Page 17 - Studio International - September October 1975

Ornament is No Crime

Joseph Rykwert

`If we have no hope for the future, I do not see how we can
look back on the past with pleasure.' (William Morris,
The History of Pattern-Designing)

There was a time when the painter There were two kinds of architecture : and increasingly despised by any vital
and sculptor had a clear idea of that of the poets and that of the artist. Even those whose practice involved
their link with the architect: they Polytechnicians. They often overlapped, them in the most elaborate ornamental
were all three 'visual' artists. The and in any case the public came to inventions, theorized in terms which
art of the painter and sculptor, consider them suitable for different were not unsympathetic to the
however, was imitative of nature; kinds of building. The poets concentrated Polytechnicians. There should be no
that of the architect was only their attention on historical, and features about a building which are not
partially so. Architecture imitated, therefore nostalgic, ornament; the necessary for convenience, one of them
yes — but imitated culture. Polytechnicians maintained that if wrote; construction and propriety
Monumental building reproduced beauty must be specially catered for in and all ornament should consist of the
the necessary forms of a primitive building, it was through proportion. enrichment of the essential structure of
but rickety construction in Not the old musical consonances of a building. Such ideas now seem a strange
permanent and noble materials. In universal harmony, dear to justification for a full-blooded return to
so far as it came to imitating nature, renaissance and baroque theorists, but the imitation of English architecture in
it was the proportions of the human three different and separate kinds : that the late fifteenth century. But such
body which the architect abstracted simply derived from the properties of theories were advanced as a justification
in his measurements. materials, and that derived from of Gothic and Classical, Hindu and
This view of the art of building, economy which is the desire for the Moorish and even Chinese. The appeal
consecrated by theorists since Vitruvius greatest possible simplicity of geometry was ultimately to the polytechnic
(and he had drawn on much older (and justified their insistent use of the justification of ornament as a shock-
sources) had an enormous vogue at the circle and square); and, as a mean, that absorbent package, particularly necessary
end of the eighteenth century. With a old-fashioned kind of proportion which in an age of structural innovation and
change of century came a change of was associated with classical orders — and functional specializing and
attitude, shown by a double attack on therefore with a repertory of decoration — diversifying. It was, however, self-
the old view. Architecture, some said and which was considered useful in that destructive in the end, when the
(with Goethe and the poets), did not it would, by clothing structure with justification of ornament by
imitate primitive construction: convention, spare the users of the convention would appear threadbare or
architecture imitated nature — the sacred building the shock of the unusual. This even cynical. The process was
wood, the cave-shrine. In this novel last proportion was thought to be of expedited by another, and rather
argument, the old belief that purely local application in Europe and different development: throughout the
architecture was based on the the Mediterranean. Builders in Persia, nineteenth century, artists who had
proportions of the human body, which China or India would have no call for earlier been uprooted from their guilds
had been the mainstay of the advocates this kind of packaging and could rely on and gathered into academies were
of nature, was forgotten. But even this materials and economy alone to furnish schooled in the disciplines of taste.
modified form of the natural argument them with all they needed. Art-schools grew from the academies
was contradicted by a new and As the disciples of the Polytechnicians at the time when the Polytechnics were
important breed, the Polytechnicians. spread throughout Europe, to the Far created. In the schools, artists shifted
Architecture, they maintained, did not East, to the American West and to their attention from creating objects
imitate anything. Architecture was Africa, they carried this doctrine with intended to edify, move or excite the
dressed-up construction. They did not — them. It is, of course, true that the spectator, and concentrated on an
at any rate at first — ever advocate that nineteenth century was the great age of authentic expression of individual
construction should appear shamelessly applied ornament. But as the century vision, in which the artist's relation to
naked. Decency, propriety, convention — went on, the merely conventional nature the spectator through the object became
society, in short — demanded that naked of ornament was increasingly evident, increasingly less important, as artists
construction be covered, and that
covering was ornament.
Ornament had once meant: that which
makes decent in supplying a missing
essential. 'Modesty,' the French
Academy dictionary defines, 'is a great
ornament of merit.' That is not what the
Polytechnicians meant. Ornament was
not supplying that which was good in
itself with its essential complement, but
covering the unacceptable. The cover
catered to trivial pleasure. Architecture
was concerned primarily with necessity,
and its true essential beauty depended on
a direct and economic satisfaction of
man's most urgent, physical needs. The
beauty of necessity satisfied reason alone;
much as the beauty of association and
sentiment could appeal only to the
imagination. Here was a dichotomy A. Welby Pugin
which was to grow more divisive Misapplication of Italian, Swiss and Hindoo Architecture (from The
throughout the nineteenth century. True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture)

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