New construction in Europe is awful as well. Cheap, vinyl casement windows abound, brick veneer, pebble siding and disposable kitchens and fake flooring. They make homes that look like they could survive a bombing, but they're actually fragile and cheap buildings.
> building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade
A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to.
> We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture
What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?
It's surprisingly "affordable" to have an entirely custom house designed and built, but the only people who bother are people who are certain they'll be in an area for quite awhile. Otherwise you either buy a developer's house (one of five models that they're pumping out, each one designed to be less obnoxious than the previous, so everything is always "beige" to the max) or you buy an existing one, which is usually just a developer house from a decade or more ago.
There’s always been a lot of shit built. The good things will last 100’s of years and the shit will be ripped down in 40. The examples linked here are garden variety crap mainly. The 1970’s-1990’s in particular had a lot of bad stuff built. Especially if you want 6k sq feet and don’t understand that to build that inside and out at quality will cost a few million + land costs.
If you find a decent builder today you can have a high quality home built. But it’s not cheap. It never has been.
> building $10m houses out of shitty plywood and fake bricks glued on the fascade
A 10m home is probably not build of veneer. High quality construction is still available but you pay for it. Engineered wood is super high quality and expensive, plywood is a find cladding and there are higher end versions (Zip System for example) available as well. A modern, well constructed home today is unbelievable energy efficient and has an air-tight envelope by code. Yes, you can build cheaply too (essentially cardboard cladding in certain areas!) but you don't have to.
> We are simply an unsophisticated culture, with an education system that never exposes people to art or architecture. We're a nation of Nouveau riche pseudo-sophisticated country people who think that money = culture
What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Have you driven around a town made of mainly pre-war homes? Are you at all familiar with the various styles of different periods?