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The beauty of concrete

Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.

But such laws were generally absent in the United States, where there was thus an enormous proliferation of ornamental woodwork in the late nineteenth century, a process bound up with the popularity of what Americans call the ‘ Queen Anne ’ and Eastlake styles. The obvious explanation is that ornament survives in the mass-market housebuilder market because the people buying new-build homes at this price point are less likely to be influenced by elite fashions than are the committees that commission government buildings or corporate headquarters. In the first half of the twentieth century, Western artistic culture was transformed by a complex family of movements that we call modernism, a trend that extends far beyond architecture into the literature of Joyce and Pound, the painting of Picasso and Matisse, and the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

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