Quote:
Originally Posted by photoLith
For whatever reason, humanity largely stopped caring after WW2 about architecture, if you can even call 99 percent of buildings today architectural. Even cheap houses and buildings back before WW2 for the most part had some character or architectural merit.
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Populism and democracy.
When a small elite held power in society, they could focus their energy and money (supported by education and taste) toward creating things of beauty.
Now we live in a much flatter society, which unfortunately has the nasty side effect of reducing all aspects of culture (from entertainment to architecture) to the lowest common denominator.
Communist countries were of course the purest demonstration of this, architecturally. Not only were the ubiquitous "commie blocks" ugly, but I believe they were intentionally so. Beautiful buildings are a
bourgeois indulgence, of course.
There are implications for planning and the way cities develop eveywhere. For example, the debate here in the UK about building on greenbelt. Some forward-thinking aristocrats once decided that it was important to preserve open spaces and places of beauty for the common good. It was a bit paternalistic, perhaps, but for the better. Now people want housing, and any housing will do, even cheap mass produced houses or flats on cul-de-sacs, and anyone who argues against this on aesthetic grounds is being "elitist".