ORNAMENTATION
“The urge to ornament one’s face and everything within one’s reach is the origin of fine art. It is the babble of painting. All art is erotic.”
- ADOLF LOOS
Ornament once was be described the decoration of the outlook of the building structure or element.According to the meanings in dictionary , ornament has several different meanings :
Oxford Dictionary: 1. a thing used to make something look more attractive but usually having no practical purpose.
Cambridge Dictionaries: 1. an object which is beautiful rather than useful
Although the ideology of Modernism once rejected the supposed decadence and wastefulness of the mass production of ornament, it is indisputable that over the past ten years entirely new construction and manufacturing processes have made the return of ornament economically viable.What interventions can be valuable when it comes to ornament in architectural design, and how can ornament be applied to architecture in a most effective way?
“Ornament” declared the influential architect Adolf Loos “is a crime”unless it has function . It was an idea that Le Corbusier later took up with his famous statement that the house is “a machine for living in”. Form, the modernists proclaimed, must follow function.
Nowadays in contemporary architecture we see a revival of the use of ornament. A lot of patterns are generated by software and transformed into, or applied to, construction elements. Completed façades are covered with these patterns, complex forms are generated in order to stand out, and buildings are subjects to experiments with new technologies, concepts or structural challenges. It is remarkable that ornamental interventions which are responding to the building shape or human use of the building are hard to find in contemporary projects.
Of course, as soon as ornament becomes cheap, elite taste moves on.Thus, the plainer an object, the more valuable it suddenly becomes.
This is, effectively, the birth of Modernism which the effort now goes not into ornamentation but into making the building or the product so that it appears simple.. The stripping-off of ornament suddenly becomes an ethical duty, which leads to the moralising (rather than necessarily moral) arguments of the Modernists.
Ornament in architecture nowadays represents various tasks ,not even an aesthetic decoration ,but also in environmental and technological way.For an example , the Ministry of culture in Paris. Ornament was being used according to cover up the unnessary part of building , as it is a combination of two existing old building , A continuous mesh of steel lace wrapped up these two building ,covering up two different architectural type building,showing a nice , same language way outlook .The steel meshes are all framed, similar to each other, and they respond to the windows of the original buildings
Ministry of culture in Paris. Ornament ， using wire mesh as ornament to cover the unbalance of two buildings.
Structural DNA, M.V. van Embbden Andres,taking technological task that ornament help supporting the loads of building.
Xicui Entertainment complex Beijing .
Technological task goes to the Structural DNA, M.V. van Embbden Andres and Xicui Entertainment Complex Beijing by Simone Giostra .The LED display(ornament) combined with a photovoltaic system as a curtain wall of building, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to illuminate the screen after dark, mirroring a day’s climatic cycle. the facade displays a specially commissioned program of video installations, and live performances by artists. The technological façade is repeatedly subdivided in an almost fractal way, which makes the pattern easy to read, but the totality of façade completely covers the building and doesn’t refer to the function of the building or the organization of the building at all.
If I were the new author for the forth text , I will discuss about the argument : potential of ornament in nowadays.Can ornament be important as building structure ? Can ornament stands individually without building elements ? The Relationship of the ornament and the user’s needs of building.Since the human ,environment and the function are the main considerations in architecture.These points are my main points that gonna be discussed , and find out why ornament is essential in contemporary architecture , in an other way rather than just beautify.