The nice thing about your articles is that even when they fail to answer their questions, they are still fascinating to read and think about. So this time.
I don’t think that you could have ever answered the particular question, because, I suspect, the question itself is framed in the wrong way. You see it as a question about architecture, while I’d think that the architectural expression of it is just one aspect of a much wider phenomenon.
For one, ornaments have not only disappeared in architecture, but all throughout everyday life. Cutlery used to be heavily ornamented (I still have a knife of my grandmother’s with all sorts of leafy ornament going around its handle), drinking glasses were, the salons of the Titanic were, and if you look at historical medical or lab equipment in a museum, you will see that even medical instruments and lab tripods for beakers used to come with lion feet. Modern times have done away with *all* of that, not only with architectural ornaments. And this, I think disproves your conclusion: for it is today trivial to 3d-print an ornamented knife-handle or pen holder for your desk, but nobody does so. It’s not that we don’t have the wealth to introduce beauty into our lives. It is rather that our standards of beauty have changed. Today, beauty is seen in the direct opposite of ornament: the stark simplicity of Zen, Japanese architecture’s straight lines and right angles, and its popular version: IKEA chic. One can still buy heavily ornamented garden chairs from cheap Chinese factories, but nobody wants to. We think of ornaments as garish and stark simplicity as aesthetically attractive.
Why have our aesthetic preferences changed? I don’t think that you could pinpoint one single reason. For lab and medical equipment, it’s clearly utility: medical knowledge about infections and contamination prescribes that such equipment should be easy to clean and disinfect, and the same applies to cutlery to some extent. You want a knife that will reliably be clean after rinsing it off, without having to poke through the ornament with a toothpick to remove any sticking bits of food.
Another thing is a cultural shift in the perception of luxury. I think it was Karl Lagerfeld who said (but I might be wrong about the source): “Today, luxury means to have an ironed T-shirt in your wardrobe.” The richest, trendiest men, the rulers of today’s world, come dressed in turtlenecks, T-shirts and jeans: from Steve Jobs to Zuckerberg. Even suits are suspect: only crooks like SBF or Trump insist on suits and ties. The more affluent the wearer, the more they “can afford to dress badly” seems to be the perception of it. And the same applies to architecture. Only a newly-rich lottery winner would build a mansion with marble doves fluttering over the ornate balconies. When Steve Jobs or Bill Gates build their houses, they are either modelled on simplified folk architectural motifs (“Mediterranean arches”) or clean modern lines without obvious ornamentation. But as with the T-shirt, which has to be “ironed” to signify luxury, the un-adorned Scandinavian style house has to have almost invisible ornamental touches: the contrast in the colours of the wooden beams; the positioning of the spotlights; the outside vista as it is framed through the windows. It is the now the *restraint* that makes the ornament aesthetically valuable, not the exuberance.
Yet another point might be efficiency: we love it. YouTube videos have to be short and to the point. Nobody likes flowery prose or long intros. We don’t have the patience for art that takes too long, or for a meal of many courses. McFood delivers the goods as quickly as possible. And this might also be a reason why we want our architecture to reflect this efficiency, the ease and speed that we want to surround and characterise our lives.
In the end (and sorry for the long comment), I don’t have any more answers than you. But I suspect that the answer to the architecture question is much more complex, involving a good deal of explaining the mindset of 20th and 21st century modernity. I also don’t think that our future will necessarily contain ornamented space stations *for the reasons you mention.* We might get ornamented space stations at some point, but I suspect that it will be just because of a swing in fashion, or maybe it will never happen because of reasons of practicality. Who knows. Anyway, a fascinating question and a great read. Thanks!
When I worked in a shop that was doing some custom-molded plastic parts, the story went that the first part off the line cost $200,000. Subsequent ones cost a nickel.
Alternative hypothesis: "Architectural ornamentation" is not the correct analysis of the observed phenomena. For example, your very first image is Egyptian columns. I highly doubt that was so much an example of showing off your wealth like le goût Rothschild for them as much as it was an attempt to make the building into a site of magic and to properly immortalize the pharaohs as gods and the souls of the worthy as being in the blessed fields in the afterlife. When you get to later architecture, the purpose it serves starts to seem even more obvious because then we're talking about Christian architecture and architecture of other modern religions, and that has a religious significance, not merely a decorative one. The function of "architectural ornamentation" of Christian churches, Hindu temples, etc. is to make the building holy, not to show off wealth or personality. We don't think of stained glass windows and cathedrals in churches, minarets and prayer rugs in mosques, or statues of gods and goddesses in Hindu temples as ornamentation because we know what they're for so readily that the fact this is at least seen as having a purpose (even if it's not your personal belief) is obvious.
The idea that there's "ornamentation" that can show status solely because of its age seems to be very much a Gilded Age invention to me. Everything else is religion, magic, or "magico-religion." By that standard, yes, all the modernist architecture would I think very much have "ornamentation" as well such as the beams you made fun of. It expresses a belief in progress and the future as opposed to just leaving the beams off and being more rustic or what have you. Speaking of science fiction architecture, I don't think it's all necessarily sleek. Sure, the Jetsons is, but alien type of architecture tends to go back to being ornate-looking, even though this is mostly because it's covered in different kinds of technology or bio-organic matter. In other words, once you get far enough into the future that you're basically back to magic and religion, it looks ornate again. This is basically what I think the real end goal is insofar as there ever really is an end goal.
Mar 24·edited Mar 24Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois
The main gap I see in your argument is that ornamentation was used in ways that didn't just signal wealth. At least in American cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
For example, I live in a renovated shotgun tenement building in Boston that was built in 1906. It was not build by a high-class family with any desire to signal wealth, yet is has a good deal of ornamentation. (Mainly crown molding on the roof line, but also sculpted arches above the doorway).
Sure, the buildings in the historically rich part of town (Back Bay) are more ornamented, but the buildings in the historically poor parts of town (North End, East Boston) are not 0 ornamentation the way modern construction is.
And, to add even more complexity to this, infill housing in my neighborhood often has matching ornamentation (crown molding on the roof line and pretty arches above the doors), which suggests that it is economically feasible to include even today)!
Il y a toujours des modes et des tendances, la disponibilité des ressources, puis l’héritage culturelle. J’ai été surprise par la différence des palais japonais comparativement au palais de style renaissance en Europe, construit à une époque similaire pour une fonction similaire.
Il y a autour les maisons de subsistence construite massivement sans fla fla. Alors, les nobles se sont-ils fait avoir, puisque ils voient des maisons peu jolies et décousues, alors que le peuple voit le merveilleux château!
Aujourd’hui, on peut tout faire! Il y a quand même différents courants architecturaux en cours, mais l’air du temps est, en effet, plus tôt épuré.
Étienne, j’ai confiance qu’un jour tu influenceras le monde avec tes goûts somptueux et tous voudront une maison de style étienienne.
Another element I think might play a role is that people often don’t think of architecture as isolated but as coherent style in a landscape.
When middle class people comissions things for their house is often as a form of individual expression, but a solution to the outside architecture problem should be more collaborative. I bet people wouldn’t want a neighborhood where every random house is a different style or a mishmash of varying design elements. Like a park where every lot belongs to a different neighbor and everyone decides to cultivate different plants and can’t agree on what the ecological project should be overall.
Whenever people talked about buildings being ugly I always sorta didn’t understand because I’m the kind of guy who thinksy house is what happens *inside* the walls (I’m therefore also attracted to the form follows function mantra), which is usually much more personalized. When people talk about buildings *in general* being ugly they’re not just talking about their particular home (as you said, there are some forms of decoration that are cheap enough that if someone really wants it they can go for it). Rather it’s an issue about how to handle the aesthetic commons, the landscaping of public space. Just decorating your home won’t do it and it’s not worth the effort if no one else goes along.
People sometimes solve this through municipal rules which might be coercive and incur in unnecessary costs for homeowners. The dilemma is finding a political solution that allows people to manage their collective space without falling into exclusionary-preservarionist rules that impede development or limit individual aesthetic freedom.
Thought-provoking. Of course, there's an interesting meta-story about how it is that something one drafted as recently as 2021 can seem so, well, mysterious, in 2024, but let's not go there. Pineapples: yes, they were huge in the Regency, a theme of which the series 'Sanditon' took full advantage with a pineapple served at a dinner which - spoiler alert! - turned out to be a metaphor for a corrupt society.
The nice thing about your articles is that even when they fail to answer their questions, they are still fascinating to read and think about. So this time.
I don’t think that you could have ever answered the particular question, because, I suspect, the question itself is framed in the wrong way. You see it as a question about architecture, while I’d think that the architectural expression of it is just one aspect of a much wider phenomenon.
For one, ornaments have not only disappeared in architecture, but all throughout everyday life. Cutlery used to be heavily ornamented (I still have a knife of my grandmother’s with all sorts of leafy ornament going around its handle), drinking glasses were, the salons of the Titanic were, and if you look at historical medical or lab equipment in a museum, you will see that even medical instruments and lab tripods for beakers used to come with lion feet. Modern times have done away with *all* of that, not only with architectural ornaments. And this, I think disproves your conclusion: for it is today trivial to 3d-print an ornamented knife-handle or pen holder for your desk, but nobody does so. It’s not that we don’t have the wealth to introduce beauty into our lives. It is rather that our standards of beauty have changed. Today, beauty is seen in the direct opposite of ornament: the stark simplicity of Zen, Japanese architecture’s straight lines and right angles, and its popular version: IKEA chic. One can still buy heavily ornamented garden chairs from cheap Chinese factories, but nobody wants to. We think of ornaments as garish and stark simplicity as aesthetically attractive.
Why have our aesthetic preferences changed? I don’t think that you could pinpoint one single reason. For lab and medical equipment, it’s clearly utility: medical knowledge about infections and contamination prescribes that such equipment should be easy to clean and disinfect, and the same applies to cutlery to some extent. You want a knife that will reliably be clean after rinsing it off, without having to poke through the ornament with a toothpick to remove any sticking bits of food.
Another thing is a cultural shift in the perception of luxury. I think it was Karl Lagerfeld who said (but I might be wrong about the source): “Today, luxury means to have an ironed T-shirt in your wardrobe.” The richest, trendiest men, the rulers of today’s world, come dressed in turtlenecks, T-shirts and jeans: from Steve Jobs to Zuckerberg. Even suits are suspect: only crooks like SBF or Trump insist on suits and ties. The more affluent the wearer, the more they “can afford to dress badly” seems to be the perception of it. And the same applies to architecture. Only a newly-rich lottery winner would build a mansion with marble doves fluttering over the ornate balconies. When Steve Jobs or Bill Gates build their houses, they are either modelled on simplified folk architectural motifs (“Mediterranean arches”) or clean modern lines without obvious ornamentation. But as with the T-shirt, which has to be “ironed” to signify luxury, the un-adorned Scandinavian style house has to have almost invisible ornamental touches: the contrast in the colours of the wooden beams; the positioning of the spotlights; the outside vista as it is framed through the windows. It is the now the *restraint* that makes the ornament aesthetically valuable, not the exuberance.
Yet another point might be efficiency: we love it. YouTube videos have to be short and to the point. Nobody likes flowery prose or long intros. We don’t have the patience for art that takes too long, or for a meal of many courses. McFood delivers the goods as quickly as possible. And this might also be a reason why we want our architecture to reflect this efficiency, the ease and speed that we want to surround and characterise our lives.
In the end (and sorry for the long comment), I don’t have any more answers than you. But I suspect that the answer to the architecture question is much more complex, involving a good deal of explaining the mindset of 20th and 21st century modernity. I also don’t think that our future will necessarily contain ornamented space stations *for the reasons you mention.* We might get ornamented space stations at some point, but I suspect that it will be just because of a swing in fashion, or maybe it will never happen because of reasons of practicality. Who knows. Anyway, a fascinating question and a great read. Thanks!
When I worked in a shop that was doing some custom-molded plastic parts, the story went that the first part off the line cost $200,000. Subsequent ones cost a nickel.
Alternative hypothesis: "Architectural ornamentation" is not the correct analysis of the observed phenomena. For example, your very first image is Egyptian columns. I highly doubt that was so much an example of showing off your wealth like le goût Rothschild for them as much as it was an attempt to make the building into a site of magic and to properly immortalize the pharaohs as gods and the souls of the worthy as being in the blessed fields in the afterlife. When you get to later architecture, the purpose it serves starts to seem even more obvious because then we're talking about Christian architecture and architecture of other modern religions, and that has a religious significance, not merely a decorative one. The function of "architectural ornamentation" of Christian churches, Hindu temples, etc. is to make the building holy, not to show off wealth or personality. We don't think of stained glass windows and cathedrals in churches, minarets and prayer rugs in mosques, or statues of gods and goddesses in Hindu temples as ornamentation because we know what they're for so readily that the fact this is at least seen as having a purpose (even if it's not your personal belief) is obvious.
The idea that there's "ornamentation" that can show status solely because of its age seems to be very much a Gilded Age invention to me. Everything else is religion, magic, or "magico-religion." By that standard, yes, all the modernist architecture would I think very much have "ornamentation" as well such as the beams you made fun of. It expresses a belief in progress and the future as opposed to just leaving the beams off and being more rustic or what have you. Speaking of science fiction architecture, I don't think it's all necessarily sleek. Sure, the Jetsons is, but alien type of architecture tends to go back to being ornate-looking, even though this is mostly because it's covered in different kinds of technology or bio-organic matter. In other words, once you get far enough into the future that you're basically back to magic and religion, it looks ornate again. This is basically what I think the real end goal is insofar as there ever really is an end goal.
The main gap I see in your argument is that ornamentation was used in ways that didn't just signal wealth. At least in American cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
For example, I live in a renovated shotgun tenement building in Boston that was built in 1906. It was not build by a high-class family with any desire to signal wealth, yet is has a good deal of ornamentation. (Mainly crown molding on the roof line, but also sculpted arches above the doorway).
Sure, the buildings in the historically rich part of town (Back Bay) are more ornamented, but the buildings in the historically poor parts of town (North End, East Boston) are not 0 ornamentation the way modern construction is.
And, to add even more complexity to this, infill housing in my neighborhood often has matching ornamentation (crown molding on the roof line and pretty arches above the doors), which suggests that it is economically feasible to include even today)!
So, I actually wrote a short essay on this same matter, but my conclusion is very different from yours. Ornamentation IS very cheap, or at least some of it is already very cheap: https://open.substack.com/pub/torresfdz/p/no-beauty-is-not-a-luxury?r=fl834&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Il y a toujours des modes et des tendances, la disponibilité des ressources, puis l’héritage culturelle. J’ai été surprise par la différence des palais japonais comparativement au palais de style renaissance en Europe, construit à une époque similaire pour une fonction similaire.
Il y a autour les maisons de subsistence construite massivement sans fla fla. Alors, les nobles se sont-ils fait avoir, puisque ils voient des maisons peu jolies et décousues, alors que le peuple voit le merveilleux château!
Aujourd’hui, on peut tout faire! Il y a quand même différents courants architecturaux en cours, mais l’air du temps est, en effet, plus tôt épuré.
Étienne, j’ai confiance qu’un jour tu influenceras le monde avec tes goûts somptueux et tous voudront une maison de style étienienne.
Another element I think might play a role is that people often don’t think of architecture as isolated but as coherent style in a landscape.
When middle class people comissions things for their house is often as a form of individual expression, but a solution to the outside architecture problem should be more collaborative. I bet people wouldn’t want a neighborhood where every random house is a different style or a mishmash of varying design elements. Like a park where every lot belongs to a different neighbor and everyone decides to cultivate different plants and can’t agree on what the ecological project should be overall.
Whenever people talked about buildings being ugly I always sorta didn’t understand because I’m the kind of guy who thinksy house is what happens *inside* the walls (I’m therefore also attracted to the form follows function mantra), which is usually much more personalized. When people talk about buildings *in general* being ugly they’re not just talking about their particular home (as you said, there are some forms of decoration that are cheap enough that if someone really wants it they can go for it). Rather it’s an issue about how to handle the aesthetic commons, the landscaping of public space. Just decorating your home won’t do it and it’s not worth the effort if no one else goes along.
People sometimes solve this through municipal rules which might be coercive and incur in unnecessary costs for homeowners. The dilemma is finding a political solution that allows people to manage their collective space without falling into exclusionary-preservarionist rules that impede development or limit individual aesthetic freedom.
Thought-provoking. Of course, there's an interesting meta-story about how it is that something one drafted as recently as 2021 can seem so, well, mysterious, in 2024, but let's not go there. Pineapples: yes, they were huge in the Regency, a theme of which the series 'Sanditon' took full advantage with a pineapple served at a dinner which - spoiler alert! - turned out to be a metaphor for a corrupt society.
PS: The same for prose: we prefer Hemingway to Proust or even Lawrence Durrell. This can't be because of economic reasons.