This TED Talk features architecture critic and writer Justin Davidson,

recorded live at TED NYC 2017.

Imagine that when you walked in here this evening,

you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same.

Ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. That person sitting right next to you might have the most idiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearing the same blank expression all

the time. That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies

to buildings, not people. Cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture, and color.

You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character.

In apartment buildings, in Riga, and Yemen.

Social housing in Vienna,

Hopi villages in Arizona,

brownstones in New York,

wooden houses in San Francisco.

These aren't palaces or cathedrals.

These are just ordinary residences

expressing the ordinary splendor of cities.

And the reason they're like that

is that the need for shelter is so bound up with

the human desire for beauty. Their rough surfaces give us a touchable city, right? Streets that

you can read by running your fingers over brick and stone. But that's getting harder to do,

because cities are becoming smooth.

New downtowns sprout towers that are almost always

...