36 Ewa Węcławowicz-Gyurkovich
research, which has been carried out for several decades,
is aligned with a trend associated with contemporary ar-
chitectural and urban design in the historical context of
European cities. The coexistence of heritage elements
with new urban, architectural and landscape layouts is
a phe nomenon that is characteristic of early-21
st
-century
European cities. Public buildings with cultural uses and
a scale consistent with the surrounding urban fabric, built
in Madrid, Barcelona, Sainte-Lucie-de-Tallano (Corsica),
Cottbus, Hamburg, Marseilles and Budapest were select-
ed for analysis. These buildings, both new constructions
and adaptive reuse projects targeting historic buildings,
despite their apparent separateness of scale and character,
which depend on their context, are linked by the design
of the aesthetics of their forms and architectural atmo-
spheres, characteristic of New Decorationism, through the
use of external building envelopes with textures created
from clear, repetitive patterns. The selection criteria were
the territorial connement to Western Europe, the period
of construction as the 21
st
century, and the distinctiveness
and diversity of materials used to create the buildings’
decorative envelopes.
About the meanders of thought
In architecture, philosophical and aesthetic concepts
change constantly. Aesthetic concepts are not xed and
unchangeable. In each era, new value criteria and slightly
dierent aesthetics emerge. The concept of beauty has also
changed over the years. Scottish philosopher and historian
David Hume, who lived in the 18
th
century, pointed out in
his works that many people cannot have a proper view of
the concept of beauty because they are incapable of ex-
periencing sophisticated emotions (Eco 2005). Years ago,
a similar question of whether Minimalism makes us hap-
pier than Decorativism was asked by Alain de Botton in
his bestselling book The architecture of happiness (2006).
Artists create their own worlds, which sometimes have
little to do with current reality. Today’s world of aesthetic
exploration in the eld of forms and textures uses other
elds of science such as mathematics, physics, biology,
botany, as well as the latest industrial technologies. Many
contemporary thinkers are of the opinion that the world
of new art, from which architecture stems, is subjected to
a constant process of clashing avant-garde concepts with
the real world, and is dependent on mass media messag-
ing and advertising. Piotr Dehnel is convinced that the ob-
served apparent shallowness and superciality of popular
culture is related to the spread of access to it and is a de-
rivative of the costs we have paid for […] freedom and
justice in civil society. And it is – let us admit it – a price
not too exorbitant compared to the price of human exis-
tence (Dehnel 2006, 292). On the other hand, Gianni Vat-
timo, another Italian philosopher who explored the crisis
and death of art already in the 1980s, warned against the
end of modernity and proposed his own interpretation of
culture, which he called late modernity. He saw evil in
mass culture and the culture widely disseminated by the
mass media, which should be opposed in order not to lead
to the demise of high art. He wrote that aesthetic experi-
ence arises only as the negation of all its traditional and
canonical characteristics, starting with the pleasure of the
beatiful itself (Vattimo 2007). We have known for a long
time that contemporary architecture is tied with painting
and sculpture in the concept of the so-called great reality,
which is based on three principles: rst – every manifes-
tation of reality is worth presenting as per Ruskin’s belief
in “selecting northing, rejecting nothing”; second – every
form of creativity is allowed, and art is to fully reect the
“anarchy of life”; and third – in all external manifestations
of reality we can nd indications of the most internal lay-
ers of nature (Krakowski 1981).
New trends in 21
st
-century architecture
An analysis of recent European projects shows that we
are now seeing a multidirectionality of aesthetic postures.
The rst two decades of the 21
st
century have shown that
new trends and currents in architecture have begun to
emerge. Most of those that emerged in the 20
th
century
have remained, but we can also observe the emergence of
new ones, which are not numerous but are becoming no-
ticeable by their distinctiveness (Węcławowicz-Gyurko-
vich 2014).
One of the rst to appear was Biomorphism, which ori-
ginated from a virtual architecture that was initially built
only in the digital realm. Biomorphism proposed soft,
rounded forms, often inspired by nature, biology, botany
and even anatomy (Zellner 2000).
Then we have New Topography, which protects the na-
tural landscape and the uidity of the terrain. Topographic
architecture displays changing events, the motion of pass-
ers-by, and the ow of media images (Nyka 2006). During
the 9
th
Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004, with the
permission of exhibition commissioner Kurt W. Forster,
this trend was represented by numerous designs and
projects which, by imitating the forces of nature – earth-
quakes, soil delamination, landslides caused by wind and
water – show a landscape that, in its end result, looks as
though it had never been developed by humanity (Meta-
morph 2004).
Another direction is New Expressionism, reminis-
cent of the work of early 20
th
-century architects. In re-
cent years we have also encountered new buildings that
are characterised by dynamism, which achieve an eect
of slenderness, and which depict motion and uidity in
architecture. We encounter buildings with bold, elongated
straight or undulating lines that suddenly become jagged
or are twisted, bent, building forms that are – seemingly
– alien, dierent from those found in the surrounding en-
vironment (Węcławowicz-Gyurkovich 2018).
In contrast, one of the most recent trends is New Decora-
tionism. It appears that since the beginning of the 21
st
cen-
tury we have been observing a loss of interest in Minimal-
ism and Reductionalism in architecture, which appeared
in Europe in the 1980s and 90s. This style is understood
as the introduction of decoration and ornamentation into
the external envelopes of new buildings constructed us-
ing various construction materials: metal, glass, concrete,
ceramics, stone or wood. This is most commonly seen in
