Why did we stop building like this?

Every carved cornice, every dome, every hand-set stone we still travel across the world to see was, at some point, a completely normal way to put up a building. Then, within a single century, it wasn’t. Here’s what actually changed, and what it actually costs to change it back.

The great simplification

Ornament is slow. It needs stone carvers, plasterers, and masons: trades that took a generation to learn and were decimated by two world wars. What replaced them wasn’t a new aesthetic philosophy so much as a rescue plan: concrete, steel, and glass could be assembled by semi-skilled labour, fast, at a scale that could house a continent that had just lost most of its housing stock. Modernism gave that shortage a manifesto: ‘ornament is crime,’ form follows function, and the manifesto outlived the shortage by eighty years. Somewhere in the handoff, ‘we have to build fast’ quietly became ‘beautiful buildings are old-fashioned,’ and nobody ever really argued the second part. It just stuck.

Building traditionally is barely more expensive.

Ornament and detail are usually a small slice of a project’s total cost: the land, services, structure, and consenting dwarf the price of a cornice or a carved lintel. What actually drives the blank, repeated glass box isn’t a fixed budget; it’s a margin decision. A simpler facade is a faster approval, a faster build, and a bigger number at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Nobody is stopping a developer from building this way. They are simply choosing not to, because nothing is currently asking them to.

Run the numbers over a buildings full life and the gap closes further. A masonry facade built to last a century is refinanced once, maybe twice, over that period. A curtain-wall system built to a 25 to 40 year horizon is torn out, re-consented, rebuilt, and re-financed three or four times in the same window, and every one of those cycles carries its own demolition cost, disruption cost, and material cost on top of the original build. Ornament isnt the expensive choice, replacement is.

2–8%

Typical added cost of traditional ornament and materials over a stripped-down equivalent, usually the smallest line item in the whole

100+ yrs

How long a well-built masonry facade lasts before major renovation, against 25 to 40 years for many curtain-wall systems.

1 choice

Cost was never really the barrier. Faster, blanker buildings simply protect margins better, and nothing currently requires otherwise.

It Was Never About What Buildings Look Like

Ask a developer why a facade is blank glass and precast panel instead of carved stone, and the honest answer is rarely aesthetic. Its underwriting. A bank valuing a project cares about square metres, lease-up speed, and exit cap rate, not whether the cornice is handsome. Beauty doesnt appear anywhere on a pro forma, so it doesnt get built, not because anyone decided ugly buildings are better, but because nobody with capital at risk is currently asked to care.

This is the same pattern behind almost every ugly building going up in New Zealand right now, and it shows up city by city across this site: apartments built for Airbnb yield instead of residents in Christchurch, towers built to a minimum consenting standard instead of a neighbourhoods character everywhere else. The people building these projects arent villains, theyre simply following the only incentive currently on offer. Change what gets rewarded, and what gets built changes with it.

See What Needs to Change

“Nobody is forcing New Zealand to keep building this way. It’s a habit, not a law.”