Comment by rgovostes
2 days ago
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
> One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
> This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
There is a tradeoff between affordability and aesthetics. Lengthy review processes make housing more expensive. Seattle cares, but it cares more about affordability. With the cost of housing right now I think that's the right call. Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
> Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
> Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
Paying architects, engineers, and lawyers to go back and forth with city bureaucrats and committees for months or even years is typically the expensive part.
Building housing lowers the cost of housing. Requiring some accounting of $ saved on brickwork -> $ spent on homelessness is just another bureaucratic hurdle, which is ironically exactly what TFA is complaining about.
Do you think New York and Florence have those beautiful buildings because their local design review committees had high standards? I don't.
I think aesthetics should nearly always come second to other concerns, except in very specialised cases. For a start, it's largely a matter of personal taste. "Streamlining the design review process" is something I wish was more of a priority where I live. Those rates (local property tax) dollars are much better spent on almost anything else in my opinion.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Also, there is often a tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability. The cost of living has gone up, and most people struggling to climb the property ladder would happily sacrifice the former for the latter. With respect, this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems.
The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.
> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems
I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.
I am much more depressed by our crushing lack of new housing construction that keeps cities unaffordable for the middle class than I am about new buildings not being sufficiently pleasing to my eye.
I’ve gone the other way. I moved to Tokyo, most of the buildings are copy-pasted and objectively ugly. But taken together it forms an extremely functional city, so it’s a dream to be here.
In NYC at least, the low point of architectural beauty was in the 1960-2000 era. In the past decade or two I think there has been a lot of really quality architecture going up. The current aesthetic issue plaguing the city is the onerous regulations that result in unneeded scaffolding being put up around buildings for months or even years.