The question is what cost are we willing to pay for buildings and cities to be more beautiful? The author doesn’t address cost at all and it is one of the prim

The question is what cost are we willing to pay for buildings and cities to be more beautiful? The author doesn’t address cost at all and it is one of the primary inputs to buildings. Not just the construction cost but the operating costs especially the ongoing energy consumption. Productivity and efficiency matters. At the city scale, these have a measurable impact on quality of life. A city that wastes gigawatt-hours of energy every year will be poorer than its neighbors that do not. But perhaps you would pay something extra to live in that beautiful but massive energy sink of a city. How much extra? No one wants to live in a perfectly efficient yet ugly building or city. So the question is, what is worth for buildings to be aesthetically pleasing? P.S. This is not a symptom of capitalism, IMO, as the author incorrectly asserts and the end. Productive use of energy is an equation of life not any particular economic system.