>It is trivial today to mass-produce ornamentation Which is about when ornamentation started to become undesirable. The arts and craft movement was itself a ki

>It is trivial today to mass-produce ornamentation Which is about when ornamentation started to become undesirable. The arts and craft movement was itself a kick-back against mass production of ornamentation as it cheapened buildings. Not everyone could afford hand crafted buildings. They sought to create a distinction between 'rich' handcrafted building and 'poor' mass produced. Notice that word.. cheapened. Even the very words we have themselves underlie the reasons why we find these things desirable. Once everyone could have ornamentation, it was no longer valued.. just like potatoes. Other things that cemented the shift away from the ornamentation and spacial characteristics of pre-arts and craft architecture were, in some order (and lets ignore cathedrals and such because a. they are still handmade, and at about the same rate as in previous eras b. they are not typical of any building in any sense and they never have been c. we only love the ones that we never knocked down): 1. plumbing (you can greatly increase the size of buildings if it take less than ten minutes to find a tap or a toilet, and you can stop them buring down easier) 2. artifical lighting and heating (most buildings were configured entirely to capture and distribute light and heat) 3. the spanish flu (the dramatic and sudden push for modernist buildings came directly out of the tail end of the flu, and after a few decades of other rampant illnesses related to buildings.. typhoid, tuberculosis, etc and as the wealthy were exposed to modern hospitals - devoid of fireplaces, dust catching ornament, and with clean white ceramic finishes - and their brethren mountain spa wellness retreats) 4. cost (turns out that non-ornamental mass production is even cheaper than ornamental mass production) 5. speed of deisgn and construction (it doesn't matter how lovely your handcrafted building is, if I can build twenty others in the same time frame) Now that with modern fabrication we can produce effortless modernist buildings, they are no longer valued. So people inevitably push back against devaluation, and that which cannot be devalued is taht which cannot be remade. Like the hipsters of the same era, they look to the past with its stories and promises of cultural supremacy. And they forget all the small steps that led us to this point. Preferring instead to dream of an era that never existed, but in its historical survival. Everyone hates Eisenman's buildings. But we only know this because they existed.