In cities like Seattle, Boston, Denver and Charlotte, new "luxury" condos and apartment buildings are going up to meet demand for new housing. But many of these buildings look like simple, plain boxes.

Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with architecture critic and author Sarah Williams Goldhagen (@SarahWGoldhagen) about what makes these buildings "poor," "boring" architecture, and how monotonous architecture actually negatively affects us.

Interview Highlights

On why there are so many of these kinds of buildings being built

"There are a lot of different reasons for it. If you separate it out into supply and demand, one is that that's what's being built, so that's what's cheap to build, because the wheels are greased for that kind of architecture. Buy in bulk. That's what the market has been giving and so it's easy to give that. The second reason is that there's a general point of view, both among real estate developers, who are building these buildings, and among clients who are buying these buildings, that good design ... is an unaffordable luxury. And we know two things now: one, it's not unaffordable. It costs just as much to build a well-designed building as a poorly designed building. And neither is it a luxury because the research is clearly showing that people actually respond very poorly to those bad buildings.

"Someone did a study walking along buildings that was like a poor, undifferentiated surface. It was actually the side of a shopping mall. People's heart rates went up, their cortisol levels shot up. It makes you anxious to be in enervating, boring, repetitive environments, and these projects are being built at such a large scale that they form the urban fabric that people live in and it's not good for them."

The Square Apartments under construction in Richmond, Va., in 2014. (Eli Christman/Flickr)

On how long these buildings will last and what styles have aged well

"There's style and then there's craftsmanship, and some stylistic moments were more felicitous than others. There's no question about that. I mean, you know, those New York 1950s and '60s white, enameled, tiled, brick apartments on the Upper East Side were not a good stylistic decision. ... People need what they experience to speak to them, to pull them in, draw them in, cognitively. We actually know that the way that most people respond to environments is not conscious, and yet, the environments are having very profound effects on us.