Is There No Accounting for Taste?
Or is there a way to rank which styles of architecture make people happiest?
Back in 2020, I created a popular tweet thread on 1945 as the dividing line in the history of architecture, using city halls in upscale California communities like Beverly Hills (1932) vs. Malibu (1978) to provide apples to apples comparisons. I wrote in 2024:
You might well say that there is no disputing taste. But I think I’ve come up with an objective measure of public sentiment regarding the beauty of public buildings: Simply measure how much demand there is from brides to be married there.
For example, I doubt if the San Jose city hall is booked up as long in advance for weddings as the stupendous 1915 beaux arts San Francisco city hall, where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married. Tom Wolfe admiringly called it “this Golden Whore’s dream of paradise ... it’s like some Central American opera house ... a veritable angels’ choir of gold … and all kept polished as if for the commemoration of the Generalissimo’s birthday.”
I only recently figured out fifty years after first reading Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers that by “Golden Whore,” Wolfe was referring to Mrs. DiMaggio, but not so blatantly as to get punched out by Mr. DiMaggio.
Lately, there’s been a not unreasonable trend toward mid-priced weddings at fancy city halls.
The Washington Post reports:
All the cool girls want chic courthouse weddings
City hall was once a go-to option for couples looking to elope, save money or simply get their wedding over with. Now it’s a venue with a recognizable aesthetic.
July 12, 2026
By Megan Buerger
… Rosser and Preka belong to a class of couples who are effectively establishing a new wedding tier centered on city hall.
For decades, the market offered two options: the $35 license-and-done or the full production with its 18-month runway. The new middle path takes the courthouse moment and builds a single, art-directed day around it — hair and makeup in a hotel suite, a styled portrait somewhere in the city, a buyout at a Michelin-starred restaurant — for a fraction of the traditional budget and a fraction of the stress. “It’s a chance to design a whole day with their favorite people in a way that feels genuinely elevated,” said Kait Peña, a wedding photographer, “for a lot less than bringing 150 people to Italy.” …
In addition to fewer rules, lower costs (a recent study by the Knot, the popular wedding-planning website, says the average American wedding costs $34,000) and more flexibility, courthouse ceremonies carry a certain cachet. Jenny Fu, a photographer who arranged her own pandemic elopement outside a courthouse that she loved purely for its architecture, offers a fashion analogy: quiet luxury. “We’ve been bombarded with so much luxury in your face, like, ‘How rich am I,’ that people want to do something more intimate to balance that out,” she said.
But some courthouses are more romantic than others. For example, at the opposite end of the romance scale from the all-world 1915 San Francisco city hall is the efficient but forgettable post-1945 Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk office in Norwalk:
Now that courthouse weddings are in fashion, it’s easy to see which kinds of courthouses appeal most to brides. The Los Angeles Times reports:
The fierce competition to get married at California’s most popular public buildings
By Sonja Sharp
July 14, 2026
… “Less than a decade ago, courthouse weddings were still the purview of camera-shy celebrities, midlife second marriages and mother-to-be brides. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, their popularity has boomed, transforming certain courthouses and municipal buildings into sought-after locales to tie the knot.
Snagging an appointment to elope has become almost as difficult as scoring Olympic tickets.
In Santa Barbara, marriage appointments open 90 days in advance, with new slots released every hour while the courthouse is open. On a recent weekday, slots in October vanished in less than five minutes. …
The shift toward boutique legal ceremonies has transformed the marriage business and the municipal buildings where such nuptials take place, turning elopement from a breezy wedding alternative into a formal contact sport.
“It books up so fast, you have to be online at the exact time [of day] you plan on having your appointment,” explained the photographer, whose viral 2024 snaps helped supercharge the Santa Barbara courthouse’s popularity on social media. “A lot of my brides get stressed out.” …
Santa Barbara’s Moorish Revival hall of justice has long been Southern California’s most coveted civil marriage spot. Vice President Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff took their vows in its storied Mural Room in 2014. Reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker were wed on the steps outside in 2022.
But officials say demand has exploded in recent years, thanks in part to Pinterest and TikTok.
“We see dozens a day, starting at 8 o’clock in the morning,” said Lee, the county supervisor and officiant for the day, whose office is across the street. “I see them line up right there outside the doors.”
The race to the clerk’s window is not limited to Santa Barbara. Other popular courthouses such as the L.A. County Courthouse in Beverly Hills and the Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana have seen similar surges in demand.
But no municipal building in the state compares to …
Paywall here.
