I remember, on my first trip to Chicago, being completely impressed by the “girly” skyscrapers. Decoration relished – despite the city’s Modernist aspirations … Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe forming secure landmarks for the city’s architectural tours. The city’s urban texture was immediate at street level, and engaging. Decoration exuded signs of architectural thought, consideration, and pleasure.
It no doubt also signalled past wealth and excess, ideologically a problem for the socially extreme. Certainly the Beaux-Arts raised numerous reactions from mid-century architectural students in part because of its bourgeois tendencies. Modernism seemed so much more ethical – didn’t Vernon Brown talk about “wholemeal bread” compared with an architectural equivalent to cupcakes? But is the envitable and eternal solution the relegating of excessive ornament to the architectural dustbin? Even wholemeal bread has a bit of texture …
I think Wellington needs more pretty buildings. Poor little decoration has too hard a time for too long. It’s time we made a concerted effort to revive prettiness. 
A couple of girly buildings in Lambton Quay or Courtenay Place wouldn’t go astray. Forget value engineering and other pseudynoms for crude cost-cutting. Forget engineering! Let’s relish the superficial, the play of light on building surfaces, and even some old-school proportioning. Let’s get some pleasure back into the architectural elevations in the city.
Perhaps something to think about for the Queen’s Wharf competitions?
… and just to end – because I couldn’t resist it – People in Planes’ music video: “Pretty Buildings” …
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