Embellishment is a basic human need. Why was it banished from modern architecture?

This lavishly illustrated volume is the first major global history of ornament from the Middle Ages to today. Crossing historical and geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways and considering the role of ornament in both art and architecture, Histories of Ornament offers a nuanced examination that integrates medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern Euroamerican traditions with their Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican counterparts. At a time when ornament has re-emerged in architectural practice and is a topic of growing interest to art and architectural historians, the book reveals how the long history of ornament illuminates its global resurgence today. Organized by thematic sections on the significance, influence, and role of ornament, the book addresses ornament's current revival in architecture, its historiography and theories, its transcontinental mobility in medieval and early modern Europe and the Middle East, and its place in the context of industrialization and modernism. Throughout, Histories of Ornament emphasizes the portability and politics of ornament, figuration versus abstraction, cross-cultural dialogues, and the constant negotiation of local and global traditions. Featuring original essays by more than two dozen scholars from around the world, this authoritative and wide-ranging book provides an indispensable reference on the histories of ornament in a global context. Contributors include: Michele Bacci (Fribourg University); Anna Contadini (University of London); Thomas B. F. Cummins (Harvard); Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest); Daniela del Pesco (Universita degli Studi Roma Tre); Vittoria Di Palma (USC); Anne Dunlop (University of Melbourne); Marzia Faietti (University of Bologna); María Judith Feliciano (independent scholar); Finbarr Barry Flood (NYU); Jonathan Hay (NYU); Christopher P. Heuer (Clark Art); Rémi Labrusse (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense); Gülru Necipoğlu (Harvard); Marco Rosario Nobile (University of Palermo); Oya Pancaroğlu (Bosphorus University); Spyros Papapetros (Princeton); Alina Payne (Harvard); Antoine Picon (Harvard); David Pullins (Harvard); Jennifer L. Roberts (Harvard); David J. Roxburgh (Harvard); Hashim Sarkis (MIT); Robin Schuldenfrei (Courtauld); Avinoam Shalem (Columbia); and Gerhard Wolf (KHI, Florence).

Once condemned by Modernism and compared to a ‘crime’ by Adolf Loos, ornament has made a spectacular return in contemporary architecture. This is typified by the works of well-known architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Sauerbruch Hutton, Farshid Moussavi Architecture and OMA. There is no doubt that these new ornamental tendencies are inseparable from innovations in computer technology. The proliferation of developments in design software has enabled architects to experiment afresh with texture, colour, pattern and topology. Though inextricably linked with digital tools and culture, Antoine Picon argues that some significant traits in ornament persist from earlier Western architectural traditions. These he defines as the ‘subjective’ – the human interaction that ornament requires in both its production and its reception – and the political. Contrary to the message conveyed by the founding fathers of modern architecture, traditional ornament was not meant only for pleasure. It conveyed vital information about the designation of buildings as well as about the rank of their owners. As such, it participated in the expression of social values, hierarchies and order. By bringing previous traditions in ornament under scrutiny, Picon makes us question the political issues at stake in today’s ornamental revival. What does it tell us about present-day culture? Why are we presently so fearful of meaning in architecture? Could it be that by steering so vehemently away from symbolism, contemporary architecture is evading any explicit contribution to collective values?

In the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace (1851), some architects, engineers, manufacturers and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. This book studies the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation, and the contexts in which it flourished. As such, it offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture.

Ornaments are omnipresent ? they can be found on buildings, fabrics, jewelry, tiles, ceramics and wallpaper. Scorned at the beginning of the modern age, ornament has long since returned to architecture and influences design drafts as much as tattoo motifs.00In New Grammar of Ornaments, Thomas Weil compares current ornamental objects with the results of archaeological research on ornamental artifacts and concludes that there is an anthropological constant. From the recurring arrangements of stripes, rectangles, triangles and dots and the frequency of the forms of floral ornaments used, he derives a new ?grammar of ornament.?00More than 160 years after Owen Jones' influential publication, New Grammar of Ornaments is a new standard work. It categorizes the variety of ornamental forms used worldwide and for the first time places them in a major art and cultural-historical context.