The Best Buildings Are Good Neighbors

The northern half of Chicago's Monadnock Building is seventeen stories of brick, almost entirely without ornament. Completed in 1891, its walls rise from a gently curving base, with projecting windows arranged in long vertical rows. From a distance, the building appears remarkably simple. Up close, the weight of the masonry, the depth of the openings, and the slight curvature of its surfaces reveal an extraordinary degree of care.

It was a commercial building, developed to provide rentable office space in a rapidly growing city. Its architects, Burnham & Root, worked within the practical and financial constraints of speculative development. Yet the result remains one of Chicago's most compelling pieces of architecture, a building whose presence extends well beyond the people who work inside it.

The Monadnock presents a useful contradiction. A building can be conceived as a financial investment and still make an enduring contribution to the city. Some of the most anonymous buildings now occupying urban streets were created under similarly commercial circumstances, but offer little comparable pleasure.

They stand along shopping streets, occupy former industrial sites, and fill gaps between older structures. Some are enormous, others modest. Their materials and proportions vary, but many share an extraordinary capacity to disappear from memory. It is possible to walk past one every morning for years and struggle to describe it.

British designer Thomas Heatherwick has made this architectural monotony the subject of a campaign. Through Humanise, established in 2023, he argues that buildings should offer visual interest and emotional engagement to the people who encounter them, whether or not they ever go inside.

In a September 2026 interview with Monocle, Heatherwick compared bland architecture to ultra-processed food. Both emerge from sophisticated systems designed for efficiency, consistency, and commercial performance. Both can fulfill their immediate purpose while leaving something important out.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, particularly when Heatherwick suggests that monotonous architecture may affect human health. But his campaign raises a question that reaches beyond architectural taste. Buildings are among the largest, most expensive, and longest-lasting products of human design. Their consequences extend far beyond the people who pay for them.

WHEN BUILDINGS BECAME ASSETS

The relationship between architecture and money has always been intimate. Cathedrals proclaimed institutional wealth, palaces demonstrated political power, and merchants commissioned buildings that expressed their commercial standing. Even the most admired works of architecture were shaped by budgets, patrons, and the economics of construction.

What changed with the growth of the modern city was the scale and organization of property development. Buildings increasingly became investments designed to accommodate occupants who were neither their owners nor their financiers.

Chicago provides an early example. Following the Great Fire of 1871, developers and architects worked together to accommodate the city's expanding commercial economy. Advances in elevators, steel framing, fireproofing, and mechanical systems made taller office buildings possible. A developer could construct a building for numerous tenants, with rental income supporting the investment.

The resulting architecture was often extraordinary. The Rookery, the Marquette Building, and the Monadnock emerged from the commercial development of the Loop, yet each acquired a distinctive character. They demonstrate that financial ambition and architectural quality have never been mutually exclusive.

During the twentieth century, the financial machinery surrounding buildings grew increasingly sophisticated. Property could be held through corporations, financed through complex arrangements, traded through investment vehicles, and evaluated according to projected income and returns. Ownership became more easily separated from occupation, allowing investment decisions to be made far from the buildings themselves.

Architect and scholar Matthew Soules has examined this process in a report for the Royal Institute of British Architects. He argues that the financialization of property has encouraged forms of architecture that can be readily divided, valued, exchanged, and managed as assets.

Standardized floor plans, familiar construction systems, and predictable operating costs can make property easier to compare with competing investments. Large residential developments may be designed around repeated units, while commercial buildings accommodate the requirements of multiple possible tenants.

These tendencies can encourage visual uniformity, although the relationship is far from inevitable. Standardization has also produced excellent buildings, reduced construction costs, and helped accommodate growing urban populations. Financial constraints can inspire architectural ingenuity as readily as they can discourage it.

The more consequential issue is how those constraints shape the decisions that architects and developers are able to defend.

The rent from an additional apartment can be estimated. The cost of replacing brick with a less expensive cladding system can be calculated. A lender can examine occupancy projections and determine whether a development meets its requirements.

The benefit of a thoughtful entrance, a carefully composed façade, or a ground floor that makes walking more enjoyable is less easily expressed in financial terms.

Some of that value returns to the owner through higher rents, stronger demand, or a more desirable address. Other benefits are enjoyed by people who may never enter the building, and whose appreciation produces no obvious entry in its financial accounts.

The property industry has become extraordinarily proficient at assigning value to space. It has fewer methods for valuing the experience of the people outside it.

THE STREET BELONGS TO EVERYONE

In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her influential account of how streets and neighborhoods function. She challenged a planning culture that often treated cities as arrangements of traffic routes, housing blocks, and separated uses.

Jacobs saw something more intricate. A successful neighborhood depended on the activity generated by shops, homes, sidewalks, and the people who moved between them. A grocery store, a front stoop, or a short walk to another street might seem unimportant individually. Together, these elements produced the social life of the city.

Danish architect Jan Gehl pursued related questions in Life Between Buildings, published in 1971. He studied how people responded to the dimensions and arrangements of urban spaces, paying attention to walking distances, places to sit, shelter, and the relationship between buildings and sidewalks.

His work helped shift attention from the building as an isolated composition to the experience of moving around it. A handsome tower could be a disappointing neighbor if its ground floor consisted of blank walls and service entrances. A modest row of shops might contribute far more to street life through windows, doorways, and a succession of reasons to stop.

French architect Nicolas Soulier later examined the spaces between buildings and streets in Reconquérir les rues. Gardens, steps, entrances, thresholds, and small planted areas allow private buildings to participate in public life. Their cumulative effect gives a street much of its character.

Heatherwick approaches the same question through what he calls door distance, the close-range experience of materials, textures, details, and entrances. He argues that architects have become preoccupied with how buildings appear from a distance or in the carefully composed images used to promote them.

Architectural renderings show pristine façades under favorable light, surrounded by attractive pedestrians and conveniently mature trees. The actual experience is less composed. People encounter buildings while carrying groceries, hurrying to work, or waiting for a bus. They see them in rain and darkness, from awkward angles, and at distances of only a few feet.

A building can be striking from across a plaza while offering remarkably little at street level. Its most revealing elevation may be the one that never appears in the promotional material.

Heatherwick has also sought scientific evidence for his argument. In a 2025 essay for WIRED, he described research using physiological measurements to investigate how people respond to architecture.

Environmental psychologist Colin Ellard, professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, has studied how physical environments influence attention, perception, and behavior. In a 2025 research preprint, Ellard and researcher Jatheesh Srikantharajah reported findings from field studies involving 97 participants in London and Toronto.

Participants stopped in front of buildings with different levels of visual complexity while researchers recorded their impressions and measured skin conductance, an indicator of physiological arousal.

Buildings with relatively simple façades were generally considered less attractive and more boring. Participants also showed declining physiological arousal during exposure to less visually complex buildings, compared with more complicated façades.

The findings are intriguing, but their implications require care. Physiological arousal does not directly measure happiness, and a person's response to a façade cannot be translated into a long-term health outcome. The research remains preliminary, and it does not establish that boring buildings cause illness.

A compelling case for better architecture does not depend on a medical diagnosis. People spend considerable portions of their lives in environments they did not choose and cannot readily change. Their experience ought to count.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF AMBITION

In Bordeaux, three long social housing blocks stand in the Grand Parc district, northwest of the city's historic center. Built during the postwar decades, they belonged to an architectural tradition that favored repetition, industrialized construction, and the efficient provision of housing.

Their façades presented the familiar appearance of large modernist housing estates: rows of relatively small windows, repeated balconies, and an imposing scale.

By the early 2010s, the buildings needed substantial renovation. Following consideration of their future, the public housing operator Aquitanis commissioned a transformation of the three blocks, containing 530 apartments.

The architects were Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, working with Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin. Their proposal began with a recognition that the buildings retained valuable structures and space, even though the apartments needed improvement.

They examined what residents were missing. The answer included more room, more daylight, better views, and greater freedom to use the apartments in different ways.

A new structural layer was constructed along the outside of the buildings. Prefabricated concrete elements formed the floors and supports for winter gardens and balconies, extending the apartments outward by up to 3.8 meters. Small windows were replaced with large glazed sliding doors, opening into semi-outdoor rooms protected by glass and polycarbonate enclosures.

The transformation was substantial. Many apartments gained around 30 square meters of additional space, allowing residents to accommodate dining tables, seating, plants, and activities that had previously been difficult to fit inside.

The winter gardens also changed the relationship between the apartments and the outdoors. Where residents had once looked through comparatively small windows, they could now open large doors toward expansive views. Space that had previously ended at an exterior wall became a flexible extension of the home.

The buildings' appearance changed accordingly. Repetitive façades acquired a new layer of depth, transparency, and movement. Curtains, furniture, plants, and the different ways residents occupied their winter gardens introduced variation to the elevations.

The work took place while residents remained in their homes. Prefabrication and careful scheduling limited intensive construction work inside individual apartments, while improvements were made to bathrooms, services, access, and the surrounding grounds.

The economics were striking. Project documentation reports €27.2 million, excluding tax, for rehabilitation, while a European Commission account describes a wider €35 million renovation budget. The figures represent different reporting scopes, but both indicate the scale of the investment in retaining and improving existing homes.

Completed in 2017, the project received the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the Mies van der Rohe Award, in 2019.

The transformation preserved 530 apartments while substantially improving their comfort and usable space. Its success lay in recognizing possibilities within buildings that might otherwise have been regarded as obsolete.

The architectural expression followed the improvement in domestic life. The new façades remain composed largely of repeated structural elements and transparent panels. Residents supply much of their variation simply by living there.

There is something quietly radical about this arrangement. In an industry where architectural quality is often associated with unusual forms and expensive finishes, Grand Parc demonstrates how a significant improvement in everyday life can result from a straightforward decision about space.

Its significance to the wider city is related, although distinct. Residents received the project's most direct benefits: larger apartments, better views, and improved living conditions. The public benefits include the preservation of a substantial housing resource, the continued use of existing structures, and the avoidance of displacement during renovation.

The project also changed the appearance of the surrounding neighborhood, but there is little reason to assume that this visual improvement was its greatest achievement. Grand Parc is a lesson in architectural generosity toward occupants, with broader benefits that extend through the preservation and continued usefulness of the buildings.

It expands the definition of architectural quality beyond the appearance of the façade.

THE PRICE OF MAKING THINGS BETTER

There is a serious objection to the argument for more characterful architecture, particularly in cities struggling to build enough housing.

Design requirements cost money. More expensive materials increase construction budgets. Elaborate planning reviews can delay projects, creating financing costs that eventually affect rents or sale prices. Demands for architectural harmony can also become a convenient way to oppose new housing.

The consequences of delays are measurable. In a 2026 study published in the Journal of Urban Economics, researchers Stuart Gabriel and Edward Kung examined multifamily housing development in Los Angeles between 2010 and 2022.

They estimated that reducing approval times by 25 percent would have increased the rate of housing production by 12.7 percent through earlier completion of projects already underway. The estimated effect was greater when accounting for the possibility that faster approvals would encourage additional development.

The study examined regulatory approvals broadly rather than aesthetic design review specifically. It nevertheless demonstrates the importance of time in the production of housing.

A city that insists on expensive façades while making it difficult to construct apartments may end up with handsome buildings and too few homes.

The difficulty with some arguments for better-looking architecture is that they treat visual character as a public benefit without accounting for the costs of producing it. A carved stone façade costs more than a simple wall assembly. A complicated building envelope can be more difficult to maintain. Detailed aesthetic approval processes may introduce uncertainty into development schedules.

Public taste presents another difficulty. Residents may object to new buildings because they dislike their appearance, but aesthetic arguments can also conceal a more fundamental resistance to change.

The public value of architecture includes accommodating growth. A building that provides urgently needed homes makes a meaningful contribution to its city, even if its exterior is unremarkable.

Grand Parc offers a different perspective on architectural ambition. Its designers established what residents needed, identified the qualities worth retaining, and directed investment toward improvements that made their homes more generous and adaptable.

That approach required careful design and substantial public funding. Its economics cannot simply be transferred to new developments in other cities, but the project demonstrates the value of judging architecture through what it allows people to do.

A useful building, a durable building, and a beautiful building may represent different kinds of achievement. The most successful examples bring these qualities together, although the demands of affordability, construction, and urban growth will always require choices.

The question is how to make those choices without disregarding the people who will live with their consequences.

WHAT THE CITY RECEIVES

Economists use the term externality to describe a cost or benefit experienced by someone who is not directly involved in a transaction.

A factory may impose pollution on nearby residents. A well-maintained garden may provide pleasure to people who neither own nor pay for it. The benefits and burdens extend beyond the original exchange.

Architecture produces externalities constantly.

A building can make a sidewalk more comfortable through shade, shelter, and active ground-floor spaces. A thoughtful entrance can make a street more inviting. Durable materials and carefully composed façades can provide enjoyment to passersby who have no financial interest in the property.

The same building can diminish its surroundings through blank walls, poorly positioned service entrances, or an inhospitable relationship with the sidewalk. The people affected may never enter it, yet they encounter its consequences every day.

These effects accumulate across streets and neighborhoods. A single unremarkable façade may matter little. Hundreds of them can produce an environment that feels monotonous and impersonal. Conversely, the pleasure of an appealing street often comes from modest contributions made by individual buildings over many decades.

Private ownership offers an imperfect way of accounting for these experiences. A landlord can collect rent from a desirable apartment, but cannot easily charge the people who enjoy walking past its building. The public receives some of architecture's benefits without paying for them directly, just as it endures some of its costs without compensation.

Cities already recognize this relationship through planning and building regulations that govern how private development affects the surrounding environment. The appearance of buildings is more difficult to address. Beauty is contested, tastes change, and prescriptive rules can produce their own forms of monotony or become obstacles to necessary development.

The challenge is to take the public experience of architecture seriously without turning aesthetic preference into a barrier to building.

Heatherwick's campaign has helped bring attention to an aspect of architectural performance that is easy to overlook. Its most useful consequence may be a broader understanding of who buildings are designed to serve.

That understanding might result in more engaging façades, better ground floors, or entrances that contribute to the street. It might encourage architects to preserve an adaptable building rather than replace it. Sometimes the greatest public contribution will be the efficient provision of more homes.

The Monadnock and Grand Parc reveal different expressions of the same principle. One is a commercial building whose carefully considered exterior has enriched a Chicago street for more than a century. The other is a social housing transformation that improved everyday life for hundreds of households while preserving a substantial piece of the city.

Both remind us that architectural value extends beyond the immediate financial transaction, although its beneficiaries and forms vary from project to project.

A building can satisfy every requirement placed upon it and still leave its surroundings poorer. Equally, an ordinary structure, thoughtfully arranged and well made, can enrich a street for generations. Neither outcome is fully captured in the calculations that determine what gets built.

The city inherits the result long after the original developer has moved on. Its residents encounter the building in every season, under changing light, and through the routines of ordinary life. They have little choice in the matter.

A building belongs to its owner. Its presence belongs to the city.

FURTHER READING

• Thomas HeatherwickHumanise: A Maker's Guide to Building Our World (2023). An argument for restoring emotional engagement and character to contemporary architecture.
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). A foundational account of how ordinary buildings, streets, businessesand residents contribute to urban life.
• Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings (1971). A study of how the arrangement of buildings and public spaces shapes movement, social activityand the experience of cities.
• Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life (2015). An exploration of how physical environments influence perception, emotionand behavior.
• Matthew Soules, Financialisation: Buildings and Architecture at the Centre of Global Financial Systems (2024). An examination of the relationship between financial markets, property ownershipand architectural form. Published by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
• European Commission, Bordeaux: A New Life for 530 Homes. An account of the Grand Parc transformation, its design strategy, financingand impact on residents.
• Stuart Gabriel and Edward KungDevelopment Approval Times and New Housing Supply: Evidence from Los Angeles (2026). Research published in the Journal of Urban Economics examining the effect of regulatory approval delays on multifamily housing production.
• Jatheesh Srikantharajah and Colin EllardThe Physiological and Psychological Impact of Boring Buildings (2025). A research preprint examining responses to architectural façade complexity.