[Footnote on Wright] If you happen to be taller than 5'8 when visiting a Wright building (like myself), bend your knees until you are at that eye-level to appreciate the full experience. https://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=8915
I usually find that extremely ugly. It is simple to do, and there are heaps of examples around, but it is usually done into a flat rectilinear surface so doesn’t add much beauty. Forms are often repetitive, but even when the pattern varies over the complete surface it usually lacks any real style IMHO.
Which is about when ornamentation started to become undesirable. The arts and craft movement was itself a kick-back against mass production of ornamentation as it cheapened buildings. Not everyone could afford hand crafted buildings. They sought to create a distinction between 'rich' handcrafted building and 'poor' mass produced.
Notice that word.. cheapened. Even the very words we have themselves underlie the reasons why we find these things desirable. Once everyone could have ornamentation, it was no longer valued.. just like potatoes.
Other things that cemented the shift away from the ornamentation and spacial characteristics of pre-arts and craft architecture were, in some order (and lets ignore cathedrals and such because a. they are still handmade, and at about the same rate as in previous eras b. they are not typical of any building in any sense and they never have been c. we only love the ones that we never knocked down):
1. plumbing (you can greatly increase the size of buildings if it take less than ten minutes to find a tap or a toilet, and you can stop them buring down easier)
2. artifical lighting and heating (most buildings were configured entirely to capture and distribute light and heat)
3. the spanish flu (the dramatic and sudden push for modernist buildings came directly out of the tail end of the flu, and after a few decades of other rampant illnesses related to buildings.. typhoid, tuberculosis, etc and as the wealthy were exposed to modern hospitals - devoid of fireplaces, dust catching ornament, and with clean white ceramic finishes - and their brethren mountain spa wellness retreats)
4. cost (turns out that non-ornamental mass production is even cheaper than ornamental mass production)
5. speed of deisgn and construction (it doesn't matter how lovely your handcrafted building is, if I can build twenty others in the same time frame)
Now that with modern fabrication we can produce effortless modernist buildings, they are no longer valued. So people inevitably push back against devaluation, and that which cannot be devalued is taht which cannot be remade. Like the hipsters of the same era, they look to the past with its stories and promises of cultural supremacy. And they forget all the small steps that led us to this point. Preferring instead to dream of an era that never existed, but in its historical survival.
Everyone hates Eisenman's buildings. But we only know this because they existed.
The problem is not that there is some magical loss of essence when something is made by a machine, it is that mass market products in the West prioritize looks over function: strawberries that are the size of eggs and taste like cardboard, bread that is white and puffy but mostly air and mush, milk that is pure white and tastes like chalk water.
And in our industry, UI that look amazing on video and images but reduce your productivity to that of a brain damaged chimp.
The problem isn't that things are machine made, it is that we are making the wrong things because the wrong things look better in ads.
Classical music went through a similar phase, but now the repertory is conservative as ever. Why? In part because atonal music on traditional instruments is just as labor intensive!!
You can produce simple forms with moldings, but worse, you produce generic forms.
First, 'Industrialisation' also implies a fairly capitalist attitude towards everything and ornamentation may be costly in that context.
Second, labour used to be 'cheap and plentiful', or rather, power was so concentrated, that the people who built such buildings could 'afford' the ornamentation (or maybe compel their serf-like workers to do it). And they cared about it because 'class' was a different thing altogether way back when.
Third, ornamentation in many areas is still very expensive. To ornament, a building of any size would require designers, workers, and a lot of time and many. 'Some' products could be ornamentalized, but others, far less so. Suppose you built an office building with nice domed interior, and you wanted to have it 'ornamented' like a Cathedral. I wager it would be expensive.
The masons that utilized these ornamental techniques no longer seem to exist in even moderate quantities.
But to me, none of this matters. Kentuck Knob is just such a lovely building, and Fallingwater... Fallingwater is a breathtaking masterpiece, there are no words to describe this feeling. During my first visit, I turned around to give it one last look and literally wept.
Wright achieved great mastery in terms of his structural engineering - two great examples are his Johnson Wax building with the "mushroom" columns that were radically stronger than any were willing to believe (a destruction test was used to prove it at the time - concrete construction being very new (post Romans that is) [1] and his Falling Water house where he used the mass of the house to provide a counter balance to the great cantilevering terraces and novel new reinforced construction techniques. The contractor for Falling water had no real experience with this new reinforced concrete construction, and apparently did not build according to the detailed plan as they assumed it would simply fall down once forms were removed. Wright had to personally go to the site and knock down the last supporting column of the great cantilevered terrace as no one was willing to be the one to destroy the house. Although it did not collapse, it did sag over the decades because of the construction flaws, and has been recently repaired to have full intended strength [2]
In the context of this discussion on ornamentation and philosophy in architecture, that Wright's execution was lacking is somewhat irrelevant.
[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/14/frank-lloyd-wright-johnson... [2] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-...
His schools have had issues, because the schools were meant to be sandboxes for the students to get real world experience, and try things which may or may not work. The fact that the schools have become landmarks after his death has nothing to do with Wright's design philosophies.
If you look at Wright's own house, it incorporates lots of clever ideas in terms of engineering more rugged forms which will hold up over time (like molding profiles that are designed to be coped from multiple directions to keep joints in place, and stained glass patterns that lend themselves to 'hiding' extra reinforcement on one side where the structure will be invisible to the beholder, for example).
Here are my pics of his house when I went through it last time I was in Chicago. I tried to get as many such above examples as possible...
As the article shows, lots of architectural ugliness isn't cost-saving at all. It costs extra and makes the buildings less usable http://news.mit.edu/2008/sponge-book-1007
Sometimes it costs a lot extra and is much less usable. https://thetech.com/2010/03/19/statasuit-v130-n14
Ironically, look at Rosslyn Chapel--it was basically falling apart until The DaVinci Code caused enough tourism that they had enough revenue to repair it.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Sw5TDwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Especially in the 'new world' it'd be hard for a culturally aware 'rich man' to even know what to build because often the context doesn't exist.
If you want to build something traditional in downtown Stockholm, you have a few choices.
If design is a 'language' - many areas literally don't have a language other than the functional. So the creative aspects end up being ... 'whatever'.
I'm pretty sure that, for example, most places in Switzerland has some pretty strict rules for what you can build.
or maybe it is just my bias, working in consumer apps...
I don't think this is entirely true. A lot of the most hideous (in my opinion) modern buildings look like they actually spent money looking horrible. They have contorted structures that seem to be screaming out "I could fall over at any moment" which must rely heavily on load-bearing frames. Their "brutally honest" concrete often looks like it does nothing more than providing an ugly facade, and creating more work for a hidden steel skeleton.
I think there's two separate complaints - first that cheap modern buildings are cheap, functional (as long as they hold up), and ugly. Think Stalinist city blocks. Second, the modern showpieces are even worse, actively going out of their way to look horrible, like some Stalinist government buildings.
It's not the fault of architects if private companies want to build cheap square feet for cubicles or cheap apartments. Maybe the public could regulate against it, but that's only going to happen if they trust architects to do a better job with more money.
But when architects do have a bit of money to waste on making a building look good, I think they're often pressured to make something original. Previous designs had evolved over maybe thousands of years, of course they are much better, just try drawing a totally original concept for a car that other people won't think is cringey. There's also more time pressure - presumably older designers had far more time for planning (a king can wait a little before a new cathedral is built, a mayor can't wait till the next election). And while new materials and techniques can make new things possible, those things are not always attractive to people who spent their early childhood stacking bricks (so anything relying too heavily on tension just instinctively feels like a disaster waiting to happen).
The 'bread' you get in the Anglosphere is a crime against humanity. Not because it is machine made, but because it comes with a philosophy: looks matter more than taste.
Meanwhile Eastern Europe still uses the old soviet factory bread and the thing tastes like manna when you get it fresh.
For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously. Industrial bakeries are far more efficient so only a select few can afford to pay for good bread, and so there are far fewer individual bakers, and they're more expensive because there's less demand - they can't make it up on volume. It's the same with artisans.
My father was a plasterer in his 20s, and worked with old men who did the ceiling decorations in the British Embassy in Dublin. But they were the last of their kind, because nobody wanted that any more. And now they're all dead.
Richly decorated edifices could be risen today, but they're far more expensive, and thus we can't afford to roll the dice and end up with a bunch of good buildings by process of survival. Instead, everything is mediocre and designed to amortise to zero value within a few decades, to be torn down and built again, not better, merely different.