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!
Of course it's tied to a much larger phenomenon! But as you accurately point out, it seems impossible to find a single explanation for that phenomenon, so we have to break down the problem into smaller pieces. This essay was (at least originally) meant to do that, by focusing on this one question that *ought* to be simple, or at least simpler than trying to explain all of modern aesthetics. If we can figure out the economic aspect of ornamentation, then a little part of the mystery is dispelled, and maybe we can make progress.
I also purposefully focused on architecture because I think ornamentation is still more common for small consumer goods (though I agree it's rarer than it used to be). So explaining the mystery for architecture is more interesting. However, I ended up thinking that the explanation is approximately the same: ornamentation is cheap enough to be tasteless but still too expensive to be widespread.
You wrote that "it is today trivial to 3d-print an ornamented knife-handle or pen holder for your desk," but that one comment I cited about the $2000 custom pen holder shows that it in fact isn't trivial: custom designs are still pricey, *unless* they become mass-produced, at which point they're not custom anymore and generally feel tasteless. So in practice most people prefer simple efficient designs and that becomes the aesthetic standard for almost all classes of objects.
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.
Analyzing the ornament of religious buildings separately seems potentially useful, so thanks for bringing that up. But I'm not convinced it's so different from the case of rich people decorating palaces.
Why would the ornamentation in temples and churches be "holy"? I suppose one answer might be "because God ordained it", but assuming a materialist standpoint, it has to be something like "because it's interesting to look at", which in turns comes from being unusual, which in turn comes from things like "it is difficult to justify the expense of intricate sculpture in a premodern society where 75% of the economy is devoted just to producing food" or "we hired this well-known artist who is uniquely talented at painting stained glass windows". Otherwise, the Egyptian or Hindu or Christian clergy might as well have decided that bland, simple designs are holy. (And sometimes they have, for instance in the case of some modern churches.)
Of course, nobody likes to spell out that ornament and other design choices are made to show off wealth and status. People will always prefer to say that they choose it for the "beauty" or other abstract qualities like "holiness". But there's virtually always a deeper reason.
Great point. Might add that “ornamentation” wasn’t even thought as ornamental all of the time. Much of what we call a particular “style” is just a natural unfolding of the constraints and possibilities of a given construction technology, plus the purported purposes of the building. Say, we just discovered pointed archs and extended buttresses as a form of structural support, plus we need large spaces with a lot of light and good accustics. Hence, gothic and all its spikiness. Form follows function.
The aesthetic crisis of our age might just be a result of the more general crisis of meaning. There aren’t clear functions and therefore the forms are bland. No mysticism and therefore no building custom made to accomodate a ritual use.
The other dynamic of religious buildings is that it’s not one persons wealth funding it, it’s a community. People all over the region would fund the big cathedral in the city and it was multiple generations as they took a hundred years to complete. So those costs were really spread out.
When I was a kid we all spent evenings and weekends giving our volunteer labor to help build a new church building. That saves a lot. And it’s a labor of love for each other in the congregation and as we’re taught, literally worship to God to build the place we will later worship within. Nothing motivates free labor like investing in your eternal estate.
Here’s a very interesting and direct point to ornamentation as a thing; The very first time in these Scriptures that the Holy Spirit is said to have inspired something in a human is in Exodus when Moses was building the Tabernacle, a mobile temple. It’s worth quoting.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills— to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts.”
It goes on in detail about everything like utensils used and priestly garments. There you have the beginning of thinking about and doing ornamentation in a major world religion…the same one getting a lot of press right now in the Middle East. If you’ve ever wondered why Jews are so well educated and rich in art and humor, this gives a clue. Hopefully peace will be abundant also soon and everyone will have a well decorated home.
We usually think of the Holy Spirit inspiring prophecy or preaching, but here in its debut it’s an architectural design craftsmen who needs to hear from God.
I do like to add I’m not religious anymore after being a minister myself, but this is too rich a tradition to throw out.
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)!
I don't see how anything you're saying goes against my argument? "Wealth" is relative, and signalling it is therefore done by people of all social classes. A fairly poor family that manages to live in a "nice" building (which prior to modernism would be shown through ornamentation, among other things) shows that they're not as poor as people who live in less nice buildings.
I interpret ornamentation being included on tenement housing (and also factories / warehouses) as meaning that in the past ornamentation was included as a default of construction, rather than as an attempt by whoever had the buildings built to signal their relative wealth.
I do realize that I'm not sure my interpretation is true, it is possible that in the past we also built lots of completely unornamented buildings, and just that very few of them have survived to today.
I suppose there are kinds of ornamentation that don't really cost anything (e.g. making patterns in bricks of different colors without using more bricks) and so have often been a default of construction in some times and places. But there are also many kinds that do add to the cost of a building and that did become ubiquitous in some times and places, due e.g. to fashion effects.
I think, ultimately, that anything that adds cost without being strictly necessary is overwhelmingly likely to have some sort of signalling purpose, even if builders and buyers and renters aren't directly aware of it, but it's true that the full story for any given kind of ornamentation is complex and involves various motivations.
I don't think our conclusions differ that much? I also conclude that ornamentation is relatively cheap.
But I wonder if we're simply talking about different things. The building you give as an example seems rather un-ornamented to me. There is a little bit or ornamentation, but most of the things you mention are either extra decorative elements (not part of the architecture, like the plant pots and the cross, I think), functional elements (like the metal bars, more a security feature than an aesthetic one), or simple choices that don't really add extra work to the building, like the colors of the window frames (if you have windows they'll necessarily have frames, and those frames will have to be some color). All of these can and do occur in modernist buildings as well. I, too, think your example building is cute, but not because it's ornamented and perhaps even in part because it's *not*.
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.
Je suis pas sûr que j'ai des goûts assez cohérents pour ça! Ces temps-ci le balancier est retourné du côté du minimalisme et je (re)préfère les lieux épurés sans ornementation excessive :p
Comme avec les ananas, l’ornementation est plus tôt permanente, ce qui fait qu’on peut la regretter plus tard. Sont-elles plus facile à ajouter ou à enlever?
Ornementation éphémère? Ou avec des upgrades possibles? Genre des écrans qui montrent des motifs ou un mur blanc selon notre feeling du moment 😅
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.
Yeah, this is one of the things I was vaguely gesturing at when I wrote that architectural ornamentation is a more complex situation than ornamentation in other domains — you put it better than I did.
I personally like architecturally varied neighborhoods and I think there's some harm in how city planning often prescribes uniformity. But I understand why some people like the uniformity and overall I agree that it's a hard problem.
Oh I also like style variation, I just think most people don’t. What I was getting at is that I think the buñk of the landscaping effort for a given neighborhood prolly qould have to be made by a single monumental landmark rather than individuals (plazas as opposed to gardens, social places as opposed to homes)
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!
Of course it's tied to a much larger phenomenon! But as you accurately point out, it seems impossible to find a single explanation for that phenomenon, so we have to break down the problem into smaller pieces. This essay was (at least originally) meant to do that, by focusing on this one question that *ought* to be simple, or at least simpler than trying to explain all of modern aesthetics. If we can figure out the economic aspect of ornamentation, then a little part of the mystery is dispelled, and maybe we can make progress.
I also purposefully focused on architecture because I think ornamentation is still more common for small consumer goods (though I agree it's rarer than it used to be). So explaining the mystery for architecture is more interesting. However, I ended up thinking that the explanation is approximately the same: ornamentation is cheap enough to be tasteless but still too expensive to be widespread.
You wrote that "it is today trivial to 3d-print an ornamented knife-handle or pen holder for your desk," but that one comment I cited about the $2000 custom pen holder shows that it in fact isn't trivial: custom designs are still pricey, *unless* they become mass-produced, at which point they're not custom anymore and generally feel tasteless. So in practice most people prefer simple efficient designs and that becomes the aesthetic standard for almost all classes of objects.
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.
Analyzing the ornament of religious buildings separately seems potentially useful, so thanks for bringing that up. But I'm not convinced it's so different from the case of rich people decorating palaces.
Why would the ornamentation in temples and churches be "holy"? I suppose one answer might be "because God ordained it", but assuming a materialist standpoint, it has to be something like "because it's interesting to look at", which in turns comes from being unusual, which in turn comes from things like "it is difficult to justify the expense of intricate sculpture in a premodern society where 75% of the economy is devoted just to producing food" or "we hired this well-known artist who is uniquely talented at painting stained glass windows". Otherwise, the Egyptian or Hindu or Christian clergy might as well have decided that bland, simple designs are holy. (And sometimes they have, for instance in the case of some modern churches.)
Of course, nobody likes to spell out that ornament and other design choices are made to show off wealth and status. People will always prefer to say that they choose it for the "beauty" or other abstract qualities like "holiness". But there's virtually always a deeper reason.
Great point. Might add that “ornamentation” wasn’t even thought as ornamental all of the time. Much of what we call a particular “style” is just a natural unfolding of the constraints and possibilities of a given construction technology, plus the purported purposes of the building. Say, we just discovered pointed archs and extended buttresses as a form of structural support, plus we need large spaces with a lot of light and good accustics. Hence, gothic and all its spikiness. Form follows function.
The aesthetic crisis of our age might just be a result of the more general crisis of meaning. There aren’t clear functions and therefore the forms are bland. No mysticism and therefore no building custom made to accomodate a ritual use.
The other dynamic of religious buildings is that it’s not one persons wealth funding it, it’s a community. People all over the region would fund the big cathedral in the city and it was multiple generations as they took a hundred years to complete. So those costs were really spread out.
When I was a kid we all spent evenings and weekends giving our volunteer labor to help build a new church building. That saves a lot. And it’s a labor of love for each other in the congregation and as we’re taught, literally worship to God to build the place we will later worship within. Nothing motivates free labor like investing in your eternal estate.
Here’s a very interesting and direct point to ornamentation as a thing; The very first time in these Scriptures that the Holy Spirit is said to have inspired something in a human is in Exodus when Moses was building the Tabernacle, a mobile temple. It’s worth quoting.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills— to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts.”
It goes on in detail about everything like utensils used and priestly garments. There you have the beginning of thinking about and doing ornamentation in a major world religion…the same one getting a lot of press right now in the Middle East. If you’ve ever wondered why Jews are so well educated and rich in art and humor, this gives a clue. Hopefully peace will be abundant also soon and everyone will have a well decorated home.
We usually think of the Holy Spirit inspiring prophecy or preaching, but here in its debut it’s an architectural design craftsmen who needs to hear from God.
I do like to add I’m not religious anymore after being a minister myself, but this is too rich a tradition to throw out.
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)!
I don't see how anything you're saying goes against my argument? "Wealth" is relative, and signalling it is therefore done by people of all social classes. A fairly poor family that manages to live in a "nice" building (which prior to modernism would be shown through ornamentation, among other things) shows that they're not as poor as people who live in less nice buildings.
I interpret ornamentation being included on tenement housing (and also factories / warehouses) as meaning that in the past ornamentation was included as a default of construction, rather than as an attempt by whoever had the buildings built to signal their relative wealth.
I do realize that I'm not sure my interpretation is true, it is possible that in the past we also built lots of completely unornamented buildings, and just that very few of them have survived to today.
I suppose there are kinds of ornamentation that don't really cost anything (e.g. making patterns in bricks of different colors without using more bricks) and so have often been a default of construction in some times and places. But there are also many kinds that do add to the cost of a building and that did become ubiquitous in some times and places, due e.g. to fashion effects.
I think, ultimately, that anything that adds cost without being strictly necessary is overwhelmingly likely to have some sort of signalling purpose, even if builders and buyers and renters aren't directly aware of it, but it's true that the full story for any given kind of ornamentation is complex and involves various motivations.
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
I don't think our conclusions differ that much? I also conclude that ornamentation is relatively cheap.
But I wonder if we're simply talking about different things. The building you give as an example seems rather un-ornamented to me. There is a little bit or ornamentation, but most of the things you mention are either extra decorative elements (not part of the architecture, like the plant pots and the cross, I think), functional elements (like the metal bars, more a security feature than an aesthetic one), or simple choices that don't really add extra work to the building, like the colors of the window frames (if you have windows they'll necessarily have frames, and those frames will have to be some color). All of these can and do occur in modernist buildings as well. I, too, think your example building is cute, but not because it's ornamented and perhaps even in part because it's *not*.
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.
Je suis pas sûr que j'ai des goûts assez cohérents pour ça! Ces temps-ci le balancier est retourné du côté du minimalisme et je (re)préfère les lieux épurés sans ornementation excessive :p
Comme avec les ananas, l’ornementation est plus tôt permanente, ce qui fait qu’on peut la regretter plus tard. Sont-elles plus facile à ajouter ou à enlever?
Ornementation éphémère? Ou avec des upgrades possibles? Genre des écrans qui montrent des motifs ou un mur blanc selon notre feeling du moment 😅
Bon point, une autre raison pour laquelle l'architecture est dans une classe à part
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.
Yeah, this is one of the things I was vaguely gesturing at when I wrote that architectural ornamentation is a more complex situation than ornamentation in other domains — you put it better than I did.
I personally like architecturally varied neighborhoods and I think there's some harm in how city planning often prescribes uniformity. But I understand why some people like the uniformity and overall I agree that it's a hard problem.
Oh I also like style variation, I just think most people don’t. What I was getting at is that I think the buñk of the landscaping effort for a given neighborhood prolly qould have to be made by a single monumental landmark rather than individuals (plazas as opposed to gardens, social places as opposed to homes)
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.
Don't you ever write things and later find that you're at a total loss at what you meant?
Definitely, and it's always disconcerting.
All the time! But don’t let that stop you and I love it that you didn’t in this instance, Étienne
PS: The same for prose: we prefer Hemingway to Proust or even Lawrence Durrell. This can't be because of economic reasons.