Quote:
Originally Posted by Cirrus
Anyway, long story short, to sum up:
1) I think most people like historicist architecture because it has human-scaled details, which modernism refuses to allow, but without which cities are dull.
2) I think most people like historicist architecture specifically because they can't visualize anything else with human-scaled details. There is no alternative.
3) I think most people would get over historicism and appreciate (and demand!) more contemporary architecture if contemporary architecture were at all interested in meeting the need for human-scaled details.
4) I think we could end this whole traditional/modernist fight if the architecture world got less dogmatic about refusing to produce ornament, and started using its brain power to produce new and different types of ornament.
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Miami Beach. Go past the Italianate Revivals and some of the more ornate stuff. Do the many blocks of Streamline Moderne buildings smash your perceptions of modernist structures being innately inhumane? It's one place where the architectural concepts of space, light, etc. are appreciated. Do those ribbon windows make the place insufferable? Can most people even care about the differences between the Mediterranean revivals (with the historicist detailing), Art Deco (that's often in-between), and the Streamline Moderne? Too bad much of the earlier (before the age of cost cutting and prefab) Bauhaus buildings were nuked in Europe. You could also visit Tel Aviv and see similar 'human-scaled' Bauhaus-influenced structures.
Unfortunately 20th. century architecture coincided with the rise of cost-cutting, prefabrication, and the age of the automobile. Thus most EVERYTHING you see now, (including the smattering of contemporary styles and the abundance of the neo-historicist architecture) is built to a cost, and suffers from it. You think white picket fences and classical capitals and cornices will elevate a tract suburban home into something approximating the 'human-scale' that you love? The real estate industry makes money from this nostalgia. Unfortunately within a few years the 'classical' detailing will age (and age poorly because it was made of plastic materials in a mold, as opposed to the truly timeless, authentically historic stuff that was built with a hammer and stone chisel) and look bad. You could state that bad modernism and its sparse detailing are a product of our reliance on precast concrete. Yet at the same time, the presently-built neo-historicist stuff isn't much better, as it's also built with precast, and has an additional layer of prefabricated historicist detailing.
Instead of scapegoating modernist styles, we could cite prefabrication as a reason for our bad architecture. But prefabrication has also allowed for cost-efficiencies that weren't available in previous eras. If we really wanted to critique the failings of our cities now, we'd start off with how our cities are built. A white picket fence and 'human-scaled' detailing suddenly aren't impressive when the house is located 30 miles from the core and its inhabitants are mortgaged to their eyeballs and each and every person is car-dependent.