Is Ornament Crime? Discussing The Representative Nature of Ornament in Architecture (original) (raw)
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A Critical Review of Ornament in Contemporary Architectural Theory and Practice
ITU A/Z Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, 2016
For over a century, the controversial issue of ornament has oscillated between the two extreme conditions of being condemned and praised. Although current architecture receives ornament enthusiastically due to its design potentials, it still remains as a problematic and critical topic, as it maintains its blurry and slippery character. The aim of this study is to construct the theoretical framework of ornament in the twenty-first century architectural domain. The paper intends to investigate the reemergence of this-yet-ambiguous issue to evaluate its new aspects, and redefine its limits in contemporary architectural theory and practice. Being much more than an intricate architectural element, an in-depth study of ornament overlaps its reemergence with social, cultural, and economical status quo. Through the examination of specific contemporary case studies, this study makes a layered reading of architectural ornament as an instrument of image-driven contemporary culture within spectacle-laden public sphere. In contemporary architecture, the digital, structural, sensual, representational, and symbolic facets stratify ornament metaphorically and literally, making it an intense medium of impression and expression. Ornamental buildings emerge as embodiments of consumption, exhibition, and public attention, by contributing to image-making, commercial success, and marketing strategy, in addition to the performance of ornament as a challenging designerly instrument.
Directions and Intellectual Bases of Ornament Criticism in Modern Architectural Literature
2016
Following the publication of Adolf Loos’s famous article “Ornament and Crime” in 1908, arguments against ornaments reached an unprecedented level which led to its elimination from the majority of architectural practices in western countries during the first half of the 20 century. The ornamental approach, despite being severely criticized by postmodernist critics in 1960’s, never completely ceased to exist. In an attempt to discover the reasons behind the long-lasting presence of such a practice, this paper looks into different directions of ornament criticism in modern architectural literature. Modern critics condemned ornamentation by ascribing several defects such as deception, decadence, disutility, wastefulness, recession and lack of spontaneity. As a result of such associations, designers repress in themselves what they consider as defective and internalize anti-ornament beliefs of modernism in a form of self-control. This leads to the marginalization of ornament in architectu...
The Ambiguity of Ornament in Architecture: Is It a Substantive or Surface Issue ?
The Ambiguity of Ornament in Architecture: Is It a Substantive or Surface Issue ?, 2024
This article deals with the ambiguity of ornament in architecture, the historical tensions that have characterized its use, and the factors that have led to its return today. In an architectural panorama marked today by the excessive use of parametric and kinetic patterns, many architects, historians and theorists are trying to find a theoretical basis justifying a tendency to an obsession with the patterns. The systematic link between what today adorns the envelopes of parametric architecture projects is made without reference to this history full of tensions. The Grasshopper and Dynamo plug-ins operate excessively in a total break with the thinking of William Morris, John Ruskin, Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl or Alberti. Modernist architecture has made a break that has generated a collective amnesia about the essence and purpose of certain architectural practices, particularly those relating to ornament. The reflection, therefore, engages in a genealogical investigation to trace the intimate relationships that have linked ornament to architecture. It reveals how these positions of rejection and admission have been motivated more by the technical and technological implications and the capitalist desires that carry them than by artistic impulses.
The Necessary Ornament. About Decor et Ornamentum in Architecture
(sITA) studii de Istoria și Teoria Arhitecturii / studies in History and Theory of Architecture, 2020
In many European languages the word “decoration” is frequently used as a synonym of ornament, and often perceived as something superfluous and unnecessary which can be “added on.” However, the original sense of the Latin verb decēre, where the noun decor comes from, points out that every situation requires a convenient, or decent, behavior. Decoration is something “appropriate and decent,” specifically required for the occasion. Concerning decoration, this means a shift from the concept of superfluous ornament to necessary ornament, because it is appropriate. Developing from the reflections of the Gothic Revival, this hybrid nature of decoration, which is both decor (decent/appropriate appearance or behavior) and ornamentum (added on adornment), can be the key to reading all subsequent architecture, that of the bare solids and the white and smooth surfaces, for which ornament was, as it is well-known, a “crime.” This paper aims to trace back in contemporary architecture the origins of its search for decoration as “necessary ornament.” The main idea is to read architecture in the light of its relationship between convenience and aesthetics, so that, to quote a famous sentence by Auguste Perret, it can be really considered architecture and not a mere work of engineering. Especially nowadays, when advanced technological means allow architects to think what once was simply not-drawable, so also unthinkable, one should ask themselves not if it is licit but if it is “decent.”
International Journal of Scientific and Technological Research (IISTE), 2021
Throughout the history of architecture, ornamentation has been applied as elements that embody emotions through aesthetic pursuits within the scope of the possibilities, and techniques of the period. Traditional craftsmanship in ornamentation are items embodied in architectural structures in historic buildings by local craftsmen. Its protection necessitates the method of transmission from generation to generation. In traditional production times, this transmission was handled by competent people. At the present-time, technological developments have caused a radical change during this regard. This study aims to enhance how the ornaments in traditional architecture are often revitalized and interpreted by applying a re-ornamental understanding of contemporary architecture and benefiting from the possibilities of technology.
2008
Architecture needs mechanisms that allow it to become connected to culture. It achieves this by continually capturing the forces that shape society. This book is a graphic guide to ornaments in the twentieth century. It unveils the function of ornament as the agent for specific affects, dismantling the idea that ornament is applied to buildings as a discrete or non-essential entity. Each case exploits specific synergies between the exterior and the interior, constructing an internal order between ornament and material. These internal orders produce expressions that are contemporary, yet whose affects are resilient in time. Initiated as a seminar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Farshid Moussavi is a partner in leading London-based firm Foreign Office Architects.
The Distinction of Ornament and Decoration in Architecture
2017
Ornament has been present throughout the recorded history, revealing human's aspirations, reflections and imaginations. Correspondingly, the discussion of ornament has almost uninterruptedly been a major topic for architectural discourses; one which has led to the publication of several significant texts in which ornamental practices has been addressed from a variety of perspectives. An investigation into the key architectural texts however, reveals that the absence of a certain definition of ornament and its functions in architecture as well as the interchangeable use of the terms 'decoration' and ornament as synonyms, have always been a serious obstacle to reach a clear conception of ornament nature . In this regard, the present paper attempted to distinguish between 'ornament' and 'decoration' based on a comparative analysis of the scholars’ accounts and the way the terms were employed in the architectural texts. Results indicated that the aforemention...
When decorations have a function. Technology and aesthetics in contemporary façades
TEMA, 2024
This paper, starting from a reflection on the role of decoration and ornament in history, their evolution in the cultural debate, and some significant case studies, discusses the relation between function and decoration in the artistic and architectural discussion from the 20th century until nowadays. The representational function of architecture has always been based on the ornamental and decorative elements, which allow the readability of the building and the transmission of meanings and information. This function is even paradoxically performed in works conceived as manifestos of anti-decorativism. In light of the most recent trends, architecture reclaims this communicative function, manifesting the tendency to be an image, primarily through the design of the external surfaces and envelopes on which the semantics and iconicity of the new languages of contemporary architecture are based. The architectural object becomes an image – an image of itself, its designer, the context and the culture that generated it – precisely thanks to its ornamental and decorative dimension, which is discussed and analysed in this article