Ornament (architecture)
In architecture ornament refers to decorative detail on buildings. "Surface modulation" the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it in a 1941 essay (Summerson 1963). Ornament has been part of the traditions of architecture of all times and places in human history and help separate architecture from mere shelter construction. Even the simplest traditions of vernacular building employ traditional ornament. The exception in 20th Century modern architecture, although familiar to this generation, is a historical aberration.
During the 19th Century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise definition, became the source of aesthetic controversy in western architecture, as architects and their critics searched for a suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas Leverton Donaldson asked in 1847, "are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style of the 19th century?" (quoted by Summerson). Colonialism and soon the new discoveries of archaeology expanded the repertory of ornament available to architects and designers, until its sheer variety became burdensome; after about 1880, photographic illustration made details of ornament even more widely available than prints had done.
There were two available routes from this sensed crisis. One was to devise an ornamental vocabulary that was new and essentially contemporary. This was the route taken by architects like Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, or by the unique Antoni GaudÃ. Art Nouveau, for all its excesses, was a conscious effort to evolve such a "natural" vocabulary of ornament.
A more radical route abandoned the use of ornament altogether, as in some designs for objects by Christopher Dresser. At the time, such unornamented objects could have been found in many unpretending workaday items of industrial design, if architects had thought to look: industrial ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of the electric lines.
A symbolic aspect of the morality of ornament in this controversy surfaced in the 1908 manifesto of architect Adolf Loos, translated into English in 1913 and suggestively titled "Ornament and Crime", in which he declared that lack of decoration is the sign of an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is economically inefficient and morally degenerate; Modernists were eager to point to American architect Louis Sullivan as their godfather in the cause of aesthetic simplification, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned ornament that articulated the skin of his structures.
With the work of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus through the 1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of modern architecture. Lack of architectural ornamentation became equated with the moral virtues of honesty, simplicity, and purity. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock dubbed this the "International Style". What began as a matter of taste was transformed into an aesthetic mandate. Modernism became the only acceptable way to build. As the style hit its stride in the highly-developed postwar work of Mies van der Rohe, the tenets of 1950s modernism became so strict that even accomplished architects like Edward Durrell Stone and Eero Saarinen could be ridiculed and effectively ostracized for departing from the aesthetic rules.
At the same time, the law against ornament began to come into serious question. "Architecture has, with some difficulty, liberated itself from ornament, but it has not liberated itself from the fear of ornament," Summerson observed in 1941.
One reason was that the very difference between ornament and structure is subtle and perhaps arbitrary. The pointed arches and flying buttresses of Gothic architecture are ornamental but structurally necessary; the colorful rhythmic bands of a Pietro Belluschi International Style skyscraper are integral, not applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. For another, architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of establishing scale, signalling entries, and aiding wayfinding, and these useful design tactics had been outlawed. And by the mid 1950s modernist figureheads Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer had been breaking their own rules by producing highly expressive, sculptural concrete work.
The argument against ornament reached a fever pitch in 1959 over discussions of the Seagram Building, where Mies van der Rohe installed a series of structurally unnecessary vertical I-beams on the outside of the building, and the whole argument was suddenly over in 1984 when Philip Johnson produced his AT&T Building in Manhattan with an ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian pediment. In retrospect critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist building.
- Summerson, John, 1941. in Heavenly Mansions 1963, p. 217