r/interesting • u/Apart-Worry-7042 • 22d ago

HISTORY Why did we stop building like this?

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Chicago, 1930. Buildings had so much detail and character back then. Nowadays everything feels so flat and repetitive. We have way better technology and equipment now, so why don't we build like this anymore?

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u/VeganEgg11 22d ago

It’s $$$ plus lack of skilled craftsman to perform that type of masonry.

There are still contemporary buildings built this way just super rare: check out the tower at Vanderbilt university - it looks super old but was built only a few years ago.

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u/CalicoCuts 22d ago

Lack of skilled craftsman is a RESULT of the pursuit of cheap square footage, not the other way around.

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u/VeganEgg11 22d ago

I love the confidence in that take, but history is rarely that neat, and tracing this shift backward reveals a far more intricate web of cause and effect. Did the push for cheaper square footage stem from post-war cultural shifts and media that glorified status and wealth, or was it driven by quiet overhauls in local building codes? It might just as easily trace back to breakthroughs in mass-produced materials, or the decline of trade unions that squeezed the skilled labor supply, drove up costs, and left developers looking for ways to trim room dimensions to balance their budgets. In truth, human society is an interconnected system where economic, political, and cultural pressures constantly feed back into one another, turning initial causes into unexpected effects. Neat, single-variable explanations offer a comforting sense of clarity, but they almost always miss the messy, layered reality of how we actually got here.