Forsher wrote:Nilokeras wrote:When has brutalism ever been so in vogue as to 'suppress' demand for other styles of building? The era of brutalism was filled with other styles of architecture. More importantly, the types of artisan work required to build things like mass production wrought iron fixtures were gone long before brutalism came about.
Brutalism is but one manifestation of the bias against ornamentation. It's not a comment about Brutalism specifically, but a comment about how all in vogue styles share an anti-ornamentation bias.
Ok, but this is a thread about brutalism specifically lol— these seems like an incredibly surface-level dismissal of pretty much all of modernist design as “anti-ornamentation” without considering how brutalist or different styles of contemporary architects have actually rethought, iterated on, and created new forms of ornamentation for public monuments.
Forsher wrote:
If I wanted to ask chatGPT I would ask it. I'm talking to you.
If you asked chatGPT it could not explain "ideological house" to you... I know this because I tried to get it to do so. HOWEVER, if, and I repeat myself, you asked chatGPT to say what word (academic) architects would attach to
the definition I wrote for "ideological house" then "ideal type" is one of the results they'd give.
Thus armed, you are invited to investigate the concept of the ideological house by reference to what people have to say about "ideal types". Obviously this did not happen, but it could've.
Why couldn’t you just say “upon investigation I think what I meant was ‘ideal type’” instead of dragging the droids into architecture criticism lol
Umeria wrote:Brutalist buildings would have a much better reputation if they didn't keep them so cold all the time. Hard to feel welcome when it's 50 degrees inside.
Neoclassical buildings would have a much better reputation if “they” didn’t keep them so humid inside. Hard to feel welcome when dew is condensing out of the air onto your skin at 60 degrees. All neoclassical buildings are like this, by the way, I’ve checked
Cydathenaeum wrote:At no point in human history
was ornamentation necessary or economical. What material explanation is there for why the Greeks built the Parthenon as they did? If material forces so dominant, why then do medieval cathedrals include decoration which is not possible to see from the perspective of someone on the ground? Both were, in a sense, ideologically attached to the expression of beauty and societies were prepared to go to great lengths to provide their outlay;
I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, you can analyze it as a simple output of superstitions that helped uphold the reigning political economies and regimes of those eras. Ornamenting areas no one on the ground could see serves to increase the expenditure and number of artisans required, creates secret knowledge that can be revealed as propaganda to express the power and wealth of the cathedral’s sponsor or sponsors, legitimizes them further in the eyes of the church, and reinforced the regime’s own self-belief in its divine favor. They
also just loved beauty, I’m sure, but pretending like it’s absolutely incomprehensible from a political-material perspective why they might undertake such efforts is kind of a stretch.
It is a very blinkered thing to try to justify: material forces killed beauty and this is why it is a good thing.
“Killed beauty”? Can we please be serious for a minute and chill out? Just because you don’t find certain styles beautiful doesn’t mean your taste is universal— I genuinely enjoy just looking at a lot of brutalist architecture and monuments, I think they’re often quite beautiful, just in a different way from your baroque or gothic cathedrals or your classical basilicas or what have you. Brutalist and modernist buildings can have plenty of ornamentation and style, the fact you don’t recognize it as such doesn’t make your taste somehow objectively correct.
Yes, there’s a lot to be said about the rise of minimalism and its consequences for the human race or whatever, but honestly I’d be more interested in hearing about the aesthetic consequences of this trend for interior design, vehicles, clothing, personal effects, and appliances— not public architecture, where I would submit that a lot of contemporary ornamentation (glasswork, decorative metal and stone claddings, screens & audio, water features, gardens, disrupted surfaces, abstract sculpture) maybe just often isn’t recognized as such, since we’re used to imagining things like realistically-styled friezes and colonnades with elaborate capitals and ironwork and stained glass as default decorative elements. The foam-core non-load-bearing decorative column is a rather tragic consequence of this failure of imagination— to borrow from Forsher, those are our “ideal type” of architectural decoration, but we miss a lot if we narrow our focus to only finding the ideal type of a thing beautiful.