Taste vs. cost

My career began in architecture, so reading Robert Kwolek on whether people prefer traditional buildings and Samuel Hughes on ugliness and housing, I wasn’t surprised that architecture students want different things than everyone else. We do! Part of it is that we are trained to imagine ourselves standing in the room rather than looking at the facade, and that is hard to unlearn. And part of it is that we think “modern” is the harder problem. Classical at any scale is often reproducing something already designed, or scaling up something that already exists, and I’d argue plenty of it isn’t really designed at all, certainly not to the degree a context-appropriate modern building is. Also, a lot of what these surveys call modern is actually postmodern, which is a different conversation.

Kwolek ends on the question worth pointing out here: “Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike?” I think the answer is mostly that almost none of us are commissioning anything. Architecture and engineering came to 1.5%, or $6,480, of the $428,215 it cost to build the average American home in 2024. Only about one in five new single family homes is built for a particular owner on their own land, and the ten largest builders account for 44% of all new single family closings.

I have a related personal anecdote: we are swapping our home oil system for heat pumps, which means sealing the envelope, which means replacing the siding, which is about as close to a free opportunity to change how the house looks as we will ever get. Both the material and the design costs of going more contemporary would have been significantly higher, so we’ve landed on a nominal material update and effectively no aesthetic change (same color, scale, etc), though I would have readily gone the other way if the cost had been comparable. I assume a lot of these types of decisions land here, and for the same reason, and that most of them are about houses that already exist rather than houses anyone is commissioning.

Of our collective affordability problems this is very much the least of them. But if a dread of ugliness really is hanging over our cities, maybe the lever is cost rather than taste. About forty jurisdictions now pre-review house plans and publish them, which either solves the problem or hands everyone the same house, and I don’t actually know which. How to make good design cheap and widely available is a question for another day!