[kelseyfrog]

Adolph Loos[1] and the post-WW2 minimalists won; that's what happened.

We took Louis Sullivan's maxim, "a rationally designed structure may not necessarily be beautiful but no building can be beautiful that does not have a rationally designed structure" to its logical conclusion, "form follows function". Rather than being the starting point for beauty, it became the end of it and we trained generations of architects to prioritize one aesthetic.

1. Ornament and Crime (1908) https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf

[like_any_other]

That's what most of the usual reasons given (excuses and lies, really) ignore. They'll blame economics (despite us getting richer by nearly every metric, and extra funding only getting us more aggressively ugly buildings [1]), or the lack of craftsmen to carve gargoyles (as if there weren't countless beautiful buildings without anything so intricate), changing tastes (despite overwhelming public consensus older buildings looked better), or most hilariously, some kind of "survival of the prettiest", where supposedly buildings used to be just as ugly in general, but most were demolished, and only the best looking kept (yet e.g. old photos of Manhattan will show nearly every building being beautiful, at least compared to today).

Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to the dominant schools of thought in architecture, Loos and Bauhaus and modernism, that basically outright require ugliness and generic sterility.

[1] https://www.thehideawayexperience.co.uk/blog-post/scottish-d...