Baring in mind I know very little about architecture: so what? Most things carry something of their predecessor, regardless if they're evolution or revolution. Kindle looks like a book, because you use it like a book despite being made of anything but paper. The save button is universally a floppy, a thing anyone younger than 30 knows as "ersatz solar eclipse glasses." Things carry on long after we forgot their function, like appendix. Why is this observation noteworthy, or even curious? Also, you gotta love a guy whose bibliography consists of unclickable ad for his book, a tiny note on a blog, a glorified pamphlet from XIX century, and an article that explains the observations better. Bonus points for pasting sentences from 400-pages of Vitruvius like he's Confucius. Or Lenin.
A Kindle doesn't look much like a book, it looks more like a tablet computer. The only similarity is a rectangular area of text, which is the bare essence of a tool used for reading, also present in the Kindle web app and street signs. The floppy disk is not the predecessor of the save button; they existed together for many years and the button image persists because it is a familiar way to represent an abstract concept. I don't know anything about architecture, and when I read this article I searched my phone for pictures of buildings and found one that showed the row of small blocks along a top edge. These are called dentils because they resemble teeth. I think they look nice, and it's interesting that they are now decorative elements with an atavistic function, like the non-closing shutters on the front of my house.The Roman architect Vitruvius (iv. 2) states that the dentil represents the end of a rafter (asser). It occurs in its most pronounced form in the Ionic temples of Asia Minor, the Lycian tombs and the porticoes and tombs of Persia, where it clearly represents the reproduction in stone of timber construction.
Sure it does. They need covers to keep clean and avoid problems with the screen. And once you look around, notice how many people put book covers on theirs. Or 'Kindle covers that look like a book cover', for turbo-pedants. A lot of people habitually hold them by the spine, despite reading only on one side (unlike a book) and it not being a 'functional' choice. It was on buttons probably since GUIs were a thing. That's where it started and spread, evolving from typed commands like 'cp x A:\' or some such. Familiarity remained widespread long after the device itself became obsolete, but not necessarily after function. The OP said that. I don't need the article explained, but justified. OK, I can understand liking a callback. I'd be partial to use 'vestigial' over 'atavistic', but you do you.A Kindle doesn't look much like a book,
The floppy disk is not the predecessor of the save button
they existed together for many years and the button image persists because it is a familiar way to represent an abstract concept.
These are called dentils because they resemble teeth.
I think they look nice, and it's interesting that they are now decorative elements with an atavistic function, like the non-closing shutters on the front of my house.
I understand the point of the article to be that it's interesting when artifacts evolve and previously functional elements are retained for a purely decorative purpose. I take your point to be that it's not so interesting. Consider that a typical Kindle contains dozens of books, so it is more like a bookshelf than a single book. The original design intent was for the device to "get out of the way and disappear so you can enter the author’s world." The display may have a page-turning animation, or a dog-ear icon indicating a bookmark, or adjustable margins, but outside of the reading interface I don't see book-like structural features, certainly not a spine to hold the pages together and display the title while the book is shelved. A cover is a functional accessory "to keep clean and avoid problems with the screen" and not a merely decorative replacement for a formerly functional element. Hardback books have dust jackets that also have a functional purpose: to protect (and decorate) the book. I don't see the relevance of the floppy disk or save button. Storage media has evolved considerably, from flexible plastic disks to hard platters in metal enclosures, shiny CD-ROMs and DVDs, and now solid state flash memory. At no point was a previously functional element retained for decorative purposes. The GUI happened to become popular when the 3.5-inch disk was in service, the save button adopted that image as an icon and has not evolved since. Indeed, that must be why I was looking for dentils in my photo, but I forgot by the time I got to the nitpick-Devac stage. "Vestigial" is probably a better fit, but it implies uselessness so maybe we are stuck with "skeuomorphic."The OP said that.
My half-decade dive into luxury goods fundamentally started when I was presented with the reality that every single culture on earth has had luxury goods, that luxury goods are a basic feature of society, and that it is not the everyday items that anchor us psychologically but the frivolities we spent too much on because we wanted them. A whole lotta confusing shit clarifies once you start looking at luxury and ornament as a fundamental aspect of societal structure. Durable goods, such as architecture, are where you see it the most. The classic "culture is collapsing" argument is "look at all these great books/songs/movies/poems/recipes/colors-of-paint from the past compared to the paucity of quality we suffer today, clearly our society is screwed" because it ignores every book/song/movie/poem/recipe/color-of-paint that didn't stand the test of time. We call them "classics" because we look back through the long lens of history and we still like them. They survived countless fashion cycles and public moods to become standards against which the present is compared. Any classic of fashion or style will be researched endlessly. The originator will be known. Van Gogh is widely acknowledged as the turning point between Impressionism and Expressionism but he also sold few paintings during his life. The fashion of the world had to catch up to Van Gogh in order for his prints to be essential on the walls of dentists' offices the world over. If you do not wish to make a choice, you imitate that which people are used to. We have pineapples in architecture because of the cultural earthquake they caused in the Renaissance. We don't wear chatelaines because functionality beat that form. That's above and beyond skeuomorphism, which is usually used to describe "functional imitation" whether in design or in nature. I would argue there's no skeuomorphism in architecture; none of the functions of a building have replaced obsolete functions. You might be able to argue that an escalator is a skeuomorphism of stairs while the obvious solution is a paternoster but the rarity of paternosters worldwide says something about humanity's inability to get used to them. "It's old therefore it's good" is so obvious, on the other hand, that normies get confused when they find out that "modern" architecture is anything from 1920 to 1960. pictured: the future, as imagined in France in 1927