Hannah sent us something this week — she's an architect and she's been diving deep into the traditional architecture movement. She's noticed this grassroots push, especially in the Netherlands, where regular people are saying, we want a say in what our cities look like. The problem is, architecture as a profession is pretty dogmatic about what's acceptable, and traditional design isn't really taught. But she's also not sold on the classical orthodoxy either — she wants to find the middle ground. The practical question she's stuck on is this: when you sit down with a developer and they say traditional design is too expensive, what evidence do you actually have to prove them wrong? She knows conceptually the cost argument doesn't hold up, but she needs the ammunition to sway contractors and developers who only speak one language — the bottom line.
This is the exact conversation that's been simmering in the profession for about five years now, and it's finally boiling over. The architectural civil war between modernism and traditionalism has this surprising battleground — it's not the design review board or the architecture school crit room. It's the developer's spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet, it turns out, might not say what everyone assumes it says.
The spreadsheet as battlefield. There's something deeply satisfying about that.
It really is. And the timing on this question is perfect, because we're seeing municipal design codes actually start to shift. In the Netherlands, where this whole lay-led movement started, you had this major policy change in twenty twenty-three — the Bouwcultuur policy. More than forty municipalities now require aesthetic committees that include non-architects. Regular citizens get a vote on what buildings look like in their neighborhoods.
Which is probably terrifying to a lot of architects.
But it also means architects who can deliver traditional design are suddenly the low-risk option. And that's the thing I want to dig into — this isn't an aesthetic argument anymore. It's a regulatory survival strategy.
Let's frame the actual conflict here. You've got architects trained in a modernist orthodoxy — they learned that traditional design is pastiche, it's inauthentic, it's not what serious architects do. And then you've got this lay-led traditionalist backlash that has real political teeth. But both camps are dogmatic in their own way. Hannah's point about the classical people being incredibly orthodox — she's right. Some of them would rather you use authentic Georgian brick bonds or don't bother.
Meanwhile the developer sitting across the table doesn't care about any of that. They care about cost per square foot, speed to market, and whether they can lease the thing when it's done. So the architect is caught between two ideological camps, and the only person who can actually greenlight the project speaks a completely different language.
Which brings us to the central question. Can you prove that traditional design is cost-competitive? And if you can, how do you weaponize that evidence in a developer meeting without sounding like you're making an emotional appeal?
Let's start by busting the core myth, because it's the first thing any developer is going to throw at you. Traditional architecture is more expensive. Everyone knows this. It's just common sense, right? All those stone details and cornices and brick patterns — that's custom work. Modernist buildings are clean, efficient, rational.
The problem with common sense is it's often wrong and rarely checked.
This one is spectacularly wrong when you actually look at the line items. Let me walk through a real comparison. Take a typical six-story mixed-use building — ground floor retail, five floors of residential above. You've got two versions: the modernist one with a curtain wall system and lots of glazing, and a traditional one with punched windows in a brick facade.
Punched windows meaning individual windows set into a solid wall, rather than a continuous glass skin.
Now, the twenty twenty-four RICS Cost Study on Placemaking and Traditional Detailing — RICS is the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, this is the gold standard for construction cost data — they found something fascinating. Traditional facades do carry a cost premium. But it's only two to four percent.
Two to four percent. That's not nothing, but it's not the dealbreaker developers assume it is.
But here's where it gets interesting. That same study found a twelve to eighteen percent reduction in MEP complexity — that's mechanical, electrical, plumbing — for traditional buildings. Because traditional floor plates with smaller, regularly spaced windows allow for passive ventilation strategies. You're not fighting solar gain through floor-to-ceiling glass. Your HVAC system doesn't have to be a beast.
The facade costs a little more, but the mechanical systems cost a lot less. Net net, you might actually come out ahead.
We haven't even gotten to the glazing itself. This is where the numbers get almost embarrassing for the modernist default. The Davis Langdon twenty twenty-three Cost Model — Davis Langdon is one of the biggest quantity surveying firms in the world — they broke down facade costs. Modern buildings typically spend twenty-five to thirty percent of their facade budget on curtain wall systems. Traditional punched windows with brick surrounds? Forty to sixty percent less per square meter of facade.
Forty to sixty percent less. That's not a rounding error.
It's enormous. And think about what a curtain wall actually is. It's a custom-engineered aluminum and glass system. Every mullion, every gasket, every thermal break is a manufactured component. It has to be fabricated to precise tolerances, shipped to site, installed by specialized crews. A brick wall with a window in it — the brick is a commodity product, the window is probably off-the-shelf, and the labor is standard masonry and carpentry.
We're paying a premium for the privilege of making our buildings look like corporate office parks. That's the glockenspiel of architectural decision-making right there — it sounds sophisticated but nobody actually asked for it.
Let's talk about structure, because this is another place where the modernist assumption falls apart. In a mid-rise building — up to about seven stories — you have a choice. You can do a steel frame with moment connections, which is what most modernist buildings use because they need those big open spans for the glass walls. Or you can do load-bearing masonry or brick veneer on CMU.
CMU being concrete masonry units — basically cinder blocks.
The twenty twenty-two AISC study — that's the American Institute of Steel Construction — they published cost data showing steel framing adds eighteen to twenty-five dollars per square foot for five to seven story buildings. Load-bearing masonry comes in at twelve to sixteen dollars per square foot.
You're saving somewhere between six and nine dollars a square foot just on the structure. On a fifty-thousand-square-foot building, that's... three hundred to four hundred fifty thousand dollars.
That's before we even talk about what happens over the life of the building. Traditional masonry buildings have a hundred-plus-year service life. Curtain wall modern buildings? Fifty to sixty years before major envelope replacement.
You're building something that lasts twice as long for less money upfront. This is starting to sound less like a cost argument and more like a failure of basic arithmetic in the profession.
I haven't even mentioned the hidden costs of modernism that developers pay year after year. Curtain wall sealants need replacement every fifteen to twenty years. That's a major scaffolding job, removing old sealant, reinstalling. On a six-story building, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars each cycle. A brick wall with punched windows? You repoint the brick every fifty to seventy-five years if you need to. The windows might need replacing after thirty or forty years. But there's no sealant maintenance cycle.
The gift that keeps on taking.
Then there's the energy performance. Smaller glazing areas mean thirty to forty percent lower cooling loads. That's not a marginal improvement — that's a completely different HVAC specification. Smaller equipment, less ductwork, lower energy bills for the life of the building. If you're a developer who's going to hold the asset, that operating cost difference compounds. If you're building to sell, the cap rate calculation changes because the net operating income is higher.
We've established that the cost argument against traditional design doesn't hold up under scrutiny. But knowing the numbers is only half the battle — you have to know how to present them. Let's talk about the developer's real decision-making framework.
This is the crucial pivot. Developers don't just build buildings — they build investments. Their calculus isn't construction cost. It's construction cost plus time to market plus leasing velocity plus exit cap rate minus risk. And on every one of those variables beyond the initial build cost, traditional design outperforms.
Walk me through leasing velocity. I've heard this claim before — that traditional buildings lease faster because people like them more — but is there actual data?
The twenty twenty-five JLL survey — JLL is Jones Lang LaSalle, one of the big three commercial real estate firms globally — they surveyed two hundred institutional investors. Traditional buildings lease fifteen to twenty percent faster in residential and retail. The investors themselves reported this. These are the people writing the checks.
Fifteen to twenty percent faster. Translate that into months.
If a typical new residential building takes twelve months to reach ninety percent occupancy, a comparable traditional building is doing it in nine to ten months. That's two to three months of additional rental income across a hundred-plus units. At two thousand dollars a month per unit, on a hundred-unit building, that's four to six hundred thousand dollars in accelerated revenue. That pays for a lot of brick detailing.
The flip side — what's the cost of an empty unit sitting there for an extra three months?
Not just lost rent. You're still paying property taxes, still paying common area maintenance, still paying the construction loan interest. Every month of vacancy is a direct hit to the project IRR. Developers live and die by IRR.
We've got construction cost parity or advantage, lower operating costs, faster lease-up. What about the construction process itself? I've heard the argument that traditional buildings are actually simpler to build because the details are standardized.
The twenty twenty-four Lean Construction Institute study is the one to cite here. They found that projects using standardized traditional details had twenty-two percent fewer change orders than modernist projects with custom facade systems.
Twenty-two percent fewer change orders. For anyone who hasn't been through a construction project, change orders are where budgets go to die.
They're the single biggest source of cost overruns and schedule delays. And the reason is intuitively obvious once you think about it. A modernist building with a custom curtain wall — every project is a prototype. The mullion spacing, the glass specification, the attachment details — they're all designed from scratch for that specific building. Something doesn't work in the field, you're issuing a change order, the contractor is submitting a price, everyone's arguing about who pays.
Whereas a brick wall with a punched window — we've been building those for about four hundred years.
The details are baked. The construction sequence is known. The subcontractors have done it a hundred times. There's no learning curve, no field engineering, no surprises. The Lean Construction Institute finding is basically quantifying what every experienced contractor already knows: boring is fast. Boring is predictable. Boring makes money.
Boring is beautiful, if you're the one signing the construction loan.
That's exactly the argument you make to a developer. I'm not selling you nostalgia. I'm selling you schedule certainty.
Let me pull on another thread here. I've heard that traditional buildings have lower defect claims, but I don't know if that's real or just folk wisdom.
It's very real, and it's quantified. The twenty twenty-three Zurich Insurance report — Zurich is one of the largest construction insurers in the world — they analyzed claims data across thousands of buildings. Buildings with traditional pitched roofs and masonry facades had forty percent fewer water intrusion claims in the first ten years compared to buildings with flat roofs and curtain wall systems.
Forty percent fewer. Water intrusion is basically the number one source of construction defect litigation.
It's the gift that keeps on giving for lawyers, and the nightmare that keeps on taking for developers. Flat roofs pond water. Curtain walls leak at the joints. These aren't design flaws — they're inherent to the building systems. And insurers have noticed. Developers who build traditional can negotiate lower premiums — roughly half a percent to one percent reduction in total project cost.
Which on a thirty-million-dollar project is a hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars. Not life-changing, but it's real money that drops straight to the bottom line.
It's money you get before you even break ground. It's not contingent on market conditions or lease-up performance. It's just a check you don't have to write.
Let's talk about some actual projects, because I think case studies make this concrete in a way that abstract numbers don't.
The one I keep coming back to is the Brickfields development in Utrecht. Twenty twenty-three, a hundred and eighty units, traditional brick facade with punched windows. Built for eighteen fifty euros per square meter. There was a comparable modernist project going up at the same time in the same market — nineteen twenty euros per square meter. The traditional building was actually cheaper.
That's from the Dutch Bouwkosten Kenniscentrum — the building cost knowledge center. This isn't some traditional architecture advocacy group cooking the books.
These are construction cost databases that contractors use to bid jobs. It's as close to ground truth as you get in this industry. And then you've got the counter-example — the Glass Cube office tower in Rotterdam, twenty twenty-four. Custom curtain wall mullions, very sleek, very contemporary. Thirty-five percent facade cost overrun. Eighteen-month delay for sealant failure remediation before they could even occupy the building.
An eighteen-month delay. On a commercial project, that's catastrophic. The carrying costs alone...
The developer on that project would have been paying interest on the construction loan, property taxes, and getting zero rental income for a year and a half past the scheduled completion date. The IRR on that project probably went from projected twelve percent to maybe four or five percent. It might have been a financial loss.
Yet architects keep proposing these systems. The definition of insanity, but make it architecture.
It's not insanity — it's training. Architects are taught to design buildings as aesthetic objects, not as financial instruments. The developer is thinking about the financial instrument. The gap between those two mental models is where projects die.
Let's talk about the regulatory piece, because this is where the ground is shifting under everyone's feet.
This is the argument that might actually matter most to developers right now. As of twenty twenty-five, fifteen US cities have adopted form-based codes that incentivize traditional massing and materials. Denver, Austin, Charlotte — these aren't small markets. These are major growth cities.
Form-based codes meaning the zoning regulates what the building looks like and how it meets the street, not just what happens inside.
And the trend is accelerating. In the UK, the twenty twenty-four Levelling Up Act mandates beauty commissions for large developments. The word beauty is actually in the legislation. It's a legal requirement now.
The British government legislated beauty. That's such a wonderfully British thing to do.
It is, but it has real teeth. If you're a developer proposing a large project in the UK now, you have to demonstrate that your building is... Or at least that a commission of people tasked with judging beauty thinks it is. And guess what kind of buildings tend to pass beauty commissions?
Not the Glass Cube in Rotterdam, I'm guessing.
Developers who propose modernist buildings in jurisdictions with beauty commissions are taking a permitting risk. They might get denied. They might get delayed for eighteen months of design review. They might get approved with conditions that blow their budget. Traditional design, in that regulatory environment, becomes the path of least resistance.
You're not selling the developer on tradition. You're selling them on permitting certainty. It's the same playbook as the schedule certainty argument — you're not making an aesthetic case, you're making a risk reduction case.
Risk reduction is the language developers actually speak. They don't care if a building is beautiful. They care if it gets built on time and on budget and leases up. If traditional design reduces the probability of a planning disaster, that's worth real money in their risk model.
Let's look at another case study that ties this together. The High Street Revival project in Bath, UK — twenty twenty-five.
This one is almost too good to be true, but it's documented. Developer comes in wanting a modernist building. Architect presents the cost evidence we've been discussing — construction cost comparison, operating costs, lease-up data, regulatory risk. Developer switches to traditional design. The project achieves ninety-eight percent pre-leasing in six months.
Ninety-eight percent in six months. And the comparable modernist project?
Seventy-two percent in twelve months. Same market, same time period. The traditional building leased more units in half the time.
That's not a marginal difference. That's a completely different risk profile for the project.
Pre-leasing matters enormously because construction lenders often require a certain pre-leasing threshold before they'll release the full loan. Hit that threshold faster, you de-risk the financing. Lower financing costs, less equity at risk. The financial cascade from faster leasing touches every part of the capital stack.
Let me bring in another US example. Denver — two identical fifty-unit condo projects, one modernist glass and steel, one traditional brick with punched windows. Twenty twenty-four Denver MLS data.
The traditional project sold out four months faster, and at a five percent price premium per square foot. Buyers literally paid more for the traditional building.
You're telling me the traditional building cost less to build, sold faster, and commanded a higher price. That's the holy trinity of real estate development.
Higher revenue, lower cost, faster velocity. If you pitched that to a developer without showing them pictures of either building, they'd take that deal every single time. The only reason they don't is that nobody has shown them the numbers in a format they trust.
Which brings us to the actionable part. Hannah's real question is: how do I actually use this evidence in a meeting? What does the pitch look like?
I've been thinking about this, and I think the answer is what I'd call the Three-Page Deck strategy. You walk into a developer meeting. You don't lead with pictures of Georgian townhouses or talk about proportion and harmony. You lead with a spreadsheet.
Page one is construction cost comparison. And I don't mean national studies — I mean your own cost database built from three to five recent projects in your market. Line item by line item. Facade cost per square meter. Structural system cost per square foot. MEP cost per square foot. Show them the glazing savings, the steel savings, the HVAC savings. Show them the net number.
If you don't have your own cost database yet?
Start building it this week. Call three contractors you've worked with and ask for rough square-foot costs on brick facade versus curtain wall in your market. They'll give you numbers. Contractors love talking about costs — it's what they think about all day. Then you've got local data, and developers trust local data over national studies every time.
Page two is operating cost and leasing velocity. Show them the JLL data on lease-up speed. Show them the energy modeling difference — smaller glazing ratios, lower cooling loads. Show them the maintenance schedule comparison — no sealant replacement cycles. Translate all of that into net operating income. Higher NOI means higher property value at exit. That's the language of the pro forma.
Page three is risk reduction and regulatory compliance. The Zurich insurance data on water intrusion claims. The Lean Construction Institute data on change orders. The list of form-based code cities that are already regulating for traditional design. Frame traditional design not as a style choice but as an insurance policy against permitting delays and construction defects.
Then you close with a specific project example where this approach delivered a higher IRR.
The High Street Revival in Bath is perfect for this. Or the Denver condo comparison. Pick the one that's closest to your developer's market and project type. End with a number — we delivered X IRR versus Y for the modernist alternative. That's the slide they'll remember.
The whole pitch takes maybe fifteen minutes, and the word beauty never comes up.
You're not selling architecture. You're selling risk-adjusted returns. You're speaking their language. And here's the thing — developers are not stupid. They're not ideologically committed to modernism. They're committed to making money. If you can show them, with credible numbers, that traditional design makes them more money at lower risk, they will switch. They'll switch so fast it'll make your head spin.
Like adopting a feral cat.
I'm not sure that's the analogy I'd use, but yes — once they see the numbers, they'll wonder why they ever did it the other way.
Let me ask you about a specific tactical question. Who do you target? Not every developer is going to be receptive to this, even with the numbers.
The sweet spot is boutique and mid-market developers — twenty to two hundred units. These are the developers who actually care about lease-up speed and community acceptance, because their projects are small enough that a few months of vacancy hurts. They don't have the balance sheet to absorb a permitting disaster. They're not building a brand image — they're building a retirement fund.
Whereas the large national firms...
The large nationals are harder to sway, not because the numbers don't work, but because they have institutional momentum. They've got in-house design standards. They've got relationships with curtain wall manufacturers. They've got a brand that's associated with a certain look. You can still make the argument, but the friction is higher.
Start with the developers who feel the pain most acutely.
And there's another piece of tactical advice that I think is underappreciated. Partner with a cost estimator who specializes in traditional construction. The twenty twenty-five RSMeans data shows something really striking — estimators who are unfamiliar with traditional methods routinely overestimate costs by fifteen to twenty-five percent.
Because they assume everything is custom. They don't know that there are standard brick details, standard precast elements, standard window proportions that are basically off-the-shelf. So they price traditional design as if every cornice is hand-carved by Italian stonemasons, when in reality it's precast concrete from a catalog.
The cost estimator is accidentally making your argument harder.
The developer trusts the cost estimator more than they trust the architect. So if the estimator says traditional is twenty-five percent more expensive, that's the number that sticks, even if it's wrong. You need an estimator who knows the traditional supply chain and can price it accurately.
This is such a practical point. You're not just building an evidence base — you're building a team that can deliver the evidence credibly.
That team composition matters. Architect, cost estimator, maybe a contractor who's done traditional work before. When the three of you walk into a developer meeting together and present aligned numbers, that's powerful. That's not one architect with a dream — that's a delivery team with a track record.
Let me step back and ask the uncomfortable question. If all of this is true — if traditional design is cost-competitive or cheaper, leases faster, lasts longer, and insures for less — why hasn't the market already shifted? Markets are supposed to be efficient.
First, architectural education. Most architecture schools haven't taught traditional design as a living practice in fifty years. Students graduate knowing how to design a curtain wall but not a brick cornice. They specify what they know.
It's not a conspiracy — it's a curriculum gap.
Second, developer risk aversion. Developers are not in the business of being first. They're in the business of being right. If every other building in the market is modernist, building modernist feels safe, even if the numbers say otherwise. Nobody ever got fired for specifying a curtain wall.
The IBM problem, but for buildings.
And third, there's no standardized cost database for traditional construction in most markets. The RSMeans data exists, but it's not organized the way developers think about projects. So the default assumption — traditional is expensive — persists because nobody has done the work to disprove it systematically.
Which means there's an opportunity for the architect who does that work.
That's the gap you fill. Build the cost database. Present the evidence. Be the person who can walk into a meeting and say, here's what it actually costs, and here's the IRR difference. You'll be the only architect in your market who can do that, and developers will notice.
Let's talk about where this is heading, because I think there's a technological dimension that's going to accelerate all of this.
AI-driven design tools. Autodesk Forma, and others like it, are making it dramatically easier to generate traditional details at scale. You're not hand-drawing every cornice profile — the software can parametrically generate traditional facades with standardized details that are known to be constructible.
The labor cost of designing traditional buildings drops.
And once the design cost drops and the construction cost data is systematized, the last arguments against traditional design evaporate. The architects who master this vocabulary now — who learn how to design traditional buildings efficiently using modern tools — they're going to own the next decade of mid-rise development.
Because they'll be the only ones who can deliver what the market wants at a price the market accepts.
What the regulations increasingly require. The form-based code cities, the beauty commissions, the insurance incentives — all of these trends point in the same direction. The modernist default is becoming a liability. The traditional alternative is becoming the safe bet. The architects who see that shift coming are going to be very busy.
Let me try to synthesize this into something actionable for Hannah and for anyone in her position. You're an architect who wants to move the industry toward better buildings. You're not an ideologue — you see value in both traditions, and you want to apply classical principles to contemporary life. What do you actually do on Monday morning?
Number one: build your own cost database. Start with three to five recent projects — yours or colleagues — and do a line-item comparison. Facade, structure, MEP, maintenance schedule. Get local numbers. Developers trust local data.
Target the right developers. Boutique and mid-market, twenty to two hundred units. They feel the pain of slow lease-up and community opposition more acutely. They're more open to a better mousetrap.
Use the regulatory hedge argument. As more cities adopt form-based codes and beauty commissions, developers who propose modernist buildings are taking a permitting risk. Traditional design is the path of least resistance. Frame it as risk management, not taste.
Partner with a cost estimator who actually knows traditional construction. If your estimator is pricing brick details like they're custom stonework, your numbers will be wrong and your credibility will suffer. Find someone who knows the traditional supply chain.
Then the homework assignment. Pick one project in your pipeline — doesn't have to be a live commission, it can be a speculative proposal — and run the full cost comparison. Construction cost, operating cost, lease-up projections, insurance premiums. Build the three-page deck. Bring it to your next client meeting, even if the client didn't ask for it. Show them the numbers.
The evidence is on your side. You just have to present it in their language. And their language is not proportion, harmony, or cultural continuity. Their language is IRR, cap rate, and basis points.
The spreadsheet is the battlefield, and the spreadsheet says what the critics don't expect.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The morin khuur, the traditional Mongolian horsehead fiddle, is traditionally constructed using a chemical process where the wooden body is coated with a mixture of pine resin and fermented mare's milk, which reacts with the horsehair strings to produce a tone that can carry for up to four kilometers across the open steppe — a technique documented by Qing dynasty envoys traveling through the Gobi Desert region in the seventeen-twenties.
...right.
Fermented mare's milk. On a fiddle.
If you want to dig deeper into the educational context behind all of this — why architects aren't trained in traditional design in the first place — check out our episode on the broken chain of design. And for the broader gap between architectural idealism and developer reality, there's our episode on what architecture actually is. Links are at myweirdprompts.
The question we're left with is this: if the numbers are this clear, and the regulatory winds are blowing this direction, how long before the market tips? My bet is sooner than the profession expects. The architects who are ready for that moment are going to be very hard to hire.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. We're at myweirdprompts.If you found this useful, tell an architect — they probably need to hear it.
Until next time.
