Real Feelings for Fake Beauty

the desire to live in a beautiful built environment can't be snarked away

Yale University

There’s a meme, of sorts, that pops up on Twitter from time to time: why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore? The sentiment is associated with a more general yearning for the past, the kind that asserts that America or Western civilization or human culture are in decline. There certainly must be a lot of people who harbor similar concerns, as evidenced by how these tweets tend to rack up thousands of “likes.” They’ll share a picture of some beautiful old building - Art Deco classics like the Chrysler Building are common, but also Gothic buildings, and neoclassical, and others - and ask why we don’t, or can’t, or won’t make beautiful buildings anymore. They’ll point to the aesthetic qualities of older buildings, remind us that we have vastly more advanced technology and are far richer today than when those beautiful buildings were built, and wonder why we don’t build for beauty these days.

Kangmin Lee | 이강민@kangminlee

Why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore?

7:01 AM · Dec 17, 2024 · 22.9K Views

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69 Replies · 68 Reposts · 1.2K Likes

Why are so many new fancy buildings generic and forgettable works of brushed steel and glass? Why so many new ordinary buildings cookie-cutter rectilinear jobs, almost entirely free of embellishment or decoration, all flat roofs and sharp edges, and neutral in both color and effect? Why do they all look like… that? You know what I mean by “that.” Sometimes the style is referred to as Late International or The Glass Box Style, but perhaps the term Value-Engineered Modernism is more apt. Whatever you call it, this kind of building is the architectural equivalent of a default font, a soul-crushing assembly line of sterile glass monoliths that erases local identity in favor of the numbing, cookie-cutter uniformity of global bureaucracy. It’s the corporation in building form.

As is true with all social media phenomena, there is a counter-chorus, and it expresses itself in condescending, sighing, superior tones. Part of this is related to the fact that the accounts lamenting the death of public aesthetics are often right--coded; certainly a lot of the complaints are coming from Twitter users with Greek statues for profile pictures. And really, any sentiment that’s repeated often enough on social media will attract mockery in time. But a good deal of the derision comes from the online side of the YIMBY movement, which in the last decade or so has become something like the caricature mainstream Dems made of the Bernie Sanders online army back in 2016 - that is, snarky, self-righteous, and fundamentally concerned with achieving in-group status through the mechanism of arguing about politics. YIMBYs are an imperfect but important force in a country that desperately needs to build more housing and which has all manner of stupid and sclerotic zoning rules. It’s generically true, though, that the more online you get the less useful any given political movement becomes, and Twitter YIMBYs seem absolutely attached to representing all of the worst elements of that group - they’re incurious, rude, reductive, averse to basic best practices of messaging, and above all else, tribal. (Politics gets stupid when politics becomes a way to belong rather than a way to to do things.) And they’ll have you know that lamenting the death of beautiful buildings is dumb, lol lol lol lol.

The Twitter YIMBYs tend to treat concern for aesthetics as a decadent demand in a world where we need to JUST BUILD. And their particular tactic is to insist that we don’t build attractive buildings anymore because doing so is just too expensive, and really, what’s more important, the unconquerable human desire to live surrounded by beauty, or our need to put people in homes??? Case closed! But not really. It turns out that it’s simply not true that building stylish and ornamented buildings is relatively more expensive today than it was in eras past. Read all about it. Yes, Baumol’s cost disease is real, and construction is a manpower-intensive industry, but almost a century after the Empire State Building was erected, we’ve got the benefit of modern logistics and supply chains and automated production of essential parts and so on. The cost of labor cannot explain the death of decoration in modern building design. And increasingly, there seems to be an acknowledgment that it’s easier to move the public to accept new construction when said new construction is inspiring. King YIMBY Matt Yglesias had a good post on this recently; as he says, we can look at the premium people will pay to live in townhouse neighborhoods where most of the construction happened 100+ years ago as a clue to what people actually like. Housing is expensive in both Park Slope and Hudson Yards, but there’s no question that the former is an aspirational bourgie vision that has stood the test of time while the latter is barely tolerated. And aesthetics plays a large role in that.

We’re wired to pursue beauty. We are not, however, wired to pursue authenticity.

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I live in New Haven county and I take walks around Yale’s campus a few times a month. These days I usually bring my baby boy with me. I live within a ten minute walk of the shore, so I walk by the ocean almost every day, but sometimes you’d like beauty of more man-made origins, and Yale has that kind of beauty in spades. As has been said many times, it’s a college campus that looks like the idealized vision of a college campus that lives in the heads of a lot of 18-year-olds, which is a key recruiting benefit. Harvard has a pretty campus, but it’s sensible and brick and utilitarian. Yale is… ornamented. The university has its fair share of boring buildings, though few ugly ones; most of the buildings outside of Old Campus are perfectly fine. (The skating rink is a personal favorite.) The school’s moneymaker is Old Campus, which looks like Edinburgh, like a city out of time, like a series of castles. Yale undergrads have been known to argue over which of their residential colleges are best equipped to resist an invasion by the Visigoths. And people really go for this stuff. I’m the type of person to make fun of the urge to attend college at a school that looks like Hogwarts, but… I get it. I totally get it. I mean, that’s why I go for so many walks there. It’s pretty.

Of course this advantage is built upon an aesthetic that is, in a sense, fake.

Yale is 325 years old, not very old at all by international standards but still the third oldest American college, after Harvard and William & Mary. And yet Old Campus isn’t even that old. The oldest surviving building at Yale, Connecticut Hall, is 270 years old - and somewhat ironically, looks much more like a Harvard building than the rest of the campus. Most of what you see in Old Campus was built after the Civil War. And even if those buildings had been built at the time of the university’s founding in 1701, they would not be period appropriate; New England buildings from the beginning of the 18th century aren’t Gothic in style or adorned with the kind of gargoyles and reliefs that are everywhere at Yale. Yale was built to look old, specifically styled after the “Oxbridge” fashion of England’s great universities. Its architectural style is, depending on how you look at it, symbolic, or aspirational, or postmodern, or perhaps fraudulent. It’s not like the school hides information about when its buildings were built or whether they’re made in a deliberately retro style. But most people who walk through campus have no idea that its buildings are just as decorative and fundamentally a work of fantasy as those in Disneyland. They just know, and love, how the campus feels.

I do know some people who have a viscerally negative reaction to the whole affair, for the record. The pretense offends them, I suppose. Certainly this is mainly true of people with knowledge of architecture and passionately-held aesthetic values, although there are some who just get a strange feeling of disquiet and inauthenticity from the place. And of course Harvard people have had a lot of fun at the expense of Yale’s pomo antiquity. Harvard has several buildings that are truly old, though still at good hundred years younger than the school itself; Massachusetts Hall there is some 30 years older than Yale’s oldest building. More to the point, Harvard’s campus in general stands as an architectural hodgepodge that demonstrates the flow of design history over time, which is what you would expect with a school approaching its 400th birthday.

Harkness Tower is where Yale’s attempt to establish a medieval character through modern building reaches its zenith. It’s done in a style called English Perpendicular Gothic, which flourished in the 14th and 15th century; the building was completed in 1921. It’s absolutely bedecked with gargoyles and statues and all kinds of ornamentation. Its function is equally aesthetic in nature: the tower, a memorial to a Yale student paid for by his fabulously wealthy mother, is a bell tower. It houses a carillon, a set of large bells that are played by keyboard. You can often walk by and hear a Yale student playing a modern hit. And that’s about it; there are no administrative offices in Harkness Tower, no classrooms. The building exists to look and sound beautiful. Again, there are some people who take offense to that sort of thing. But most people who tour around the campus don’t know that the buildings were made to look old; they just know that Yale is old and an Ivy and that Ivy League schools are built with a certain kind of grandeur. My guess is that, if they knew that Harkness Tower was a 20th-century facsimile of a 15th century style, built by oil money to honor an obscenely wealthy alum none of them had ever heard of, they wouldn’t much care.

Here’s a bit that will fry your noodle.

As suggested above, Yale divides its undergraduates into a series of residential colleges, small communities where students live, dine, and socialize throughout their time at Yale. There are fourteen of them now. Each student is assigned to one of the colleges in their first year, and that affiliation becomes their primary social and administrative home. This assignment is supposed to be random, aside from measures taken to maintain adequate gender and racial diversity, although it’s rumored that like most everything at Yale the children of wealthy alumni can get what they want as far as attending a particular college goes. The system, as I understand it, is also modeled on the undergraduate colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, aiming to make a large university feel more intimate and community-oriented. (Yale’s investment in aping the old British titans is considerable.) As students advance and spend more and more time in their major classes, and perhaps move off campus, their colleges become less central to their day-to-day lives, but one’s residential college remains a core part of their identity as an Eli, and (as I understand it) alums frequently donate to their colleges, specifically.

In the mid-1950s, Yale underwent an expansion that involved the creation of two new residential colleges, Ezra Stiles and Morse. For whatever reason, the college decided to buck its own history and build these new colleges in an identifiably modern style. They were designed, in fact, by Eero Saarinen, the neo-futurist architect who’s perhaps best remembered for designing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The buildings aren’t particularly futuristic looking, but they are identifiably modern, and they stick out like a sore thumb in their location nestled just next to Old Campus. And while I’m sure they have many proud alums, a lot of student hate the look of those colleges and dread being assigned there. Because most people don’t come to Yale to live in tasteful mid-20th-century modernist buildings; they come to go to college in medieval architecture. They come for Hogwarts. This could 100% be an urban legend, but I’ve heard tell that those two colleges have a hard time generating as much alumni donation as colleges that look more like the Yale ideal, so embittered are some who are assigned to them.

When Yale again expanded in the mid-2010s, they were determined not to make that same mistake. The two new colleges, Pauli Murry and Benjamin Franklin, were built in an updated Gothic style - brick, rather than the brownstone that makes up much of Old Campus, but identifiably retro in architecture and ornamentation, a return to Yale’s architectural bread and butter. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s story on the expansion ran under the headline “At Yale, 2 Costly New Colleges Aspire to Look Old.” Clearly, the university had come to understand what its brand really was and what made it most attractive to idealistic elite college students, the kind trying to decide whether to come to New Haven or to go to Stanford or Brown. Competition for the best students is always fierce. Why not lean into their most natural advantage?

But there’s something… off about the new colleges. The brick is a little too bright, the stones a little too free of grime. That area, set meaningfully far away from Old Campus, has a weird ersatz vibe to it; it doesn’t help that it was carved so deliberately out of preexisting space that there’s almost nothing immediately around it but city streets, giving it an odd, doll’s house kind of an atmosphere. The trees are scarce and young and thus shade is hard to come by. And the efforts to make the new buildings look old have a way of underlining the fact that they’re not. That one yellowed pane of glass in that picture there is meant to invoke the discolored glass of long ago, but of course the building it sits in is less than a decade old, and that yellow glass was carefully chosen and intentionally deployed. Here, it’s not so objectionable, but in some banks of windows in these buildings, there will be three or four colored panes, in yellow or pink or blue.

Worse are the “cracked” windows which, if you creep close enough to look, are in fact simply designed windows that have jagged lines of metal running through them, designed to look like natural cracks. I can’t find a good picture right now, but they’re wild to look at. And as you’d probably guess, these little flourishes just make the new colleges stand out in their newness even more; the statuary is too white, the lawns too well-manicured. The whole thing is hung with a creepy inauthenticity. But then, the older Old Campus buildings are also deeply inauthentic, and yet it doesn’t bother me at all; I “believe” the atmosphere when I walk among them. Their fakery is real enough that I can choose to buy into it. I’m able to accept the illusion, embrace the kayfabe. Which gets to the hoary old world of simulacra theory, to Baudrillard, and to the way the modern world keeps attempting to remake an old world that never existed, and to the relationship between beauty and self-deception. These are the things I think about as I wander around campus with my baby strapped to my chest.

I was walking around by the site of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray ten years ago, when they were nearing completion, with a friend who was Yale-affiliated. Even then I felt that there was something off about them. When I complained about the artifice, he said something wise: that I had to think in the timescales the university did. Old Campus was not as old as it pretended to be, but it was still old enough to look and feel old. In 50 years, he thought, the buildings that made up Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray would be sufficiently old that they would look as old as they were meant to feel and feel as old as they were meant to look, and no one would know the difference. And he was probably right.

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How do these two strands come together, the search for beauty in modern buildings and its discontents, and the strange relationship between age and artifice and authenticity in architecture, as exemplified by one of the most shamelessly elitist institutions left in the world? I’m not entirely sure, other than in this: the pursuit of aesthetic excellence is not a straight path, but it is one that people will always walk all the same, and we ignore the power of subjective aesthetics at our peril. People want their college to look like a college and not like an office park, and I think we should trust and honor that instinct.

What’s remarkable, when you sit with all of this long enough, is that the Yale campus essentially answers the Twitter debate all by itself. The YIMBYs are wrong that beauty is prohibitively expensive, but the debate is asking the wrong question anyway. The real question isn’t whether we can build beautifully, it’s whether we’re willing to admit what we actually want, which is to be surrounded by things that feel old and storied and earned, even when they aren’t. Yale understood this and built a fantasy, and the fantasy worked so well that a century later they felt compelled to extend it, and even their imperfect extension will probably fool people in another fifty years. The desire isn’t really for Gothic architecture specifically, or for Art Deco, or for any particular style. The desire is for the feeling that a place has been cared for across generations, that it meant something to the people who built it and to the people who came after. Beauty is the signal. Permanence is the message.

Which I know is an odd thing for me to say, given that I am a committed proponent of The New. A lot of those Twitter accounts that call for aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design in new buildings hate Brutalism, while I love it. And it’s odd, when you think about it, because whatever Brutalism may be, and no matter how much many people might hate it, it’s an architectural school passionately dedicated to aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design. It’s just that the people who want beauty in buildings don’t see it in Brutalism, and maybe they also see the style as an example of the decadent decline of the West, and I’m sure some of it them see it as a consequence of the pernicious influence of communism or the Jews…. There’s a lot going on, in calls for the beauty of the past. But at the core of all of this is the simple fact that taste is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I can almost believe that some people love the Corporate Modernism that’s expressed in so many hideous apartment buildings that stuff the DC suburbs. Almost. We are that which we are inspired by. Above this paragraph you’ll see an image of Beinecke, Yale’s rare books library, where one can find priceless works of art like a Gutenberg bible. Beinecke is not Brutalist in design (New Formalist, I reckon), but it is decidedly modernist, and it’s nestled in the very heart of Old Campus. And yet it works, somehow, in its environs, for the same reason I buy into the artifice of its neighbors, the architectural cosplay: because it looks good enough to earn that respect.

And here’s where I find myself making a kind of peace with the whole business of beautiful lies. I know that Old Campus is a stage set, that the gargoyles are props, that the medievalism is a borrowed costume from universities that were themselves borrowing from an even older tradition. I know all of that, and I go back anyway, baby on my chest, to walk among the Gothic opulence. My friend was right about the timescales, but I think he was pointing at something bigger than he intended: authenticity is itself a function of time. The new colleges at Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray feel fake not because they are fake - Old Campus is equally fake - but because they haven’t yet had the time to make us forget that we’re in on the trick. Beauty, it turns out, requires a kind of willing amnesia. We have to be allowed to forget the scaffolding. And maybe that’s the real argument for building ornately and lavishly right now, today, in our own cities and neighborhoods: not that we’ll love it immediately, but that someday, if we build it with enough sincerity and enough craft, people will walk past it and feel, without quite knowing why, that human beings once cared about beauty enough to live and work inside of it, and might still.