The ugliness of much contemporary building comes from builders no longer knowing how to make a building truly one with its surroundings.

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• The great majority of modern buildings are awkward assemblies of unrelated components, lacking the coherence necessary to be living designs.claim0.804
  Aesthetic judgment on modern buildings.
• After 1900, a variety of modern building processes came into use that are not structure-preserving—some accidentally structure-destroying, others actively promoting ugliness for profit.claim0.800
  Historical shift.
• Buildings made with an eye to the past will most often fail to have living structure, because the process of historical reproduction somehow turns vivid, living structure sour.claim0.785
  Argues that copying historical forms does not produce living structure.
• The modern world we build, because its construction is driven by our attitudes about money, production, design, building, and planning, breaks from smooth unfolding at almost every stage.claim0.778
  Critique of contemporary building processes.
• The more austere forms of buildings also arise from the wholeness that comes from buildings that are near rectangular, to make positive space.claim0.770
• The makers of image-ridden, ugly buildings did not truly please themselves; they acted out of wilfulness and a desire to conform.claim0.770
  Alexander argues that what appears to be self-pleasing in modern architecture is actually wilfulness and professional image-management.
• The brutal geometry comes from the need for the internal geometrical coherence of the building, not from the surroundings.claim0.768
  Clarifies that the alien, brutal quality originates in internal structural logic rather than contextual adaptation
• No building is ever really complete – inhabitants' requirements change, environment changes. Repair should lose sense of 'incorrectness' and become redesign opportunity.concept0.767
  Alexander's foundational insight about iterative system improvement that motivates the piecemeal growth approach.