SJ St James Street PO is one of those very nice POs with elaborate masonry, hardwood counters and brass knobs, ornate and wrought metalwork and such.
We took Louis Sullivan's maxim, "a rationally designed structure may not necessarily be beautiful but no building can be beautiful that does not have a rationally designed structure" to its logical conclusion, "form follows function". Rather than being the starting point for beauty, it became the end of it and we trained generations of architects to prioritize one aesthetic.
1. Ornament and Crime (1908) https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf
Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to the dominant schools of thought in architecture, Loos and Bauhaus and modernism, that basically outright require ugliness and generic sterility.
[1] https://www.thehideawayexperience.co.uk/blog-post/scottish-d...
There's also the improvements in building techniques like curtain walls in commercial buildings, and truss connector plates and aluminum/vinyl siding in residential allowed for laborers to replace craftsmen like masons and carpenters. While you'd think that would free up more money for beautification, the economic preference for many individual shareholders and taxpayers doesn't seem to support that.
Add in car-centric development and the advent of television, the internet, and smartphones, and what's the point of making things beautiful anymore? You won't appreciate the finials on a lamppost from the inside of your car, and if the world is ugly, you can look at your phone.
But it's not fully explained by the unwillingness to spend money either. I think the postmodern movement's impact on public beautification turned a lot of people off the idea. Eschewing traditional beauty is fine for museums and galleries, but there are a lot of murals out there that ruined perfectly good walls. Chicago's Cloud Gate, Philadelphia's LOVE Park, Minneapolis's Spoonbridge and Cherry, and I'm sure a large number of other instances of public art since the postmodern era can be fun, visually striking, and iconic. But I'd hesitate to call them beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint, especially when compared to their cities' existing monuments and statues. However, that's a matter of taste. And as we've grown more divided almost all matters of life, both literally and figuratively, even if we all agreed to spend $X on public beautification, I doubt we'd be able to meaningfully agree on what's beautiful.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
qkeast•1mo ago