“THE TERRA-COTTA JUNGLE.”
~or~
“If it Ain’t Baroque Don’t Fix It.”
JUNE ’O8.
For centuries we’ve been staring at bone-white Classical Revival architecture, supposedly modeled after the Roman and Greek temples of old. Something that we’ve forgotten until recently, however, is that the Greeks and Romans didn’t leave their architecture white, nor did they their statues and friezes. Paint doesn’t last too long in the Mediterranean sun, though, and it was a good thousand years after the fall of the Roman empire before the Western world became interested in Classical architecture again. By then we’d forgotten, and most thought the old temples were always white. Some architects in the last few decades of the Revivalist period took advantage of the wondrous new discovery of terra cotta to recreate the colorful cornices of The Roman Empire, but the scourge of modern architecture had already begun to eat away at the national aesthetic, and pretty soon the public had a thorough disdain for anything and everything old.
Terra cotta is a wonderful clay, it’s as strong as iron, completely and totally waterproof, completely and totally fireproof, able to withstand temperatures of one thousand degrees Celsius, can be sculpted into many exciting shapes to better decorate your building, and even be molded by extrusion for easy mass-production of trendy linear-art-deco ornament. It can be glazed in a rainbow of colors that never, ever fade even if left in the sun for a hundred years, it glistens in the rain, and if it rains enough it cleans itself. Terra cotta, of course, is very popular in Seattle and Portland, pretty much every building built here between 1890 and 1940 is covered in terra cotta tile, or occasionally steel-framed buildings have no conventional bricks at all, all the panel walls are made out of terra cotta bricks. Unfortunately like everything awesome, it went out of style, and the workshops that were able to churn out terra-cotta bricks at such little expense closed down, and now we have nothing.
k1pqk0me1p36zl6z
Sofar
– Seattle
That wasn't even spam. That was entirely pointless.
