Evolutionary Architecture: Introduction

One of my biggest passions is architecture. Beautiful architecture never bores me —Whether I find it in an extravagant Sicilian baroque cathedral, an imposing neoclassical townhouse in London or one of the many art nouveau buildings in Barcelona. Many of my trips revolve around visiting places of with pretty buildings.

During my long walks through old city centres, including those of Amsterdam, London, Havana and Florence, I always find modern buildings to be exceptionally ugly compared to old buildings. Walk down a historic street in Europe, and you’ll likely spot it — a brutal concrete box squatting between elegant old townhouses, like a gap in a row of teeth. Even the simplest medieval buildings – built without any thought for beauty when building methods and materials were very basic – look better to me than modern structures. The latter are often intentionally asymmetrical, unadorned concrete structures that, in my view as well as those of many others, damage the public aesthetic.

Why is modern architecture so insufferably hideous? I'm not the first person to ask this question. People have been complaining about the ugliness of modern buildings ever since modernism¹ emerged in the early 1900s among communist idealists. Since then, surveys have consistently shown that an overwhelming majority of people dislikes modern architecture.

Defying public preferences, modern architects have continued their aesthetic onslaught — their designs are built anyway, time and again. When people object, they're usually told they'll learn to like it eventually or that beauty shouldn't matter in architecture anyway. But people still hate these buildings, which suggests we should take their complaints seriously. Beauty does matter, and modern architecture seems unavoidably hideous.

What this series covers

This series will have eight articles:

Articles 1-4: I’ll cover human universals² in the experience of architectural beauty. Evidence from history, psychology, evolution and brain science shows that humans universally prefer certain features in buildings, like symmetry and decoration. These preferences come from our evolutionary past. You'll discover why you instinctively find some buildings beautiful and others ugly, and you’ll learn how to spot the features that make buildings beautiful.

Article 5: After explaining these preferences and where they come from, I'll explain how architecture evolved over the centuries until modernism took over. Like evolution in nature, architectural styles used to develop through a kind of natural selection based on what worked best.

Article 6: I'll derive a set of universal principles for good architecture based on human nature and the process explained in article 5. It’s exactly the rejection of those principles that sets apart modernism. By sticking to these principles, architects can make their designs beautiful. It’s science!

Article 7: I'll explain why modern architecture has failed to win over the public and was doomed from the start. Its rejection of the principles in article 6 is what makes modernism unique in history and inevitably ugly.

Article 8: Finally, I'll present data on the economic value of traditional architecture and explain how property developers and investors can profit from it. I'll also cover solutions including policy changes, education, and using the universal principles from article 6.

Who this is for

This series aims to give architects, property developers, urban planners, policy makers and architecture enthusiasts useful and interesting scientific insights. Understanding these ideas will help:

• Property developers and investors make better returns

• Architects become more popular

• Policy makers create cities that people actually enjoy

I hope you'll enjoy reading this series. Please leave comments if you have thoughts – your feedback will help me improve my ideas.

Click here for the next article of this series.

1. For simplicity I use the term modernism to also refer to the nontraditional styles that have come after, including postmodernism.

2. ‘A phenomenon that is found in the same form irrespective of cultural setting and/or time period. Such universals are typically construed as rooted in a common biological and evolutionary-based heritage.’ (retrieved on 13 October 2021 from https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/using-internet-study-human-universals/13405)