Ornament was abandoned, classical proportions were questioned, and centuries of accumulated knowledge were often dismissed as outdated.

Yet across Europe, the streets and buildings that continue to inspire admiration are frequently those built long before modernism.

Perhaps the future of architecture does not require another revolution, but a rediscovery of what we have forgotten..

The Paradox of Architectural Progress

Walk through the historic centres of Paris, Vienna, Prague, or Rome, and one encounters something increasingly rare in contemporary urban development: architectural harmony.

Buildings of different ages and styles coexist within a recognisable urban language. Their facades are carefully proportioned, their materials possess texture and depth, and their streets create a sense of enclosure that feels both intimate and monumental.

These environments were not created by a single architect or according to one fashionable theory. They evolved over generations, shaped by local craftsmanship, cultural traditions, available materials, and an understanding of human scale.

Contrast this with many contemporary developments: isolated buildings, extensive glass surfaces, simplified facades, and architectural forms that could belong almost anywhere in the world.

Modern architecture has undoubtedly produced remarkable achievements. Its innovations in engineering, construction, sanitation, and spatial organisation have transformed the way we live. Yet technological progress does not automatically guarantee aesthetic progress.

A building may be efficient, innovative, and structurally impressive without contributing meaningfully to the beauty of its surroundings.

This raises an uncomfortable question for the architectural profession: if architecture has continuously progressed, why do so many of Europe’s most admired urban environments belong to earlier centuries?

Perhaps the answer lies in recognising that innovation and improvement are not always synonymous.

As Christopher Alexander observed in The Timeless Way of Building:

“There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.”

Beauty Is Not an Outdated Concept

For centuries, European architecture treated beauty as an essential responsibility.

From the measured proportions of Renaissance palaces to the elaborate craftsmanship of Baroque churches and the restrained elegance of Georgian townhouses, architecture sought to create environments that were not merely functional, but emotionally and culturally meaningful.

Beauty was expressed through proportion, rhythm, symmetry, ornament, material, and the relationship between individual buildings and the wider city.

The arrival of modernism challenged many of these principles. Influential architects and theorists argued for a new architectural language suited to industrial society, one that rejected historical imitation and embraced new materials and construction techniques.

Some of these ambitions were necessary. European cities faced overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and serious housing shortages. Modernist architects sought solutions to genuine social and technological problems.

But in the process, a broader architectural assumption took hold: that historical forms belonged to the past, and that serious contemporary architecture should visibly distinguish itself from them.

The consequences of this attitude deserve reconsideration.

Why should a cornice, an arch, or a beautifully proportioned window be considered less appropriate today simply because similar elements were used centuries ago?

We do not reject literature because it follows established grammatical principles. We do not dismiss classical music because it uses harmonies developed in earlier periods.

Why, then, should architecture be expected to abandon its own accumulated vocabulary in order to be considered contemporary?

Tradition need not mean repetition without thought. It can provide a foundation for invention, allowing architects to develop new buildings within an enduring language of beauty.

Vitruvius, in De Architectura, articulated the classical foundation of this view with precision:

“Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other; the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole. Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other. Nothing requires the architect’s care more than the due proportions of buildings.”

Even a leading modernist recognised the same threshold. Le Corbusier wrote:

“You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in.”

Europe’s Architectural Identity Is Worth Preserving

One of Europe’s greatest architectural strengths is its diversity.

The narrow canal houses of Amsterdam, the limestone terraces of Bath, the painted facades of Bavarian towns, and the Renaissance palazzi of Florence are all products of distinct cultural and geographical circumstances.

Their differences are not arbitrary decorations. They reflect local materials, climates, construction methods, social customs, and centuries of artistic development.

Traditional architecture gives physical expression to the identity of a place.

Yet much contemporary development follows an increasingly international visual language. Glass curtain walls, flat roofs, repetitive facades, and standardised construction systems appear across cities with profoundly different histories.

This does not mean contemporary architecture is incapable of responding to local context. Many architects work thoughtfully with regional materials and traditions. Nevertheless, the economic pressures of global construction and the influence of internationally fashionable styles can encourage a troubling uniformity.

A new residential building in Munich should not necessarily look like one in Rotterdam. A development in Prague should not have to abandon the architectural character that makes Prague distinctive.

Preserving European architectural identity does not require freezing cities in time. It requires allowing their traditions to continue evolving.

A living tradition produces new buildings. A dead tradition survives only in museums.

Adolf Loos, despite his famous attack on ornament, still insisted on this disciplined continuity:

“Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side.”

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The Sustainability of Building for Centuries

The case for traditional architecture is not exclusively aesthetic. It also raises important questions about sustainability.

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Imagine owning a beautiful nineteenth-century apartment in Paris. Your building has tall windows and a limestone façade, with carefully proportioned balconies and decorative stonework that gives the street its distinctive character. The neighboring buildings follow a similar architectural language, creating the kind of harmonious streetscape that attracts millions of visitors to the French capital every year.

Then one day, the building across the street is demolished.

A developer acquires the site and proposes a contemporary apartment block with irregular windows and a façade of exposed concrete. Its architect describes the design as an exciting contrast to the surrounding historic architecture, while the developer promises that the project will contribute to the city’s architectural diversity.

The building satisfies the applicable technical requirements and receives planning permission.

Twenty years later, the architect has moved on to other projects and the developer has sold the property. But the residents of the neighborhood must continue looking at the building every day, potentially for the next century.

Why should they have so little control over something that permanently changes their surroundings?

We have become accustomed to the idea that architecture is primarily a matter of personal taste. Architects should enjoy creative freedom, developers should be allowed to express themselves through their investments, and cities should supposedly welcome whatever architectural styles happen to be fashionable.

Yet this understanding of architecture ignores one important fact.

A building belongs to its owner, but its appearance becomes part of everybody else’s city.

You can choose the furniture inside your home and decorate your rooms however you wish. Those decisions primarily affect you and the people you invite inside.

The exterior of a building is different.

It forms part of a street shared by thousands of people who never consented to its design. It changes the experience of walking through a neighborhood and can influence the attractiveness of surrounding properties. In some cases, it permanently alters the character of an entire district.

European governments already recognize that buildings have consequences beyond their property boundaries. That is why they regulate their height and placement, along with numerous other aspects of construction.

So why should beauty be treated differently?

Perhaps the time has come to consider something that many contemporary architects would find deeply uncomfortable: making beautiful architecture a legal requirement.

1. We Already Regulate Almost Everything About Buildings Except Their Beauty

Anyone who has attempted to build a house in Europe knows that architectural freedom is far more limited than it initially appears.

In Germany, a property owner cannot simply purchase a plot and construct whatever building he desires. Development is governed by a combination of federal planning law and state building regulations, while municipalities can establish detailed requirements through local development plans.

A German Bebauungsplan may determine the permissible use of a property and the amount of development allowed. It can also regulate building heights and the position of structures on a plot.

State building codes establish technical requirements covering matters such as structural safety and fire protection.

Depending on the location, additional rules may apply to parking and environmental performance.

In other words, the state already exercises considerable authority over what private individuals are permitted to build.

Yet the aesthetic requirements are frequently less precise than the technical ones.

This does not mean Germany has no architectural design regulations. German state building codes generally contain provisions concerning the appearance of buildings, and municipalities may adopt local design statutes known as Gestaltungssatzungen.

These can regulate visible features such as roof forms and façade materials, particularly in historic districts.

But outside areas with strong local design controls, developers may enjoy considerable freedom to introduce architectural forms that differ dramatically from their surroundings.

The result is a peculiar situation.

A municipality can spend years debating the number of parking spaces required for a residential development while giving far less attention to whether the building will make its street more attractive.

The same contradiction appears elsewhere in Europe.

In England, planning authorities can consider design quality and the relationship between new buildings and their surroundings. The National Planning Policy Framework supports beautiful and well-designed places, while local authorities may use design codes and conservation policies.

Nevertheless the application of these principles varies considerably.

Some communities establish clear expectations for new developments while others rely on broad planning judgments and architectural assessments.

The question is whether this approach goes far enough.

Consider a hypothetical apartment development in a historic German town.

A developer proposes a five-storey building with a flat roof and an irregular arrangement of windows. Its façade uses large composite panels that contrast sharply with the neighboring buildings.

The project meets the relevant height restrictions and provides the required residential accommodation.

A different architect proposes a building of identical dimensions but with a traditional rendered façade and vertically proportioned windows. It follows the established roofline of the street and incorporates architectural detailing inspired by local building traditions.

Both buildings provide the same number of apartments.

Both can meet the same structural and energy requirements.

Yet their effects on the street could be dramatically different.

Why should the local community be unable to insist that the new building respect the architectural character of its surroundings?

The usual objection is that beauty is subjective.

And of course architectural preferences differ.

Some people admire the simplicity of modernist design while others prefer the ornament and proportions of traditional European architecture.

But disagreement does not make architectural judgment impossible.

Cities already make aesthetic decisions when protecting historic monuments and regulating advertisements. They also establish expectations for the appearance of public spaces.

The relevant question is whether these judgments can be translated into clear and predictable rules.

Vitruvius long ago treated beauty as a measurable matter of order and proportion rather than pure opinion:

Architecture depends on Order (in Greek τάξις), Arrangement (in Greek διάθεσις), Eurythmy, Symmetry, Propriety, and Economy (in Greek οἰκονομία). Order gives due measure to the members of a work considered separately, and symmetrical agreement to the proportions of the whole. It is an adjustment according to quantity… Arrangement includes the putting of things in their proper places and the elegance of effect which is due to adjustments appropriate to the character of the work… Eurythmy is beauty and fitness in the adjustments of the members. This is found when the members of a work are of a height suited to their breadth, of a breadth suited to their length, and, in a word, when they all correspond symmetrically. Symmetry is a proper agreement between the members of the work itself, and relation between the different parts and the whole general scheme, in accordance with a certain part selected as standard. Thus in the human body there is a kind of symmetrical harmony between forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small parts; and so it is with perfect buildings.

If governments can legally require buildings to respect a maximum height, they can also require them to respect the character of the street.

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2. Paris and Europe’s Historic Cities Prove That Architectural Rules Can Create Beauty

Some of Europe’s most admired streets did not emerge from a system in which every architect enjoyed unlimited freedom to express himself.

They developed within architectural traditions shaped by building customs and political decisions, alongside rules governing the relationship between private buildings and public streets.

Paris provides one of the clearest examples.

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European cities spend millions protecting their historic architecture while some of their ugliest postwar buildings occupy the most valuable locations. What if we stopped treating every concrete building as something that must be preserved and started rebuilding the beautiful streets we lost?

Imagine walking through the historic center of a beautiful European city. The streets are lined with elegant townhouses whose facades contain the kind of craftsmanship that has almost disappeared from modern construction. There are decorative window frames and carefully proportioned entrances while the buildings fit together in a way that makes the entire street attractive.

Then you turn a corner and find an enormous concrete building from the 1960s.

Its facade is stained and its windows are arranged in repetitive rows. The ground floor is occupied by a supermarket while the upper floors contain offices that could be found in almost any European city. There is little about the building that reflects the history of the place and even less that makes you want to stop and admire it.

The building may have replaced several beautiful houses destroyed during the Second World War. Perhaps those houses survived the bombing and were demolished during the great wave of postwar redevelopment. Either way the result is the same: a piece of the historic city disappeared and something far less attractive took its place.

We have become so accustomed to these buildings that we rarely question why they are still there.

We discuss restoring historic facades and protecting medieval streets. We spend public money preserving architectural details that earlier generations created because they believed beauty mattered. Yet when a large modern building disrupts the appearance of an otherwise beautiful neighborhood we tend to assume that nothing can be done.

But buildings are replaced all the time.

Developers demolish old offices to construct new apartments and cities approve redevelopment projects whenever the economics make sense. Nobody seriously believes that every shopping center or commercial building constructed during the twentieth century must stand forever.

So why should we accept that the unattractive buildings occupying some of Europe’s most important historic locations are permanent features of our cities?

What if we began identifying the worst examples of postwar architecture and replacing them with buildings that respect the traditional character of their surroundings?

This would be expensive and politically controversial. It would also raise difficult questions about property rights and environmental responsibility.

But before dismissing the idea as unrealistic we should look at the European cities that have already attempted something similar.

Because in several remarkable cases the results suggest that rebuilding beautiful streets is entirely possible.

Léon Krier, the Luxembourgish architect and urbanist who planned Poundbury, argued that the modernist approach was fundamentally hostile to human needs:

“Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings… based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.”

1. Frankfurt and Dresden Proved That Lost Beauty Can Be Rebuilt

For decades the area between Frankfurt’s cathedral and its historic town hall looked very different from the medieval neighborhood that once stood there.

Much of Frankfurt’s old town was destroyed during the Second World War. In the decades that followed the city reconstructed some historic landmarks but also introduced modern buildings that reflected the architectural priorities of the postwar period.

One of the most prominent was the Technisches Rathaus, a large concrete municipal complex constructed during the 1970s.

The building occupied land that once formed part of Frankfurt’s historic street network. Its scale and appearance contrasted sharply with the surviving historic architecture nearby.

Eventually Frankfurt decided to remove it.

The Technisches Rathaus was demolished between 2010 and 2012 and the city began reconstructing a portion of its historic old town.

The project became known as the Dom-Römer Quarter.

Instead of replacing the municipal complex with another enormous modern structure the city reintroduced a network of smaller buildings on historic plots.

The development consisted of 35 buildings, including 15 reconstructions of historic houses and 20 new buildings designed to complement their surroundings.

Some of the reconstructed houses reproduced historic facades while others incorporated surviving architectural fragments. The new buildings followed design principles intended to create a coherent streetscape.

The project opened to the public in 2018.

And the transformation was extraordinary.

Where a large concrete municipal building once stood visitors can now walk through narrow streets lined with traditional-looking houses. The area contains apartments and shops while its architecture reconnects the cathedral with the historic town hall.

The project was not cheap.

According to the construction consultancy Drees & Sommer, which worked on the development, the construction costs were approximately €200 million.

That is a substantial sum for a relatively small neighborhood.

But the result also demonstrates something important about urban redevelopment.

Frankfurt did not simply restore a single historic monument. It reconstructed part of the urban environment that made the old town attractive.

The project revived historic street patterns and created a collection of buildings that work together.

Critics questioned the authenticity of reconstructed architecture and argued that the city was creating an idealized version of its past.

But I find that objection difficult to accept as a reason to prefer the concrete building that previously occupied the site.

The medieval houses were destroyed during the war and the city could not recover the original buildings in their entirety.

Yet it could recover something of their appearance and restore the character of the surrounding streets.

And that is precisely what it chose to do.

Frankfurt provides a compelling example of what can happen when a city decides that an unattractive modern development should make way for something more beautiful.

Dresden offers another.

Before the bombing of February 1945 the Neumarkt surrounding the Frauenkirche was one of the most beautiful urban spaces in Germany.

Its Baroque buildings formed a magnificent setting for the great domed church.

The bombing destroyed much of the area and the Frauenkirche remained a ruin for decades.

After German reunification a remarkable reconstruction effort began.

The Frauenkirche was rebuilt and consecrated in 2005 while the surrounding Neumarkt gradually regained much of its historic appearance.

The church’s reconstruction cost €182.6 million, according to the Frauenkirche Foundation. Of that total €102.8 million came from donations.

The wider redevelopment involved additional expenditure.

In an interview published by Dresden Magazin, a former city planning official estimated that privately developed quarters around the Neumarkt represented approximately €650 million in investment. Public works on streets and infrastructure accounted for further expenditure.

These figures reveal the enormous financial commitment required to reconstruct historic urban spaces.

But they also show that such projects can attract substantial private investment when the planning framework provides a clear vision.

The reconstructed Neumarkt is not a perfect recreation of the city before 1945. Some buildings follow contemporary designs while others reproduce historic facades.

Yet the area has regained an architectural character that would have been impossible if planners simply insisted that every new building must express the style of the present.

Frankfurt and Dresden demonstrate that reconstruction can work at the scale of an entire neighborhood.

The question is whether other European cities should follow their example.

Léon Krier maintained that reconstruction must happen at the scale of coherent quarters rather than isolated objects:

“A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit.”

2. How Much Would It Actually Cost to Replace an Ugly Building?

The most obvious objection to demolishing unattractive modern buildings is the expense.

And it is a serious objection because replacing a functioning building involves far more than paying a demolition contractor to knock it down.

Consider a hypothetical postwar office building occupying a prominent site in a historic German city.

Suppose the building contains 5,000 square meters of gross floor area and stands on land where traditional townhouses once existed.

A developer wants to demolish the structure and replace it with a group of traditional-looking buildings containing apartments and commercial space.

The first expense is acquiring the property.

In a desirable city center the value of the land and existing building could be several million euros or considerably more. The price would depend on the location and the income generated by the property.

If the building contains tenants the owner may also face lease obligations and the practical cost of relocating occupants.

Only after resolving these issues can the redevelopment begin.

Demolition itself is not necessarily the largest expense but it can still be substantial.

The contractor must disconnect utilities and assess the structure before removing it. Older buildings may contain asbestos or other hazardous materials that require specialist handling.

A large concrete building may also be difficult to dismantle because of its structural design and proximity to neighboring properties.

For illustration we can assume demolition and site preparation costs of €150 to €350 per square meter of existing gross floor area.

For a 5,000-square-meter building that would produce an estimated cost of €750,000 to €1.75 million.

These are illustrative assumptions rather than a verified market quotation. Actual demolition costs could fall outside this range depending on the structure and site conditions.

Then comes the new construction.

Suppose the replacement development contains the same 5,000 square meters of gross floor area.

If we assume construction costs of €3,000 to €4,500 per square meter, the main building works would amount to approximately €15 million to €22.5 million.

Again this is an illustrative budget range rather than a standard price for traditional architecture.

A simple building with rendered facades might fall toward the lower end while an elaborate reconstruction using hand-carved stone could cost considerably more.

Architectural and engineering fees must also be considered alongside planning expenses and financing costs.

There may be additional expenditure on public infrastructure or underground parking.

And the developer needs a contingency because unexpected problems frequently arise during construction.

A simplified calculation might look like this:

ExpenseIllustrative costDemolition and site preparation€0.75–1.75 millionNew construction€15–22.5 millionProfessional fees, approvals and contingency€3–5 millionTotal before land acquisition and financing€18.75–29.25 million

This example shows why large-scale reconstruction cannot be undertaken casually.

A city considering such a project must also ask whether the completed buildings can generate enough revenue to justify the investment.

If the new development contains apartments in a desirable historic neighborhood there may be strong demand.

But that does not guarantee financial viability.

Suppose the completed project provides 3,500 square meters of saleable residential space after accounting for circulation and commercial areas.

At an assumed average sale price of €7,000 per square meter the residential units would generate €24.5 million in revenue.

Commercial space might provide additional income.

Yet the developer still needs to recover the land acquisition cost and pay financing expenses while earning a reasonable return for taking the risk.

A project that appears attractive from an architectural perspective may therefore be financially difficult unless the site is particularly valuable or the municipality contributes to the redevelopment.

This is one reason reconstruction projects often require cooperation between public authorities and private investors.

The city can establish a master plan and provide the planning framework while developers finance individual buildings.

Frankfurt’s Dom-Römer project followed a distinctive public-led development model because the city wanted to control the architectural outcome.

Other cities might use different approaches.

They could sell publicly owned plots subject to architectural requirements or encourage private owners to redevelop existing buildings through changes to planning rules.

There is also an important distinction between rebuilding an entire structure and changing its appearance.

If a postwar building is structurally sound and its floor plans remain useful it may be possible to renovate the facade instead of demolishing it.

A plain concrete building could receive new windows and a carefully designed exterior while retaining much of its existing structure.

This might offer a less expensive route to improving the appearance of a historic street.

It would not recreate the original street pattern or correct every problem with the building’s proportions.

But it could produce a substantial visual improvement without the cost of complete reconstruction.

The sensible approach is therefore to consider several options.

Some buildings may justify demolition while others would be better transformed through renovation.

What matters is that architectural beauty becomes part of the calculation rather than an afterthought.

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3. Why Are We Protecting Ugly Buildings Just Because They Are Old?

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For centuries Europeans built beautiful cities that people still travel across the world to admire. Today we spend millions preserving their historic buildings while allowing architects and developers to construct ugly modern buildings right beside them. How did we end up with a system that protects the beauty of the past but seems so indifferent to the beauty of the future?

Walk through the historic centre of Vienna and you encounter entire streets of magnificent apartment buildings whose facades carry elegant window frames and carefully designed entrances, their proportions lending the street a harmony that has become rarer in modern neighbourhoods. Many of these were ordinary residential houses when built; their architects simply followed the traditions of their time and the shared understanding that even an apartment building should contribute something beautiful to the city. Imagine one of those buildings demolished and replaced by a large concrete box whose windows bear no obvious relationship to the neighbouring houses and whose flat facade makes little attempt to continue the architectural character of the street. The architect may call the design contemporary or innovative while the developer emphasises energy efficiency and modern apartments. Everything may comply with the regulations and the project may even win an award, yet the street has become less beautiful.

This is especially strange because European cities spend enormous sums protecting the historic architecture that makes them attractive. We restore old facades and impose strict requirements on the owners of listed buildings because we understand that architectural beauty has cultural value. When it comes to constructing something new, however, we frequently accept almost anything that meets the technical requirements. Why should an architect be allowed to place an ugly modern building in the middle of a beautiful historic neighbourhood? Why do we treat architectural creativity as something that deserves protection even when it comes at the expense of the surrounding city? And why do our planning systems make it so difficult to build the kinds of traditional streets that people continue to admire?

1. How Architects Became More Important Than the Streets They Build In

One of the greatest differences between traditional and contemporary architecture is the way architects think about their relationship with the surrounding city. For centuries European builders worked within architectural traditions that developed gradually over generations. These traditions influenced everything from the height of a building to the proportions of its windows and helped create streets where individual houses looked different while still belonging together. The famous boulevards of Paris largely acquired their recognisable appearance during the nineteenth-century transformation of the city under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. Building regulations established rules concerning heights and the arrangement of facades while architects worked within a shared architectural language. The result was an enormous number of apartment buildings that remain attractive today despite being constructed by different people for different owners. The beauty of these streets comes partly from the individual buildings but also from the way they relate to one another. A single Haussmannian apartment house might not be an extraordinary architectural masterpiece, yet place twenty of them beside one another and the entire street becomes something remarkable.

This principle runs throughout historic Europe. In Amsterdam the narrow brick houses have different gables and decorative details but share enough characteristics to create a harmonious streetscape. In many Italian towns the buildings follow similar proportions and use familiar materials while their individual differences give the streets their character. Modern architecture increasingly moved away from this understanding during the twentieth century. Architects such as Le Corbusier challenged the inherited city and promoted new approaches based on modern construction methods. Historical styles were rejected by influential modernists while architectural originality became an important measure of professional achievement. As Le Corbusier wrote in Towards a New Architecture:

Architecture is stifled by custom. The “styles” are a lie. Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character. Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.

A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined ends, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit. Economic law unavoidably governs our acts and our thoughts. The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house. We must create the mass-production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass-production houses. The spirit of living in mass-production houses. The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses. If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house, and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the “House-Machine,” the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful.

Over time the idea that a building should express its own identity became deeply established in architectural education. Students were encouraged to develop distinctive concepts and demonstrate creativity through new forms. A building that looked completely different from its neighbours could be praised precisely because it challenged the surrounding architecture. This helps explain why so many modern additions to historic streets seem determined to announce their presence. Instead of continuing the proportions of neighbouring houses the architect introduces an unusual facade or a dramatic contrast in materials. The building becomes a statement about contemporary architecture even when that statement makes the street less attractive.

There is nothing inherently wrong with designing something original. European architecture developed through centuries of experimentation and many of its most beautiful buildings were innovative when they first appeared. Earlier architectural traditions, however, generally offered recognisable principles that allowed buildings to contribute to a larger urban environment. Today the architect’s individual vision can become more important than the appearance of the street itself. This raises a question that deserves far more attention than it receives. If an architect designs a building that thousands of people will have to look at every day for the next hundred years, why should the architect’s personal preferences carry more weight than the character of the city? Architecture is different from painting because buildings cannot simply be removed from public view when people dislike them. They become part of the everyday environment and influence how entire neighbourhoods are experienced. A city should therefore never be treated as a collection of opportunities for architectural self-expression. Its beauty is something that belongs to the public and deserves to be protected accordingly. As Léon Krier has observed:

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

Traditional architecture and urbanism are not styles; they are methods of building that have proven their worth over centuries. They produce places where people feel at home because they grow from shared conventions of proportion, material, and scale. Modernism rejected these conventions in the name of originality and progress, but the result has been cities that are fragmented, ugly, and hostile to everyday life. The street, once the principal public room of the city, was declared obsolete. Buildings were turned into isolated objects. The public realm was reduced to residual space between towers and parking lots. This was not an advance in civilisation. It was a deliberate abandonment of the accumulated knowledge of how to make cities that are beautiful, useful, and lasting.

2. Why Our Building Laws Protect Almost Everything Except Beauty

The appearance of our cities is shaped by an enormous number of laws and regulations. Developers cannot simply purchase a piece of land and construct whatever they want because nearly every aspect of a building is subject to some form of control. In Germany a new residential development must comply with the applicable planning framework and the building regulations of the relevant federal state. A local development plan known as a Bebauungsplan can regulate the permitted use of land and the size of buildings while other provisions address matters such as building distances and access. In Britain planning authorities assess development proposals against local planning policies and other material considerations. Similar systems exist throughout Europe although the precise rules differ considerably between countries.

These regulations can be extraordinarily detailed. They influence the number of apartments a developer can construct and the amount of land that must remain available around a building. Fire safety requirements affect circulation spaces while energy regulations influence insulation and the design of windows. None of these requirements is inherently unreasonable because buildings need to be safe and functional. Yet the enormous attention devoted to technical compliance makes the treatment of architectural beauty particularly interesting. In many places the appearance of a building is considered during planning approval but the standards are relatively broad. Local authorities may require new developments to respect the character of their surroundings without establishing a clear architectural language that designers must follow. The interpretation of these requirements can leave considerable room for disagreement. A developer might argue that a plain modern facade represents an appropriate contemporary addition to a historic street. A planning authority might accept this interpretation even when local residents believe the design is completely unsuitable.

The situation becomes more complicated when historic buildings are involved. In Germany a listed building is subject to heritage protection under the laws of the relevant federal state. Alterations that affect its protected character may require special permission and owners can face restrictions on replacing historic windows or changing important architectural details. Similar protections apply to listed buildings in Britain where unauthorised alterations can carry serious legal consequences. These restrictions exist because society recognises that historic architecture is worth preserving. The owner of a beautiful nineteenth-century house may therefore face substantial obligations when carrying out even relatively modest renovations. Yet a new building on a nearby plot may be permitted to use a completely different architectural language if the applicable planning and heritage controls allow it. This creates an obvious tension. We recognise that historic architecture contributes to the character of a city but do not necessarily require new architecture to make a comparable contribution.

Of course some European cities already have stronger architectural controls. Municipal design statutes in Germany can regulate elements of building appearance while conservation areas in Britain give authorities additional powers to protect historic character. France also uses heritage protections and planning rules to regulate development in sensitive areas. The legal tools therefore exist in various forms. What differs is how strongly cities choose to use them and what kind of architecture they want to encourage. There is no fundamental reason a municipality could not establish clear rules requiring new buildings in a historic neighbourhood to respect traditional proportions and materials. Such rules would need to be legally sound and consistent with the wider planning framework but they would hardly be an unprecedented interference with architectural freedom. We already accept that developers must respect countless restrictions when constructing a building. Why should preserving the beauty of a street be considered less important than regulating its technical characteristics? A city could decide that new buildings in certain neighbourhoods should follow established architectural principles while allowing greater experimentation elsewhere. It could establish clear expectations for facade composition and roof forms without requiring every house to become an exact copy of its neighbours. This would provide architects with a framework similar to the one that helped create many of Europe’s most admired streets. The purpose would be to ensure that individual projects contribute to something larger than themselves.

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3. Is Traditional Architecture Really Too Expensive?

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For centuries architects tried to make buildings beautiful. Then a new generation decided that everything needed to change, producing one of the most radical transformations in the history of European architecture.

Walk through the historic center of Vienna and you encounter entire streets lined with buildings whose facades carry stone carvings, carefully proportioned windows, and entrances shaped by sustained attention to appearance.

Many of these were ordinary apartment houses built for everyday use rather than as monuments, yet their designers still treated beauty as a normal responsibility.

By contrast, much of what we construct today consists of plain concrete volumes or expansive glass facades that often appear to have been shaped with limited concern for how they will look to the people who pass them.

Even costly new buildings frequently lack the quiet charm of a modest nineteenth-century townhouse, and complaints about the difference are commonly answered by the claim that beauty is merely subjective or that architecture must mirror the modern age.

These responses leave open a more basic question: why should modernity require the abandonment of beauty when we possess superior materials, more efficient methods, and far greater technical resources than earlier generations? The shift was not accidental.

During the twentieth century a group of influential architects systematically challenged the traditions that had shaped European cities for centuries, rejecting historical styles, attacking ornament, and advancing a new vision of what buildings should be.

Their ideas altered the appearance of cities across the world, and the consequences remain visible.

1. When Beauty Was Part of Architecture

For centuries European architects studied classical principles because they regarded proportion, harmony, and visible order as essential to good building.

The Roman architect Vitruvius summarized the requirements in a formulation that remained influential long after the Empire itself had disappeared:

“All these must be built with due reference to durability, convenience, and beauty. Durability will be assured when foundations are carried down to the solid ground and materials wisely and liberally selected; convenience, when the arrangement of the apartments is faultless and presents no hindrance to use, and when each class of building is assigned to its suitable and appropriate exposure; and beauty, when the appearance of the work is pleasing and in good taste, and when its members are in due proportion according to correct principles of symmetry.”

This triad of strength, usefulness, and beauty continued to guide practice through the Renaissance, when architects such as Andrea Palladio studied surviving antique structures and produced villas and palaces whose carefully related columns, windows, and masses demonstrated how classical rules could generate elegance at ordinary scales.

The same concern for appearance appeared in very different languages, from the structural logic of Gothic cathedrals to the dramatic spatial effects of Baroque churches.

What these traditions shared was the expectation that a building should not only shelter its occupants but also contribute to the visual character of the city around it.

Even modest townhouses often received a cornice, a refined doorway, or a measured rhythm of openings so that they belonged to a larger architectural conversation. Because successive generations worked within recognizable principles, streets assembled over time still cohere visually today.

2. The Architect Who Called Ornament a Crime

One of the sharpest early challenges came from the Austrian architect Adolf Loos. In his 1908 lecture known as Ornament and Crime he argued that cultural progress required the progressive elimination of decoration from useful objects. He wrote:

“The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use. I thought I was giving the world a new source of pleasure with this; it did not thank me for it. … Every period had its style; why was it that our period was the only one to be denied a style? By ‘style’ was meant ornament. I said, ‘Weep not. Behold! What makes our period so important is that it is incapable of producing new ornament. We have struggled through to a state without ornament. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfillment awaits. Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls!’ … Ornament is not merely produced by criminals, it commits a crime itself by damaging national economy and therefore its cultural development.”

Loos associated superfluous decoration with waste of labor and materials that could otherwise raise living standards, and he linked the desire for ornament with earlier stages of human development.

His own Looshaus in Vienna, completed in 1912 opposite the Hofburg, illustrated the practical result: an unusually plain upper facade that contrasted sharply with the richly decorated buildings around it and provoked controversy precisely because it refused the ornamental conventions expected of a prominent urban structure.

Loos still valued fine materials and careful proportions, yet his argument shifted the burden of justification. Ornament, once a normal means of enriching a facade, now required special defense, and for many later architects the simplest course was to omit it.

3. Le Corbusier and the House as a Machine

If Loos helped undermine the status of ornament, Le Corbusier advanced a broader redefinition of what a modern building should be. In his 1923 book Towards a New Architecture he declared:

“A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on.” The phrase expressed his conviction that residential design should be reorganized around the practical demands of industrial society rather than the forms of earlier styles. Elsewhere in the same work he wrote: “The styles are a lie. … Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage. … It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms.”

Reinforced concrete, standardized production, and the example of factories and automobiles supplied both the means and the model.

Flat roofs, open plans, and the separation of structure from enclosure became characteristic devices. Le Corbusier also proposed large-scale urban schemes, most famously the 1925 Plan Voisin, which envisioned replacing a substantial portion of central Paris with tall residential towers set in open parkland.

Although the plan was never built, it made explicit how far some modernists were prepared to go in treating the inherited street pattern as an obstacle rather than a resource. Traditional density, narrow streets, and the gradual accumulation of buildings were features to be overcome in favor of abstract geometric compositions and new patterns of circulation.

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4. The Bauhaus Changed What Architects Were Taught

A further institutional shift occurred with the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius. In the school’s manifesto he stated:

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Walk through the historic center of Prague or Vienna and you will see people stopping to photograph buildings that were constructed centuries ago. They admire the beautiful facades and the craftsmanship that went into even ordinary houses. Entire neighborhoods have become tourist attractions because people enjoy looking at the architecture.

Now think about the last modern apartment building you saw being constructed.

Was anyone stopping to admire it?

Of course there are beautiful modern buildings and plenty of ugly old ones. But there is something strange about a profession that seems so interested in producing buildings that look nothing like the places people travel across the world to visit.

We know that people love traditional architecture. We see it in the popularity of historic European towns and the enormous effort governments make to preserve them.

Yet when it comes to building new neighborhoods we frequently get plain concrete facades and enormous glass boxes that could stand in almost any city.

And the strangest part is that many of these buildings are praised by the architectural profession itself.

So how did we reach a point where architects and ordinary people seem to have such different ideas about what makes a beautiful building?

When Architects Stopped Trying to Please Ordinary People

For centuries architects worked within traditions that placed enormous importance on proportion and decoration. Their buildings were expected to serve practical purposes while contributing something beautiful to the streets around them.

A successful architect needed to understand how windows should be arranged and how the different parts of a facade should relate to one another. Even relatively modest buildings could feature elegant entrances and carefully designed details.

This did not mean every building was beautiful or that everyone agreed about good taste. But architects inherited a common language of design that ordinary people could recognize and appreciate.

During the twentieth century that relationship began to change.

Modernist architects challenged the architectural traditions of earlier generations and argued that the modern world required an entirely new approach to building.

Architects such as Le Corbusier believed that architecture should respond to industrial society through new materials and rational planning. Ornament increasingly came to be regarded as unnecessary while geometric simplicity became an important feature of modern design.

These ideas were influential because they promised a new architecture suited to modern life.

But they also changed the way architects understood their profession.

Instead of working within a tradition that developed over centuries architects were encouraged to create something original and break with established conventions.

Innovation became an important measure of architectural achievement.

And once originality becomes more important than beauty it becomes possible to praise a building precisely because it looks unlike anything people are accustomed to seeing.

Le Corbusier put the case for this break in Towards a New Architecture (1923):

“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician. The ‘styles’ are a lie. … A house is a machine for living in. … You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: ‘This is beautiful.’ That is Architecture. Art enters in. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution. Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.”

The critic Léon Krier later diagnosed the long-term result of that shift:

“Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings… based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better. … The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car—he drew it!—is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.”

Architecture Became an Intellectual Exercise

One reason modern architecture can feel disconnected from ordinary people is that architects are frequently trained to think about buildings differently from the public.

An architect might admire a building because it explores an unusual structural idea or challenges established conventions.

Someone walking past the same building may simply wonder why it looks so unpleasant.

Neither person is necessarily looking at the building in the same way.

Architectural education places considerable emphasis on concepts and design experimentation. Students are encouraged to develop original ideas and explain the intellectual reasoning behind their projects.

There is nothing wrong with this in itself because architecture requires creativity and technical knowledge.

But problems arise when the explanation becomes more important than the building.

A facade might be described as an exploration of fragmentation or a response to the surrounding urban fabric. The architect may provide an elaborate explanation of the design while the people who live nearby see little worth admiring.

And this raises an uncomfortable question.

Should a building need a lengthy explanation before people can appreciate it?

When you stand in front of a beautiful Renaissance palace you do not need to understand the architect’s philosophy to recognize that someone took great care with its design.

You can admire the proportions and the arrangement of its windows without knowing anything about the building’s history.

Traditional architecture communicates much of its beauty directly through what people see.

Some contemporary architecture requires a very different kind of appreciation.

Its admirers may value the underlying concept more than the visual experience of the finished building.

That helps explain why a project can receive professional recognition while leaving many people completely unimpressed.

Adolf Loos drew a sharp distinction between private art and public building that still resonates:

“The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. … The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.”

Why Architectural Awards Don’t Always Reflect Public Taste

Architectural awards can recognize extraordinary achievements in design and engineering. They can also celebrate buildings that challenge established ideas about what architecture should look like.

But the priorities of award juries do not necessarily match those of the people who live with the buildings.

A jury might reward an innovative use of materials or an unusual approach to spatial organization. Residents may care more about whether the building looks attractive and contributes to a pleasant street.

These priorities can overlap but they are not identical.

The difference becomes especially interesting when architects discuss the buildings they admire most.

Many celebrated contemporary projects are praised for their originality and willingness to challenge convention.

Yet originality tells us very little about whether a building is beautiful.

A house can be completely unlike anything built before and still be unpleasant to look at.

Meanwhile a carefully designed traditional building may receive little attention from architectural critics because it follows established principles.

This creates a peculiar situation.

An architect who designs an attractive building in a familiar style may be accused of lacking imagination while another who produces a deliberately unconventional structure may be celebrated for innovation.

But why should the second achievement automatically be considered more important?

The people who live in a neighborhood will see its buildings every day long after the awards have been handed out.

Surely their experience deserves at least as much attention as the opinions of a professional jury.

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We Confused Simplicity With Beauty

One of the most visible changes in modern architecture is the disappearance of ornament..

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Walk through an old European town and you will notice something remarkable. The houses people stop to photograph are rarely the largest or most expensive ones. They are ordinary homes with beautiful windows and carefully designed entrances that have stood for generations.

You can find them in the villages of southern Germany or along the narrow streets of northern Italy. Their facades differ in color and decoration but they belong together because their builders followed a shared understanding of what makes a beautiful street.

Now visit a typical new housing development.

You might find houses with large windows and spacious interiors. They may offer excellent insulation and conveniences that earlier generations could only dream of. Yet the streets themselves frequently feel strangely anonymous.

The buildings could stand almost anywhere.

Their facades are often reduced to simple geometric shapes while the spaces between them are dominated by driveways and garage doors. Little attention is given to the architectural details that once made even modest homes attractive.

Of course beautiful houses are still being built today. But the traditional architectural language that shaped entire neighborhoods has largely disappeared from ordinary residential construction.

And I think that loss deserves more attention.

Because when we look at the houses people love most we discover that their beauty rarely depends on extravagant materials or unusual designs.

It comes from principles that earlier generations understood remarkably well.

1. When Ordinary Houses Were Beautiful

One of the most striking things about historic European towns is that their beauty extends far beyond their famous monuments.

Consider Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

Visitors come to admire its medieval walls and picturesque streets. But much of the town’s charm comes from ordinary houses that were built for merchants and craftsmen rather than kings or bishops.

These buildings were not all designed by famous architects. Many followed local construction traditions that developed over generations.

Their builders understood how a house should meet the street and how its facade should relate to neighboring buildings.

Windows were arranged with care while entrances received enough attention to make them welcoming. Roofs were designed as visible parts of the architecture rather than treated as purely functional coverings.

The result was a town in which ordinary buildings contributed to a larger sense of beauty.

This does not mean every medieval house was comfortable or well constructed. Many were cramped and vulnerable to fire while others disappeared because they could not survive the passage of time.

The historic houses we admire today represent buildings that survived through centuries of maintenance and alteration.

But they still reveal something important.

Earlier builders frequently worked within local traditions that gave ordinary residential architecture a recognizable character.

And because those traditions were shared the beauty of a street did not depend on a single extraordinary building.

As the architect and theorist Christopher Alexander described it in The Timeless Way of Building:

“There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.”

2. We Replaced Architectural Traditions With Fashion

For centuries European builders worked within architectural traditions that developed gradually.

A carpenter in Bavaria understood the construction of timber-framed houses while a mason in France worked with the proportions and materials common to his region.

These traditions were not fixed. They changed as new techniques became available and as architectural fashions spread between cities.

But builders generally understood themselves as continuing an established language.

A new house could be different from its neighbors without appearing completely unrelated to them.

During the twentieth century this relationship changed dramatically.

Modernist architects challenged the idea that buildings should follow inherited styles and argued that architecture ought to reflect the materials and needs of the modern age.

Ornament was increasingly rejected as unnecessary while simple geometric forms became associated with progress.

These ideas produced important buildings and opened new possibilities for design.

But when their principles spread into ordinary residential construction the results were not always successful.

Many houses lost the decorative details that once gave their facades character without gaining the careful proportions that make restrained architecture beautiful.

A plain wall can be elegant when its windows and materials are thoughtfully composed. But removing ornament does not automatically create good design.

And replacing a familiar architectural tradition with whatever happens to be fashionable can make houses look outdated surprisingly quickly.

Traditional architecture offered something different.

It allowed buildings to change while remaining connected to the places where they stood.

As the architect Léon Krier put it:

“Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.”

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3. We Started Designing Houses Around Cars

Perhaps the greatest change in residential architecture was not caused by architects at all..

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Walk through the streets of Bologna and you will notice something unusual. Instead of walking beside the buildings you often find yourself walking beneath them.

Beautiful stone columns support covered walkways that extend along the streets. Above your head are vaulted ceilings and beside you are the entrances to shops and homes that have stood for generations.

These covered walkways are called porticoes and they are one of the defining features of Bologna.

The city has more than 60 kilometers of them. Some are medieval and others were built centuries later but together they create an extraordinary network of sheltered public spaces.

You can walk through much of the historic center without stepping into the rain. During the summer the arcades offer protection from the sun while allowing people to move comfortably between different parts of the city.

But their greatest achievement goes beyond shelter.

The porticoes make ordinary streets beautiful.

They transform the space between buildings and roads into a place where people want to spend time. Instead of treating the sidewalk as an afterthought they make it an essential part of the architecture.

And I think that is something every modern city could learn from Bologna.

1. A City That Built Its Streets Around People

One of the most remarkable things about Bologna is that its porticoes were never reserved for grand palaces or important monuments.

They appear along ordinary residential streets and beneath buildings that have served everyday purposes for centuries.

You can leave your home and walk to a nearby shop while remaining under the protection of the same architectural structure. The street becomes an extension of the buildings around it rather than an empty space separating them.

This creates a very different experience from walking through a typical modern neighborhood.

In many newer developments buildings stand apart from the sidewalk behind parking areas or stretches of unused land. Their entrances are separated from public life and pedestrians move through spaces that offer little shelter.

Bologna developed around a different principle.

Buildings were designed to contribute directly to the street.

The porticoes create a continuous transition between private property and public space. Their columns establish a recognizable rhythm while the covered walkway gives pedestrians a comfortable place to move.

And because the arcades extend from one building to the next the street feels like a connected architectural whole.

The beauty of Bologna does not depend on every building being extraordinary.

It comes from the way ordinary buildings work together.

Jan Gehl on the proper order of urban design:

“First life, then spaces, then buildings—the other way around never works. In a society that is becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices, and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience things directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life.”

2. How Bologna’s Porticoes Began

The origins of Bologna’s porticoes reach back to the Middle Ages when the city began expanding rapidly.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries Bologna grew into an important center of trade and learning. Its university attracted students from across Europe while merchants established businesses along its increasingly crowded streets.

As the population increased the city needed more living space.

One solution was to extend the upper floors of houses over the street.

These projections created additional rooms without requiring owners to purchase more land. Over time wooden supports were added beneath the extensions and the spaces below developed into sheltered walkways.

What began as a practical response to overcrowding eventually became one of the city’s most important architectural traditions.

The early porticoes were frequently constructed from timber. A few remarkable examples survive today including the wooden arcade of Casa Isolani on Strada Maggiore.

Its enormous timber columns support the upper floors of a medieval building and reveal how the earliest porticoes appeared before stone and brick became more common.

As Bologna continued growing the city authorities began regulating the construction of porticoes.

Medieval statutes required new buildings in important parts of the city to provide covered walkways and established rules intended to keep them usable.

The authorities understood that these structures served the entire community.

A portico might belong to a privately owned building but the space beneath it was meant for public passage.

This arrangement became one of Bologna’s defining characteristics.

And it allowed a practical building tradition to develop into an extraordinary system of public architecture.

3. The Secret Behind Bologna’s Beautiful Streets

The beauty of Bologna comes from the way its buildings work together.

Walk beneath a long row of porticoes and you will notice how the arches create a continuous rhythm along the street. Each column frames a small part of the view ahead while the repetition of the arches gives the entire street a sense of order.

The effect is especially beautiful when sunlight enters from the side and casts shadows across the pavement.

Traditional architecture makes extensive use of repetition because it allows individual buildings to contribute to a larger composition. A single arch may be attractive but a hundred arches extending along a street create something far more impressive.

Bologna demonstrates this principle particularly well.

Its porticoes vary considerably in appearance because they developed over many centuries. Some have simple brick columns while others feature elaborate stone capitals and richly decorated ceilings.

Camillo Sitte on the artistic versus purely technical treatment of streets:

“Modern systems… are concerned exclusively with the arrangement of street patterns, and hence their intention is from the very start a purely technical one. A network of streets always serves only the purposes of communication, never of art, since it can never be comprehended sensorily, can never be grasped as a whole except in a plan of it… Only that which a spectator can hold in view, what can be seen, is of artistic importance, for instance, the single street or the individual plaza.”

Yet these differences rarely destroy the visual unity of the street because the buildings share the same basic architectural feature.

This allows each generation to contribute something new without abandoning the character established by earlier builders.

And the result is a city where even an ordinary walk becomes an architectural experience.

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4. When Private Buildings Served the Public

One of the most interesting aspects of Bologna’s porticoes is the relationship between private ownership and public use.

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Their facades show the passage of time but somehow this makes them more beautiful.

Now compare them with a modern apartment building constructed thirty years ago. Its exterior panels may be stained and its once-fashionable design already looks dated. What seemed innovative when it was completed can quickly begin to feel tired.

Of course many old buildings survived because people maintained them and considered them worth preserving. Plenty of poorly constructed buildings from earlier centuries disappeared long ago.

But there is still something important to learn from the traditional buildings that remain.

Their beauty comes partly from the materials they use and partly from the way those materials change with age. Their proportions remain pleasing even as their surfaces weather and the craftsmanship behind their construction continues to reward closer attention.

Traditional architecture was built around principles that could survive changing fashions.

And that is why some of Europe’s oldest buildings remain among its most beautiful.

1. Natural Materials Become More Beautiful With Time

One of the greatest strengths of traditional architecture is its use of natural materials.

Walk through an old town in France and you will see limestone facades that have developed warm golden tones over centuries. In northern Germany you will find brick buildings whose surfaces have become richer and more varied with age.

These materials change gradually because they respond to sunlight and weather. Their colors deepen and their surfaces develop small irregularities that give them character.

A stone wall does not need to look perfectly new to remain beautiful. In fact its weathered appearance can make the building feel more connected to its surroundings.

Traditional builders understood the qualities of the materials available in their region. They used local stone where it was abundant and brick where suitable clay could be found.

This gave European towns their distinctive appearance.

The pale limestone buildings of Paris look different from the red-brick houses of northern Europe because each architectural tradition developed around the resources of its landscape.

Many modern buildings rely instead on industrial surface finishes that are designed to look uniform when first installed. Some age well but others lose their appearance as coatings fade or panels become discolored.

Natural materials are not immune to damage and stone can deteriorate badly when exposed to pollution or moisture. But when chosen carefully and maintained properly they can develop a richness that manufactured finishes struggle to reproduce.

This is one reason old buildings can become more attractive with time.

Their surfaces tell us something about the years they have survived.

John Ruskin, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (The Lamp of Memory), captured this precisely:

For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, until it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life.

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2. Traditional Architecture Was Designed to Be Repaired

Another reason traditional buildings survive so beautifully is that many were constructed using materials that can be repaired individually.

Consider a half-timbered house in a German town.

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The square opens before you like an enormous outdoor room. Medieval buildings curve around its edges while the famous Torre del Mangia rises above the rooftops; people sit on the warm brick pavement and spend hours watching the life of the city unfold.

And the remarkable thing is that this place was built more than 700 years ago.

Now think about how many modern public squares have been built in the last fifty years. Cities spend millions on new plazas and hire famous architects to redesign their public spaces; yet how many of these places make you want to sit down and stay for an entire afternoon?

What did the medieval builders of Siena understand that so many modern architects seem to have forgotten?

The answer has surprisingly little to do with money or elaborate decoration.

For centuries European towns developed around public squares that served as the center of everyday life. These were places where merchants sold their goods and citizens gathered for important occasions; their architecture gradually developed around the simple idea that a public space should be both useful and beautiful.

And when you look closely at the most beloved squares in Europe you begin to notice that they share certain characteristics.

Here are seven rules that help explain why they work so well.

1. A Beautiful Square Needs Walls

The first thing you notice about many historic town squares is that they feel like rooms.

Of course there is no ceiling above them but the surrounding buildings create something remarkably similar to an interior. Their façades define the edges of the space while the entrances and windows give those edges a recognizable human character.

This is one of the reasons Piazza del Campo works so well.

The medieval buildings follow the curve of the square and create a continuous architectural boundary. Even though the surrounding houses differ in appearance they contribute to the same larger composition.

The square therefore feels like a place with a definite beginning and end.

Now imagine removing half the buildings around it.

Suddenly the space would lose much of its character because the buildings are doing more than providing a beautiful background. They are creating the square itself.

You can see the same principle in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid.

The square is surrounded by continuous façades with arcades running along the ground floor. Once you enter the space you immediately understand its boundaries and the surrounding architecture gives the enormous courtyard a sense of order.

This is why an open field with a fountain in the middle does not automatically become a beautiful square.

A town square needs buildings that give it shape.

The Greeks lay out their forums in the form of a square surrounded by very spacious double colonnades, adorn them with columns set rather closely together, and with entablatures of stone or marble, and construct walks above in the upper story. But in the cities of Italy the same method cannot be followed, for the reason that it is a custom handed down from our ancestors that gladiatorial shows should be given in the forum. Therefore let the intercolumniations round the show place be pretty wide; round about in the colonnades put the bankers’ offices; and have balconies on the upper floor properly arranged so as to be convenient, and to bring in some public revenue.

— Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book V, Chapter 1 (Morgan translation)

Vitruvius is already treating the forum as a walled outdoor room: colonnades for walls, offices and walks along the edge, and an open center held by architecture rather than left as a void.

2. The Proportions Must Feel Right

Once the surrounding buildings establish the boundaries another question becomes important.

How large should the square actually be?

A square can be too narrow and feel like an enlarged street. It can also be so enormous that the surrounding architecture loses its influence and the people crossing it appear almost insignificant.

Traditional European squares usually establish a recognizable relationship between their width and the height of the buildings around them.

Consider the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

The Palazzo Vecchio dominates one side of the square while the surrounding buildings help define the remaining edges. The space is large enough to accommodate public gatherings but the architecture remains close enough to give the visitor a sense of enclosure.

This relationship matters because people experience architecture from the ground.

When the surrounding buildings become too distant their details are difficult to appreciate. The windows and entrances disappear into the background and the square begins to feel like an empty expanse.

Older squares generally avoided this problem by growing within the dense fabric of the city.

The buildings stood close together and the public space developed at a scale that remained connected to everyday life.

Of course there is no single mathematical formula that produces a beautiful square.

But the best examples make the relationship between open space and surrounding buildings feel natural.

The size of a forum should be proportionate to the number of inhabitants, so that it may not be too small a space to be useful, nor look like a desert waste for lack of population. To determine its breadth, divide its length into three parts and assign two of them to the breadth. Its shape will then be oblong, and its ground plan conveniently suited to the conditions of shows. The columns of the upper tier should be one fourth smaller than those of the lower, because, for the purpose of bearing the load, what is below ought to be stronger than what is above, and also, because we ought to imitate nature as seen in the case of things growing; for example, in round smooth-stemmed trees, like the fir, cypress, and pine, every one of which is rather thick just above the roots and then, as it goes on increasing in height, tapers off naturally and symmetrically in growing up to the top.

— Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book V, Chapter 1

Two millennia before modern plazas were sized for traffic diagrams, Vitruvius tied the dimensions of the public square to the number of people who would actually use it, and warned against a space that looks deserted.

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3. Every Square Needs Something Important to Look At

Walk into a beautiful historic square and your eyes usually find something that deserves attention.

It might be a church standing above the surrounding rooftops or a town hall with an impressive entrance. Sometimes a fountain occupies the center while the surrounding buildings provide a beautiful architectural setting.

The important thing is that the square possesses a clear focal point.

In Siena that role belongs to the Palazzo Pubblico.

Its great tower rises above the surrounding buildings while the square slopes toward the town hall. The entire composition seems to draw your attention in that direction.

This was particularly appropriate because the building served as the seat of the city’s government.

The architecture therefore expressed something about Siena’s political life.

The Piazza San Marco in Venice offers another example.

St Mark’s Basilica provides an extraordinary focal point at one end of the square while the surrounding arcades establish a more regular architectural setting. The contrast between the basilica and the surrounding buildings makes the church appear even more remarkable.

And this brings us to an important principle.

A beautiful square does not require every building to compete for attention.

Sometimes the most successful arrangement allows one important building to dominate while the others create a harmonious background.

I will say that a sacred building ought to be the most beautiful and the most ornate of all, and that a public building ought to be more ornate than a private one. … The principal ornament of the city will be the public buildings, and among these the temples will hold the first place. … Let the temple be so placed that it may be seen from every side, and that its dignity may be increased by the space which surrounds it; and let the forum, the basilica, and the other public works be so disposed that each may have its proper view and its proper approach.

— Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (paraphrased in the standard sense of Books VII–VIII; the civic hierarchy of temple, forum, and public buildings is Alberti’s own)

Alberti’s point is hierarchical, not decorative. One building is allowed to matter more than the others, and the square exists partly so that building can be seen.

4. The Buildings Must Belong Together

One of the most remarkable things about old European squares is that their buildings are rarely identical.

Different owners commissioned them at different times and their façades sometimes belong to different architectural periods. Yet the overall composition can still feel surprisingly harmonious.

How did they achieve this?

A large part of the answer lies in the way traditional buildings followed shared conventions.

Their windows might be arranged in similar patterns while the heights of neighboring buildings remained relatively consistent. Even when individual façades received different decorations the larger architectural rhythm continued across the square.

Look at the Grand-Place in Brussels.

Its famous guild houses possess elaborate façades and distinctive rooflines. Each building has its own character but together they form one of the most impressive urban spaces in Europe.

The square developed over centuries and much of its present appearance followed reconstruction after the French bombardment of 1695.

Despite the variety of its buildings the surrounding architecture forms a remarkably coherent ensemble.

This is an important lesson for modern town planning.

You do not need to make every building identical to create a beautiful public space.

You need enough shared architectural language for the buildings to look as though they belong to the same place.

Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. … It is the great and elegant order of the parts, fitted together with such proportion that nothing can be added, diminished, or changed without impairing the grace of the whole.

— Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Book VI (the classic definition of concinnitas)

Alberti is not asking for identical façades. He is asking for a whole in which difference is held by proportion, so that the square reads as one body rather than a row of competing objects.

5. The Ground Floor Must Be Interesting

So far we have looked at the square from a distance.

But what happens when you actually walk around it?

This is where the ground floor becomes particularly important because it is the part of the architecture people experience most closely.

Traditional town squares frequently placed shops beneath the surrounding buildings while entrances opened directly onto the public space. Arcades provided shelter from the weather and made it possible to walk around the square while remaining close to the activity inside.

The Plaza Mayor in Salamanca is a wonderful example.

Its eighteenth-century Baroque façades rise above continuous arcades that contain cafés and other businesses. People can walk beneath the arches while the open square remains available for gatherings.

The architecture therefore creates two different experiences.

You can stand in the middle and appreciate the grand composition or move around the edges where the buildings become part of everyday life.

This is something many modern plazas struggle to achieve.

A large public space surrounded by blank walls offers very little reason to remain there. Even if the paving is attractive the surrounding buildings provide nothing interesting to discover.

Historic squares worked because their edges were full of life.

And that life gave people reasons to return throughout the day.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Jacobs is writing about a street, but the lesson travels. A square stays alive only if its edge keeps offering small reasons to pause: a shop, a door, a café, a window, another pair of eyes.

6. A Beautiful Square Needs Somewhere to Sit

One of the simplest ways to judge a public square is to watch what people do when they arrive.

Do they immediately cross to the other side or do they find somewhere to sit?

The most successful historic squares offer people opportunities to remain without requiring them to participate in a particular activity.

In Siena visitors sit directly on the sloping brick pavement of the Piazza del Campo. Others gather around the Fonte Gaia while people in the surrounding cafés watch the square from beneath the buildings.

The square accommodates all these different activities without requiring an elaborate arrangement of modern street furniture.

Its architecture already makes spending time there enjoyable.

The same principle appears in smaller Italian piazzas where a fountain provides a natural gathering point. A church entrance might have broad steps that become an informal place to sit while the surrounding buildings provide shade during the warmer hours.

These details matter because a square should be comfortable as well as beautiful.

People need places where they can rest and watch the life of the city.

And when enough people begin doing that the square becomes more than a space between buildings.

It becomes somewhere people actually want to be.

Only when opportunities for sitting exist can there be stays of any duration. If these opportunities are few or bad, people just walk on by. The existence of good opportunities for sitting paves the way for the numerous activities that are the prime attractions in public spaces: eating, reading, sleeping, knitting, playing chess, sunbathing, watching people, talking, and so on. Good places to sit and rest are very definitely a question of good benches—and inviting ones. … The entire square is built like a grandstand—a shell with places for standing and sitting at the top, along the façades at the shell’s periphery.

— Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings (1971)

Gehl’s Campo comparison is almost a description of Siena. Sitting is not street furniture added later. It is the condition that turns a crossing into a place.

7. The Square Must Belong to the City Around It

Finally we come to a principle that is easy to overlook.

A beautiful town square should feel like a natural part of the surrounding streets.

In medieval European cities public squares were usually connected to a network of narrow streets and passages. You might approach through a relatively modest street before suddenly emerging into a magnificent open space.

That transition was part of the experience.

Consider the Piazza del Campo once again.

Several streets lead into the square from different directions and the surrounding medieval city remains closely connected to it. You can walk through Siena’s narrow streets before arriving at the enormous curved piazza almost unexpectedly.

The contrast makes the square feel even more impressive.

Venice provides another excellent example.

The narrow streets around Piazza San Marco create a very different experience from the openness of the square itself. As you emerge from the surrounding passages the scale of the architecture becomes immediately apparent.

This is one reason historic squares can feel so much more interesting than modern plazas surrounded by wide roads.

The older squares belong to a continuous pedestrian environment.

You can arrive on foot and continue exploring the surrounding city without constantly encountering barriers created for traffic.

Their beauty therefore depends partly on what happens beyond their boundaries.

A square cannot become the heart of a city if the city around it makes reaching that heart unpleasant.

A town needs public squares; they are the largest, most public, rooms that the town has. But when they are too large, they look and feel deserted. … Make a public square much smaller than you would at first imagine; usually no more than 45 to 60 feet across, never more than 70 feet across. This applies only to its width in the short direction. In the long direction it can certainly be longer. … Build buildings round the square in such a way that they give it a definite shape, with views out into other larger places. … The life of a public square forms naturally around its edge. If the edge fails, the space never becomes lively.

— Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977), patterns 61 and related edge patterns

Alexander’s sizes are stricter than Siena or Venice, which he treats as exceptions for cities already dense with people. The principle still holds: the square only works if it is stitched into a walkable fabric of streets, edges, and smaller rooms.

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Why We Should Build Beautiful Squares Again

Once you begin looking at Europe’s historic town squares through these seven principles you realize that their beauty is rarely accidental.

The surrounding buildings create enclosure while their proportions give the space a comfortable scale. An important building establishes a focal point and the neighboring façades create a coherent architectural setting.

Meanwhile the ground floors make the edges interesting and the square itself gives people somewhere to spend time. The surrounding streets then connect the public space to the everyday life of the city.

All these things work together.

And the remarkable part is that none of them requires a particular historical style.

A town square can be Gothic or Baroque and still follow many of the same principles. Its buildings might be constructed from brick or stone while the overall composition remains beautiful.

The real lesson is that traditional European builders understood public space as something that deserved careful architectural design.

They recognized that the space between buildings mattered just as much as the buildings themselves.

Today we spend enormous amounts of money constructing public plazas and redesigning urban spaces. Yet many of these projects struggle to create the kind of atmosphere that an ordinary historic square achieved centuries ago.

Perhaps the solution is simpler than we think.

We should begin by studying the places people already love and understanding the principles that make them work.

Because the beautiful town squares of Europe were built by people who understood something fundamental about cities.

A great square is an outdoor room that an entire city can call its own.

A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city. … Locate public buildings, monuments, fountains on public squares, on prominent spots and in the focus of major vistas. … Frame central squares and high streets with narrow lot- and block-fronts. Reserve ground floors and mezzanines of central square and high-street buildings for non-residential uses.

— Léon Krier, on the urban quarter (widely cited formulation; the last three lines from his community-design checklist)

Krier’s closing claim is the practical version of the essay’s last sentence. A square becomes the city’s room only when the quarter around it has a center, an edge, and a life that can reach it on foot.

Take a typical nineteenth-century apartment building in Paris. It might have five floors and a rather simple arrangement of windows; yet somehow the whole façade feels carefully designed and pleasant to look at.

Now compare that with a modern apartment building of roughly the same size.

Both buildings need windows and an entrance while both must provide enough space for the people living inside. Yet one might become a beloved part of the street while the other feels like an enormous box with holes cut into it.

So what makes the difference?

For centuries architects developed ways of arranging the outside of a building so that every part belonged to a larger composition. The position of the windows mattered just as much as the proportions of the wall around them; even the simplest doorway could become an important part of the design.

And once you begin noticing these things you start seeing them everywhere.

Here are five of the most important principles behind a beautiful façade:

1. Proportion: Getting the Shape Right

In the sixteenth century the Italian architect Andrea Palladio became famous for designing some of the most beautiful villas in Europe.

His buildings were usually quite simple in their basic arrangement. A central entrance established the main axis while windows and columns followed a carefully organized system; what made the result beautiful was the relationship between the individual parts.

Palladio believed that architecture should possess the same kind of mathematical harmony found in music.

Andrea Palladio, preface to Book IV of The Four Books of Architecture (Isaac Ware translation, 1738):

“And indeed, if we consider this beautiful machine of the world, with how many wonderful ornaments it is filled, and how the heavens, by their continual revolutions, change the seasons according as nature requires, and their motion preserves itself by the sweetest harmony of temperature; we cannot doubt, but that the little temples we make, ought to resemble this very great one, which, by his immense goodness, was perfectly compleated with one word of his; or imagine that we are not obliged to make in them all the ornaments we possibly can, and build them in such a manner, and with such proportions, that all the parts together may convey a sweet harmony to the eyes of the beholders, and that each of them separately may serve agreeably to the use for which it shall be appointed.”

In The Four Books of Architecture he explained how rooms could be designed using related dimensions and how the different parts of a building should form a coherent whole. His preferred proportions included ratios such as 1:1 and 2:3; these relationships helped architects organize spaces without making every room identical.

The same principle applies to a façade.

A window can be beautiful on its own but still look wrong if it is too large for the wall surrounding it. Similarly a doorway might possess beautiful carving while appearing strangely small compared with the building above.

Traditional architects therefore paid close attention to the relationship between openings and the masonry around them.

Look at the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence.

Leon Battista Alberti designed its façade in the fifteenth century and organized the exterior with repeated pilasters and horizontal divisions. Each floor belongs to the same underlying composition; the result is a building whose individual parts make sense together.

This is the first secret of a beautiful façade.

Before you begin adding decoration you need to get the proportions right.

2. Rhythm: Making the Windows Work Together

Now imagine walking along a street in Bath.

The buildings may extend for hundreds of feet and contain dozens of individual homes; nevertheless the street often feels like one carefully designed composition.

A large part of that comes down to the windows.

Traditional façades usually arrange their openings according to a recognizable rhythm. Windows repeat at regular intervals while the spaces between them follow a similar pattern; the eye can therefore move across the building without constantly encountering something unexpected.

Vitruvius, De architectura, Book I, Chapter II (Morris Hicky Morgan translation, 1914):

“Architecture depends on Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry, Propriety, and Economy. Order gives due measure to the members of a work considered separately, and symmetrical agreement to the proportions of the whole. It is an adjustment according to quantity. By this I mean the selection of modules from the members of the work itself and, starting from these individual parts of members, constructing the whole work to correspond. Arrangement includes the putting of things in their proper places and the elegance of effect which is due to adjustments appropriate to the character of the work. Eurythmy is beauty and fitness in the adjustments of the members. This is found when the members of a work are of a height suited to their breadth, of a breadth suited to their length, and, in a word, when they all correspond symmetrically.”

This becomes especially important on long façades.

A wall stretching across an entire city block can feel enormous if nothing divides it into smaller sections. Arrange the windows into repeated bays and suddenly the same wall becomes much easier to understand.

Georgian architects were particularly good at this.

They could design a row of relatively ordinary houses and give the entire street a sense of unity through consistent window placement. Individual homeowners might decorate their entrances differently; the larger rhythm still held everything together.

Paris offers another excellent example.

During the nineteenth century the new apartment buildings along Haussmann’s boulevards followed common rules concerning height and alignment. Their windows created repeated patterns across the street while balconies helped connect neighboring façades.

The interesting thing is that repetition did not require every building to look identical.

Architects could vary the details around individual windows while preserving the underlying rhythm.

And that is what makes this principle so useful.

You can create an interesting façade with very little ornament if the windows themselves form a beautiful composition.

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3. Hierarchy: Giving the Building a Beginning and an End

One of the easiest ways to recognize a traditional building is to look at how its different floors are treated..

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The beautiful buildings can look completely different from one another. A Gothic church has very little in common with a Georgian townhouse while an Italian palazzo might use an entirely different architectural language; somehow all three can still feel ordered and beautiful.

So what do they have in common?

For centuries architects worked with a collection of principles that helped turn a wall into something more than a wall. Proportion determined its shape while rhythm organized its openings; ornament then gave the building character without destroying the order underneath.

You can reduce much of this to seven basic ideas.

Think of them as the seven pillars of beautiful architecture.

Let’s start with proportion.

1. Proportion

More than two thousand years ago the Roman architect Vitruvius argued that buildings should possess relationships between their parts much like the human body does.

A hand belongs to an arm and an arm belongs to a body; architecture could work in much the same way. The height of a column related to its width while the dimensions of a room related to the building around it.

The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect. They are due to proportion, in Greek analogia. Proportion is a correspondence among the measures of the members of an entire work, and of the whole to a certain part selected as standard. From this result the principles of symmetry. Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of those of a well shaped man. For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth… The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown. Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole.

— Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book III, Chapter I (trans. Morris Hicky Morgan)

Renaissance architects became fascinated by this idea.

When Andrea Palladio designed his villas in sixteenth-century Italy he used carefully related dimensions to organize rooms and façades. A building could be large without feeling clumsy because its individual parts belonged to a larger system.

Beauty will result from the form and correspondence of the whole, with respect to the several parts, of the parts with regard to each other, and of these again to the whole; that the structure may appear an entire and complete body, wherein each member agrees with the other, and all necessary to compose what you intend to form.

— Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture, Book I, Chapter I (1570; trans. Isaac Ware)

This is one reason old buildings can feel so satisfying even when you know absolutely nothing about architecture.

Your eye encounters relationships it can understand.

A window has a relationship to the wall around it and the wall has a relationship to the entire façade; once those relationships begin working together the building starts feeling like a complete composition.

Which brings us naturally to the second pillar.

2. Symmetry

Stand in front of a Georgian townhouse and you can usually understand the building almost immediately.

The entrance establishes the center while the windows balance one another across the façade. Your eye does not need instructions because the architecture already tells you how the building is organized.

This is symmetry at its simplest.

Leon Battista Alberti, writing a century before Palladio, treated that balance not as a rigid mirror-image but as a concordance of parts so complete that nothing in it could be altered without loss.

Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline, and position, as dictated by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in Nature. This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, authority, and worth… Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.

— Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Book VI, Chapter 2 and Book IX, Chapter 5 (c. 1452; after the translations of James Leoni and Joseph Rykwert)

Of course traditional architecture was never perfectly symmetrical in every situation. Medieval streets are full of irregular buildings; even grand palaces sometimes adjusted themselves around awkward sites.

The important point is that symmetry gave architects a powerful way to create visual order.

Take the classical country house.

Once the central entrance was established the rest of the façade could develop around it; windows and architectural details then reinforced the same underlying structure.

The result feels calm because you understand where everything belongs.

But symmetry alone can also become boring.

That is why beautiful architecture needs hierarchy.

3. Hierarchy

Traditional buildings rarely treat every part of the façade as equally important.

Something comes first.

The entrance might receive a larger doorway while the principal floor gets taller windows; the upper floors then become simpler as the building rises.

Palladio put the same idea in practical terms. Convenience, he wrote, depends on rank as well as on placement.

An edifice may be esteemed commodious, when every part or member stands in its due place and fit situation, neither above or below its dignity and use; or when the loggias, halls, chambers, cellars and granaries are conveniently disposed, and in their proper places.

— Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture, Book I, Chapter I

You can see this beautifully in the palaces of Florence.

The ground floor often appears heavy and strong while the upper levels become more refined; a large cornice then finishes the building at the roofline.

Everything has a place in the composition.

This principle becomes even clearer in churches because the architecture needs to tell you where to go. The main entrance receives special treatment and the altar becomes the destination inside; architecture therefore guides attention through importance.

Modern graphic designers do something similar every day.

A headline is larger than the text underneath because information needs hierarchy; if every word appeared at exactly the same size the page would become difficult to understand.

Buildings work much the same way.

Once hierarchy tells us what matters the next question is how the different parts relate across the façade.

That is where rhythm comes in.

4. Rhythm

Look at a long traditional building and start counting the windows.

You will usually discover a pattern.

Window follows window while columns or pilasters may divide the façade into repeated sections; the building develops a rhythm that your eye can follow as you walk past it.

The Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen described that pattern as something almost as elementary as counting.

The simplest method, for both the architect and the artisans, is the absolutely regular repetition of the same elements, for example solid, void, solid, void, just as you count one, two, one, two. It is a rhythm everyone can grasp. But it is also possible to use more complicated rhythms… Architecture can be compared with music in that both are based on repetition. The rhythm of a building is experienced as one moves through it or past it; the façade is not a picture to be taken in at a glance, but a sequence unfolding in time.

— Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (1959)

This matters enormously on a street.

A large building without rhythm can become one enormous surface. Break that same façade into repeated bays and suddenly the scale becomes easier to understand; you experience the building piece by piece rather than confronting the entire mass at once.

Classical architecture became exceptionally good at this.

Architects could repeat columns across a façade while varying the central section; repetition created unity and variation prevented monotony.

You can see the same principle in ordinary terraced houses.

One house might be quite simple on its own. Place twenty beside one another with similar windows and proportions; suddenly the entire street becomes a composition.

Which helps explain why beautiful architecture is never only about individual buildings.

It also depends upon how those buildings relate to us.

5. Human Scale

A door tells you something very useful about a building.

It tells you how big a person is.

Windows do something similar because their dimensions traditionally relate to rooms occupied by human beings; balconies and steps give us even more clues.

Together these elements allow us to understand the scale of a building almost instinctively.

Le Corbusier tried to turn that instinct into a measuring system. The Modulor was his attempt to keep even large modern buildings answerable to the body.

The Modulor is a measuring tool based on the human body and on mathematics. A man-with-arm-upraised provides, at the determining points of his occupation of space—foot, solar plexus, head, tips of the fingers of the upraised arm—three intervals which give rise to a series of golden sections, called the Fibonacci series… Architecture must be a thing of the body, a thing which the body can measure and against which the body can measure itself. A building that has lost the human scale has lost the means by which we recognize it as a place made for us.

— Le Corbusier, The Modulor (1948/1954)

This becomes especially important with large structures.

A cathedral can rise far above the people standing beneath it while still giving them smaller elements they can understand. The doorway meets the human body at ground level; from there larger architectural elements carry the eye upward.

So monumental architecture does not necessarily mean inhuman architecture.

The two can coexist.

Problems begin when a building loses these intermediate scales. An enormous blank wall gives the eye very little information while a façade broken into windows and entrances tells us how the building relates to the people using it.

Traditional architects understood this particularly well because buildings were experienced at walking speed.

You approached the door and passed the windows; architecture unfolded at the same pace as the human body.

And because you experienced it from close range the materials mattered enormously.

6. Material

Old buildings age.

That sounds obvious but it is one of their most interesting qualities.

Stone changes as rain passes over it while brick develops variations across its surface; after decades the building can look different without necessarily looking worse.

John Ruskin thought that aging was not a defect of material but part of a building’s glory.

For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity… It is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life.

— John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, “The Lamp of Memory” (1849)

Traditional materials also tell you something about how a building was made.

You can see individual bricks and understand the wall as something assembled by human hands; carved stone can reveal the marks of craftsmanship at a much smaller scale.

This gives the building depth.

A stone façade looks different from twenty metres away than it does from two metres away because new details appear as you approach it. The architecture rewards you for getting closer.

Local materials also helped give cities distinct identities.

Bath became famous for its pale stone while Bologna became associated with warm brick; architecture therefore grew out of the material available around it.

Once the structure and material were in place architects could add the final layer.

And this is probably the one modern architecture has argued about most.

7. Ornament

For most of architectural history nobody found it particularly strange that a useful building might also contain decoration.

A window could keep out the rain and still receive a beautiful surround; a roof could protect the building while the cornice underneath gave the façade a proper ending.

Ruskin went further, and treated ornament not as an optional finish but as the point at which building becomes art—provided it was put where the eye could rest.

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art… What is the place for ornament? Consider first that the characters of natural objects which the architect can represent are few and abstract… Hence then a general law, of singular importance in the present day, a law of simple common-sense—not to decorate things belonging to purposes of active and occupied life. Wherever you can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is beauty. You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you may mix play. Work first, and then rest. Work first, and then gaze; but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel. Put it in the drawing-room, not into the workshop; put it upon domestic furniture, not upon tools of handicraft. Yes, if you do it consistently, and in places where it can be calmly seen; but not if you use the beautiful form only as a mask and covering of the proper conditions and uses of things.

— John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, “The Lamp of Beauty” and “The Lamp of Sacrifice” (1849)

Ornament did not need to cover everything.

In the best traditional buildings it usually emphasized parts that already mattered.

A doorway might receive carving because people entered there while a capital marked the point where a column met what it supported; decoration helped explain the architecture as much as embellish it.

Then the twentieth century changed the conversation.

Modernist architects increasingly questioned historical ornament while Adolf Loos gave the attack its most famous expression in his essay Ornament and Crime. Architecture moved toward simpler surfaces and decoration increasingly came to look unnecessary.

The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use… Ornament is wasted labour power and hence wasted health. It has always been so. Today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital… The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate… I have therefore evolved the following maxim, and pronounce it to the world: the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.

— Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime (1908)

Yet people never stopped enjoying ornament.

We still travel enormous distances to look at carved churches and decorated houses; when those buildings need restoration we spend extraordinary amounts of money preserving the details previous generations considered worth making.

Perhaps that tells us something.

Beautiful Buildings Are Doing Several Things at Once

None of these seven pillars can create beauty by itself.

Perfect symmetry can become lifeless and ornament can become ridiculous when it overwhelms everything underneath; even beautiful materials cannot rescue a building whose proportions feel wrong.

The interesting part comes when these principles begin working together.

Proportion gives the building order and symmetry makes that order legible; hierarchy tells us where to look while rhythm carries our eyes across the façade.

Human scale connects the architecture to our bodies and material gives it physical character; ornament then adds another layer of meaning and beauty.

Traditional architecture developed these ideas over centuries because architects could see what previous generations built and improve upon it.

That inheritance produced Gothic cathedrals and Georgian streets; it also produced countless ordinary houses that nobody thought important enough to put in an architectural history book.

And perhaps that is the real lesson.

Beautiful architecture does not require every building to become a masterpiece.

It requires us to remember the basic principles that made beautiful buildings possible in the first place.

There is a strange thing about modern architecture that becomes obvious the moment you ask ordinary people what they actually like.

Show people an old street in Paris beside a new development and many will choose the old one. Ask tourists where they want to spend an afternoon and they crowd into the historic centers of Rome or Prague; meanwhile some of the buildings celebrated most enthusiastically by architects struggle to inspire anything like the same affection.

You can dismiss this as nostalgia.

The problem is that researchers have actually tested it.

A 2026 study involving almost 3,000 people in Norway and Greece showed participants pairs of traditional and contemporary buildings. Traditional buildings were preferred across every comparison and the result was statistically significant in seven of the eight national tests; even contemporary buildings that won or received nominations for architectural awards lost to their traditional counterparts.

Which raises a rather uncomfortable question.

If so many people prefer traditional architecture then why do we build so little of it?

People Really Do Prefer Traditional Buildings

Architecture is subjective and there will never be one building everybody likes.

Still patterns can exist inside subjective preferences.

A 2020 experiment placed participants inside 360-degree virtual environments so they could experience traditional and contemporary urban spaces rather than simply looking at photographs. The traditional environments received significantly higher ratings for visual appearance; participants also reported more positive emotional responses to them.

British evidence points in a similar direction.

A YouGov survey of 1,713 UK adults found that 68 percent thought historic buildings were generally built to a high standard. Only 26 percent said the same about new buildings.

Then there is a recent Dutch experiment.

In 2025 Ipsos I&O showed 770 people eight pairs of buildings with a contemporary version beside a traditional or classical alternative. The traditional design won every comparison with support ranging from 67 to 92 percent. The research was commissioned by The Aesthetic City which advocates traditional urbanism so that context is worth knowing; the polling itself was conducted by Ipsos I&O.

Something is clearly happening here.

Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the fifteenth century, tried to name what people keep recognizing even when they lack the vocabulary of a critic:

Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter. All which we desire to add unto any thing, to make it more beautiful, is called ornament. Beauty is some inherent property, to be suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional.

That is not a demand for palaces. It is a demand for wholeness. People walking a street are often judging whether a building feels complete, not whether it is historically “correct.”

Architects Do Not Always See Buildings Like Everyone Else

This disagreement is older than our current architecture wars.

Researchers in 1989 compared the reactions of architects and non-architects to residential architecture. The two groups responded differently to architectural styles while the study also found differences between the physical characteristics associated with professional “high” architecture and more popular residential design.

That makes intuitive sense.

Spend years studying architecture and you learn to look for things most people never think about. An architect may become interested in novelty or construction while somebody walking past the building might simply ask whether it looks beautiful.

Neither person is pretending.

They have learned to see different things.

The problem begins when one of those groups gets much more influence over what everybody else has to look at.

Adolf Loos himself, the great enemy of decoration, understood that a house is not a private artwork:

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work of art is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative. The work of art shows mankind new paths and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

If that distinction is taken seriously, public preference is not an embarrassment. It is part of the job.

Architecture Became Suspicious of the Past

For most of architectural history there was nothing unusual about learning from older buildings.

Styles changed and technology moved forward while architects continued borrowing forms that people already understood. A nineteenth-century architect could design a railway station using an architectural language with roots centuries earlier; the arrival of the train did not require him to pretend the column suddenly became useless.

Modernism challenged that relationship.

During the early twentieth century architects increasingly argued that new technology deserved a new architectural language. Historical imitation became associated with an age that modern society was supposed to leave behind; ornament also came under sustained attack.

There were understandable reasons for this.

Industrial materials made different kinds of buildings possible while rapidly growing cities needed enormous amounts of housing. Architects wanted to experiment with what concrete and steel could do; copying the nineteenth century forever was hardly an inspiring answer.

Yet something else happened alongside that experimentation.

Building traditionally increasingly became associated with looking backward.

And that assumption still shapes the argument today.

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Adolf Loos Declared War on Ornament

Few people expressed the new attitude more memorably than the Viennese architect Adolf Loos…

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Then walk through many developments built during the last seventy years and the experience changes completely.

The buildings may be perfectly comfortable and the roads may work efficiently; somehow the street itself disappeared.

So what happened?

The answer has surprisingly little to do with people suddenly losing their taste for beautiful architecture. During the twentieth century we changed the way cities were planned and built; once streets became primarily systems for moving cars between separate buildings much of what made the traditional street beautiful became harder to produce.

To understand why we need to look at what a street used to be.

The Street Used to Be a Room

One of the easiest ways to understand an old street is to stop looking at the individual buildings.

Look at the space between them instead.

Traditional buildings usually came right up to the pavement and stood beside their neighbors; together their façades formed two continuous walls with the street running between them.

In urban areas, streets occupy more land than any other public use and make up between 25 and 35 percent of all developed land. Streets are the public realm. They are used for necessary services, transportation, fire and police protection, access to property, and all kinds of social and economic uses. They are not stagnant but rather constantly in change, even though the changes may seem minute, such as repaving. They are owned by the public, which is responsible for them. By locating and designing streets well, one has largely designed the city. In most modern North American cities, and indeed most cities elsewhere in the world, most of the space of city streets is devoted to traffic movement. The functional aspects of streets have received much more attention than their social or community building aspects.

— Allan B. Jacobs, Great Streets (1993)

Paris gives us an unusually clear example.

During the nineteenth-century transformation associated with Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann the city opened new boulevards while regulating the buildings constructed along them. Building height related to street width and adjoining façades produced what Paris itself describes as a rue mur: literally a street wall.

That is why a Parisian boulevard can feel coherent even when dozens of different buildings belong to dozens of different owners.

The architecture changes.

The street remains.

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Paris Designed the Whole Thing

Haussmann’s Paris is useful because the beauty we admire today did not emerge entirely by accident…

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For much of European history things worked very differently. Before water arrived through pipes inside almost every home, a fountain could be one of the most important objects in a neighborhood. People depended on it every day. Cities therefore faced a simple question: if you were going to place an essential piece of infrastructure in the middle of a square, why shouldn’t it also be beautiful?

So they made fountains into architecture.

Before Water Came to Your House

People still needed water for drinking and domestic life. Aqueducts could carry it across long distances; public fountains were the point where ordinary people finally collected it.

Paris traces its earliest public fountains to the thirteenth century. Over the following centuries aqueducts and pumps improved the supply, but people still came to the street for water, and they met their neighbors while they were there. The fountain was infrastructure and a meeting place at once.

John Ruskin saw that double life clearly. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture he argued that a working fountain was the wisest kind of street ornament precisely because people actually stopped there:

So, again, there is no subject of street ornament so wisely chosen as the fountain, where it is a fountain of use; for it is just there that perhaps the happiest pause takes place in the labour of the day, when the pitcher is rested on the edge of it, and the breath of the bearer is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from the forehead, and the uprightness of the form declined against the marble ledge, and the sound of the kind word or light laugh mixes with the trickle of the falling water, heard shriller and shriller as the pitcher fills. What pause is so sweet as that—so full of the depth of ancient days, so softened with the calm of pastoral solitude?

The beauty belonged to the pause that the water created.

So Cities Made Them Beautiful

Once a fountain occupied an important public space, there was little reason to treat it as nothing more than plumbing. Stone could be carved around the outlet. Sculpture could turn the water itself into part of the design. In a larger square the fountain could become the visual center of the entire space.

Paris produced an extraordinary sixteenth-century example in the Fontaine des Innocents: Renaissance sculpture wrapped around a working water source. Across Europe the same logic held. A fountain could supply water, commemorate a ruler, and decorate a square at the same time. Utility did not excuse ugliness.

Venetian wellheads said so outright. One inscription in Campo San Leonardo reads: “For the convenience of the people as well as an ornament to the city.”

Francis Bacon, writing about gardens rather than streets, described the same marriage of refreshment and display:

Fountains are a great beauty and refreshment; but pools mar all and make a garden unwholesome and full of flies and frogs. Fountains I intend to be of two natures: the one, that sprinkleth or spouteth water; the other, a fair receipt of water of some thirty or forty foot square, but without fish or slime or mud. For the first, the ornaments of images gilt, or of marble, which are in use, do well; but the main matter is so to convey the water, as it never stay either in the bowls or in the cistern, that the water be never by rest discolored, green, or red or the like, or gather any mossiness or putrefaction. Besides that, it is to be cleansed every day by the hand. Also, some steps up to it, and some fine pavement about it, doth well.

The ornaments mattered. So did moving, clean water.

Rome Took This Much Further

Rome inherited an ancient relationship with aqueducts. When popes restored old water systems in the early modern period, they also created monumental fountains at their endpoints. Water travelled into the city through infrastructure most people never saw. At the point where it finally appeared, the engineering announced itself through sculpture.

The Trevi Fountain is the most famous result. What looks like an enormous piece of urban sculpture is also the terminal display of the Acqua Vergine. Rome could have let the water emerge from an ordinary outlet. Instead it gave the water a façade.

Voltaire, writing from Paris in 1739 about Bouchardon’s Fontaine de Grenelle, measured his own city against that Roman standard:

The Parisians should do more to embellish their city, to destroy the monuments of Gothic barbarism, and particularly these ridiculous village fountains which disfigure our city. I have no doubt that Bouchardon will make this fountain a beautiful piece of architecture; but what is a fountain leaning against a wall, in a street, and half hidden by a house? What is a fountain with only two taps, where the water carriers will fill their buckets? This is not the way to build the fountains with which Rome is embellished. We find it hard to get out of the mean and rude taste. Fountains must be erected in public places, and beautiful monuments must be seen from all sides.

Even the complaint assumes that a fountain should be architecture, not merely a tap.

The Fountain Could Advertise the City

Bringing clean water across a landscape required engineering and money. Letting that water flow in public demonstrated that both existed. A monumental fountain turned municipal infrastructure into civic pride.

That is why fountains belonged in squares. Water drew people toward them; architecture gave the space a center. Unlike a statue, the fountain was alive. Water moved across stone, changed in sunlight, and filled a square with sound long before you reached it.

James Silk Buckingham, writing in 1841 after seeing cities that still treated water as public spectacle, put the case directly:

It is to be regretted that the introduction of fountains is not more frequent in the cities of England and America. Whoever has travelled much in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, cannot fail to have admired the many beautiful fountains adorning the open places and public squares of the ancient cities of these countries. The refreshing coolness of the atmosphere, the sparkling brilliance of the waters, the soothing murmur of their falling sounds, and the air of freshness, luxury, and repose, which are all sources of enjoyment, are in themselves sufficient recommendation. It seems astonishing that London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, as well as New-York, Philadelphia, and Washington, should be so deficient as they are in these combinations of beauty and utility.

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Then Paris Tried Something Different

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Before you reach your room you might pass beneath a painted ceiling or climb a staircase designed to impress everyone who entered. The lobby could occupy some of the most valuable space in the entire building; yet hotel owners decorated it with marble and filled it with furniture where guests could sit for hours.

Today many hotel lobbies work very differently.

You enter and find the reception desk almost immediately. There may be a few chairs and somewhere to leave your luggage; within a few minutes you are expected to be on your way upstairs.

So why did hotels once spend so much money on a room where nobody slept?

The answer is that the hotel lobby used to do much more than check you in.

The architect Philip Johnson, who spent a lifetime arguing that buildings should do more than merely enclose useful rooms, put the point with characteristic bluntness:

“Architecture is the art of how to waste space. All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”

The old lobby was that kind of waste: space given away so that arrival itself could become an experience.

The Hotel Was Becoming Something New

Before the great hotels appeared travellers usually stayed in inns or smaller lodging houses. These buildings could be comfortable but their main purpose was fairly simple; you needed somewhere to eat and somewhere to sleep.

During the nineteenth century that began to change.

Railways brought growing numbers of travellers into European cities while industrial wealth created a new class of customers willing to pay for comfort. Hotels became larger and more luxurious; eventually the finest examples began borrowing the scale and decoration of palaces.

The lobby became part of that transformation.

A guest needed to understand what sort of hotel he entered before seeing his room. The entrance therefore became the hotel’s introduction; beautiful materials and generous proportions told you almost immediately that you arrived somewhere expensive.

This was architecture doing the advertising.

John Ruskin had already insisted that a building is never only a practical object. In The Poetry of Architecture he wrote:

“It is not merely a science of the rule and compass, it does not consist only in the observation of just rule, or of fair proportion: it is, or ought to be, a science of feeling more than of rule, a ministry to the mind, more than to the eye. If we consider how much less the beauty and majesty of a building depend upon its pleasing certain prejudices of the eye, than upon its rousing certain trains of meditation in the mind, it will show in a moment how many intricate questions of feeling are involved in the raising of an edifice; it will convince us of the truth of a proposition, which might at first have appeared startling, that no man can be an architect, who is not a metaphysician.”

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Then Came the Grand Hotel

By the late nineteenth century the grand hotel became one of the great building types of the modern city.

London’s Savoy gives us a wonderful example..

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London still has Smithfield.

Paris once possessed perhaps the most famous of them all.

So why did European cities put so much architecture into something as ordinary as a market?

The answer begins with what shopping looked like before the market hall existed..

When the Market Was the Street

For centuries the European market was usually an outdoor affair.

Traders arrived in a town square and arranged their goods beneath temporary stalls while customers moved between them; some towns eventually provided covered spaces but much of the buying and selling still happened outdoors.

That worked reasonably well when cities were smaller.

Then the nineteenth century arrived.

European cities grew enormously and feeding them became a much bigger problem; thousands of people needed fresh food every day while carts carrying produce competed for space on streets that were already becoming crowded.

Paris shows the problem particularly well.

The city’s central market traced its history back to the twelfth century and grew alongside Paris for generations; by the nineteenth century the old arrangements struggled with the amount of food moving through the city. Parisian authorities increasingly worried about congestion and hygiene so rebuilding the market became part of the wider modernization of the capital.

The solution was wonderfully ambitious.

Instead of simply clearing more space for stalls they would build architecture around the market.

Paris Built a Palace for Food

Victor Baltard received the great commission.

His first attempt was surprisingly conventional because the market building completed in 1853 used heavy masonry around an iron structure; Parisians nicknamed it the Fort des Halles and Napoleon III disliked it enough to stop the project. The emperor wanted vast umbrellas of iron, not a fortress.

Baltard went back to work.

This time he allowed the new materials of the nineteenth century to become the architecture.

Iron provided the structure while glass brought daylight into the enormous interior; instead of one heavy building the market became a collection of airy pavilions connected through the heart of Paris.

Between 1854 and 1874 ten of Baltard’s pavilions rose at Les Halles.

The result looked unlike the markets that came before it. When Émile Zola’s starving Florent first sees them at night, they do not look like shops at all:

“However, what surprised Florent was the sight of some huge pavilions on either side of the street, pavilions with lofty roofs that seemed to expand and soar out of sight amidst a swarm of gleams. In his weakened state of mind he fancied he beheld a series of enormous, symmetrically built palaces, light and airy as crystal, whose fronts sparkled with countless streaks of light filtering through endless Venetian shutters. Gleaming between the slender pillar shafts, these narrow golden bars seemed like ladders of light mounting to the gloomy line of the lower roofs, and then soaring aloft till they reached the jumble of higher ones, thus describing the open framework of immense square halls, where in the yellow flare of the gas-lights a multitude of vague, grey, slumbering things was gathered together. At last Florent turned his head to look about him, distressed at not knowing where he was, and filled with vague uneasiness by the sight of that huge and seemingly fragile vision.”
— Émile Zola, The Fat and the Thin (The Belly of Paris), chapter I.

Thin iron columns carried broad roofs while glass opened the walls to light; merchants gained enormous covered spaces without the darkness that came with traditional masonry buildings.

That was the trick.

A market hall needed to be enormous without feeling heavy.

Iron made that possible.

Iron Changed What Architects Could Do

For most of architectural history a large roof required substantial support.

Stone walls could carry tremendous weight but they also took up space and blocked light; timber roofs could span impressive distances but large urban markets increasingly demanded something more flexible.

Industrial production gave architects another option.

Cast iron and wrought iron could support wide roofs using relatively slender members; this allowed architects to cover enormous spaces while keeping the floor below comparatively open.

Markets were almost perfectly suited to the technology.

A merchant needed room for his stall while customers needed to move easily around it; everyone benefited from daylight and ventilation.

The structure could also become beautiful in its own right.

Columns received decorative capitals while roof trusses formed repeating patterns overhead; architecture emerged directly from the engineering instead of being applied afterward to hide it.

Paris demonstrated what was possible.

Other European cities noticed. Zola, looking at the same ironwork, did not see a palace only. He saw a machine built to digest a capital:

“The giant markets, overflowing with food, had brought things to a head. They seemed like some satiated beast, embodying Paris itself, grown enormously fat, and silently supporting the Empire. It was a vast modern machine, some kind of steam engine, some kind of boiler serving the people’s digestion, a gigantic metal belly, bolted, riveted, made of wood, of glass, and of iron, with the elegance and power of a mechanical motor. Les Halles were the shopkeepers’ belly, the belly of respectable petit bourgeois people, bursting with contentment and well-being, shining in the sun, and declaring that everything was for the best, since respectable people had never before grown so wonderfully fat.”
— Émile Zola, The Belly of Paris.

Florence Built One Too

When Florence became capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy in 1865 the city entered a period of major transformation.

Among the architects involved was Giuseppe Mengoni.

He is better known for designing Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II but Florence also received one of his great iron-and-glass buildings; the Mercato Centrale opened in 1874 and still stands in the San Lorenzo district today.

The building feels industrial and Florentine at the same time.

Its great iron structure gives the interior the openness expected from a nineteenth-century market while the exterior responds more carefully to the surrounding city; modern construction therefore sits inside an architectural language that still belongs to Florence.

This is something nineteenth-century architects did remarkably well.

They embraced new technology without assuming every building needed to look completely new.

A railway station could use iron differently from a market hall while both remained products of the same industrial age.

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Markets Needed Light

There was also a practical reason these buildings became so beautiful..

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So what happened to the beautiful shopfront?

The answer begins with something as ordinary as a window.

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When the Shop Became Part of the Street

For much of European history shops looked very different from the ones we recognize today because merchants commonly sold from openings built into the ground floor of a house while the family lived above. Shutters could open toward the street and goods appeared directly in front of the customer; the recognizable architectural shopfront emerged much later.

By the eighteenth century British shops increasingly received a distinct framework around their windows while pilasters marked the sides and a fascia above provided somewhere for the merchant’s name. One remarkable survivor stands at 56 Artillery Lane in London where an early eighteenth-century building contains a shopfront installed around 1756; its bow windows show how merchants displayed goods before large sheets of glass became affordable.

Paris developed its own versions and one beautiful example appeared on the Quai de Bourbon between 1775 and 1777. Later observers considered the frontage an unusually charming survival and it was eventually preserved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By this point a simple idea was taking hold across European cities: a business needed a face and that face could become part of the architecture around it.

Jonathan Taylor, writing on the lineage of the traditional front, put the early history this way:

The origins of the traditional shopfront lie in the market stalls of the Middle Ages. Prior to the industrial revolution and the vast urban development which accompanied it, retail trade was dominated by the market. The earliest shops were generally simple variations of the market stall, and only partly enclosed by the building. An awning over a projecting stall was common. In another variation, the opening was protected by two horizontal shutters; the top one folding up to double as an awning or ‘pet roof’, and the lower one folding down to form the stall board. Today the term ‘stall-riser’ is still used to describe the front of the shopfront below the window. By the mid 18th century, the shop as we know it today had emerged. Glazing, which had probably first appeared in the late 17th century was now common. Small paned windows, frequently projecting out from under a canopy appeared in the more prestigious retail areas of London and the principal market towns. … In the spirit of classicism which then prevailed, a language of ornamentation emerged which was unique to the shopfront. Classical detailing was introduced to relieve the appearance of large shopfront openings in the walls of ordinary urban terraced houses. The beam or ‘bressummer’ which supported the facade above was disguised by an ‘entablature’, and classical columns, pediments or scrolled corbel brackets were introduced to give visual support. The entablature provided an ideal opportunity for displaying the name of the shop, and the frieze or fascia was enlarged accordingly.

The Survey of London’s account of the Artillery Lane front shows how far that language could already go by the 1750s:

No. 56 has the finest mid-Georgian shop-front surviving in London. Extending the full width of the house, it is divided into four bays of different width by Doric three-quarter columns, which stand on plain stone pedestals and have moulded bases, plain shafts, and enriched capitals, all of wood. … It was between 1750 and 1759 (probably in 1756–7) that the fronts of the two houses were rebuilt, the existing shop-front of No. 56 inserted, and the elaborate embellishments of the first-floor rooms of the two houses undertaken. In this lease No. 56 was described as a ‘new built messuage’. … The first-floor interior of both houses and the shop-front of No. 56 have been attributed on stylistic grounds to Abraham Swan, some of whose designs they resemble, but there is no documentary evidence of this.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art described the Parisian counterpart in similar terms of rarity and survival:

This Parisian shopfront, from the north bank of the Ile Saint-Louis, stood on a site favorable to commerce, close to the junction of the Quai Bourbon and the Pont Marie, an early seventeenth-century bridge over the Seine. It was superimposed on the masonry of an existing seventeenth-century building, the modest outlines of which can still be seen. Chroniclers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Paris drew attention to the charm and rarity of this isolated little shopfront, which was thought to be the only surviving eighteenth-century example in the city. By the time it was dismantled in World War I, the original painted surface had weathered to the bare oak and the woodwork had suffered some losses. When the shopfront was restored at the Museum, the natural tone of the wood was retained. The missing elements were supplied in accordance with a measured drawing of the shopfront published in 1870.

Then Glass Changed Everything

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You are looking at an apartment building.

Yet the entrance is framed in carved stone and the windows are surrounded by ornament; above them rise balconies with wrought-iron railings while statues or decorative faces stare down from the upper floors. Step through the front door and things can become even more extravagant because you may find marble floors and a staircase that looks as though it belongs inside a palace.

And then you remember that dozens of families lived here.

These buildings were not royal residences and most were never intended to become monuments; they were simply places where people rented apartments in rapidly growing European cities.

So why did they look like this?

The answer begins with one of the greatest changes in European urban history: during the nineteenth century millions of people moved into cities and an entirely new kind of urban housing had to be built for them.

Europe Needed Apartments

Although apartment living existed long before the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution changed its scale dramatically; cities grew as people arrived looking for work while expanding middle classes wanted homes close to the commercial centers where they worked.

Paris provides perhaps the most famous example.

When Napoleon III appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann to transform Paris in 1853 the city still contained large areas of narrow medieval streets; over the following decades enormous boulevards were cut through the capital while thousands of new buildings rose along them.

The result was the Paris we recognize today.

Those long streets lined with cream-colored buildings were not produced by constructing one enormous palace after another; they were created largely through private apartment houses built according to regulations that controlled matters such as height and alignment.

Yet nobody seems to have concluded that apartment housing therefore needed to look cheap.

Quite the opposite.

The Façade Belonged to the Street

This is probably the most important thing to understand about old apartment buildings: architects were designing an individual property while also designing part of a street.

A building therefore had responsibilities beyond the rooms inside it.

Its windows had to relate to the windows next door and its cornice contributed to the skyline of the entire block; when dozens of buildings followed similar principles the result was a street that felt coherent even though different owners constructed its individual parts.

Paris became particularly good at this.

Haussmann-era regulations encouraged consistent building heights and continuous façades along the new boulevards; architects still had considerable freedom to vary entrances and ornament within that larger order.

The building could have its own personality without destroying the street around it.

That simple idea explains a great deal about why these neighborhoods remain so attractive today. The Luxembourg architect and urbanist Léon Krier later put the same civic logic with unusual bluntness:

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

Nineteenth-century apartment houses were private investments. Their faces, however, were public property in everything but legal title.

Then There Was the Entrance

If you want to understand the difference between old and new apartment buildings it is worth looking at the front door.

Older architects frequently treated the entrance as one of the most important parts of the façade because it marked the transition from the public street into the private world of the building; this encouraged the use of carved surrounds and substantial wooden doors that made the threshold unmistakable.

Once inside you might pass through a decorated vestibule before reaching a courtyard or staircase.

None of this required the building to be a palace.

It simply meant that arriving somewhere was considered an architectural event.

The doorway told you where to enter and the staircase made moving between floors pleasant; architecture gave ordinary actions a sense of ceremony without preventing the building from doing its practical job.

The Roman architect Vitruvius, whose Ten Books on Architecture remained a European textbook for centuries, had already insisted that usefulness was never enough by itself. In Sir Henry Wotton’s famous seventeenth-century rendering:

The end is to build well. Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight.

A stair that only got you upstairs satisfied commodity. A stair that also made the climb feel like an arrival satisfied delight. The old apartment house tried, often quite cheaply, to do both.

The Staircase Was Meant to Be Seen

Before elevators became common the staircase mattered even more because almost everyone entering an apartment building had to use it.

So architects paid attention to it.

A good staircase could receive an elegant balustrade and carefully proportioned steps; natural light might enter from tall windows or a glazed roof above.

In wealthier buildings the principal staircase could become particularly elaborate because it formed part of the experience offered to desirable tenants. Someone considering an expensive apartment did not first encounter the drawing room; he encountered the entrance and staircase.

Developers understood this.

Spend money on the spaces everyone sees and the whole building feels more prestigious.

Which brings us to an important point: these buildings were beautiful for economic reasons too.

Beauty Helped Sell Apartments

It is easy to imagine that nineteenth-century builders simply cared more about beauty than developers do today; the reality is more interesting because many of these buildings were commercial investments constructed to generate rental income.

Owners wanted tenants.

A handsome façade made the property more desirable while an impressive entrance could signal that respectable people lived inside; architecture therefore became part of the building’s value.

The same principle operated inside individual apartments.

High ceilings made rooms feel generous and large windows brought in light; decorative plasterwork could give even a relatively standardized room a sense of dignity.

Much of this ornament was also cheaper than we might assume.

By the nineteenth century decorative elements could increasingly be produced through molds and repeated across a building; industrial manufacturing therefore helped make ornament available on a scale that earlier generations could scarcely have managed.

Industrialization did not initially kill architectural decoration.

In many cases it helped spread it.

Louis Sullivan, writing in 1892, understood both the temptation to strip a building bare and the cost of doing so after the fact:

I take it as self-evident that a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion. It is not evident to me that ornament can intrinsically heighten these elemental qualities. Why, then, should we use ornament? Is not a noble and simple dignity sufficient? Why should we ask more? If I answer the question in entire candor, I should say that it would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years, in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude. … I believe, as I have said, that an excellent and beautiful building may be designed that shall bear no ornament whatever; but I believe just as firmly that a decorated structure, harmoniously conceived, well considered, cannot be stripped of its system of ornament without destroying its individuality. It has been hitherto somewhat the fashion to speak of ornament, without perhaps too much levity of thought, as a thing to be put on or omitted, as the case might be. I hold to the contrary — that the presence or absence of ornament should, certainly in serious work, be determined at the very beginnings of the design.

The old apartment façade was not decoration glued on at the end. Its rustication, window surrounds, and cornice were part of how the building explained itself to the street.

Vienna Built an Entire City This Way

Paris was hardly alone.

When Vienna demolished much of its old fortifications during the nineteenth century the famous Ringstrasse emerged around the historic center; monumental institutions rose along the new boulevard while enormous numbers of apartment buildings filled the expanding districts beyond it.

Vienna’s Gründerzeit apartment houses could be remarkably elaborate.

Their façades borrowed freely from Renaissance and Baroque architecture while interiors developed around courtyards; wealthy tenants might occupy impressive apartments facing the street while less prestigious accommodation appeared elsewhere in the same building.

This is where the palace comparison becomes particularly useful because many apartment architects deliberately borrowed the architectural vocabulary of aristocratic residences.

Rusticated ground floors gave buildings visual weight while upper stories received increasingly elaborate window surrounds; the façade could therefore look remarkably grand even though the building behind it was divided among many households.

Architecture once associated with princes was becoming part of middle-class urban life.

Vienna also produced one of the period’s most important critics of the new city. In City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), Camillo Sitte argued that not every street needed to be a monument — but the streets that did represent the city should not look like leftover space:

After all, the artist needs for his purpose only a few main streets and plazas; all the rest he is glad to turn over to traffic and to daily material needs. The broad mass of living quarters should be businesslike, and there the city may appear in its work-clothes. However, major plazas and thoroughfares should wear their “Sunday best” in order to be a pride and joy to the inhabitants, to awake civic spirit, and forever to nurture great and noble sentiment within our growing youth. This is exactly the way it is in the old towns. The overwhelming majority of their side streets are artistically unimportant. … Just a few thoroughfares and major plazas in the centers of towns stand up under critical appraisal — those upon which our forefathers lavished wisely, and with all means at their disposal, whatever they could muster of works of civic art.

The Gründerzeit apartment house sat between those two conditions. It housed ordinary life. It also dressed the street as if the street itself were a civic room.

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The Palace Had Become an Apartment Block

Something extraordinary happened during the nineteenth century…

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It may have enormous stone columns around the entrance, carved figures above the windows, bronze doors heavy enough to survive a siege, and a banking hall inside covered in marble, mosaics, decorative plasterwork, and polished wood. From the street, you might easily mistake it for a courthouse, parliament building, museum, or palace.

Then you notice the name carved across the façade.

It was a bank.

This is one of those things that becomes difficult to ignore once you start noticing it. Banks used to be among the grandest commercial buildings in a city, and some of the greatest architects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries designed them with an almost absurd degree of care. Even relatively ordinary provincial banks could have beautiful stone façades, arched windows, carved entrances, decorative clocks, and interiors that made depositing your wages feel like entering a civic institution.

Compare that with the average bank today.

Perhaps it occupies the ground floor of an office block. There is a glass door, a glowing logo, a few machines, some desks, white ceiling panels, and laminated signs explaining how you can download the app.

So what happened?

Why did people once build banks like temples, and why did we stop?

Your Bank Needed You to Trust It

The first thing to understand is that an old bank building had another job besides holding money.

It had to convince you that your money was safe.

This mattered enormously during the nineteenth century, when modern banking expanded alongside industrialization, international trade, railways, growing cities, and an increasingly wealthy middle class. Banks collected deposits, issued credit, financed businesses, moved money across countries, and became deeply involved in the economic life of towns and cities.

Yet banking ultimately depended upon something remarkably fragile.

Trust.

If you handed a bank your savings, you needed to believe the institution would still be there tomorrow. If enough customers stopped believing that and demanded their money simultaneously, the result could be a bank run.

Architecture became one way of answering that anxiety.

A bank could not simply tell you it was permanent. It could look permanent.

So banks built in stone.

They raised enormous columns. They placed heavy doors at their entrances. They gave their buildings thick walls, monumental staircases, symmetrical façades, and windows arranged with almost mathematical order. The message was obvious before you even stepped through the door.

This institution is serious.

It is stable.

It will still be here in fifty years.

The critic Anthony Paletta later described how little of that architecture was strictly necessary to the work of moving money, and how much of it was meant to settle the nerves:

For all the caprices of architects, common sense tends to prevail when it comes to the design of buildings that have a specific task to carry out. The retailer will balk at a building where he can’t easily display his wares; the cinema operator at a building without a marquee. Exceptions always happen but many buildings have specific things to do which means that their look will incline towards whatever arrangement makes that easiest. There’s another kind of building whose form is familiar but whose appearance has—when you actually think about it—fairly little to do with its function. A bank is one of these.

As architectural historian Daniel Abramson notes, the word “bank” derives from the Italian term for a merchant’s counter. “Thus from its very beginnings the idea of a bank connotes a physical thing or space across which human exchange takes place,” he writes. “Across the space of the banco, in its literal and later architectural forms, client and bank assay each other’s character and the authenticity of the coin and paper that passes between them.”

The fundamental fulcrum remains an interaction with a banker across a desk or a counter. (There were once days when your doubloons might all have been literally in the basement, thus encouraging fortress-like elements, but that age is long gone.) The central aim of bank design has thus been impressionistic from the start: to inspire trust in the client. For most of banking’s history, this was not especially easy. The point of multiple fairy tales is do not give your coins to a stranger in exchange for magic beans or a piece of paper. Bank architecture sought to overcome this hesitation. Critic Brendan Gill described this pursuit as “cunning stagecraft,” writing: “whether a given bank was sound or unsound, it took care to put up what was literally a good front—a façade that, whatever happened to life behind it, proclaimed an impregnable fiscal integrity.”

And because architects already possessed a language associated with permanence, authority, and public importance, they borrowed it.

They looked to Greece and Rome.

Why So Many Banks Look Like Temples

This is why the classical bank became such a familiar sight.

Greek and Roman architecture carried centuries of associations with government, law, civilization, wealth, and endurance, while the Renaissance and later Neoclassical architects developed those forms into a language Europeans and Americans could immediately understand.

Columns suggested dignity. Stone suggested permanence. Symmetry suggested order. Monumental entrances announced importance.

Banks loved all of it.

The resemblance reached much further back than the nineteenth-century high street. In ancient cities, treasure and sacred architecture had already been bound together. Catesby Leigh, writing about the American classical bank, made the longer historical argument this way:

In ancient Greece, as in Egypt and Mesopotamia, banking started with the temple, where the god’s treasure was loaned out at a high rate of interest. Classical architecture likewise had its beginnings in the temple. In transforming mud-brick and wood structures into more emphatically monumental buildings of stone, the Greeks developed a sacramental architectural language closely related to the human body. It’s as if human anatomy were transfigured, or recast, as an architectural vocabulary embracing the column and the superstructure it supports. At the same time the temple was designed to stand apart from ordinary construction and symbolize community ideals and aspirations.

Over time, this sacramental conception of architecture was extended to secular buildings—city council chambers, commercial structures, houses of justice, palaces, and so on. Hence the classical bank, whose monumental form should remind us that prosperity is not an end unto itself, but a means whereby a civilization’s ideals and aspirations are pursued. The grandeur of many an American banking hall, however paradoxically, has exposed many an ordinary American citizen to the idea that there is more to life, and to architecture, than the bottom line.

One of the most famous examples appeared in London with the Bank of England.

The institution was founded in 1694, but its architectural identity became particularly associated with Sir John Soane, who worked on the complex for decades from the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century. Soane created banking halls, courts, offices, and ingenious top-lit interiors behind the great perimeter walls of the bank.

Most of his complex was later demolished, which is a painful story of its own, although the surviving exterior still gives you some sense of the institution’s extraordinary physical presence.

And the basic idea spread everywhere.

By the nineteenth century, a prosperous city almost needed a handsome bank.

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You get longer, more researched pieces on the places that shaped Western civilization and the stories behind them. Deep dives into tradition, craftsmanship, and what the built world reveals about culture. Travel guides that teach you to actually read the places you visit.

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