Why We Never Got an Entire Art Nouveau City
Why Don't We Live in an Art Nouveau World?
A hundred years after Gaudí's death, the Sagrada Família is finally the world's tallest church — yet Art Nouveau remains a rare, short-lived style. Visiting Barcelona's Hospital de Sant Pau, the author finds the ornamentation dazzling at first and exhausting within half an hour, and concludes the movement burned out fast for a reason: people tired of it, just as he did. The piece weighs the 'trad' critique of modern architecture against the many mundane forces that shape what gets built.
I'm glad Modernista architecture exists, and I'm glad we have the Sagrada Família as an absurdly ambitious experiment, but my feeling is that there is just the right amount of this style in the world.
- virtualritz
I have architect friends. They can't draw, they can't sculpt, they have no clue about art history. Or color theory, if you want to go that far. Usually golden ratio/Fibonacci is kinda where it ends. One of them is a professor of architecture, no less.
That said, I'm sure there are architects today for which some or all of this is not true.
Most of the above are subjects an architect student would have had to learn about and demonstrate profienciency in, to earn their degree, a 100 years ago.
I'm sure the change in architecture's priorities played a role in this too. Industrial materials, construction efficiency. The need to mass produce housing, costs and new social ideals, yadayadayada.
And ofc the modernist rejection of any ornament; even that which is there historically, on existing architecture.
My hope is that in a future where we 3D-print buildings or construct them with robots we will see a renaissance of non-functional[1] beauty/sculpture/texture/color in architecture because the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistend.
But then, architecture is also always a mirror of the period. And from that pov it's not looking so great for beauty making it back any time soon.
[1] Yet functional because how can the happiness/joy of the perceiver of architecture be removed from what should count as functional, in architecture?
- bondarchuk
Sort of a recap for normies of Scott Alexander's Whither Tartaria from 2021: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
It is also interesting to read about the Amsterdamse School, an early 1900's style with "mass appeal" of which you can see many beautiful examples throughout the city, which were also only built thanks to strong support from the political sphere. https://architecture-history.org/schools/AMSTERDAM%20SCHOOL....
- BobBagwill
I think contemporary architecture is perfect:
Cheap, soulless, forgettable, replaceable metal and glass rectangular prisms filled with cheap, soulless, forgettable, replaceable workers. Form follows function!
That old architecture implied things like spirit, transcendence, community, beauty. Outmoded concepts for sure!
- robochat
It's important to remember that the Art Nouveau part of Barcelona was where the very rich people lived. They were apartment buildings for the very wealthy. Also the very nice houses that we visit on holidays and trips tend to have originally been very rich peoples' houses. It's like looking back at music in past decades and only seeing the good stuff and forgetting that there was far more mediocre stuff that has since been collectively forgotten.
- recursivedoubts
Read from bauhaus to our house, by tom wolfe. In america we had the Arts & Crafts movement (e.g. greene & greene) as a native folk form.
It was all killed because two dynamics came together to push "the yale box": corporate america's love of cheap buildings (although the buildings are cheap to build but often nightmares to maintain and use... somebody else's problem) and the ideological purity spiraling post WW2 driven by the academic environment and the rise of abstract architectural criticism over the practical building arts.
post modernism acknowledged the failure of the yale box but, because going back to traditional building forms was unthinkable (of course), had to do ironic kitsch instead
- Nevermark
> Art Nouveau architecture, being nouveau, relied far more on artistic genius and bespoke decorative elements.
> an architecture meant for jewels [...] reliant on [...] the starchitect.
> This made the style difficult to replicate at scale.
I think this is it. There was no convergence on a set of stable basic elements, from which other elements, unique or not, would still inherit common constraints. Without common constraints, extensions or variations just create a mess of ideas, good or bad, with no coherence between them.
> It’s not even clear what a badly executed Art Nouveau building would be
If nobody knows where a style starts or stops, or what is required or not, it isn't really a style. It is a movement encompassing many styles, a dynamic evolutionary explosion that will not just lose common definition but common recognition. Not a specific design or style.
- vslira
I think the part of this post that is a push back at the “trad critique” doesn’t really work: at a point the author basically says that modernism has its hold due to being a (and I’m paraphrasing uncharitably here) cheap and easy shot at architectural respectability, which is not only not a defense of it, but pretty much the point of the “trad critique”
- fsloth
Not mentioned in the article - Helsinki has a large collection of Art Nouveau ("Jugend") buildings, though not quite matching Riga.
https://www.myhelsinki.fi/visit/helsinki-art-nouveau-archite...
"Helsinki is indeed a unique city of Art Nouveau architecture on the global scale, boasting no less than 600 “Jugend” buildings – more even than in Barcelona or Brussels."