In most cities or college campuses the older buildings are all more beautiful than buildings built after 1940, at least to my eye. The worst are the brutalist and modernist buildings of the 50's and 60's.
"Beautiful" is a concept completely lost in Architecture in trends dating back many decades. I am a big fan of the beautiful, as are some other architects, but the general trend has been to not even consider the idea for quite a while. The most trendy thing now is sustainable building - also having nothing to do with the beautiful and in many cases detrimental to the idea.
Another way to look at this is as long as it's trendy to make art that ignores the beautiful, so too will architecture ignore the beautiful. It has to do with culture and philosophy, and fortunately there are still some people who desire beauty in their buildings and demand it from their architects, but not nearly enough.
Indeed, sustainability is the new trend. However, recently I came across a random blog comment that noted that 19th century buildings were far more energy efficient:
But look at lower Manhattan and all the traditional pre-war New York skyscrapers . . . in fact, look at any great pre-war building . . . they are all 10x more energy efficient than any modernist structure.
They tended to have thick masonary walls and windows that opened. (That's why people had paperweights). They were also more slender and indented than the sheer glass slabs that the "less is more" crowd have forced on us.
Traditionalists like Ernest Flagg and Sanford White were building for natural ventilation and energy conservation because there was no alternative. And they managed to solve this problem with soul-soaring art that was funtional and profitable.
Thom Mayne is attempting to invent something that had already been perfected generations ago but discarded in the name of "progress." But isn't that so often the case. If he weren't so self-absorbed he might have learned something from his elders.
I agree that the new SF Federal Building is really hideous looking, but it has some state of the art sustainability features that far surpass the good old days. Could this have been an attractive building with those same features? Sure, but the trend followers want it this way - ugly.
FvB is on the right track, I think. It is not the style itself, but the interaction between the style, the culture and the political system, that created the problem.
Perhaps modernism is so successful because it's so hard to do well. It's a classic academic fuck-you: create an unsolvable problem and then solve it. Can you build a beautiful building out of flat, bare concrete? I can. Guess my SAT must be higher than yours. Pity about that, poor chap.
It's pretty easy to see how this essentially repellent attitude can thrive in a New Class world, where academic accomplishment is the only legitimate form of social status. It's also easy to see how the emperor's new clothes syndrome developed, and so many second-rate buildings, in which the subtle elegance was so subtle as to be nonexistent, got built.
Innovative architecture doesn't have to mean ugly architecture - just as innovative furniture doesn't (always) mean ugly furniture. But as long as architectural decisionmakers are juries and committees rather than eccentric, Randish corporate tycoons, Dilbert is here to stay. Playing by the New Class rules gives us New Class buildings - the architecture we deserve.
An extreme theory, but after spending a lot of time hanging around academia, I'm inclined to agree.
My girlfriend is just graduating as an architect. She just likes very modern or minimalistic designs. I do not think she appreciates classic buildings or decoration. To me it seems like a big loss. But I am only a software engineer.
