Quote:
Originally Posted by Alliance
No. Its simply bullsh!t, adapting the APPEARANCE of a style of architcture (to be easily confused by those who know nothing about it) to a medium that that style of architecture was never designed to be used for. The only thing it shows about taste is that there are plenty of people ignorant about style, class, and architecture buying into a facade of high society and historical nostalgia. It simply shows people are too laugably unaware to actually have anything but faux taste.
(To be clear. I'm talking about the tastes of LaGrange, the developer, etc and not targeting any one individual in particular.)
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Now, I agree with you that the Elysian is entirely ugly and innapropriate, but your reasoning is wrong.
The Elysian is a total piece of excrement not because it is applying a style to a place where it 'shouldn't be' but because it is a skimpy cop out replication of that style. The materials are bad, the proportions are bad, the details are bad (the thing has friggin balconies)...nothing matches up with the style it is supposed to follow. If it were done in the right materials, with the right massing and the right details, it could be a beautiful building (architecturally regressive, but beautiful nonetheless).
This is the Ansonia, in New York. It is a spectacular high rise done up like a French Chateau that suceeds brilliantly because the architects paid attention to detail and the developers paid pretty penny.
wikipedia.org
Mind you every building (save Sullivan's Transportation Building) at the Columbian Exposition was revivalist, but nobody flipped shit because it was done right. It's ironic that architectural styles seen today as being unique to a time period and taboo to replicate were actually replicas themselves. If you're going to building something revivalist, DO IT RIGHT. Because if you don't, you get 60 storey towers of precast concrete with little carved in lines to give the impression of limestone the developers didn't want to spend money on.