Why Don't We Live in an Art Nouveau World?
asteriskmag.com
asteriskmag.com
That said, I'm sure there are architects today for which some or all of this is not true.
Most of the above are subjects an architect student would have had to learn about and demonstrate profienciency in, to earn their degree, a 100 years ago.
I'm sure the change in architecture's priorities played a role in this too. Industrial materials, construction efficiency. The need to mass produce housing, costs and new social ideals, yadayadayada.
And ofc the modernist rejection of any ornament; even that which is there historically, on existing architecture.
My hope is that in a future where we 3D-print buildings or construct them with robots we will see a renaissance of non-functional[1] beauty/sculpture/texture/color in architecture because the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistend.
But then, architecture is also always a mirror of the period. And from that pov it's not looking so great for beauty making it back any time soon.
[1] Yet functional because how can the happiness/joy of the perceiver of architecture be removed from what should count as functional, in architecture?
Or that seems like the goal of commercial builders now, right?
To be fair, this isn't entirely new. The American West was strewn with cheap wooden structures that all looked alike with big fake fonts with hand painted signs. Those mostly rotted so they're uncommon in our lexicon outside of movies.
I'm currently renting but looking to buy in my area, I'm sure I'll find the chemical stripping of horrible white gloss paint and the painting over of 'minimal' white walls with a riot of colour outright cathartic. The house I'm renting would look so good if someone took the time to undo all the bodge jobs and cheap decoration choices I think. The lovely hardwood doors have proper brass hinges for example but it's all covered up with decades' worth of horrid white paint. Half the houses round here probably have gorgeous hardwood floors under crappy laminate or lino, and almost all have nice fireplaces I'd love to reinstate and use with a wood burner.
When and where was this a common thing?
I've lived and owned houses built from the 1750s to the 1960s in England and Norway and none of them have much in the way of ornamentation.
> Houses used to be built to be lived in
Of course and that's one reason why most didn't have a lot of ornamentation, the money would be spent on necessary functionality first.
Perhaps I'm just not wealthy enough.
> so ornamentation added value.
When and where was this a common thing?
Large urban buildings? I recently-ish randomly watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4 "Why Everything We Build is Flat" i.e. how availability of caulk contributed to less beautiful houses (in urban settings at the least).
That's why you see houses for sale where they repainted everything grey, ripped out the mature landscaping and put down plastic and dyed wood chips.
I get your point, but I still feel the need to say here clearly: No, I don't. Identical interchangable boxes are not what I would call a ideal standard for housing.
Alas, each time I pass Passeig de Gràcia I lament there are no more interesting buildings... everything is soo f* bland :|
We chose Millennial Gray because it goes with anything, not because we especially liked it. It was a perfectly acceptable option for free.
By now we've repainted half the house or so. But the rooms where the gray remains are just fine.
It will not happen because the rich will always keep standards of living of the average and poor people just at the low level that they will not rebel.
Could you explain your exact line of thinking?
I only have a couple of architect friends, but wow, they actually have exactly these skills and interests. Amazing artists and designers in their own right. They seem to know a lot about how philosophy interacts with architecture too! Interesting to know they might be the exception.
There's an ideological capture of postwar architecture departments. Talk to a dutiful architecture student and mention classical architecture, and don't be surprised if you get some eye-rolling or stock dismissals ("it's anachronistic", "it's pastiche", "it's expensive", "it's unoriginal"). People - and that includes students - tend to go along with the prejudices of their professors, both because of ignorance and because they want to "fit in".
There are some maverick departments[0], however.
> My hope is that in a future where we 3D-print buildings or construct them with robots [...] the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistend.
The cost isn't the issue. Societies much poorer than our - and we are the wealthiest we've ever been in history, materially speaking - have produced magnificent artwork and architecture. We simply have different priorities. I don't remember who it was who said this, but if you want to know what a society worships and holds in highest regard, look for the tallest building in the city.
I remember reading an article on HN about how people stated that they preferred traditional Western architecture styles, but what was built by architects was something very different. It was presented as revealed preferences contradicting stated preferences.[1]
But I think it is more about priorities, like you said in your first sentence. People may prefer traditional styles, but individuals have limited power/time, and there are other things to worry about, so their effort goes elsewhere, not on supporting their preferred architectural styles.
The other aspect I think also deserves attention is that as our lives have become more digitised and online, our care and attention towards the physical realm has degraded a little. We no longer need exquisite masonry to fire off the synapses - we have the endless scroll and the 24-hour news cycle.
Finally there is a small amount of survivor syndrome happening too - we keep the beautiful buildings but ignore or forget the enormous unhygienic slums that often co-existed with our most beautiful architecture.
Would prefer 3D printed buildings try something new; for example 3D print underground living and bedrooms for energy efficiency and just have dining + kitchen at surface level
There is enough antique architecture still standing to appreciate
We can allow ourselves the freedom to dream and explore new ideas just like the long dead gave themselves
I don't know what the equivalent for software may be, thinking you'd design cool inverted binary tree algorithms, and instead working on sucking people's information and shoving ads in their faces?
Oh the tragedy of wasted talent, forced to apply their skills toward other people's flawed and antisocial visions. Building casinos and prisons, one a trap for the mind, another for the body.
Unemployed mathematicians. I feel for their tortured souls in this unforgiving world ruled by capital, a form of numerology. They speak a native tongue almost incomprehensible to others, and the beauty they seek is invisible except for mystics like themselves.
Software engineers working in the dungeons of Mordor, seeing their craft and design abused for user-hostile purposes, against the very freedom of personal computing that brought them joy. Now with the industrial production of code, their knowledge devalued and commodified, gardens trampled by outsiders who do not care for the rich history and culture of the field.
For passion, he looks to Frank Lloyd Wright, who happens to also be my favorite architect. I think that was one of the things that endeared me to the family when I first met them. Of course, we both realize the issues with Wright. But, the architecture Wright produced is still amazing, regardless of his personality faults.
I love Gaudi, too. I saw Sagrada Família years ago, when my wife and I took a vacation to Barcelona. I’d love to go back and see it again. But, looking at his house which was turned into a museum, you start to understand why the word “gaudy” was invented.
I’m also a big fan of Victor Horta. My wife and I lived in Brussels from late 1998 to early 2006, and we were only a few blocks away from his house, which they had turned into a museum. He did some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen. But it was also very difficult to create at the time, and difficult to maintain. Only the richest people could afford that. We are fortunate that we were able to collect a couple of Art Nouveau antiques while we were there. But almost no one here in the US would recognize them, and I doubt many here would consider them beautiful.
Sadly, for production purposes in this modern world, ornamentation must be set aside. Throw all the ugly ass cheap tchotchkes in there that you want, and get your ornamentation and decoration fix however you have to. What you throw that onto or into, it’s almost certainly going to be as bland as humanly possible.
It is also interesting to read about the Amsterdamse School, an early 1900's style with "mass appeal" of which you can see many beautiful examples throughout the city, which were also only built thanks to strong support from the political sphere. https://architecture-history.org/schools/AMSTERDAM%20SCHOOL....
Cheap, soulless, forgettable, replaceable metal and glass rectangular prisms filled with cheap, soulless, forgettable, replaceable workers. Form follows function!
That old architecture implied things like spirit, transcendence, community, beauty. Outmoded concepts for sure!
It was all killed because two dynamics came together to push "the yale box": corporate america's love of cheap buildings (although the buildings are cheap to build but often nightmares to maintain and use... somebody else's problem) and the ideological purity spiraling post WW2 driven by the academic environment and the rise of abstract architectural criticism over the practical building arts.
post modernism acknowledged the failure of the yale box but, because going back to traditional building forms was unthinkable (of course), had to do ironic kitsch instead
Edit: I love me a craftsman bungalow but matching dry rotted custom milled trim from 90 years ago is an mfer.
Of course building a new house is expensive. There are a lot of sunk costs in an existing house and generally while there is a lot to not like about an old house, in generally keeping it and doing small remodels to make it better is a better use of money even though ideally you would replace it.
i.e. "any mason can build a brick house, but an architect will create an ugly box that no mason would ever have built".
https://www.myhelsinki.fi/visit/helsinki-art-nouveau-archite...
"Helsinki is indeed a unique city of Art Nouveau architecture on the global scale, boasting no less than 600 “Jugend” buildings – more even than in Barcelona or Brussels."
The whole thing is anyway an ideological thing today as it was back then. The online trad architecture aesthetic is associated with the right wing, who see it as a return to order from today's decadence and overly guilt ridden elite zeitgeist. Urbanism and human scale architecture is associated with certain parts of the left who admire Nordic and Western European social democracies like the Netherlands and Denmark against what they see as the hegemonic capitalist state of the US.
The point is, architecture doesn't live in a vacuum, it is inextricably linked to political and ideological tribalism, and choices in architecture are expressions of what other tribe one rejects and consciously differentiates from etc.
The amusing thing is that to modern eyes most of these grand expensive civic monuments speak much more to the era (definitively Victorian) than the motivations of the people who chose the designers. They have far more in common with each other, to my eyes, than they do with a Tudor mansion or a 1930s public library.
Art Nouveau and classic styles from before are very expensive to build and maintain. Human population increased massively during the Industrial Revolution leading to more demand for cheap living space, and living inside is more important than looking at it from the outside.
It's cheaper to do both now than it ever has been.
> living inside is more important than looking at it from the outside.
Even our insides are boring and stupid though. There's no creativity anywhere. It's purely cost. It's just the enshittification of housing. Companies who can cut corners and give you the bare minimum using the cheapest materials can stuff their pockets with the money they save by selling you bland tasteless trash.
Softly put, it's discipline, focus and a sense of greater purpose, far above the monetary value of things, fame and fortune.
In other words, exactly what our current, consumer-oriented society lacks. (for better or worse)
You can buy discipline, focus, and a sense of greater purpose. But it ain't cheap and few with the means to do it have the will to want it.
Consider my office. The original drafted designs for it had an airy look, full ceiling, windows connecting the rooms for added light, doors.
Every single one of those things got nixed because it meant $$$ and the people running my company didn't want to foot the bill. So instead what we ended up with is cheap carpet, no ceiling (I can see all the joists and the ductwork), and paper thin cardboard walls which you can hear discussions from across the building. But the conference room where the C Levels commonly meet is fantastically decorated.
I mean common, La Sagrada Família has nothing to do with "focus and sense of greater purpose". If you want to show off, you will want something like that. If you do not care about showing off, you end up with more boring architecture.
I say that despite finding the building itself quite ugly.
But, my primary read is "flashy attention seeker" or "fun entertaining". Not seriousness, future and all those other things OP listed. They are not disciplined, they are playful, provoking etc
> an architecture meant for jewels [...] reliant on [...] the starchitect.
> This made the style difficult to replicate at scale.
I think this is it. There was no convergence on a set of stable basic elements, from which other elements, unique or not, would still inherit common constraints. Without common constraints, extensions or variations just create a mess of ideas, good or bad, with no coherence between them.
> It’s not even clear what a badly executed Art Nouveau building would be
If nobody knows where a style starts or stops, or what is required or not, it isn't really a style. It is a movement encompassing many styles, a dynamic evolutionary explosion that will not just lose common definition but common recognition. Not a specific design or style.
There are documentaries on this.
My town stioll has the old tonw centre left in parts and it is such a contrast to mondern or 1950s big boxes...
The latter had a bikini fashion shoot ongoing.
Maybe something to do with it. The world and society completely transformed. Mass media, fashion, loss of religiosity, sexual liberation, globalization, social mobility...
He didn't mention Adolf Loos and his essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
The Central Square (Piata Unirii) has been renovated nicely and looks very good. The old main street is still in renovation, so it's not so nice now.
There is a reason that there is so much difference in interior design and art: It is easily changed and preferences vary wildly.
In a block of cookie cutter houses, one need only pick say a color of shutter.
In a block of artistic architecture, there may be one house that many enjoy while most are seen as ugly to most.
If the original builders all really enjoyed say neo-victorian, brutalist homeowners must either find another neighborhood or rebuild. And they likely can't rebuild to their own taste because what neo-victorian owner wants to stair out their windows at a bunch of cubes? What brutalist owner wants to look out upon whimsical scroll work?
It's the same in tshirts, underwear, socks, pants, bicycles...More people are okay with accepting some perceptual average than are willing to buy men's thongs and unicycles.
Thank you!
But if they manage to go to architectural school, that passion is torn out of them, by snob professors, and by what trade conventions, awards, and judges in architectural bids ask for.
The answer begins after the fifth set of images.
- The immediate reason we don’t live in an Art Nouveau world, therefore, is that it fizzled out and got replaced by a return to classicism. Let us speculate about why.
I do understand and share the view that the current mainstream is utterly boring, but I also acknowledge the (somewhat) irresistible forces that shape it: money, time, effort. And I don't believe AI can do anything to counter them in a significant manner, sadly.
It is already a topic in student textbooks, how the first private villa in the constructivist/bauhaus style was wildly over initial budget and suffered severe degradation even in the first few years, strictly because of the design decisions.
But it is a _lot_. Putting aside the artistic skill and construction cost of it, I'm glad I don't live in a city where everything is like that. I feel like it'd be overstimulating much like an analog version of the Las Vegas strip.
It would not be a lot. It would fade into the background, except that any time you want to see beauty you just have to look up and focus.
i highly doubt a christian church has the same effect. everytime i see a church i think about atrocities commited by the religion and alienation
Maybe not the exact same effect as nature but it is indeed calming to me at least. Stepping into a cathedral, or masjid, or temple and the noise of the world falls away (and I'm not even religious). I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Not to downplay atrocities committed in the name of Christianity but I am pretty sure every large ideology has its share of of atrocities.
Sagrada Família is very purposefully a total exaggeration but so are most large churches when viewed as part of their surrounding context. They’re designed to stand out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfN517mqhC8 (Absolutely worth watching if you want to know why Barcelona was planned the way it was.)
If you go to the "Gothic quarter" or to Gracia you won't see much "Art nouveau."
Its a very varied city. I live in a building in the "Modernisme" style and its lovely.
The place was horrible. With few windows and poor ventilation, it was close to a rainforest. Because of that, it was moldy and a nurturing place for respiratory diseases. Add to this the fact that in Southern Brazil no one knows how to build with proper insulation against cold and you get what many Brazilian architects say in secret about Niemeyer: "as an architect, he was an excellent sculptor".
As a belgian I love Victor Horta and growing up in Brussels it was normal for us to see "Horta houses" here and there. They're not that rare.
I, however, cannot stand that grotesque thing that the Sagrada Familia is. And I'm not the only one to consider it grotesque. I'll note that TFA's author apparently has some reservations about it too. And I really don't care the general consensus is that it is wonderful.
And the Sagrada Familia, has as already been noted in this thread, is certainly nothing like Art Nouveau (someone described it in this thread as "closer to H.R. Giger's Alien than Art Nouveau" and I fully agree).
As a sidenote I'd say architects have a duty to make things that are sustainable. Something so grotesque that it takes decades after your death to even only finish, let alone maintain, means "architecture" went somewhere deeply wrong.
I don't doubt it's great PR for the city of Barcelona though.
As the saying goes: "To each their own bad tastes" ("A chacun ses mauvais gouts").
Hand placed parquet that took a master craftsman several weeks to lay disappeared. Intricate carvings upon otherwise utilitarian and common structures likewise.
Art Deco itself is a compromise with this creeping reality. Not fully modern minimalist but economically efficient in using flattened elements, prefabs and striaght accents for detailing.
When a trad person posts their diatribe online it is a simple tell. They know next to nothing about how the built world is actually created. And they don't understand how wages came to form the basis of respect for working people. The act of decrying the utilitarian transition is itself a form of disrespect via ignorance. Because what you are essentially saying is that your aesthetic preferences are more important than the time of expert laborers, whether you know it or not.
They're definitely not cheap with all the marble I've seen being used
Architecture. Goals. Values.
everyone wants the same for less, so optimisations like this are individually rational, but collectively it's a disaster. on a long enough time scale, the market may end up flipping back against hyperoptimization.
These frills aren't something that's objectively good. I view them as social signals, something to indicate you can afford it, and that you belong in an elevated social class. This sort of signalling is parasitic. We are worse off for it being there, and we are better off if we actively identify the tendency toward it and consciously reject it.