(Roughly) Daily

The venerable Witold Rybczynski on how, starting with Adolf Loos and the Vienna Secession, ornament was “banished” from modernist architecture– and on what that’s cost us…

… The abandonment of ornament has levied a heavy toll on the practice of architecture, tantamount to misplacing a crucial instrument of one’s toolbox. With ornament, an architect could give meaning to a building not only by incorporating specific references to what went on inside… but also by simply dialing the intensity up or down. Thus the main entrance of the Philadelphia Board of Education Building is not merely larger than the service entrance, it is more elaborately decorated, topped by two winged female figures and a medallion containing what looks like a coat of arms. Without subjunctive ornament, a building risks being less nuanced, but without meaningful ornament, it risks becoming, well, meaningless.

The banishment of ornament means an end to the close collaboration between architects and artists. It is difficult to imagine an architect today saying, “I should like to do the plan and the massing of the building; then … turn the ornament over to a perfectly qualified sculptor, and the color and surface direction to an equally qualified painter.” Today, the art in public buildings tends to be divorced from the architecture. A large travertine sculpture, Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure, stands outside Marcel Breuer’s UNESCO Building in Paris. Inside is a Picasso mural, The Fall of Icarus. The sculpture and the mural are beautiful works of art, but they have nothing to do with the architecture. They are simply “a Henry Moore” and “a Picasso.” The days when architects and artists worked closely together are long gone, and the results are not necessarily architecture that is worse, but architecture that is more one-dimensional: a long solo unenlivened by the occasional duet.

Take away ornament, and what are you left with? When we get close to a building today, we are confronted by gaskets, caulking, nuts and bolts—the minutiae of building construction. Or worse: exit signs, ventilation grills, and fire-hose cabinets. There is an architectural consequence to this. Traditionally, buildings were built as relatively straightforward boxes, their distinctive quality provided by ornament. Lacking the latter, architects feel obliged to provide dramatic cantilevers, unusual shapes, vertiginous space, and soaring roofs. But these big moves are not balanced by the finer-grained experience of small moves—that is, by ornament…

Why ornament matters in architecture: “Give Us Something to Look At,” from @witoldr in @TheAmScho. Eminently worth reading in full.

* Christopher Alexander, in conversation with Rybczynski

###

As we make with meaning, we might spare a thought for Pier Luigi Nervi; he died on this date in 1979. An exemplar of the trend against which Rybczynski argues, Nervi was an architect who drew on his deep engineering expertise– especially in reinforced concrete– to create notable “thin shell” structures worldwide.