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Dr Andreas Matthias's avatar

The nice thing about your articles is that even when they fail to answer their questions, they are still fascinating to read and think about. So this time.

I don’t think that you could have ever answered the particular question, because, I suspect, the question itself is framed in the wrong way. You see it as a question about architecture, while I’d think that the architectural expression of it is just one aspect of a much wider phenomenon.

For one, ornaments have not only disappeared in architecture, but all throughout everyday life. Cutlery used to be heavily ornamented (I still have a knife of my grandmother’s with all sorts of leafy ornament going around its handle), drinking glasses were, the salons of the Titanic were, and if you look at historical medical or lab equipment in a museum, you will see that even medical instruments and lab tripods for beakers used to come with lion feet. Modern times have done away with *all* of that, not only with architectural ornaments. And this, I think disproves your conclusion: for it is today trivial to 3d-print an ornamented knife-handle or pen holder for your desk, but nobody does so. It’s not that we don’t have the wealth to introduce beauty into our lives. It is rather that our standards of beauty have changed. Today, beauty is seen in the direct opposite of ornament: the stark simplicity of Zen, Japanese architecture’s straight lines and right angles, and its popular version: IKEA chic. One can still buy heavily ornamented garden chairs from cheap Chinese factories, but nobody wants to. We think of ornaments as garish and stark simplicity as aesthetically attractive.

Why have our aesthetic preferences changed? I don’t think that you could pinpoint one single reason. For lab and medical equipment, it’s clearly utility: medical knowledge about infections and contamination prescribes that such equipment should be easy to clean and disinfect, and the same applies to cutlery to some extent. You want a knife that will reliably be clean after rinsing it off, without having to poke through the ornament with a toothpick to remove any sticking bits of food.

Another thing is a cultural shift in the perception of luxury. I think it was Karl Lagerfeld who said (but I might be wrong about the source): “Today, luxury means to have an ironed T-shirt in your wardrobe.” The richest, trendiest men, the rulers of today’s world, come dressed in turtlenecks, T-shirts and jeans: from Steve Jobs to Zuckerberg. Even suits are suspect: only crooks like SBF or Trump insist on suits and ties. The more affluent the wearer, the more they “can afford to dress badly” seems to be the perception of it. And the same applies to architecture. Only a newly-rich lottery winner would build a mansion with marble doves fluttering over the ornate balconies. When Steve Jobs or Bill Gates build their houses, they are either modelled on simplified folk architectural motifs (“Mediterranean arches”) or clean modern lines without obvious ornamentation. But as with the T-shirt, which has to be “ironed” to signify luxury, the un-adorned Scandinavian style house has to have almost invisible ornamental touches: the contrast in the colours of the wooden beams; the positioning of the spotlights; the outside vista as it is framed through the windows. It is the now the *restraint* that makes the ornament aesthetically valuable, not the exuberance.

Yet another point might be efficiency: we love it. YouTube videos have to be short and to the point. Nobody likes flowery prose or long intros. We don’t have the patience for art that takes too long, or for a meal of many courses. McFood delivers the goods as quickly as possible. And this might also be a reason why we want our architecture to reflect this efficiency, the ease and speed that we want to surround and characterise our lives.

In the end (and sorry for the long comment), I don’t have any more answers than you. But I suspect that the answer to the architecture question is much more complex, involving a good deal of explaining the mindset of 20th and 21st century modernity. I also don’t think that our future will necessarily contain ornamented space stations *for the reasons you mention.* We might get ornamented space stations at some point, but I suspect that it will be just because of a swing in fashion, or maybe it will never happen because of reasons of practicality. Who knows. Anyway, a fascinating question and a great read. Thanks!

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Eric Brown's avatar

When I worked in a shop that was doing some custom-molded plastic parts, the story went that the first part off the line cost $200,000. Subsequent ones cost a nickel.

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