Architectural Decline?

The "beauty and general consistency" of Edinburgh's older buildings prompts Tyler Cowen to ponder the "decline" of urban architecture

But I still wonder why urban architecture no longer yields consistently beautiful urban regions. Anyone who has walked around the major European cities, or even glanced at the Chrysler building, surely has asked the same question. Why is the quality of exteriors declining relative to interiors? Given that nice exteriors are a public good, why were they ever so nice in the first place?

He suggests a few possible explanations and some of these have merit but his difficulty in resolving this conundrum lies in mis-stating the problem. Judgements of aesthetic quality are necessarily fraught. In determining whether any absolute architectural decline has taken place, one must have some sort of objective standard against which such decline may be measured. It is a common assumption that one's personal architectural preferences accord with the consensus view and further that the consensus view represents an enduring objective assessment of architectural quality. Neither assumption is safe. I would direct anyone who might suppose that the quality of contemporary architecture is poorer than that of the pre-modernism era to go to their nearest quality booskhop and take a flick through Phaidon's excellent Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Architectural innovation and creativity still thrives.

That said, this is not a phantom phenomenon but to answer the conundrum one must be more precise: The problem is not about a decline in the quality of "architecture" so much as the decline on the quality of "building". At any given time, there will always be many more "buildings" than works of architecture and ordinary, unheralded contemporary buildings are uglier than their historical counterparts. To understand why this is so it is necessary to consider how the process of "making a building" has changed over the last couple of centuries. There are a number of factors here but the two key reasons are 1) "Bureaucratisation" and 2) Technological advancement

1) Planning permission is a relatively recent phenomenon and its most notable consequence is extensive state intervention into the building procurement market. In "supplying" a building or building design, one must not only satisfy the "demand" of the client paying for it or that client's customers but also the demands of the planning bureaucrats. These latter demands are not restricted to consideration of objectively assessed negative externalities nor indeed of subjectively assessed aesthetic qualities but also include assessments of future users' intended needs. That previous attempts by state agencies to anticipate consumer demands in other sectors have failed miserably has not diverted planning officers from this task. One effect of this meddling is that blandness is rewarded.

2) Perhaps more importantly, the technology which permits exciting and innovative architecture also enables the dull and inelegant. Put simply, there are now vastly many more ways to build crappy buildings. In the pre-modernist era, you could only go so far wrong building a building out of brick. Walls needed to be of handsome thickness simply to stand up, only a certain width of window opening was practical. Technological advancements removed many of the restrictions which just so happened to ensure a certain minimum elegance to the ordinary building.

Comments

[Jon Ihle]

I would extend your second point by noting that the modernist privilege afforded to values such as innovation and creativity to the exclusion of pre-modernist notions of posterity and integrity certainly has played a role in the widespread idiosyncrasy of contemporary urban environments.

[Peter Nolan]

Economists have a concept of "survivorship basis", which cautions against judging any time series when the unsuccessful specimens fall out of the analysis over time.

Wouldn't it be the case here too that poorly-built or unsuitable buildings would be those least likely to survive over time, leading to some kind of evolutionary improvement in the appearance of long-lived cities?

I'll get my coat...

[Frank McGahon]

Jon,

That's true up to a point but "idiosyncrasy" isn't typically the defining characteristic of the 'burbs Mr Cowen decries.

Peter,

That's a very good point, one echoed by Mike Linksvayer in commenting on the same post.

[Jon Ihle]

Re: survivorship basis: sometimes perfectly decent buildings, such as brick and brownstone townhouses in North Philadelphia, are neglected and ultimately destroyed in favour of hideous public housing. There doesn't seem to be an evolutionary mechanism at work there so much as an economic one - which seems not to favour aesthetic value whatsoever.

[Peter Nolan]

Well, that is government intervention rather than profit-seeking behaviour of producers.

[jr]

It was the profit-seeking behavior of producers that tore down Penn Station and stuck the hideous Pan Am Building on top of Grand Central. In my own neighborhood, the profit-seeking behavior of producers creates blocks of unsightly "townhouses" each with a garage door and a fake individual roof-line, instead of gracefully repeating row houses following the curve of the street.

[Conor Griffin]

Peter, on a point of information, is the econometric notion you refer to not survivorship "bias", rather than "basis"?

However, on a less pedantic note, I fully agree with your point that the historical sample against which today's buildings are compared must be biased, in the same way that using the historical performance of the S&P500 or the FTSE100 by definition does not include the performance of those individual components that drop out of the index through bankruptcy (or rather, on the journey towards bankruptcy).

[Peter Nolan]

'Tis bias, not basis. I was thinking of something else, having recently reread the good Dr Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness.