The problem with brutalism or glass buildings isn’t that it all looks the same or lacks local character. The problem is that they are ugly. It’s only when we ar

The problem with brutalism or glass buildings isn’t that it all looks the same or lacks local character. The problem is that they are ugly. It’s only when we are asking the second “why”—“why are they ugly?”—that we find out that, at least in part, these styles are specifically designed to avoid any sort of local or cultural flavor. Neoclassical architecture doesn’t have this problem because it intentionally calls back to Greece and Rome, reflecting a cultural heritage that is, in fact, shared all the way from Moscow to Boston.