'Block by block, this basic architecture is ironing away the city’s rich and rough texture — a smoothing caused partly by scale, cost, and regulations but mostly by an unquestioned aversion to anything that smacks of the ornate.' JDavidsonNYC writes
Photo: Alphotographic/Getty Images/iStockphoto If you threw a handful of big new New York buildings in a box, shook it, then picked them out one by one, what are the chances that you’d guess their assigned function or place them at the correct address? Take, for instance, Monarch Heights, a residential building aimed at students at 415 West 120th Street in Morningside Heights; 425 Grand Concourse, an affordable-housing complex that boasts passive-house sustainability standards; the...
This is an idiosyncratic prejudice. Suburban home builders woo buyers by slathering them with gables and bays and balustrades and porticos and portholes, a profusion that the critic Kate Wagner has chronicled magnificently in her blog McMansion Hell. Classical architects continue classicizing with undimmed passion. Dictators, both genuine and wannabe, soothe themselves with marble and gilt.
We can honor the past’s handiwork without requiring its return, especially now that computer-driven laser cutters and milling machines can handle more fine-grained convolutions than an army of Sicilian stonecutters. A quarter-century ago, the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron screenprinted news photos onto the concrete surface of the Eberswalde Technical School Library in Germany.
A few decades later, the modernist movement disapproved of such subterfuge. An almost puritanical hostility to decoration took hold, insisting that it was more rewarding to achieve perfect simplicity than to slather walls with pointless curlicues or hide sloppy joints behind an icing of rosettes. And it’s true that ornate façades can be a liability. All those dirt-collecting pigeon magnets crumble and fall.
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