Ornament as an abstraction of society
Ornamentum¹ : equipment, apparatus, furniture, decoration, ornament,embellishment, adornment, (plural) regalia, jewel, jewelry
Ornare : To decorate, adorn, embellish
Ornament always fascinated me, from ancient buildings to Adolf Loos’s hatred of ornament. I wondered many times what the purpose of ornament is? Reading Loos, I was first against all kind of ornament, but then understanding his view, I understood he was not against ornament in itself, but against what it became. Some ornaments belong to certain times, and Loos’s time was not about greek and roman ornament anymore. The question then is, what is ornament and how should it be created appropriately to its own time. Is ornament the reflection of the society we live in or is the society the reflection of how we ornate our buildings and belongings?
Ornaments exist since long time everywhere in the world but in this essay I will focus on our Greco-Roman heritage that create our european tradition. I will try to understand the relation between ornament and society. If ornaments are an abstraction of society, can they help us understand ancient societies as well as maybe exotic societies.
In his book Ornament: The politics of architecture and subjectivity, Antoine Picon starts with the question “What if architecture were ultimately about ornament? Even décor.”² The following quotes in the book are from Islamic art specialist Oleg Grabar, who said “Good architecture is always meant to be an invitation to behave in certain ways; it always adorns life, and, some exceptions notwithstanding, does not require the emotions surroundings whatever one does in a building” concluding that “architecture is a true ornament (…). Without it, life loses its quality. Architecture makes life complete, but it is neither life nor art.”³
A really intriguing question is ultimately what is ornament? In the book The Function of Ornament, Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo explain what creates ornament which is “The interplay between depth (form, structure, screen or surface) and a specific material (such as program, image, or colour) produces the ornament (for example complex tilings, perforated screens, or structural patterns which transmits affects in each case.”⁴ This definition of what is our contemporary ornament explains where it comes from and how it is created as well as its purpose, affect, which is common to a lot of definitions. Christine Bucki-Glucksman in her book Philosophies de l’ornement draws comparison with music where she conclude with “ornementation doesn’t fall under overloading, but makes, structure and detail, parure and bareness coexist. Because only “contrasts have the gift of moving” (Monteverdi), and ornament becomes disparity and dissonance, like rhetoric and its figures of speech…”.⁵
With these definitions we can now see a bit of what is ornament and what its purpose is. In the next few paragraphs I will try to understand and explain how ornaments are related to a given society and how ornament could have influenced the life of people living at some given times. From greek times through renaissance, rococo, the fall of ornaments, until our days of computational ornament, I will try to see if ornaments and society could be linked.
Architecture and society
Getting back to the beginning of our society, the Greek empire started our culture of ornament and abstraction. If we look at temples and other important buildings we see sculptures representations of humans, animals and nature. These subjects were omnipresent in their culture and their myths of the world revolved around the gods and goddesses of nature. Their ornaments were then obviously the stories of those divinities. These myths were used to guide people in their life and explain the origin of their civilisation. They were myths but in this time, they were taken as explanation. These myths were abstraction and parabolas of how people should behave in a moralistic and philosophical way. This was a time when the religious and the politics were strongly linked together. We can understand this as either ornaments are an abstraction of how people should behave or ornaments are an abstraction of how people lived.
Architecture is one of the most important form of art, because not only it embellishes the world but it creates the frame of the world we live in. To understand how people lived in the past we can rely on writings and paintings which describe a kind of simple and romanticised living. But when we look at architecture we have both the technical and the spiritual way of living. As Le Corbusier said, a building is a machine to live. Architecture with its creation of spaces defines how people arrange their day with their practical tasks, but with ornaments it tells how people live spiritually.
Architecture is a vector of how people live, it is a representation of how they live. But when created, architecture is also an hypothesis of how people will live in the future. Architecture could then be a reflection of society and society be a reflection of architecture.
Ornament as the face of architecture
Ornaments are the building’s way of expressing ideas into the world, they are the face of the building but the face of the architect as well. From theories alluding that entablatures are abstractions of the human face⁶ to the sphere theory of German Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, which Picon explains as “the ambition of ornamented architecture is to engage with humans in a somewhat similar way, that is, to create connection between visages that gives birth to an intersubjective sphere.”⁷ This sphere is then the reflections of both faces merging together to create a unique narration. But what is this narration, is it only some myths or stories, or do ornaments reflect a society?
The narration created in between the people and the building could be what society really is, the will of the politics mixing with the will of the people. We have seen that the building and the ornament precisely are here to communicate with us and bring us emotions and affects. The work of the architect is then to articulate a narration for the public to understand. Architecture and power were during a long time tied together from the ancient greek to renaissance where the clergy and the politics ordered buildings and art to engineer and craftspeople. Architects were then only the director for the narration they wanted to tell.
If we look at certain period in history we can see relations between what the power people (politics and clergy) did want to express and the ornaments they put on their building. It was not a direct reflection of how the whole society was, but a reflection of the will of the power people. Through ornaments and other artifacts, their will could be understood by the people. Architecture and ornaments were a catalyst to educate their folk.
For a long time politics and clergy were closely linked and the rules of living came from religion. The clergy and politics were not the only ones to have power. The people, even without political power, could make changes for their lives through different means, like writings, comedies or even revolution. The power people, to keep their power, would then take it in account to accommodate their folk.
We see that ornaments influenced society but society influenced the power too. We can now see that power people influenced ornaments, which influenced people, and people influenced power people, the circle is finished. Ornament is then an abstraction of what society as a whole looked like.
No ornament is ornamentation
Picon’s question at the beginning of Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity reinforce the statement from Loos’s idea of the ornament being only a chimera of past time. Until the beginning of the industrial revolution, religion was really important for communities but then society moved to something more scientific. Religion lost some of its power and became then not so much about living in the present world as about spiritual growth.
During a long period ornament was the symbol of power and religion because it was the way the world was ruled. But with the industrial revolution those rules changed. Ornamentation should have taken the same path of evolution but instead evolved taking inspiration from its past and not from the present. At this time using representation of religious and greco-roman ideas was not in phase with the life of people. It was not understandable for the people, thus becoming only some kind of mimic to symbolise power and religion.
As Loos explains, his stand against ornaments was not really against ornament, but against the mimicking of ideas from the past. He wanted to find out what would be the ornament of his time. As society was going forward, he wanted people’s mind to go forward, not looking at the past but creating the future. The world evolved but architecture stayed behind.
This could explain how ornament was a reflection of the society, and the shift to the total absence of ornaments is an explanation of society as well. We can also look at the modernist movement’s architects who decided to only work with materials as an ornament statement. The society had moved to a society that was interested in materials and technical issues. The modernist movement was a reflection of this period of great technological innovation in a lot of disciplines. Because the norm was ornamentation, putting ornament on a facade was a statement but deciding not to put ornament was a greater statement.
Conclusion
Ornamentation could definitely be a reflection and abstraction of a society. As we have seen, architecture and ornaments are a reflection of society as well as a catalyst for society. With understanding of ornaments and what they want to describe we can have a grasp of what a society was at that time.
Extrapolating from Loos’s position and figuring the problems of his time, we can understand some problems in our time. By mimicking ornamentation from the past that had nothing with the present life, people were living in romanticised past and not thinking about the future. If we apply this reasoning that ornamentation is the reflection of a society to our society, we can maybe understand what our society is.
We have seen that architecture through ornament is a reflection of our society as well as the society is a reflection of architecture. We can now try to understand how architecture could create a reflection of the world we want to live in. Is it possible for architecture to erase differences between classes, eradicate sexism, racism and homophobia?
During decades architecture has not taken account of disabled person in its design. It was not on purpose but because as a society we didn’t care about minorities. Now that we make design for all, can we then acknowledge other differences?
I think that by taking knowledge from the past but not living in the past or thinking that it was better before, the goal of architecture in the future is to create and reflect the better world we want to live in.
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¹ definition from en.wiktionary.org
² Picon, Antoine. Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity.Chichester: Wiley, 2013. p 009
³ ibid
⁴ Moussavi, Farshid and Michael Kubo. The function of ornament.Barcelona: Actar, 2006. p 105
⁵ Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Philosophie de l’ornement : D’Orient en Occident. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008. p 18
Original quote in french “l’ornementation ne relève pas du surchargé, mais elle fait coexister la structure et le détail, la parure et le dénuement. Car seuls “ les contrastes ont le don d’émouvoir” (Monteverdi), et l’ornementation se fait disparité et dissonance, comme dans la rhétorique et ses figures stylistiques…”
⁶ Blondel, Jacques-François. Cours d’architecture.
quoted by Picon, Antoine. Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity. Chichester: Wiley, 2013. p 061
⁷ Picon, Antoine. Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity.Chichester: Wiley, 2013. p 061–062
Bibliography
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Philosophie de l’ornement : D’Orient en Occident. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008.
Gibberd, Matt, and Albert Hill. l’ornement est un crime, architecture du mouvement moderne. Paris, Phaidon, 2017.
Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2008.
Loos, Adolf. Ornements et crimes. Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2003.
Moussavi, Farshid and Michael Kubo. The function of ornament. Barcelona: Actar, 2006.
Picon, Antoine. Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity.Chichester: Wiley, 2013.
This essay was done for the fall 2019 course A history of abstraction in architecture by Pier Vittorio Aureli for the Architecture Master at EPFL.
