Post #143766 by Satan's Sin on Mon, Feb 28, 2005 2:24 PM

It was just like with the artisans that used to do all the amazing stucco work on buildings until the turn of the (last) century, and then modern architecture became the Status Quo and made their services obsolete.

I finally got to stay in a "real" modernist building, the Loew's Hotel in Philadelphia, built in 1933 (originally as a bank/office building), billed as the first "modernist" skyscraper in the U.S.

What an eye opener. Modernism I had always thought of as plain and stark and even kind of bland and ugly (and certainly not requiring the services of artisans). But that was what the form had devolved into. Originally, these modernist buildings were -- although clean of line -- made of the most sumptuous materials and careful craftsmanship. Ornamentation was minimal to nonexistant, but the floors, the walls, the ceilings -- everything was the finest mahogany or marble or aluminum, all of it requiring the most expert of installation by artisans. Its gorgeousness just knocked my socks off. The only "modern" buildings I'd been inside prior to this were cheap office buildings, and the difference between these two ways of "doing" modernism was the difference between the living and the dead.

Just wanted to point out that modernism wasn't always cheap and soul-draining.