I have been reading Coby Lefkowitz’s Building Optimism: Why Our World Looks the Way It Does, and How to Make it Better. I am most interested in chapter five “Why Does Everywhere Look the Same?” That is another way of restating the puzzle that, at some point after WWII, the aesthetic quality of a lot of buildings and neighborhoods seemed to plummet. Even though we are much wealthier today.
With increasing returns to scale, we produce these buildings and neighborhoods en masse, and although they are comfortable and affordable, they just aren’t that pretty. Quite simply they are mass produced.
The increasing returns to scale hypothesis explains a few facts:
1. Why we find this trend almost everywhere.
2. Why there are some exceptions to the trend in striking individual buildings (Guggenheim Bilbao?), but very few exceptions on larger scales involving many buildings together.
3. Why the trend does not end.
4. Why interiors can be so lovely when exteriors are so mediocre. The interior of course is very often “created” by the individual family living there, rather than bought en masse.
By no means is the increasing returns to scale hypothesis for mediocre buildings entirely new. You can find versions of it in many other writers. But perhaps Lefkowitz states it the most clearly?
The post Another hypothesis why building aesthetics have declined in quality appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
