ORNAMENTATION WITH MODERNISM
What is the role of ornament in architecture today?
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.
For now, ornament still reserved. The Modern Movement in architecture had scarcely succeeded in abolishing ornament before people began to speculate about how and when it would return. From my research, I found that since the 1960s there have been streams of modernism that have recognised the depth of ornament as cultural symbolism and its importance in continuity and communication.
“When modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornament.” US architect Robert Venturi
It has become virtually impossible to read about a new structure without seeing the word “icon”. Whether it is a museum, apartment block or house, every new-build is touted as iconic. The urge to ornament has been subsumed in increasingly absurd shapes.
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Most of the modern architect, they introduced pattern and decoration as a way of bridging the gulf between theory and practice.
“Ornamentation can suggest a way in for the users. it can provide a story, a coding. We were looking for a way of taking the flexibility and the DIY nature of a semi detached house while allowing residents to adapt and decorate.” AOC’s Geoff Shearcroft
Along with a conventional brick frontage there are sections of quilted gold and pink diamond check. In fact the variegation gives a kind of keying to further customisation. Crown Terrace, social housing is being throwing up to the most interesting innovations in domestic design now. Across the Atlantic and at very much the other end of the social spectrum, Ian Schrager’s new SoHo condominium development, 40 Bond, uses ornament as a kind of barrier but also as a hoarding.
The screen as an architectural device is almost normal now. Industrial processes, particularly the meshing of computer rendering technologies and laser-cutting, have made the production of almost any pierced, two-dimensional surface possible. In the complexity of these screens architects appear almost universally to be looking to the formal and mathematical invention of Islamic designs.
Zaha Hadid worked on a residential tower which the skin is perforated with hundreds of geometric openings in an astonishingly complex arrangement producing a graphically elegant façade treatment. As the tower rises, the frequency of the openings becomes greater so that the cladding becomes lighter as it reaches up towards the sky.
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Slovene architects Sadar Vuga have revived an entirely different tradition of tiled ornament. Their condominium building in Ljubljana is spattered with multi-coloured square tiles. Their countryman Max Fabiani’s Portois and Fix Building in Vienna in 1899 suggested a new possibility for decoration within the modernist obsession with the flat plane of the façade, with its dramatic tilling, treating the elevation as a picture plane.
“The surface has always been a background for obsessions and desire. Modernism discarded these associations but we are now in a swing back. The technology and the software at our disposal now gives us enormous control over form, equations can become a material presence. We are interested in that intricacy between pragmatism and retinal exuberance – it is something that bridges the disciplines, from architecture to furniture, interiors and product.” Douglis