What Happened to "Useless" Beauty?

And how to produce ornaments at scale...

If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll come across a version of a meme comparing a wonderful Gothic or Art Deco tower belonging to a bygone era, to a modern box built by a modern, minimalist architect.

Although it’s something of an oversimplification, it points to a broader sentiment of discontent with the missing craftsmanship in modern architectural design — what happened to all the “useless”, but beautiful little details?

Well, the disappearance of ornamentation (and craftsmanship) in construction can be traced back to two primary causes about one century ago:

• Cultural attitude

• Pursuit of scale

Let’s explore how it happened, and how to bring craftsmanship back in harmony with contemporary construction…

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This Saturday dives into the story of the despised queen who drove France into revolution: Marie Antoinette — but there are a lot of myths to dispel about her…

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Culture

The shift in attitude towards craft and ornamentation started taking place in the 1910s. Adolf Loos, an influential architect of Austrian and Czech descent, claimed in his essay “Ornament and Crime” that “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects."

This essay was one of the theoretical and practical pillars of the Bauhaus movement emerging about a decade later, and ultimately, the International Style post-WWII.

Villa Muller by Adolf Loos, Prague

From a cultural perspective, many architects and builders post-WWII defined ornament in a very blunt way: a simple, added, and unnecessary decoration that could be removed without impacting the building's performance or aesthetic perception (depending on the design).

Building as efficiently (and cheaply) as possible in this sense became preached as virtuous.

Scale

In the same time frame, early concepts of mass-produced housing based on industrialized production methods started to change attitudes toward traditional craftsmanship.

In 1924, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, laid out the parameters that would be necessary to enable industrialized construction — namely the need for scale based on “rigid standardization.”

Walter Gropius: Förster-Krafft-System House exhibited in Berlin, 1931–1932

In the following hundred years, the focus on industrially mass-produced building components, combined with the vision to eliminate ornaments, led to the ubiquitous housing solutions and standardized building products that are now globally available.

In other words, buildings across the world began to look largely the same, liberated of their delightful details. But this might not be the case for much longer.

In recent times, there has been pushback against both the cultural and economic arguments previously laid out. Architects have been rediscovering the practical benefits of craft and ornamentation on quality of life, and new technologies are making it more practical to produce at scale…

Can Ornaments Be Useful?

Acanthus leaves have adorned Corinthian columns for millennia

Firstly, ornaments matter because they assign ordinary things meaning. They speak to the tradition or craft that produced a building or object.

Take for example, the acanthus leaf in Mediterranean culture: it’s a symbol of enduring life, and makes sense symbolically to embed right into structural features like columns. Small details like this connect you to the past (several millennia in this case).

So they might infuse buildings with cultural significance, but can they be practically useful?

Well, the distinction between “ornament” and “useful object” is far more complex than Loos suggested. In many cases, the “ornament” is, to a large extent, an integral part of a building with complex functionality. For instance, the base and capital of a column are efficient ways to ease the load transfer from the architrave / beam into the column shaft, and from there into the foundation or base plate of the building.

Or take the traditional “ornamental” eave details of Victorian houses. These are in fact very elaborate waterproofing features, not purposeless decorative elements.

Since the 1970s, architectural thinkers like Christopher Alexander have been trying to make the case that craftsmanship, ornamentation, and traditional proportions at every scale play an integral role in human health and happiness. Practically, they can be deployed to manage temperature, light, and humidity in a sustainable way.

Scalable Craftsmanship

The joys of ornamentation are by no means limited to architecture…

Recognizing the benefits of ornamentation and craftsmanship is not enough to bring them back. We also have to make it financially viable.

There are downsides to traditional construction methods: they’re labor-intensive, subsequently slow and cost-intensive, and materials are more expensive than the at-scale outputs that feed the construction market. An exclusively custom-crafted housing product is not scalable and, subsequently, unsuitable to satisfy the supply deficiency in housing production.

So either we find scalable ways to produce ornaments, or we implement new technologies in a way that creates time and budget for a contemporary version of craftsmanship — what does that look like?

Well, in recent years, we’ve started to see the use of robotics, parametric architecture, and prefabrication to search for that balance between high tech, ornament, and craft that can be applied cost-efficiently.

For example, SHoP architects used software to design masonry patterns and prefabricated facade panels for its Mulberry building in New York City:

Or architectural researchers like Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler have been perfecting robotic automation in construction for the past two decades.

They’ve recently started to implement this in real life projects, like this robotically created facade in Switzerland:

And finally, there are developers like Neutral, making a push at building housing that can satisfy both scale and beauty. What they do is use high-end, prefabricated components like mass timber panels to quickly erect a building’s “core.”

That core is then skinned, internally and externally, with customizable craftsmanship in both wood and masonry.

Optimistically, we might in fact be witnessing a new school of architecture and design: one with a renewed appreciation for ornament and craft, coupled with new technologies and a 21st century approach that combines the best of both worlds.

It’s a step towards a future where our built environment isn’t just functional, but comes alive in the details…