maybe the catholic classicists will consume themselves and leave us alone

im not even...

i know it's fun to point out the building he's criticizing isn't well designed but like.... where are the well-designed low-budget non-public classical buildings built last year?

im looking. where

i feel like it's hilarious for a classical architect (who has not necessarily built a whole lot) to critique a low-budget building for not doing classical architecture right, when like... it's a budget problem, not a "didn't classical design correctly" problem

like.... until it is proven otherwise i'm pretty sure it's the default claim to say if true classical architecture could be done well and cheaply, someone would have figured out how to do it by now lmao

that school probably could have been done passably in a contemporary contractor-friendly style and still been pleasant enough to look at.

yet the problem of affordable, church-quality classical architecture for strip malls eludes us still

like.... one problem with rigid, precise, elaborate, proportionate and occasionally custom mouldings, sculpture, filigree, surface finishes etc is that.... it's expensive? to design and execute?

Like this is the same problem as brickwork, even modern brickwork, and it's one of the reasons we're increasingly seeing/specing prefab faux-brickwork panels

we can say that's because we've got a labour shortage of competent bricklayers, and I'm sure we do

but it's also expensive to train good bricklayers, which means their labour is pricey, and it's cheaper to do panels.

trad architects argue we don't do trad shit anymore because of ideology/education. Maybe! but lots of architects still love old buildings?

And architects also fucking love good brickwork

see every architect responding to this post from yesterday https://twitter.com/seanmaciel/status/1298321826796523522

there's no like... hyper-modern ideology governing our abandonment of good brickwork.

a lot of us love bricks, and we love good siding and shinglework, and we hate vinyl siding and bad, cheaply designed mcmansions.

if you offered a some competent modern architect the chance to create their own pantheon, in a romanesque style, with the appropriate funding, site, and labourers somewhere with completely traditional methods

maybe not everyone would do it, but I bet a whole bunch would???

i wasn't going anywhere with this in particular

I just love the idea of a self-professed catholic, classical designer pointing at a strip mall school as something that A Better Classical Designer would surely have designed Far More Classically