ORNAMENTATION IN ARCHITECTURE
What is ornamentation in architercture?
Ornamentation, in architecture, applied embellishment in
various styles that is a distinguishing characteristic of
buildings, furniture, and household items. Ornamentation often
occurs on entablatures, columns, and the tops of buildings and
around entryways and windows, especially in the form
of moldings. Throughout antiquity and into the Renaissance,
and later for religious buildings, applied ornament was very
important, often having symbolic meaning.
The relationship between ornament and architecture has had a
symbiotic structure for centuries. However, the link between
ornament and architecture was disrupted after the emergence
of the Modern Movement (International Style) with its non-
ornamented façades in the architectural sphere. Nevertheless,
there are unique examples of the Modern Movement around
the globe which contain ornamentation and traditional
materials
I feel it is directly related with eras and the meanings which
people attribute to those eras. Architecture is directly related
with everything else like many other disciplines.
• When there is power, there are supreme looking civic
authoritarian façades - Roman
• When there is religion and horror they make dark and
monumental temples - Gothic
• When there is enlightenment, people prefer white and
fresh looking buildings - Renaissance
• When there is increasing population and the need for
housing goes up, ornaments become too expensive to
consider - Modernism
• When engineering advances, complex forms become
easier to build - Postmodernism
If today there wasn't any cities that grow like hot air balloons,
people would consider more about details, ornaments, beauty,
small aesthetic additions. The condition is inseparable from
other things of our era. Our understandings define our
demands.
My reasoning towards ornamentation as a method
of being a communicative element
Ornament begins as luxury. The more ornamented a building,
a piece of clothing or an item of jewellery, the more labour has
gone into its production and the more expensive it is. The
Industrial Revolution and machine production changed
everything. Suddenly decoration became cheap. Which
coincided with the economic need for growth - the
manufacture of more and more (decorated) stuff. This, in
essence, is the argument of Marx, Morris, Loos and Veblen.
Decoration characterised as a mechanism for capital to
produce and sell more useless crap to the masses.
Of course, as soon as ornament becomes cheap, elite taste
moves on. If decoration is suddenly cheap, then the plainer an
object, the more valuable it suddenly becomes. This is,
effectively, the birth of Modernism as described by Pevsner and
others, the stripped aesthetic of the Bauhaus or the Arts and
Crafts where the effort now goes not into ornamentation but
into making the building or the product so that
it appears simple.
But with the added dimension of morality. The stripping-off
of ornament suddenly becomes an ethical duty, which leads to
the moralising (rather than necessarily moral) arguments of
the Modernists.
The curious thing is this conflation between Minimalism,
modernity and morality. Ruskin, the originator of the moral
argument, equated the work of the craftsman - which is
necessarily some kind of ornamentation - as a moral
prerogative. Adolf Loos, despite his ‘Ornament and Crime’
(the laughably silly text without which any discussion of the
subject is impossible), agrees. For Loos, the shoemaker
decorating his brogues is exactly the craftsman at the heart
of good design. You only need to look at Loos’s interiors to
understand that his position on ornament has been radically
over-simplified.
His text was aimed at the excesses of the Viennese Secession,
a particular moment, it is dripping with sarcasm.
But that century-and-a-half of the critique of ornament,
that resistance to decoration in design, has become
so embedded in our culture that we are now able only to
approach the subject through irony or deliberate distance.
Whether we think of the appliqué classicism of
Postmodernism or the thin veneer of decorative facades
engendered by digital production, ornament today is almost
inevitably seen at a remove. That alienation is at the heart of
the problem - and it is a problem because ornament is the
language through which architecture communicates with a
broader public and each remove puts another degree of
separation between the profession and the public.
