Where’s the Ornament?

This is a “folded plate,” one of the trendy styles of architecture these days.

Stipulate that Adolf Loos is dead. The man that wrote “ornament is crime” and set off the landslide of Modernism is no longer important on the world scene. Empires have faded away, suffrage is universal, and Europe is no longer the center of the universe. There is no longer any reason to fear ornament. The Corbusian idea that “functional is beautiful” has largely come a cropper amid near-universal disenchantment among the public at large. And yet, there is no ornament.

It’s been 37 years since Venturi wrote Learning from Las Vegas, and defined the “duck” of a building as symbol versus the “decorated shed” of buildings with symbols. He gave the avant garde permission to decorate, to apply symbols, to pull away from the tale of the “pure” form that operates under the fiction that it is a rational response devoid of culture. Yet the move (after a brief flirtation with Post-Modern, which was more about lampooning the cultural symbols than updating them) has been to an ever higher and more extreme form of the “duck” – an architecture of composed element placement, a shoehorning of functional aspects into form requirements that may or may not fit well with them.

Short of ornament, there are essentially two paths to significance: Form and Craftsmanship. (The usual terms of “proportion,” “space,” or “dialogue,” or things like this strike me as fundamentally form issues as executed.) Both of these are fantastically expensive. Form requires that the functional aspects of the program be sublimated to a framework of “gesture” for the basic configuration of the building. Unfortunately, most buildings really want to be fairly regular so the result is either a masterwork of compromise (in the case of Frank Gehry) or a self-important sacrifice of the purpose of the investment to mercurial trendiness (in the case of Zaha Hadid.) Craftsmanship is more responsible, but not any easier. There are those in the High Modern tradition that are able to execute construction with the exceptional detailing and precision of fabrication to make the building components themselves interesting and attractive (Renzo Piano is probably the best example.) They face two hurdles; the first is total dependence on the care and attention of the construction side of the equation, which is a very difficult demand for a basically messy business, and commands a substantial cost premium out of the reach of all but the highest profile projects. The second is they fail to solve the public disenchantment with non-representational arts of all kind. One must be something of an adept to appreciate the delicate formulation of this kind of thing.

Since the beginnings of humanity man has felt a need to ornament his self and surroundings to give them meaning and mark his place in the world. Maybe it goes back to some kind of James Frazer need for a talisman or trial identification device. The ornament that we’re used to seeing has taken familiar forms: either the temple-magic of Pagan religion, or narrative instruction and creation-worship of a superstitious pre-enlightenment feudalism. There have been countless others, of course, but these have been the most common sub-strata. There were brief flowerings of a new, electric thing at the turn of the last century in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but two cataclysmic European wars but an end to all but the functional strain (which had the good fortune to shelter the second in the infatuated realms of North American academe.) Where now will the ornament with the new meanings for the new age emerge? When will the false dichotomy of historical pastiche versus cold functionalism (or formal self-advertising) end?

Who has the courage?