Building BeautifullyA project of the Manhattan Institute
We know which buildings people love. We keep building the other kind.
A project of the Manhattan Institute on beauty in the built environment: why it matters for wellbeing, for housing supply, and for the environment.
Paul Shakeshaft and John Ketcham
Why it matters
Beauty is not a finishing touch. It decides what gets built at all.
Wellbeing
People do not merely prefer beautiful places, they behave differently
in them. A street worth walking down is walked down. And the buildings
we put up outlast almost every other decision a city makes.
Housing
A good deal of what gets called NIMBYism is a reasonable objection to
ugliness. Neighbours shown something worth having are far readier to
accept density — which is how young and working families get a foot on
the ladder.
Environment
The greenest building is the one nobody wants to demolish. Beauty
earns a building the affection that keeps it standing, maintained and
adapted, instead of replaced every forty years.
The comparisons
Not old against new. Loved against unloved.
The easiest way to dismiss an argument about beauty
is to call it nostalgia, so this set is chosen to make that difficult. Each
pair holds two buildings of the same use at a similar scale, several of the
buildings we admire here are modern, and some come from well outside the
Western tradition. Every pair states why it is a fair comparison.
Railway station
1 / 6
Pennsylvania StationPhotograph needed
What we can build Pennsylvania Station
New York, United States · 1910 · McKim, Mead & White · Beaux-Arts
A waiting room modelled on the Baths of Caracalla, built by a railway company and open to anyone holding a ticket.
Pennsylvania Station (rebuilt)Photograph needed
What we build instead Pennsylvania Station (rebuilt)
New York, United States · 1968 · Charles Luckman Associates · Corporate modernism
Vincent Scully on the replacement: one entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.
Why this is a fair comparison. The strongest control available: same city, same site, same railway, same purpose, and only the design changed. The 1910 station was demolished in 1963; the replacement concourse opened beneath Madison Square Garden in 1968.
Modernist in every structural sense, and warm with it: hand-made brick, timber, and a grass courtyard raised above the street.
Boston City HallPhotograph needed
What we build instead Boston City Hall
Boston, United States · 1968 · Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles · Brutalism
Garlanded by critics on completion, and voted among the most disliked buildings in America repeatedly since.
Why this is a fair comparison. Both are postwar modernist civic buildings by celebrated architects, sixteen years apart. This pair is here to argue against our own side: the problem is not modernism. Aalto's building is as modern as Boston's, and people are fond of it.
Social housing
3 / 6
Het SchipPhotograph needed
What we can build Het Schip
Amsterdam, Netherlands · 1920 · Michel de Klerk · Amsterdam School
Municipal housing for dock workers, in sculpted brick, with its own post office and meeting hall. Still lived in a century later.
Robin Hood GardensPhotograph needed
What we build instead Robin Hood Gardens
London, United Kingdom · 1972 · Alison and Peter Smithson · Brutalism
Streets in the sky for more than two hundred families. Demolition began in 2017, over the objections of architects rather than residents.
Why this is a fair comparison. Both were avant-garde municipal housing schemes by architects at the top of their profession, built as showpieces of what social housing could be. One is protected and well loved by the people in it; the other was demolished while critics campaigned to save it.
Place of worship
4 / 6
Sheikh Zayed Grand MosquePhotograph needed
What we can build Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · 2007 · Islamic
Completed in 2007, drawing on Mughal, Moorish and Ottoman precedent. Proof that a living tradition can still build at the highest level.
Liverpool Metropolitan CathedralPhotograph needed
What we build instead Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral
Liverpool, United Kingdom · 1967 · Frederick Gibberd · Modernism
Built fast and cheaply after Lutyens's vast design was abandoned; leaking within a few years, and the subject of later legal action over the defects.
Why this is a fair comparison. Both are major modern religious buildings by leading designers with national backing. Liverpool has real defenders and its interior light is genuinely admired; it is here because its fabric failed within a few years, which is a cost that arguments about beauty are usually accused of ignoring.
Railway station
5 / 6
Kanazawa StationPhotograph needed
What we can build Kanazawa Station
Kanazawa, Japan · 2005 · Contemporary Japanese
A glass and steel dome entered through the Tsuzumi-mon, a timber gate shaped after the hand drum used in Noh theatre.
Kyoto StationPhotograph needed
What we build instead Kyoto Station
Kyoto, Japan · 1997 · Hiroshi Hara · Modernism
Some four hundred and seventy metres of steel and glass in Japan's historic capital, built over objections that it would overwhelm the city it serves.
Why this is a fair comparison. Two large stations inserted into historic Japanese cities within a decade of each other, both thoroughly modern, both generously funded. Kanazawa carries its city's tradition into new material; Kyoto was controversial before it opened and remains so.
Housing district
6 / 6
BrandevoortPhotograph needed
What we can build Brandevoort
Helmond, Netherlands · 1997 · Rob Krier · New traditional
Several thousand homes begun in 1997 in a traditional Dutch idiom, sold at ordinary market prices.
Some thirteen thousand homes in hexagonal slab blocks, separated by design from traffic, shops and street life. Large parts were demolished from the 1990s.
Why this is a fair comparison. Two large planned residential districts in the same country, both state-backed, both intended as models of their moment. They are roughly thirty years apart, which makes this the weakest control in the set; the note is here to say so rather than hide it.