It's accelerated by globalism; a lot of people seem to want what is traditional to be something nice to look at but powerless (no need for participation), which results in things being stripped down, labeled and commodified.

There is no need to be sad. You have the ability to create and participate.

This is not really true, my 100 year old house in the UK is one of hundreds in my suburb/village. Each house is slightly different though, in terms of the layout. The fireplace is hardwood and has some columns on it that are handmade on a lathe, each side is slightly different. The doors are clearly handmade as they have slightly different features on each. This obviously doesn't happen anymore unless you are paying a massive premium. This required a much higher element of skill obviously, analogous to the difference between writing low level code and wiring library code together with a modern web framework, or even a low code saas product.

Just a note that this is true for "cathedrals" in the figurative sense as well as the literal sense that you seem to mean it - there are plenty of attractive historical buildings that weren't religious but still represented displays of prestige and power by governments or just individuals.

There's also heavy survivorship bias going on here. The Dickensian slums of London weren't worth preserving so were wiped away, whereas more impressive buildings were much more likely to be preserved. A naive assessment of historical buildings in London might be that the whole place was much more impressive than today, whereas it may be that, on average, the reverse is true.

>You are comparing cathedrals with regular living/working places.

The house i'm renovating was built by lower class people now dead. The fireplace has some marvelous emaile work. My grandparents on one side were factory workers (glass cutter and cigar roller specifically) and are still ridiculously frugal beyond belief due to their experiences in the world wars. Their living room has lovely cornishes, etc. Their fire places have art of goats and nature on em. The modern equivalent of that fireplace is a comparatively ridiculously expensive box with 0 ornamentation.

On the other hand the expensive new builts now go 2 ways with some harking back to old pastoral styles but with less detail and the other ones are cubic featureless boxes inspired by american flat roofed villas but without the wealth to take it much further.

I could go on and on about the death of detail in design and elsewhere and i know it's just annecdotes but it's to be found absolutely everywhere. Not just the cathedrals and major buildings of the state and the rich.

I remember one small town post office we frequented wasn’t much to look at outside—brick, but not fancy—but was gorgeous inside. Marble everywhere, including floors, brass everything including solid wood brass-clad exterior doors and fine, ornate brass PO Box doors, et c. Probably built at the tail end of the 19th century.

Just a sleepy little town post office, but they built it like it’d be there 300 years. I can’t imagine what those nice, serious-feeling doors alone would cost to get today. I know no small town post office would ever get them, that’s for sure.

All the ones near me now are much newer and are the same sort of disposable stripmall-type construction as everything else. They don’t feel nice to be in. They don’t feel serious. They will not be here in 100 years, probably not even 50.

Cathedrals? Bah, nonsense. Go into google street view and slap down a marker in any random town with buildings built a few decades ago on in the American east coast. Downtown in a random town, not in a modern suburb or commercial park. You'll see humble regular buildings, built for regular people to live or work in, with decorative trims and fancy brickwork.

Here's one I found in seconds: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2537582,-73.7922474,3a,30.7y...

Look at the brickwork around the windows on the house with the blue door. It's no cathedral, just some random building in a random small town nobody has ever heard of. The builders obviously cared to make it look nice anyway. If you go down the street you'll see many other buildings like that. Not all of them by any means, many of the others are plainer, more utilitarian, and many of those are obviously newer. But to say that "Regular living/working places are produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now." obviously isn't true. Some were built as cheap as possible then. Many are now. But many then were deliberately built to be nicer than was required.

> Regular living/working places are produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now.

Yeah, a trip to an open-air museum (we call such a place a "skansen" in Poland) will show you that for most of history, people lived in places that even homeless of today would scoff at. Right angles are a luxury.

The wheel has turned - now we are keeping 20-year olds in school who should instead be earning money and are saddling them with impossible student loans.

And half of the building contractors are Mexicans with even less rights than your worker with US passport.

Not necessarily. Impressive stone buildings in the Western Balkans were often built by people who were quite poor, except for what livestock they held. It helped that society was clan-based, so resources were pooled, and when these families had to build a house in a region of vendetta and invasion, for protection they chose stone that has held up well over time.

An interesting parallel might be those old Amish houses in the US built well through communal effort, even though the families might have been cash-poor.

There's certainly some truth to that, but even the comparatively wealthy people of today live in homes made using terrible materials and zero craftsmanship/artistry. They're still charging us as much as they can get away with, to the point where housing is increasingly considered unaffordable, but the quality of the work and the materials are total trash.

But we still watch things like the Qatar World Cup which was largely understood to have been constructive by modern day slaves. Was the quality of architecture more aesthetic there than in other competitions?

Love that site, so good and really captures what I don't like about modern housing