This piece is featured in Issue 25 of Works in Progress. Subscribe today to get Issue 26, and an issue every two months after, delivered straight to your home or workplace.
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.
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.
These preferences may seem obvious. Of course a traditional high street is more pleasant to walk down than a freeway with six lanes of traffic. But at the time, the level of consensus was surprising. The Metuchen survey was the first to show that people tend to have predictable, shared responses to different built environments, responses that are not purely a matter of individual taste. The research team used the results to make recommendations for streetscape improvements, facade renovations, and infill multi-family housing, and Metuchen later developed a design code on this basis.
The Metuchen survey was pioneering, but it had some obvious limitations. First, participants in public meetings are not a representative sample of the local population. Second, the images used in the survey did not offer a perfectly controlled comparison, making it difficult to know what exactly respondents were reacting to. Did people dislike the width of the street, the low ratio of building height to street width, the style of the facades, the absence of greenery, the presence of fast-moving cars, or something else? We cannot know based on their responses to any individual image, although the survey included enough images that robust patterns do start to emerge.
Britain’s cottage industry in architectural visual preference surveying took off in the late 1980s, beginning with a 1987 study by a Cambridge undergraduate called David Halpern, who later became a leading behavioral psychologist. Halpern showed volunteer students photographs of twelve people and twelve buildings, asking them to rate their attractiveness. Students on different programs had similar views on which faces were the most attractive. But when it came to buildings, architecture students held wildly different views from those in other disciplines. In fact, their preferences were often directly opposite.
Halpern’s study had obvious limitations: the sample was unrepresentative of the general population and small, and the images were imperfectly controlled. But it has become a minor classic, and studies have since been run in Canada in 2001, Britain in 2015, and Chile in 2019 with similar results, showing a wide divergence between professional and lay opinion when it comes to the visual appeal of different architectural styles.
The first properly sampled visual preference survey followed in 1998, run by the British Market Research Bureau for an industry group called the Popular Housing Forum. British respondents were presented with card sets showing newbuild houses of a given style. As before, the pictures were imperfectly controlled, although the use of multiple pictures in each group compensated for this to some extent. 94 percent of potential newbuild buyers said they would prefer to live in one of the more traditional options, and 92 percent of other respondents said they would prefer one of the more traditional options to be built near them.
In the following decades, several more visual preference surveys were commissioned by academic researchers, architecture firms, think tanks, and public bodies. Most of these studies were conducted by professional polling companies, so their respondents will have been largely representative of the general population. However, nearly all of them still used imperfectly controlled image pairs, meaning that it was hard to be sure that responses were caused by differences in architectural style rather than some other difference between the images. And the original images used in some older studies have been lost, making it hard to rest too much weight on them.
However, to the extent that their findings are reliable, they show that while a minority of the public enjoys boundary-pushing modern architecture, the majority prefer more traditional buildings. And different groups respond to architectural styles in reasonably consistent patterns: where demographic data have been collected, it seems there is a weak tendency for men and younger people to be more open to modernist architecture, compared with women and older people. As far as we can tell from these surveys, though, all demographic groups prefer traditional styles: the preference is simply more pronounced in some groups than others. This holds not only for houses but also for hospitals and commercial and civic buildings.
One of the best early visual preference surveys was commissioned by the British architectural practice ADAM Architecture in 2009. Four real commercial buildings were shown in matching perspectives and weather conditions, two in traditional styles, two in modernist ones. Both of the modernist buildings had won prizes, suggesting that they were especially well-designed examples. Even so, only 23 percent of respondents preferred them, compared to 77 percent for the two traditional designs. The images offer the best controlled comparators of any study before the 2020s, with matching perspectives and lighting conditions.
David Halpern’s finding that architecture students differ in their tastes from those in other majors was corroborated by later research. Portuguese researcher Luis Balula carried out a visual preference survey in the small city of Évora in 2008–2009. Balula broke down the results into experts (architects, planners, developers, academics) and non-experts. Both groups gave higher ratings to older buildings, but there was more divergence when it came to modern designs. For example, non-experts had a positive view of the pastiche Mediterranean group of homes pictured in figure 7, while the experts were generally negative. Inversely, the modernist apartment block was rated negatively by the non-experts, but positively by the experts.
Perhaps the difference between lay and expert taste explains why the public’s preference for traditional architecture has occasionally come as a surprise to researchers. Two visual preference surveys were commissioned in 2002 and 2005 by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), a British independent public body, and both found low levels of support for modern styles. ‘The Modern Movement’s concern for light and sun and large windows should give a modern style a clear advantage over more traditional designs, but this advantage does not seem to have been understood by home buyers’, the 2005 report regretfully notes.
The golden age of visual preference surveying
While the surveys carried out from the 1970s to the 2010s gave a fairly clear indication that the public consistently prefers traditional architecture, they are not perfect evidence. Imperfectly controlled comparisons and sometimes self-selecting panels mean that their findings can, and often have been, challenged.
In the past five years, however, the evidence has rapidly strengthened. Technological improvements, especially artificial intelligence, have cut the cost of image editing, allowing survey images to be far better controlled. And at the same time, renewed public debate about architecture has driven an increased quantity of visual preference surveys, often led by specialist research groups like Create Streets in Britain or The Aesthetic City in the Netherlands. Something of a golden age of visual preference surveying has emerged, with an increasing number of studies of unprecedentedly high quality.
Perhaps the most famous visual preference survey ever conducted was commissioned by the National Civic Art Society in 2020, looking at federal and courthouse buildings in the United States. It asked respondents for their preferences between seven pairs of photos of actual buildings, controlled so far as possible for massing (the form and volume of a building) and context. In every case, huge majorities of respondents preferred the traditional designs, averaging 72 percent across the seven questions.
As in other studies, most striking is how little the clear preference for traditional designs was affected by demographics. There was almost no correlation with political affiliation, with 70 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Republicans preferring the traditional designs. Women were somewhat more pro-traditional than men, at 77 percent against 67 percent. 75 percent of white Americans preferred traditional architecture against 65 percent of Hispanic Americans and 62 percent of black Americans. No significant correlation was found with income or educational level, and age was only a weak predictor: 77 percent of over 65s preferred traditional architecture against 68 percent of those aged 18–34.
Many modern visual preference surveys have been carried out in Britain. In 2023, disappointed by the utilitarian design proposal for a new rugby stadium in Bath, England, the small firm Apollodorus Architecture proposed a classical alternative. Create Streets then commissioned a polling company to survey public views on the two designs, holding context and rendering style constant between the image pairs. Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.
The same trend shows up in infrastructure. High Speed 2 (HS2) is a railway under construction between London and Birmingham. Create Streets ran a visual preference survey comparing HS2’s planned concrete viaducts with a brick-clad design emulating Britain’s ubiquitous railway viaducts from the nineteenth century. Again, they held context and rendering style constant, so that only building treatment varied between the images. The survey showed a clear preference for the red brick design, 69 versus 28 percent. These results varied only modestly along demographic lines: support for the brick viaduct was slightly higher among women than men (71 versus 66 percent). Anomalously, the survey also found that Labour voters were slightly more pro-traditional than Conservatives (72 against 69 percent) and younger people more than older people (70 percent for the youngest group against 64 percent for the oldest).
In 2025, Christ’s College Cambridge announced plans for a new library building designed by Grafton Architects, one of the world’s most prestigious architecture firms. Create Streets prepared a counterproposal with the same floor area, using the Gothic style traditionally favored by Cambridge colleges. In a survey of over 2,000 British adults, 71 percent preferred the traditional design, while just 21 percent favored the original proposal. As with the HS2 survey, this pattern held across all demographic groups with little variation.
This preference is seen time and again. The British retailer Marks and Spencer is planning to demolish a 1920s building in central London and replace it with a modern design. Working with the architect Francis Terry, Create Streets proposed an alternative scheme with the same overall floor area, but retaining and extending the existing facade. They then commissioned pollsters to survey 3,130 British adults on images of the two designs, holding the context and rendering style constant. This yielded the strongest difference in preference of any Create Streets study, with 79 percent supporting the alternative proposal, and only 17 percent the original. As usual, demographic breakdowns show little correlation between architectural taste and other characteristics. Londoners were a little more likely to favor Marks and Spencer’s proposal than the national average, but still favored the Terry scheme by 72 against 26 percent.
Create Streets recently ran a slightly different kind of poll on a major proposed development in London called Shoreditch Works. Shoreditch Works would involve the demolition of some postwar warehouses, which would be replaced with much larger office blocks in a style drawing on Victorian commercial architecture and Art Deco.
Most of the studies we have looked at aim to control for everything other than architectural style. In this comparison, however, the proposed buildings were drastically taller than the existing ones. The standard view is that the public dislikes high-rise development, meaning that this study could be seen as ‘biased against’ traditional architecture. But in each case, between 76 and 78 percent of respondents preferred the proposed scheme to the existing condition. And, again, support for the proposals was slightly stronger among younger than older respondents.
Continental Europeans appear to prefer traditional architecture by similar margins. In 2025, the Dutch group The Aesthetic City ran a visual preference survey on architectural preferences in the Netherlands. It asked respondents for their preferences between eight pairs of images, and showed a preference for traditional buildings among Dutch respondents ranging from 67 to 92 percent, with an average of 82 percent. The Dutch study is notable for showing how useful artificial intelligence is in visual preference surveying. In all but one image pair, they used a photograph of a modernist building and then used AI to create the traditional alternative. This allowed image pairs to be tightly controlled for context, weather, and massing.
Taking the measure of public taste
The main question of any visual preference survey on architectural style is whether it generalizes. Sceptics often argue that when the public prefers a particular traditional design over a modernist one, it is just because that particular modernist design is weak. A better modernist building, they claim, could have matched or surpassed the popularity of the traditional one. The suspicion of a loaded choice of images is heightened by the fact that most visual preference surveys have been commissioned by organizations sympathetic to traditional architecture, with only a handful of counterexamples like the early CABE studies.
Nevertheless, it is striking that every image pair surveyed so far has generated the same result. Visual preference surveying on architectural style is still in its infancy: perhaps only three dozen fully controlled image pairs have ever been polled on, and these high-quality studies have occurred only in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States. We will be able to draw conclusions with far more confidence in a decade, when we will have tripled or quadrupled the size of our evidence base.
For now, the provisional conclusion is that 70 to 90 percent of the population has a clear preference for traditional architecture. This preference is surprisingly unchanged by other demographic features. Men, younger people, and maybe richer people tend to be slightly more likely to favor modern architecture, but these trends are not marked. Every demographic group favors traditional design: men and women, old and young, rich and poor.
If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.
In other words, there seems to be a mysterious divergence between people’s stated and revealed preferences. Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike? There are several interesting possibilities. But investigating them will have to wait for the future.
Robert Kwolek is a senior architectural designer at Create Streets.
Interesting piece. Truth is though I find myself discerning between the higher quality traditionalist examples and the lower quality ones. Same too for modernist examples. A cheap building is a cheap building. The real psychological test is how does the building look and make you feel on an aimless, drizzly, overcast Sunday afternoon.