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What I’m Reading: Freddie deBoer, “Real Feelings for Fake Beauty” (6 April 2026).

What’s remarkable, when you sit with all of this long enough, is that the Yale campus essentially answers the Twitter debate all by itself. The YIMBYs are wrong that beauty is prohibitively expensive, but the debate is asking the wrong question anyway. The real question isn’t whether we can build beautifully, it’s whether we’re willing to admit what we actually want, which is to be surrounded by things that feel old and storied and earned, even when they aren’t. Yale understood this and built a fantasy, and the fantasy worked so well that a century later they felt compelled to extend it, and even their imperfect extension will probably fool people in another fifty years. The desire isn’t really for Gothic architecture specifically, or for Art Deco, or for any particular style. The desire is for the feeling that a place has been cared for across generations, that it meant something to the people who built it and to the people who came after. Beauty is the signal. Permanence is the message.

Which I know is an odd thing for me to say, given that I am a committed proponent of The New. A lot of those Twitter accounts that call for aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design in new buildings hate Brutalism, while I love it. And it’s odd, when you think about it, because whatever Brutalism may be, and no matter how much many people might hate it, it’s an architectural school passionately dedicated to aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design. It’s just that the people who want beauty in buildings don’t see it in Brutalism, and maybe they also see the style as an example of the decadent decline of the West, and I’m sure some of it them see it as a consequence of the pernicious influence of communism or the Jews…. There’s a lot going on, in calls for the beauty of the past. But at the core of all of this is the simple fact that taste is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I can almost believe that some people love the Corporate Modernism that’s expressed in so many hideous apartment buildings that stuff the DC suburbs. Almost. We are that which we are inspired by. Above this paragraph you’ll see an image of Beinecke, Yale’s rare books library, where one can find priceless works of art like a Gutenberg bible. Beinecke is not Brutalist in design (New Formalist, I reckon), but it is decidedly modernist, and it’s nestled in the very heart of Old Campus. And yet it works, somehow, in its environs, for the same reason I buy into the artifice of its neighbors, the architectural cosplay: because it looks good enough to earn that respect.

And here’s where I find myself making a kind of peace with the whole business of beautiful lies. I know that Old Campus is a stage set, that the gargoyles are props, that the medievalism is a borrowed costume from universities that were themselves borrowing from an even older tradition. I know all of that, and I go back anyway, baby on my chest, to walk among the Gothic opulence. My friend was right about the timescales, but I think he was pointing at something bigger than he intended: authenticity is itself a function of time. The new colleges at Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray feel fake not because they are fake — Old Campus is equally fake — but because they haven’t yet had the time to make us forget that we’re in on the trick. Beauty, it turns out, requires a kind of willing amnesia. We have to be allowed to forget the scaffolding. And maybe that’s the real argument for building ornately and lavishly right now, today, in our own cities and neighborhoods: not that we’ll love it immediately, but that someday, if we build it with enough sincerity and enough craft, people will walk past it and feel, without quite knowing why, that human beings once cared about beauty enough to live and work inside of it, and might still.

— Freddie deBoer, Real Feelings for Fake Beauty
Substack, 6 April 2026