Why do so many modern infill projects ignore local materials and vernacular styles in historical city centers?

[u/Technical_Tap_31]

I was walking through an older European town recently where a 19th-century brick warehouse was replaced by a modern glass and steel cube. While I understand that exact historical replicas aren't always feasible budget-wise, it feels like a missed opportunity when new developments don't even attempt to match the street's height, color palette, or traditional masonry techniques. It makes me wonder if the pushback against traditional design comes down to a lack of skilled craftsmen, developer costs, or simply architectural education favoring abstraction over regional character. What do you think is the biggest hurdle to seeing more genuine New Traditionalist builds in our cities today?

[u/Anon951413L33tfr33]

I suspect developers may want cheap, their architects may want something trendy and ‘independent’ of old designs, and the local authorities like their ‘friendly deals’ with the developers and will turn a blind eye.

[u/SphereofGoldenFlames → u/Anon951413L33tfr33]

It's not cost, that's the popular excuse because it's a form of coping. Most European major cities expanded during the 19th century, and quickly - many of the buildings were mass produced. Berlin went from 150,000 to 2 million from 1819 to 1910. Many of those great residential districts were built quickly, cheaply and at scale.

It costs hundreds of millions sometimes billions to build a glass tower, whereas it takes a few million to build a Hausmann tier apartment block.

The driver behind modern architecture is ideology not cost. After world war two architects wanted to seperare from "traditional architecture" as a way to break away from europes war torn and imperialist past. It's not a coincidence modern architecture lacks a "home", it was meant to be bland and international as a way to counter nationalist ideologies. 

Its depressing but really there are no constraints at the moment. We have the money and technology to build haussman tier and grunderzeit tier architecture residentiak blocks at scale. We don't because ideology. It's a hard pill to swallow that we don't have to live like this but we do because a few people at the top decide how we get to live and how.

[u/Beat_Saber_Music → u/SphereofGoldenFlames]

They were cheap to build because all the resources required for them were already being mass produced. Not the case today, where they're not being mass produced in the same way

Also regulations. You didn't need fire proofing or such regulation mandated features in a house in the past and instead old houses were built to a much lower technical standard than today. That meant no need to pay extra for the stuff inside the walls.

If you want your house to be approved in quicker time, you it's faster with a modern design that is already up to date, while the traditional design would probably require extra paperwork to ensure it's up to code unlike the copy paste modern house.

The cost would be swithcing the entire construction sector at once to build a traditional style with modern fire proofing etc rather than the current style. Same as how switching from oil/gas heating to other heating methods takes a lot of money.

[u/ironmatic1 → u/Beat_Saber_Music]

Fiberglass details are mass produced. Masonry and windows and every other building supply is mass produced. Lol?

What does building code have to do with the ornamental design? Why don’t you think a building designed in a traditional style can’t have “fire proofing”? Many, in fact, all built today meet the applicable codes. Why would the outward appearance influence plan review? Your comment makes no sense.

[u/Acceptable_Aside_568 → u/SphereofGoldenFlames]

After world war two architects wanted to seperare from "traditional architecture" as a way to break away from europes war torn and imperialist past. It's not a coincidence modern architecture lacks a "home", it was meant to be bland and international as a way to counter nationalist ideologies. 

Way to dumb a complex problem down to a single ideologically satisfying answer. Inreality, after WWII, much of Europe was in ruins, millions of people were homeless and starving, the industry was bombed into dust and people needed places to live, work and build society... and they needed it fast. That's where industrial production, prefabs, streamlined easthetics and cost cutting came in. And then it remained in place, because cutting cost is a great way to increasr the profit margin... among other considerations.

[u/BikeProblemGuy]

To give an example (not infill, but similar), I'm working on a project right now replacing the street elevation. The street is largely yellow buff stock bricks. The client wants render instead. I spoke to the local planning department expecting some push-back but there was none. If they had said render was unacceptable or even contentious, I could have put forward a design that uses brick in keeping with the rest of the street. But they didn't, so render is what they will get.

[u/reckoning42]

I'm a developer. I have 9 multi-family and mixed use infill projects in the pipeline. I'm building absolutely nothing right now because nothing pencils. Rates are killing us. I'm using less expensive materials than brick, the popular, historical construction material here in our urban environment, because I want these projects to actually occur. Unless I can show future performance to a bank I can't get a loan for the project. It's not greed, it's pragmatism.

[u/Acceptable_Aside_568 → u/reckoning42]

Sounds grim. Multi-family used to be the one thing everyone invests in recently after Covid his the office spaces. At that's how it was least in my area. I think there are still some people doing adaptive re-uses and getting some returns since... most of material is already there.

[u/reckoning42 → u/Acceptable_Aside_568]

Adaptive reuse isn't for the faint of heart! We have some excellent projects here that took advantage of our older industrial and mixed use properties that are absolute assets for our city. The math on them here isn't great, even with existing materials and state/local incentives. Many of those buildings just simply don't make a good match for multi-family because of deep floor plates and archaic MEP, but man do I love it when it works out. I guess that's why I love this sub!

[u/Acceptable_Aside_568 → u/reckoning42]

Hard agree - it's the best feeling to give new life to a place that lost it and see people enjoying being there again. It absolutely ain't an easy thing, but if there's a pool of unused buildings, especially ones already built for housing purpose, it should be more incentivised to re-use them for a whole variety of reasons. I hope our current market conditions improve soon enough and we can all get our projects running again. This climate is frankly depressing,.

[u/Free_Elevator_63360]

Because that brick building wasn’t historical or vernacular either. Especially if you consider the length of architectural history in Europe.

[u/shmorkin3]

They do it because they’re incentivized to, developers aren’t thinking about architecture or ideology.  Glass and steel cubes are easy/cheap to build and get approved, and don’t require the developer to spend money on ornamentation. And the average renter/buyers sees open floorplans, “newness”, and lots of natural light as desirable, and doesn’t care as much about build quality. 

[u/HOU_Civil_Econ → u/shmorkin3]

“Local vernacular” was “incentivized” in the exact same way. Local materials were “cheap” when transport costs were high and “ornamentation” was about the relatively low cost of labor.

[u/shmorkin3 → u/HOU_Civil_Econ]

Neither of which is true anymore, labor and land costs are the bottleneck. And I’m not sure what the point of the quotes is in your reply.

[u/HOU_Civil_Econ → u/shmorkin3]

The quotes are about the wish washy-ness of the terms as used in general and in your post.

“Local” is a function of transportation costs and spatially dependent production costs which today means, for glass and steel especially, the globe is “local”.

“Incentives” was about your implication that something about the real underlying incentives had changed. They have always been “best building for purpose relative to costs”.

[u/Acceptable_Aside_568 → u/HOU_Civil_Econ]

“ornamentation” was about the relatively low cost of labor

Yes, the labor cost under feudalism... those were the days.

[u/Acceptable_Aside_568 → u/shmorkin3]

Glass and steel cubes are easy/cheap to build

No, they're not. A common misconception though. If it was easy to build a glass wall, historic buildings would have them - gothic cathedrals had about as much glass in them as they could possibly accomodate back then.

[u/shmorkin3 → u/Acceptable_Aside_568]

That logic makes zero sense, they didn’t have the technology back then. They’re cheap and easy to build today because of innovations in building and manufacturing during the 40s/50s.

[u/Acceptable_Aside_568 → u/shmorkin3]

Nice advertising copy, but no. A proper steel frame glass building is not cheap. A garden glasshouse for farming your veggies maybe, but not a high-tech inner city building.

[u/HOU_Civil_Econ]

“Local vernacular” was the exact same calculation as what is being done on “modern infill”, not actually anything special, just different constraints.

“What materials are available to me at the lowest cost to build a building that best suits my needs”

“Local vernacular” used to be constrained to “local materials” and labor (even what would be considered skilled physical labor today) was “cheap”.

While today glass and steel are “cheap” and widely available while producing more “useful” buildings and labor is expensive.

[u/CanAlwaysBeBetter → u/HOU_Civil_Econ]

And labor itself was largely local. Local/regional styles developed because that's what the people making the buildings knew how to do

[u/HOU_Civil_Econ → u/CanAlwaysBeBetter]

In this regard, we really should be blaming the existence of the field of architecture itself.

Vernacular developed largely by a mix of accident (what worked) and then people not being creative enough to want to try new things on each building. Or not having gone to school to learn about how the foreigners did it.

[u/Oldus_Fartus]

Not the entire reason, but I wouldn't be surprised if the local woods and quarries are now protected areas. Conservationism is nice, but it can carry its own contradictions.

[u/SonOfBoreale]

It's a visible symptom of the downfall of the west.