The myth of ‘We don’t have buildings nowadays like we used to’

"We just don't build buildings like we used to." Sometimes it’s a comment on quality—an assertion that houses aren’t as durable today as they once were—and sometimes it’s a comment on style—a belief that we don’t build houses that are as timeless, tasteful, or beautiful as they used to be. It’s something we say to defend the types of houses we grew up in or dream of someday living in.

 It’s a statement that contains some truth, but it also misses crucial context about the material conditions, functionality, and style trends of the past. When comparing today's buildings to yesterday's, it's important to consider labor, production, and technology. Often, when people say that how old buildings are better than new buildings and how they are still intact, they invoke a change like labor: The buildings of yesteryear were built by “skilled craftsmen,” and today’s houses are built by “unskilled labor.”

There’s not much difference between how we built popular speculative single-family housing back then and how we build it now. The “death of craft,” meaning the rarity or end of certain skills such as plastering, stuccoing, or custom architectural details, has more to do with the introduction of newer, more flexible building materials such as plywood and drywall, which were more affordable and easier to install than plaster.

Architecture is inherently linked to the types of building materials available at the time. In the 19th century, available stone and vast swaths of the old-growth forest made heavy masonry and balloon framing techniques very economical. To build with the masonry styles of the 19th century today is possible but prohibitively expensive. To note a recent example, a row of townhouses in Chicago, built in a traditional Italianate style utilizing large amounts of limestone, were so expensive to construct that to compensate, they rent for over $13,000 per month. And while their exteriors may be desirable, many of the buildings of the 19th and early 20th century used a variety of materials we consider quite undesirable today, such as lead paint and asbestos.

To compensate for the growing expense of both extracting and importing building materials whose local reserves have been exhausted, more economical building materials were developed. Developments in building technology, such as modern insulation and acoustical and fire engineering, made new buildings considerably quieter, warmer, and less prone to fire than their predecessors. Stricter building codes, standards, laws, and regulations, often cited by architects as being an impediment to architectural expression and affordability, have also succeeded in making new buildings safer, more energy-efficient, and more accessible to people with disabilities.

While there are a handful of wonderful postmodern residences, and while a handful of architects continue the tradition of building fine homes, there are very few residences being built for anyone other than the ultra-wealthy, and almost none being built in the reigning deconstructivity and parametric styles of today’s big architects. This disconnection of architectural culture from the residential, indeed, from the culture of homemaking itself, is perhaps the most poignant truth within the statement “We don’t build like we used to.”