Have we given up on hating bad buildings?
Because we have a lot of bad buildings these days
I feel like it should be a much bigger story that pretty much every new office and apartment building these days is identical, and identically unpleasant and awful to look at. The style is known as “5-over-1,” and it emerged from the fertile combination of (a) a relaxed building code, and (b) Southern California aesthetic. It all makes sense when you look at these things that way, right? Low construction standards and Los Angeles chic.
Nobody is talking about this the way it should be talked about. There is some running commentary here and there—the New York Times did a report last month, and you can always be certain that if it’s really important and the Times is reporting on it, they’re extremely late to the beat—and some periodic grumbling on social media, but for the most part people just seem more or less resigned to this fate: An old warehouse is bulldozed, or an aging retail space is condemned, or a tract of land in a suburban sprawl is plowed under, and within several months you’ll see those familiar lines arise at the sight: Weird angles, bizarrely jutting façade, dull colors, Walgreens and/or Krispy’s Nashville Chikun on the ground floor. It all feels so cold, so heartless, as if it wasn’t actually designed by human beings but by something that was only crudely familiar with the human modalities.
You know what these buildings look like? They look like they were designed by artificial intelligence. By ChapGPT or some other similar robot. Like someone typed into one of those programs: “Design me an attractive building that can be built cheaply and house lots of people.” And the A.I. cobbled together every disparate conceptualization of “attractive” it had in its database, forcing 50 years’ worth of worthless architectural convention through a pulping machine and out through a digitized mechanical extruder, and this is what it came up with. Here Is Your Attractive Housing Structure, Human. It Is Ready For Occupation By Rental Tenant Inhabitants.
People should be hating these things more than they are. As I wrote last month regarding art, it is okay to hate bad things. That’s what hate is there for—not to hate people, whom we should always be disposed to forgive at all times, but things, the corrupters and ruiners of people and of the goodness which should as a rule sustain them. And these buildings are most assuredly ruinous: They are ugly, they are at once both formless and hideously formed, they make people depressed looking at them and I can only imagine they are extremely depressing to live in.
Have you met anyone who really, actually likes this style of architecture? Who is willing to defend it as an important and enriching contribution to the American cultural and infrastructural landscapes? Of course not. They weren’t made for importance and enrichment, they were made because some dudes somewhere did a market assay and decided that that one postindustrial administrative ward in your city could absorb a 25% high-dense cluster development with mixed-used mid-rise and options for expanded retrofit of the nearby foundry. Work expected to begin in summer, ready by spring 2025.
We can ask for more than this. We have a right to expect it. We can demand our city and state authorities stop allowing the places we love to become the sort of comically dystopian soulless wastelands people have been un-ironically warning about for decades. I understand there’s this endless running commentary about “affordable housing” and “housing crises” and whatever, but we can absolutely solve whatever real estate problems are currently at hand without resorting to this. Imagine someone telling you: “Oh, no, the only way to build more housing is to make it look cheap and ugly!” It’s ridiculous on its face. You can build well, relatively cheaply, and still attractively. It’s possible. But they’re not going to do that if the most we can muster is to look at these buildings, mutter, “Oh man, another one?” and then move on with our day. Start hating these buildings like they deserve and start demanding that the people in charge stop allowing them. That’s a good place to begin.