Justification for predominantly late-medieval style buildings in a modern world

Question

So, my setting operates with some futuristic tech, which turned out to be pretty lame (especially nanomachines, they're just fancy pants medicine). Therefore, to spice things up, I encased it in a Late-medieval/Renaissance coating.

This means an almost complete absence of Modern and Bauhaus design, and a dominace of Gothic, Romanesque, and occasionally Baroque styles, albeit only in appearance.

I wanted this choice to have a more tangible reasoning behind it than "Splish splash, Modernist architecture belongs in the trash". Though it's true that whitewashed buildings will look like otter vomit after a few years.

One thing to note about the world are the remnants of a bio-weapon that wander at night and chew your face off, also known as minecraft zombies. This explains why any and every settlement has a wall but not how they got the zombies to pay for it.

What would the most likely reason for the predominance of Medieval styles be in this world from a utilitarian/logical perspective?

Note: The buildings aren't a part of the world's past, they're contemporary and usual. They're everywhere in all human settlements. Building techniques (rebar, nanocomposites, etc) are still used, it's only appearance.

Answer 1

In XIXth century there was a fad for neo-(insert style here). Apparently in RL people needed less good justification to build a building, than you write a story. All you need that after it become popular at that moment and somehow it stick.

Realistic justification:

• fad and collective believe what's a good taste
• someone put it to a building code / zoning law and is really hard to reverse it
• if all buildings are style X, then if you try to build anything else you're accused of creating some monstrous eye-sore (does not explain why it started, but it self-reinforces)
• some nostalgia from good old days, when traditions were kept and migrant zombies were not roaming the streets
• it has good feng shui ;)
• from utilitarian perspective such building may have not bad thermal mass, which may be advisable in more harsh climate (sure, you can achieve that in many ways, but this is the most stylish)

Answer 2

Environmental concerns

Buildings in the styles you mentioned are build from natural materials such as stone & wood which are environmentally friendly (wood is a renewable resource and shaping stone is a lot less hurtful to the environment then smelting metal & space age materials).

Low maintenance long term

The pyramids existed for thousands of years with very little maintenance needed so your city planners might want to leave some sort of monument to the future where even long after the building will become uninhabitable it will still serve a monument for future generations to say that a great society lived here.

Answer 3

Take a look at some long-settled cities and why they have changed. Then eliminate those factors.

Destruction

London is one of the most prominent examples of this. The Great Fire wiped out vast swathes of the city - rebuilding it as it was with narrow streets unsuitable for its greatly increased size made no sense, so much of it was redesigned from the ground up. The Blitz almost 300 years later resulted in the destruction of more buildings, with the destroyed buildings generally replaced with modern structures.

Widespread destruction will almost inevitably result in new architectural styles to replace the losses, so avoid large scale destruction.

Population pressure

This force is fairly self-explanatory. When the population of a city grows, either the area of the city must increase or population density must increase. Growing the area of the city eventually puts massive strain on internal transport systems (which are close to breaking point even in most modern high-density cities), so buildings start to go up instead of out. (This will be even more of an issue in a zombie-besieged city where the walls would need to be expanded.) As noted by @AlexP, high-rise baroque buildings are much more expensive than modern styles, so the need for high-rise buildings needs to be eliminated by removing population pressure as a factor. The cities' populations must be falling either through emigration (to where?) or a decline in birth rates. Which segues nicely to...

Vision of the future

Any forward-looking, expansionist civilisation will be coming up with new things. A reactionary civilisation clinging to its past glory days - not so much. You end up with "heritage listings" for every building over a hundred years old (so that if you need to replace it you must rebuild it to look exactly like its previous "incarnation"), a ban on any structure over 10 storeys high and similar development-stifling laws. This can only happen in association with the zero population growth mentioned above or the entire system collapses and completely new buildings will be required.

And maybe new buildings attract zombies...?

What if the zombies - or some other bioweapon-infected creatures - are attracted to bright, shiny structures? In that case it makes sense to have squat, brownstone buildings with low-reflectivity windows hiding behind your walls )and probably blackout laws at night). This would make shiny white marble almost as risky as steel-and-glass, but might provide a tactical reason for maintaining the status quo. (Idea inspired by the behaviour of the "zombies" in John Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky, which are attracted to light and sound.)

Answer 4

The year is 1440.

Your people did not develop their tech. The tech was given to them. A well-meaning alien or time traveler is worried about the effects of the Black Plague and parachutes in to the Europe of 1390 with advanced tech, uplifting the culture.

As you can (and hopefully will, for your fiction) imagine, there are immense ramifications to this. You can spin some interesting stories - for example, your tech Prometheus happens to be Jewish, and bestows the tech to the Jews of Spain; subsequent history there unfolds very differently.

One thing that would probably not be too different is the building stock. The tech delivered concerns itself more with nanobots than construction, which changes minimally. Sociocultural upheavals do not extend to radical changes in architecture,. which proceeds according to the pre-uplift trajectories.