Why have we mostly given up on ornamentation in architecture? Ross Douthat correctly says today (based on an essay by Samuel Hughes) that it's not because ornamentation got too expensive. Just the opposite: we can mass produce high-quality ornamentation today far more cheaply than any previous era—both in absolute and relative terms.
From my perspective, the decline of beauty, grace and ornament in public architecture reflects a collapse of humanist confidence and religious faith, an abandonment of the assumption that human artifice is tapping into some deeper cosmic order, a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself.
This is sort of typical of Douthat, but even putting my personal perspectives aside I think it's plainly misguided. To see why, let's dive down a little bit into what kinds of buildings we're talking about.
Houses. The typical house of yesteryear is clearly no more beautiful than even the dreariest tract house of today.
Mansions. That is, houses of the rich. Some of these were quite beautiful in prior times. But the same is true today. Fallingwater is unornamented but Instagrammable in a whole different way. Take a helicopter tour of the Malibu coast and you'll see hundreds of stunning mansions in all kinds of architectural styles.
The Sandcastle House and the Wave House on the Malibu coast.
Cathedrals. This is a matter of taste, to be sure, but modern cathedrals are often quite spectacular and ancient ones are sometimes nothing much.
Retail shops. These have never been anything special.
Factories. Again, using this in the broadest sense (everything from granaries to steel mills), these have never been anything more than functional boxes.
Apartment houses: As far as I know, these have always been ordinary rectangular boxes subdivided into rooms, usually built as cheaply as possible in order to maximize rental income.
So far, I don't see a case for much difference at all between prior eras and today. But there are two more categories:
Civic buildings. This is a tricky one. Were city halls in the past uniformly beautiful? Hardly. Some were, while others were fairly ordinary. The same is true of modern city halls. Ditto for concert halls, museums, arenas, and schools. Government buildings are probably uglier on average today. Overall, I might score this one in favor of previous eras, but it's a close call.
The Crescent Tower in Qatar.
Large commercial buildings. Now we're cooking. When people talk about ugly buildings, this is what they almost always mean: skyscrapers. The Chrysler building is beautiful while the World Trade Center is mundane. But keep in mind that skyscrapers have been around for little more than a century, so we're only comparing the early 20th century and the postwar 20th century.
It's true that modern skyscrapers are often plain glass and steel towers, but this is mostly for reasons of cost and modern taste, not because of a fatal surrender to bad ideas about aesthetics and human life itself. Those prewar buildings tended toward art deco and rococo, but it wasn't because they were built in the Middle Ages when large buildings were monuments to God. It's because that was the style of the time.
Long story short, complaints about modern architecture almost always revolve around big skyscrapers, and these are commercial buildings, not pieces of art.
There's also a recency bias at work here. We tend to remember only the old buildings that were spectacular and therefore are still around. We've forgotten the thousands and thousands of mediocre ones. The Pantheon in Rome, which started off Douthat's essay, is a case study in this. Most old Roman buildings didn't survive to the present day, but the Pantheon did because it was lucky enough to be transformed into a Christian church before looters got to it. What's more, it's not even that beautiful. It's just a big dome and a fairly pedestrian portico. It's impressive, and we tend not to build very many big domes these days outside of football stadiums, but especially viewed from the outside it's pretty ordinary.
The Sphere in Las Vegas. It's a very different kind of dome than the Pantheon, but is it really any less beautiful or impressive?
Long story short, I'm skeptical that architecture in general is any less beautiful than it ever was. Sure, downtown Peoria is probably pretty humdrum, though I'll bet downtown Feronia was too. And you'll never convince me that brutalist architecture is anything but a huge mistake. But if we could compare the entire corpus of ancient and Renaissance buildings with the entire corpus of modern buildings, I'm not sure I'd put my money on the old guys.
49 thoughts on “Maybe we build more beautifully today than we think”
rick_jones
Were Victorian houses of yesteryear not “common?”
rick_jones
the World Trade Center is mundane
Is?
azumbrunn
It's a Douthat column for God's sake. Not worth spending any intellectual energy on.
Solarpup
Very, very rarely he comes up with something worth reading and thinking about. Never in terms of politics, and certainly not anything that he subsequently ties to his political and/or religious beliefs (as if there is a difference between the two). However, he occasionally does something interesting along the lines of film criticism. I remember him writing a blog on why Disney should have hire Ben Affleck to direct the Star Wars sequels and thinking, "Hmmm, he's got some good points here." (They probably wouldn't have been any worse than the JJ Abrams ones.)
His constant harping that if just believed in Jesus harder then everything would be great is very tired. Doesn't matter what the issue is, he thinks if we just went to church more things would be better.
MattBallAZ
Yes. Eff Douthat with a sponge and a rusty hammer.
kkseattle
The fact that Douthat didn’t mention Frank Lloyd Wright—or even The Fountainhead, for God’s sake—reveals that he just dialed this in from his vacation.
There is a reason that some of us walk into Versailles and are simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Visit the reception room of any tinpot dictator and you get plenty of ornamentation. And it’s gross.
But I’m from the West. I like log cabins, arts and crafts, WPA lodges, and mission style (although I do like hunting for gargoyles in East Coast cities).
cld
But you have to be careful, sometimes the gargoyles are hunting back.
tomtheelder
A class of buildings you are missing is public schools, particularly high schools. When I see an old high school in what was then just a small city I am almost always impressed with the expense lavished on making it grand. Those schools are clearly an expression of civic pride. Todays new schools are far more utilitarian. I may be biased by only noting and recalling the impressive ones and the remaining population might be biased by cities refurbishing the grand buildings and demolishing the mundane ones. Still, now that graduating high school is all but universal instead of the significant achievement it once was, our attitude toward the schools has changed.
dilbert dogbert
I went to schools that were built in the 1910's and 20's. By today's standards they were fire traps and not earthquake resistant.
Fire and earthquake standards make them all now just one story with at least two exits for each room and windows you can climb out of. Now we have to design to active shooter standards.
bouncing_b
Over the past 15 years, Seattle taxpayers laid out millions to modernize our 1920s-era high school buildings and the results are mostly spectacular. They visually upgrade their neighborhoods and are functional for the 2020s. (And they meet modern earthquake and fire standards; it can be done).
Even though my kids are more than a decade out of high school I am proud of our willingness to tax ourselves for such a public good.
bouncing_b
Over the past 15 years, Seattle taxpayers laid out millions to modernize our 1920s-era high school buildings and the results are mostly spectacular. They visually upgrade their neighborhoods and are functional for the 2020s. (And more earthquake and fire resistant; it can be done).
Even though my kids are a decade out of high school I am proud of our willingness to tax ourselves for such a public good.
ScentOfViolets
Mies van der Rohe has much to answer for. Bertrand Goldberg, maybe not so much, but boy those corn cobs ... I'm a big fan of Googie, BTW, if you want to calibrate my opinions on architecture.
msobel
Alternate praxis. Anything Ross Don't Do That writes is a lie. (If I claim an opinion that is false is that lying?)
What is often interesting is analyzing why he wrote it. In this case, it seems like the 10927th variation on the argument, "Kids these days." or "It was better before antibiotics were discovered."
Creigh Gordon
When it comes to public spaces in general, I think that the influence of car culture is pretty much a disaster. I believe that some underused malls are being transformed into residential uses, that might work out well.
FrankM
I'm also not convinced that the amount of ornamentation is less. But I think it's also true that the type of ornamentation has changed. If, like Ross Asshat, you pine for the foregone days of yesteryear, you'll think of this as a sign of whatever you already decided is true. If you read his columns regularly, they're all the same: everything is a sign of declining culture, religiosity, etc. etc.
iamr4man
You’d be hard pressed to find anything I agree with that was said by Donald Trump/his lackeys but upon reading this post by Kevin I was reminded of the new(ish) Federal building in San Francisco that I hate, hate, hate so I looked it up and found this:
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture. The order mentioned the building as an unsatisfactory design, saying, "GSA selected an architect to design the San Francisco Federal Building who describes his designs as 'art-for-art’s-sake' architecture, intended primarily for architects to appreciate. While elite architects praised the resulting building, many San Franciscans consider it one of the ugliest structures in their city."[15] This executive order was revoked by President Joe Biden in February 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Federal_Building
I remember the first time noticing it thinking how horribly ugly it was and wondering what exactly it was because it looked like a prison but I thought that unlikely. Reading the Wikipedia article I noted that it seems to have been designed to annoy the people who have to work there:
“Mayne believed that the federal government should be a model in the promotion of worker health and exercise. This led Morphosis to specify passenger elevators that stop only at every third floor, requiring many employees and visitors to then walk up or down one or two flights of stairs to reach their destinations. There are also elevators for the disabled that stop at each floor, but they have become commonly used by the able-bodied as well, causing overcrowding.”
If I were Nancy Pelosi it is not a building I would want to have my name attached.
cld
The key problem with a lot of modern architecture, and modern art, is that it's made to look good in a photograph while the experience of actually being with it in real life is entirely ignored in such a way that the person standing in front of it or walking through it feels the most basic element of their experience is absent or aggressively ignored, and we end up with a sense of a dismissive or insulting intention.
jt
Yes, the CAD rendering looks good. So many modern buildings are kind of two dimensional, with boring flat surfaces that have panels of different materials.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, people walked past buildings all the time. There's time to really look them this way. You don't see the design and the details from a car window. So many days are indoors -- car -- indoors now.
And buildings were the big purchase. No cars or other modern stuff for status.
martinmc
My are of interest, movie theatres are a great example of the rise and fall of ornamentation.
The Palaces of the 20's to mid-30s are amazingly ornate and decorated, hence the preservation of so many (alas, the loss of so many more).
The non palace variety were often lovely iconic deco/moderne. Sometimes similar, but never the same.
Post war ornamentation was mostly abandoned. The rise of the multi-screen, chain operated theatre in the 70's and 80's led to the McDonaldsization of the motion picture theatre. Characterless, unmemorable and disposable.
By the 90's there were at least attempts to replicate palaces, though they were more tributes to concession stands than movies.
Europe, at least, had some innovations in architecture for their movie theatres, but I don't know there stuff as well.
As movie theatres appear to be on their last legs for most of the country, it will be interesting to see what will be considered worth saving.
aldoushickman
"The Palaces of the 20's to mid-30s are amazingly ornate and decorated, hence the preservation of so many (alas, the loss of so many more)"
Again, this is selection bias, as Kevin noted. The stuff from the 20s and 30s that made it until today were the ones that people decided to keep around for a century. There were plenty of garbage buildings back then, just as there are plenty of garbage buildings around today; we just see the ones today because we live in the 2020s and not the 1920s.
That said, I definitely appreciate the style of the old movie houses that were nice enough to last until the present. But it's worth not fetishizing the past. A lot of old architecture amounted to things that we would find abhorent (servant's quarters/spaces) or foolish (rigid, constrained structures that are hard to retrofit with new technology) or wasteful (energy inefficient and hard to insulate window structures, drafty interiors that don't accomodate good HVAC) or reliant on primitive materials (we have much better steel, glass, and composites than we did 100 or even 50 years ago).
J. Frank Parnell
Some of the worst ugliest architecture is the “ brutalist” designs widely built in the fifties. Yet according to Trump this was when America was great.
cmayo
I think brutalism has its place and can have a certain appeal.
aldoushickman
Agreed. I lived in DC for a while, and I actually sorta like the brutalist style government buildings. Solid, efficient, useful, and unconcerned with being flashy--exactly what government ought to be, afaic.
If you want gilded government buildings, human history (and, sadly, present) is littered with idiotic royalists and strongmen who looted their society's economies to ensure that the aristocracy got to live and work amongst marble, crystal, and gold. Brutalist buildings are a refreshing and, dare I say it, democratic rebuke to all that nonsense.
cmayo
Those are exactly the buildings I was thinking of.
I actually like how the Pentagon and J. Edgar Hoover buildings look, for example. Their form suits their purpose.
SnowballsChanceinHell
Good god. There is nothing democratic about Brutalism. It is authoritarianism manifested.
What do you do for a living? How old/educated are you? I'm trying to imagine the life course that generates a person who sneeringly associates traditional ornamentation with "idiotic royalists and strongmen" and yet is clearly ignorant of the association between brutalism and totalitarian communist dictatorships.
cld
Also, the buildings of the past with highly ornamented exteriors often have interiors that are starkly utilitarian, or, to the modern mind, ill-considered. The opposite is often the case today, where the interior can be very comfortable and attractive while the outside, the part facing the public that almost everyone has to live with, will be, at best, a plain lump, and often a lump that doesn't work with any of the other lumps around it, and that is what gives the impression of the lousiness of our constructed environment.
ColBatGuano
This. The Pantheon might be "beautiful" or "impressive", but it's not really functional as anything other than a church and even that is questionable. Building enormous cathedrals today would be a monumental waste of time and money.
MrPug
tl;dr Douthat is a fucking moron.
Joseph Harbin
“There's also a recency bias at work here. We tend to remember only the old buildings that were spectacular…. We've forgotten the thousands and thousands of mediocre ones.”
Very true. That’s how our memory works, especially our cultural memory. Those sentences are equally true if you substitute any number of words for buildings: books, songs, movies, and so on. Movie stars, athletes, presidents et al. all seemed bigger than life when we were growing up. Some were worth the buzz. Many were not. Even today’s biggest names seem rather ordinary at my age.
I do miss some things about the past. Like the old New York Times. I understand it was not as great as I remember it. But I don’t think it was ever this bad.
Kevin is right about brutalism. A mistake.
cmayo
There isn't much ornamentation these days because there's no profit incentive in it. People are so desperate to buy or build anything that even the worst architects and builders can turn a tidy profit with ease. And when they're the competition for the good architects and builders, why would they have any incentive to spend more and do better?
They don't, so they don't. So we have ugly shit.
SnowballsChanceinHell
It's not so much profit incentive as cost. Bespoke ornamentation requires far more human labor (and more skilled human labor) than standardized construction techniques. And the costs, risks, and timeline of standardized construction techniques are well-known, while bespoke ornamentation can add delay and risk to a project.
When the marginal cost of human labor is low, as compared to the marginal cost of materials, you get beautiful ornamentation. When the marginal cost of human labor is high, you get standardized components that snap together like legos.
Andrew
The classic fallacy of survivorship bias. Only the nice looking houses that have some merit are left so of course we look at them and think that all old houses were of the same quality. That said, I can think of a few houses around which would look nicer with the addition of a few grotesques and gargoyles.
D_Ohrk_E1
01. Above all, one does not get to complain about not having nice things if one is not willing to pay for nice things.
02. It's easy to conflate style and ornamentation -- as is clear in your chosen examples -- to the extent that one might consider Post-Modernism to be inclusive of ornamentation. But I assure you, Po-Mo is not the only expression of ornamentation. If only your eyes were truly open, you would have noticed that most of Las Vegas is pure ornamentation. And Disneyland.
03. Street Art/murals is a response to the lack of ornamentation, covering up plain walls. So in a sense, our modern world is rich with ornamentation. Go search for Kamea Hadar's work in Hawaii. His mural of Obama is one particularly popular one but he also did a full height mural on an affordable housing project, Hale Kewalo Apartments.
aldoushickman
"Street Art/murals is a response to the lack of ornamentation, covering up plain walls."
Similarly, the fact that we all have access to increasingly huge glowing rectangles that can display anything we want means that static dumbmatter walls lacking ornamentation is less and less a problem.
D_Ohrk_E1
Some people prize Banksy's works such that they rip out parts of walls so that they can retain and preserve a piece of ornamentation that was meant to be ephemeral.
jeffreycmcmahon
Douthat is a deranged idiot and everything he says should be ignored.
weirdnoise
UCI, just down the road from you, has some fine examples of Brutalist architecture. It's especially striking at night.
tribecan
Most everything in the built landscape in the US was built by developers. We’ve never really had a developer culture that esteemed architecture over profit, so our cities and suburbs look the way they look: mostly pretty cheap and ugly. The beautiful cities of Europe are so because they were built by kings and princes and wealthy families who competed to build more beautiful houses than their peers. Conservatives believe so much in the bottom line that they’ve never wanted to give governments, at any level, the power to impose aesthetic standards. And they’ve been attacking the whole idea that government can do anything well for decades. Which makes it less likely that civic architecture will have the funding to compete with the great buildings of the past. The best architecture of today is quite beautiful, it seems to me one of the great periods in the history of architecture. But in a nation built by real estate developers who care only about the bottom line we aren’t likely to as many great buildings as we would in a culture that valued beauty over profit.
MindGame
I think it's pretty easy to point to eras in which houses and retail shops -- even some factories -- were very broadly beautiful or at least went together harmoniously. Many neighborhoods in cities all over the world -- even several in the US -- provide still extant examples. What many of the buildings in these places share is having been built in adherence to a prevailing design canon, generally before modernism excised purely decorative elements from the standard building design practice.
Now, there are certainly beautiful, individual buildings in the modernist style or later, but they tend to be isolated examples from particularly masterful architects. The great advantage of the design canons, both aesthetically and practically, was they they provided a set of rules and organizing principles of design elements which even averagely talented architects, or even builders alone, could successfully apply. This resulted in the construction of quite attractive buildings on a very large scale.
Although I reject the kinds of stylistic mandates some conservatives would like to see widely established, I do empathize with the sentiment. It would be wonderful to see the rise of cultural movements that develop organically from within society with the goal of creating new decorative styles for broad application. Our fragmented multi-culturalism makes this a great challenge, but maybe whatever decorative style or styles coming from this would just need to reflect and express this cultural diversity.
shapeofsociety
Modernist architecture is a big part of the reason for NIMBYism and the problems it has caused. Prior to the 1950s, nobody much cared about historic preservation because they were confident that if an old building got demolished it would be replaced with a better one. That changed after WWII. Penn Station is the most famous example of a beautiful and much-loved old building that got demolished and replaced with something horrendous, but it's not the only one. Modernist architecture is mostly bad, and mostly worse than what came before it, and this is why we now have so many people agitating to block the demolition of old buildings and prevent the construction of new ones. The architects betrayed the people, the people lost trust in them, the people passed laws to stop them from doing things.
Civic buildings most definitely got worse after the war. Before the war we got nice things with marble and Greek columns; after, we got ugly gray boxes going up in DC. Nice city halls and courthouses are usually prewar structures.
I don't mind modernism in skyscrapers, but in civic buildings it is gross. Buildings built by democratic governments should be designed to please the public, not impress fellow elites with their defiance of popular taste.
shapeofsociety
Douthat is on to something here: Back when ornamentation was expensive and out of reach for people who were not rich, it was a status symbol, something that impressed fellow elites. Once ornamentation became cheap and you started seeing it in the homes of ordinary people, it ceased to be impressive and the elites abandoned it. "Tacky" is the word the rich use to describe things that look expensive to untrained eyes but are actually cheap. "Tasteful" means things that are actually expensive, and especially things that are not obviously expensive to those not "in the know".
cld
'A house is a machine for living' is almost the worst idea about anything anyone's ever had.
fabric5000
you owe Peoria an apology. I was there recently and it’s nice. Has a small riverfront, a great convention center, and some nice looking older buildings in a compact downtown.
pjcamp1905
I stopped reading when he said buildings are ugly because we don't have sufficient faith in god. After that, there is nothing more that needs refuting.
alltheusernamesaretakenreally
I have a confession. [Looks around, whispers]. I never want to see another French Cathedral again. Maybe because I was dragged to so many of them when visiting France as a teenager but they all sort of ended up looking the same...yeah Notre Dame is cool and I'm glad they rebuilt it.
Note this isn't anti other religious buildings, Spanish churches can be interesting (very gothic!) and in Italy they often incorporate stuff left over from the Romans. But I just got sick of the endless parade of French Cathedrals...
aldoushickman
Just want to say that I find it somewhat astonishing that, in a blog whose commentariat so frequently bemoans the lack of housing/high housing prices, folks in this thread here are whining that the problem with housing is that it isn't pretty enough.
I'm perfectly happy with my house, and am glad that I didn't have to pay an extra X% for it simply to appease the aesthetic sentiments of a bunch of looky-loos who apparently believe that I should pay more for an overdesigned dwelling to make them happy.
Special Newb
The sphere is absolutely an eyesore and should be nuked from orbit. The Pantheon even without paint is light years more beautiful.
Were Victorian houses of yesteryear not “common?”
Is?
It's a Douthat column for God's sake. Not worth spending any intellectual energy on.
Very, very rarely he comes up with something worth reading and thinking about. Never in terms of politics, and certainly not anything that he subsequently ties to his political and/or religious beliefs (as if there is a difference between the two). However, he occasionally does something interesting along the lines of film criticism. I remember him writing a blog on why Disney should have hire Ben Affleck to direct the Star Wars sequels and thinking, "Hmmm, he's got some good points here." (They probably wouldn't have been any worse than the JJ Abrams ones.)
Hard to take anyone seriously who worries about the Star Wars sequels, except for Mr Plinkett.
https://youtu.be/FxKtZmQgxrI?si=d6zvHU8lS3Kx4NKr
His constant harping that if just believed in Jesus harder then everything would be great is very tired. Doesn't matter what the issue is, he thinks if we just went to church more things would be better.
Yes. Eff Douthat with a sponge and a rusty hammer.
The fact that Douthat didn’t mention Frank Lloyd Wright—or even The Fountainhead, for God’s sake—reveals that he just dialed this in from his vacation.
There is a reason that some of us walk into Versailles and are simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Visit the reception room of any tinpot dictator and you get plenty of ornamentation. And it’s gross.
But I’m from the West. I like log cabins, arts and crafts, WPA lodges, and mission style (although I do like hunting for gargoyles in East Coast cities).
But you have to be careful, sometimes the gargoyles are hunting back.
A class of buildings you are missing is public schools, particularly high schools. When I see an old high school in what was then just a small city I am almost always impressed with the expense lavished on making it grand. Those schools are clearly an expression of civic pride. Todays new schools are far more utilitarian. I may be biased by only noting and recalling the impressive ones and the remaining population might be biased by cities refurbishing the grand buildings and demolishing the mundane ones. Still, now that graduating high school is all but universal instead of the significant achievement it once was, our attitude toward the schools has changed.
I went to schools that were built in the 1910's and 20's. By today's standards they were fire traps and not earthquake resistant.
Fire and earthquake standards make them all now just one story with at least two exits for each room and windows you can climb out of. Now we have to design to active shooter standards.
Over the past 15 years, Seattle taxpayers laid out millions to modernize our 1920s-era high school buildings and the results are mostly spectacular. They visually upgrade their neighborhoods and are functional for the 2020s. (And they meet modern earthquake and fire standards; it can be done).
Even though my kids are more than a decade out of high school I am proud of our willingness to tax ourselves for such a public good.
Over the past 15 years, Seattle taxpayers laid out millions to modernize our 1920s-era high school buildings and the results are mostly spectacular. They visually upgrade their neighborhoods and are functional for the 2020s. (And more earthquake and fire resistant; it can be done).
Even though my kids are a decade out of high school I am proud of our willingness to tax ourselves for such a public good.
Mies van der Rohe has much to answer for. Bertrand Goldberg, maybe not so much, but boy those corn cobs ... I'm a big fan of Googie, BTW, if you want to calibrate my opinions on architecture.
Alternate praxis. Anything Ross Don't Do That writes is a lie. (If I claim an opinion that is false is that lying?)
What is often interesting is analyzing why he wrote it. In this case, it seems like the 10927th variation on the argument, "Kids these days." or "It was better before antibiotics were discovered."
When it comes to public spaces in general, I think that the influence of car culture is pretty much a disaster. I believe that some underused malls are being transformed into residential uses, that might work out well.
I'm also not convinced that the amount of ornamentation is less. But I think it's also true that the type of ornamentation has changed. If, like Ross Asshat, you pine for the foregone days of yesteryear, you'll think of this as a sign of whatever you already decided is true. If you read his columns regularly, they're all the same: everything is a sign of declining culture, religiosity, etc. etc.
You’d be hard pressed to find anything I agree with that was said by Donald Trump/his lackeys but upon reading this post by Kevin I was reminded of the new(ish) Federal building in San Francisco that I hate, hate, hate so I looked it up and found this:
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture. The order mentioned the building as an unsatisfactory design, saying, "GSA selected an architect to design the San Francisco Federal Building who describes his designs as 'art-for-art’s-sake' architecture, intended primarily for architects to appreciate. While elite architects praised the resulting building, many San Franciscans consider it one of the ugliest structures in their city."[15] This executive order was revoked by President Joe Biden in February 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Federal_Building
I remember the first time noticing it thinking how horribly ugly it was and wondering what exactly it was because it looked like a prison but I thought that unlikely. Reading the Wikipedia article I noted that it seems to have been designed to annoy the people who have to work there:
“Mayne believed that the federal government should be a model in the promotion of worker health and exercise. This led Morphosis to specify passenger elevators that stop only at every third floor, requiring many employees and visitors to then walk up or down one or two flights of stairs to reach their destinations. There are also elevators for the disabled that stop at each floor, but they have become commonly used by the able-bodied as well, causing overcrowding.”
If I were Nancy Pelosi it is not a building I would want to have my name attached.
The key problem with a lot of modern architecture, and modern art, is that it's made to look good in a photograph while the experience of actually being with it in real life is entirely ignored in such a way that the person standing in front of it or walking through it feels the most basic element of their experience is absent or aggressively ignored, and we end up with a sense of a dismissive or insulting intention.
Yes, the CAD rendering looks good. So many modern buildings are kind of two dimensional, with boring flat surfaces that have panels of different materials.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, people walked past buildings all the time. There's time to really look them this way. You don't see the design and the details from a car window. So many days are indoors -- car -- indoors now.
And buildings were the big purchase. No cars or other modern stuff for status.
My are of interest, movie theatres are a great example of the rise and fall of ornamentation.
The Palaces of the 20's to mid-30s are amazingly ornate and decorated, hence the preservation of so many (alas, the loss of so many more).
The non palace variety were often lovely iconic deco/moderne. Sometimes similar, but never the same.
Post war ornamentation was mostly abandoned. The rise of the multi-screen, chain operated theatre in the 70's and 80's led to the McDonaldsization of the motion picture theatre. Characterless, unmemorable and disposable.
By the 90's there were at least attempts to replicate palaces, though they were more tributes to concession stands than movies.
Europe, at least, had some innovations in architecture for their movie theatres, but I don't know there stuff as well.
As movie theatres appear to be on their last legs for most of the country, it will be interesting to see what will be considered worth saving.
"The Palaces of the 20's to mid-30s are amazingly ornate and decorated, hence the preservation of so many (alas, the loss of so many more)"
Again, this is selection bias, as Kevin noted. The stuff from the 20s and 30s that made it until today were the ones that people decided to keep around for a century. There were plenty of garbage buildings back then, just as there are plenty of garbage buildings around today; we just see the ones today because we live in the 2020s and not the 1920s.
That said, I definitely appreciate the style of the old movie houses that were nice enough to last until the present. But it's worth not fetishizing the past. A lot of old architecture amounted to things that we would find abhorent (servant's quarters/spaces) or foolish (rigid, constrained structures that are hard to retrofit with new technology) or wasteful (energy inefficient and hard to insulate window structures, drafty interiors that don't accomodate good HVAC) or reliant on primitive materials (we have much better steel, glass, and composites than we did 100 or even 50 years ago).
Some of the worst ugliest architecture is the “ brutalist” designs widely built in the fifties. Yet according to Trump this was when America was great.
I think brutalism has its place and can have a certain appeal.
Agreed. I lived in DC for a while, and I actually sorta like the brutalist style government buildings. Solid, efficient, useful, and unconcerned with being flashy--exactly what government ought to be, afaic.
If you want gilded government buildings, human history (and, sadly, present) is littered with idiotic royalists and strongmen who looted their society's economies to ensure that the aristocracy got to live and work amongst marble, crystal, and gold. Brutalist buildings are a refreshing and, dare I say it, democratic rebuke to all that nonsense.
Those are exactly the buildings I was thinking of.
I actually like how the Pentagon and J. Edgar Hoover buildings look, for example. Their form suits their purpose.
Good god. There is nothing democratic about Brutalism. It is authoritarianism manifested.
What do you do for a living? How old/educated are you? I'm trying to imagine the life course that generates a person who sneeringly associates traditional ornamentation with "idiotic royalists and strongmen" and yet is clearly ignorant of the association between brutalism and totalitarian communist dictatorships.
Also, the buildings of the past with highly ornamented exteriors often have interiors that are starkly utilitarian, or, to the modern mind, ill-considered. The opposite is often the case today, where the interior can be very comfortable and attractive while the outside, the part facing the public that almost everyone has to live with, will be, at best, a plain lump, and often a lump that doesn't work with any of the other lumps around it, and that is what gives the impression of the lousiness of our constructed environment.
This. The Pantheon might be "beautiful" or "impressive", but it's not really functional as anything other than a church and even that is questionable. Building enormous cathedrals today would be a monumental waste of time and money.
tl;dr Douthat is a fucking moron.
“There's also a recency bias at work here. We tend to remember only the old buildings that were spectacular…. We've forgotten the thousands and thousands of mediocre ones.”
Very true. That’s how our memory works, especially our cultural memory. Those sentences are equally true if you substitute any number of words for buildings: books, songs, movies, and so on. Movie stars, athletes, presidents et al. all seemed bigger than life when we were growing up. Some were worth the buzz. Many were not. Even today’s biggest names seem rather ordinary at my age.
I do miss some things about the past. Like the old New York Times. I understand it was not as great as I remember it. But I don’t think it was ever this bad.
Kevin is right about brutalism. A mistake.
There isn't much ornamentation these days because there's no profit incentive in it. People are so desperate to buy or build anything that even the worst architects and builders can turn a tidy profit with ease. And when they're the competition for the good architects and builders, why would they have any incentive to spend more and do better?
They don't, so they don't. So we have ugly shit.
It's not so much profit incentive as cost. Bespoke ornamentation requires far more human labor (and more skilled human labor) than standardized construction techniques. And the costs, risks, and timeline of standardized construction techniques are well-known, while bespoke ornamentation can add delay and risk to a project.
When the marginal cost of human labor is low, as compared to the marginal cost of materials, you get beautiful ornamentation. When the marginal cost of human labor is high, you get standardized components that snap together like legos.
The classic fallacy of survivorship bias. Only the nice looking houses that have some merit are left so of course we look at them and think that all old houses were of the same quality. That said, I can think of a few houses around which would look nicer with the addition of a few grotesques and gargoyles.
01. Above all, one does not get to complain about not having nice things if one is not willing to pay for nice things.
02. It's easy to conflate style and ornamentation -- as is clear in your chosen examples -- to the extent that one might consider Post-Modernism to be inclusive of ornamentation. But I assure you, Po-Mo is not the only expression of ornamentation. If only your eyes were truly open, you would have noticed that most of Las Vegas is pure ornamentation. And Disneyland.
03. Street Art/murals is a response to the lack of ornamentation, covering up plain walls. So in a sense, our modern world is rich with ornamentation. Go search for Kamea Hadar's work in Hawaii. His mural of Obama is one particularly popular one but he also did a full height mural on an affordable housing project, Hale Kewalo Apartments.
"Street Art/murals is a response to the lack of ornamentation, covering up plain walls."
Similarly, the fact that we all have access to increasingly huge glowing rectangles that can display anything we want means that static dumbmatter walls lacking ornamentation is less and less a problem.
Some people prize Banksy's works such that they rip out parts of walls so that they can retain and preserve a piece of ornamentation that was meant to be ephemeral.
Douthat is a deranged idiot and everything he says should be ignored.
UCI, just down the road from you, has some fine examples of Brutalist architecture. It's especially striking at night.
Most everything in the built landscape in the US was built by developers. We’ve never really had a developer culture that esteemed architecture over profit, so our cities and suburbs look the way they look: mostly pretty cheap and ugly. The beautiful cities of Europe are so because they were built by kings and princes and wealthy families who competed to build more beautiful houses than their peers. Conservatives believe so much in the bottom line that they’ve never wanted to give governments, at any level, the power to impose aesthetic standards. And they’ve been attacking the whole idea that government can do anything well for decades. Which makes it less likely that civic architecture will have the funding to compete with the great buildings of the past. The best architecture of today is quite beautiful, it seems to me one of the great periods in the history of architecture. But in a nation built by real estate developers who care only about the bottom line we aren’t likely to as many great buildings as we would in a culture that valued beauty over profit.
I think it's pretty easy to point to eras in which houses and retail shops -- even some factories -- were very broadly beautiful or at least went together harmoniously. Many neighborhoods in cities all over the world -- even several in the US -- provide still extant examples. What many of the buildings in these places share is having been built in adherence to a prevailing design canon, generally before modernism excised purely decorative elements from the standard building design practice.
Now, there are certainly beautiful, individual buildings in the modernist style or later, but they tend to be isolated examples from particularly masterful architects. The great advantage of the design canons, both aesthetically and practically, was they they provided a set of rules and organizing principles of design elements which even averagely talented architects, or even builders alone, could successfully apply. This resulted in the construction of quite attractive buildings on a very large scale.
Although I reject the kinds of stylistic mandates some conservatives would like to see widely established, I do empathize with the sentiment. It would be wonderful to see the rise of cultural movements that develop organically from within society with the goal of creating new decorative styles for broad application. Our fragmented multi-culturalism makes this a great challenge, but maybe whatever decorative style or styles coming from this would just need to reflect and express this cultural diversity.
Modernist architecture is a big part of the reason for NIMBYism and the problems it has caused. Prior to the 1950s, nobody much cared about historic preservation because they were confident that if an old building got demolished it would be replaced with a better one. That changed after WWII. Penn Station is the most famous example of a beautiful and much-loved old building that got demolished and replaced with something horrendous, but it's not the only one. Modernist architecture is mostly bad, and mostly worse than what came before it, and this is why we now have so many people agitating to block the demolition of old buildings and prevent the construction of new ones. The architects betrayed the people, the people lost trust in them, the people passed laws to stop them from doing things.
Civic buildings most definitely got worse after the war. Before the war we got nice things with marble and Greek columns; after, we got ugly gray boxes going up in DC. Nice city halls and courthouses are usually prewar structures.
I don't mind modernism in skyscrapers, but in civic buildings it is gross. Buildings built by democratic governments should be designed to please the public, not impress fellow elites with their defiance of popular taste.
Douthat is on to something here: Back when ornamentation was expensive and out of reach for people who were not rich, it was a status symbol, something that impressed fellow elites. Once ornamentation became cheap and you started seeing it in the homes of ordinary people, it ceased to be impressive and the elites abandoned it. "Tacky" is the word the rich use to describe things that look expensive to untrained eyes but are actually cheap. "Tasteful" means things that are actually expensive, and especially things that are not obviously expensive to those not "in the know".
'A house is a machine for living' is almost the worst idea about anything anyone's ever had.
you owe Peoria an apology. I was there recently and it’s nice. Has a small riverfront, a great convention center, and some nice looking older buildings in a compact downtown.
I stopped reading when he said buildings are ugly because we don't have sufficient faith in god. After that, there is nothing more that needs refuting.
I have a confession. [Looks around, whispers]. I never want to see another French Cathedral again. Maybe because I was dragged to so many of them when visiting France as a teenager but they all sort of ended up looking the same...yeah Notre Dame is cool and I'm glad they rebuilt it.
Note this isn't anti other religious buildings, Spanish churches can be interesting (very gothic!) and in Italy they often incorporate stuff left over from the Romans. But I just got sick of the endless parade of French Cathedrals...
Just want to say that I find it somewhat astonishing that, in a blog whose commentariat so frequently bemoans the lack of housing/high housing prices, folks in this thread here are whining that the problem with housing is that it isn't pretty enough.
I'm perfectly happy with my house, and am glad that I didn't have to pay an extra X% for it simply to appease the aesthetic sentiments of a bunch of looky-loos who apparently believe that I should pay more for an overdesigned dwelling to make them happy.
The sphere is absolutely an eyesore and should be nuked from orbit. The Pantheon even without paint is light years more beautiful.