Most People Prefer Traditional Architecture, and the Surveys Keep Agreeing

Put two buildings side by side and people's answers rarely divide the way researchers expect. A review published in Works in Progress looks at the visual preference surveys run over the past five decades and finds one recurring result: in almost every study, a large majority of respondents chose traditional architecture over modernist alternatives.

A method born in New Jersey

The author, Robert Kwolek, a senior architectural designer at Create Streets, traces the approach to 1979 in Metuchen, New Jersey. The town asked the Rutgers University Urban Design Studio to photograph hundreds of its streets and buildings and have residents rate them at a public meeting. Participants preferred small-town streetscapes, detailed and varied facades and a walkable scale, and disliked blank buildings and wide, car-dominated streets; Metuchen later based a design code on the results.

In 1987 David Halpern, then a Cambridge undergraduate and later a leading behavioural psychologist, showed students photographs of twelve faces and twelve buildings. Views on faces were consistent across disciplines, but architecture students ranked the buildings very differently from everyone else, often in the opposite order. Where surveys collect demographic data, men and younger people tend to be slightly more open to modernism, yet every group still favours traditional styles.

What the numbers show

The studies cited in the piece point the same way. A 1998 survey by the British Market Research Bureau found 94 percent of potential newbuild buyers would rather live in one of the traditional options shown to them. A 2009 study for the practice ADAM Architecture, matching perspective and weather across four real commercial buildings, saw 77 percent prefer the two traditional designs, though both modernist examples had won prizes; and the National Civic Art Society's 2020 survey of American federal and courthouse buildings averaged 72 percent for traditional designs.

British polls by Create Streets have produced margins of 74 to 26 for a classical design for a Bath rugby stadium, 69 to 28 for a brick-clad viaduct on the High Speed 2 railway and 79 to 17 for an alternative Marks and Spencer scheme on Oxford Street. In the Netherlands, The Aesthetic City's 2025 study, which used AI to build tightly matched alternatives, recorded an average of 82 percent for traditional options. All told, the article puts the share of the public preferring traditional architecture at 70 to 90 percent.

The limits, and the puzzle

Kwolek is careful about the evidence: early surveys compared images that also differed in framing or weather, some rested on self-selecting panels, and most were commissioned by organisations sympathetic to traditional architecture. Even so, he argues, the pattern leaves a puzzle — nearly every architecture school teaches broadly modernist styles, more than 99 percent of architects practise in them, and in Britain there has been hardly a public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s.