Architects' War

"What need has Falkensburg of external enemies? She is large enough by far to wage a full and devestating war upon herself."
- Professa Dara Kleinsfeld, Magistra of the Academy of the Humanities, 1060-1152, Medal of the Gilded Trident (twice).


The seeds for one of the more intense of Falkensburg's intramural civil wars can be seen in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 755. With so much of the city is ruins, an extended period of building and rebuilding commenced, during which several new trends in architecture would flourish.

There were two schools of thought that proved most popular among the construction patrons among the city's wealthiest citizens. Most popular were the Third Classicists, who rejected the quest for authenticity that dominated the Neoclassicist movement of the seventh century as well as the naive imitation of the 'golden age' civilizations' styles in favor of a style which attempted to adapt ancient sensitivities to modern needs. Only slightly less popular were Expressionists, who found value only in pressing architecture to the very limits of the possible, employing every available technology to build things that were, in practice, either outrageously large, ornamented to the point where they were more properly considered sculpture than buildings, built out of materials not typically used in construction, or some combination of these things. By the close of 783, nearly all of the city's real estate with any value had been rebuilt, which left the most talented young, rising architects of both schools without work, as Prince Elias's 7th Edict, against the destruction of historical buildings for commercial purposes, was not to be repealed for centuries to come.

Against this backdrop of frustration among these newly-wealthy rival schools of architecture came the Succession Crisis of 785. The Crisis began with only small outbreaks of violence and rioting, and it seemed likely to most observers that it would lead to a re-establishment of the Decade Council. Instead, those various Architects chose to fan the flames of war. Initially, the aim was simply to clear further ground for the construction of new buildings, but as the war progressed, specific attempts to destroy the buildings of the rival tradition became commonplace.

The Architects' War ended in 789, almost immediately after the involvement of the Architectural Guilds in driving the fighting became public knowledge. The public and the various institutions of the city turned against the Architects quickly, and both schools were in disgrace, leading to the contracts to design buildings to replace those destroyed in the War going entirely to Modernists, a group of people for whom the height of creativity was the installation of a handful of ornamental falcons on the roof corners of a boxy building otherwise identical to dozens of other boxy buildings.

-Doktor Plasner

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