When walking around, have you ever stopped and took a long look at your surroundings? Have you ever taken a look at apartments, homes, public areas like parks, schools, or large stores or malls? Doesn’t the architecture look a bit bland to you? When looking into more older buildings, you start to realize that the older the building, the more beautiful the architecture and the modern buildings of today start to look more and more bland. But when and why did they start doing this? Why the sudden change in taste?
Modernism
As the years went by, naturally, we all have changes in taste and perhaps everyone of tired of the big old overdesigned building and wanted rather to go for a simple look. Or maybe there was a benefit to doing so that made us make the change to the look in architecture for the future. In 1929, the US had just come out of The Great Depression, and not even a decade later, WW2 started, and 3 years after that, the US joined the war. Why is this important? Well, to put it simply, the US had a lot going on in the 1900s. Between the war and economic struggle, the last thing the US had to worry about was how pretty the buildings look like, so they cut back on that.
Aftermath
After the war, housing problems started to rise due to all the veterans returning from the war. Specifically in Europe, there was a housing crisis after WW2, and not long after the war, there was the Mid-20th century “Baby Boom”, which basically meant that a lot of people had kids around this time, adding to the demand of housing. In order to solve this, houses were built to be less beautiful and more simplistic so that they could built quick, cheap and easily. As this practice continued, homes began to be seen less like places to live and more like commodities as the years went by, thus resulting in low quality homes live overpriced small apartments and so on. But what about public areas or buildings like big malls, shops, parks, etc.?
Urbanization
Also around the 1900s, roads as we know them today started to be built, and in order to have all these roads, we needed land. This resulted in a mass car-centric urban planning for the future of architecture, which was the final nail in the coffin for our beautiful architecture. Massive roads and freeways do not compliment wonderful built structures at all. For example, say that you were admiring an area that does in fact have one of those beautiful buildings from an older time, however you are interrupted by the loud noise of the freeway, and the smell of exhaust gas. Not to mention the parking lot is full of a lot of cars and kind of take away from the beauty of the building. Doesn’t it take away from the experience? It would certainly make me want to go home, and so would many surprisingly. No one really socializes and in turn, doesn’t feel the need to stay in these public areas anyways.
Conclusion
After analyzing the reason more closely, we can now see that the sudden change of taste in architecture was one derived from convenience, circumstance, urbanization, high demand and even our overall change in society. We learned that past events, although decades away at this point, really impacted our future lives, even up until now. So is that it? No more beautiful and cool looking buildings? Well, only time will tell, but from the looks of it, it certainly does seem that way.