115 years ago, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art was completed. A century later, it was voted by the British public in a RIBA survey as their favorite building in the country. It was a magnificent fusion of practicality and exquisite use of ornament and craftsmanship as decorative elements. Tragically, it burnt down six years ago, but its spirit could live on as the blossoming technologies of AI and digital fabrication usher in a new generation of ornamentation in architecture.

The same year the Mack was completed, Adolf Loos wrote Ornament and Crime, marking a key moment in the birth of modernism. This cultural shift, coupled with the industrialisation of construction technology, drove the move to modernism as the dominant force in architecture, leading to the abandonment of expressive, decorative elements in buildings.

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