I sometimes wonder about this too. When you walk through European cities and look at the decoration of those old houses, they were all handcrafted. I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details. Same with all those old chairs, where some woodworker sculpted everything by hand. You can't imagine that right now anymore.
Is it because we throw away stuff after 5 years? Or because we just have way more stuff to produce? Because we don't work as hard? I have no idea.
> I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details.
On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.
> Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power.
I don't think that's it, at least for public buildings like churches, theaters, town halls, museums, and so on. After all, veto power doesn't prevent awful buildings like the Walkie Talkie building[1] from being built, as long as they conform to the bland, in vogue architectural tastes. It's the cult of postmodernism, stripping away visually interesting features, even though humans gravitate to older buildings despite the "form over function" blind cult thinking. This has dominated architecture for the past few decades. Many older buildings are simply built with many intricate visual details that are architectural heresy nowadays. As mentioned, there was a briliant article and HN discussion on this recent-ish, I just cannot dig it up.
EDIT: This is the article, "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture":
I have not looked up the numbers, but would guess wealth inequality is a big part of it. Those houses were built for people who were richer, and they had people working for them who were poorer, than is common nowadays in the west.
There isn't really a concept of civic pride any more. The Victorians - for all their many faults - did have a kind of local-scale pseudo-patriotism which motivated some very impressive buildings.
When modernism decided that decoration was superfluous and forbidden, it also did a lot of damage to the tradition of civic building.
Buildings were no longer designed to be aesthetic. If private, they were supposed to be utilitarian money factories put up by capital as cheaply as possible for the generation of more capital. Or they were supposed to fill a social need - again, as cheaply as possible.
A few architects, like Calatrava, produce public statement buildings, but they're often poorly regarded and not necessarily designed to wear well. (Calatrava has a very striking visual style but is notorious for poor build quality.)
Modern corporate HQs - like Amazon's and Apple's - half buck the trend, but only half. They're modernist statement buildings, but they're still motivated by a kind of minimalist corporate narcissism rather than pride.
The only buildings that don't fit the trend are some of the religious mega-projects. They're designed to be awe-inspiring and spectacular, and they often are.
So the real culprit is penny-pinching modernist utilitarianism - mostly capitalist, but not exclusively. If you removed that you could recreate a 21st century aesthetic of imaginative but robust civic architecture at all scales, with high quality materials and handcrafted detailing and decoration.
In a very literal sense the entire culture is run on an ethic of ever-narrowing acquisitive miserliness. This started to become a serious problem in the 80s, and it's been hugely dispiriting - not just for the arts but for civics in every respect.
Is it because we throw away stuff after 5 years? Or because we just have way more stuff to produce? Because we don't work as hard? I have no idea.