Why Is the Modern World So Ugly?

> We take our cues from what the buildings around us ‘speak about’. If they speak of grace and charm, kindness and light, our mood will be buoyant, if however they seem to threaten and intimidate us, we will feel humiliated and cowed.

I don't think this totally captures the problem with modern architecture. It's not that the buildings are threatening or intimidating, but that they convey no emotion at all - they're utterly sterile.

This kind of antimodern sentiment is typical for US architecture art-historians. Of course the argument is entirely flawed.

Old architecture with history has more owners and more tastes that a modern building stemming from a single vision. Beauty is not a mischmasch of different tastes and addons, beauty comes from a coherent and elegant design. You can have that in older buildings also, but generally it's the definition modern architecture which aligns with our definition of beauty. Which mostly contradicts the historical practice of postmodern architecture, a Mischmasch of envogue old styles, if baroque, renaissance, gothic, classic and so on to name the most prominent. With most buildings and cities having all these styles mixed together. In the end you end up with perl6 or C++. Everybody wants to add a new pretty corner there, and a new balcony there, and you need to say yes.

This is not beauty, beauty is Lisp or Forth, of Mies Van der Rohe. Modernism is the definition of beauty, postmodernism is the definition of warts. But you need to know and understand the concepts, or you dont get it.

A lot of this reads as if it was written by a villain from an Ayn Rand novel:

"a troubling idea came to the fore: that the architect was a distinctive individual, with a unique vision...

... We lost our ability to say that what we really craved was buildings that looked a bit like they had always done; buildings that one wouldn’t ever have to wonder who did them."

> As Modernism declared: ‘Form must follow function’

This is true, but there is nothing saying you cannot start with a functional baseline and add form on.

No slave labor.

Or at least, it's been outsourced too far away or its too underground to have them sculpting gargoyles in the summer.

Well, I guess Dubai is kind of ugly too.

tl;dr: modernism, sprawl, and aesthetics the author doesn't agree with.