Why Cities Stopped Building BEAUTIFUL Things — Transcript

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1. 0:0072% of Americans say they want new
2. 0:03public buildings to look like this.
3. 0:05Since 1994, the federal government has
4. 0:07built 78 of them. Six look like this.
5. 0:11And no, this isn't a left or right
6. 0:13thing. Democrats, Republicans, and
7. 0:15independents all said almost exactly the
8. 0:17same.
9. 0:18And it's not just America. Look at this
10. 0:20wall. Same city, same street, roughly
11. 0:23the same money, very different result.
12. 0:26Here's the strangest part. This was
13. 0:27Pennsylvania Station in New York. It
14. 0:29opened [music] in 1910. Eight acres of
15. 0:32stone, columns, and light. Its main hall
16. 0:35was modeled on the ancient baths of
17. 0:36Caracalla in Rome.
18. 0:3853 years later, in 1963, the city tore
19. 0:42it down and put an arena on top of what
20. 0:43was left. So, if almost everyone prefers
21. 0:46this, why did we stop building it? It
22. 0:49wasn't one villain. It was an idea, a
23. 0:51war, a budget, and a rule book. Let's
24. 0:54take them one by one.
25. 0:58Here's something that surprises most
26. 0:59people. The Paris everyone falls in love
27. 1:01with was, in its day, standardized mass
28. 1:04housing. In 1853, Napoleon III handed
29. 1:07Paris to one man, Georges Eugène
30. 1:09Haussmann. Over 17 years, he cut wide
31. 1:12boulevards through the medieval city and
32. 1:14lined [music] them with buildings made
33. 1:15almost from a template. Same height,
34. 1:17same cornice line, balconies on the same
35. 1:20floors. Critics at the time called it
36. 1:22monotonous. But look closer at one of
37. 1:24those facades. A heavy stone base,
38. 1:26carved window frames, iron balconies, a
39. 1:29cornice to throw the rain off the wall,
40. 1:31a mansard roof hiding one more floor.
41. 1:33Almost every piece of ornament did a
42. 1:35job, and a lot of it came straight out
43. 1:37of a catalog. And here's the key. Around
44. 1:401900, what made a building expensive was
45. 1:42the material. Stone cost money. Hands
46. 1:45didn't. A carver's day could cost less
47. 1:47than the block he was carving. So, the
48. 1:49decoration was the cheap part. Hold on
49. 1:51to that. It's going to matter. Then, in
50. 1:531910, a Viennese architect named Adolf
51. 1:56Loos gave a lecture with a title that
52. 1:58sounds like a tweet, Ornament and Crime.
53. 2:00His argument was that decoration is
54. 2:02wasted labor and wasted money, something
55. 2:04modern people should simply grow out of.
56. 2:06And he didn't just talk. Right across
57. 2:08the square from the emperor's palace,
58. 2:10the Hofburg, he built this, the Loos
59. 2:12house. No window frames, no carving on
60. 2:15the upper floors. The Viennese called it
61. 2:17the house without eyebrows. The story
62. 2:19goes that Emperor Franz Joseph refused
63. 2:21to look out of the windows facing it.
64. 2:23Loos lost that battle, but his idea won
65. 2:25the war. In 1919, the Bauhaus opens in
66. 2:28Germany. In 1923, Le Corbusier writes
67. 2:31that a house is a machine for living in.
68. 2:34Two years later, he proposes bulldozing
69. 2:36a huge piece of central Paris and
70. 2:38replacing it with 18 identical towers in
71. 2:40a park, Plan Voisin. Luckily, it was
72. 2:43never built, but the idea traveled. Mies
73. 2:46van der Rohe put it in three words, less
74. 2:49is more. [music] In 1958, his Seagram
75. 2:51Building in New York became the model
76. 2:53for the whole planet. And that's how you
77. 2:55get the same glass box in Dubai, in
78. 2:57London, in Shanghai, in São Paulo. Think
79. 3:00about it. For the first time in history,
80. 3:02a building tells you nothing about where
81. 3:04you are. Still, an idea alone doesn't
82. 3:07rebuild a continent. A war does. By
83. 3:101945, cities like Warsaw, Rotterdam,
84. 3:13Dresden, Frankfurt, Coventry, and Berlin
85. 3:15were largely in [music] ruins. Millions
86. 3:17of families needed homes, and not in 20
87. 3:20years, now. And modernism had exactly
88. 3:23the answer governments wanted. Forget
89. 3:25the carving. Cast concrete panels in a
90. 3:27factory, truck them in, lift them with a
91. 3:29crane. A whole block could go up in
92. 3:31weeks, and everyone after it went up
93. 3:33faster. So, we built one, then the same
94. 3:36one again, and again, thousands of times
95. 3:39from East Berlin to Moscow. To be fair,
96. 3:41it worked. People got hot water,
97. 3:43daylight, and their own bathroom, many
98. 3:45of them for the first time. But it had a
99. 3:47cost. In St. Louis, the Pruitt-Igoe
100. 3:50project opened in 1954. 33 buildings, 11
101. 3:54floors each, praised as the future of
102. 3:56housing. Less than 20 years later, in
103. 3:581972, they started blowing it up. One
104. 4:01critic later called that day the moment
105. 4:03modern architecture died. It didn't die,
106. 4:05of course. It just got cheaper.
107. 4:08Because here's the part nobody likes to
108. 4:10say out loud. Remember 1900, when stone
109. 4:13was expensive and hands were cheap?
110. 4:15Today, it's flipped. Materials are
111. 4:17mass-produced. Skilled labor is the most
112. 4:20expensive thing on a building site.
113. 4:22A carved cornice that once cost a few
114. 4:24days' wages can now cost more than the
115. 4:26windows under it. Now picture a
116. 4:28developer's budget. Structure, land,
117. 4:31services, and the facade and detail.
118. 4:34When the numbers don't add up, and they
119. 4:35never do, guess which slice gets cut
120. 4:37first. The industry even has a polite
121. 4:40name for it: value engineering.
122. 4:42Watch what happens to one building, step
123. 4:44by step. The carving goes, and that
124. 4:47saves money. The window frames go, the
125. 4:49balconies, the cornice, the roof. Every
126. 4:52single step makes sense on a
127. 4:53spreadsheet, and at the end, you've got
128. 4:55this.
129. 4:57Then add the rulebook: zoning, fire
130. 4:59codes, energy rules, accessibility,
131. 5:02parking, height limits, insurance. Most
132. 5:04of them exist for good reasons, but
133. 5:06every page leaves a little less room and
134. 5:09a little less money for anything that's
135. 5:11only there to be beautiful.
136. 5:13But wait, are we being fair to the past?
137. 5:15Hear me out. Imagine a street in 1900.
138. 5:18Some buildings are gorgeous. Plenty are
139. 5:21cheap and ugly.
140. 5:22Over the next 100 years, which ones get
141. 5:24demolished? The ugly ones. [music] Which
142. 5:26ones get protected? The beautiful ones.
143. 5:29So when we walk through an old town
144. 5:30today, we're not seeing the past, we're
145. 5:32seeing the winners. [music]
146. 5:34That's survivorship bias.
147. 5:36And even the beautiful ones had a dark
148. 5:38side. Look behind a grand Berlin facade
149. 5:40from the 1870s. [music]
150. 5:42Behind the front house, courtyard after
151. 5:44courtyard, wing after wing.
152. 5:46Under the rules of 1853, a courtyard
153. 5:49only had to be 5.34 m on each side, just
154. 5:52enough for a fire engine [music] to turn
155. 5:54around, not enough for sunlight. In one
156. 5:56Berlin block, Mayershof, up to 2,100
157. 6:00people lived at times. So, the ornament
158. 6:02was real, but so were the slums behind
159. 6:04it. And architects saw the problem with
160. 6:06their own revolution, too. In 1966,
161. 6:09Robert Venturi answered Mies with one
162. 6:11line, "Less is [music] a bore." So, is
163. 6:14beauty coming back? In a few places, it
164. 6:17never really left. In 1945, Warsaw's
165. 6:19[music] Old Town was almost completely
166. 6:21destroyed. The city rebuilt it brick by
167. 6:24brick, partly using old paintings as a
168. 6:26guide. In 1980, UNESCO listed it as
169. 6:29World Heritage, a reconstruction. In
170. 6:31Frankfurt, a concrete office complex
171. 6:33from the 1970s sat right next to the
172. 6:35cathedral. The city tore it down and, in
173. 6:382018, opened a new [music] Old Town. 35
174. 6:42buildings on about 7,000 square meters.
175. 6:4415 of them, faithful reconstructions of
176. 6:46houses lost in the war. Critics call it
177. 6:49fake. Tourists love it. Locals mostly
178. 6:52just enjoy walking through it. And
179. 6:54technology may flip the money one more
180. 6:56time. A robot arm can now carve stone
181. 6:58from a digital model, day and night. If
182. 7:01ornament gets cheap again, the
183. 7:02spreadsheet argument starts to crumble,
184. 7:04and the stripped box could start growing
185. 7:06its details back. So, why did we stop
186. 7:08building beautiful buildings? We didn't
187. 7:10forget how. We stopped having a reason.
188. 7:13An idea made ornament look like a crime.
189. 7:16A war made speed matter more than
190. 7:18anything. And the money flipped, so
191. 7:20beauty became the first thing cut from
192. 7:21every budget. None of that is permanent.
193. 7:24Ideas change, prices change, rules can
194. 7:27change. And here's the twist. In 2026,
195. 7:30Amtrak unveiled plans for a new Penn
196. 7:32Station, a 7 to 8 billion-dollar rebuild
197. 7:35with a stone facade, columns, and a
198. 7:37grand sunlit hall. Construction is meant
199. 7:40to start by the end of 2027. 60 years
200. 7:43after New York tore its most beautiful
201. 7:45station down, it's trying to build one
202. 7:47back.
203. 7:48If you enjoyed this one, check out our
204. 7:49other videos. And tell us in the
205. 7:51comments, which lost building in your
206. 7:53city would you bring back? Thanks for
207. 7:55watching.
208. 8:07>> [music]