Standing in the Roman Pantheon last spring, one of my daughters asked the kind of question that newspaper columnists are tempted to place in the mouths of our children when we’re hard up for a column hook: “Dad, why don’t people build things this beautiful anymore?”
One of my fitfully followed parental rules is that when a kid asks about something that touches on the deep issues of our time, I don’t immediately launch into a jeremiad. Instead, my children are served a combination of here’s what your dad thinks and here’s what other people think, with a thumb on the scale for the paternal point of view but also a pedantic attempt to make sure they understand the whole debate. (Often they wander off before I’m done, for some reason.)
So I told her that from my perspective, the decline of beauty, grace and ornament in public architecture reflects a collapse of humanist confidence and religious faith, an abandonment of the assumption that human artifice is tapping into some deeper cosmic order, a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself.
But then I also told her that the change was partly a somewhat mundane matter of building costs, that ornamentation gets relatively more expensive under modern conditions because you can’t pay skilled artisans a pittance anymore, and glass and concrete cubes are just far cheaper to put up. (It was when I started to explain Baumol’s cost disease that someone wisely suggested we go get gelato.)
We had been home from Italy only a little while, though, when I read an essay that made me feel ashamed of my attempted evenhandedness. Titled “The Beauty of Concrete” and penned by Samuel Hughes for the online magazine Works in Progress, it starts out by limning a version of my own “on the one hand, ideas, on the other hand, economics” explanation for why, sometime after the Art Deco era, so many Western buildings became either hyperutilitarian or gobsmackingly ugly. (Those are my own aesthetic judgments; his essay is more circumspect.)
Hughes calls the first explanation the “naïve” one — the idea that there was a change in ideology and worldview, starting with the modernist era in the early 20th century, that altered what elites wanted to commission and what architects wanted to design. The second explanation he calls the “sophisticated” one — the idea that “ornament declined because of the rising cost of labor,” that old-fashioned architecture is made up of “small, fiddly things that require far more bespoke attention than other architectural elements do” and modern economies don’t generate the right incentives to create a large caste of bespoke fiddlers.
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