Почему мы больше не строим красивые здания?

North America didn’t become ugly by accident. It became incredibly efficient. As a result, small businesses are dying and franchises are taking over. And across much of the modern world, places thousands of miles apart are beginning to look strangely alike. We made cities cheaper to build, easier to navigate and more efficient to live in. Supermarkets replaced the butcher, baker and fishmonger. Cars gave us extraordinary freedom. Standardisation helped house millions. These were real achievements. But every gain came with a trade-off. The piazza became a car park. The family shop became a franchise. Skilled craftsmanship became prohibitively expensive. Buildings became easier to reproduce almost anywhere — and places gradually became harder to distinguish from one another. Perhaps the problem is not that we stopped caring about beauty. It is that modern society became exceptionally good at valuing what can be measured — cost, speed, productivity, floor space, traffic flow — while struggling to account for what cannot: beauty, belonging, continuity, attachment and a sense of place. This film explores why old Italian towns feel so different, why modernism emerged in the first place, what supermarkets and cars have to do with architecture, and why the economics of modern development so often favour the generic over the particular. So perhaps the real question is not simply why North America, and so much of the modern world, became uglier. It is whether a civilisation increasingly organised around the short term can still build anything worth inheriting. ————————————————————————————————————————————————— For Business Inquiries: madebyfocal@gmail.com ————————————————————————————————————————————————— For Mosaic Purchases: If you are interested in purchasing one of Luciano Di Corinto’s mosaics, commissioning a piece, or contacting him about his work, you can reach him directly at: Luciano Di Corinto Larghetto dei Gradoni 6/7 66034 Lanciano (CH), Italy Email: luciano.dicorinto@virgilio.it ————————————————————————————————————————————————— 00:00 — Why Is the Modern World So Ugly? 01:41 — We Can’t Afford to Build Like This Anymore 04:04 — Why Old Towns Feel More Human 05:15 — What Did We Used to Build For? 06:18 — The Car Changed the City Forever 07:18 — Why We Chose Efficiency Over Beauty 08:55 — The Things We Forgot How to Measure 09:53 — The Hidden Cost of Convenience 12:26 — Would Anyone Preserve What We Build Today?