It has been a while since I have written a longer article. This week I have some reflections on a classic but still very much relevant problem: beauty in the built environment. What makes a place beautiful is a question which the general public cares very much about, and which it seems like most professional designers want to avoid as much as possible! I am not sure when environmental design stopped being about having fun creating beautiful constructed environments. In this essay I argue that a mastery of the fundamentals of spatial design, a focus on craft and a rediscovery of play are three elements which can return us to the simple objective of creating beautiful places.

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Beauty and ugliness in the constructed world

The built environment is a constructed habitat, the result of the modification of original material resources into a spatial organization that is intended to support human existence. When considered in this way, a city itself becomes a complex artefact of architecture. A constructed place is though not just a sort of sculpture that is meant to be visually perceived from somewhere on the outside, like an art object on a pedestal. It will be inhabited and lived in, and as a part of nature it constitutes an entire life-world. In this sense it can be said that the built environment has meaning, while its character allows other patterns of behaviour, interaction, communication and reciprocation to emerge.

An increasing number of people describe the urban environment that we have built for ourselves as «ugly». This is a somewhat overused term that lacks nuance, but it reflects the undeniable existence of a tangibly negative response that many have when asked to evaluate their surroundings. People have always created various places which for a variety of reasons become quite unappealing, but the ugliness of the human habitat appears to have grown more pervasive in recent decades. It all started perhaps with a critique of individual buildings that broke wholly from established tradition while masquerading under the banner of modern architecture, and for many it has expanded along with many other accompanying societal changes to encompass a variety of the environments of everyday life. While there will always be a certain amount of subjectivity in judgments of beauty, much of the built environment that has been constructed in recent times is indeed quite ugly.

I am not sure where this picture was taken, but a similar environment can be found just about anywhere across the entire North American continent.

The built environment as a reflection of culture

When we inhabit a place, we become exposed to all the various experiences and impressions which ultimately constitute the qualities of this environment. The character of these qualities are a direct reflection of the culture that spawned them. Culture can be defined as «a relative, organized system of shared meaning» (Coolen & Ozaki, 2004). The relationship between activities and place is cultural in its nature. Sometimes meaning is consciously created; in many cases it comes about unconsciously as a consequence of immersion in a given cultural context.

The cultural sphere commonly referred to as «western» is at the time of writing in a period of accelerated decline. I need not go into depth about the plethora of problems that we face in coming years: rising unemployment amongst young people, the proliferation of useless «AI-slop», unhinged corporate greed, collapsing birth rates and low marriage rates, bleak economic prospects, inflation, smartphone and media addiction, and much more. What is more relevant here is to observe how this decline also has become evident in the qualities of the contemporary built environment.

In theory, built forms are a physical manifestation of the wishes, motivations and feelings of individuals within a culture (Rapoport, 1969). In practice, most people today have very little direct control over the patterns that characterize the buildings and urban surroundings they live in, and are increasingly at the whim of impersonal cultural patterns that operate on a macro-scale beyond the influence of the individual. One might at best have the freedom to select some furniture or a surface material within a mortgaged apartment, but most people are otherwise forced to live most of their lives in standardized, generic dwellings which reflect a limited economic reality much more than they reflect personal tastes, needs or style. Many young people today have already given up on the commonly held dream of owning a personal home.

The demands of an impersonal residential market displace traditional construction even as far away as Reykjavík, Iceland. Picture taken in 2012.

We live in a culture which has come to lack a coherent, common ideal or artistic narrative. The formal ideals of the Bauhaus, the modern movement’s overarching intention to improve the health of the individual through design and postmodernism’s attempt to correct the unintended consequences that followed are long behind us, and nothing else has emerged to fill the void. The contemporary built environment increasingly reflects a paucity of imagination, play and joy. Undoubtedly such a trend is the result of complex interactions between many variables, and has been many decades in the making. In the age of the Internet, things seem only to have become even more diluted and atomized. The recent smartphone revolution seems to have had an especially devastating effect, where we now are able at the touch of a screen to expose ourselves to more images of people and places from more parts of the world than we ever previously could have expected to see in a lifetime. It is odd that this exposure seems to be leading towards an even greater homogenization of culture, rather than offer broader inspiration from previously undiscoverable sources.

Generic urban dwellings for generic urban people. While there is nothing obscenely negative about this environment, there is nothing obscenely positive about it either. It is impossible to determine from the picture where this building lies.

Late last century, a new movement called «critical regionalism» gained some popularity. The term was coined by Kenneth Frampton in 1983, in an attempt to critique the increasingly negative consequences of modernist design and establish a new sense of place. This approach intended to develop new built forms as a response to the traditions, needs and requirements of a specific climate, place and culture, a type of «return to the local». While it inspired many designers with its renewed focus on the qualities of specific places, it has not had much of a large-scale impact on the expression of our cities or culture. Perhaps the closest thing to a shared design movement that we have today is a focus on «sustainability», but this has become a woefully meaningless term, and even the imperative of improving the ecological state of the built environment through design has yet to give rise to a coherent form language, set of spatial ideals or shared expression. Adherents of sustainability often seem to be interested on the contrary in building as little as possible while reducing and restricting people’s lives and opportunities for expression as much as possible, without simultaneously proposing a creative alternative to modern consumption habits that offers any lasting aesthetic or experiential quality.

Many have noticed the gradual disappearance of colour from much of the modern world.

It can be argued that this lack of cultural coherence and depth has spread to all aspects of life. We need look only to modern automobiles for example, which have become dreadfully ugly objects (in addition to their overwhelmingly poor technical quality). Fashion has become just as inelegant. It is not uncommon today to see hordes of people that attempt to dress in exactly the same generic style, all in an attempt to look a certain way in photos taken on a smartphone to express their conformity to whatever happens to be trending at the moment on a given social media page.

Design will always be a reflection of culture, and it is apparent that contemporary design has lost much of its affective value.

The new Kia Tasman pickup. A shockingly ugly vehicle.

The superficial illusion of the feature in the absence of depth

One the architects that I admire the most is Robin Boyd (1919-1971). Early as a student I stumbled across his book The Australian Ugliness (1960). In this work Boyd lays down a heavy critique of the prosaic environments that he experienced in mid-century urban Australia, and it resonated deeply with my own personal negative evaluation of the dreadfully boring environment I was stuck in at the time in western Canada. Boyd was especially opposed to a tendency that he called «featurism», where the foundational architectural patterns of an environment become subordinated to the accentuation of selected surface-level features, decorations and finishing materials. The featurists focus on the packaging, often in a deliberate attempt to ignore the paucity of what is being packaged underneath. A box is though a box at the end of the day, regardless of whether it is clad in a fancy surface material or left completely bare.

It is noteworthy that Boyd especially related the proliferation of featurism to existential insecurity. He believed that it was the adopted visual style of an ambivalent, uncertain population that was at odds with its surroundings, unsure of how to inhabit them, clinging to the edges of a continent and looking everywhere for answers but into its own interior. Here we find a metaphor for a refined culture, or the lack of it: when one does not have much going on on the inside, one tries to draw attention to superficial traits that can be stuck onto the outside to hide the absence of a high-quality idea. While blatant featurism is perhaps less common today (especially in Scandinavia), in many ways the pursuit of surface-level impressions continues to cover up the absence of any kind of developed style or ideal underneath much of what gets built. A lack of spatial and experiential depth is especially characteristic of the common residential market.

Featurism has been taking over fashion for a long time, largely as a response to the so-called «attention economy» of the times. We have all had a laugh at the impractical, outlandish clothes (if they can even be called as such) that are put on display in high-culture fashion shows. Here the fashion seems to be judged primarily on the basis of its ability to invoke a reaction from the public and increasingly to «go viral» on the Internet to generate attention, rather than on the basis of genuine quality or established design principles. 

Absurd, idiotic fashion. A sign of a dying, distorted culture. 

In addition to the lack of a common culture, it needs also be said that there is a significant number of accompanying practical problems which make the creation of beauty difficult today. I have long been a critic of prevailing economic conditions, which have as things stand made it a luxury of the economically wealthy to create a unique home in spatial terms. Within the city, architecture as a creative profession is increasingly dying: the majority of projects for new dwellings largely consist of the production of a standard 3d-model and coordination between large numbers of specialists and producers, where the only opportunity to display some real innovation or creativity might come in the choice of a facade cladding (as long as it is cheap and does not entail any need for maintenance, of course) on the outside of the generic, overly-optimized plan solutions that are stacked up to the limit on the inside. Many new residential complexes give the impression of walking around in an IFC-model in real life. The result is an aesthetic homogenization of much of the built environment that we experience, and as a consequence the homogenization of much of our daily lives.

The original cover of The Australian Ugliness (1960).

It is interesting that Boyd believed in a type of «science of space enclosure» which he meant should be applied to the majority of the buildings in a city, and a more refined and elegant architectural art that would be reserved for a smaller, specific group of culturally important landmarks. To some extent, the modern built environment has in fact been produced according to this division. Most urban dwellings are constructed to the bare minimum, where minimal technical requirements in the local building code are used as upper design parameters to generate solutions which maximize the number of new dwellings on a given site while minimizing their spatial quality, leaving no room for variation or personality in their expression. Culture houses, stadiums, universities and other large scale monuments have on the other hand become the exclusive domain of large-scale international competitions, and while these projects undoubtedly offer increased creative possibilities in theory, we see that they result more often than not in solutions which seem gimmicky and strikingly out of place in the local landscape. Just like with modern fashion, the primary intention behind the proposals seems more often than not to be to generate attention and shock value, rather than create meaningful, timeless quality.

Creating beauty with a return to the fundamentals

What then is the future of design? It is interesting that there seems to be an increasing divide between the tastes of the general public and the solutions proposed by professional designers. Within established professional circles, the increasingly limited room for maneuver and the mediocre solutions that result tend to be justified with haughty references to things like «inherent potentialities», «processes of place creation» and other abstract theoretical terms which are often completely at odds with the immediate responses of the public to the outcomes. Many individuals’ experiences of the places that actually get built are overwhelmingly negative, and people often state preferences for much simpler, much more visually meaningful solutions.

In recent years there has been a renewal of interest for classical design in particular, as popularized in the Norwegian context for example by movements such as «Arkitekturopprøret». Personally I do not see a return to classical architecture to be either a useful or desirable «one size fits all» solution to the visual shortcomings of contemporary cities. While covering everything in classical motifs might help slightly to improve the aesthetic qualities of the environment on the surface, it seems to be an unimaginative, overly cautious approach which does little to recognise the endless potential of architecture to create meaningful experiences through the holistic design of space and form. In the worst of cases such preferences could just become a new type of featurism, where the same uninteresting spatial solutions inside are clad on the outside with classical details this time around instead of modern facade materials. Professional designers have though few effective means to combat such a meaningless response when the solutions that they propose themselves as an alternative are judged to be so unimpressive.

The solution to environments with a character similar to that shown on the left is according to many to clad buildings on the outside with classical patterns similar to those shown on the right. The result still seems to be unsatisfactory. Pictures taken from the Instagram page of Arktitekturopprøret Norway (https://www.instagram.com/aonorge/).

The increasing dissatisfaction with the qualities of the built environment goes in any case to prove that the archetype of the beautiful is still as necessary and desired as ever in human life to inspire, motivate and invoke joy. In spite of any attempts to suppress it, it will likely always remain central to the human experience. Regardless of how the design professions change in the future, the need for the conscious design of an environment to suit a given set of human needs will persist, including all the elements within it that help to create the spatial experience. Creating beauty must start with a focus on what actually makes a space desirable to dwell in, an understanding of the most basic fundamentals of design: form, order, material and space. The primary practical and intuitive skill of the designer is in my view to be able to combine these elements to create places that offer a beautiful impression, that contribute to solve all the material and spiritual problems that people have, and that people simply like to be in.

As usual I must mention here one of my deepest sources of personal inspiration, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1978). In this large book, Alexander presents a series of architectural patterns which underlie many places that have proven themselves to have lasting quality throughout history. As a student, I quickly found a lot of interest in Alexander’s approach. The value consists not so much in his proposed method of building, but rather in the unusual search for the archetypal elements, the patterns, that are present at places that most people judge as beautiful. The basic patterns can take on an endless variety of local forms and expressions, all according to the specific needs and problems that apply at a given place and time. They are a useful starting point to gain insight into why some places have a more positive impression on us than others, and exactly what it is about them that makes them so meaningful and beautiful.

Alexander’s work tends to be erroneously associated with advocating a return to an overly traditional style, and I always find it important to emphasize one of the points that he makes in the book to address such a claim: the patterns have nothing specifically to do with a given style or time, and are not necessarily bound to tradition or classical design. The reason that many older, traditional places appeal to us more than modern ones has little to do with the fact that they are traditional, but rather quite simply because they solve the archetypal problems of our lives better than new places do. There is after all a reason that certain solutions are valued high enough to become a part of a tradition, rather than tried once and never repeated.

Säynätsalo Town Hall, Alvar Aalto (completed 1951). Aalto’s undeniable mastery of the fundamentals of spatial design demonstrate how it is possible to create meaningful spaces out from creative use of these fundamentals, without adherence to any overly traditional dogma or «style».

A sense of craft

Beautiful places tend to display a quality of craftsmanship - not just in their design, but also in the details and the material components of which they consist. Especially in relation to sustainability, it is important to integrate an understanding of resource flows and building ecology into spatial solutions.

Frampton (1992) argues that place and production must become intertwined to create the character which gives us our identity. He believes that it is impossible to separate character from the process of making. Much of the emptiness of modern life stems from an overwhelming focus on quantity over quality. In new construction we increasingly find generic spatial solutions, cheap materials, oppressively standardized proportions and a focus on abstract numbers which have little relevance for our spatial experiences, rather than an attempt to create a tangible impression of beauty. Recent developments in AI-technology threaten only to accelerate the proliferation of a shallow focus on speed and output over the personal quality of what is produced, and it is rather depressing to see many established design professionals so eager to outsource their thinking to impersonal algorithms just to get something done faster or to replace their own intellectual input. Computer-generated places will only further reduce the potential expression of craftsmanship in the surroundings, accelerate the ongoing regression to the mean, and lead to further alienation of the designer from future inhabitants and the future inhabitants from their daily surroundings.

The loss of craftsmanship is part of a much larger economic web which is unfortunately in no way completely under the control of a designer. I am myself largely uninterested in trying to propose a completely new societal system, but rather wish to emphasise the agency that a designer has even within existing rigid societal frameworks to influence how a building will be put together through its careful design. While compromises always need to be made, it is still possible to emphasise the details and tectonic logic of a solution, and to come up with beautiful solutions that simply make good sense.

A beautiful environment will express a quality of craft: the good old-fashioned, carefully considered design of a space, built for humans to live and thrive in. This is in no way a rejection of technology, but rather a conscious adaptation of technology to the overarching intended quality: beauty and craftsmanship in production. Well-crafted places are often times surprisingly simple, and they tend to invoke a sense of beauty in how they offer a direct expression of the connection between people and their environment.

The immaculate craftsmanship of Japanese carpenters on full display in a house/studio by Toshihito Yokouchi, Kyoto, 2023.

A sense of play

People need much more play in their lives, especially adults. Most people tend to take life far too seriously, and have completely lost sight of the fundamentally playful nature of the universe. Our built environment should constantly invoke and remind us of the playful character which lives in ourselves. A certain beauty is likely to emerge as a result.

I am not sure when environmental design stopped being fun. Designing and building a habitat for people should first and foremost be a joyful thing! To build and create are basic human instincts, no less natural than the tendency of a bird to fly or a cheetah to run. The history of architecture demonstrates a stunning richness of meaningful spatial solutions that humans have found (often with relatively meagre means) to inhabit a landscape and organize life. How depressing it is to compare the qualities of generic urban dwellings of today with the serenity of the Japanese machiya-house or the optimism of Scandinavian «low and dense» settlements (tett-lav), ironically in a time where you would expect that unprecedented access to construction technology would make it easier and more efficient than ever to produce anything that we could imagine.

While it is obvious that technical, data-driven aspects of construction such as climate analysis and life-cycle analysis of materials matter and can be optimised, the design of a space should remain a playful, intuitive task. The intention should first and foremost be to create an environment that delights the senses, that expresses the endless creative nature of people and their unique personalities. A playful environment can raise our mood and help us come into contact with the ephemerality of our own existence. If it all dissolves, we might as well dance and enjoy ourselves as long as the music is being played. Why not create places that become a marvellous, playful background to our life experiences?

The wonderfully playful residential design of Taketo Nishikubo (Niko Design Studio). House in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, 2025.

Judgments of beauty tend ultimately to be the result of a holistic impression rather than a detached, theoretical analysis of the components. Beauty in the built environment can be created by designers that have mastered the fundamentals, and that use them in a playful way with careful consideration of craftsmanship to create places that appeal to the shared archetypal elements of our existence. The formal design professions have been moving further and further away from these intentions in recent times, and it is high time that they return.

With the fall of the modernist world view late in the 1960s, the belief also collapsed that architecture could in a meaningful way improve the human condition. I fundamentally disagree. I believe that both a culture as a whole and the lives of all individuals within it can be considerably improved by the qualities of the architecture that it inhabits and the patterns of life that are made possible by these places. Beauty for me has always been found in the simple, meaningful things that need no other explanation other than that people enjoy them. With an increased focus on the practical, intuitive qualities that appeal to human beings, we can use contemporary technology and methods of production to create an infinite variety of constructed environments that deeply nourish the innate human need to exist in beautiful spaces.

Simple, beautiful environments. There is no reason why we cannot build more places like this, but it will require a shift of focus to the intuitive, tangible qualities of the built environment.

References

Alexander, Christopher et al. (1978). A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction. Oxford University Press.

Boyd, Robin. (1960). The Australian Ugliness. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire.

Coolen, Henny & Ozaki, Ritsuko. (2004). Culture, Lifestyle and the Meaning of a Dwelling. 

Frampton, Kenneth. «Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance». In Foster, H. (ed.) (1983). The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture. Port Townsend: Bay Press.

Frampton, Kenneth. (1992). Modern architecture: A critical history. London: Thames & Hudson.

Rapoport, Amos. (1969). House, Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.