The Contents: Oddities Inside ............................................................. 83

Pavia’s Certosa (Fig. 1.1). It seems plausible to suggest that a weariness with this evident belief of “more is better,” up through Gothic revival and beyond, was a major instigator of the onset of modernism.

In turn, ironically, our species’ documented need for structure and detail in its environment has given rise to this cheapened elaboration of modernism’s cheapened simplification. And in contrast to the dimensional modeling of those precedents, we find that the need to cheapen has flattened it to mere surface or near-surface efforts. A pertinent forebear from the more recent past would be Michael Graves’ Portland Building, decorated by pilasters, garlands, and mega-keystones all mere inches in relief, its pairs of tipped-out “sconces” being the only exceptions. (To be sure, this is not all as intended: “value engineering,” the architect’s curse, shaved off the roofscape elements, projecting belvedere, and three-dimensionally developed garlands, notably flattening the overall work.)

Blank Wall “Enhancement”

Take something as simple as a volume partially clad in a grid of flush metal panels, a reasonable enough material choice for a commercial or institutional application (and certainly a desirable step up from synthetic stucco in most cases). But surely many of us have seen applications where the basic color is mixed in with a range of darker or lighter versions of that color. Sometimes the evident intent is to “patinate” the overall wall appearance—to lend a little variegation to what would otherwise be a large and dull surface: a fair enough goal, when a budget lacks the natural patination qualities of sheet copper, for example. Apparently, though, to judge from the results one sees, this is hard to achieve with a manufacturer’s standard range of colors (or may simply be hard for some designers to achieve, period, regardless of the colors available), and the result is a jarringly overscaled pixelization.

ORO Editions

1.1 Certosa di Pavia, Lombardy, Italy