But I’m not really sure. A lot of architects almost have a morality about their designs: that a building shouldn’t cover up structural columns or engineering structures. That beauty is honesty, and adding extraneous stuff in the name of design isn’t honest, and in fact, immoral.

This is certainly different from the design of buildings 200 or 300 years ago, which often were excessive and baroque.

But it’s hard to say one is better than the other.

Old architecture with history has more owners and more tastes that a modern building stemming from a single vision. Beauty is not a mischmasch of different tastes and addons, beauty comes from a coherent and elegant design. You can have that in older buildings also, but generally it's the definition modern architecture which aligns with our definition of beauty. Which mostly contradicts the historical practice of postmodern architecture, a Mischmasch of envogue old styles, if baroque, renaissance, gothic, classic and so on to name the most prominent. With most buildings and cities having all these styles mixed together. In the end you end up with perl6 or C++. Everybody wants to add a new pretty corner there, and a new balcony there, and you need to say yes.

This is not beauty, beauty is Lisp or Forth, of Mies Van der Rohe. Modernism is the definition of beauty, postmodernism is the definition of warts. But you need to know and understand the concepts, or you dont get it.

If I were to really grasp at straws to defend the other position, maybe the contemporary aesthetic has become overly minimalist and utilitarian, as opposed to being style oriented. Restaurants are now cement cubes, all new apartment complexes look like hotels with a white|beige|gray palette and are also cubic, modern cars are all white and bulbous-looking, skyscrapers are either cubic or (ironically) overly whimsical in architecture to the point where they appear to have no obvious function. Perhaps if standard designs and architecture were less boring, people wouldn't care so much about homogeneity.

The idea that functional items can be designed in a way that avoids ephemeral styling or fashions (think of the annual model changes in the US car industry of the 50s) is a key modernist principle. Whether it's actually possible to draw that distinction and maintain it in practice is a totally different question.

So "modern" and functionalism is great, but I'd rather they figure out something lasting before they experiment with a few $100M of my taxes/tuition/donation.

Might as well advocate for soviet's Stalinkas, just plaster some ornaments and plants on them!

The whole point of contemporary culture is that we finally have the technological, creative and cultural freedom to experiment and create new things. I'm sure for X amount of people that dislike this there are same amount of people who love it.

The Berlin Reichstag is one often-cited example of successful combination of old and new: https://www.google.com/search?q=reichstag&client=safari&rls=...

Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.

This is empirically false. 'Taste' has not been driven to prefer modern designs, the two have simply diverged:

A study of courthouse architecture determined that “[our] findings agree with consistent findings that architects misjudge public likely public impressions of a design, and that most non-architects dislike “modern” design and have done so for almost a century.” Yet 92% of new federal government buildings are modern. - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria

There is zero evidence that architects are trying to create classicaly beautiful, pleasing, beloved by the public buildings, and are simply thwarted from fully succeeding by the cost of labor. Which was somehow not an impediment when our societies were far poorer and less productive.

In fact, the evidence points in the exact opposite direction.

Let's say a genuinely creative architect is tasked with building a library in a city along a river. He goes to great length creating a design that incorporates the nature of the location and makes an iconic landmark for the city, a new beloved classic. All the surrounding cities want libraries that look like that one which was so good. But these other cities have different geographies, copy and pasting the building ruins what made it appealing in the first place. You can pick up on some aesthetic notes, but without doing the hard work that was done for the original, you still wind up getting a much more generic and commoditized copy. For the vast majority of people, its these cheap imitations they will deal with day in and day out. They compare these new works to the older buildings which were truly designed with their cities in mind, and find the generic buildings lacking. They might note that the original looks good, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, and likewise just because someone used the style well once doesn't make it good.

You see this in many cases. Someone in a well tailored suit selected to match their figure looks great; but they are drops in an ocean of people wearing suits in standard sizes with maybe $10 of alteration work. There are loads of beautiful modern and abstract works of art; but they are typically lost in a sea of far more mediocre works and there is no real way to classify which is which without looking at them for yourself.

And note that the same principle would hold even if the current modern aesthetic embraced something other than minimalism. The Taj Mahal may be a beautiful work, but if a building of roughly the same style were common in every city, each made by the lowest bidder with little concern for the quality of the final product, you'd probably find the style extremely unappealing.

However our modern society has internalized normalcy. It is incredibly uncomfortable to stand out. Because a few people look good in well tailored suits, everyone in the office must wear a suit, or face the embarrassment of being a non-conformer. Or on a different coast, perhaps it is the one person who can really rock the suit who must nevertheless forego it to blend in with a field of t-shirts and cargo shorts. Being creative and individualistic means wearing a strange color pair of socks with the otherwise standard outfit - everything is unique, but in a standard framework where very little is original. Minimalism is thus a sensible choice - adding anything adds uniqueness but none of that uniqueness is integral.

When the only assessment we can make about a creative work, e.g. a building (but fine arts just as well), is that it looks "cool", or "interesting", or "contemporary", or "futuristic", what that really means is that we are hesitant to say it looks "beautiful", "attractive", "timeless". Strong assessments like the latter are axiomatic and require a confidence in your aesthetic sensibilities. That these sensibilities are globally shared, that you are empathetic enough to step outside of your own head and look at it as an older person, as a child, as somebody who won't be born until a century from now.

Modern spectacle architecture (like that Bangkok tower) today does not inspire that confidence. It defies being called beautiful, because innately we experience it as not that. It might look "cool", or futuristic, but that's about it. A building like that is infantile branding, it looks like a tetris-game because the kind of people who design and finance this are childish, confusing technological prowess with worth and beauty.

Likewise for Bauhaus design - also a century old.

There are hints of a new generative aesthetic - busy in an unhierarchical repeated-elements kind of way, with organic influences - but that's better suited to architecture and sculpture than commercial design.

There probably won't be a completely original design language until AR/VR become ubiquitous - which will take a while.

As a non-architect, terms like “architectural merit” sound pretty hollow to me, often just amounting to gate keeping by people who like a particular style and dislike change.