Quote:
Originally Posted by marvelfannumber1
I only see a pre packaged design that as most likely mandated by the developers with the architects basically playing the yes man. When looking at something like the Pantheon I get a sense that the Romans were trying to build something that would make a visitor go "wow", something that would inspire people and give us a closer realationship to art than paintings could ever do. Modern architecture on the other hand is just....there. As said it does not really give me a feilling or any type of opinion. I don't get any connection with it, it's just a building.
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You use the Pantheon as an example of not-modern architecture so perhaps your perspective goes back far enough to accept that even 150 year old buildings had made-to-order, mass-produced mouldings and details for building that were basically built by contractors (not all buildings were designed by architects back then) who acted as yes men for their clients.
"I want a moulding of a monkey eating figs above this window!"
"But sir! You are a lumber baron in northern Canada!"
"MONKEY. FIGS."
So, uh, my city's most "beautiful" skyscraper is made with stock pieces from a warehouse in Montreal. All those little stone banks across Canada? Terra cotta, not stone (more like brick, just prettier) and all designed by a small team of architects in the south who pumped them out several a week with little regard for the contexts in which they would sit. And often with early 20th century buildings those "large stone blocks" are a veneer, sometimes less than an inch thick. There is a lot of deception to them. The giant stone columns of most banks in Western Canada are brick structures coated in mass-produced terra cotta tiles. They didn't even have to build the bricks correctly for it to work, the gaps were filled in with mortar. Very little skill was actually necessary compared to 100 years before.
The ornamentation of 19th to early 20th century revival and neo- architecture in North America is largely just for show. I means very little. I am sure James Whalen didn't even know that the architect had put monkeys eating figs on his building.
Not really saying that newer buildings are "as nice" as old ones, but to say the old ones are nice because of "the craftsmanship" is kind of faulty logic. There is more craftsmanship in one of Mies' skyscrapers than there is in many of those historic buildings. And the mass-produced buildings of the era? They were smaller because the country wasn't as rich back then and the technology wasn't as affordable, and the vast majority of them are gone now.