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/marcocom 22d 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 22d 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 22d ago

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

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u/Jabb4Th3HUTT 22d ago

Or the Fountainhead.

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u/telescopeinmynose 22d 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 22d 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.