European Cathedrals and American Gas Stations

When we look at the differences between older styles of architecture and the modern globalized style of architecture, we often bemoan modernity while failing to appreciate the economics involved in the construction of buildings. While it is true that many buildings from antiquity are beautiful, it is worth noting that the majority of older buildings that have survived into the present day benefit from a survivorship bias, in which mostly only the buildings that were thought worth preserving and which it wasn’t too costly to maintain have been preserved. Adding onto that point, even though outhouses and cathedrals coexisted within the same time periods, we mainly see that outhouses are allowed to rot away while cathedrals are preserved and we do not see the same quality of workmanship in outhouses that we do in cathedrals. When it comes to the beautification and preservation of buildings, it primarily is determined by resource allocation rather than by anything spiritual, social, or functional. This is why even though most outhouses haven’t been preserved, many gilded bathrooms in the landmarked homes of the rich have been, because despite only the latter example being seen as worth preserving, both styles of restrooms served the same functions, held the same social connotations, and possessed the same spiritual values. While I can belabor the point by focusing on restrooms, in this article I’m going to focus on the Soviet Union’s approach to architecture. In such a centralized system, the decision-making process behind which buildings to devote resources to beautifying entirely encapsulates the central problem that this article takes on: the supposed “emergence” of soulless buildings. 

When we look at the Soviet Union’s approach to architecture and construction, different periods dictated different construction styles based on the resources and narratives that the Soviet Union had to play with and play by, respectively. Stalinist architecture favored pouring vast amounts of resources into the beautification of public spaces like train stations and educational facilities, with an emphasis on showing what lay ahead for the Soviet people. During the times when Stalin was reinvesting the surpluses of the USSR so heavily back into critical industries, in order to develop the USSR’s means of production until they were comparable with the West’s own production facilities, beautification efforts were used for primarily propaganda activities and thus, public spaces were the primary target of beautification efforts. Kruschev, during the post-war years of the 1950s, pursued an economized architectural style that primarily valued the creation of quickly made and affordable buildings. While Kruschev’s regime pursued architectural styles which created what many people know today as the stereotypically soulless and lifeless tenements of the Soviet Union, it should be entirely noted that these tenements were able to be made in such numbers and with such speed that they wound up housing huge swaths of the Soviet Union’s population and uplifting the living standards of many millions of people. While many people may deride the lack of attention paid to the physical appearances of these Soviet apartment buildings, the net benefit that they provided for the huge swaths of humanity that they were built to house cannot be measured.

While we can point to the tenements of Kruschev’s era and say that they were soulless in comparison to the gilded public structures that were built during Stalin’s era, it is a silly comparison. Different time periods dictated different behaviors and goals for the Soviet Union’s different regimes, with the benefits derived by the people from these beautification efforts being primarily coincidental. Throughout time, we’ve seen resource allocations determine what is and isn’t made pretty, and when we look at the endless labyrinths of glass-paneled buildings that dominate western skylines today, it’s worth asking not how the West lost its soul but how this new style of architecture came to be the norm. Just as it’s ridiculous to state that the farmer’s outhouse had any less soul than the nobleman’s gilded restroom, it’s equally ridiculous to say that these skyscrapers are somehow more spiritually bereft than previous megastructures. While I’m not an architect and do not claim to be an expert in that field, considerations like material shortages at construction sites, square foot pricing for increasingly tall buildings, and other concerns most likely dominate the decision-making process behind why so many buildings are built seemingly dull and uninspired today. Beauty may be the price of modernity, as the urbanization process continues to put a premium on land, which in turn causes developers to build on urban real estate increasingly light and bare-boned structures that can hold far more people vertically than traditional buildings ever could. 

Taking this into account, it’s worth noting that all of our appreciation of man’s creations is seen through a filter of context. While we don’t particularly care to see a bone flute carved by a serial killer in the late twentieth century, many people would find it interesting to see a primitive flute crafted from bone by a caveman tens of thousands of years ago. While both bone flutes may be derived from the same resources and the extraction techniques involved in both items may have been questionable, it is the context that is key here in how we appreciate these items. While many people today see the glass-paneled skyscraper as an affront to beauty, if the world were to go through an industrial collapse, we’d probably look at them as the pinnacles of human achievement and as engineering marvels before these towers inevitably collapsed. Adding onto that, just because we can appreciate the beauty of European cathedrals today does not mean that they were always appreciated during times when they were being built and furnished. In medieval Europe, the cathedrals that many conservatives hold up today as the pinnacle of architectural achievement were seen as ghastly wastes of resources and glaring symbols of the church’s self-aggrandizing tendencies by some people back then.

All of this isn’t to say that the skyscraper is more beautiful than the cathedral or the other way around, but just that architectural beauty is primarily in the eye of the beholder, and while some buildings may be intrinsically more beautiful than others, that doesn’t necessarily give them any additional characteristics beyond the superficial. This isn’t because beauty doesn’t matter but because buildings, like almost all of man’s creations, are simply tools. While Harbor Freight makes tools, they are not competing for the same consumers that Milwaukee, Klein, or Knipex are competing for, and it shows in the qualities and traits that their products possess. Harbor Freight’s tools aren’t made to be any more soulless or oppressive than Milwaukee’s tools, and anyone that suggested as much would be rightfully laughed at. The economic and material conditions that these toolmakers deal with determines the care and resources put into the production of these tools and the specifications of these tools shouldn’t be seen as deliberate decisions by engineers but as characteristics that have emerged out of the differing market demands for the various toolmakers. While the engineers did decide on the specifications that these tools were built according to, the demands and pressures on the different manufacturers determined at which point these specifications reached an optimum. While we can bemoan the loss of beauty in buildings, it’s worth questioning where that beauty went and how we can instill it back into our creations. By discovering what material and social conditions are most often conducive to producing beauty, the process of beautifying the world can be made completely emergent and can manifest in far more meaningful ways than it ever has in the past.