Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017)
Industrialization and Baumol's cost disease are the reasons why.<p>For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously. Industrial bakeries are far more efficient so only a select few can afford to pay for good bread, and so there are far fewer individual bakers, and they're more expensive because there's less demand - they can't make it up on volume. It's the same with artisans.<p>My father was a plasterer in his 20s, and worked with old men who did the ceiling decorations in the British Embassy in Dublin. But they were the last of their kind, because nobody wanted that any more. And now they're all dead.<p>Richly decorated edifices could be risen today, but they're far more expensive, and thus we can't afford to roll the dice and end up with a bunch of good buildings by process of survival. Instead, everything is mediocre and designed to amortise to zero value within a few decades, to be torn down and built again, not better, merely different.