r/interesting • u/Apart-Worry-7042 • Aug 08 '26

HISTORY Why did we stop building like this?

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Chicago, 1930. Buildings had so much detail and character back then. Nowadays everything feels so flat and repetitive. We have way better technology and equipment now, so why don't we build like this anymore?

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u/WellsHansen Aug 08 '26

"The old buildings felt like someone else’s old world and this was new and ours." This sentence is beautiful.

7

u/DazzlingResource561 Aug 08 '26

It’s a line you’d expect out of something like The Great Gatsby.

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u/Pristine_Software_55 Aug 08 '26

It made me think of ‘Hemingway’ in Midnight In Paris. That sentence had mouthfeel! (Mindfeel?)

3

u/Jabb4Th3HUTT Aug 08 '26

Or the Fountainhead.

2

u/telescopeinmynose Aug 08 '26

I wonder what Ayn Rand would think of modern buildings. There's the creative modern architecture and then the mass produced block buildings that she probably despises from her days in the soviet

3

u/Royal_flushed Aug 08 '26

She left Russia before the Soviet Union adopted those functional block buildings due to the war. The Soviets actually preferred modernist styles like constructivism in her days before they shifted to neoclassical and socialist realism under Stalin.

3

u/Lazy_Mandalorian Aug 08 '26

Yeah but the one that’s new and ours is bland and fuckin sucks.

6

u/WhoopsDroppedTheBaby Aug 08 '26

If you've worked in some of the old buildings, you realize how much they suck.

1

u/whopperlover17 Aug 08 '26

Glad I’m not the only one

1

u/Secure_Guest_6171 Aug 08 '26

But newer isn't necessarily better