Puritanism & engineerism: not new, but alive and well

Referring to the late 1800's:

The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation—for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was certainty. The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.

Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass of perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.

—Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p51 (referring to changes in the late 1800s)

Needless to say, the promise was a false one: for most things, there is no pure level of function. Especially not something as intimately related to our daily, messy lives like a home.

And referring to, well, right now:

If one gets past the patina, the quaintly burnished woodwork, the problem is that Steampunk is far too enamored of the look, the surface skin of an derivatively small chunk of the Victorian era filtered through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jules Verne, whose illustrated “scientific romances” seem to have formed the ur-aesthetic for Steampunk.

—Randy Nakamura, "Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design", Design Observer (July 2, 2008)

Nothing has changed.

Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood: of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, of harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second, aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended.

—Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p62

When you read a unilateral polemic, whether by Le Corbusier or some punk on Design Observer, beware.

Typically such frothing attempts to hide some deficiency in the author.

Look for the hidden chip on the shoulder. The author may be suffering—knowingly or unknowingly—from an inability to understand or succeed in a certain aspect of work or life (e.g. aesthetics, or personal relationships), the value of which becomes the target of his attack. She may be afraid of uncertainty, and thus promote formulas. Or maybe he just knows that people vote, with their attention and their money, for the comfort of exactitude—regardless of whether the exactitude is scientific or even useful.