the catastrophe

If our approach to architecture is fundamentally mistaken, the costs have already been enormous. Our inventory of buildings is humankind’s biggest physical investment. In the worst case, an overvalued feature, replicated globally across billions of structures over fourteen millennia, would have produced a catastrophe of lost wealth.

Some critics dislike the size and inefficiency of houses in rich countries, and some claim that apartments with inoperable windows increase healthcare spending, but the costs of our aesthetic choices are neglected. This may reflect the cultural position that art enjoys, but that position in turn owes at least some thanks to the inscrutability of aesthetic theory. It’s hard to judge whether an investment is paying a good return if we can’t agree on what the product is supposed to be. Right now, we lack a dominant theory to tell us that. In many countries, the laypeople disagree with the experts. They dislike the designs that the architectural schools and professional organizations celebrate. And within the lay and expert camps, there is division too. A review of the professional journals, for example, will reveal a diversity of form corresponding to a diversity of philosophies. Extreme minimalism and formal expressiveness, featured in the same journal, are a sign of tolerance, not agreement.

And these disparate aesthetic theories aren’t always that close to one another: often, the opposing groups politely regard each other’s obsessions as illusory. If someone says architecture should express the spirit of the age, her counterpart asks whether that spirit isn’t a hallucination. If someone says architecture should be beautiful, his opposite will point out that beauty is a cultural construction. Good geometry makes for good design? Are your clients mathematicians? The opposing positions seem arbitrary to their detractors.

A detached observer, seeing the incompatibility of the various positions, should be struck by an uncomfortable doubt. What if the whole enterprise has been overvalued, or what if its appropriate value is zero? Societies have valued other things that were useless or even counterproductive for centuries and millennia: foot binding, ancestor worship, witch hunts, conformity. If we wasted a lot of time, well-being, and wealth through those mistakes, isn’t it possible we have been wasting our efforts to make buildings attractive?

Some of the competing aesthetic theories tell us that our preferences are culturally constructed along with the emotional reactions we experience in architecture. We may be responding to a consumerist longing, which in turn is based on status signalling. Why would we want to go along with a superficial mistake like that? Shouldn’t we be resisting it instead of celebrating it? Why are we spending so much money on a fetish for outsized adornments?

Considering the scale of the potential loss, we might expect people to rudely insert themselves into their neighbours’ architectural choices or to create voluntary organizations to oppose the waste, but that’s not how we deal with the situation. Architecture is like any other topic: some people are interested in it and other people have their own hobbies, like cooking or sports. Most people don’t want to live in an ugly house or let their neighbours down, but the costs aren’t discussed as a social issue. The murky state of aesthetics plays a part, but opportunity costs are overlooked in many fields. We see a long history of people choosing to make their environments nicer instead of imagining a tragic waste of wealth that could have been used to feed the poor.

One guy has been warning us. He’s the one who looks at a new government building and says, “Well, they wasted money on that. I’d rather have my tax dollars back.” Most people don’t listen to him because we think he’s missing the qualities that we can see with our own eyes. The cost-to-value equation could be debated, but not the existence of value. We know that cultured intellectuals exist who can defend architectural aesthetics, but we may also be aware that those are the people who are so perplexed by each other.