Architecture needs mechanisms that allow it to become connected to culture. It achieves this by continually capturing the forces that shape society as material to work with. Architecture’s materiality is therefore a composite one, made up of visible as well as invisible forces. Progress in architecture occurs through new concepts by which it becomes connected with this material, and it manifests itself in new aesthetic compositions and affects. It is these new affects that allow us to constantly engage with the city in new ways.
The aesthetic composition of buildings has been explored in various ways in history. In the twentieth century, Modernism used transparency to achieve a “direct” representation of architectural elements of space, structure and program. But recent history contributed to making the use of literal transparency obsolete, prompting a discussion on the expression of buildings. Postmodernism used décor, and Deconstructivism used the geometry of collage, as styles in place of transparency. But style cannot easily adjust to changes in culture. Currently a number of conditions require us to reevaluate these previous tools for constructing building expressions. These include a growing number of building types that are “blank.”
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Ornament as Contingent: Décor and Communication
Communication can be framed historically. The relationship between the interior and the exterior of buildings range from the poché space of the Romans to the theatrical effects of the Baroque, from Gottfried Semper’s theory of ornament to Adolf Loos’s opposition to it. For Semper, the functional and structural requirements of a building were subordinate to the semiotic and artistic goals of ornament. For Loos, on the other hand, ornamentation was a crime. In his view, ornament was used in traditional societies as a means of differentiation; modern society needed not to emphasize individuality, but on the contrary, to suppress it. Hence for Loos, ornamentation had lost its social function and had become unnecessary.
Modernism brought to architecture an obsession with transparency. Transparency was meant to make architecture more “sincere,” in sharp contrast with the bourgeois practice of decoration. Architecture was no longer supposed to disguise functions, but to make them visible and to render the city and its buildings immediately readable. Such was the paradigm that dominated architecture and urban design well into the 1960’s.
A critique of this approach was formulated in the decade that followed. In the first instance, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown denounced the Modernist paradigm as cynical and dull, and proposed to replace transparency with décor. For them, décor helped to integrate buildings within the urban realm and give them meaning in the eyes of the public.
source: The Function of Ornament, Edited by Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo
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Ornament as Contingent: Décor and Communication
Communication can be framed historically. The relationship between the interior and the exterior of buildings range from the poché space of the Romans to the theatrical effects of the Baroque, from Gottfried Semper’s theory of ornament to Adolf Loos’s opposition to it. For Semper, the functional and structural requirements of a building were subordinate to the semiotic and artistic goals of ornament. For Loos, on the other hand, ornamentation was a crime. In his view, ornament was used in traditional societies as a means of differentiation; modern society needed not to emphasize individuality, but on the contrary, to suppress it. Hence for Loos, ornamentation had lost its social function and had become unnecessary.
Modernism brought to architecture an obsession with transparency. Transparency was meant to make architecture more “sincere,” in sharp contrast with the bourgeois practice of decoration. Architecture was no longer supposed to disguise functions, but to make them visible and to render the city and its buildings immediately readable. Such was the paradigm that dominated architecture and urban design well into the 1960’s.
A critique of this approach was formulated in the decade that followed. In the first instance, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown denounced the Modernist paradigm as cynical and dull, and proposed to replace transparency with décor. For them, décor helped to integrate buildings within the urban realm and give them meaning in the eyes of the public.
source: The Function of Ornament, Edited by Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo
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