Ornaments declared the influential architect Adolf Loos in 1913, “is a crime”. For much of the past century, leading architects seem to have slavishly stuck to the opinion outlined in the Austrian’s revolutionary essay Ornament and Crime.
Today’s wave of ornamented buildings avoids the added-on look by being almost uniformly flat and taking simple geometric form. Their patterning does not destroy the overall mass of the building and it is usually a repeated pattern that’s still comfortingly redolent mechanization and modernity.
As an example, Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, a new cultural centerpiece. The building is ornamented, from top to bottom and all the way round. Concrete has been formed to create a delicate veil around the building’s perimeter, shading its interior walkways and exhibition spaces from the Mediterranean sun. The façade created a beautiful dappled effect that makes the building melt into the surrounding cityscape from one viewpoint or dissolve into shimmering sea from another.
Adjaye Associates’ Moscow School of Management is an example of a simple form with surface patterning; it has one block-faced with herringbone patchwork of glass and coloured panels, while the others are monochrome. Studio 505’s façade is a surface composition communicating the rich diversity of nature through an all-over mural printed on metal panels.
The Sint Lucas Art Academy looked to traditional decorative symbols to create a new identity. As a façade, they added a series of concrete screens, which hide the disparate exterior of the preexisting structures to create a new cohesive front. The traditional fleur-de-lis designs that puncture the thick concrete screens are also used on the interior. The stylized lilies are repeated to form geometrically patterned wallpaper that covers the surfaces of the school’s foyer and hallways. The flatness of both the interior and exterior of the Sint Lucas Art Academy is an example of what FAT calls the figural section, “a flattened architectural element taking the form of a slice, extrusion, fragment or surface for information, offering a rich but non-expressive, deadpan, or objective form of communication.”
