I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades now that technology has made this kind of thing (more) possible. We could be having so much more fun in architecture right now!
Perhaps this is because I've let Twitter radicalize me on this particular subject, but it seems like modern architecture is totally ideologically captured to be against this stuff.
There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.
There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.
The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)
My cynical take is that architecture has been fully captured by the wealthy elite.
The elites like things the masses dislike as a way to signal their social distances from the masses. By designing a building that conforms to their elite taste at the expense of nearly everyone else who has to look at the thing, it reinforces their power and control over the space.
It's the moral equivalent of buying a beachfront property and blasting noise every morning from a giant PA system just so that everyone trying to just relax on the beach knows who is really in charge.
A friend of mine wrote about neo-pastiche in Plessis-Robinson, France in Archiscopie magazine. He showed me very impressive images of styrofoam shaped as greek, roman and hausmannian elements sprayed with a cheap render slapped on a concrete building that end up gentrifying neighborhoods. Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ? I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum.
In the end, the construction industry is really a deciding factor : you only see, as a classic survivorship bias phenomena, what the best building with all the money in the world looked like, ie cathedrals, palaces, and expect every building to have the same standard today. It is not realistic, nor responsible. Cheap building for the masses have always been the norm!
>Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ?
I would call this a false dilemma. There are a bunch of examples in Manhattan of beautiful facades that are extremely ornate but are painted cast iron. It does not have to be styrofoam.
>I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum
First of all, I'm not even sure that modern buildings achieve these goals.
Like you are saying, you are speaking of cheap buildings for the masses. And a sibling comment talks about how people only look at the bottom line. If a building is beautiful, it is loved; if it is loved, it is more likely to remain. And a building that remains is best for ecology.
And also, buildings are not just for the owners, they are public works, and should be designed as such. An "esthetical addendum" is not mere vanity, it is an important contributor to quality of life in a city.
Modern architecture ideology is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.
But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.
My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.
In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.
In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.
"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.
Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.
The arts have always been influenced by the philosophy of their time.
However, there is a divide between vernacular and classical architecture. Vernacular is utilitarian and it is what most people build (you build your house to serve your needs) while classical is not only utilitarian but also communicates a message (authority in gov. buildings).
Most people find vernacular architecture pretty. For example, Florence, San Miguel de Allende, New Orleans, etc. All of them have different architecture caused by the locally available materials and the weather of the place. Contrary to popular belief most of their 'beauty' doesn't come from an old appreciation of the arts people, instead these buildings only met the needs with what was available and worked best.
For example, in the north of Mexico houses were built with thick limestone ('sillar de caliche'). The thickness helped as insulation (hot weather). The limestone was plastered with 'cal' in a light color with an 'aborregado' finish that helped reflect the sunlight thus keeping the house cooler. The houses were tall because hot air rises, windows looked almost like doors because people opened them during the night to let the air in. The buildings are beautiful but they are extremely utilitarian. Nowadays most houses in Mexico are built with cement and rebar, which is ugly.
The architect Leon Krier made the argument that all of this was a 20th century phenomenon caused by industrialization and fossil fuel dependency, which has not only affected buildings but how cities get built (urban planning). He believed this would end once fossil fuels reservoirs decreased.
This has been my hope for a while! I live in a 1911 house and the amount of small detail everywhere would be impossibly expensive by modern construction standards. I also like modern minimalism, but I know many of the drywall corners everywhere in modern homes aren't design decisions as much as cost savings measures.
We can, but will you pay for it? The standard house building a house is cheap - some of those decorations would increase the costs by as much as double - but they won't increase the value of the house.
I have a rule of thumb that seems to hold: until you get to about 3500 sq feet in a house people will choose larger over decorations where possible. Larger than that and you don't want to clean the house yourself (that is unless your wealth supports regular professional cleaning you won't go much larger). Of course as a rule of thumb it isn't a hard rule, some people want more space, others can live with less. As houses get larger people are willing for more decoration cost.
For apartments it is worse - renters rarely will pay extra to live in a nice building.
Yes. Aesthetic things are good for the soul in subtle ways. It's like making a split pea soup without a bay leaf. You wouldn't be able to figure it out, but you know something is missing and it makes most people sad even if they can't identify it.
If history has shown something is that minimalism always wins (don't confuse minimalism with the horrible/cheap building and design practices that are norm today)
you are right, i should have said simplicity and not minimalism (mostly in science and religion), oscillation/ movement and counter movement is always there in different formsthough
Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.
This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)
We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.
I like this general hypothesis, but dislike this formulation:
> This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
I don't find "gothic" design beautiful though I can recognize the skill and devotion it represents; I do love shaker and bauhaus and scandi design. There is no "objective sense" when it comes to beauty.
I think you could rephrase this as "where what's beautiful is no longer determined by the amount of skill and effort to construct it", which I think is also true but also more meaningful and much more accomodating to the range of actual "ordinary people's" tastes ...
However, while you may be correct that the range of opinions among "regular people" encompasses people who like Bauhaus or brutalism, it is important to acknowledge that such people are the minority (and, fair to add "by far" in most settings).
After seeing the real thing in a museum, I would love to have an Egyptian relief replica on the inside wall of my house. No sarcasm, I think it would be badass.
