Perhaps this is because I've let Twitter radicalize me on this particular subject, but it seems like modern architecture is totally ideologically captured to be against this stuff.

There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.

There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.

The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)

This has been my hope for a while! I live in a 1911 house and the amount of small detail everywhere would be impossibly expensive by modern construction standards. I also like modern minimalism, but I know many of the drywall corners everywhere in modern homes aren't design decisions as much as cost savings measures.

We can, but will you pay for it? The standard house building a house is cheap - some of those decorations would increase the costs by as much as double - but they won't increase the value of the house.

I have a rule of thumb that seems to hold: until you get to about 3500 sq feet in a house people will choose larger over decorations where possible. Larger than that and you don't want to clean the house yourself (that is unless your wealth supports regular professional cleaning you won't go much larger). Of course as a rule of thumb it isn't a hard rule, some people want more space, others can live with less. As houses get larger people are willing for more decoration cost.

For apartments it is worse - renters rarely will pay extra to live in a nice building.

This might have influenced too many people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

If history has shown something is that minimalism always wins (don't confuse minimalism with the horrible/cheap building and design practices that are norm today)

> I've always wondered why we haven't seen a broad architectural movement returning to highly ornate decorative facades

If you follow trends in USA single family detached home construction, the trend is rather the opposite direction. Extreme rises in inflation generally, price of vehicles, construction materials are sending house builders down paths of using the cheapest, shoddiest possible materials and then slapping a veneer of normalcy on top of it. The amount of MDF and oriented strand board in use is greater than it's ever been. Now they're going back to aluminum wiring, copper clad aluminum cat5e cable, and similar. You should see the horrific results of a framing inspection (pre-drywall) done by a professional, neutral and diligent inspector in the average single family home tract development these days.

Modern "Architecture" has taken the trends of the mid-late 1990s McManson to its ultimate extreme of building "luxury" housing that is in reality anything but. Just good enough to sell, then the shoddiness in construction and maintenance becomes somebody else's problem.

After seeing the real thing in a museum, I would love to have an Egyptian relief replica on the inside wall of my house. No sarcasm, I think it would be badass.

I think a good theory is:

Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.

This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.

(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)

See Tom Wolfe's excellent From Bauhaus to Our House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House

Also this ACX discussion (it's a few posts) is really good: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-t...

We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.

These people are trying: https://www.humanise.org/

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