The elusive goal of lasting beauty in web design

I think what's lost in this is the fact that architecture, once constructed, is fixed in space and barring any unforeseen disaster, is necessarily used on a daily basis by a group of people. It is often prohibitively expensive to raze a structure and start anew, is that a constraint we have in web design?

Architecture fosters an ongoing relationship that evolves over time: shock turns to acceptance, cleverness becomes irritation, etc. The relationship between the thing and its consumers is no different between architecture, the abandoned ipod or even the humble webpage, but we adjust our expectations differently based on how quickly we can replace them.

Fadell's point in the article, i think, is that we shouldn't expect all consumer products to be disposable, which is why i think he uses architecture as his foil.

I think it's unfair to say that web design as thing doesn't fit into the environment or that it doesn't have lasting beauty, but it certainly doesn't generate the sort of physical artifacts that people romanticize in any of the other graphic arts. You can yank a poster off a bulletin board and hang it on your wall, but you can't very well do the same with a website. Let's be honest, that page might not even be there tomorrow.

Finally, are zines timeless? Newspapers? Posters? Movie advertisements? Craigslist? By what metric do we assign that label? Why? Are they really timeless? Don't they all echo the hopes and fears of their times?