Against the survival of the prettiest - Works in Progress Magazine

Many modern buildings put up today seem uglier than traditional ones around them. Some say this is because we’ve torn down the ugly old buildings, and only see the survivors. Are they right?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that many buildings are ugly. Every day, we encounter offices, apartment blocks, retail sheds, McMansions, warehouses and hospitals that are unpleasant to look at. But here is what seems to me to be a much stranger fact: most of us struggle to identify an ugly building built before about 1930, and acutely so before 1830. In my experience, this is often true even for people who like the best recent buildings as much as they like the best old ones and who think we have good reasons not to build in old styles today. Thoughtful friends of contemporary design normally enjoy and respect old towns, while agreeing that quite a few recent places are terribly designed.<br>This is plausibly one reason why older homes tend to command a price premium, even after controlling for factors like location – a remarkable fact that distinguishes housing from virtually all other goods, whose value falls over time. These trends were presumably part of what Milan Kundera referred to with his famous phrase ‘the uglification of the world’.

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Seaton Delaval Hall – an ugly building? From DavidRBadger on Flickr

If pressed, we can probably identify some borderline cases of ugly old buildings. Plenty of old buildings are clumsy, crude imitations of elite metropolitan styles. There are decrepit old buildings, which are sad to look at without being intrinsically ugly. Some people find highly ornate styles hard to stomach, like German Rococo, Churrigueresque or the temple architecture of Southern India. Old functional buildings, like mills, prisons and fortresses, can be bleak. Perhaps some of Hawksmoor’s and Vanbrugh’s buildings partake of ugliness of a kind. But there is an unmistakable quality of barrel-scraping about all this. Maybe Seaton Delaval, Nikkō Tōshō-gū and the Palazzo Pitti are ugly; but if they are, they are surely less ugly than countless buildings within walking distance of most of those reading this, and one wonders if they are really ugly in the same sense at all.<br>The claim that people tend to feel this way is, confessedly, based only on anecdotal evidence. But as anecdotal evidence goes, I think I have a lot of it. In 2019, I worked as a research assistant on the British government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. The Commission interviewed hundreds of people, and the unfavourable comparison of historic and many (not all) contemporary developments recurred constantly, quite regardless of the interviewee’s professional background or architectural orientation. What people did sometimes disagree about, though, is why this is.<br>The obvious explanation for why new buildings are uglier than old ones is that we build more ugly buildings today than we used to. But there is also a seemingly more sophisticated explanation, which draws on the idea of a survivorship bias.

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A hypothetical damage pattern on a Second World War bomber. Creative Commons Wikimedia.

The canonical story of a survivorship bias occurred during the Second World War, when the US military was analysing the damage its bombers had sustained from enemy fire. The statistician Abraham Wald pointed out that the Air Force’s records only included damage to bombers that had survived, meaning that all damage to the more vital parts of the planes had gone unrecorded. Paradoxically, therefore, the parts of planes which most needed armouring turned out to be exactly the ones with least recorded damage.<br>The survivorship bias theory about buildings starts from the premiss that people are less likely to demolish beautiful buildings than ugly ones, all else being equal. This will be partly because people like beauty, but also because the property owners who could afford to invest in beauty could also afford to invest in build quality. Thus, as the stock built in a given period ages, its uglier members will be demolished at a greater rate than its beautiful ones, leading to the proportion of beautiful buildings rising over time.<br>Eventually a situation might be reached in which only a handful of the most beautiful buildings have survived, generating an illusion that the buildings of that time were uniformly extremely beautiful. This is perhaps the situation with medieval build stock, of which only a tiny and completely unrepresentative sample remains today.<br>This is an elegant theory, and in my experience it attracts a lot of clever people. It also has the obvious advantage of removing the pressure to believe that we mysteriously got worse at making attractive buildings, at the same time as we were getting better at doing so many other things. Given what a...