The author fails to acknowledge the enormous expense of building anything else. Traditional forms require a considerable amount of on-site highly skilled labor which is often just not available in sufficient quantities, on a sufficient time-table, at an acceptable price.
If we acknowledge the aesthetic realities then we can make those tradeoffs with open eyes. Perhaps we decide that cheap is worth being ugly. Perhaps we can find styles that are cheap without being ugly (there are many "international style" buildings in steel and glass that are perhaps bland, but nowhere near as hated as concrete-oriented brutalism). But to even have that conversation we'd need to acknowledge the non-architect's perception of these buildings as ugly as being legitimate.
It's non-sense, past has a lot of example of simple architecture done by people without many resources acommodating the mass. Rome was already 1 million people during the first millenia, there were buildings with 6 or 7 floors, they were not all covered with classical friezes and statues costing extra-labor.
> Rome was already 1 million people during the first millenia, there were buildings with 6 or 7 floors,
Did you really choose an example of a society that used slave labor extensively?
It's hard to make a comparison due to opportunity cost. Imagine you are a person with the innate competence and dedication to eventually become a master craftsman. Do you learn woodworking, stonework, etc. and labor inexpensively for years as a apprentice to eventually top out at being paid moderately well doing work that benefits a single project .... or do you learn to develop cellphone apps that get used by tens of millions or billions of people?
As we create more jobs which are highly leveraged-- where one unit of work potentially produces an enormous amount of benefit all less leveraged jobs are squeezed by the competition.
In cases where high skills and years of training don't matter the effect isn't so great because skilled industrial production jobs don't compete as much for that labor pool. But for these construction jobs, they do.
Are you trying to compare cellphone app development with woodworking or stonework ? It needs more time to be a good woodworker but I think more people can learn the job (you don't need to be literate). Any actual construction worker (and there are a lot more than cellphone app developers) could build with ancient building techniques like vaulted ceilings given time and instructions. It's not a problem of craftsmanship or leverage, it's more a problem of standardization without benefits (I do not think concrete flat ceiling are really less expensive than vaulted for one or two floors buildings, Christopher Alexander reports that they still build houses like this in Mexico, doing vaults with simple crossed wood splines[1]).
