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i see modern architecture as a mirror on the human mind and personality and emotions,a mis-shapen,misunderstood and abstract part of human beings that is rarely explored.
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I see it as a big problem that modern architecture focuses so much on abstract explorations mirroring the mind and personality and emotions, and so little on producing attractive functional buildings that people actually like.
Architecture isn't sculpture. It isn't abstract. We literally have to live in it.
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And Cirrus, you're an intelligent guy, but that defense of ornament feels tautological. "Ornament is necessary, so when modern architects don't give it to us they're "lazy" or there's some kind of post-modern denial of expectation happening?"
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I didn't offer much of a defense of why I think ornament is necessary. We can have that conversation, but I skipped it in that post to make an attack.
I was attacking architects who deny traditionalism by insisting on producing architecture "of its time", but by defining architecture "of its time" as following a
102 year old dogma. I was attacking architects who think that boxing themselves in to the rules of 20th Century modernism makes them free thinkers.
I am calling the architectural establishment a bunch of hypocrites who aren't following their own rhetoric. I am saying that the establishment is so uptight with obsolete 20th Century dogma that it has forgotten how to actually produce creative and functional 21st Century buildings. I am saying that architecture has become uncompromisingly conservative in regards to modernism. I am saying that if
The Fountainhead took place today, the groupthink establishment would be demanding that Howard Roark build modernist glass buildings without ornament.
OK, I may be ranting.
I am just sick of the damn hypocrisy in architecture.
If you'd like to know why I think ornament is necessary, by all means we can talk about that.
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It's also true, as pointed out by Malcolm Gladwell, that when asked, most people will say they prefer a rich, bold, dark roast coffee, when most of them actually prefer a weak, sweet coffee.
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Let's test this analogy. When purchasing homes, do most people prefer traditional or modernist designs?