Resurrecting Ornamental Architecture
Ornaments are functional.
Before the bombs, Dresden was the Florence on the Elbe. Its Baroque and Rococo streets were a creative wellspring for painters like Caspar David Friedrich and composers like Richard Wagner. After the bombs, the people of Dresden began to rebuild in their traditional, ornamental style. They reconstructed what they could with historic accuracy, while filling in the gaps with details that look like they might have been the originals. Upon visiting this city in the process of reclaiming its reputation as a jewel box, British journalist
recently noted that:There is opposition, in particular from the architectural establishment — and one can gauge from this proposal how they see the city’s future. Many of the criticisms are familiar to English speakers; the buildings are inauthentic, or even comparable to Disneyland, which I always find an unconvincing argument when people spend huge amounts of money to stay in theme parks like the Efteling precisely because they present the only modern architecture specifically designed to make people happy.
The question of authenticity may be a philosophical one, I suppose, a Ship of Theseus debate, but I personally don’t see architecture as being analogous to works of art; its value does not lie in its ‘authenticity’, because its scarcity has no value to its owner. Its real value lies in its aesthetics — enjoyed or suffered by everyone.
West links to a 2007 proposal from the architectural establishment for a new Gewandhaus building in the Dresden Neumarkt, a prominent square in the city center, that features an asymmetrical plaster and glass building shaped like a quarry wall hewn at jaunty angles. Its smooth, unadorned façade is a void, lacking the complex details that define the resurrected traditional architecture encircling it. In the rendering, this incongruity catches your eye like a black hole sucking your attention away from the surrounding beauty to stare at expansive, flat walls where nothing happens — no motifs, no cornices or friezes, nowhere for the eye to linger at an exquisitely carved detail.1
By 2010, public outcry over the winning design caused the city council to block its construction and plant trees in its place. But in cities less sensitive to safeguarding architectural tradition, new buildings — civic, corporate, and residential — are rarely adorned like their pre-war counterparts. Too often, ornamentation is treated like an indulgence.
But ornamentation is functional, because architecture that most people enjoy being around is useful. Consider but one critical example: Americans suffer from exorbitant rents in cities that build too little new housing — but I suspect that the NIMBY movement would be defanged quickly if architects embraced styles that neighbors would delight to see built outside their windows. Though people consider more than their view when reacting to neighborhood changes, how new construction affects quality of life certainly looms large in their minds. And even if we think of real estate only in terms of investment, then in the abstract, while building new housing puts downward pressure on the price of existing supply by reducing scarcity, making that new housing beautiful puts upward pressure on the price of existing housing supply by magnifying the overall vibrancy of the neighborhood.
When architects first denounced ornamentation at the beginning of the 20th century, they tried to redefine beauty by the standard that “form follows function.” And though the Modernist zeitgeist has passed, ornamental architectural has yet to recover — and is therefore in need of renewed defense against the misconception that ornamentation is superfluous. Here is the original charge against ornamental architecture from Adolf Loos, the Modernist pioneer who laid the intellectual bedrock of the movement when he sneered at “the ornament disease” in his 1908 essay “Ornament and crime”:
I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects. I believed that with this discovery I was bringing joy to the world; it has not thanked me. People were sad and hung their heads. …
Then I said: Weep not! See, therein lies the greatness of our age, that it is incapable of producing a new ornament. We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament. See, the time is nigh, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then fulfilment will be come.
Putting aesthetics in moral terms, Loos insisted that ornament “is a crime against the national economy that it should result in a waste of human labour, money, and material.” He believed that smooth, unadorned surfaces were timeless, because without an ornamental style they would never go out of fashion — never mind that he was advocating an aesthetic as distinct as any other. Of his belief that humanity was destined to evolve beyond ornamentation as naturally as a child matures into an adult, he betrayed no doubt:
I don't accept the objection that ornament heightens a cultivated person's joy in life, don't accept the objection contained in the words: ‘But if the ornament is beautiful!’ Ornament does not heighten my joy in life or the joy in life of any cultivated person.
The father of Modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was inspired by Loos' belief that ornamentation is “degenerate.” In his 1923 manifesto Toward a New Architecture, Le Corbusier had the audacity to claim that “a cathedral is not very beautiful” because Gothic architecture is too ornamented to “proceed from the great primary forms.” Almost a century later, firefighters would put the lie to this outlandish claim when they risked their lives to save the Notre Dame in Paris as it went up in flames.
Loos and Le Corbusier exemplify what G. K. Chesterton called the unintelligent type of reformer in one of his most memorable metaphors:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
“Chesterton's fence” cautions that we should always try to understand our customs before dismantling them — Chesterton elsewhere called tradition the “democracy of the dead”:
Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. … Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
So why is it that every culture, everywhere in the world, has always created ornamental architecture? Why has this practice been a human universal across time and space? Loos believed that ornamentation was a passing phase in human evolution, destined to be outgrown, and so he began “Ornament and crime” by directly invoking biology:
The human embryo in the womb passes through all the evolutionary stages of the animal kingdom. When man is born, his sensory impressions are like those of a newborn puppy. His childhood takes him through all of the metamorphoses of human history. At 2 he sees with the eyes of a Papuan, at 4 with those of an ancient Teuton, at 6 with those of Socrates, at 8 with those of Voltaire.
But Loos misunderstood evolution.2 Every extant species is the most successful at filling its particular niche in the circle of life — otherwise they would go extinct. Organisms react to the brute forces of survival and reproduction, each coping in its unique way. Arguably, the most successful species are the “living fossils” that have scarcely evolved over hundreds of millions of years, like the horseshoe crab that has changed little since the Triassic Period, or the gingko tree that has looked the same since the Middle Jurassic. These species developed evolutionary strategies with exceptional durability; contra Loos, passing through evolutionary phases is not synonymous with superiority.
Indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, the fact that ornamental architecture is an enduring and universal human tradition suggests the opposite of what Loos concluded. Nothing becomes widespread unless it is useful. Nothing lasts that long unless it is useful. Evolution is trial by fire, wherein vestigial traits become shrunken and impotent. But right up until Loos and Le Corbusier, ornamental architecture was blossoming like never before.
Perhaps humanity could not afford the luxury of casting aside ornamentation until it entered a period of unprecedented abundance. The scientific and industrial revolutions triggered the modern era that invigorated human progress and made modern architecture possible with inventions like steel beam manufacturing and air conditioning.3 When Le Corbusier pronounced that “A house is a machine for living in,” he was speaking as a man of the Machine Age.
Perhaps humanity could not afford the luxury of casting aside ornamentation until it entered a period of unprecedented abundance.
To be clear, we do not need evolutionary theories to justify ornamental architecture. It is enough to have Chesterton’s Fence as a guiding principle: Humanity has decorated its walls for tens of thousands of years, at least since the cave paintings in Chauvet and El Castillo, and if Adolf Loos could not understand such a profound phenomenon, then he should have gone away to think. Only a fool discards something capable of thriving for over 40,000 years because he is so uniquely numb to beauty that “Ornament does not heighten [his] joy in life.”
But we may still wonder how we evolved our aesthetic sense and love for ornamentation — the joy of learning about beauty is reason enough to ask the question. A scientific study of aesthetics is neither cold nor unfeeling, as it is often misconstrued, but a way to explore.4 Just listen to the romantic overtones when the physicist Richard Feynman chastised his artist friend for dismissing how a scientist can experience beauty:
He would hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I would agree. And he says, “You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty . . . I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions: the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors of the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions, which the science, knowledge, only adds to the excitement, mystery, and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
Ornamentation is even older than the galloping lions and rhinos painted on the Chauvet cave walls; indeed, ornaments are more ancient than humanity itself, for we are not the only species attracted to them. This takes Chesterton's “democracy of the dead” far into our evolutionary past, where we can search for common ancestors with other animals that share our aesthetic sense.5 This kinship inspired science writer
to extol the beauty of birdsong and plumage in his new book Birds, Sex, and Beauty, in which he wonders “How can it be that the aesthetic sense of the bird today coincides partly with mine, that we both have, in Charles Darwin's word, a similar ‘taste for the beautiful’?”:6This is a point that puzzled Darwin. You can just about devise a theory to explain why male ornaments — and songs — became conspicuous and exaggerated, but how or why did they become so beautiful to the human eye and ear? It’s hard not to think that birds too must find them so, that the aesthetic sense is one we somehow share with Peahens and Curlews. His answer was that people and birds are both driven by generations of mate choice to evolve this love of beauty. Reproduction of the hottest is a very different process from survival of the fittest, Darwin argued.
The standard of beauty that bird song, and bird feathers, share with people would include a preference for pure notes, rather than harsh squawks or clicks, harmonies rather than disharmonies, regular, rhythmic phrasing rather than a jumble, and in the visual world, pure hues, bright luminance and elegant shapes. There may be a hint here as to why my aesthetic sense and the Curlew’s, Black Grouse’s or Peahen’s are so similar. Purity of note or hue is harder to produce, more statistically improbable and more unusual than broad-spectrum noises or broad-spectrum browns. In the natural world, bright colours and pure notes and intricate patterns do not occur by accident; they have to be created deliberately.
It is harder to create beautiful things than ugly things, whether a human learns to paint like Caravaggio, compose like Bach, or carve the façade of a Gothic cathedral — or whether a peacock thrives enough to grow the most vibrant tail. Sexual fitness can be judged by the ability to summon beauty into existence. If this explanation proves true, then ornamentation may result from a key sexual selection pressure that affects the survival of our species. (And the peacock's.)
This is not to say that painters, composers, and architects are only trying to seduce, which is too reductive for understanding complex human behavior. Instead, this theory puts the ancient impulse to adorn in context: reproduction is a bedrock evolutionary requirement, and we observe that species under the pressure of sexual selection develop ornaments. It adds a question: Does it weaken our species if we reject ornamentation? Are we even capable of resisting the urge to adorn, any more than we can resist the urge to have sex?
Note that even the most devout Modern architects gave in to this ancient impulse. Tom Wolfe skewered the former Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for hypocritically decorating his famous Seagram Building with:
vertical wide-flange beams on the outside of the concrete, as if to say: ‘Look! Here's what's inside.’ But sticking things on the outside of buildings. . . Wasn't that exactly what was known, in another era, as applied decoration? Was there any way you could call such a thing functional?
Mies lapsed in his principles because he tried to preserve the aesthetics of his original design despite unwelcome changes required by American fire codes. The steel beams that he preferred to leave exposed would collapse in a fire unless encased in protective concrete. Such building codes are obviously useful requirements that hardly impede a function-forward design; otherwise, what does “functional” even mean?
It seems that Mies, who started out as a German Expressionist, never entirely escaped the emotive influence of that movement after he embraced the supposed rationality of Modernism.7 Even Le Corbusier sometimes painted his concrete structures with gaudy, rainbow colors. However much he justified this indulgence with idiosyncratic color theory, why should we accept that his reasons for painting the walls were more “functional” than what motivated Renaissance fresco artists or the cavemen in Chauvet tens of thousands of years ago?
Adolf Loos co-opted the idea that “form follows function” from Louis Sullivan, the architect known as the “father of skyscrapers” who helped rebuild Chicago after it burnt down in 1871, and as the mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright. New inventions like elevators had just made his skyscrapers possible, and he believed that this new form — a building shaped more like a monumental obelisk — needed a visual language of its own. Although Sullivan believed that the Beaux-Arts style of his contemporaries was aesthetically stagnant Renaissance pastiche, he never argued that ornamentation had no function.
Unlike the austere Modernists who came after him, Sullivan adorned his innovative buildings with organic designs influenced by the Celtic knots of his paternal heritage melded with the Art Nouveau movement that had just erupted into existence with the 1893 construction of Hôtel Tassel and Hankar House in Brussels. He also incorporated geometric shapes that foreshadowed the Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and ‘30s. For Sullivan, ornamentation should evolve — not disappear.
In his 1896 essay “The tall office building artistically considered,” Sullivan coined the phrase “form ever follows function” while also intimating that aesthetics must follow evolutionary logic:
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling.
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.
By the 1960s, many of Sullivan’s skyscrapers were neglected and in need of renovation, but were instead torn down during the American urban renewal program. Alarmed at the rapid loss of Chicago's architectural heritage, the photographer Richard Nickel began campaigning for their preservation. Nickel grew obsessed with documenting Sullivan's work through photography and by salvaging as much ornamentation as he could physically remove from the buildings before demolition; both his images and artifacts can now be viewed at museums like the Art Institute of Chicago.
Then in 1972, while Nickel was trying to save ornaments from Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange building, the partially demolished structure collapsed on top of him. His body lay under the rubble for about a month before demolition workers found him, and then he was buried near Louis Sullivan’s grave in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. Like the firefighters who would later save the Notre Dame, Nickel valued our architectural heritage more than his own life.
Such self-sacrifice is stirring, but the rebuilding of Dresden demonstrates a less tragic solution to the destruction of beauty. After the bombing, the Nazi Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, who had been responsible for air defense over the city, mourned the architectural loss more than the loss of life, because “artistic treasures can't be replaced.” But as Ed West points out, “the city's grotesque local ruler” was “wrong in his callous assessment of 1945 — human beings can't be replaced, but buildings can.” And crucially, Dresden offers but one example of how destruction can be undone. Not every city needs to replicate its past; we should invent new aesthetics, as Sullivan exhorted us to do, that can also bring back beauty.
Richard Nickel may not have put himself in danger if he believed that the beauty of Sullivan's skyscrapers were replaceable — or maybe he knew that they were, and that by rescuing pieces of the past, he was safeguarding examples of how beautiful American cities could be if we chose to resurrect ornamental architecture.
This essay expands on my response to
’s question about my earlier piece “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco.’” Richard also complained that I never include images besides my drawings, and kind of threatened not to keep reading me unless I changed my ways. Though I like the aesthetic purity of only including my drawings, I am breaking with tradition to make sure he reads this expanded answer to his question:And he had a strange respect for the intellectual ambitions of young children — notably, he never had any of his own.
Le Corbusier’s early buildings felt like furnaces because they were constructed before the invention of air conditioning. Even his admirer’s found them unpleasant, like architect Gordon Bunshaft:
We came to the Salvation Army Building, and it has one façade of the building which is about six or seven stories, all glass. I think it faces south. That didn't work. It was not air conditioned. It was just a furnace. They built a block wall about three feet back from this glass wall and put openings like ordinary windows in the block wall so that people would get light but they wouldn't get this radiating heat. So that, of course, destroyed the building. Then some of the horizontal metal coverings for the glass were hanging out in the air. They were falling off. It was the shabbiest goddamn thing you ever saw.
You can read more about the impact of Le Corbusier’s buildings and drawings here:
Beauty Under the Cover of Darkness
This is a sequel to my September 2024 piece “‘America was supposed to be Art Deco.’”
As philosopher Denis Dutton puts it in The Art Instinct:
The issue, however, is not one of sentimentally attempting to dignify things we like – chamber music or cheesecake – by turning them into adaptations. For a Darwinian aesthetics, the question is how genuine adaptations might produce or explain capacities and preferences even for rarefied experiences.
Alternatively, various species may have separately converged on the same aesthetic sense, rather than inheriting it together from a common ancestor — similar to the way that convergent evolution explains how birds, bats, and insects each independently learned how to fly in their own way. If our aesthetic sense is a product of convergent evolution rather than sharing a common ancestor, then that may be an even stronger argument that beauty is an objective phenomenon outside of ourselves that disparate lifeforms can discover.
Ridley writes that he wishes he were a bird:
One day, while watching the display of the Black Grouse, it dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like birds do and other dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colours for a hundred million years. We mammals are, as I say, usually some shade of brown, and brown is the default colour nature adopts when it is not trying to be ‘colourful’. … Only after the asteroid hit sixty-six million years ago, did we start slowly to become daylight lovers. So when we human beings wax lyrical about the beauty of a bird of paradise or a sunset, we are mere beginners, naive dullards glimpsing what the real gods of colour can do, and not appreciating it in its full glory.
I incline to your views because you write persuasively and with illuminating knowledge. But we must be careful not to give to free a rein to the ornamentally inclined. There is ornamentation and ornamentation. Also: ornamentation upon ornamentation (Help!). You give particularly beautiful examples, but I think ornamentation can sometimes be defined as fiddling about with forms that are beautiful already and should be left alone. The drive to ornament can look obsessive and even manic and perhaps some of the modernists architects' austerity was an over-reaction to the imperial ornamentation mania of the Victorians. See how the fussy mosaic panels the Victorian designer William Blake Richmond stuck up in the choir of St Paul's Cathedral compromise Christopher Wren's elegant, soaring design.
Why would ornamentation negate usefulness? I would take one beautifully ornamented building in Paris or Dresden over a thousand useful boxes. Give me all the ornamental architecture! 👏👏👏