Art History 11 > 1 Champs-Élysées, Paris.
Debating Ornament’s Value in Architectural Modernity Shaun Ball
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hen looking to the origins of modern architecture, it can be seen that the struggle to define and create the ideal structure is directly related to building materials. I argue that it is ornament which obscures this struggle through clouding both the form and function of buildings. While it is unnecessary to completely remove ornament to expose this struggle, it is important to recognize philosophical approaches and practical advancements made by Modernist architects in their attempt to reinterpret the role ornament plays in architecture. However, before exploring the debates surrounding ornament, its origins must first be acknowledged. Ornament branched outward from ancient societies, evolving in both meaning and complexity with each culture that it encountered. Born as decoration using simple building materials by the societies of Ancient Egypt and Assyria, ornament has been employed a means of decorating buildings through manipulating materials to render an image or pattern, typically evoking a symmetrical or naturalistic theme. What this decoration acts upon is the desire to obscure and disguise the materials used for buildings from their natural properties, instead causing them the materials to represent some other representational function of society often relating to history, genealogy or class. This is what ornament encompassed up to the latter half of the 19th century, when architects began reacting against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, during which highly skilled workmen were replaced with machines across Europe from around 1760 to 1830. These workmen had been responsible for decorating buildings, and the shift to ornament being made through machine processes and mass production caused modern architects to begin reinterpreting many fundamental aspects of ornament. It was during the latter half of the 19th century that the controversy surrounding the interpretation of ornament reached its height. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, ornamental patterns had been traditionally connected to the upper, ruling classes. However, as the downfall of many autocratic societies began to occur through events associated with the Industrial
Revolution, the rise of new egalitarian philosophies pertaining to class began to emerge with increasing regularity. With ornament having been conventionally understood as an extension of the aristocratic reach, it understandably faced harsh criticism, such as from the British architect Matthew Digby Wyatt. Upon viewing the faux-wood and faux-bronze ornament on many of the buildings on the ornate ChampsÉlysées (fig. 1) in Paris in 1849, he exclaimed: Both internally and externally there is a good deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If each simple material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of the construction so arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of grandeur, the qualities of “power” and “truth,” which its enormous extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of expense.1 Wyatt’s sentiments may be understood as echoing ideas previously stated by German architect Gottfried Semper, who in 1834 championed for building materials to be presented in accordance with their own natural properties. In doing so, Semper called for wood to appear as wood and brick as brick. He believed each material needed to be transcribed in architecture in accordance with its own ‘statical law.’ In other words, the material should speak for itself, stepping forth undisguised.2 This idea from Semper, with help from Austrian architect Adolf Loos, would eventually evolve into the concept of ‘concrete materiality.’ Loos took Wyatt’s distaste for “unprofitable ornament” and Semper’s ‘statical law’ and advanced them toward a “penchant for the surface of the material,” something that would become central to the tenets of Modernist architecture in the 20th century. Through demonstrating a mastery of utilizing natural stone as a design element, Loos was able to most effectively convey his concept of the paramount important of “the surface of the