Give Us Something to Look At: Why ornament matters in architecture
theamericanscholar.org
theamericanscholar.org
Whenever I see this stuff discussed, the conversation rarely plumbs the depths. But even in this article -- just look at the photos. The buildings accused of being ornamented -- they're elaborate in a specific way; the complications aren't there just for the sake of adding something, they reiterate certain structural themes, create depth, a sense of connection at variety of scales. Compare to the "unadorned" buildings -- dead, flat, boring, generic, your attention slips off them like water off an oiled pan.
What I often muse about as someone who builds software, are the parallels between the concerns of the architect and those of a UX designer. We've all seen styles and themes come and go, and some comparisons beg to be drawn. The flat design trends of recent years match the anonymous glass facades housing the FAANGs. Skeuomorphic interfaces as degenerate and overburdened as baroque twirls at their peak. Etc etc.
But underlying these comparisons is always the qualification of purpose. The flat and skeuo interfaces fall short precisely because they're decorated (or, undecorated) for style's sake, there's a disconnect from function - even if the function (especially if!) is to make the person faced with them feel a certain way.
Over the many years, the only interfaces I've seen fulfill their mission of connecting with the user, creating a unique space that immerses and engages, are those in games. Finely crafted one-offs, thematic, memorable, full of intricate detail, intimately connected to the subjects of the interaction, the mission, the overall story of the game.
They're coherent, involved, and what communicates that connection are the many details, specific and deliberate. Yes at first glance they're ornamental, but reveal themselves to be deeply functional after a longer look.
Basically the deal with Alexander is he was a VERY early adopter of computerization in architecture. He made some kinda... missteps? about systematization in his earliest writings. Then walked it all back / developed it with "A City is Not a Tree" talking about graphs and urban organization.
His arc from there was constantly deeper into trying to make sense of how information science techniques could be applied, most notably in A Pattern Language and the case study of its application, The Oregon Project.
Then, his "magnum opus" was a development on that where he tried to fill in the gaps that A Pattern Language left was A Timeless Way of Building.
If you don't want to get too deep, I'd stick with A Pattern Language.
"The Nature of Order" (four books!) is the most extensive - beautiful, comprehensive, a little overwhelming, he lays out a broad philosophy of how built up spaces can foster life. Lots of visual examples, but gets pretty conceptual and abstract too.
"The Timeless Way of Building" is a bit more focused, centers around the architectural concerns. More compact, more practical than the Nature of Order.
"Pattern Language" -- you'll see that one suggested a lot. He lays out the concepts of interacting patterns ("best practices") that act on a variety of scales, some more generic, some more abstract. It's less of a read than a reference, but a few chapters lay out the motivations.
"Notes on the Synthesis of Form" - the most far out one of the four suggestions, abstract, philosophical, a rarefied read. Dissects the essence of concepts, defines what "form" is -- fascinating read for sure, and not too long.
Exactly. Consider the very first photograph, which highlights the owls: I couldn't actually see the books, but I could see the owls, and my instant thought was, 'I bet this is a library'. Because owls are so strongly associated with wisdom, Athena, books, and learning. Far from being useless, they are subtly serving as a UI, drawing on a recognition memory: even 30 years from now, should I happen to be walking through Chicago, I will probably recognize the library as a library solely from the owl-book cues.
I'm reminded of Tufte's 'data ink' phrase: Tufte visualizations can often be quite beautiful, but they are not necessarily minimal; they could be made simpler by removing 'ornamentation', but only by also losing subtle 'data' or theme. (You can have plenty of style or decoration, it just has to mean something.)
Whereas, in the anti-human boxes prized by modernism, they are interchangeable, meaningless, big ugly dumb boxes, designed for humans and things to be shuffled in and out of at the convenience of the powers that be - cubicles writ large.
This is the heart of the matter for me. The article talks about how a well-ornamented building reveals more detail as you get closer. I see that kind of fractal richness as the building repaying and thanking the city for giving it the space to exist. It's interesting at every distance, aware of its immensity and respectful of the people who have no choice but to look at it, offering something for the eye of anyone in line of sight.
Glass skyscrapers and unadorned buildings don't have that quality: you get the same cold-shouldered inscrutability whether you're ten feet or ten blocks away. They're fundamentally rude. In the city, but not of it.
Before and after shots: https://www.archiseek.com/2016/permission-demolish-fitzwilto...
Pictures don't really do justice to just how startling the thing looked; it was completely unignoreable. Now, from a practical point of view, it probably needed replacing; it was a pretty inefficient use of land, if nothing else. But they could at least have replaced it with something interesting.
(Fun fact: it used to contain the Australian embassy, amongst other things, which always felt vaguely inappropriate; Australia just doesn't have the appropriate sinister vibes for such a building.)
Yet another soulless amalgamation of concrete and glass (that invariably wins prestigious awards and is praised for its uniqueness or something) can be plopped anywhere, Dubai, Stockholm, New York, or Cape Town, and it wouldn't make a shred of difference.
But personally, instead of lamenting it, I see it as a sign of our march towards the “Earth” culture. We are watching the development of the first global civilisation unfold.
It’s exciting, even if it has none of the charm of older architectural styles.
"In time even the flickering ships ceased to ply the trade lanes between the entrance portals, because there can be no reward for the traveller when departure point cannot be distinguished from destination."
You'd think that for a place as varied and interesting as Earth, you'd emerge with something that is as varied and interesting.
I'd rather call architectural styles from 100 years ago "modernist" to avoid confusion.
That said - the International Style, which started over a hundred years ago at this point (back when style "movements" were still a thing) was actually a universalist project, trying to argue FOR the ideal architecture whose express purpose was that it COULD BE plopped down anywhere.
Needless to say that approach has some... issues. But it has to be understood that the world they were reacting to was VASTLY different from today. Tenement slums without indoor plumbing were still a thing for example. These guys were massively egotistical, paternalistic, etc. So of course their approach was going to have certain flaws. But they were trying to do what -they thought- was in the universal good.
More recently people like Frampton argued for "critical regionalism" that tries to reconcile local character and culture with contemporary standardized building practices. Then postmodernism happened and history and local culture were allowed back in the academy (cf: Washington Library). Since deconstructivism collapsed under the weight of self-parody it's been a kind of no limits return to regionally responsive architecture.
But the awards that are being given out for that aren't the ones that get all the press. Except the Pritzker, which has really changed its tune in the past 15 years in recognizing architecture with more character and sensitivity to its culture.
They all look the same, just like skyscrapers.
"soullessness" and "lack of character" go back a long way, and people only mentioning it when talking about brutalism or glass buildings is just evidence they know nothing about the history and culture they are trying to preserve
I hate both buildings, enough that I’m having negative feelings about both architects.
They are both so godawfully ugly that I would probably walk a different route rather than get angry again every time I walk past. Gross.
https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/then-now/hawkins-st-theatr...
Almost seems criminal.
What Seattle got was raw concrete. Pseudo brutalist. That building was an ugly piece of shit the day it opened, and it just got uglier every day after. To paraphrase Office Space, every time you saw the Kingdome, it was the ugliest it had ever been.
What they replaced it with has changed names a couple times but is a decent building. And the Mariner’s stadium has actual brick on it, but due to budget problems only on the side that faces away from most commuters.
It seems like the artists’ drawings for some buildings, especially the simple ones, can end up lying quite a bit. I get the same vibe from the building in the parent comment. I bet the proposal was exactly the same shape as what they build but the facade was rendered much differently.
The replacement is definitely boring and generic. Still far less ugly than the brutalist building it replaced. I think this photo gives a better impression of it:
Both buildings are conceptually very similar. I do like both.
The houses are also always... the same. The variations in it are where the rectangle windows are and the length / width / height. But that is it.
I predict that in 20-30 years these houses will be seen as one of the ugly architectural trends of my time.
While houses that were built a century or even more ago (and that still stand) are lush with these ornaments and still retain a sort of beauty. [2]
I've lived in one of these type of houses and while they have some impracticalities because they have been built in a different century the outside stays a thing of beauty and you could guide people to your house purely because of how it looks.
Currently my wife and I are looking to build a new house and one of the requirements that we have for our architect is to build it with small details on the outside and a bit more classical than the current trend is.
[1] https://sibomat.be/media/f0xf52fy/moderne-bouwstijl-realisat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oude_Markt#/media/File:Old_mar...
Examples: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property... - Fake Georgian townhouses. You're still left with a four storey house, which isn't super-practical, and they look ridiculous.
https://www.pjhegarty.ie/projects/esb-head-office/ - Replacing a distinctly un-Georgian Brutalist thing which itself replaced a row of Georgian houses back in the day. Again, looks silly, but if they'd played it completely straight they'd be left with a pretty impractical office building.
These things weren’t built for mom, dad and 2.4 kids, but much larger families (6? 8 kids?) who were rich enough to have their own staff living alongside. Many were eventually subdivided into tenements and by the 20th century one street managed to fit 835 people between 15 houses.
There’s a reason well maintained Georgian houses sell for approaching €2 million euro. These new Georgian-style builds are targeting the very wealthy rather than trying to be practical city centre housing, in Ireland at least.
Which is still a good bit less than you'd expect for the square footage (that would work out to 4-500eur/sqft, which would def. be on the low end for the areas they're most found in), reflecting the awkwardness of the layout.
Of course, if you consider any building older than 100 years to be "impractical", then maybe living in the historic centre of a city isn't for you? There are plenty of modern (and soulless) places to live in the more modern fringes of the city.
And I disagree - the new ESB headquarters on Fitzwilliam St doesn't look "silly" at all - it actually looks very well to my eye from the street. Unfortunately https://maps.app.goo.gl/NL2qtasuMNM89Nqg8 doesn't have enough detail to show it but certainly the materials and brickwork is of a high quality. It doesn't aim to be pastiche or fake as you call it, but it does respect the materials and elevation of the historic streetscape.
Nothing impractical about a four story building as such. The (normally five story) Georgian terraces are normally very long and narrow, though. This makes them difficult to turn into practical housing; you're looking at either awkwardly long narrow rooms, or rooms without natural light, if you turn them into apartments (and as single unit housing they're far too big for practical purposes). They also make for awkward offices (I've worked in one, back in the day).
You could... maybe make wider faux-Georgian terraces, I suppose, but at that point you're getting into the weird-looking anyway.
Probably because a lot of folks don't understand the 'old' styles and how they work. Brent Hull specializes in restoring pre-WW2 buildings, and designing new ones that follow the design rules:
* https://www.youtube.com/@BrentHull/videos
A break-down on how a Georgian house should appear (i.e., use the Golden ratio everywhere):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA&t=3m11s
Has a recent playlist, "New House Old Soul", on constructing new buildings (and additions) that harness the design rules of previous styles properly:
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEWB3ObiETMTGy11dF91...
It’s why many homes today are built off existing models. But you see it in higher-end homes.
Now, of course the required parts could become mass produced if there were the demand. And I agree it’s a simpler and beautiful style. But you can’t put a flat roof on them.
https://aw930cdnprdcd.azureedge.net/-/media/andersenwindows/... (There's some chance that those are even internal, which are longer lasting/easier to clean, but much less convincing owing to having all the wrong shadow lines.)
I can see a modern Georgian type thing though. Definitely nicer than so much of the garbage being built today.
As for glazing... I'm not 100% sure. I've heard there are ways to get glass panes that are better insulated. My other guess is that, had muntins continued to be popular, the market would have found something. There's nothing inherently inefficient about them.
For example, one option a local window company gave to me was to simple add some plastic covering on the inside of the window. It would not reduce the outward appearance at all, but would provide some insulation. As it is, our house is quite efficient and we don't actually have any insulation. The way they used to build houses (not open floor plan, multiple stories, etc) actually make them more pleasant to live in, in my opinion. Our only issue was that, when adding AC, the original forced air venting leads to a noticeable temperature differential due to the lack of an intake on the second floor, but we'll be fixing this soon. Plus, ceiling fans have basically eliminated the worst of the problem.
For your old windows (I have many still, mainly in the front) I recommend ensuring you have good weather stripping and that you have storm windows installed. That helps a lot. Mine are double hung sashes though so the pulley boxes are massive leaks but nothing I can do about that.
I guess I could just seal the windows shut and put insulation in the pulley boxes but they are still functional even though we rarely open them.
Our residential house design is even worse, they’re uniformay the most bland, cookie-cutter-McMansion-trash that’s built in a way that’s almost actively hostile to its environmental conditions.
Christopher Alexander's dissertation, "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" lays out a very compelling sociological explanation of how this happens.
TLDR: People initially create things (like houses) to solve local problems, usually their own problems, with the materials and methods they have locally available. As the craft develops, its practitioners start to compete directly with each other and the craft becomes "self-conscious." This competition finds increasingly esoteric "dimensions" to compete on, at the expense of solving the real-world problems the craft initially set out to solve. So consider e.g. early designers of chairs. They were looking for good places to sit that looked nice in their homes. Now, if you want acclaim as a chair designer, you have to design the most garish, over-the-top, wildly uncomfortable "chair" (sculpture) that you can.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
>before it's time to replace or renovate them after 25 years or so.
And secondly that is short especially since the ceramic rooftiles that predated them could last 70.
I find render is classic and beautiful but yes they are an ongoing maintenance issue to regularly repaint every decade or so and once the render has become damaged, rerendering the whole thing is eye-wateringly expensive. The main challenge is the right materials and expertise (lime render and porous mineral paint) which is expensive so people flipping a house will just bodge it with cement render and waterproof paints that will barely last a decade before it cracks, traps water, causes damp and starts coming way from the wall.
(Note that exposed stone also weathers and requires replacement which can make render/paint maintenance look very cheap).
A key part of the longevity of render is the design of other features e.g. you need correct channelling of water so it doesn't pour from roofs/windows down the render causing stains. This requires true skill and subtle architectural features like drip grooves carved under overhanging coping stones and subtle curves in the render itself (bell cast beading I think?). I am maddened by hokey designs that e.g. add a section of wooden facade above render which grossly stains the render below within months. It's just so careless and predictable. Any staining is a design fault that past experts knew how to avoid. There shouldn't be any "sources of colour" above render.
One of the joys of render is that you can personalise it with your own colours [2] which will stain less easily than white (grey is quite trendy) or even go for full graphic design [3] (I can't recall if those specific buildings were rendered - we have a tradition of drawing stone lines onto render so that it resembles limestone construction).
[1] https://images.mansionglobal.com/im-365825/social
[2] https://offloadmedia.feverup.com/secretbristol.com/wp-conten...
Isn't that always the case? I seem to recall that all architectural styles have been considered ugly 30-40 years after they were first in fashion. And then eventually they start to become appreciated.
When you pay a fortune for the land and building materials you can't really build something nice.
When you have to comply with a million regulations, costs go even higher if you want an individualized house. If you keep it blocky and without decorations you can keep it affordable.
You would never get permission to build the Parthenon because it's simply not energy efficient.
Personally I think you should be able to build your own house without regulations, but not to sell it (i.e. you have to demolish it to sell the land). It's the perfect compromise between safety and freedom.
The cost of complying with regulations when building a house isn't even particularly high. It's stuff like "use x thickness of insulation" and "design it with a protected fire escape route". It doesn't cost much at the design stage to take those into account. The dominating cost is materials and labour.
What regulations stop people putting ornamentation on their house?
So, building as cheap and fast as possible is important to stay afloat. Example: making house from prefabs is cheaper and faster comparing to building using bricks + pro brick laying technics (i.e. what you can call ornamentation).
Besides, we should also consider that while saying that ornamentation is good to have, it does not mean it would fit all the people.
Good idea is to have regulations limiting what exactly you can build in historical centers of european cities.
Kudos to Belgium to preserving its heritage so well, big thumbs down to being a black hole for architecture today.
The flip side of why people find a walk in nature lifts their mood.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/oct/19/demand-... [2] https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/the-psychological-cost-of-bor...
Repetition is one of the tools that help emphasize and create centers. Look at the building in the first photo in the article -- how much repetition there is in terms of shapes, architectural "molecules".
Just compare these dirty 19th century facades with a dirty facade of a house from the 70ies:
https://photographierer.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/DSC_23...
https://schall-fassadenreinigung.de/wp-content/themes/yoothe...
The latter looks absolutely filthy, while the former, although uncleaned for 150 years, still look nice.
I do not buy the efficiency argument given by Adolf Loos at all. What you gain in labor time by removing ornamentation, you will loose in renovation work and (urban) living quality.
Ornament might be an alternative: just make massed buildings look nice instead of demanding that they are broken up into a bunch of lego blocks.
A good thread by Alfred Twu here: https://twitter.com/alfred_twu/status/1715230266531475702
I also wonder if the trend away from ornament has something to do with the trend towards fancier materials and bolder colors -- wasserstrich bricks, wood facades, decorative plasters in bathrooms, highly polished pigmented concrete floors, aluminium window frames in unusual colors, etc. People need their interestingness fix :-)
With global warming, that is becoming more and more an advantage, rather than a defect!
And stalinist architecture gets called all sorts of names. This buiding [1] is located very close to where I live, an excellent example of very early 1950s stalinist architecture and also eerily similar to the "good" example from your linked tweet.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4527856,26.095487,3a,48.4y,3...
What do you consider to be the defining features of Stalinist architecture though? The Wikipedia page portrays it as more or less "whatever happened to be built during Stalin's reign, whatever the style".
[1] https://www.yankodesign.com/2021/12/28/creative-brick-design...
[2] https://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/10/kahrizak-residential-housi...
It's complicated because it has rarely been studied in an ideological-free manner (or not that I know of), so I'm basing my judgements mostly on what I've seen built around me from that era and by reading a couple of local architecture magazines back from those days, magazines that were actively putting forward said "stalinist" style.
I'd say that this definition: "whatever happened to be built during Stalin's reign, whatever the style" is generally correct, with a small correction when it comes to the "whatever the style" part, as in it looks to me that there was some consistency in said style going from the mid-to-late 1930s to Stalin's death (in 1953), so that "whatever" part is a little forced.
As per said style itself I don't know how best to define it, mostly neo-classical with intense tints of grandiloquence, for example this building from Bucharest, Casa Scânteii [1], is a very good example of that style (said building is a "scaled-down" replica of the Main building of the Moscow State University [2]).
A good starting point could be this wikipedia page of a "stalinist" architect named Alexey Shchusev, the style that I'm talking about can be seen in his works going from about ~1935 to his death, so I wouldn't include the Constructivist period (which was in place throughout the '20s) as part of Stalinist architecture proper, but maybe that's just me. For those that know Romanian there's a recently published book about Shchusev called Alexey Shchusev, An Architect of the Imperial Russian Style [4], and by the same author I now see that there's a more general book on Stalinist architecture called Die Architektur Stalins [5], this one in German.
Leter edit: There's also an English version of that book on Shchusev: Alexey Shchusev: Architect of Stalin's Empire Style [6]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Free_Press
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_building_of_Moscow_State_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Shchusev
[4] https://cartier.ro/libraria/arta/alexei-sciusev-un-arhitect-...
[5] https://www.amazon.de/Die-Architektur-Stalins-Bd-Bilddokumen...
[6] https://ribabooks.com/Alexey-Shchusev-Architect-of-Stalins-E...
My grandparents will endlessly complain about the lack of good quality products on the market (knives, power tools, clothing) but at the same time refuse to engage in locally-made albeit more expensive merchants.
Making buildings pretty may cost more (although, from my own understanding sourcing local tradespeople and using local materials ends up significantly cheaper over time) but the ROI is significantly better, both culturally and financially (pretty buildings age better, they become more appreciated over time in both financial and cultural value).
So is it the same with house goods? Are we just unwilling to accept that knives haven't got worse, it's just that we have mass-produced medium-quality low opportunity cost products that we can keep chucking out the window and complaining about? I rambled on, I totally agree that the efficiency of good/pretty architecture is completely understated.
Is a democratic election free if everyone voted freely, but was under the influence of widespread propaganda?
I'm not going to argue the political metaphor because I feel the parallels there are too far apart to be a useful comparison.
In this scenario, you can not “vote with your wallet”.
Different case when we are talking deliberately exclusive luxury products, but for general purpose items like "a really good quality knife" we absolutely could be turning them out in vast numbers.
Absolutely.
Actually, it's a bit different: the shop you bought it from knew you only seek for a lower price.
The thing they're actually missing is a mass-produced product that brings the cost down because of scale but at the same time is still designed with quality in mind. It's not that the best available knives got worse, the average $50 ones did.
It works for buildings too - whatever is the currently popular architectural style is typically what's is easiest to get. If everyone is getting pretty buildings, we can all get them without having to spend (much) more money.
For example, all rough wood framing is solid wood, all cabinetry is built from solid baltic birch plywood (zero OSB, zero MDF), stainless steel fasteners throughout, multiple layers of rigid insulation for through-winter occupancy, all cushions made with 1000d cordura, plumbed with PEX with Flair-it fittings, propane heat system, solar,etc.
My van is much lighter than RVs as a result, I don't need tandem wheels as most van RV builds do.
The most luxury of luxuriest RVs can't duplicate that. The overhead of hired labor and the coalescing of "we just do it this way" thinking among the RV trade results in a poor typical product.
Spending an extra 1 million on marketing gives me a far better ROI.
These are basically 0 sum, you want a dishwasher or a pretty overhang?
Idk your comment irks me like a populist demagogue saying everyone can have free free free.
In many cases a pretty building can be marketing. There are also many intangible effects such as the moral of people who work in said building.
Also like OP said pretty buildings are often cheaper over long term because people don't want to tear them down as often.
Just because it's harder to calculate/measure ROI doesn't make it non-existent.
> These are basically 0 sum, you want a dishwasher or a pretty overhang?
No one is suggesting to forgo basic amenities for ornamentation?
My 1920s house has no dishwasher, but is pretty. I added a dishwasher for a few hundred dollars. When I redid the molding in our house (took it all off, repainted, repaired, and put it back on), I took my mouldings to the wood store just for fun to see how much it would cost. The dishwasher was cheaper. Not even because it's that great moulding, but because they just don't make it like that anymore.
Not to say that they don't have valid complaints, but some of this is definitely selection bias. People don't complain about the things that have gotten better. For example, today, it's not rare for a car to last 10 years without serious issues. There are a bunch of car owners who have driven cars to 1 million+ miles and these aren't some specialty car, but rather the run-of-the-mill cars coming off of factory lines.
There's lots of good knives out there at price points that many people can afford. I personally own a Global 3 knife set (chef, paring, utility) that meets 99% of my cutting needs and cost $130. I've had them for 9 years and I expect them to last at least another 10 years. $130 is expensive, but not over a 20-30 year period. Same thing with my pots and pans (all-clad) which I expect to last me another 20-30 years, if not the rest of my life.
My iPhone is 3 years old. It has been dropped more times than I can count, but still looks new. The glass on it is simply better quality than what existed before. No, it won't last a lifetime, but it will last an acceptable amount of time for something that gets as much use as it does.
And with the internet, quality goods are more accessible than ever. With a few clicks, I have buy pens and paper from Japan, cooking-ware from France and Panama hats from Cuenca, even if I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
That said, my biggest complaint is with appliances. Good appliances exist (e.g. Miele, Speed Queen), but in general, there's little correlation between price and quality. You can buy an LG fridge for $1500 or for $4500, but they use the same crappy compressor, so the more expensive one won't last any longer (and in fact will probably break sooner because it has more features on it that can break).
The reason it's increasingly hard to find "good enough" in today's retail marketplace because 90% of us emphasize cost and convenience over fine design or workmanship. In past decades, if you wanted a solid product, you shopped at a bricks retailer you knew well (Sears, Macy's, Land's End) and you trusted their buyers to stock only good stuff. But today 90% of us shop online at retailers who stock mostly cheap disposable products because they're half the cost of "good enough" (and 1/10 the cost of heirloom), and because they can be delivered to to our door quickly and effortlessly. That's where double sigma (97%) of the supplier bell curve now. Unsurprisingly it takes a lot more effort for us to unearth the 3% that isn't ephemera, given we have to do the digging without retailers we trust.
The core of that problem is that this is a self-reinforcing destructive loop, and it's not just for tools but for everything these days. Cheap imports, especially from China, grabbed the masses that were just interested in price, and large chain stores grabbed the masses that didn't want to spend hours driving around small specialist stores. The remaining people were not enough to support the few stores that did still sell quality products, so they closed down, so even more people went for cheap large-chain stuff because they couldn't expect that they'd be able to find what they need reliably at a small, local store. A lot of formerly popular brands (here in Germany, most infamously AEG, Telefunken and Grundig) ended up going bankrupt and now also sell relabeled cheap Chinese stuff.
And now, the revolution is eating its children, as the deluge of scam products and dropshippers on Amazon shows.
When you have a clean white wall, with three square windows decisively set in one part, yeah, it looks bold and fresh. But after a few years you get a wall with those rainwater "tear paths" that just look sad because there's nothing else to catch the eye. If instead there were some sills, ledges or maybe just some brick surface patterns, those same water traces would be patina that's perceived as part of the ornament.
A lot of walls don't get washed every day though, even the flat minimalist ones. What makes sense for a school or a hospital or a courthouse might not make sense for a home or a condo.
We spend millions in the year before a building opens, then millions every decade it exists on maintenance and repairs. Having a full time washer would raise that quite a bit.
Window washers make hazard pay and have higher insurance costs than janitors because of the physical danger, do they not?
So what's that about?
Is the Looshaus, even though unornamented for the time, still more ornamented than contemporary standard? Or is it about something other than ornamentation? Or is it just my own personal judgement which is unusual or wrong (based only a picture, not being there in person) -- what do people generally think of the Looshaus today?
https://www.scruton.org/building-beautiful
I am also obsessed with traditional Japanese architecture. Lots of simple ornament, warm colors and materials, deliberate use of shadows and light.
Books:
Japanese Homes and their Surroundings
Japanese Architecture: An Exploration of Elements & Forms
"Why do you waste all that effort (on something that I, personally, don't enjoy or benefit from)?" is an argument I read between the lines all to often …
> Loos made ornamentation sound like something practiced only by primitive peoples or criminal deviants.
Loos didn't make ornamentation "sound like" something practiced only by primitive peoples or criminal deviants. That was his main point. His argument is
1. We're more evolved than primitive people.
2. Primitive people, degenerates, and criminals ornament themselves and their environments.
3. Therefore we've evolved beyond the need to ornament our selves and environment.
A simple difference in taste doesn't quite capture Loos' racism. Loos attempts to build a reality where he and un-ornamentalists are more civilized, cultured, and morally superior to others and ornamentation is evidence of such. He uses ornamentation to construct a difference and then uses that difference to validate his superiority.
Loos' argument rests on othering "primitive people" and makes makes six total references toward the Papuans to accomplish this. It's short so I'll list each one.
1. Comparing them to children - "At the age of two he[the child] looks like a Papuan"
2. Describing them again as immoral children - "The child is amoral. So is the Papuan, to us."
3. As cannibals - "The Papuan kills his enemies and eats them."
4. As a reckless ornamenter - "The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his rudder, his oars; in short, everything he can get his hands on."
5. Again compares them to children, and implies they are degenerates - "But what is natural for, a Papuan and a child, is degenerate for modern man."
6. That "we" are more progressed than primitive people. - "People progressed far enough for ornament to give them pleasure no longer, indeed so far that a tattooed face no longer heightened their aesthetic sensibility, as it did with the Papuans, but diminished it."
I can't stress enough how childish Loos himself comes across in the piece. It's a temper tantrum of an article and I'm honestly surprised it's taken seriously, or at least was. I'd encourage folks to read the original[1]. It's a five to ten minute read.
1. https://www.archdaily.com/798529/the-longish-read-ornament-a...
And I should keep my eyes more open for those things.
Funny how there's two complementary phrases that should ring the same alarm and are often used for the same (usually racist/classist/etc.) people:
- We've progressed beyond X, thus X is bad (and we're better for not doing X) - We've always done X, thus X is good (and we're better for not doing Y)
(The parenthetical obviously just being an excuse for unfounded hate.)
Sadly there are many more such examples, architecture was in a dark place in the 80s.
At least here it's just tastelessness at fault, as opposed to a concrete (pun intended) hatred of beauty...
This design was a collaboration among many groups, and had a long list of "as a homage to XXXX, we've included this design element." It almost certainly wasn't a serious entry, but that list of design elements apparently kept getting it enough votes to stay in the competition as they did each round of elimination. At the end of the competition, they looked at the remaining entries and realized that this was the only one that could be built for the amount of money in the bond issue. So it won.
It's pretty strange as the "cheap" option, because everything you touch is made of marble, brass or solid wood, the doors are huge and very heavy, every light fixture looks custom made, it's filled with artwork and sculptures, etc.
Beauty matters. We can have different definitions of what beauty is, and tastes change. But we still need beauty. We are not just purely functional organisms, whether or not our philosophy admits it. We have a sense of the aesthetic. We don't like ugly, and we don't like boring, and we don't want to be surrounded by either of them.
Ornamentation is taste, and taste is very cyclical. If you grew up in an over-the-top ornamented place, it's very understandable that you'd view the simple clean lines of modernist architecture as a revelation. OTOH, if you grew up in bland generic International Style places, it's perfectly understandable why you'd yearn for something beyond basic shapes. You can't separate taste from the environment you grew up in, your predisposition for novelty-seeking etc.
FWIW, I think we're near the end of the modernist cycle. A lot of us grew up in very bland environments and now we want something more. But 100 years ago, the same thing we're now decrying was a breath of fresh, calming air in a suffocating environment.
It would be impossible to summarize the entire "architectural dialog" as one thing, but let's be general. Inside these discussions, a lot of us laugh a people like Patrik Schumacher for constantly trying to make some battle of the -isms happen. Rybczynski has had a long and prolific career, and can be forgiven for being of an older generation who were taught that there was some ideological battle for what was "right" or good or beautiful in "architecture."
But today your typical architect is going to have their own design "style" or method, but also a pluralistic view that it's the diversity of approaches that makes architecture richer. Most architects I know could expound on their love for say Olson Kundig, David Chipperfield, Freddie Mamani, and Kengo Kuma in a single sitting.
I couldn't tell you a single architect who doesn't actively want to make beautiful buildings that elevate the human spirit. Rybczynski only uses the word "developer" once in the entire piece (even then it's just to mention that Wagner was one). In reality, it's the economic logic of modern development that has driven the enshittification of architecture hated by everyone - architects most of all.
So I guess, can you point me to some examples of modern architects showcasing the sorts of things they'd rather build?
I'm honestly not sure how you would classify something like this:
https://www.sensesatlas.com/freddy-mamani-neo-andean-archite...
With anything from
The former looks like something new, where culturally relevant ornamentation truly is given extra weight. The latter looks like any generic fancy building you could find anywhere in the world.
Which I think goes with what I said... there are a handful doing something interesting and they seem to have enough projects. It seems there would be demand. I notice that Mamani in particular is self-taught, which probably explains a lot of this.
The picture that's being painted online over the last few years has ultra-modern super-minimalist architects on one side and hyper-traditional maximum-maximalist architects on the other side.
I haven't seen many actual architects giving their take on it (they're probably out building stuff).
I was familiar with buildings by some of them, and looked up the rest. Excepting, as a sibling post does, Freddie Mamani, the best thing I can say about the ones that are not just straight up unsightly is that they are interesting, in the way in which an essay that a verbally gifted student wrote arguing for a nonsense position randomly pulled out of a hat can be interesting. Do you think that, if you polled people who have nothing to gain socially from signalling sophistication in modern architecture (this in particular excludes all architects and politically normal upper-middle-class white-collar workers), many would report that their spirit was elevated by them?
[1] https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/im_display.cfm...
Ultra modern architecture is still interesting but I like it when it goes beyond a white box and does something unique and striking.
[1] https://offloadmedia.feverup.com/valenciasecreta.com/wp-cont...
ex: *they were not easy to clean. Modern was easy to clean.
Which only added to my depression, as I felt like I was on Vogsphere. And then imagine a New England winter wind whipping through those rectilinear slabs. By all means, ornament your buildings. Make your structure an aesthetic.
The idea is that an unornamented building is just a single (arguably vulgar) symbol intended to represent something else. The example is a building shaped like a rubber duck. A decorated shed is a building with a purpose and then ornamented symbols attached to it to integrate it into its environment.
Hmm, that looks quite like a ripe off of the Central Post & Telegraph Head Office in Denmark.
https://media.homeanddecor.com.sg/public/2020/11/0-VillaCph_...
Central Post & Telegraph building is classified as Neo-Baroque[1], while the Harold Washington Library (of significantly later construction) reflects many of the Beaux-Arts[2] forms and ornamentation.
In the UK at least, many buildings have zero ornamentation, and are just plain brickwork, without even window ledges etc, and these look terrible to me.
The facelift they gave it was awful, and I would personally not call it ornamentation.
Lots of modern architecture seems to try and create the illusion/impression of ornamentation, without going to the trouble of actually ornamenting.
HN commenter, Architect, FountainHead reader
Wait...what?!