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> a simple form insert into a concrete form can create any desired ornamentation

I usually find that extremely ugly. It is simple to do, and there are heaps of examples around, but it is usually done into a flat rectilinear surface so doesn’t add much beauty. Forms are often repetitive, but even when the pattern varies over the complete surface it usually lacks any real style IMHO.

For sure, it can be done in an ugly way, as can most things. It can also be done incredibly well - I know of a great sculptor who is focused on using forms to create sculpture with concrete - but this would be on the extremely good side of the scale.

>It is trivial today to mass-produce ornamentation

Which is about when ornamentation started to become undesirable. The arts and craft movement was itself a kick-back against mass production of ornamentation as it cheapened buildings. Not everyone could afford hand crafted buildings. They sought to create a distinction between 'rich' handcrafted building and 'poor' mass produced.

Notice that word.. cheapened. Even the very words we have themselves underlie the reasons why we find these things desirable. Once everyone could have ornamentation, it was no longer valued.. just like potatoes.

Other things that cemented the shift away from the ornamentation and spacial characteristics of pre-arts and craft architecture were, in some order (and lets ignore cathedrals and such because a. they are still handmade, and at about the same rate as in previous eras b. they are not typical of any building in any sense and they never have been c. we only love the ones that we never knocked down):

1. plumbing (you can greatly increase the size of buildings if it take less than ten minutes to find a tap or a toilet, and you can stop them buring down easier)

2. artifical lighting and heating (most buildings were configured entirely to capture and distribute light and heat)

3. the spanish flu (the dramatic and sudden push for modernist buildings came directly out of the tail end of the flu, and after a few decades of other rampant illnesses related to buildings.. typhoid, tuberculosis, etc and as the wealthy were exposed to modern hospitals - devoid of fireplaces, dust catching ornament, and with clean white ceramic finishes - and their brethren mountain spa wellness retreats)

4. cost (turns out that non-ornamental mass production is even cheaper than ornamental mass production)

5. speed of deisgn and construction (it doesn't matter how lovely your handcrafted building is, if I can build twenty others in the same time frame)

Now that with modern fabrication we can produce effortless modernist buildings, they are no longer valued. So people inevitably push back against devaluation, and that which cannot be devalued is taht which cannot be remade. Like the hipsters of the same era, they look to the past with its stories and promises of cultural supremacy. And they forget all the small steps that led us to this point. Preferring instead to dream of an era that never existed, but in its historical survival.

Everyone hates Eisenman's buildings. But we only know this because they existed.

He’s talking about real artistry, by people. Sure machines can make things that look ‘right’ but that bread isnt gonna taste great, and the ornamental formwork won’t look right either. Their point about industrial scales vs manual artistry are spot on - very few can now afford high quality. But most of us can afford medium quality, which to me is a trade off we as a society have taken over time.

The former Eastern Block has factory bread that tastes better than most artisanal bread in the West. Same for all other foods.

The problem is not that there is some magical loss of essence when something is made by a machine, it is that mass market products in the West prioritize looks over function: strawberries that are the size of eggs and taste like cardboard, bread that is white and puffy but mostly air and mush, milk that is pure white and tastes like chalk water.

And in our industry, UI that look amazing on video and images but reduce your productivity to that of a brain damaged chimp.

The problem isn't that things are machine made, it is that we are making the wrong things because the wrong things look better in ads.

I think you are missing the point. Asking an architect friend, it's a lot about the ratio of material to labor costs. Sure it was time consuming, but everything was time consuming. And materials were expensive.

Classical music went through a similar phase, but now the repertory is conservative as ever. Why? In part because atonal music on traditional instruments is just as labor intensive!!

Mass produced ornamentation! That's not what I'm talking about.

You can produce simple forms with moldings, but worse, you produce generic forms.

He's correct and not correct.

First, 'Industrialisation' also implies a fairly capitalist attitude towards everything and ornamentation may be costly in that context.

Second, labour used to be 'cheap and plentiful', or rather, power was so concentrated, that the people who built such buildings could 'afford' the ornamentation (or maybe compel their serf-like workers to do it). And they cared about it because 'class' was a different thing altogether way back when.

Third, ornamentation in many areas is still very expensive. To ornament, a building of any size would require designers, workers, and a lot of time and many. 'Some' products could be ornamentalized, but others, far less so. Suppose you built an office building with nice domed interior, and you wanted to have it 'ornamented' like a Cathedral. I wager it would be expensive.

I would like to add/adjust your point a bit. In many Midwestern cities many buildings of all income levels had ornamentation since the brick layers and other masons built or worked on their own homes. St. Louis in particular was well known for this although I was unable to find the original article speaking about it.

The masons that utilized these ornamental techniques no longer seem to exist in even moderate quantities.

http://dynamic.stlouis-mo.gov/history/wabmobricksinstl.cfm

Yeah, but aren't FLW houses/buildings notorious for being crap quality construction? Leaking, cracking, sinking, and molding?

I do not know about all FLW buildings but can talk about the ones in SW Pennsylvania - Kentuck Knob and famous Fallingwater. FLW paid a lot of attention to the construction and durability but a lot of bad rep comes from two factors: one, those building in particular were built in the challenging environments: one on the top of the hill, one - built into the side of the hill, over the creeks. Another factor is that a lot of FLW ideas required quality craftsmanship. As an example, Kentuck Knob has a row of sunlights on one side of the building. As far as I remember they were not made properly at first and caused problems with water leaking in.

But to me, none of this matters. Kentuck Knob is just such a lovely building, and Fallingwater... Fallingwater is a breathtaking masterpiece, there are no words to describe this feeling. During my first visit, I turned around to give it one last look and literally wept.

Yes, Wright focused most of his attention on expressing his world view with his work, rather than careful systems engineering and detailing of that work for long-term exposure to the elements. The classic story about this is when one of his clients called Wright angrily that water was leaking on his desk, Wright's response was "well then, move your desk"

Wright achieved great mastery in terms of his structural engineering - two great examples are his Johnson Wax building with the "mushroom" columns that were radically stronger than any were willing to believe (a destruction test was used to prove it at the time - concrete construction being very new (post Romans that is) [1] and his Falling Water house where he used the mass of the house to provide a counter balance to the great cantilevering terraces and novel new reinforced construction techniques. The contractor for Falling water had no real experience with this new reinforced concrete construction, and apparently did not build according to the detailed plan as they assumed it would simply fall down once forms were removed. Wright had to personally go to the site and knock down the last supporting column of the great cantilevered terrace as no one was willing to be the one to destroy the house. Although it did not collapse, it did sag over the decades because of the construction flaws, and has been recently repaired to have full intended strength [2]

In the context of this discussion on ornamentation and philosophy in architecture, that Wright's execution was lacking is somewhat irrelevant.

[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/14/frank-lloyd-wright-johnson... [2] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-...

No, just the opposite.

His schools have had issues, because the schools were meant to be sandboxes for the students to get real world experience, and try things which may or may not work. The fact that the schools have become landmarks after his death has nothing to do with Wright's design philosophies.

If you look at Wright's own house, it incorporates lots of clever ideas in terms of engineering more rugged forms which will hold up over time (like molding profiles that are designed to be coped from multiple directions to keep joints in place, and stained glass patterns that lend themselves to 'hiding' extra reinforcement on one side where the structure will be invisible to the beholder, for example).

Here are my pics of his house when I went through it last time I was in Chicago. I tried to get as many such above examples as possible...

https://imgur.com/a/ontIR

I've always heard that his designs and concepts are great (that's my opinion too), but the actual construction quality was lacking.