Architecture and Evolution: Introduction

One of my greatest passions is architecture

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. Whether I find it in an extravagant Sicilian baroque cathedral, an imposing neoclassical London townhouse or one of the many art nouveau buildings in Barcelona, the beauty of architecture never bores me. As a result, much of my travelling is aimed at visiting places of exceptional architectural beauty and grandeur.
During my many long walks through old city centres including those of Amsterdam, London, New York, Havana and Florence, I often found modernist buildings, however, to be exceptionally ugly compared to anything else built. They seem to have the power to disrupt otherwise very ‘harmonious’ rows of pretty buildings in our old cities. I find even the simplest medieval edifices, built without any aesthetic considerations at all in a time when building methods and materials were very limited compared to today’s, still much more pleasing to the eye than the structures of modernity. The latter are often intentionally asymmetrical, unadorned concrete structures that, in my view as well as those of many others, damage the public aesthetic.

Why is modern architecture so insufferably hideous? I am, of course, not the first to ask this question. The issue of ugliness has probably been the foremost objection against modern architecture ever since modernism arose in the early twentieth century amongst communist idealists. Throughout the decades, polls have shown modern architecture to be detested by the public.

Regardless, for the past hundred years the modernists have continued their aesthetic onslaught — their structures are built anyway, time and again. The public’s objections are mostly dismissed with the assertions that they will just learn to love it soon enough, or that beauty should not be a goal in architecture at all. Yet the objections have persisted, suggesting that the dismissal of anti-modernist critique was never actually due. Beauty does indeed matter, and the ugliness of modern architecture increasingly seems to be intrinsic to modernism itself.

This series, titled ‘Architecture and Evolution’, will comprise eight articles. In the first four, I will shed a light on human universals

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in the experience of architectural beauty. Historical, (evolutionary) psychological and neurological evidence shows that some architectural features, such as symmetry and ornament, are universal in the aesthetic preferences of the human species. These human universals stem from our evolutionary history.
After explaining these aesthetic preferences and their origins, I will explain what drove the evolution of architecture itself throughout the centuries until modernism became dominant. Akin to evolutionary processes found in nature, evolution in architectural style used to take place through selection on the basis of fitness.

Through an understanding of these concepts we will arrive, in the sixth article, at a set of universal principles for good architecture that follow from human nature. It is exactly these principles of which the firm dismissal is the essence of modernism.
This dismissal is what has made modern architecture in many ways unique in history, and not unimportantly, why it is bound to be intrinsically ugly. This will be explained in the seventh article — why modernism has failed and why it has been doomed from the start.

In the eighth article, the last of this series, I will cast a light on the economic value of architecture and explain how property developers and investors can turn it to profit. This will involve some economics, but will be made as understandable as possible.
I will also propose some other solutions. This is predominantly a matter of policy, but also a matter of education and the adoption of the universal principles for good architecture that will be laid out in chapter 6.

The aim of this series is to provide architects, real estate developers, urban planners, policy makers and architecture aficionados with scientific insights that are both interesting and useful. I am convinced that a good grasp of the matter will enable real estate developers and investors to deliver better returns, architects to enjoy greater popularity and policy makers to make the built environment more pleasing to the public.

I hope you will enjoy my work. In case you find yourself thinking of leaving a comment: please do. Your feedback would be very much appreciated since it could help me sharpen my thoughts.


Click here for the next article of this series.

1. i.e. the architecture of buildings, as opposed to landscape architecture.

2. ‘A phenomenon that is found in the same form irrespective of cultural setting and/or time period. Such universals are typically construed as rooted in a common biological and evolutionary-based heritage.’ (retrieved on 13 October 2021 from https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/using-internet-study-human-universals/13405)