This essay covers some interesting aesthetic trends, but its timeline and evidence are manipulated to fit the author’s argument.
But rather than nitpick, I just wanted to say that I find the current “style maximalism” to be quite fascinating. That was always the promise of globalization to me: the juxtaposition and mixing of aesthetic and cultural traditions. Of course you will sometimes get Trump’s gaudy excess, but that’s more of a comment on his lack of taste than an argument against the baroque in itself.
Edit: For an everyday example of what I'm referring to: compare the original Blade Runner (1982) to the sequel (2017). The first film is far more baroque, dusty, maximalist, and messy - and it lends the film a real sense of atmosphere and authenticity. This scene is a good example [1]: it's raining, there are neon lights everywhere, the characters are speaking in a hodgepodge of numerous languages including Hungarian, Japanese, and German. Later in the movie, you have a variety of bizarre characters, androids, robot dolls, and city environments.
Then, compare a similar scene in the new film, 2049.[2] Its style and atmosphere are far more minimal, modernist, and simplified. It feels a little too sterile, too clean for a post-apocalyptic city with hundreds of millions of people. The rest of the film follows suit: the abandoned locations don't seem that abandoned and the characters are all pretty straightforward. It is nowhere near as strange of a film as the first one is.
I found the atmosphere in the new Blade Runner quite captivating. Post-apocalyptic is a bit of a harsh word. Apocalypse as a concept is human centric, and humanity survived; it's the surrounding ecosystems that collapsed. Humanity died in that it was redefined as independent of the planet.
In 2049 the cities are somewhat sterile and you don't feel the masses of people living in it, but it's like that already today. In a city with 10+ million people you don't fall over each other when walking down the street. Usually the city is just big enough to compensate for high population. Sure you can have slums, but that wasn't explored in the movie, as far as I can remember.
And this likeness to today's cities is what left the biggest impression with me. That you can have the planet dead in some meaningful way and have a lifestyle so much like ours now. It reminds me of fact that most of our current ways of living in a metropolis are alredy geared towards being independent of non-city eco-systems.
> In a city with 10+ million people you don't fall over each other when walking down the street. Usually the city is just big enough to compensate for high population.
I guess you haven't visited Tokyo. The streets are teeming with (non-tourist) people.
Shenzhen is a modern city, it has big wide boulevards, wide sidewalks, which makes burying subways easy
It does have smaller "cuns" sort of villages within the city, with narrow streets and more people, they seem to be knocking down the densest ones (and building upwards)
Now I am wondering when we might see our first steampunk-inspired skyscraper... Someone with Bitcoin/Startup fu money expressing their taste. Maybe someone taking over a block and attempting to recreate a scene from Blade Runner?
But also I wouldn't call blade runner steam punk. I think it was more influenced by the actual urban blight in the 1980s. The gentrification white return trends were not foreseen, so it was assumed there would be more hollowing out.
Then again, that the big pyramids are downtown, and not in Anaheim or something, defies that explanation. Contrast is abhored both by suburbs / white flight / gated communities which seek to flee and hide wealth, and the modern trends of urban neighborhoods being uniformly more wealthy than they appear.
Blade runner is solidly cyber punk, and its inspiration is very strongly influenced by Hong Kong, which is flashy and modern and neon, but a lot of those neon signs are hiding decrepit buildings housing people in slumlike conditions.
Not to mention the 1920's "Mayan revival" style -- Deckard's apartment building is based on the real life Ennis House, which was used in some shots in the movie, although others were a set inspired by it.
I find this "baroque capitalist" style is even more present in certain cultures outside the West, particularly those that are just becoming "rich" in this generation.
Walking around the Dubai airport terminal, for example, is an assault of this "maximalist", silver/gold style. Modern Chinese buildings sometimes feel the same way. It's like the whole world is turning into a Las Vegas casino.
DXB is positively staid by Arab standards. Try eg the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, which reputedly cost $2 billion to build and is over a kilometer wide.
Historical doesn't really communicate much, but the tension between neoclassicism vs. the baroque or rationalism vs. romanticism are good places to start. Early American architecture was very neoclassical (for example, most of the monuments in Washington D.C.) but you don't get much baroque architecture in the U.S., as the highpoint of baroque was in the 1600's and early 1700's.
The short version is that at certain times, ornamentation has been seen as gaudy and excessive, while at other times it was perceived as richer and less boring than more functional or minimal architecture.
Some did, historicist [0] architecture for example was controversial in its time for that reason. My former university's library building [1], opened in 1905, was then widely ridiculed for being gaudy.
Versailles was interesting to visit but after a while all that intricate detail became exhausting, which is perhaps why the gardens surrounding the place are such a needed relief. Great for impressing nobles who visit infrequently, but tedious to live in I must imagine even if just for the summer months.
If you think this started with Trump, go to Newport, RI and visit some of the mansions. Trump's (and Vanderbilt's) style reflects a single narrative manifested at many different levels of abstraction: "Look at me, I'm rich!" And it never ceases to fill people with awe: if a person has enough money/power to commission this sort of thing, what else could they do with it?!
And that is a very specific purpose of such houses rather than the author's hypothesised "insecure egotist". The same thinking goes in to making houses of worship or government beautiful and intricate.
The point is to hit people with jaw-dropping opulence to get them into a frame of mind where they are small and they are dealing with something large. It is easier to convince them to do things they would not ordinarily do, and it makes them much more likely to see their host as important and able to provide unforeseeable opportunities.
Showing off is fun, but billionaires are canny and strategic people or they don't get to stay as billionaires. There are probably a few layers of thinking beyond being crass when pictures of their homes are pushed out into the public sphere.
To me, buildings with decor are pretty human-scale and relatable. But the decor-less brutalism, which came as a reaction to that style, really succeeded at making people feel small. I grew up in Moscow, and even as a child I hated being around concrete boxes, but loved being around the Seven Sisters - the kind of imperial buildings that OP doesn't like.
Brutalism is a different kind of making you feel small: the "you are an insignificant insect and will be crushed flat without even a moment's consideration" kind. I'm quite sure Brutalist architecture inspired the design of the Vogons' buildings and spaceships in various Hitchhiker's Guide visual media, for this reason.
I would say this stuff is fairly independent of human scale. Birds eye views of table models and renders + car culture ruin scale, not gaudiness.
In fact, I'd say that much 18th century baroque is too human scale: when you zoom out all the tiny ornaments blur together. I was immediately impressed by Saint Peter's basilica in the Vatican when I entered it for being a baroque building that defied this problem: the massive columns balance the small details and keep it interesting at all scales.
The ideas you put on display are part of the form you bring to the world. The Christians did a lot of converting with well designed testaments to the ideas contained within. Immortalizing the stories of old in stone shows a society works and means something better than intimidating the poor with wealth.
Coating your cities in a large cloth of meaningful idea is art that lives and effects the world. Dead art ends up in museums. The symbols and ideas put into these buildings will be a beacon for thinking about the future and what the shape of the world will be. You will feel new feelings in these forms and find a different place to install a hierarchy of competence around a central idea.
Building a maxamilist tower around citigroup or the avengers creates a tree of floors that can be imbued with productive action around that idea, company and collective set of people.
Reducing architecture to showing off is hot right now and misses most of architecture's effect on a human.
It’s precisely Fussell’s position in his Class that old-money families learned some time in the early 20th century to live invisibly—an old-money house will be so far off the road you can’t see it from there, modestly protected by a gate and perhaps fence. He hardly treats of these people at all, as they’re rarely encountered by those outside their social circles and a little less prone to homogeneity than most of the other classes, aside from a general “calling attention to oneself is NOT what one does”.
Under Fussell’s analysis Trump’s displayed taste in decor and clothes are about as Middle as could be, thought not a small amount of Fussell’s Proles’ taste creeps in in his clothes and food. Imitating the baroque and “living large” while wearing expensive clothes that don’t fit is what one might expect from a high-dollar lottery winner who used to hold some middle position at a bank branch.
Even recently (before Trump today) you say ridiculous, gaudy developments in the form of McMansions, with excessive, nonsensical architectural features for the sake or showing off.
Trump’s aesthetic is if you pumped tens, if not hundreds of millions into one of those structures.
A lot of truth in this article, but I disagree that trump has anything to do with this trend. As other commenters have pointed out, this trend predates trump’s ascension. The author admits vapor wave predates trump, as does Burner art and certain Japanese styles which I think played a major part in producing and popularizing this aesthetic. Trump’s aesthetic bears superficial similarities with this aesthetic, but I think in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I don't think the article hinges on trump bringing this stuff out. I think its more like the existing popular appeal of this stuff counteracted / re-channeled disgust.
I think the author tries too hard to link everything to Trump. That first skyscraper from the MFGA is definitely maximalist and baroque, but in a decidedly different way compared to trump's buildings. Honestly I think the world could use more buildings like it. Cities of endless rectangular prisms are boring
But rather than nitpick, I just wanted to say that I find the current “style maximalism” to be quite fascinating. That was always the promise of globalization to me: the juxtaposition and mixing of aesthetic and cultural traditions. Of course you will sometimes get Trump’s gaudy excess, but that’s more of a comment on his lack of taste than an argument against the baroque in itself.
Edit: For an everyday example of what I'm referring to: compare the original Blade Runner (1982) to the sequel (2017). The first film is far more baroque, dusty, maximalist, and messy - and it lends the film a real sense of atmosphere and authenticity. This scene is a good example [1]: it's raining, there are neon lights everywhere, the characters are speaking in a hodgepodge of numerous languages including Hungarian, Japanese, and German. Later in the movie, you have a variety of bizarre characters, androids, robot dolls, and city environments.
Then, compare a similar scene in the new film, 2049.[2] Its style and atmosphere are far more minimal, modernist, and simplified. It feels a little too sterile, too clean for a post-apocalyptic city with hundreds of millions of people. The rest of the film follows suit: the abandoned locations don't seem that abandoned and the characters are all pretty straightforward. It is nowhere near as strange of a film as the first one is.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwOApqmJMQ
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opDlMeqRACI