Douthat: Ideas, not economics, changed the way cities look

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

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 in to 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 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 that modern economies don’t generate the right incentives to create a large caste of bespoke fiddlers.

The rest of Hughes’ essay is a brief against the sophisticated take. He argues that technology and mass production did not actually make ornamentation more expensive; it made it much, much cheaper. The “sophisticated” story arguably applied much more to the premodern era than to the modern one: The cost of skilled labor and the absence of economies of scale limited what the builders of cathedrals and parliaments could achieve (making what they did achieve that much more impressive). But “the manufacture of ornament was revolutionized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” Hughes said, and in wood and stone and metal alike it became far cheaper to create the work that made the great monuments of the 19th century city possible.

Indeed ornamentation probably became more commonplace, not less, across the early decades of mass production and industrialization, Hughes wrote:

The vernacular architecture of the seventeenth or eighteenth century tends to be simple, with complex ornament restricted to the homes of the rich and to public buildings. In the nineteenth-century districts, ornament proliferates: even the tenement blocks of the poor have richly decorated stucco facades

The revealed evidence is in fact overwhelming that the net effect between, say, 1830 and 1914 was mainly one of greater affordability. To be sure, the ornament of the middle and working classes was of stucco, terra-cotta or wood, not stone, and it was cast or milled in stock patterns, not bespoke. These features occasioned much censoriousness and snobbery at the time. But we might also see them as bearing witness to the democratizing power of technology, which brought within reach of the people of Europe forms of beauty that had previously belonged only to those who ruled over them.

Only thereafter, via the cultural disillusionment that followed the First World War, did ornamentation enter into an eclipse, one that after World War II became so complete and radical as to spawn a puckish contemporary conspiracy theory that holds that many pre-1945 buildings actually belong to a vanished empire, Tartaria, whose existence and collapse has been erased from our history books so that we don’t realize just how far we’ve fallen.

I am a semi-Tartarian myself, insofar as I expect future civilizations to regard the break in architectural styles as indicating a more serious declension than what our contemporary self-image would expect.

This perspective comes with inevitable caveats. Yes, some modern architecture in some contexts is beautiful and arresting and effective. Yes, many attempts to reclaim older patterns can feel derivative and stale; the fact that ornamentation still survives in the McMansion market doesn’t make McMansions any less tacky. Yes, some of the buildings raised by contemporary “starchitects” have an innovative energy that’s lacking in homages to the ornamental past. (Though I’m a hard sell when it comes to the alleged beauties of brutalism.) And since I dragged my classically inclined daughter into this article, I should note that I have a son who regularly announces his intention to build a high-modernist supervillain lair somewhere on the California coast.

But still and all, the alternate modern timeline imagined by Hughes is the one I wish that we inhabited:

We can imagine an alternative history in which demand for ornament remained constant across the twentieth century. Ornament would not have remained unchanged in these conditions. Natural stone would probably have continued to decline, although a revival might be underway as robot carving improved. Initially, natural stone would have been replaced by wood, glass, plaster, terra-cotta, and cast stone. As the century drew on, new materials like fiberglass and precast concrete might also have become important. Stock patterns would be ubiquitous for speculative housing and generic office buildings, but a good deal of bespoke work would still be done for high-end and public buildings. New suburban housing might not look all that different from how it looks today, but city centers would be unrecognizably altered, fantastically decorative places in which the ancient will to ornament was allied to unprecedented technical power.

Here is the good news in his argument: What bad ideas made, good ideas can unmake. We don’t necessarily need to repeal the laws of economics or solve Baumol’s cost disease to build as beautifully as our ancestors once did. We just need to see the world more humanistically and mystically, to regard ourselves as stewards and subcreators once again.

And here is why I’m recommending Hughes’ essay now, as we leave the last of summer behind and enter into an autumn in which political considerations will overwhelm every other preoccupation. Politics matters greatly, and it matters even for the style of public architecture; which is why I am on record praising the first Trump administration’s attempt to push American architecture away from ugliness and back toward beauty. But the biggest changes in our common life often take shape independently of any vote or legislation.

An idea can accomplish a great deal in the world, for good or ill, without ever winning any kind of formal political victory over its opponents.

No electorate voted to replace Gothic Revival and art nouveau with soulless modernism, no great Western referendum did away with ornament; but a radical transformation of our physical environment happened all the same.

That’s something worth remembering, for the victors and losers of 2024 alike.

Whatever change you seek in contemporary America, it might slip away even if you win elections. Or it may be accomplished, beyond your expectations, even in the shadow of political defeat.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.