> I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details.
On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.
> Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power.
I don't think that's it, at least for public buildings like churches, theaters, town halls, museums, and so on. After all, veto power doesn't prevent awful buildings like the Walkie Talkie building[1] from being built, as long as they conform to the bland, in vogue architectural tastes. It's the cult of postmodernism, stripping away visually interesting features, even though humans gravitate to older buildings despite the "form over function" blind cult thinking. This has dominated architecture for the past few decades. Many older buildings are simply built with many intricate visual details that are architectural heresy nowadays. As mentioned, there was a briliant article and HN discussion on this recent-ish, I just cannot dig it up.
EDIT: This is the article, "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture":
On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.