Egregoros

@wizardmanperson you'd be hard pressed to find many examples of actual classical architecture at all, unfortunately.
If we're being technical, there's classical and modern and also vernacular architecture. Whereas classical is about a strict grammar (Palladio), modern is about one-upmanship (as soon as rules emerge, they are thrown out), and vernacular is more about function and material, which is why it plays a subordinate role today.

big housing projects use modules quite a lot, yes.
The issue is that they are not classically proportioned or decorated anymore.
I looked this up for illustration, but apparently the OG commie blocks under Stalin were! Stalinist architecture follows classical rules. Never knew this.
pic 1 is the first ever modular commie block house, pic 2 is Stalinist architecture

@wizardmanperson This ornate one was built under Stalin before the end of WWII.
You Ossis probably didn't get a lot of that style.
apparently pic rel was soviet built
"Altmarkt Galerie" in Dresden

and this section of East Berlin has a lot of Stalinist stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee
that apartment block looks great.

This is all new for me too. Commie blocks are the epitome of ugly modernism. But it's nice to have my mental model confirmed (modernity is orthogonal to modularity)

@WandererUber the dresden commie architecture is quite nice when we're talking about the city center, but the inner parts are a lot uglier from what I've seem already (i might not noticed or associated the nice ones with their doing, so).
But that was fair imo, since the city was destroyed and they needed to quickly raise homes for the then made-homeless people.

In berlin i know that there was a lot of saving face done to try keeping the illusion that the soviet model was superior, so that might've contributed for their nicer examples in the eastern parts.

@wizardmanperson I've browsed that wikipedia article about the promenade in Berlin and at least one of the architects was a modernist. He was only able to build something beautiful as long as Stalin was alive and forced him to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Henselmann

>they needed to quickly raise homes for the then made-homeless people.
this is the thing I keep talking about. Modularity means fast build times. Modularity does NOT mean modernist. The beautiful apartments I've posted in this thread were ALSO build quickly and also made from cheap modules. The look is a design decision, not a necessity.

@wizardmanperson took a while huh?
I'm glad I kept saying that over and over
This was my point, the fact that there is nothing in principle that says the concrete mould for the apartment module must have these (1) modernist "pseudo-ornaments" that look like vent holes. It could just as easily have classical actual ornament (2)
And interestingly, when I googled for the first time up thread, Stalin already made them do that!

That said, I think there IS something to the conception everyone has that industrial processes lead to these simplified shapes, but in my experience it's mostly driven by design constraints. it's very easy to make some weird ass modernist geometric fluting, but it's hard to CAD organic shapes.
I think the panel press forming machine thingamajig could do both quite easily. There are ornate forms on SOME cheap doodads too. Like flowerpots and stuff. (3)