Imperial competition fuels ornamental complexity arms race, unipolarity keeps things simple

The more I look at the history of American architecture, the more striking the parallels to Romanesque become -- beyond the obvious level, where we had a full-blown Romanesque revival here. Our own distinctive American style resembles Romanesque in many ways, whereas both are unlike the lineage of Gothic / Baroque / Rococo in the Late Medieval / Early Modern Euro empires.

Most notably in the stark transitional areas between major volumes, e.g. where columns or wall supports join with the roof, or the walls of two volumes meet up. Romanesque and American architecture leaves these joints fairly free of intermediate-sized volumes to soften or break up the transition, whereas Gothic etc. employ lots of volumes at various intermediate sizes to cover up the seam. That gives lots of ornamentation to Gothic etc., while Romanesque and American buildings are relatively less adorned.

That will be the focus of case studies around the world and over time, soon. For now, I just want to lay out the broad theoretical idea, with a quick review of several different cultural domains.

Our musical styles aren't as intricate in polyphony and counterpoint as the Gothic / Renaissance / Baroque / Classical lineage in Europe, which again makes us resemble the Frankish Empire and early French Empire (back when they were still carrying over the Frankish traditions, before their integrative civil war concluded circa 1200 and set them off on a whole new ethnogenetic journey with Gothic). Compared to 18th-C. German and Austrian imperial music, we've returned to monophonic Gregorian chant of the Frankish / early French era (again, beyond the obvious level where there was a full-blown popular revival of Gregorian chant during the '90s, in the American imperial sphere of influence).

And our literature is far less intricate, developed, and adorned compared to anything from the Gothic era of the 13th C onward in the Euro empires. Whether it's our poetry, novels, screenplays, stage plays -- it's far more naturalistic, less stylized, and therefore without as much ornamentation as our Late Medieval / Early Modern predecessors. But very much like our Scandinavian and Russian peers of the late 19th and especially 20th centuries, as reviewed here. And see here for the same comparison in architecture.

Russia is an even better example of the theory, since they used to have a much more ornamented literary output -- and more ornamented architectural style -- back when they were just one of many empires competing against each other. They only changed to the simplified styles in literature and architecture during the 20th C., when they suddenly had no imperial competitors after those competitors collapsed in WWI (except for America -- on the other side of the world, and so, not a real threat).

In this way we have yet again returned to the Frankish era, where despite recent attempts to rebrand their culture as a "Carolingian Renaissance," no one claims that their writers produced a Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, etc. The closest that the Romanesque world got to such a work was the Song of Roland (about an episode from Frankish history), written in the 11th C, while the nascent French Empire was still thinking of itself as Frankish in nature. Most of those Late Medieval chansons and romances, however, were written as the French Empire's integrative civil war was wrapping up, in the late 12th C (e.g. Chretien de Troyes), and afterward -- along with the radical shift to Gothic architecture.

In the unrelated domains of architecture, music, and literature, American imperial culture resembles that of the Frankish Empire, while both are alien to the imperial cultures of Europe from the 13th to 19th centuries.

What other large-scale set of forces were similar for the Franks and the Americans, but the opposite for the French, British, Spanish, Germans, Austrians, Lithuanians, Ottomans, and Russians (for awhile)? Well, that's just it -- the jam-packed arena of rival empires in the latter group. The Franks were pretty much the only empire of their era. There was a foreign empire confined to Iberia (the Moors), and the Byzantines in the southeast of Europe, but the Franks were based in the northwest (which was still a huge amount of territory, including modern France, Germany, and northern Italy).

Likewise, from our early days, Americans have been mostly the sole imperial power, at least locally, and then globally. The French were not much of a bother in North America, we defeated our British overlords, and the Spanish were confined to Central and South America (and the Spanish colonies collapsed in the early 1800s anyway). Then after WWI, we had no European rivals either, whether geopolitically or culturally. Europe was over... aside from Russia, but that's too far removed to really count in the American mind (again, geopolitically or culturally).

China's most recent empire had collapsed at that time, too, India and Iran's empires had collapsed fairly recently, no empire emerged from the Ottoman territories -- except for the Saudi Empire, which began in the late 1700s, defeated the Ottomans in the Middle East, and kept going strong through most of the 20th C. But they're too far away from America to pose a serious threat to us, geopolitically or culturally.

All around the world, there was only America, Russia, and the much smaller-scale Saudi empires. What a relief!

Just cuz there wasn't literally one (1) empire in the entire world, doesn't mean it was a multipolar environment -- it was very far toward that end of the spectrum. Also close to the unipolar end was the Byzantine heyday, as well as the early Arabian / Muslim conquests (e.g. the Umayyad Caliphate). Also, the Maurya, Delhi Sultanate, and Mughal empires of India.

At the other end was Europe between 1300 and 1900, where multiple empires emerged and jockeyed for position, fighting countless wars with each other for supremacy, but never attaining it. Also at that multipolar end of the spectrum was much of North Africa and the Middle East, circa 1000 to 1300 AD (until the arrival of a unipolar Pax Mongolica). Also, the Gupta and Pala empires of India.

Needless to say, the very first empires like the Egyptians and Akkadians were on the unipolar side -- not enough time for multiple rival empires to emerge and arrive at their borders.

(I'll try to focus on East Asia some other time, since I haven't studied their architectural history very much.)

I'll do the architectural case studies later, but suffice it to say for now, the theory is that unipolar environments favor simple ornamentation, while multipolar ones favor elaborate ornamentation.

Why? Well, when you have multiple imperial rivals, you're not only competing over the military control of territory, or the economic trade networks, but also cultural influence. You think you can do intricate tracery? Ha! We'll make ours *even more* intricate! You can't compete over simplicity, because it has a hard boundary -- you can't get more minimal than minimal, but you can get orders of magnitude more maximalist.

This imperial cultural rivalry sparks an ornamental arms race among the competitors, as each struggles to keep up and out-do the others. In this way it is similar to runaway / Fisherian selection from evolutionary biology (e.g. the peacock's tail, from a polygynous species with intense competition among males for female mates, vs. the more drab robins who are at least monogamous within the breeding season).

Empires in a unipolar environment don't feel such a strong pressure to keep up with others, or out-do others, so why over-do it? Keep it simple. Make it impressive, monumental, awing, etc. -- sure, but without getting sucked into a ratchet of escalating complexity. This peacefulness of cultural forms reflects the peacefulness of geopolitics when there's only one empire in the neighborhood. That doesn't mean it's free from conflict -- it expands by conquering others, but these others are not also empires in their own right always trading territory back and forth.

Egyptian pyramids and obelisks, Akkadian ziggurats, Frankish / Romanesque and Byzantine churches, Umayyad mosques, Mauryan stupas, American Block Symphony -- all very simple groupings of volumes with minimal volumes of intermediate size to fill in the transition zones, leaving clearly visible seams. Relatively unadorned.

Gothic cathedrals, muqarnas-marked mosques, Gupta temples -- far more encrusted with ornamentation at the highest scale (filling transition zones between volumes).

But we'll see the details in another post. The important point for now is the dynamics underlying the emergence of these ornamental arms races, and why they only appear in certain times and places. It's worth emphasizing that there is no unilinear trend over history toward either greater or less complexity, nor is there a regular rhythmic cycle between the two ends of the spectrum. Periods of complexity do alternate with periods of simplicity, but it's not a regular repeating loop like a pendulum swinging, or weather seasons repeating.

And so, people who complain about the relative lack of ornamentation in 20th-century and later architecture, compared to Gothic through Rococo architecture, are correct on one level -- namely, noticing and describing the facts.

But they're wrong about there being a timeless Paradise that came before this current Fall -- go back to only 1100 AD in Europe, and you're right back to where you started in 20th-century America. Go back even further, in fact -- it was still Frankish and Byzantine. Even Roman architecture is not that heavily ornamented, owing to its unipolar environment (only serious imperial rival was Parthian Iran, leaving a zone of contest in the Levant and Armenia, but still very far removed from the age of Early Modern Euro empires).

And the ornament-likers are also wrong about our ability to intervene and alter the course of history. They complain that the less-adorned buildings come from crazed utopians who deliberately engineer the lack of ornament -- but they don't do that at all. Lack of ornament in 20th-C America, and its sphere of influence, comes from our unipolar environment. We can't will our entire creative class into producing heavy ornamentation in their output. They're subject to societal and geopolitical forces beyond anyone's control.

Rather, it is the would-be builders of latter-day Gothic cathedrals and Miltonian epic verse who are the delusional utopians trying to force a square peg through a round hole. Our environment doesn't support those forms any more than the Frankish and Romanesque environments did.

You can seethe forever about the relatively simpler styles we have, or you can learn to embrace our neo-Romanesque culture, if you require a trad LARP angle to your lifestyle choices.