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In the twentieth century, a radical change took place in global architecture. The modernist movement emerged in the 1920s, favoring unornamented designs, exposed modern materials like steel and concrete, and the abandonment of the complicated visual patterns of traditional planning and facade design. Modernism came to dominate global architecture by the 1950s, and although it has evolved and fragmented since then, styles of broadly modernist character remain dominant today.
Throughout its history, both supporters and detractors of modernist architecture have agreed that it is not widely liked. In 1940, the English architectural historian John Summerson remarked that the public ‘can’t understand it, never will, and hates it like poison’. In 1977, the German-American architectural critic Wolf von Eckardt prematurely announced the death of modernism, claiming that ‘No one mourned. It was never popular.’ The young Summerson was sympathetic to modernism while von Eckardt disliked it, but they made the same observation about its standing with the general public.
Were Summerson and von Eckardt right? In recent years, researchers have begun to study this more systematically using visual preference surveys. In their simplest form, these are just a comparison of two images alongside a neutral, unbiased question, like ‘Which do you prefer?’ Online panels and better image editing have brought down their cost in recent decades. Since the 1990s, around twenty properly sampled visual preference surveys have been run on popular architectural preferences.
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Many are British, partly because the King’s championship of traditional urbanism has generated a particularly lively debate about architecture in Britain. However, visual preference surveys have also been run in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal and Chile, and enthusiasm for visual preference surveying is rising internationally.
Early visual preference surveys were often methodologically primitive. A common limitation was that they surveyed responses to images that varied in many respects, such as the angle of the photograph or the weather, making it impossible to claim that architectural style alone had caused any difference in ratings. Over time, however, much has been done to mitigate this, with progressively better editing techniques being used to create more controlled image pairs. In the past few years, artificial intelligence has greatly reduced the time and costs of producing comparable images, making reliable large-scale visual preference surveys far more feasible.
In every survey conducted, over 60 percent of the respondents have favored traditional architecture, with many revealing over 85 percent support. This preference is surprisingly unaffected by age, gender, politics, socioeconomic class and nationality. The results are not definitive, but they suggest that there is substantial public discontent with the dominant trends in modern architecture. Perhaps the anecdotal impressions of Summerson and von Eckardt were not so far off after all.
The birth of visual preference surveying
The story of visual preference surveying begins in 1979, in the small town of Metuchen, New Jersey. Metuchen decided that it wanted data on local opinion to guide its design policies, and so it commissioned a study from the Rutgers University Urban Design Studio. The Rutgers team took hundreds of photographs of streets and buildings in Metuchen, and asked locals to rate them at a large public meeting. Metuchen residents overwhelmingly preferred streetscapes with a traditional, small-town feel, detailed and varied facades, and a walkable, human scale. They disliked blank, featureless buildings, and wide, car-dominated streets.
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