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Old Posted Nov 27, 2017, 3:22 AM
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Part of the change to modernism after WWI was an idea that, through architecture, we could create an entirely new world free of conflict. By removing ornamentation that looked toward the past and instead designing buildings that only incorporate contemporary materials and features, maybe we could move humanity away from conflict. Obviously that didn't actually work. Then World War II happened and people realized this no-more-ornamentation thing was a pretty cheap way to replace the lost buildings or build more new buildings.

Great modernist architects (like Ludwig Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright) maintained classical proportions and high levels of detail (especially in the interiors they designed, which included matching furniture and signage; Mies even went as far as creating fonts for his buildings' signage). Those are great pieces of architecture, they avoid the bulk of the problems that many poorly designed modern buildings have.

Another aspect to modernism that was obvious in the past but has been lost today is the contrast it presented to historic architecture. Seagram Building in 1950s New York surrounded by gothic, deco and wedding cake architecture? The fact that it wasn't covered in ornamentation was it's ornamentation. Throw in 1,500 shitty imitations 20 years later? All of that gets lost.

Tour Montparnasse still benefits from this aspect. It's so wildly different from everything around it that no only can you appreciate the shape and form of modern architecture, but you also get a better appreciation of the texture and colour of the older architecture around it. They're complementary. If it were half the size or if there were more buildings like it nearby, it would completely lose that and be less exciting.

Another thing we've lost with modernism is the ability to see faults in historic architecture. Some of those buildings are also badly designed with unusual proportions and impractical interior layouts or not enough windows or doors but when it's a classical or revival building, people seem more willing to overlook that simply because it has ornamentation.

As for nature: the most recent modern architecture we're seeing makes extensive use of local materials (like wood, glass and stone, which are found everywhere but also local at the same time in a way that manufactured aluminium panels aren't) and much more greenspace.

And another thing that gets lost on people like the author of that article (which I honestly thought was James Kunstler because he's also a fanatical anti-modern architecture/anti-skyscrapers person) is the cost of building today. In the past, you didn't need large bathrooms on every floor (we just shit into pots and dumped them out windows until, like, the 1800s), there was no extensive electrical and communications cabelling, heating was more rudimentary insulation was poor or absent. They could put a lot of money into having stone facades carved because the rest of the building was so simple to construct they didn't have to spend so much on that part of it. Today, the parts of a building we can't see are always far more complex than what the facade is showing us, and that really cuts into the budget for decorative facades. It's easier to just make a glass box, which are at least unoffensive in their simplicity.
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