Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit
Somehow I feel we here in our little forum are complicit in this. For decades, we have eagerly awaited the passing of various population thresholds and the acquisition of things like "500-footers".
"This place has 11 million people and five supertalls".
The total reign of quantity. The faith that quantity alone would produce certain qualities.
A billion monkeys on a billion construction sites with the hope that they will build prewar Manhattan.
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I find there's a lot of talk about building aesthetics here and people complaining about ones they find ugly. Some people more than others of course. lol
But I suspect it largely comes down to incentives. The main ways you can cause an area's architecture of be attractive overall are:
a) master plans like Haussmann's Paris which only works if the person or people doing the plan have taste that you like and enough power/control over the process to enforce it.
b) Heavily prescriptive planning such as requiring certain material, styles, colours, and other elements. And any requirements need to be compatible with the market in a capitalist society. If your requirements add too much cost then no one will build.
c) Independent entities who want to invest in aesthetics either for their reputation or some sense of civic good or duty.
Pre-war Manhattan would be a combination of the last two which a heavy emphasis on the 3rd. Corporations wanted the prestige of grand offices and were willing to fork over money to achieve it. And there were planning prescriptions like the set backs rule to allow sunlight. Today large corporations do sometimes spend extra to make a building beautiful but often there's a greater emphasis on cost and efficiency. Plus Ottawa doesn't have that many large corporations and the prevailing styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were generally more ornate. So it would be mostly down to the government to build stuff itself or to set prescriptions for architecture. For most democratic governments, building stuff themselves is now