Yes, I agree. Postwar buildings are much more likely to be featureless compared to 19th or early 20th century buildings, even regular houses. I think the economic boom and demand for new houses and buildings contributed to skipping the sort of traditional detail and ornate finishing work for the sake of moving on to the next project.
Why would we continue to create the same thing? We had access to steel and glass in a way we never did before. He’ll you couldn't create a decent larger sheet of glass until the 1940s. Nails cost more than wood when blacksmiths made them.
What I'm talking about is for example, a nearby school has a concrete embankment because it's built on a hill. Being built around 1910, the concrete surface is intricately and unnecessarily decorated with little arches and buttresses to make it visually appealing. If that same embankment were built today, it would not be made of glass, but rather bare concrete, with the only surface decoration being the formwork grid of tie marks left over from construction, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadao_Ando#/media/File:Galleri...
Possibly. We need to be careful of selection bias when comparing old construction to new. There was a lot of crap built long ago that wasn’t detailed, etc and it’s gone by now. This happens with houses a lot.
And I’m a person that lives old buildings and their methods!
But there’s also lots of great modern architecture that will survive the test of time. The Calatrava train station in NYC for example. Most public transit stations are unremarkable but that one is amazing.
We still build great things. And crap too. But we always have.
But yeah you’re probably right that in the early 20th century you saw a bit more craftsmanship in vernacular architecture. We had a lot of guys over from the old world with those skills that worked for cheap.
