When profit is the primary guiding principle of urban development, what is lost is not just aesthetic refinement but the values that make a city worthy of human life. Beauty, patience, and intention are sacrificed for expediency. The logic of capital demands that buildings rise quickly, cheaply, and with maximum return, reducing architecture to basic shelter rather than an expression of a city’s essence.
The new structures erupting across Brooklyn, New York are victim to this approach—thin EIFS facades that feign solidity, windows set flush with the exterior like afterthoughts, flat roofs devoid of aesthetic ambition, a skyline dictated by zoning codes. These buildings offer no engagement with the neighborhood’s history, no conversation with the buzzing street below. They are not built to endure or persist; they are built to be flipped, bought, and sold in cycles of speculative investment.
The greatest cities of the world understood architecture as a form of its culture. In Western Europe, doors are framed by carved architraves and rusticated stone pilasters, signaling arrival as an important event to make an impression. Windows are adorned with wrought-iron balconettes and crowned by sculpted pediments, offering depth and shadow play rather than sterility. Ceilings do not exist overhead blandly, but are vaulted, coffered, or frescoed. Think of the gilded stuccoes of the Palais Garnier, the barrel vaults of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, and the trompe-l’œil heavens of Sant'Ignazio in Rome. It’s a detailed beauty, not a quick and easy job.
Walls, in their finest incarnations, are not surfaces but narratives, intricate stories. There’s the sgraffito façades of Florence, where layers of plaster are carved away to reveal intricate patterns; the ceramic azulejos of Lisbon, their cobalt blues reflect the Atlantic light; the ashlar masonry of Edinburgh, where stone is cut so precisely that mortar becomes unnecessary. These structures speak of a patience and craft that modern conveniency has made obsolete.
As novelist Jeffrey Eugenides wrote, “Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.”
The pursuit of quick profit negates the patience required for deep beauty. Beauty is not a luxury—it is a necessity for the human spirit, an assurance that we do not unconsciously occupy space, but are shaped by it.
A city that prioritizes only the immediate and the profitable will leave behind no inheritance, only the ugly rubble of residual greed.
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