An image divided in two has been circulating recently. On the left, a fish-shaped downspout gargoyle, aged metal on light stone, with carved scrolls and leaves surrounding it. On the right, a grey pipe with its elbow, screwed to a wall. Above, a question: why did we stop caring about beauty? And below, someone replies: if you want art in your society, you must make it possible for artists to live within it.

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Both sides interest me, and I believe both are mistaken. The response is correct in its sentiment but fails in its reasoning, which is the worst way to be right.

I begin with the fish, because there is a fact that changes the entire scene. That type of ornament was sold in catalogues. In 1887, the firm Bakewell & Mullins published one for stamped sheet metal with over a thousand designs in zinc, brass, and copper, each with its dimensions and price. Architectural terracotta workshops in Chicago and New York issued their own in 1882 and 1888. Mesker Brothers, in St. Louis, sold metal façades by mail order. One chose the model, ordered the piece, it arrived, and it was bolted into place.

And there was an economic reason, not an aesthetic one: moulded terracotta was cheaper than carved stone precisely because the mould is repeated. The profuse ornamentation on many late nineteenth-century facades is not the mark of a society that loved beauty more than we do. It is what happens when a technology that reduces the cost of decoration appears alongside a market that distributes it. It is an industrial product. Exactly what the meme opposes it to.

I add a caveat, as this does not hold as a general law. It is not proven that historical ornament, as a whole, was proportionally cheaper than that of today; what is documented is that certain industrialised techniques made decoration cheaper compared to manual labour. That suffices for my purposes.

The second problem with the comparison is what we are comparing. On the left, there is not just any downspout from 1890: there is one that someone photographed because it is good, on a building that was preserved because someone decided to preserve it. Heritage criteria state this without disguise. UNESCO demands outstanding universal value and speaks of masterpieces of human creative genius. Critical heritage studies have long been pointing out that the dominant discourse privileges the monumental, the expert, and the material. Of the ordinary construction of that century, of the poor, of the cheap, of that which collapsed, almost nothing remains, and of the little that remains, no photographs are taken. We compare their exception with our average.

Let us now address the response, which is the part that touches me closely and where I disagree with the most discomfort, because I agree with its conclusion.

That fish was not made by an artist. It was made by a founder, or a stonemason, within a guild system that established quality standards and the rules of apprenticeship. In Quattrocento Florence, sculptors and carpenters belonged to the same guild, that of the masters of stone and wood. The category of artist in our sense—an individual, autonomous creator with their own body of work—separates from manual craft much later, and it separates actively: as the status of the artist rises, the old association with manual trades begins to be seen as a burden to their professional aspirations.

Thus, the statement relies on an anachronism. And it has a practical consequence that refutes it: if the material conditions of contemporary artists were to improve tomorrow, we would not have ornamental downspouts. We would have more contemporary art. Which is what we want, but it is not what the statement promises.

It is worth remembering where the other half of the argument comes from, because almost all of us cite it incorrectly. When Adolf Loos wrote the text we know as Ornament and Crime, he was not saying that all ornament is a crime. He was arguing against ornament applied to the useful objects of his time, and his primary reason was economic: that it represents a waste of human labour, money, and material. His complaint was labour-related. The same kind of complaint that the response to the meme makes today, in the opposite direction.

And incidentally: the text is not from 1908, as is repeated. The most reliable research places it as a 1910 lecture, and its publication in French arrived in 1913 and in German in 1929. It is a fine example of what we are discussing: a date that is transmitted without verification because it fits well into the narrative.

The disappearance of ornament in the twentieth century does not have a single cause. There was an ideology, that of the modern movement, which explicitly rejected it. There were new materials and an industrial rationalisation of construction. There was a relative increase in the cost of skilled labour, although economics warns that this alone does not explain why the consumption of ornament fell. And there were changes in taste, in the client, and in the norm. Reducing it to the idea that we stopped loving beauty is to substitute history for a moral judgement.

I arrive at what truly interests me, and it is what both sides share without realising it. Both assume that beauty is something added on top of function: first the pipe, and then the fish on top of the pipe. Ornament as a supplement. And from there, the discussion can only be about whether we can afford the supplement.

In my research, I maintain a different position. What causes something to function as art is not a decorative layer applied to a useful object: it is a reorganisation that the system's function fails to absorb. By that criterion, the fish may produce absolutely nothing. If it is item number four hundred and forty-seven in a catalogue, chosen by a developer to signal that their building is of high status, then it fulfils its function perfectly and is exhausted by it. And the plain pipe may produce it, if somewhere, for someone, it reorganises how a façade is viewed. I do not state this as a provocation: I state it because the criterion does not examine the form, it examines the effect.

Ornament and art are not the same thing. Confusing them is what allows the discussion to be framed as nostalgia, and nostalgia is treacherous ground. There is currently an active field that advocates for a return to traditional architecture and beauty, with serious institutions and architects behind it, and a segment of the populist right has adopted it as a banner. However, it would be unjust to reduce it to that: the same word, beauty, appears in European urban policies of a very different nature, including the New European Bauhaus. Researchers studying the phenomenon warn that the political hijacking of architecture is always relative and unstable. It is best not to distribute labels.

And above all: criticising the built environment is not reactionary. Jane Jacobs did so against abstract planning, Christopher Alexander sought habitable patterns in the face of uncomfortable and inhospitable spaces, Robert Venturi did so from the perspective of complexity and contradiction, and an entire phenomenological tradition remains attentive to the body, light, and matter. Anyone who leaves a housing estate with the sensation that there is nothing there to look at is not being nostalgic. They are noting something real.

I conclude by conceding what the response correctly identifies, which is not insignificant. The material conditions of the producer determine what can be built: that is true, and it is the underlying thesis of almost everything I write here. Only the chain does not run from well-paid artists to beautiful façades. It runs from how construction is financed, regulated, and contracted to what the executor can afford. The fish will not return because we pay painters better. And if something must return, it is not the fish.

On open conversation

This text responds to a discussion that has circulated recently on social media, and I do so because it appears to me that the two opposing positions share an assumption that is rarely examined: that beauty is a layer added over function. In my research, I maintain that what makes something function as art is not an applied layer, but a reorganisation that the function does not absorb, and from that point, ornament and art cease to be synonyms. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of architecture, construction history, heritage conservation, or the craft of building, this notebook remains open.

Sources

Bakewell & Mullins. Stamped sheet-metal catalogue, 1887 (reprinted as Victorian Architectural Sheet-Metal Ornaments, Dover). North Western Terra Cotta Works, Architectural catalogue, Chicago, 1882. New York Architectural Terra Cotta Co., 1888 catalogue. Mesker Bros. Iron Works, 1892 catalogue. Digitised in the Building Technology Heritage Library.

Architect Magazine / Building Technology Heritage Library, 4 November 2021, on the economic advantage of terracotta over carved stone.

National Gallery of Art. Resources on the Florentine guild system and the change in the artist's status.

Smith, Laurajane. Authorized Heritage Discourse; and International Journal of Heritage Studies 31, no. 4 (2025). UNESCO, criteria for outstanding universal value for the World Heritage List.

Long, Christopher. Ornament, Crime, Myth, and Meaning (ACSA proceedings), on the dating and meaning of Adolf Loos's text. Loos, Adolf, Ornament and Crime (1910 lecture; French ed., 1913; German ed., Frankfurter Zeitung, 1929).

RIBA, on the modernist rejection of ornament. Seelow, Atli Magnus. Arts (2017), on function and form.

Chabard, Pierre. Footprint (TU Delft), on the political instrumentalisation of neo-traditional architecture. Macarthur, John and Holden, Susan. Architecture and Culture, on the reappearance of beauty in urban policies.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, MoMA, 1966.

Esteban Ruiz, Juan A. Art as Structural Surplus. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20020706