OK, this is something I genuinely don’t understand.
The trad types love to make hay out of changes in architectural fashion. “Grand medieval / Gothic architecture = beautiful, modern architecture = hideous” is a constant refrain. And it’s often specifically tied to a concept of degeneration, like “the ancient masters knew how to do this wonderful thing but we’re worse so all we can do is make things ugly.”
…and, look, this seems kind of overblown and absurd to me, there are lots of different aesthetics that can work well, there are lots of glass-and-steel modernist creations that look really good, the Hong Kong skyline is one of mankind’s glories, etc. etc.
But.
It’s true that “classical edifice with lots of columns and vaulted roofs” and “ornate Gothic pile” are two of the most aesthetically successful architectural styles in the history of history. Lots of people really really love them; specifically, lots of people really really love them more than they love more-modern-looking things. (I am one of those people, when all the factors are weighed.) Most of the most visually iconic buildings in the world are old-timey stone things rather than sleek contemporary things. Hell, for that matter, most of the “Total Epic Fail” buildings that everyone hates are experiments in contemporary design that didn’t pan out.
So why aren’t we building any more of the old-timey buildings that so many people think are beautiful? Like, at all? It seems like a safe, conservative, popular choice. But as far as I can tell it doesn’t happen these days. As late as the 1930s we were making grand classical-style buildings like the National Archives. So what happened? Even with a trend towards sleek contemporary stuff, you’d think that someone would want to buck the trend and cater to the taste for old-timey grandeur, but apparently not.
Possible explanations I can imagine include:
1) We didn’t stop making them, I just don’t know about them, the publicity is all in the direction of “look at this modern shitpile.” (This sounds extremely wrong to me, but I’d like to see evidence.)
2) The trads are correct, we’ve degenerated, we actually don’t have the skills to produce another Notre Dame. (This also sounds super wrong.)
3) Contemporary glass-and-steel-and-concrete architecture, with lots of sleek plain lines, is so much cheaper than elaborately carved stone that no one with any kind of budget accountability could get away with old-timey stuff.
4) Grand old-timey architecture is only plausible for giant high-impact projects, and no high-level architect wants to do the safe old-fashioned conservative thing for a giant high-impact project, it’s always “let me show off my bold new idea.” (The “bold new ideas” often seem pretty samey and derivative to me, but maybe they’re still coded as bold and new?)
5) It’s just the tides of fashion, fashion is way stronger than I think and doesn’t allow for exceptions.
Thoughts?
There is so much involved in this. So, so, so much. I’m sure it’s somewhere in a lot of architects’ and art historians’ Masters theses. I tried to do a write up about this but it was getting long and stupid. So I’m going to stick to only one point.
I feel like a lot of people are basically comparing palaces to strip malls.
Plenty of ancient cities consist of basically clumps of featureless blocks, and most medieval peasants’ homes certainly were basic and functional boxes. The ancient and medieval worlds also had plenty of boring, banal public buildings, homes, and businesses. We really need to contextualize what we are comparing, because what most of us live in *now* would have looked very much like the homes of all of the other commoners, and not like the wonders of history that we goggle at.
People keep making this point, and it doesn’t seem especially germane. If the question is “why don’t we make classical- and gothic-styled public buildings like the ones that can be found in pre-modern cities?,” what do we learn from the fact that pre-modern cities contained a lot of non-classical-or-gothic-styled buildings as well?
It’s true that comparing high-profile high-budget architectural projects to random strip malls is kinda silly, but we can limit our comparison to our own high-profile high-budget architectural projects, and the question persists.