A Decorated World
Throughout the twentieth century, architects tried to convince the world that simple abstract architecture was more worthy, correct or beautiful than its decorated alternative. “Ornament is a Crime” wrote Adolf Loos in 1913, citing for proof, amongst other things, the prevalence of tattoos amongst convicted criminals.
This was not a success and even now most people that I have come across as an architect for over 30 years (if they are being honest and not simply trying to sound sophisticated) admit to enjoying the decoration and embellishment of the pre twentieth century buildings that they live amongst.
Architects are opportunists and realists. In early twentieth century Europe, the labour movement, the growth of workers’ unions and the continued march of industrialisation meant that hand-crafted work became increasingly unaffordable. In the Weimer Republic constitution of 1919 the right to form unions was enshrined in law and the improvement of working conditions for every citizen became stated ambition. Architects supported this social movement and became interested in making architecture that was functional, cheap and consistent with mass production, delivering quality to the every-man. This movement aligned beautifully with the sober economic reality of the late 1920’s Germany.
So, in simple terms, it became expensive to decorate buildings due to the need for dignified working conditions for the workers who were building them and politically expedient to supply good affordable housing to the freshly emancipated, voting masses. Simple undecorated architecture was born, everyone could have it but it spoke to them of necessity and not delight.
The deep longing for decoration, for richness of texture, for craft and ornament did not disappear and as architects we can now reappraise this desire in the light of affordable digital fabrication. In this essay, I am contending that decoration became architecturally unfashionable in the early twentieth century due to economic constraints which have since disappeared and that with cheap digitised mass production, we have the means of production – digital, to question this fashion for the simple or ordinary.
We now live in a world where everything is expression, we live in a rich tapestry of layered digital experiences. It’s interesting to look to the Victorian world, that delighted in the rich texture of history, building on the eclectic visual collecting of artefacts from foreign lands which, perhaps even more than the Georgian world, effects our built environment in Dublin. The Victorian world, through the dubious colonial ambitions of the Europe’s wealthy was perhaps the first wave of Globalization, and is therefore highly relevant to visual culture today.
The alternative modernist tradition of expressionism in architecture of the 1920’s developed directly from the Victorian world, Walter Gropius, later famous for the extreme functionalist architecture of the Bauhaus, in 1919 described “painting, sculpture and architecture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future, substituting “a million craftsmen” now for “a million 3-D printers and another million CNC machines” and we start finding a richly ornamented architecture for everyone to enjoy, that has faith in the future and finds delight in the past.
