Architectural Ornament
Architectural Ornament
Definition
Architectural ornament refers to decorative elements applied to or integrated into buildings that serve symbolic, communicative, or aesthetic functions beyond structural necessity. In Learning from Las Vegas (1977), Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour rehabilitate ornament against Modernism's rejection of it, distinguishing between ornament as applied decoration (signs, facades) and ornament as structural articulation (Modernism's "unadmitted decoration").
Key Thinkers
- Thomas Hope — the ornament-doctrine's earliest wiki voice (1807), at the furniture scale: ornament legitimate when it exhibits "breadth and repose of surface," "opposition of plain and of enriched parts," "harmony and significance of accessories" and "apt accord" of detail to destination — the disease located as much in mechanical production's ornament-void as in "injudicious appendages" (see repose, the-antique).
- venturi-robert — Argues for ornament as legitimate symbolic communication
- scott-brown-denise — Analyzed ornament in commercial architecture
- adorno-theodor-w — Critical theory on ornament (negative view)
- loos-adolf — "Ornament and Crime" (Modernist rejection); but Deyong's chapter complicates the caricature — Loos "distanced himself from 'the purists who pushed the [logic of function] to the absurd, [in claiming] that ornament should be systematically abolished'" ("Ornament and Education," 1924), adorned his commercial exteriors (American Bar, Goldman & Salatch, the unbuilt Josephine Baker house), and built tactile, luxurious interiors (Lina Loos's fur bedroom).
- taylor-mark-preston-julieanna — the interior's side of the debate: ornament's suppression is entangled with the gendered identification of the female body with the domestic and the decorative
- Laura Garófalo-Khan — the performative register (presenting Kent Bloomer): ornament as act rather than symbol — "small-scaled, repetitive, or rhythmic ornament that 'contests the material reality of the [modernist] box'"; the three formal acts (rhythmization, changefulness, competition between species of things) that "proclaim life"; and ornament as "an index of the prevalent ordering systems relevant to a given culture" (Picon, Grabar, Vrachliotis) — see performative-ornament
- Jacques Soulillou — the philosophical register: ornament as the medium of order's appearance ("allowing the order to appear, as one says that something appears in the light," p. 314) and simultaneously "essentially chaos" that undermines it — "order looks like an island of precarious stability" at ornament's heart; the ground plan encoding sex and power (ornamental-ground-plan); the absence of ornament as the grid; and ornament as "anti-rational in its essence" though exploitable by rationality's will to power (2002/2006)
- (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Alois Riegl, for whom ornament is not superfluous addition but "the visible expression of an inner desire (Wollen) to transform the world via our interaction with it" — ornament as the ground of style itself.)
Related Concepts
- decorated-shed — Building type defined by applied ornament
- symbolism — Ornament as symbolic system
- denotative-symbolism — Explicit ornament (signs, letters)
- connotative-symbolism — Implicit ornament (form, material)
- the-duck — Ornament fused with form
- The Decorative — the interior-design counterpart: decoration as cultural practice, suppressed and gender-coded
- Gender and the Interior — the structure/ornament dialectic re-read as a gendered discourse of power
- performative-ornament — the concept's third position: ornament as act — dynamism and exuberance "conscripted to create delight," proclaiming life (biophilia) rather than refusing (purity) or symbolizing (postmodernism)
- ornamental-ground-plan — the concept's social-anthropological depth: ornament as the encoding matrix of sex and power (Soulillou)
- ornamental-excess — the concept's economic face: ornamental expense as a general economy in which excess is a requisite condition of order (Soulillou)
- call-to-order — the concept's reflexive mechanism: the denunciation of ornament/excess/the decorative as power's re-founding act (Soulillou)
- biophilia — the warrant the performative register claims: ornament as "the subject of biophilia"'s proclamation of life, and the "valuable ally in the 'biophilization' of the interior"
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the debate's earliest ornament-doctrine (1807), at the furniture scale: ornament legitimate and necessary — the disease is both the ornament-void of mechanical production ("wrought by the most mechanical processes only, either remained absolutely void of all ornament whatever," p. 153) and "injudicious appendages" ("more expensive, without becoming more beautiful," p. 154); the ornament-excellences enumerated as a doctrine — "that breadth and repose of surface, that distinctness and contrast of outline, that opposition of plain and of enriched parts, that harmony and significance of accessories, and that apt accord between the peculiar meaning of each imitative or significant detail, and the peculiar destination of the main object" (pp. 153–154); and the standard — the ancients ("the elegancies of antique forms and ornaments" adapted to "modern customs and habits," p. 154). Hope's criterion is neither purity nor symbol but accord: ornament justified by its fit to the object's destination, with repose as its leading compositional quality (see repose, the-antique).
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The Classical Language of Architecture — the classical system of ornament: standardized carvings matched to standard profiles ("the ovolo is enriched with egg-and-dart, the cyma reversa with water-leaf…"); rustication raised by Giulio Romano "to a pitch of expressiveness which no one else had dreamed of"; and the eighteenth-century rationalist attack on the whole apparatus — Cordemoy's call to abolish "architecture in relief" as the ancestor of modernist anti-ornament.
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Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the gendered re-reading: what is provoked is "not just the suppression of ornament but the identification of the female body with the domestic and with the decorative" (p. 10); the structure/ornament dialectic "so fervently governs many architectural treatises" yet "move[s] beyond" the issues interior theory raises; and the historiography of decoration whose style-manual documentation "contributed to the suppression and relegation of the decorative to a lesser understood architectural activity" (p. 11).
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A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — ornament's positive art-historical theory: Riegl defined ornament as "the visible expression of an inner desire (Wollen) to transform the world via our interaction with it"; Loos's practice against the caricature — austere exteriors but tactile, luxurious interiors ("the bedroom he designed for his wife, Lina Loos, is made out of fur"), adorned commercial exteriors, and an explicit distance from the purist abolition of ornament; see style and optic-haptic-perception.
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Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — the chromatic wing of the purity position: Le Corbusier's Rappel à l'ordre "tirade against 'the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments'" — ornament, glitter and colour as one target-set; ornament/clutter/glitter/colour as kitsch (the modern form of degeneration) rather than Loos's primitive 'degeneracy' (p. 33); and the Purist drift "from the 'architectural aesthetic' to the 'aesthetic of printed cloth'" as ornament's delegitimation by scale (p. 35) (see chromophobia, kitsch).
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Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the performative register: Bloomer's ornament that "contests the material reality of the [modernist] box," whose three formal acts "convey measures of indefiniteness, temporality, impermanence, mystery, ambivalence, and growth" and "proclaim life, which is the subject of biophilia"; the historiographic frame — "ornament as an index of the prevalent ordering systems relevant to a given culture" (Picon, Grabar, Vrachliotis), with today's parametric ordering system expressing "emergent orders"; Wright's link — "nature is excessive in its design. Like ornament, it fulfills a purpose through repetition, redundancy, and articulation of small performative parts"; and the modernist loss that frames the whole debate from the grotto's side — the typology that "lost favor, morphologically and conceptually, with the advent of modernism and its coupled desire to separate non-human nature from the human-made and eliminate superfluous embellishment." See performative-ornament, biophilia.
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On technological limits (Olsen 2018) — the digital-ornament renaissance and its manufacturing arm: Antoine Picon (2013, p. 27) via Olsen — "digital technology has allowed [texture] to become a more autonomous dimension, present from the start in the design process and imbued with a definite ornamental character," part of "a reinvigorated interest in ornamentation" that has "energized discussions about the sensorial experience of interior spaces"; the production claim — "3D printing holds tremendous potential for interior architecture, where a renewed interest in ornament and tactility can be manufactured at an approachable scale"; the historical lineage — Virginia San Fratello names "the influences of Henry van de Velde on their work and the desire to integrate ornament into interior environments"; and the framed-ornament case — Ruy-Klein's Klex 1, whose "framed ornament could be imagined as either remaining as a singular exquisite object or becoming a bordering element at the seams of a room." See 3d-printing, performative-ornament, quasi-autonomous-interior.
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Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the philosophical re-foundation of the concept: ornament's ordering function redefined as letting order appear rather than imposing it ("it does not superimpose itself on a pre-existing order, as accident on essence in traditional metaphysics. It might rather be order that is viewed as accident in relation to ornament," pp. 313–314); ornament as polymorphous chaos that is order's "most dangerous enemy" and the "island of precarious stability" order becomes in its light (pp. 313–314); the grid thesis — minimalism laying bare the formal substratum, "The absence (le vide) of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid" (p. 315); symmetry and repetition as power's modalities, not ornament's necessities ("Order, through the ornament, gives itself an air of symmetry and repetition… the path of least resistance, consistent with the objectives of power," p. 315); the ground plan of sex and power (see ornamental-ground-plan); and the permanent combat — "Order can never ultimately establish itself because ornament works to undermine it" (p. 317). The concept's most radical re-founding: ornament neither symbol (Venturi), act (Bloomer), nor Wollen (Riegl), but the light in which order appears and the enemy that undermines it — the source that turns the concept's "ordering" function from a design claim into a political anthropology. See the-decorative, ornamental-excess, call-to-order.
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Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the ornament's consumer-culture register: "An obsession with the ornament, of which Heping, owner of Hongtai Decoration Materials, is a professional promoter, penetrates the fictional world, both its form and content" (p. 330) — the ornamental detail's registered pleasure as narrative's "driving force," the novel's realism resting on commodities' "differentiating function" (pp. 330–331). Where Venturi's ornament symbolizes, Bloomer's proclaims life and Riegl's expresses Wollen, Tang's ornament retails: the decoration-materials dealer as the ornament economy's professional promoter (see the-decorative, ornament-vs-purity, sign-value).
Open Questions
- How does digital fabrication change the economics and aesthetics of ornament? (Garófalo-Khan's chapter answers the production half — "the thin-shelled constructs popularized by multiple digital fabrication techniques today," "feathery digitally fabricated units" — and names parametric functions as the ordering system ornament now indexes; Olsen's chapter answers the economics half — 3D printing's cost wall ("upwards of US$75 per pound, and the more durable, the more costly") and Emerging Objects' material hacks as the workaround; Picon's "autonomous dimension" names the aesthetic half. What remains is the durability question: has ornament manufactured in salt, sand, or sawdust survived ordinary use?)
- What is the relationship between ornament and cultural identity?
- Can ornament be politically progressive?
- Is the suppression of ornament inseparable from the gendering of the decorative — i.e., can the architectural ornament debate be settled at all without addressing the gender of the interior?
- Is "proclaiming life" (Bloomer, via Garófalo-Khan) a genuine third basis for ornament — neither moral refusal (purity) nor symbolic communication (Venturi) nor psychological desire (Riegl's Wollen) — or is it Riegl's Wollen restated in ecological vocabulary: "the visible expression of an inner desire… to transform the world" become life's own expression?
- Soulillou's ground plan makes ornament an index of order — the medium in which sex and power divisions appear — and simultaneously claims ornament is "anti-rational in its essence" (p. 320), so that "no rationality could found ornament" (p. 320). Can the concept's two political readings (ornament as symbol, ornament as order's medium) coexist, or does Soulillou's thesis subsume the others: Venturi's symbol-ornament is order's communicated appearance, Riegl's Wollen its desired appearance, Bloomer's life-ornament its animating appearance — with the decorative as all three's escapee?
- If "the absence of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid" (p. 315), is the modernist suppression of ornament an internal intensification of ornament (the grid as ornament's formal substratum) rather than its abolition — and does that reframe the purity position as a call to order within ornament's own economy (see call-to-order, white-cube)?
