A lot of this analysis is purely about style, not substance. It's a discussion of what font the website uses, not whether it's useful and easy to navigate website. We should be evaluating buildings based on wether they are in the right place in the first place, wether it creates a walkable setting, wether you can find the front door easily, wether you can navigate around the building easily, wether they are energy efficient, wether they provide a healthy internal environment... etc. What decorations you stick on the outside are kind of the last thing to worry about. For example, the main problem with the brutalist building with the caption 'Some people like this building, some do not. But all must experience it' is scale, not style, if you chopped off the top five floors and left only three storeys, it would be much more acceptable in its setting. A lot of the problems with brutalist architecture are less to do with the style of materials and more a failure to address basic design issues like signalling 'where's the front door?'.
I get where you're coming from, but the article is very specifically about the external design of buildings, and the impact that external design has on the area around it.
You're not wrong that the internal design is important (and perhaps, in some cases, given less attention than it should fairly receive) but one of the points the article makes is that for any given building, only a very small people who experience that building will actually be interacting with it directly. Most people will experience it as a background to something else going on in their life:
> Buildings’ exteriors serve as backgrounds to a huge range of activities. In my view, this generates constraints on what we want them to look like. The streets of a city are places of work and play, of sickness and health, of triumph and grief. To all this, buildings owned by strangers form the involuntary backdrop, and for this reason, we often want them to be as we want strangers to be: polite, courteous, friendly and unintrusive.
With this in mind, I don't think it's unreasonable to also evaluate buildings on the basis of how their facade contributes (or doesn't contribute) to the general vibe of the area around it.
Another way, I live in Tokyo and 95% of buildings here are prefab and ugly. But it’s a delightful city to be in nonetheless, because everything about them is functional in a way that creates a great atmosphere. I’ve come to value the physical prettiness of buildings less and their public function far more.
That's a good attitude I'll have to adopt. In America, the 4-over-1 design, of 1,
ground floor of commercial, with 4 floors of residential above it, has become a very generic "downtown" look across the whole country. it's boring.
