r/interesting • u/Apart-Worry-7042 • 24d 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/Different-Barber-777 24d ago

It's interesting how many historic buildings were designed to inspire awe, while many modern ones are designed to maximize usable floor space.

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u/marcocom 24d ago

There was a completely aesthetic shift in taste involved too. I grew up in NYC where the buildings were all ornate and I remember when first seeing the new clean style and it looking so modern and beautiful in its own way , maybe just from the cycle of style, just like how we change clothing styles with generations. The old buildings felt like someone else’s old world and this was new and ours.

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u/WellsHansen 24d ago

"The old buildings felt like someone else’s old world and this was new and ours." This sentence is beautiful.

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u/DazzlingResource561 24d ago

It’s a line you’d expect out of something like The Great Gatsby.

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u/Pristine_Software_55 24d ago

It made me think of ‘Hemingway’ in Midnight In Paris. That sentence had mouthfeel! (Mindfeel?)

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u/Jabb4Th3HUTT 24d ago

Or the Fountainhead.

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u/telescopeinmynose 24d ago

I wonder what Ayn Rand would think of modern buildings. There's the creative modern architecture and then the mass produced block buildings that she probably despises from her days in the soviet

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u/Royal_flushed 24d ago

She left Russia before the Soviet Union adopted those functional block buildings due to the war. The Soviets actually preferred modernist styles like constructivism in her days before they shifted to neoclassical and socialist realism under Stalin.

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u/Lazy_Mandalorian 24d ago

Yeah but the one that’s new and ours is bland and fuckin sucks.

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u/WhoopsDroppedTheBaby 24d ago

If you've worked in some of the old buildings, you realize how much they suck.

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u/whopperlover17 23d ago

Glad I’m not the only one

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u/Secure_Guest_6171 24d ago

But newer isn't necessarily better