A few blocks from where I live, a quaint, mid-size home was recently razed and replaced by a house that seems to have eaten its own property. It stretches from one edge of the lot to the other, with barely enough room around it to suggest that land ever existed there before. It is large in the way so many new houses are large now: swollen, as though every available inch has been converted into interior space.
I have begun noticing the same impulse everywhere: things are getting bigger, louder and more visually insistent, as though occupying more space has itself become a form of value.
Cars have become taller, wider, and more aggressive, with grilles that look more weaponized than designed. The Tesla Cybertruck seems to have taken that impulse to the extreme: it is a vehicle so visually belligerent it appears constructed to win an argument no one knew they were having. In fashion, the appetite for exaggeration has taken a more deliberate form, as Gen Zembraces enormous silhouettes and awkward proportions that would have horrified generations raised to believe that looking “put together” was a virtue or a goal.
I have found myself wondering: Is the world getting uglier?
I know that suggesting something is ugly is deeply subjective, and every generation has looked at the one before it and wondered what they could possibly be thinking. Tastes evolve, standards change, and beauty is inherently vulnerable to nostalgia. But I don’t think what I am seeing is simply a matter of taste. I think it has more to do with proportion.
Good design relies on understanding context: how a building sits on its street, how a chair accommodates a body, how type works on the page and for the reader. What I am noticing now is how often these considerations seem to disappear, as if the object itself matters more than the environment or community it belongs to.
This matters because we are living in an attention economy, and attention rewards extremity. The more a design is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable, and shareable, the easier it becomes to lose sight of proportion, purpose, and the people who have to live alongside it. A house that dominates its lot, a cartoonishly oversized shoe, or a restaurant interior conceived to be posted online before the food arrives are all responding, in different ways, to the same pressure: to attract attention first and consider the consequences after.
Perhaps this is why so much contemporary design feels more bloviating than expressive, as though visual volume now matters more than beauty.
But the problem is not ugliness itself. Sometimes ugliness is the point.
In 1996, Miuccia Prada launched a spring collection titled Banal Eccentricity, which became better known as “Ugly Chic.” The line’s muddy browns, avocado greens and awkward proportions were intentional and used with precision to challenge more conventional ideas of beauty.
That lineage allows me to understand some of what I see in Gen Z fashion now. Oversized, mismatched clothes and deliberately awkward shoes can be knowing and self-aware; the person wearing the ugly shoe may know perfectly well that it is ugly, and that may be part of the pleasure. Fashion is also temporary. You can wear MSCHF’s enormous red boots today and take them off tonight.
A building is much harder to discard.
Years ago, in an interview I conducted with the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli, he declared that design’s responsibility was “to decrease the amount of vulgarity in the world.” He was explicit that he was not prescribing a style; what mattered was creating quality in everything that surrounds us.
The distinction between ugliness and vulgarity feels important now. Beauty often depends on proportion and on how well a building, an object, or an image relates to the world around it. Ugliness can challenge expectations and still be intelligent, deliberate, and even beautiful in its own way.
Vulgarity is different. It begins when scale, excess, or attention-seeking overwhelms context altogether.
Architecture, automobiles, and commercial environments make claims on people who have no part in choosing them. When houses squeeze into their lots, vehicles grow more imposing, and storefronts battle for attention, the problem is no longer simply whether something is beautiful or ugly. Vulgarity becomes consequential when it overwhelms the environment everyone shares.
The objects we design and consume reveal what we value, and more and more of them seem to reflect an increased appetite for more. Which leaves me wondering about one of design’s oldest and most human questions: How much is enough?
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