Most people prefer traditional architecture

This piece is featured in Issue 25 of Works in Progress. Subscribe today to get Issue 26, and an issue every two months after, delivered straight to your home or workplace.In the twentieth century, a radical change took place in global architecture. The modernist movement emerged in the 1920s, favoring unornamented designs, exposed modern materials like steel and concrete, and the abandonment of the complicated visual patterns of traditional planning and facade design. Modernism came to dominate global architecture by the 1950s, and although it has evolved and fragmented since then, styles of broadly modernist character remain dominant today.Throughout its history, both supporters and detractors of modernist architecture have agreed that it is not widely liked. In 1940, the English architectural historian John Summerson remarked that the public ‘can’t understand it, never will, and hates it like poison’. In 1977, the German-American architectural critic Wolf von Eckardt prematurely announced the death of modernism, claiming that ‘No one mourned. It was never popular.’ The young Summerson was sympathetic to modernism while von Eckardt disliked it, but they made the same observation about its standing with the general public.Were Summerson and von Eckardt right? In recent years, researchers have begun to study this more systematically using visual preference surveys. In their simplest form, these are just a comparison of two images alongside a neutral, unbiased question, like ‘Which do you prefer?’ Online panels and better image editing have brought down their cost in recent decades. Since the 1990s, around twenty properly sampled visual preference surveys have been run on popular architectural preferences.Subscribe to printMany are British, partly because the King’s championship of traditional urbanism has generated a particularly lively debate about architecture in Britain. However, visual preference surveys have also been run in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal and Chile, and enthusiasm for visual preference surveying is rising internationally.Early visual preference surveys were often methodologically primitive. A common limitation was that they surveyed responses to images that varied in many respects, such as the angle of the photograph or the weather, making it impossible to claim that architectural style alone had caused any difference in ratings. Over time, however, much has been done to mitigate this, with progressively better editing techniques being used to create more controlled image pairs. In the past few years, artificial intelligence has greatly reduced the time and costs of producing comparable images, making reliable large-scale visual preference surveys far more feasible.In every survey conducted, over 60 percent of the respondents have favored traditional architecture, with many revealing over 85 percent support. This preference is surprisingly unaffected by age, gender, politics, socioeconomic class and nationality. The results are not definitive, but they suggest that there is substantial public discontent with the dominant trends in modern architecture. Perhaps the anecdotal impressions of Summerson and von Eckardt were not so far off after all.The story of visual preference surveying begins in 1979, in the small town of Metuchen, New Jersey. Metuchen decided that it wanted data on local opinion to guide its design policies, and so it commissioned a study from the Rutgers University Urban Design Studio. The Rutgers team took hundreds of photographs of streets and buildings in Metuchen, and asked locals to rate them at a large public meeting. Metuchen residents overwhelmingly preferred streetscapes with a traditional, small-town feel, detailed and varied facades, and a walkable, human scale. They disliked blank, featureless buildings, and wide, car-dominated streets.These preferences may seem obvious. Of course a traditional high street is more pleasant to walk down than a freeway with six lanes of traffic. But at the time, the level of consensus was surprising. The Metuchen survey was the first to show that people tend to have predictable, shared responses to different built environments, responses that are not purely a matter of individual taste. The research team used the results to make recommendations for streetscape improvements, facade renovations, and infill multi-family housing, and Metuchen later developed a design code on this basis.The modern tradition of visual preference surveying begins in Metuchen in 1979. These streets were scored -4.19, -1.38 and +5.07. Source: Anton C Nelessen.The Metuchen survey was pioneering, but it had some obvious limitations. First, participants in public meetings are not a representative sample of the local population. Second, the images used in the survey did not offer a perfectly controlled comparison, making it difficult to know what exactly respondents were reacting to. Did people dislike the width of the street, the low ratio of building height to street width, the style of the facades, the absence of greenery, the presence of fast-moving cars, or something else? We cannot know based on their responses to any individual image, although the survey included enough images that robust patterns do start to emerge.Britain’s cottage industry in architectural visual preference surveying took off in the late 1980s, beginning with a 1987 study by a Cambridge undergraduate called David Halpern, who later became a leading behavioral psychologist. Halpern showed volunteer students photographs of twelve people and twelve buildings, asking them to rate their attractiveness. Students on different programs had similar views on which faces were the most attractive. But when it came to buildings, architecture students held wildly different views from those in other disciplines. In fact, their preferences were often directly opposite.This building was ranked lowest out of twelve by non-architecture students in Halpern’s study, but it was the second-favorite of architecture students. Source: David Halpern.Halpern’s study had obvious limitations: the sample was unrepresentative of the general population and small, and the images were imperfectly controlled. But it has become a minor classic, and studies have since been run in Canada in 2001, Britain in 2015, and Chile in 2019 with similar results, showing a wide divergence between professional and lay opinion when it comes to the visual appeal of different architectural styles.The first properly sampled visual preference survey followed in 1998, run by the British Market Research Bureau for an industry group called the Popular Housing Forum. British respondents were presented with card sets showing newbuild houses of a given style. As before, the pictures were imperfectly controlled, although the use of multiple pictures in each group compensated for this to some extent. 94 percent of potential newbuild buyers said they would prefer to live in one of the more traditional options, and 92 percent of other respondents said they would prefer one of the more traditional options to be built near them.This early survey presented respondents with ‘card sets’ of newbuild house pictures and asked them to choose between them, rather than between individual images. From left to right, the sets above were favoured by 2 percent, 37 percent, 28 percent and 2 percent of potential newbuild buyers. Source: Robert Adam.In the following decades, several more visual preference surveys were commissioned by academic researchers, architecture firms, think tanks, and public bodies. Most of these studies were conducted by professional polling companies, so their respondents will have been largely representative of the general population. However, nearly all of them still used imperfectly controlled image pairs, meaning that it was hard to be sure that responses were caused by differences in architectural style rather than some other difference between the images. And the original images used in some older studies have been lost, making it hard to rest too much weight on them.However, to the extent that their findings are reliable, they show that while a minority of the public enjoys boundary-pushing modern architecture, the majority prefer more traditional buildings. And different groups respond to architectural styles in reasonably consistent patterns: where demographic data have been collected, it seems there is a weak tendency for men and younger people to be more open to modernist architecture, compared with women and older people. As far as we can tell from these surveys, though, all demographic groups prefer traditional styles: the preference is simply more pronounced in some groups than others. This holds not only for houses but also for hospitals and commercial and civic buildings.Bristol City Hall (left) came first and Shropshire Shirehall (right) last in a survey of ten town halls commissioned by a British think tank. Source: Alamy.One of the best early visual preference surveys was commissioned by the British architectural practice ADAM Architecture in 2009. Four real commercial buildings were shown in matching perspectives and weather conditions, two in traditional styles, two in modernist ones. Both of the modernist buildings had won prizes, suggesting that they were especially well-designed examples. Even so, only 23 percent of respondents preferred them, compared to 77 percent for the two traditional designs. The images offer the best controlled comparators of any study before the 2020s, with matching perspectives and lighting conditions.Four images of real commercial buildings used in a survey commissioned by a British architectural practice in 2009. Images two and three were preferred by 77 percent of respondents, compared to 23 percent for images one and four. Source: ADAM Architecture.David Halpern’s finding that architecture students differ in their tastes from those in other majors was