Christopher Alexander (the architect and design theorist mentioned in the beginning of the article) wrote at length (and depth!) on the concepts underlying the sense of "liveliness" or "life" in spaces, and "quality" in general. He was pretty successful at capturing it too; his "Pattern Language" describes well a lot of the aspects that make spaces and structures coherent vs not.
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.
> 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.
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.
Skeuomorphic interfaces educated people to click for the first time on buttons which resembled buttons in real life. Having to click on unadorned words would have been too difficult. Which words are to click, which words are only to read? It still is difficult at times but 30+ years of collective education makes it possible.
You can't go wrong! His most important treatise - and the book I talk about more with UX people and software devs more than architects even - is A Pattern Language.
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.
There are a few! Depending on what aspect / approach you prefer. These four are my favourites:
"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.
Personally, not a huge fan of the overly-ornamented stuff, but I do think that the current architectural trends are overly... generic. Case in point; Fitzwilton House, in Dublin, a Brutalist office block recently demolished and replaced with a modern one. The original was, well, a lot of people didn't like it, but it was utterly unique. The replacement is a completely generic glass thing, almost indistinguishable from the next one down the canal, or literally thousands of others worldwide.
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.)
They're the same picture. Someone drew a rectangle in AutoCAD, then did some repeating offsets, handed it to the engineers: "make it work". All I see is rectangles in rectangles ad infinitum.
If anyone remembers the Kingdome in Seattle, surfing the lead up to demolition someone ran pictures of the original proposal. The artist rendering was a white building, that looked okay, maybe even good.
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 Kingdome was an engineering catastrophe on top of an architectural one. It was physically falling apart and deemed unsafe for use years before it was even paid off.
You'll be glad to hear that it's gone now, though the replacement isn't particularly inspiring. That sort of thing was definitely the low-point of Dublin's architecture, though; awful building.
You can tell how ugly a building is by how many trees are obscuring it in photos.
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:
I think the minimalist design trend came from the necessity of making mass production simpler and it still is lauded as “ultra modern” and futuristic because it makes good looking design easier and in turn faster and cheaper. It’s easier to throw away all the furniture and just put 4 white cubes on a white-paited room and call it minimalist interior design than actually choosing different pieces and colors that work together.
The main problem I see is that modern architecture robs cities and countries of their character.
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.
What you, I, and everybody else here hates and is responding to here is the design choices of major corporations who are larger than many governments and have the ability and incentive to push and use an anodyne and inoffensively bland style that fits in anywhere in the world of the modern global economy. The awards are part of the same system, trying to give legitimacy to itself.
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.
This is exactly the problem with Hudson Yards in NYC. Even now, the most likely image you'll see when searching for Hudson yards is of the rather terrible "Vessel" sculpture they plopped down in the middle. This is because all the surrounding buildings are so devoid of character that they're near impossible to photograph in an interesting manner.
You can find neoclassical buildings in Boston, Havana, Paris, Oslo, Moscow.
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
The problem with brutalism or glass buildings isn’t that it all looks the same or lacks local character. The problem is that they are ugly. It’s only when we are asking the second “why”—“why are they ugly?”—that we find out that, at least in part, these styles are specifically designed to avoid any sort of local or cultural flavor. Neoclassical architecture doesn’t have this problem because it intentionally calls back to Greece and Rome, reflecting a cultural heritage that is, in fact, shared all the way from Moscow to Boston.
To be clear on terminology--this isn't "Modern" architecture; it's "contemporary". Modern refers to a very specific set of movements. The demolished brutalist building the OP mentions is an offshoot of Modern. The replacement is not.
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.
It also seems like you would expect the practical considerations from environment and material availability to result in different looking buildings. For example pitched roofs and large windows in climates with lots of snow, or windcatchers, flat roofs, white paint and small windows in warmer places.
Much like the original post, the construction industry has an intimate understanding of the pricing of the plain box as a 'standard' and the non-plain box as a 'premium / luxury'. The resulting environment expresses bland uniformity as a standard cost and unqiueness as high-specialty luxury.
But is it exciting? Why? Personally I find the idea of a uniform “Earth” culture with no local identities as exciting as the idea of never being able to travel away my own local culture to experience a different one, that is, not exciting at all.
It might be kind of exciting if it stopped people from traveling around so damn much. But of course everyone will still take 2-4 weeks every year to fly to one of the same generic vacation destinations and double or quadruple their lifetime energy footprint.
I'm reminded of the last page of "Orbitsville" (Bob Shaw, 1975).
"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."
The “global civilization” spent 20 years trying to assimilate Afghanistan before just giving up and allowing a rebuilt Kabul and all of its bland contemporary architecture get overrun by a gang of medieval goat herders. I suspect the world has already reached peak homogenization and will increasingly splinter on cultural lines in the future.
The current trend in Belgium is to build houses like cubes and drap a variation of white plaster on it [1]. While this looks great the first couple of years, the outside gets dirty and not a lot of people pay for it to get cleaned/repainted.
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.
I feel we should bring back Georgian architecture [1]: on the one hand it is quite plain and so it fits well with modern sensibilities (and modern budgets that don't allow for a lot of faff, and the lack of skilled labor), but because of its strong emphasis on symmetry and a modest amount of ornament on doors, windows and railings, it looks vastly better than the lime rendered boxes of today. It also looks great with flat roofs, and flat roofs are here to stay -- why bother with nice roof tiles when you have to cover them with solar panels anyway.
I live in a city that has a bunch of it; in practice, it's incredibly impractical, and the few modern attempts to imitate it while providing an actually usable building tend to end up looking absurd.
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.
Not sure what's impractical about a four story building? Without lifts/elevators, four stories hits the sweet spot in terms of density vs accessibility.
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.
> Not sure what's impractical about a four story building?
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.
At first glance, these look nice to me? Perhaps they look silly up close. I'm not sure what you mean by impractical though, I don't consider tall and narrow to be essential to the style, though many of the 18th and 19th century townhouses in the style surely were.
> I live in a city that has a bunch of it; in practice, it's incredibly impractical, and the few modern attempts to imitate it while providing an actually usable building tend to end up looking absurd.
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:
Why is a 4 storey house impractical? And the only thing that looks ridiculous to my eye is the top floor which, for some reason, abandons the classical look and slaps some hideous modern handrails and flashing on top.
It's 4 floors per family. An elevator or do a lot of stairs everyday. In both cases more time to move around than an equivalent 1 or 2 floors house. But if they do the stairs it keeps them fit.
My parents have a 3-floor townhouse and it's far, far more practical than the goofy sprawling "open floorplan" designs. Plus not having neighbors above/below you is a great tradeoff. I don't think this is as impractical as it would appear to someone not living in one (that's been my experience at least).
The floor space of an actual Dublin Georgian townhouse is frankly enormous - the houses seem narrow but they’re very deep. We’re talking 5000 square feet between the 4 floors in a country where the average house is 1000 square feet. And that’s in the densest part of a dense, old city.
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.
> There’s a reason well maintained Georgian houses sell for approaching €2 million euro.
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.
That’s a problem with the square footage, not the number of stories. It is well within the realm of possibility to have a reasonably sized 3 or 4 story townhouse. It can even have Georgian design elements while being reasonably sized.
You can get a new home built in Georgian Revival style but it’s going to be expensive. Home builders rely on easy to source, mass produced, standard parts. In my experience the cost goes way up. For instance, a truss can’t be used for the roof and windows are custom, etc. and there’s going to be a lot of windows.
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.
I dunno, I'm not a stickler for details. For example, I know that windows with many small panes ("muntins") are not cost-effective today and partially defeat the benefits of double and triple glazing, and the alternatives (fake bars that are glued on or between the glass) look shockingly bad... but any kind of partition at all (casement, fixed pane + tilt-turn pane, etc.) already adds visual interest and does not look out of place, as e.g. is evident in this photo of Georgian architecture with windows that I'm guessing are not historically accurate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Baggot_S...
My home has muntins, and I have to say they are incredibly convenient. If a ball goes through a window or something, it's extremely easy to replace; and very cheap. Highly recommend.
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.
Nowadays the window that was broken would just be replaced. Luckily they pop out easily!
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.
I think some of the higher-end window grills (a "stuck on the outside muntin" for a short-hand description) look fine from any distance that they're typically seen.
Having a higher end window where the mutton/grill is dominated on both sides is best imo. It looks awful from the outside when it’s an interior stick-on as there’s no dimension and line you mentioned lack of shadow lines. You generally have to go to the higher end though, like a Marvin Ultimate. 30 of those on a house, installed, just set you back $60k+. But they look great.
I had windows like those. The glued cross shaped frame was not actually glued and it was on both sides. It looked beautiful but it was a nightmare to clean. Four small glasses instead of a large one. It was wood, single layer glass. I replaced them with something that reduced the heat flow.
I live in a British Georgian rendered building (think South Kensington London [1]).
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).
Regarding [1], I cannot understand for the life of me how come people located in places where it rains comparatively a lot (which is the case of Belgium) choose that solution with flat roofs for their individual houses, it doesn't make any utilitarian sense, you're just inviting rain water into your house at one moment or another.
I think it makes perfect sense. Modern EPDM or fiber-reinforced bitumen roofs are very unlikely to leak before it's time to replace or renovate them after 25 years or so. They provide ample space for solar panels and for a heat pump, all out of sight. No need for gutters. They are easier to insulate. You don't end up with a bunch of barely usable attic space you don't need (even worse if we're talking about a hip roof instead of a gable roof.) It just takes a bit of effort to not make them look like a cheap cardboard box, whereas a house with a nice sloped roof has instant appeal.
Belgian houses are exceptionally ugly. Very badly proportioned. Belgium has the most beautiful cities in the world, but what that really means is that all the attractive areas predate the 30s. Once outside, it's a shockingly ugly country. Architects cannot seem to balance anything, weirdly positioned windows everywhere (e.g. https://www.a2o-architecten.be/work/vaartkom, this is so typical of all the dreck I saw going up there). Sad to see you use Leuven as an example. When I lived there some decade ago, all new buildings going up were unfathomably ugly. The old core was perfection though.
Kudos to Belgium to preserving its heritage so well, big thumbs down to being a black hole for architecture today.
I like traditional houses very much, but there are two things you to consider: cost and regulations.
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.
I don't agree at all. The kinds of regulations that define how buildings are made are all pretty compatible with traditional building techniques. Obviously modern houses need to have insulation and air tightness, but that's not incompatible with block and timber construction used in old houses.
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?
It is not just regulations.
It is because land + regulations are expensive, cutting costs is important. Now we also could count high interest rates.
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.
> I predict that in 20-30 years these houses will be seen as one of the ugly architectural trends of my time.
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.
History goes quite far back. The extremely rapid change of pace is quite recent. Architectural fast fashion if you will. Rather environmentally unfriendly i'd say since it allows for easy updating to modern specs that still almost never outmatches the carbon bomb that is the actual construction/materials.
It looks like everywhere modern architecture, that's the problem. There is no real culture behind it, only the insular culture of professional architects seeking out approval from other professional architects. There is no locality to it, no local materials or methods.
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.
Yeah architecture in this country is real bottom of the barrel stuff, bar a few specific buildings (the new UTS and Central Park buildings in Sydney come to mind).
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.
One thing I've noticed by people watching, both in real life and digitally, is that even if there's a lot of things to do, people won't stick around if the buildings around them are blah and flat. You could have an amazing square with all sorts of little fried food carts and comfortable benches or a digital square with lots of minigames and events, but people won't go there if they're surrounded by modernist and post-modernist architecture comprised of flat glass and concrete surfaces, no matter how planar or curved the overall forms actually are. Such buildings have a "This is a place of function, not humanity" aura that people unconsciously pick up on.
According to Christopher Alexander et al. in A Pattern Language, it's about edges: you want buildings to have a non-zero-width "edge" to them that creates an additional zone that is (a) not the building (b) not the open space beyond it. APL has several nice examples of this.
C.A. talks about centers -- edges are one of the aspects that help create centers, but there are many others.
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".
But this aura is also a lot of social conditioning. People pick up on this aura because people have been taught that ornament is art based architecture and modern designs are function based architecture.
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.
A part of me thinks that our weariness of spending "more" on architecture and beauty in cities is the same kind of weird frugality people experience with day to day goods.
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.
Your grandparents' complaining isn't entirely pointless - sure, you can get a quality product from local merchants, but the price is disproportionately higher.
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.
In both cases, there is often a lack of genuine quality/value over the cheaper options anymore, too. Many higher priced tools and architectural options are now the cheap stuff with a better grade of finish and a higher price tag.
I built a campervan in between jobs and I take pride in bragging about the quality of my build design, especially because I installed much higher quality materials and systems for around 1/3 the cost of a manufactured RV.
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.
Sounds like an awesome build! It's amazing how flimsy most of them are, even the ones you pay top dollar for. A friend and his wife were doing some major renovations to their house and bought a "luxury" 5th wheel camper to park onsite and live in during the renovation. At some point their heater failed and in the course of pulling it out and fixing it, we were totally blown away by the cheese grade construction of the thing! I'd always thought it was a "cheap campers" thing, but everything was particle board and plastic, except the road frame.
It's definitely true. Just as China has a reputation for making cheap goods, when China will make goods to whatever quality is paid for, up to and including world class craftsmanship. It's just the shop you bought it from wanted to sell at a lower price, so they paid for the cheap option.
Ironically, with the way production scales, if more people were willing/able to go for the high quality products, they'd probably wind up being somewhat cheaper than they are now.
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.
I think that has happened to some extent. Compare a 2008 smartphone to a 2023 one at like price point (or even cheaper); the 2008 one is a pretty fragile flimsy thing by comparison, generally (likely not even water resistant). Of course, smartphones benefited from _massive_ scale.
> Ironically, with the way production scales, if more people were willing/able to go for the high quality products, they'd probably wind up being somewhat cheaper than they are now.
It could be the result of people spending less time in public spaces - people often just go outside, drive a car to somewhere, get inside. So they care less about public spaces being pleasant.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 market for heirloom quality products has always been tiny, and ever will be. But the availability of "good enough" products has never been better than it is today. You just have to put in more effort to find them since 95% of advice found online is shill.
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.
What are you arguing? What's unfree about the section of the knives market relevant to the example? The government isn't forcing/incentivizing them to buy the cheaper products. Economic considerations are.
The average consumer lacks the knowledge and skill to objectively assess the quality of a knife, the seller is aware of that and manipulates them through advertising.
Is a democratic election free if everyone voted freely, but was under the influence of widespread propaganda?
If they weren't able to objectively assess the quality, they surely wouldn't be complaining, would they? But you mean pre-sale assessment, and that's again not an issue of skill because this is a repeat game. They are well aware by now that they're being manipulated but still price wins over quality.
I'm not going to argue the political metaphor because I feel the parallels there are too far apart to be a useful comparison.
This is predicated on viable options being present and available to consumers. In a lot of cases, for a lot of products, the options offered are a curated selection by the dominant forces, packaged up to appear different, but offering fundamentally very little actual difference.
In this scenario, you can not “vote with your wallet”.
I want a building with the pretty overhang. A dishwasher is $600 on Amazon. A pretty overhang on an existing building is priceless... you can't add it after-market. It always looks strange
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.
Ironically, we're also losing a lot of efficiency because cities are demanding setbacks, bumps, differences in height etc. for bigger buildings to avoid ending up with drab rectangular blocks, but that leads to more heat loss due to more surface exposed to the environment, higher use of materials and a higher risk of water ingress because there's a ton of weak points where different surfaces connect. (It also just doesn't look very good.)
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.
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 :-)
Either way it doesn't matter: buildings are going to be either heated or cooled nearly ever day. Some seasons you heat them, some you cool them, but rarely is the ambient temperature close enough to rely on passive systems for comfort. Of course local climate matters, some places never need any heating/cooling, some need is only some days. Humans have started to demand the building be more comfortable.
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.
Yeah, I think the building you show is a pretty good example of what Twu would like to see: one big mass, made pretty with consoles, balconies and cornices. You can do a more modern style too, though. I especially like Persian-inspired modern brickwork [1] [2].
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".
> What do you consider to be the defining features of Stalinist architecture though
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]
Unless it was in a city with implausibly clean air, that 19th century one has probably been cleaned at least once (at great expense, probably). Otherwise, it'd be practically black. And cleaning these things is _expensive_, and takes ages. IIRC doing one smallish (but highly ornamented) 19th century building in my university took about a year. By contrast, the house could be cleaned up in a few days. Modern buildings, clad in, essentially, plastic (or just having all-glass surfaces), even easier, of course.
My personal "founder fantasy" (not a founder type at all) for the last ten years or so has been a renderer/plugin for architecture visualisation that simulates weathering. For exactly the reasons you state. If you want a building to still look good after the honeymoon phase is over, you have to consider how it will look after a few years of realistic maintenance. If an architect talks about sustainability (and they all seem to do, these days), unless they can show evidence of having considered aesthetics after two decades of minimum maintenance it's all just babble.
I've been preaching this myself for quite a while: the way the aesthetics of minimalistically clean surfaces work is by emphasizing new-ness while they are in fact new. That does look awesome, I'm guilty of enjoying that look myself, but when that new-ness disappears, the same design emphasizes its absence. Ornaments are the the key to graceful aging in architecture.
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.
The key is maintenance. If you wash that wall every day it will never develop water stains, and a flat unadorned wall is easier to wash than one with a lot of nooks and crannies.
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.
Because washing it every day would drastically raise the lifetime cost of the building.
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?
But even the Looshaus, the example of an at the time scandalously unornamented building -- on first glance at the picture, seemed to me more comfortable, asthetically pleasing, human-centered, and spirit-raising than most contemporary new construction.
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?
This reminds me of "Why Beauty Matters", a documentary by Roger Scruton, which fundamentally transformed my views on architecture and beauty in general
To me, Loos' argument comes across as some grand rationalisation for a simple difference in taste. I.e. "I don't like it, but to state my opinion as a fact, I came up with this story about efficiency"
"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.
Not just efficiency, but degeneracy and criminality. The article fails to mention his own degenerate sex crimes, however. Much of his own work is not devoid of ornament, and ironically these works stood the test of time, in my opinion. His oversimplified work may have been startling in its day, today it looks bland next to the many many utilitarian buildings that followed this trend. Reduction inevitably leads to conformity. A cube looks like a cube, no matter who specified its dimensions.
The headline image (Harold Washington Library, Chicago, 1987) is a good example of how Post Modernism got things badly wrong - with its haphazard ornamentation grabbing styles from all over the time/place and tastelessly agglomerating them together without coherent thesis.
Sadly there are many more such examples, architecture was in a dark place in the 80s.
The original downtown library in Chicago closed in the late 1970s and moved to temporary space; they spent a full decade arguing about a permanent replacement before finally agreeing to issue a bond and to hold a design competition.
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.
I couldn't disagree more - it's a beautiful building with a strong presence. The only thing I can see being a "bit much" are the adornments on the roof.
I agree it's rather haphazard and incoherent, but given it's a library and the variety of material it contains I think the lack of coherency somewhat works.
We moved recently. Our previous house served us well, with adequate space for all the kids. My wife never complained. But this time, as we were getting ready to hunt for a house, she said, "Can our next house be pretty?"
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.
I've been lucky enough to go to a few folk art museums around the world. Buildings made by peasants can be richly ornamented, a stark contrast to the landscape, or fitting in with it. The designs showcase their craftsmanship, their relationship to their faith, their connection to their culture, and to the natural world. It reminds one of what it means to be a human who cares about more than function. Art and culture may not be the sole domain of humans, but it's one we've mastered. The spaces we live in and around should be filled with it.
People are looking for objectivity in vain. Beyond basic structure, there is no objectivity in art, music, architecture, fashion, etc. That is, you can make the argument that a discordant piano piece is objectively worse than one that follows well-worn progressions, and that would be pretty believable, but saying that a piece with more tremolos than one with no tremolos is objectively better just doesn't work.
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.
HN would probably be interested in another book by the author, Witold Rybczynski: One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684867303). It's born out of a writing prompt for a newspaper article - what is the most important tool (for construction specifically) of the past millennium? Prof. Rybczynski decided on this answer, and gives a history of the screw, both as a fastener and as a way to regulate motion in a machine. It's short but still quite comprehensive, even involving looking for screws in medieval drawings.
Hi, architect here. I'll completely sidestep specific arguments or a criticism of the critic, except one thing. The idea that there's some kind of competition of ideologies inside the entire discipline of architecture is dated.
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.
> expound on their love for say Olson Kundig, David Chipperfield, Freddie Mamani, and Kengo Kuma in a single sitting.
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?
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).
Let's suppose this is true. If it were true, I'd expect there to be at least some architects producing renderings of the sort of architecture they would like to build, if even just for design exploration. However, when I do see these sorts of experimental architecture designs online (granted, I'm not really 'in on' the right spaces), they typically are all the same style of 'modern bland'. Where're the architects showing us what they would like to build that's actually interesting, and pretty? I've seen a few architects reviving classical styles, but they seem to be the minority. And interestingly enough, those architects seem to be finding some success getting projects funded.
So I guess, can you point me to some examples of modern architects showcasing the sorts of things they'd rather build?
Well I did. Of the four, only Freddie Mamani with his Neo Andean stuff seemed to be doing anything truly different and culturally influenced. The rest are just doing 'Global modern bland'.
I'm honestly not sure how you would classify something like this:
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.
Are you, like me, confusing the main picture illustrating the article (which is the Harold Washington Library in Chicago) with the building the author talks about (which is the Board of Education Building in Philadelphia)? Because the Board of Education Building seems to have an adequate number of windows [1]. The Chicago Library does have few windows, but I'd attribute that to its purpose (the lower floor contains an auditorium, multi-purpose room, and exhibit hall) [2].
I used to love ultra modern white-box architecture, but recently I gained a new appreciation for the buildings of my home city in Europe that were built in the late 19th and early 20th century. These buildings are very ornate and I find them beautiful to look at. For example [1] is our old post office. When I look at that I can't help but think, are modern architects even trying?
Ultra modern architecture is still interesting but I like it when it goes beyond a white box and does something unique and striking.
Those buildings were covered in sooth and ugly to look at when Modernism was being born. Have you seen photos of London before the great cleaning? It looks like a dark pit. 21st century arm chair design crit needs to ‘contextualize’* its criticism..
ex: *they were not easy to clean. Modern was easy to clean.
Whenever I found myself having to engage with administrative arms of the Massachusetts government, I found myself in Boston's government district with its distinctive brutalist architecture: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_nbq2z7LV5VM/Sw71CQ9s1dI/AAAAAAAAB...
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.
Wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we designed our living spaces with some nature in mind. We plant non-native plants that don't support any bees, butterflies or birds. We don't get to smell the bloom of wildflowers in spring. We don't feel a breeze of cool air as we walk by a forest. Streams are safely redirected under roads so we no longer hear the trickle of water. Our lawns are crafted to be as uniform as possible. We go from one lifeless place to another every day. Of course we are bored!
I agree they share elements, and that’s totally expected given their architectural style lineage.
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.
The examples of unornamented buildings in the article are actually highly ornamented, but just more subtly.
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.
My wife and I purchased a 1920s home for exactly this reason. It's not a magnificent home by any means, but at that time, they seemed to pay more attention to small details. Simple things like the kinds of molding used. The kinds of window frames on the outside. The attention paid to the facade rather than just the function of the home on the inside. The leading on the glass of the builtins (which conveniently also makes it very easy to replace broken pieces). The art deco themes on the door. The stair railings which are both functional, yet artistic at the same time. Not to mention the lighting, which is so far removed from 'Restoration Hardware generic chic' that it almost makes you want to cry to think about the kind of thing we find acceptable today. Everything is subtle but it makes life better to live in something pretty rather than meh.
"The latter presumably referred to the current fashion for tattoos among European royals, including Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II."
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.