Why Don't Buildings Get Upgrades?
My phone is far better than the one I had fifteen years ago, and I expect the next one to be better still. That's how technology works: each version improves on the last. Buildings don't work like that.
In Buenos Aires, casas chorizo, long narrow houses built about a century ago with rooms lined up along a side patio, are still sought after, often more than the new apartments going up beside them. In Paris, the blocks built under Haussmann in the nineteenth century remain some of the most desirable addresses in the city. We know far more about materials, structure, and energy than the people who built them. So why don't buildings get upgrades?
Old buildings get upgraded all the time, of course: new wiring, new bathrooms, better windows. I mean the other kind of upgrade, the kind phones get, where a new version makes the old one obsolete.
My short answer is that architecture aims at a loose target. Technology improves because it has a stable target. Architecture is trying to house a good life, and we've never quite agreed on what that is.
I'm not saying old buildings were better. And I'm not arguing against technology, which has transformed architecture. The question is narrower: why hasn't all that progress added up to better buildings?
Image: Section of a Parisian house 1845 via Bibliothèque nationale de France. Image © ArchDaily
Possible explanations
There are some obvious explanations, and each is partly true.
The first is cost. Developers generally build as cheaply as the market allows, replacing well insulated brick walls with cheaper, faster-to-build drywall. But cost alone can’t explain it: the casa chorizo wasn't a palace. It was ordinary middle-class housing, built on ordinary budgets.
The second is regulation. Codes and zoning constrain what architects can do. But regulations mostly set minimums: fire exits, structural safety, room sizes. They explain why many new buildings look alike, and they may even prevent some bad buildings, but they don’t explain why good ones are rare.
The third is the strongest: survivorship bias. We only see the old buildings that survived. The bad ones were demolished, so we're comparing the best of the past with the average of the present. That's fair, and it's part of the answer. But it matters which old buildings we're talking about. The casa chorizo isn't a monument that survived because someone protected it. It's ordinary housing that survived in large numbers, because people kept finding it worth living in. And even granting the bias, it concedes the puzzle: if the past was mostly mediocre too, a century of technical progress still hasn't made the average new building clearly better than the average old one.
The fourth is taste. Maybe it's all subjective. But if architecture progressed like technology, taste wouldn't decide much. Nobody's preferences determine whether a vaccine works. The fact that taste matters so much in architecture is itself a clue.
Technology has changed architecture enormously, and in many ways architecture does improve. Buildings today are safer, warmer, more accessible, and cheaper to run than a century ago, and architects learn from each other's experiments, project after project.
Some of these changes altered how buildings are lived in, not just how they're built. The Haussmann block was designed with its social hierarchy stacked vertically: the wealthiest tenants on the second floor, with the grandest windows and balconies and fewer stairs to climb, and servants in small rooms under the roof. Then elevators arrived, and the order reversed. The top floors, with their light, views, and quiet, went from least to most desirable. The building didn't change shape. A technical invention rewrote its social logic.
But technical progress doesn't automatically become a better place to live. Air conditioning is part of why the same glass tower now stands in Dubai, Houston, and Singapore, whatever the climate outside. Technology simply gave architects more freedom; it opened up the possibility of disregarding their surroundings.
Music is similar. Recording technology has improved beyond recognition, from wax cylinders to unlimited digital tracks on any laptop. Nobody thinks songs got better as a result. The tools changed what music can sound like, not what makes it good.
So why doesn't architecture progress the way technology does? Because progress needs a fixed target. Medicine can improve because its goal, a healthy body with no disease or pain, stays roughly the same. A phone improves because what we want from it stays broadly the same while it gets faster.
The moving target
Architecture's target keeps moving, because the way people live keeps changing. The clearest example I know is the kitchen. In 1926, the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed what became known as the Frankfurt Kitchen for a large public housing program. It was a small, efficient room, laid out using studies of how long each task took, so that a woman working alone could cook with as little wasted movement as possible. It was a genuine advance, celebrated as progressive, and thousands were built. Today, many new apartments have the opposite: an open kitchen facing the living room, where cooking is social and shared. The Frankfurt Kitchen wasn't wrong. It was right for a life in which one woman cooked, alone, as work. When that life changed, the right kitchen changed with it.
This should make the casa chorizo obsolete. It was built for large families, with rooms opening one into the next, a layout that makes little sense for how most people live now. Yet people adapt it and prefer it. Why?
Because the target only moves at the surface. Underneath, it barely moves at all.
The fast layer and the slow layer
Think of a building as having two layers. The fast layer is how we live: how many bedrooms, where the kitchen goes, whether there's a home office. That's the moving target, and it changes every generation. The slow layer is tied to things that hardly change: our bodies, our senses, and the questions we bring to where we live. Light. Air. The height of a ceiling. The proportions of a room. A view. Materials that age well. The way a building meets the street, which decides whether we feel part of a neighborhood or sealed off from it. A room with good light felt good in 1900 and feels good now, because the person standing in it hasn't really changed.
This is where the story of progress breaks down. Technology is extraordinarily good at the fast layer. We're more efficient than ever at the mechanics of living: heating, cooling, cooking, communicating. But the slow questions, how to live well, how to be with other people, what makes a place feel like ours, we're answering in much the same way we were a century ago. We've become better at living without becoming noticeably better at knowing how to live.
The casa chorizo was generous in the slow layer and loose in the fast one. Its ceilings are high, its windows tall, and the patio brings light and air into every room. Its rooms weren't tailored to one way of life, so a room built as a bedroom can become a studio, a living room, or an office. It wasn't designed for us, but it left room for us.
Unmeasurable architecture
Part of the reason the slow layer gets neglected is that it's hard to measure. A 2.6-meter ceiling and a 4-meter ceiling count as the same floor area. The value of light or a patio doesn't appear in a sales brochure the way the number of bedrooms does. Whether architecture is closer to an art or a science is a debate that goes back centuries. In recent decades, however, it has tried hard to become more measurable. Instead of drawing a form directly, architects and engineers increasingly define rules and variables, such as the angle of the sun, the forces on a structure, or the flow of people through a space. They build models and let software simulate and test them to generate the building. Change an input and the design updates itself.
The appeal is understandable. A form that seems to emerge from data is easier to defend than one that seems to come from someone's preference. "This particular rotation of the tower will guarantee a certain number of hours of sun on the ground floor" is a much stronger argument in a meeting than "I think this room will feel better." I spent years working and researching in this world, and I don't think it's empty. Computation has produced remarkable buildings. But it hasn't removed judgment. Often it has just hidden it: there are an infinite number of decisions made in setting up the rules. There is nothing wrong with those choices being arbitrary; the mistake is presenting them as if they weren't, because a choice that looks like a calculation can no longer be argued with.
One of the most honest examples I know is O-14, a tower in Dubai designed by Reiser + Umemoto. Its structure is a concrete shell organized by a regular diagrid, both derived from structural engineering. The architects did not simply accept the system that engineering gave them. They deliberately pushed and perturbed it, varying the openings from large, multi-storey voids to dense fields of small ones. That changed the quality of light inside the building and broke up the uniformity of a typical office floor. On the exterior, the changing pattern of solid and void animated the otherwise repetitive diagrid and made the scale of the tower feel unstable, almost as though the facade were cascading downward. None of these effects was a by-product of the calculation. They were architectural intentions, developed through what the architects describe as a “dance” between engineer and architect. The engineering defined the system; the architects pushed that system toward effects they wanted people to see and feel.
That distinction matters. The engineering system can tell us what a building can do, and computation can make the relationships within it increasingly precise. But it cannot tell us which effects are worth pursuing. As Reiser + Umemoto put it: "engineers strive for a livable world, while architects strive for a world worth living in."
That's the slow layer in one sentence. A livable world can be measured, and it does get upgrades. A world worth living in has to be judged, and not every architect admits that the judgment is theirs.
Subjective judgment isn't the same thing as arbitrary preference. Aesthetic judgment can be cultivated, argued about, and developed through experience, even though it can't be reduced to a formula. The recurring preference for light, generous proportions, or a patio suggests that some architectural judgments survive changes in fashion. It comes from experience rather than measurement.
Image: O-14 Tower concrete exoskeleton engineering. Source: Reiser, J. and Umemoto, N. (2019) Projects and their consequences. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Learning from art
The question is how to train it. Software is built to measure, and, in my experience, architecture increasingly justifies decisions with diagrams. Judgment needs a different kind of practice, one where the data can't decide for you. For me, that practice has been art.
When I paint, there is no model to run. I decide where a line ends, how much of the surface stays empty, when a color is enough. I can break my own rules. Working with a pen plotter taught me the same thing from the other side. The machine draws exactly what I tell it, so every quality in the drawing comes back to a choice I made.
Art doesn't have the answers architecture is missing, and it isn't trying to. But it is the field where people spend their whole lives exercising the judgment the slow layer requires, and doing it in the open. James Turrell has spent decades working with little more than light, which is what the patio of a casa chorizo gives every room. Richard Serra's sculptures are studies of weight, scale, and how a body moves through space, which is what a four-meter ceiling does to the person standing under it. Both work on the slow layer with everything else stripped away.
Art criticism offers something else architecture rarely practices: centuries of people disagreeing seriously about things that can't be proved. So spend time with art: look at it, read about it, make some!
Technology will keep upgrading what buildings can do. That part has a clear target. Whether a building is worth living in aims at a target we've never pinned down, because it is our own idea of a good life. It has no upgrade path. It only gets better when someone learns to see it.
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