The most important reason why historical towns produced beautiful architecture without design is vernacular architecture:
When Amalfi was built, everyone used local materials and styles out of practical necessity. If you were building a terraced farm and house, you had to use stone quarried nearby, volcanic ash mortar from the mountains, and local limestone plaster. There were no other options. Similarly, the architectural designs using those materials are kept uniform by greater ignorance of other styles and the physical properties of the few available materials.
Local conformity of style and material was enforced without laws or community meetings. Simultaneously, styles and materials varied greatly across communities. Local conformity was matched by a wonderful global diversity of styles.
Today, people have diverse tastes sourced from global media and more diverse buildings styles and materials available due to globalization. This inverts the historical pattern and creates local variety and global conformity. Within any city you will find dozens of clashing styles: colonial houses abut glass towers and fake-wood 5-over-1s. But across cities, variance is decreased and this same clash of styles is repeated over and over again.
It’s a crime and a shame that we’ve lost the local dimension to communities. I pray this isn’t permanent, who wants to live in a brutalist world? Hopefully, we’ll see a return to local styling.
There are whose study is of smells,
And to attentive schools rehearse
How something mixed with something else
Makes something worse.
…and speaking of smells: https://stonetoss.com/comic/the-swirl/
Speaking of smells and architecture, in 1960s Russian language was enriched by portmanteau of “Khruschev” and “slum”, thanks to yet another bright idea The Boar (qv Gaping Heights) picked at US South. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=???????&ia=web
It refers to low-rise apartment buildings that have combined toilet and bath, usually prefabricated, usually poor at dealing with weather North of Ukraine.
Maxwell Tabarrok:
But this raises questions. Starting with: how diverse those «tastes sourced from global media» are, again?
He also somehow missed conformity/conformity stage between conformity/variety and variety/conformity: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/