Some buildings look from the outside either plain or highly decorated, and most sit somewhere between the two extremes.
‘Plain’ implies to me buildings that have simple unadorned facades, windows, roofing and doors. It might also mean they were built using restrained, non-reflective materials. ‘Highly decorated’ by contrast implies to me many distinctive features which make a building stand out well beyond its structural form. This might include a vivid external colour scheme (gold being an extreme), a striking pattern (using tiles), an image, or flourishing sculptured features worthy of exhibition in a gallery or museum.
Between these two outer limits of the spectrum we find the majority of buildings. How then to decide where your own tastes sit? I think it can only really be done by trial and error. When I first became interested in architecture I was drawn towards the plain modernist buildings of Le Corbusier (see an example in the below photo by Stas Knop).
Then one day I travelled to Latvia and saw the highly decorated Jugendstil or Art Nouveau buildings that are to be found in Riga (see an example in the below photo by Jacqueline Macou), as well as other historic properties dotted around the country, including the beautiful Summer Palace at Rundale.
But my final choice for Building #4 is placed on the spectrum between ‘plain’ and ‘highly decorated’. It’s a skycraper in the United States - the Reliance Building in the ‘Windy City’ Chicago (photo below taken from Home of the Skyscraper wiki).
This early skyscraper was completed in 1894 using a steel skeleton building frame onto which was clad a glass and terracotta exterior. The two street-facing facades had bay windows that broke the uniformity of the tall structure as well as accentuating the pattern of the decoration. So the building was a compromise between the plain and the highly decorative. This suited local requirements for maximum office space on small but expensive plots, but without disturbing a continued desire for aesthetic features that would be deemed acceptable along the city centre ‘Loop’. The Reliance Building had many other interesting architectural features to it, and would be overtaken by more technically adventurous and plainer skyscrapers in Chicago and elsewhere, but that’s for a different type of blog post.
What really matters is that the building is still standing after more than a century, and the more we publicise historic structures like it, the greater chance they will stay with us: unlike hasty demolitions of the past or those proposed for the future.