Why don't we live in an Art Nouveau world?
16: Flourishing
Why Don’t We Live in an Art Nouveau World?
Étienne Fortier-Dubois
How many Sagrada Famílias is too many?
This article originally appeared in Issue 16: Flourishing. Subscribe to the print magazine to get future issues delivered to your door.
A hundred years after the death of its architect and 144 years after the start of construction, the Sagrada Família’s main spire was completed this February, making it the tallest church in the world.
In addition to being the tallest, it is also one of the most bizarre. It looks like no other building, anywhere. The Sagrada Família is an expression of Antoni Gaudí’s very personal view of architecture, which incorporates Gothic elements into Modernisme, the Catalan version of Art Nouveau. The whole thing vaguely resembles a termite mound. The two completed façades are covered with countless sculpted ornaments in multiple styles. The interior is an airy forest of stone columns that rise to meet a vaulted ceiling like the branches of trees in a canopy, bathed in the multicolored light of the stained glass windows. Since 2005, the church has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Most people think this is incredibly beautiful. Every now and then, and especially this year, the Sagrada Família makes the rounds on social media. Tourists flock to Barcelona just to see it, along with other Modernista works of architecture. I did that three times, also visiting Gaudí’s intriguing Park Güell and his curvy apartment buildings like the Casa Batlló and Casa Milà, as well as works by other architects of the movement like the Palau de la Música Catalana, designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.
All of that is wondrous; it is also, like most Art Nouveau, somewhat strange. This movement, whose name means “new art” in French, was a deliberate attempt to create an innovative aesthetic across the fine arts, the decorative arts, and architecture around 1890 to 1910. In architecture, Art Nouveau was a break with the general background of historicism, the dominant tendency in the 19th century to build with an outlook to the past, constituted of various “revivals” — Neo-Gothic, Neoclassical, Renaissance Revival, etc. — as well as eclectic and mixed styles like Beaux-Arts. Today it is still beloved, but rarely built.
Why isn’t there more? Why are only a small fraction of Barcelona’s buildings Modernista? Indeed, why do only a few cities in the rest of Europe — Riga, Brussels, Vienna, Budapest, Nancy — have strong Art Nouveau traditions, and even in those cities, why does it remain a minority style?
This is an interesting question in part because of a common view of the history of architecture that has started to proliferate on social media, especially among a certain conservative, “trad” demographic. For centuries, the argument goes, humanity infused its buildings with beauty, decorating them with ornament and remixing classical knowledge accumulated across generations. This practice last flowered in the early 20th century with Art Nouveau and Art Deco, both of which are still admired today. But immediately after that, circa 1940 to 1950, humanity turned its back on all this beauty and decided to do plain, unornamented, ugly modern buildings everywhere, forever.
Let’s call this the trad critique of architecture. The trad critique is an oversimplified, naïve account, smuggling in a lot of questionable assumptions. But it does point to a real puzzle. If, as proponents of this viewpoint believe, most people prefer older-styled, ornamented constructions over modern ones, why are rich countries today — with greater means to achieve their goals than any previous society — mostly building the latter?
Maybe we can make some progress by examining one clear case study: the excesses of Catalan Modernisme and its quick transition to the more sober Noucentista style.
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