensibilities of normal people.

Distinguishing oneself from the average person often requires adopting opinions that contradict common sense. For example, most people look at an ugly building and see that it is ugly. An elite person might call it beautiful to signal their sophistication. Using things that are objectively bad is a very effective way to create a social barrier. Most people will never understand why they are supposed to praise something that looks unpleasant. This functions like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes.

Stuff that is actually objectively bad is a really good distinguishing force because they will never work out that they are supposed to. It is like the emperor having no clothes.

Historically, elites used different methods to separate themselves. Samuel notes that Ottoman court poetry was written in a style that was unintelligible to normal people. At Oxford and Cambridge in the 17th century, students were required to speak Latin at the dinner table. These were explicit barriers based on language and education. While these forms were difficult, they were often still beautiful rather than intentionally repelling.

The transition to modernism changed how these barriers work. Ben suggests that as society became more egalitarian, explicit exclusion became socially impossible. You cannot tell people to shut up because they are common. Instead, elites use hidden barriers. Samuel adds that early 20th-century modernists were openly elitist and snobby. Today, contemporary artists have internalized democratic norms. They feel awkward when their work intimidates the public, even though that intimidation acts as a status signal.

Maybe our culture became too egalitarian to have that kind of explicit barrier. So you had to have always fake barriers to entry. You can never say anyone is better than anyone else. You can never say this is the actual elite. So therefore you have to have hidden barriers on everything.

Architectural beauty often follows broad patterns that align with human intuition. One of the most significant elements is what builders call felt tectonics. This is the idea that the eye wants to be able to see how a building is standing up. While modern engineering allows for huge masses to be cantilevered without visible support, this often feels unsettling to an observer. We generally prefer to see weight transferred downward in a way that feels stable and logical.

The human eye doesn't seem to have fully adapted to that is still slightly unsettled by the sense of a huge mass supported on a tiny spindly thing. You often still have a sense looking at a reinforced concrete column, which is in fact the strongest kind of column that's ever been invented, that if you gave it a firm kick, you would easily snap it and the whole thing would fall.

Steel reinforced concrete is a wonder material that can support massive weight with very thin columns, but this efficiency can create a visual mismatch. Samuel notes that even though these structures are incredibly strong, they can look top-heavy or fragile. To combat this, some modern designs use visible steel girders to communicate strength. Architects might even add extra structural elements that are not strictly necessary just to reassure people that the building is secure.

Bilateral symmetry is a dominant feature in both nature and formal architecture. While vernacular buildings are more varied, formal styles usually follow strict rules of symmetry. This preference might stem from our biological recognition of the human face. When a child draws a house with two windows for eyes and a door for a mouth, they are reflecting a deeply ingrained pattern. Evolution is a cheap programmer and it may have simply wired us to find symmetry appealing.

Evolution is a cheap programmer. It could just be that the thing we have in our head is we like symmetry. That might need a few refinements, but that is basically the rule.

Another key element of design is the use of nested scales or fractals. This creates a visual hierarchy that makes a structure legible. High quality graph paper is a good example of this principle. It uses different line thicknesses to help the eye navigate the space quickly. Architecture that lacks this hierarchy, such as a massive slab with a perfectly uniform grid of windows, often feels cold and difficult to process. Humans prefer facades they can visually unpack through multiple levels of detail.

The eye looks at it and is like, I sort of know how to. The object is set up in a format which is naturally sympathetic to my interest. Nested levels of structure give a sense of legibility and a sense of a humanised building.

Materials play a huge role in how we perceive architecture. Some materials, like the specific granite used in Aberdeen, can make a city feel bleak. On the other hand, premium timber, recovered bricks, and fine stone almost guarantee a better result. Even simple social housing looks beautiful when it is built with high quality stone from the local area. While a designer can still make a bad building with these materials, they have to try much harder to fail.

Modern materials like steel and glass usually provide a decent baseline. However, certain styles from the 1970s and 1980s, such as dark or green reflective glass, are often seen as unattractive. The physical properties of how a material ages also matter. Ben notes that handmade bricks and industrial bricks age differently.

The crumbles that come off a handmade brick come off in lumps that feel like natural breaks. The bits that come off an extruded brick, it is kind of like an evaporating away acid effect.

Aria suggests that we naturally prefer materials with non-repeating patterns, like marble or wood. This connection to nature might be why we enjoy these surfaces. However, Ben points out that we also value perfect smoothness in things like sanded stone or stucco. This suggests that while naturalness is a useful shortcut for good design, it is not a complete theory. We also appreciate the extraordinary things that can be done with unnatural materials like metal and glass, as seen in Victorian architecture. Wood might be uniquely appealing because it was once a living creature and echoes the structures of life.

Nature contains surprisingly little ugliness compared to human-made objects like extruded bricks or breeze block facades. While there are a few exceptions, such as the monkfish or rotting corpses, the natural world is largely elegant. This scarcity of natural ugliness can make it feel like a concept that appeared later in the world rather than being a fundamental part of it.

There isn't actually very much ugliness in nature. At one time I entertained the theory that there might be no ugliness in nature until somebody showed me a monk face fish in its original world.

Human ugliness also exists, but it functions differently than the ugliness of construction materials. In humans, the opposite of ugliness is a beauty that generates desire. This is not the case for building materials, where beauty or ugliness relates to a different set of aesthetic values. The raw materials of nature provided the basis for our experience of ugliness, even if the natural world remains mostly beautiful.

The opposite of ugliness in human beings is a kind of beauty that generates desire in us, which is not true of building materials.

Samuel explores how beauty in architecture often stems from a perceived sense of life or liveliness. This idea suggests that when we find something beautiful, we project a concept of life onto it, even if only in a metaphorical sense. This connection explains why humans are drawn to bilateral symmetry in buildings, as it mirrors the symmetry found in animals and plants. Our own bodies are made of fractal structures, and we naturally respond to these patterns when they appear in our surroundings.

When you see something as beautiful, you see it as having some kind of. Like you project the concept of this thing has a concept of life from obviously used in some sort of extended or metaphorical sense.

Our experience of beauty is not purely biological. It is a heterogeneous mix of animal instincts and rational thought. While we find pleasure in living forms, we also enjoy geometrical purity and rectilinearity. These straight lines and perfect shapes are rare in nature but are quite important in design. Samuel suggests that our sense of beauty is like a cobbled together monster, combining bits from our animal nature with bits from our ability to grasp logical, abstract forms.

This mix of instincts can lead to mistakes in modern design. Some architects focus too much on the plan or floor layout because perfect squares and circles look appealing on paper. However, this creates a disconnect because people do not experience architecture as a flat map from a birds-eye view. People experience buildings through perspective as they walk around them.

Plan is something that nobody ever experiences in real life. We experience buildings in perspective, not in plan. And only God can experience.

Camillo Sitter, a late nineteenth-century Austrian architect, observed a flaw in urban design. Designers often focused on creating perfect geometric patterns that look beautiful from above. They loved creating squares or intersections where streets converged in a perfect cross. However, this geometric perfection is often impossible to perceive from the ground. Sitter argued that irregular shapes, which he called lumpy circles, actually feel more like squares to a pedestrian than a mathematically perfect square does.

He points out often this geometrical perfection is completely illegible at ground level. And even it doesn't look like. He reckons all the lumpy circles are the things that feel most like squares and like perfect squares when you're at ground level.

This conflict between the plan view and the ground experience is more visible today. Social media users love aerial photos of these geometric layouts because they contrast with the surrounding organic urban fabric. Yet the original builders and residents went centuries without ever seeing that view from above. The focus on top-down aesthetics can lead to spaces that feel imposed and unnatural to those who live in them. This suggests that modernism and the loss of ornament were not simply due to changing costs or survivorship bias but were part of a shift in how designers conceptualized space.

Status signaling plays a significant role in social hierarchy. This behavior often stems from status anxiety within the professional classes rather than just the very top of society. During periods of rapid social turnover, people feel a greater need to distinguish themselves from others. Historical examples include the use of Chinese in Japanese court poetry to separate the elite from the common man and the use of specific vocabulary to mark social standing.

Status signaling probably is part of the story. Something about status anxiety among existing elites. Maybe not the top guys at the top, but maybe the professional classes at rapid turnover in their areas was causing some sort of worry and need to distinguish themselves.

The beauty of architecture involves several distinct factors. Key elements include the quality of materials and tectonics. Tectonics refers to the visual sense that a building is stable and capable of standing up. While there is a connection between architectural beauty and the way we appreciate nature, nature alone does not explain why some buildings are seen as beautiful and others are not. Identifying the exact source of this aesthetic value remains a challenge.