No More Glass Boxes, Please

May this be widely read: Eric Felten on banishing bland architecture. An excerpt:

Brent Brolin, author of "Architectural Ornament: Banishment & Return," says architecture's abandonment of ornament has parallels: "In poetry we got rid of rhyme. In novels we got rid of plot. In painting and sculpture we got rid of figural representation." In each case, he says, there was an insistence that the artist cast off the past and be entirely original. The great irony is that, in their fierce commitment to originality, modern architects continue to knock off endless copies of classic modernist designs, such as the Glass Palace built in the Netherlands in the mid-1930s, or Mies's own 1921 drawing for a proposed glass skyscraper on Berlin's Friedrichstrasse. It's a funny sort of modernism that is stuck in a style more than three-quarters of a century old.