>There are countries where you can see buildings from 100 and 200 and 500 even years ago, not just the exceptional ones, but rows and rows of them (e.g. the who

>There are countries where you can see buildings from 100 and 200 and 500 even years ago, not just the exceptional ones, but rows and rows of them (e.g. the whole historical center of several European cities left mostly intact). And they still come across better than very expensive buildings by famous architects done in the same premium areas. Most buildings that old were consistently renovated, updated, and added onto over that time, so what we get of them in the modern day is a sort of agglomeration of many periods' styles and sensibilities rather than whatever fad happened to be cool in the decade they were built. I think one of the reasons modernist and postmodernist architectural styles tend to not age as well is because we just don't let buildings to do that anymore. It's almost always easier to tear something down and rebuild it anew so, that Burkean sense of letting the slow evolution of norms and taste build something up doesn't happen. We just get stuff that's pickled in its time.