I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.
I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.
And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t
The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.
And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?
I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.
The units are basically commodities. Same floor plans same amenities same building about the same rent. True across the country for these sort of newer buildings, only real difference is the pool doesn't close for the season for those in milder climates.
It is designed to be this way for investors more than consumers. Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all. The consumers have no choice really but to be in this market if they want to be sheltered at all. It isn't like you really can exercise free market selection for something necessary like shelter. You have to take what has been made available and you cannot do without.
There is therefore no incentive to make a smart building that is favoring the tenant since this doesn't grow the potential pool of tenants in the area, that pool remains the same size as it was. It is unlike a lot of other markets where having a better product might actually grow the customer base of the product segment overall.
> Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Lot of the finance machine works on standardization, like the are some building techniques, like spray-on insulation that work perfectly fine, but banks wont approve a loan on a building like that because its hard to inspect and repair.
This ironically makes these crappy buildings built to investor standards expensive, since banks will give cheap loans for it, on account of having low maintenance costs.
Of course all this exists only on paper.
Yes plus everyone is competing on cost so the lowest bid gets chosen.
If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.
My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?
> My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was <1k sqft (avg >2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.
Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.
Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.
Unfortunately only custom homes can afford to care about beauty. Developers are building for cheapest possible and letting the long term owners deal with the consequences.
Homes still aren’t really mechanized. I’ve seen attempts but they haven’t worked well yet. Labor and materials are so expensive!
And most new homes are built by one of a few big groups. Oligopoly issues again.
>Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?
I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.
You mention the private equity backed builder, but the designs come from the corrupted ivory tower which just invents more and more ridiculous designs (modernism, brutalism, for example) to try to stay fresh. Same in the art world. (Banksy, Warhol, others)
We have not made any progress, and perhaps we don’t need to, when it comes to architecture since World War I. There have been a few projects like La Sagrada Família, but those are exceptionally rare.
Suburban homes. What a disaster and embarrassment to the human race.
What do you think is weird about Banksy? Looks like older pre-modern art to me.
If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too. To me, brutalism hits the same things neoclassicism does but much more organically and better.
> The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
This is true, but usually fewer people die in the construction of those utilitarian housing projects
Speed of construction is also not the same as efficiency.
>The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.
In China buildings are built faster.
The global construction industry learned a lot in the last 100 years.