Appropiate, aesthetic, affordable
Who cares about architecture? Does the average person care at all?
Why doesn't it have a slot on prime-time TV news? Why is it that people can naturally debate gastronomy, fashion, sports, technology, or mental health, yet it is so difficult to spark a public conversation about the spatial quality of the places where life unfolds?
In a lecture given at the IVAM in 1994, the philosopher, poet, and professor of Aesthetics José María Valverde pointed out that the absence of articles in mainstream media explained the public's lack of interest in this discipline. But is that the real reason why society fails to understand the spaces it inhabits? Or has professional language perhaps become high-flown, self-absorbed, and unable to connect with ordinary citizens? How, then, can we awaken interest in quality environments within a context marked by an urgent housing crisis?
An early example of this was Mail Order Houses, which succeeded in democratizing access to well-designed housing. At the end of the 19th century, extensive catalogs of prefabricated houses reached mailboxes en masse, sparking widespread interest and offering à la carte solutions at a time of growing residential need. After placing an order, people received a complete kit—with pre-cut materials and innovative construction systems—that arrived by train in different phases to facilitate straightforward assembly.
That pioneering model, a precursor to many current industrialized processes, made it possible to imagine that housing could be produced with the same efficiency as automobiles: mass-produced, with quality, and at an affordable price for the middle and working classes. These construction innovations helped redefine the modern style. And yet, despite that potential, why has architecture not evolved favorably?
Let us return to José María Valverde. In that same lecture, he wondered why modernity, born of a radical shift in thought, had ultimately failed. He answered himself: "The fault, of course, lies basically with the clientele, private or official, who have proven not to be up to the moral standard." But does that responsibility fall solely on society? Andrés Rubio, in his book España fea (Ugly Spain), also laments the collective indifference to a degraded landscape. Now, what exactly does ugliness mean? Who decides what is ugly or beautiful, good or bad?
The philosopher Holmes Rolston argued that today we recognize beauty where we did not see it before: in that which is loaded with symbolism, with an ethical, sustainable, and simple life. As an example, the recent and popular cover of Bad Bunny's album Debí tirar más fotos features two plastic monobloc chairs that evoke a common, everyday life full of meaning. That chair, omnipresent across the globe, was also used by designer Martí Guixé to claim the virtues of "cheap design." A recognizable object that, unlike other much more expensive and exclusive pieces, rarely appears in the rooms featured in trend magazines. Can the cheap and everyday not also be good, and even beautiful?
It is worth closing the circle with José María Valverde's final observation, when he also pointed out the responsibility of those who design and build. In an era with the highest number of professionals and specialized schools, why are we still surrounded by such questionable buildings and spaces? The architect and professor Ramón Faura shares this concern when he states: "We often criticize starchitects, but the truth is that, for purely quantitative reasons, non-starchitects are much more harmful, as they clear-cut mountains and beaches from anonymity."
Responsibility, in reality, is shared: institutions, the market, regulatory frameworks, professional culture, and lifestyles all play a part. For too long, everyday construction has been allowed to remain outside prestigious conversation. Exceptions were celebrated while ordinary disaster was normalized.
According to the UIA (International Union of Architects), there are an estimated 3.2 million professionals in the sector worldwide. In the Basque Country, for instance, the ratio is one architect per 750 inhabitants, well above the European average (one per 1,000). What role do we, as practitioners of this profession, play when we limit our practice to bureaucratically complying with laws, protocols, and legal filings, while the trade suffocates amidst precariousness and a lack of skilled labor? How can economic equity, labor justice, and aesthetic quality be sustained simultaneously without one dimension imposing itself over the others?
"Appropriate, aesthetic, and affordable" is one of those formulas that everyone understands and almost no one fully believes. A commercial lure, a promise of a bargain, folk wisdom turned into a slogan. Something suspicious that leads us to think that one of the three conditions will eventually fail. Precisely for this reason, this very common and seemingly minor expression opens a path to reflect on the present: it allows us to name the tension between ethics, aesthetics, and economics, and to ask ourselves to what extent something can be simultaneously fair, beautiful, and accessible.
In the current context—marked by warmongering, material scarcity, a shortage of construction professionals, job precariousness, the environmental crisis, housing shortages, the accelerationism associated with artificial intelligence, and the habits of consumer society—it is worth asking how to democratize the right to well-thought-out spaces, built with quality and capable of generating a positive impact. Places that optimize resources from an ecological awareness without renouncing labor ethics. Is an appropriate, aesthetic, affordable, and universal architecture possible today, or does the true utopia of our time lie precisely there?
