Most "nice architecture" built before 1900 says Alain de Botton

Author and Living Architecture founder Alain de Botton has attacked the "dispiriting, chaotic and distasteful" architecture of urban environments in an essay entitled Why is the Modern World So Ugly?
Writing on The School of Life organisation's website, de Botton states that our ancestors would be shocked at the "horrors" of modern architecture.
"One of the great generalisations we can make about the modern world is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, an ugly world," writes De Botton, who is