Neutral was featured in a popular newsletter Culture Critic, read the full article below:
If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll come across a version of a meme comparing a wonderful Gothic or Art Deco tower belonging to a bygone era, to a modern box built by a modern, minimalist architect.
Although the contrast is something of an oversimplification, it points to a broader sentiment of discontent with the missing craftsmanship in modern architectural design — what happened to all the “useless”, but beautiful little details?
Well, the disappearance of ornamentation (and craftsmanship) in construction can be traced back to two primary causes about one century ago:
- Cultural attitude
- Pursuit of scale
Let’s explore how it happened — and some ideas for bringing craftsmanship back in harmony with contemporary construction…
Some people are actively trying to transform America’s urban fabric — my friend's company is bringing proper craftsmanship back to modern construction: sustainable materials, brick facades by local masons…
Their free newsletter (and podcast) is eye-opening — give it a read. You can even invest directly into reviving America's built environment via their work.
Culture
The shift in attitude towards craft and ornamentation started taking place in the 1910s. Adolf Loos, an influential architect of Austrian and Czech descent, claimed in his essay “Ornament and Crime” that “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects."
This essay was one of the theoretical and practical pillars of the Bauhaus movement emerging about a decade later, and ultimately, the International Style post-WWII.
From a cultural perspective, many architects and builders post-WWII defined ornament in a very blunt way: a simple, added, and unnecessary decoration that could be removed without impacting the building's performance or aesthetic perception (depending on the design).
Building as efficiently (and cheaply) as possible in this sense became preached as virtuous.
Scale
In the same time frame, early concepts of mass-produced housing based on industrialized production methods started to change attitudes toward traditional craftsmanship.
In 1924, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, laid out the parameters that would be necessary to enable industrialized construction — namely the need for scale based on “rigid standardization.”
In the following hundred years, the focus on industrially mass-produced building components, combined with the vision to eliminate ornaments, led to the ubiquitous housing solutions and standardized building products that are now globally available.
In other words, buildings across the world began to look largely the same, liberated of their delightful details. But this might not be the case for much longer.
In recent times, there has been pushback against both the cultural and economic arguments previously laid out. Architects have been rediscovering the practical benefits of craft and ornamentation on quality of life, and new technologies are making ornamentation more practical to produce at scale…
Can Ornaments Be Useful?
Firstly, ornaments matter because they assign ordinary things meaning. They speak to the tradition or craft that produced a building or object.
Take for example, the acanthus leaf in Mediterranean culture: it’s a symbol of enduring life, and makes sense symbolically to embed right into structural features like columns. Small details like this connect you to the past (several millennia in this case).
So they might infuse buildings with cultural significance, but can they be practically useful?
Well, the distinction between “ornament” and “useful object” is far more complex than Loos suggested. In many cases, the “ornament” is, to a large extent, an integral part of a building with complex functionality. For instance, the base and capital of a column are efficient ways to ease the load transfer from the architrave / beam into the column shaft, and from there into the foundation or base plate of the building.
Or take the traditional “ornamental” eave details of typical Victorian houses. These are in fact very elaborate waterproofing features, not purposeless decorative elements.
Since the 1970s, architectural thinkers like Christopher Alexander have been trying to make the case that craftsmanship, ornamentation, and traditional proportions at every scale play an integral role in human health and happiness. Practically, they can be deployed to manage temperature, light, and humidity in a sustainable way.
Scalable Craftsmanship
Recognizing the benefits of ornamentation and craftsmanship is not enough to bring them back. We also have to make it financially viable.
There are downsides to traditional construction methods in a contemporary context: these methods are labor-intensive, subsequently slow and cost-intensive, and materials are more expensive than the at-scale outputs that feed the construction market. An exclusively custom-crafted housing product is certainly not scalable and, subsequently, unsuitable to satisfy the supply deficiency in housing production nationally and globally.
So either we find scalable ways to produce ornamentation, or we implement new technologies in a way that creates time and budget for a contemporary version of crafted building elements.
What does that look like?
Well, in recent years, we’ve started to see the use of advanced robotics, parametric architecture, and prefabrication to search for that balance between high tech, ornament, and craft that can be applied cost-efficiently.
For example, SHoP architects used software to design masonry patterns and prefabricated facade panels for its Mulberry building in New York City.
Or architectural researchers like Prof. Fabio Gramazio and Prof. Matthias Kohler who have been perfecting robotic automation in construction for the past two decades.
They have recently started to implement their experimental technologies in real life projects like this robotically created facade for Keller AG Ziegeleien in Switzerland.
And there are housing developers like Neutral, working towards a solution that can satisfy both scale and beauty. What they do is use high-end prefabricated components like mass timber panels to quickly erect a building’s “core.” That core is then skinned, internally and externally, with highly customizable craftsmanship in wood and masonry.
Optimistically, we might in fact be witnessing a new school of architecture and design: a renewed appreciation for ornamentation and craftsmanship, coupled with new manufacturing technologies, offering a new, 21st century approach that combines the best of both worlds.
It’s a step towards a future where our built environment isn’t just functional, but comes alive in the details…
I recommend that everyone read Neutral’s free blog and learn about their mission to bring craftsmanship back to modern construction — it is eye-opening…
You can even invest directly into reviving America's built environment via their work.
Backlog
100 years ago Gropius identifies the core issue with achieving scale - in order to build an universally applicable housing product the standardization must start on building component level: “The organization must therefore aim first of ail at standardizing and mass-producing not entire houses, but only their component parts which can then be assembled into various types of houses, in the same way as in modern machine design certain internationally standardized parts are interchangeably used for different machines.”
Ornament is wasted labor and hence wasted health. That’s how it has always been. Today, however, it is also wasted material, and both together add up to wasted capital.
To name just one example for at-scale deployment of a “rigidly standardized” building product: In 2022 44,129,600,000 sq ft (44,1 Billion) of gyp board were installed in new construction projects across the entire globe.
In a contemporary timber construction context capitals are often avoided entirely by using complex steel connectors, whilst in traditional wood construction the transition of column to beam articulates in a complex layering of overlapping and interlocking vertical and horizontal timber members.
The combination of zoning and land use reforms, with the simultaneous loss of a craft based construction and the rise of mass produced construction components has led to the urban monocultures that are currently experienced in many American cities. These developments contribute significantly to the housing and transport crisis that is now almost ubiquitous. The little housing that the development market does supply is often subpar from a quality, sustainability and aesthetic perspective, and - the real estate market fails to cater almost entirely for the middle market segment.
What is widely considered “ornament” functions not only as a purposeful part of a building, it also creates a sense of beauty with it inherently being culturally rooted in craftsmanship traditions that have grown over many centuries with deep intrinsic knowledge of material, place and local community.
