Was Modern Architecture A Mistake?

Source: Was Modern Architecture A Mistake?, Adam Something, 13:41, uploaded 2024-04-25, category Architecture / Urbanism, playlist index 1091.

Adam Something opens with a building in Stockholm that was voted the city’s ugliest in 2022. The Neo-Brutalist block houses the Stockholm School of Architecture, which makes the insult awkward in a useful way. Stockholm City Hall gives him the opposite image: a building that looks deliberate, civic, and legible to people who have never studied architecture. The question is how a profession moves from one to the other, and whether beauty can return to ordinary buildings.

The public’s view and the politics of taste

Something rejects the idea that ugly buildings are simply interesting buildings seen by an untrained eye. He accepts that a building can have architectural value that most people miss, yet he treats the demand for formal education as a dangerous way to dismiss public judgement. People live among buildings, walk past them, and use the spaces around them. Their response belongs in the discussion even when they lack the vocabulary of the profession.

That position has a political risk. The far right can take a dislike of modern buildings and turn it into a story about progressive degeneracy, cultural betrayal, or a plot against Western civilisation. Something spends several minutes parodying that move, including the fantasy that every building should carry statues of stern white men. The joke separates two things that often get pushed together: a reasonable desire for pleasant places and a reactionary story about who supposedly ruined them.

He gives the ordinary explanation for much of Europe’s post-war ugliness. Bombing destroyed a large part of the housing stock, governments had to build millions of homes quickly, and public budgets were thin. Those constraints produced a great deal of plain housing. He still thinks governments could have managed their money better, yet the history makes conspiracy an unnecessary explanation.

The same qualification excludes big-box stores and similar buildings at the edges of cities. Their car-centred settings give people little reason to look at a facade as they cross a car park. The target is the new architect-designed building inside a city, especially in Nordic countries, that wins professional approval whilst many residents experience it as cold or ugly.

Expertise, warships, and shared streets

Something explains the divide through a warship. Someone who follows naval design can look at a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser and see a 9,600-ton vessel powered by four LM2500 gas turbines. Everyone else sees a warship. The specialist’s enjoyment comes from knowledge that the object does not need to communicate to a passer-by.

That divide works well for ships because most people do not have to spend their days beside one. Buildings occupy the shared ground of a city. A city should offer places where people can meet and stay, so an architecture that mainly impresses architects and enthusiasts has missed part of its public task. Calling residents too stupid to understand a building turns a disagreement about the city into a status test.

The Berlin Palace provides Something’s main comparison. The original Berlin Castle stood as an imperial status symbol. The video presents the Palace of the Republic as the Soviet replacement after the Second World War, then describes Berlin’s decision to demolish it and rebuild the castle’s exterior. Both structures carried political meaning and both tried to project power. Their effects at street level differ.

The castle is large and imposing, yet its facade breaks down into things a person can recognise: windows, trim, repeated details, and smaller forms of ornament. Its surroundings support walking and contain cobblestones, bike racks, patches of green, and other details sized for a person moving through them. The Palace of the Republic appears in the video as a cold monolith. Its repetitive facade offers little to hold onto, while its setting places the observer beside a wide field of asphalt and cars.

Human scale is the video’s practical term for this difference. Buildings feel friendlier when their parts relate to the size and attention of the people who use them. Their surroundings matter just as much. A pleasant facade loses its force when the street makes walking unpleasant, and a restrained building can work well when its entrances, paths, trees, and materials give the ground level some care.

Ornament, repair, and the place to be

Something treats ornament as one way to show human intent. He uses a building in Poland as an example of decoration that feels made rather than mechanically repeated. Ornament can become tacky, yet its placement can also record a person’s choices in a way that a smooth, interchangeable facade does not. He compares this feeling to the difference between an image generated by an algorithm and a photograph or painting made by an artist. The point concerns the visible presence of a human decision, not a rule that every building needs historical decoration.

He then turns to Dresden, where much of the old centre looks historic even though the buildings are recent reconstructions of what the Second World War destroyed. People like the centre because its streets and facades give them somewhere to spend time. Nearby Soviet-era and newer residential areas receive the opposite judgement in his account. They function as places to leave, while the old town functions as a destination.

The distinction should apply to every residential district. Housing should give people a place to stay and spend time rather than treating the neighbourhood as a collection of buildings around a traffic route. Something points to Culdesac Tempe in Phoenix as a recent example. The car-free neighbourhood uses little ornament, yet its smaller scale and street arrangement make it more inviting than many new developments. Extra decoration and the wear that comes with time might improve it later. The basic plan already does much of the work because it avoids oversized blocks and car-centred streets.

Gigantism and the false view from above

Architectural gigantism creates a different failure. A large, conspicuous building or complex gets placed inside the urban fabric because architecture rewards designs that look impressive from above and give their authors professional visibility. Something imagines an architect receiving ten acres of vacant land inside a city. A fitting neighbourhood could join the existing streets and feel as though it belongs there. A monumental object is more likely to attract attention.

The video treats architectural renders as part of the same incentive. Renders use a fictional material that stays clean, flexible, and perfect under every condition. Their camera can float above a project and avoid the awkward distance from which a person will encounter it. Architectural Uprising calls the gap between the render and the finished place “fake views”. A project may look convincing from a bird’s-eye perspective, then feel empty, hostile, or overwhelming from the pavement.

This gap has a social consequence. People already feel that decisions about their cities arrive from above, made by investors, officials, or technical professionals whose names they never see. A new district of identical cubes, approved without much public involvement, confirms that feeling. The city becomes uglier through a process that also teaches residents that their judgement carries no weight.

Something’s proposed repair is modest. Architects and decision-makers should ask residents to help define what an appealing and useful place looks like. The result does not need to restore an imperial past or carry a political programme. A shared preference for streets that feel pleasant is enough to begin with.

Limits of the argument

The video is an informed lay account rather than an architectural history or a study of public taste. Its claims about human scale, ornament, and the experience of specific districts come through visual comparison. The examples make the argument easy to follow, yet the captions provide no measurements, survey data, or named research that would establish the general rules.

The claim that cities are 99% populated and used by lay people is presented as a rhetorical estimate. The same applies to the suggestion that most projects ignore life at ground level. The video describes a recognisable failure in contemporary development, although it does not show how common that failure is or separate the roles of architects, developers, planning authorities, and investors.

Something also keeps expertise in the picture. Public judgement should influence architecture because buildings shape daily life, whilst a popular preference cannot settle every question about safety, structure, conservation, or urban planning. He uses witch trials and blood-libel accusations as an extreme warning against rejecting experts whenever a majority disagrees with them. His conclusion is narrower: beauty in architecture should remain an ordinary public concern, with enough professional knowledge around it to prevent the concern from becoming anti-intellectualism.

Further reading / references

• Architectural Uprising, the Swedish movement Something mentions when discussing “fake views”.

The video description also lists image sources for Stockholm City Hall, Berlin’s Castle and Palace of the Republic, the FBI J. Edgar Hoover Building, the Scottish Parliament, the Hötorget buildings, the SIS Building in London, and Liljevalchs Konsthall.