*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.

well things like HSR do interconnect a country and so unifies and therefore interconnect a culture.

now multiply this x100 with air travel and the internet.

"Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet, but your cat's are gonna love it."

I think it's less about the railway and more about standardisation of materials/building codes

Carcinization of architecture. All structures evolve to box.

I think the creative processor for our simulation is failing. This explains a lot of the wacky things that are happening.

These white boxes are everywhere, as one of my daughters call it, they lack personality as one of a normal house and don't look practical or especially luxurious beyond looking like an office building.

While I'd marvel at the architectural diversity, all our houses are bungalows. It's simply most efficient, one floor is more than enough. Boxes rule! And if you throw a pizza on the roof it'll just stay :-)

Bungalows eat up way too much land. Build up, not out.

Actually it’s more about building the houses as cheap as possible, because although French houses are generally much sturdier and better insulated than North American homes, building codes are not really well controlled here. They don’t even do plumbing and electrical inspections in new builds.

What is the leading character of the older year? Capital 1?

You can blame this guy: Adolf Loos, at least in part.

Major influence behind Modernism. He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.

"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects" is the core theme of his essay "Ornamentation and Crime" .

Basically,

1. ornamentation causes buildings and useful objects to go out of style.

2. Things that go out of style require materials and manpower to update.

3. It is the moral imperative of the designer to make useful things, things that need to be redone are less useful and are wasteful.

4. Therefore it is the moral imperative of the designer to remove all ornamentation from design.

He saw ornamentation as "degenerate" and equated ornamentlessnes with moral and intellectual development. He also made it a race thing. He used the example of people from Papua New Guinea having tattoos. Paraphrasing: "these primitive savages ornament themselves with tattoos, we enlightened europeans don't. We smart, they dumb. Therefore ornament = dumb bad, no ornament = good smart. See?"

He was a major inspiration behind the modernist movement. It helped that unadorned buildings are cheaper and easier to construct - especially with the advent of cheap glass and steel construction. So you end up with this sort of soulless architecture that gives no sense of time or place - that tells you nothing about its purpose or the people who built/use it.

common in France, in handwriting the down-tick part is often bigger than the vertical part.

Double storey terrace without lawn is much more space efficient if you don't want to have someone living upstair, country that allowed HOA nazi would be benefit from it.

oh no, current trend is different to four previous trends? whatever shall we do

Is it only if it’s the first number? I was confused why both 1s weren’t written like that, and was wondering if it was a weird way to write a 0 or something (idk if those would be accurate mid-medieval homes, probably not)

Never seen that in my whole life, it must be a mistake.

Ayn Rand also writes about this in The Fountainhead

[...] simply most efficient [...]

In what context? For what and for whom?

I think regional building materials are probably either forgotten and/or in most of the places not (easily) accessible anymore, also traditional craftmanship got displaced.

It's just low poly style, easier to render

He was mainly reacting against Art Nouveau which he was a staunch critic of.

"I think that thing is ugly, so I'm gonna make something even uglier!"

Funny enough 1921 is when all the houses from the second half of the comic started.

People don't use materials they pick up in the immediate vicinity anymore, with stone being of different colors in different regions and different materials being locally available, forcing the use of different construction techniques. They use manufactured materials that all came out of the same factory and brought over by truck.

1. People travel way more now. Skills, technologies, material also travel way more. Ideas and styles used to have local variations but now everything goes global. It's not just architecture, same happens with food, fashion, movies... Traditional restaurants disappear to make root for burger joints and so on.
2. Scale. Building 100.000 houses using the same techniques is cheaper than 100.000 custom houses
3. Custom solutions are hard to fix and renovate. Simple solutions are cheaper to maintain over time.
4. Neutral styles are practical. It's easy to decorate, find furniture that fits and change some details over time. With very characteristic styles it's hard to find things that won't clash with it. If you get bored of if and want to change something you often have to redo the whole thing. With simple styles you can easily find replacements for individual things.

The white box and brushed metal styles are not because someone decide to make everything look sterile. It's because most people don't want to completely rebuild their houses/apartments every 10 years. It's extremely wasteful and expensive to do it.

Less work to design too. Whoever is working on the simulation might be on strike. Or got layed off…

If the design's boring and copy-pasted everywhere, how could people grow attached to their houses? Furthermore, if people had to go to apartments, like for unwieldy prices for years now, they would be desensitized on the part of losing the house.

Are there zoning laws related to building footprints vs lot size, or maximum building square footage? In the US, many of these utilitarian box structures are designed to take advantage of the maximum allowable building size on a specific lot (This varies greatly by state and city)

We can pretend he's the main influence, whilst ignoring the fact that most people prefer square even walls for aesthetic, functional, and - most of all - cost purposes.

I do agree we could do better w.r.t to colour, and millenial grey needs to go. But don't knock the rectangle. Rectangle is good. Rectangle is steady. You can plan on rectangle.

Same in Canada, all those "modern houses" are the same, a box with small wide rectangle windows, it's horrible.

Rectangle good, sure. But rectangle that gives no sense of time or place sad, I think.

I really like some architecture inspired by modernism. Huge FLW fan - fallingwater is my favorite building. But the good modernist or modernist-derived buildings incorporate and emphasize their surroundings and give a sense of time and place by incorporating traditional stylistic elements, local materials, etc.

Also, no pretending needed - this guy was a major progenitor of the style. The style can be a very good fit for the needs of people who commission buildings to be built, and it can look cool in its own right, but regardless of any of that Loos was a pioneering force in the Modernist movement

Rectangle looks like shit and is monotone

No like really, I can see it making sense for older times where it was harder to build shit but cmon we are in 2026...

Why the heck should I care for that?
Instead of more houses, maybe procreate less?
Also my places have enough of free land around them, I'm not eating anything up.

I'm not a murican, why would I care for the HOA 😁
Always this defaultism...
And space-efficient for whom? We don't need a castle, we're just 2 ppl. A few rooms plus a cellar are totally fine.

Where I live, having a flat roof is absolute madness. The snow load would collapse it during the first big snowstorm.

In what context? For what and for whom?

As I expressed a personal opinion, it's obviously for me and my wife.
For 2 ppl it's efficient. Why 2 stories? A cellar is fine for a pool, but we also could do without it..

Here you would find traditional craftsmen though. You just have to pay more, where I also failed to see the benefit. But yes, not easily accessible for sure. Which is sad.

Man, I really don't care for this Adolf character...

Why do you need big heavily fortified steepled roofs when snowfall is shrinking and you're not worried about roof collapse?

Why are you using heavy lumber, stone, and plaster to build a frame when steel is cheaper and hardy plank more reliable?

Why do you need a chimney?

I think an aspect of the problem is the modern high expectations of functionality for things like climate control and ingress protection against pests and water. It's much easier to not make a mistake on those if you aren't adding any "frills". Balancing those needs with ornamentation and cost is such a difficult juggling act, most people just don't.

In my experience they're mostly painted yellow rather than white, but yup this is pretty accurate.

Media literacy moment

Just Adolf things

My town is the top frame. The industry that was here previously crashed big time in the early 1900s. There were no jobs, so no one wanted to live here. The old city never got redeveloped. So the official buildings and even the high school are from another time. Same with the houses. Now it’s part of the charm and what brings people to visit.

the artist is worried about current architectural stylings being samey, yes? and contrasting it with older styles, yes? and those older styles are not only from different areas, but different eras, yes? and people have been complaining about this since the tudor era, yes? stop me if i'm missing a step.

Not fair to equate bland housing with modernism.

Tell me this building is bland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Assembly

Stop!! The step you're missing is that the point isn't about when those different styles first emerged, but the fact that there were regional differences in style, as you correctly identified but missed the point of. It is irrelevant whether the differing styles emerged simultaneously or not: what matters is that they differed by region. The current style does not differ by region. This is the point the artist is upset about. Its nothing to do with the trend being different visually, its about the trend being homogenous across all regions, which is different than before, yes?

it's not bland, but can someone powerwash that thing?

but it's not. the "alsacian" style is what basically every house in every hanseatic german city looked like at the time, all around the baltic sea. the black roof shingles and blue paint of bretagne were both imported from england and scotland at a time when scotland exported shingles to all of western europe.

take it from someone who lives in a place where houses are traditionally painted red based on the popularity of building with brick at a point in history, these are all anchored in time rather than place. it's clout-chasing and keeping up appearances all the way down.

But consider this:

Hexagons - bestagons

HOAs exist in a lot of countries. I also had one for my apartment in the Netherlands.

It looks like it hasn't been used since the fall of the soviet union and I'm only half sure it's not intentional.

Blander than any of the Corbusier buildings you’re responding to, tbh