‘Aesthetic calamity’: Top architect reveals why everything is so ‘ugly’
Sydney’s locals have blasted a “terrible” council plan for a surf club redevelopment, while a top architect has revealed Australia’s “crisis” of ugly homes.
On Sydney’s Northern Beaches, tensions are flaring over a proposed $20 million redevelopment of Manly’s iconic surf club, with some critics branding the plans “terrible”, “brutalist” and “trash”.
And it’s far from an isolated case — with one of Australia’s leading architects now blasting Australia’s “miserable” black roofed, cookie-cutter suburbs an “open crisis”.
‘Brutalist, heavy, masculine’
In October, Northern Beaches Council finally revealed its long-awaited plans for a knockdown-rebuild of the Manly Life Saving Club, built in 1982, sparking mixed reactions from locals.
While the majority of the close to 1000 community submissions to the DA process have supported the plan, many have voiced objections.
One joint submission, from a group of local apartment owners and residents, cited “visual impact, overdevelopment, excessively large, obstructing views and detracting from the iconic Manly beachscape and the heritage precinct that is South Steyne”.
Manly resident Graham Harris called it an “unnecessary and excessive redevelopment that would harm the foreshore’s heritage character, reduce public space, and prioritise private club benefit over community need”.
“The aesthetics of this structure will negatively impact the community vibe in Manly,” wrote Gina Hill. “It looks brutalist, heavy, masculine, and hard. Where are the heritage aspects? It should be 50 per cent less brick and 50 per cent more timber. It’s a terrible design.”
Adelaide-based furniture designer James Howe, who rails against modern building styles on his popular Instagram account, blasted the proposed redevelopment in a video last week, saying it “looks like it was commissioned by a guy who just won the lottery”.
“Instead of drawing on some of the Art Deco themes from the surrounding buildings which are actually appealing and so famous for Sydney beaches, they’ve gone with that same new money, trash architect bullsh*t that you see going up all over Australia,” he said in the clip.
Howe, who has 217,000 followers on Instagram, told news.com.au it was “the same as the last f***ing Westfield you saw go up”.
“The architects who are building in this way are making themselves into victims of AI,” he said.
“Give it five years. What do they have that would make you hire them rather than paying a $20-a-month subscription to some architecture bot?”
Everything is ‘ugly’
The backlash over the Manly surf club is hardly surprising.
Across the country — and all over the world — the same complaint is repeated ad nauseam as old buildings are torn down and replaced, and seas of cookie-cutter homes and apartments sprawl ever outwards on the fringes of our major cities.
Why is everything so ugly? (Or is it?) Do people actually like this? (Many do.) Why can’t we build nice things anymore? (We can, sometimes.)
They’re questions that have been the subject of countless articles, essays, books and videos.
“If you want to understand any society, don’t listen to what it says about itself — look at what it creates,” British author Sheehan Quirke said in a viral film earlier this year lamenting the “ugly” and “boring” design now seen in everything from buildings and cityscapes to furniture, cars, doors and lamp posts.
“Those skyscrapers say the same thing as our airconditioning units and sewage plants — that we have become a society of convenience above all else.”
On social media, raging against the horrors of modern design, stripped of detail and ornamentation, is a favourite past-time.
“I would say it seems that people have departed from caring about the way things look, and I’m not entirely sure why that’s happened,” Howe said.
“But it’s very evident when you look at old buildings … it’s really obvious these were designed and built by people who had a very keen appreciation for beauty and all of the details — certain bricks pointed in different ways, different types of timber finished in different ways depending on the look that suits the material.
“Contrast that with modern buildings, you just see a complete departure from that attention to detail.
“It’s not like human beings have changed. We’re still the same people. Technically we’ve become more skilful in many ways, but I think we’ve lost our understanding of how to create beauty.
“I think it starts with the ability to conceive of putting that much work into a building. As a culture when you move away from the idea of investing thousands and thousands of hours into creating a building it’s very hard to go back.
“We used to see buildings as paying themselves off over 500 years, whereas now buildings have to pay themselves off within 30 years. It’s a fundamental shift in the way you see things.”
Grey box ‘calamity’
Arguably nothing better represents this departure from more “beautiful” older designs than the ubiquitous “grey box”, mass produced project home.
“I think they are an aesthetic calamity,” said acclaimed architect Philip Thalis, who is also a Professor of Architecture Practice at UNSW. “I think the way we do suburbia is actually an open crisis.”
Assessing one viral image of a typical example, Prof Thalis said the builders had “basically tried to throw at least four materials at every facade with no relationship between them, either aesthetically or constructionally or in terms of colours”.
“They are the dominant style around new suburbs — black roofs, arbitrary windows not attuned to orientation,” he said.
“Many of them are garages with houses attached. There’s also a real cost to the owners, because there are so many materials to maintain. Every time you have a junction [of materials] you have a maintenance problem.”
Prof Thalis said for a period in the ‘60s and ‘70s, architects had significant involvement in project homes which were fitted to sites.
Today, he added, there was “virtually no architectural involvement”, with homes now built for “maximum size and minimum cost”.
“If you step back from individual housing types, I think our standard of design and construction is very poor,” he said.
“And that is particularly puzzling given we are one of the richest countries in the world, obsessed by real estate. There is a giant mismatch between the mediocrity we build and buy and the quality that we actually need to be building in order to make durable, environmentally responsible homes.”
Function over form
Architectural styles have naturally evolved over time — from the Victorian Era homes of the latter 1800s with intricate cast-iron veranda lacework, to the distinctive multifaceted roofs of the Federation Era, the rounded Art Deco brickwork of the 1930s or the unassuming brick veneer of ‘70s and ‘80s.
Modern, minimalist styles began to emerge in the 1950s, and from the 1990s onwards, the dreaded grey box began to take hold.
“A lot of that [attention to detail] shifted in the ‘50s with this functionalism thing — lots of angled windows, panel walls … very much brutalism came in, pared everything down, and it just never came back,” said Jason Smith, who runs the popular Instagram page @1000housedrawings.
Smith, an architectural artist and former radio journalist, has made it his mission to document the “lovely old” Sydney homes slated for destruction, before they make way for cookie-cutter boxes and townhouses.
“Not every house is going to stay standing, I get it, I don’t want to come across as a NIMBY,” he said.
“I believe in more development, I know we need a ton more housing. I believe we can have both — QIMBY, quality in my backyard.”
Nearly one in five of the 1.1 million new residential dwellings approved between 2019 and 2025 were knockdown rebuilds, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data.
Over that period, an average of 16,753 dwellings per year were approved for demolition, while 35,914 new dwellings per year approved on the same site.
That is, for every demolished dwelling, an average of 2.1 were built on the same site — whether through land subdivisions, or apartments or townhouses replacing single homes.
“We pull down a 100-year-old single house, we can build 16 to 20 units, I get it,” Smith said.
“That won’t stop me wanting to talk about the beauty of the old homes we’ve lost. We’ve got a constantly diminishing stock of old homes. I don’t just mean the QVB type. The average red texture brick, that’s still a part of our history.”
Big or beautiful?
Smith believes there are many factors driving the trend, but a key one is the obsession with home size.
Australia now has the largest average home size on the world at 214 square metres, bigger than the US.
“In the last 100 years we have effectively doubled the size of the average house while the average family size has halved,” he said. “We have four times as much house as we used to in our grandparents’ era.”
There is a simple triangle of trade-offs between budget, size and quality — and for most people, borrowing from a bank, budget is fixed.
“If you want quality you’re going to have to sacrifice size,” Smith said. “The trend is pro-size, anti-quality. I’d rather have a smaller house that costs the same with the best materials, sandstone, timber. You look at an old house built in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s and [people say], ‘We can’t afford to do that anymore.’ That’s a furphy. We can but we’re looking at a house that’s 12 squares [111.5 square metres].”
Howe, for his part, says it all starts with materials, now largely mass-machine produced, from bricks to gyprock.
Until World War II, lath and plaster interior walls were the norm — thousands of strips of wood with small gaps hand coated with lime and sand. Today it’s “Big Gyprock”, with plasterboard mass manufactured by a small number of companies.
“People got used to it, they stopped noticing it looks cheap and sh*t because they don’t remember what lath and plaster walls look like,” Howe said.
More than anything the designer laments the decline of brickwork — which he attributes to the shift from lime to cement mortar last century. Cement mortar is more brittle than lime, necessitating the use of expansion joints.
“You can’t have a brick wall interrupted by multiple foam filled expansion joints that is beautiful,” he said.
“I actually think the introduction of cement mortar was a big part of what killed that Art Deco style and the kind of excellence associated with it. Styles change but what you want is for one to lead to another that is equally beautiful, but that’s not what we’ve seen.”
Prof Thalis, however, cautions against overly romanticising earlier design eras.
“People perhaps haven’t changed, but people’s understanding of what’s beautiful has changed,” he said.
“In the 1960s the terrace house was seen as a dump. Many were shonkily built, damp, the project homes of the 19th century. They were seen as awful, to be replaced, and indeed whole suburbs were bulldozed. In the 1970s Federation Houses were seen as daggy and passé.
“I don’t care what era it’s from — is it a good building? Is it too dark inside, has its roof got too many junctions and therefore may leak? We need to be more discerning. There are some mediocre Victorian buildings and good ones. There are some good kit homes available today.”
The rise of regulation
The elephant in the room, according to Prof Thalis, is the invisible hand regulation choking the creativity out of design.
“What’s happened over the last 30 years is the rise of regulation,” he said.
“People often just talk about planning regulations … planning is clearly not stopping ugly things being build. You also have an incredible and ongoing increase in complexity in terms of codes and standards you need to meet.”
Many relate to fire safety, such as requirements for sprinklers in certain size buildings, “which means you need a pump room”.
There are also complex regulations related to acoustics, thermal and disability access, and detailed Australian Standards dictating practically every aspect of a build.
“In the lift, the button has to be 500mm to right of the shaft — there are just so many rules,” he said.
Prof Thalis said he had just come from a meeting with engineers to find a window for a small apartment project.
“The windows in the courtyard have a fire engineer, an environmental engineer and an acoustic engineer,” he said.
“They all have different requirements that are almost completely unsolvable. People just don’t realise how much code compliance there is today. It’s out of control.”
Can we build it again?
In the US, President Donald Trump has ordered federal buildings to be made “beautiful again” — meaning in classical and traditional styles, namely “Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco”.
Similar attempts to revive classical styles have grown in Europe.
“I’m not seeing [a revival of earlier styles] in Australia partly due to the National Construction Code (NCC),” Howe said.
“I think the way forward is to find ways to get around all of our pitfalls in the modern scheme — materials, the NCC, skills deficit. We need innovative architecture, people that have a real eye for beauty and a very inventive way of thinking, ‘How can we come up with new styles despite all of these problems?’
“But we’re not doing that on the whole. We’re trying to build in the old style but crippled by all of these problems.”
Smith said many of the skills required were simply being lost.
“We used a stonemason to do some beautiful paving in our backyard,” he said. “He’s in his late ‘60s. He said, ‘If you’ve got children get them into stonemasonry, because when I die there are none.’”
The problem is lack of demand leading to lack of interest in craft, creating a feedback loop.
“If there’s not a demand for it in the marketplace, why would you?” Smith said. “You look at the trends.”
Howe, meanwhile, argues the demand for “the box” is artificial.
“People have been groomed into liking it,” he said.
“There’s been such an effort to promote the box because it’s so easy to smash up and make a profit.
“Some people like it — in the same way people like McDonald’s. That doesn’t mean it’s good.”
Originally published as ‘Aesthetic calamity’: Top architect reveals why everything is so ‘ugly’
