4 ms·

Wow! Absolutely gorgeous. I wonder what the motivation was for such over-the-top decoration? Lots of money sloshing around and a desire to make things beautifu

• doovd 4y ago
  Reminds me of metro stations in Moscow: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31/moscows-metro-stations-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31...
• jesterpm 4y ago
  I assumed that the gap between the cost to do the bare minimum and the cost to do some elaborate was smaller at the time. If you're already laying each brick by hand, it seems like the incremental cost to work a pattern into the bricks would be small compared to modern (bland) poured-concrete buildings, where we lay a whole floor in one go. Likewise in other trades. We invented machines to build large amounts of simple things cheaply, so we designed simpler things.
• noir_lord 4y ago
  > I wonder what the motivation was for such over-the-top decoration? Lots of money sloshing around and a desire to make things beautiful for beauty's sake? Individual or governmental prestige? The Victorians saw engineering prowess as a statement of intent to the world, combine that with this https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2015/12/17/how-austerity-destroyed-the-british-empire/#jp-carousel-2578 https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2015/12/17/how-austerity-dest... (British empire from 1830 to 1880 accounted for half of global wealth and approx 25% of landmass) and you could do incredible things. Lots of victorian infrastructure was built/over built so well we still use some of it now (London's sewer system is 2000 kilometers and brick built) - it was often seen as a legacy for the future as well.