It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to the built environment, that ambiguity is contentious — particularly when demand for new housing is so urgent. The British government estimates that it needs to build up to 300,000 homes annually to keep pace with the country’s needs; last year a Financial Times analysis put the number closer to 500,000. Historically, such large-scale development may have not been welcomed, but a YouGov study in 2024 found that 61 per cent of Britons support new housebuilding, with only 10 per cent strongly opposed.
What the public really does care about is how these homes look. In a survey of residents in London and the south-east by UK-based think-tank Policy Exchange, 85 per cent said new homes should fit in with their more traditional surroundings or be identical to homes already there. “Beauty elevates everyone’s environment and daily life,” believes Michael Lykoudis, professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. But who should decide what’s beautiful? Architects, governments or the general public? Do you need expertise to decide which architectural style is more beautiful than another?
Late this summer, Policy Exchange released a paper titled Building Beautiful Council Houses. It calls for 100,000 council homes to be built a year, with an approach centred around “the core principle of beauty”. The paper keeps the definition open-ended: “This paper does not seek to impose a unilateral idea of what is beautiful on planners, residents, architects or local authorities but it does implore all stakeholders charged with the delivery of council housing to accept that beauty is important.” It also introduces the idea of a “strategic democratisation of beauty” — releasing the definition from the hands of any one set of gatekeepers to something more collaborative.
Inside, suggestions of what is beautiful veer from Marmalade Lane co-housing development in Cambridge and Peter Barber’s social housing estate in east London to the Karl-Marx-Hof municipal housing complex in Vienna and the Boulogne-Billancourt suburb of Paris. From these examples, a “core principle of beauty” is hard to settle upon.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again executive order, a set of future building guidelines released in August, imposes a top-down prescriptive view. It states “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings” — a turn away from design that “sometimes impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people”. The emphasis on buildings modelled, like the early federal buildings in Washington DC, on those of ancient Athens and Rome, is said to benefit the “general public”, which explicitly excludes “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, instructors or professors of art or architecture, or members of the building industry”.
Unsurprisingly, architects are up in arms. An official statement from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) accuses Trump’s order of “replac[ing] thoughtful design processes with rigid requirements that will limit architectural choice” while “removing local input” from Washington DC residents — essentially, disempowering both architects and residents.
“In architecture, we have always had the question: ‘Do we build for the common good, or do we build for the ego of the architect or client?’,” says Lykoudis. Building beautifully is achieved through dialogue, he adds, and takes into account context, culture and architectural character in order to decide what should go where. Lykoudis calls Trump’s approach “simplistic”: “What the president has done, through identifying one style of architecture as beautiful, is to stifle that dialogue and short circuit everything.”
Nicholas Boys Smith, founding director of UK-based urban planning advocacy group Create Streets, who co-chaired the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, an independent UK government advisory that ran from 2018 to 2020, is in some ways more sympathetic to Trump’s view. He points to a 2020 National Civic Art Society poll that found that 72 per cent of Americans prefer a traditional style over a modern style for US courthouse or federal buildings.
“Buildings are by their nature a public good,” he says. “What you have on the walls of your home doesn’t bother me. But if we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money, it’s certainly the right starting point to build not what the individual wants, but what the public recognises collectively as attractive and meaningful.”
When it comes to homes, it’s not difficult to find “beautiful” architecture that has stood the test of time. In the UK we only have to look at much-copied Georgian architecture, or the reappraisal of 1930s council houses — as much praised for their herringbone brickwork and bay windows as their functional cavity walls. ‘‘Although at an individual level there’s obviously a high level of subjectivity, at the collective level there are core themes,” says Boys Smith.
This February for example, a University of Sussex study found infants as young as four months old are more drawn to visually complex buildings than their simpler counterparts: baroque facades, for example, fared better than brutalist ones.
Humanise is a global 10-year campaign designed to “reinvite” the public into architectural conversations pioneered by architectural designer Thomas Heatherwick. It encourages the industry to draw upon neuroarchitecture — a cross-disciplinary field exploring how our brains and bodies respond to the built environment — to gauge how people feel about a building’s visual appearance. “We’re drawn to natural materials, visual complexity and curves, while blander, less visually complex buildings have the opposite effect,” says Lisa Finlay, a partner at Heatherwick Studio. She cites a 2025 University of Cambridge study that demonstrates the relationship between built design elements and users’ cortisol levels. Such studies, Finlay argues, help channel public sentiment into planning conversations: “It helps us understand and communicate design decisions.”
But not everyone believes we should be “building beautifully”. The movement is a “distraction” from more urgent priorities such as functionality and sustainability, says Barnabas Calder, senior lecturer in architecture at Liverpool University and author of Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism. “The moment you say ‘beauty’ and ‘buildings’ in the same breath, people jump to heritage — the old styles we admire but can’t easily recreate,” offers Finlay. “At present, this means we risk either dismissing contemporary design or slipping into pastiche.”
While our notions of a “beautiful building” might be tied up with historical, classical elements, the term “visual complexity” is more style-agnostic — and therefore, Finlay continues, more expansive to our thinking. “You can get inherent visual complexity in a stone, or from a man-made design,” she says. She cites the example of two buildings: Parisian social housing project 12 Rue Jean-Bart by Jean-Christophe Quinton, and Cosway Street, a residential development in Marylebone, London. Both employ a scalloped design, but while the former does so with natural limestone, the latter uses man-made bricks in keeping with the surrounding late Victorian and Georgian architecture.
Heatherwick and others are not alone in rejecting “building beautifully”. In July 2024, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner removed the word “beauty” from government housing policy (which was added in 2020 by then housing secretary Michael Gove under the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission). She did so on grounds of subjectivity: “Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another,” she told BBC Radio 2.
Prior to that, after the release of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission’s report in 2020, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) urged the authors to replace the term “beauty” with a “broader definition” of “quality design”. “Beauty is an objective of architecture. However, it is only one element of creating a successful building or place,” reads the official response.
So how should we decide what gets built, and in what style? The UK’s current public consultation approach is far from sophisticated. In a podcast for BBC Radio 4, Heatherwick bemoans the convention of posting a laminated sheet on a lamppost to alert locals to a consultation. A 2019 report by property firm Grosvenor, based on a YouGov survey of more than 2,000 members of the public, found that just 2 per cent of the public trust private developers to act in a way that is best for the community when making decisions about large-scale development (a distrust largely driven by a perception that “they only care about making and/or saving money”, according to 75 per cent of respondents). Meanwhile, only 7 per cent trust local authorities to make decisions in the best interests of the area.
Alternatives that deepen public engagement have been proposed. The Humanise campaign champions the use of community review panels, which invite local people to make detailed comments at the pre-application stages of urban design.
A complementary approach, from Create Streets, comes in the form of local area-specific design codes produced in collaboration with public consultation, which provide a clear framework for planners, developers and communities. Boys Smith references a consultation in Lichfield, England, which led to wide public consensus. “We asked questions like, ‘What’s your favourite local building? Can you rank these buildings 1 to 10?’ It wasn’t unanimous, but there has been a high level of agreement.”
The outcome was a “gentle density” approach featuring mid-rise buildings and Georgian-style buildings featuring deep red Staffordshire bricks distinctive to the area’s history. While neo-Georgian architecture may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it was certainly a line of best fit approach for the public of Lichfield, which deemed the design code “highly appropriate”.
In Tornagrain, a village and hamlet in the Scottish Highlands with detailed master planning by Ben Pentreath & Associates, new-style traditional design was informed by a 10-day public design workshop, known as a charrette. The 4,960-home development, began in 2012, has been widely praised, with one of its homes named 2022 House of the Year in the Scottish Home Awards and resident landowner the Earl of Moray receiving an award from the King’s Foundation.
Could AI fast-track the public consultation process? Research conducted by Boys Smith found that AI dovetailed with public opinion in selecting preferred building designs for department store buildings, sports stadiums and viaducts. Through combining AI tools (including imaging to quickly communicate possible designs) and neuroarchitecture with traditional consultation processes, it could be “much easier to create buildings with a high level of public support” than it might have been 100 years ago, Boys Smith believes. Certainly, modern advances might deem what the people want — at least, what they want right now.
Because beauty fades, to draw on an old adage. Calder points to the “turnover of fashion” in architecture; brutalism, he argues, is only now “emerging from a bad phase”. Discussion around “beautiful” new-builds will inevitably impact conversations around what is considered ugly enough to knock down, Calder fears. An emphasis on “beauty” may lead to the “avoidable demolition and replacement” of unfashionable architectural styles — which he sees as a “soft target” for developers.
Is there a middle ground? Can the public be persuaded to find non-traditional building styles beautiful, creating more support for innovation while preserving the old?
Some believe that better communication holds the key. “Designers can help to bring people along by communicating the craft, and level of care, that goes into good design, and making that something people can understand and respond to,” says Finlay.
Lykoudis agrees: “We have to broaden architectural education, especially now that we are building more than ever before. In the past, the common person had a good understanding about how things were built. Today, nobody has a clue — we defer to experts. We require dialogue, but that starts with being somewhat educated in the building process.” Such discourse might even broaden public perception of what is beautiful, suggests Finlay: “We don’t yet have enough modern examples we all agree are beautiful and interesting. It’s not about a lack of talent, it’s that our collective imagination hasn’t caught up.”
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History has shown that even unlikely architectural styles such as Richard Rogers’ bowellism might win public support. Key examples of the modern style, characterised by mechanical systems like ducts, pipes and elevators on a building’s exterior, include the Lloyd’s Building in London and Paris’s Pompidou Centre, which was “generally thought of as awful but is now accepted as an oddity and appreciated by most”, says Lykoudis.
“A building can be loved for many reasons, not just an aesthetic one,” he adds, citing examples such as the Torre Velasca in Milan (which “opened with mixed reviews but now is a historical site that is being used as housing and mixed use”); and the Pirelli Building in New Haven, Connecticut, built by Marcel Breuer — a former office building for tyre manufacturing that has found new commercial value as an eco hotel. Whether it’s beauty, sentimentality or the sheer oddball factor that has preserved these buildings — it has achieved the same end proposed by the Building Beautiful movement: lasting value.
Perhaps, then, the question is less about who should decide what makes a building beautiful, or what that beauty constitutes, and more about respecting the decision-making process in a way that invites each of the stakeholders — public, architects and government alike — into the conversation.
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