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Beauty In Architecture Through Ornamentation

Semple House Condominiums (Photograph: John Veltri)

All building is

not architecture. For a building to become architecture, it must be thematically

essentialized through a process of ornamentation. The product of this process is "ornament" "Something employed to adom, beautify, or embellish, or that naturally does this; a decoration, embellishment."

"The primary difference between art and architecture is that architecture doesn't only show how the world can and ought to be; it actually makes a part of the world the way it should be and is."

Walking

through the streets of Manhattan - or any major urban area of America - one finds a preponderance of modern highrises devoid of ornament. Even smaller cities and residential neighborhoods are populated now w ith buildings and houses devoid of character, missing any sense of design. It is ornamentation that these buildings are lacking. In comparing these new er buildings w ith those of the last century and before, w e have to ask: "W hat happened?"

In

the late nineteenth century, academic classical design reached its pinnacle in America at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and w as termed "the American Renaissance." These buildings embodied a style encoded in the first century B.C. by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 90-20 B.C.). In Vitruvius: The Ten of Greek architecture - Here he comments on the evolution of ornament in "The Ornaments of the Orders," Book IV, Chapter 11:

2. So it was that some ancient carpenters ... after laying the tie-beams so that they projected from the inside to the outside of the walls, closed up the space between the beams, and above them ornamented the coronae and gables with carpentry work of beauty greater than usual; then they [the Greeks] cut off the projecting ends of the beams, bringing them in line and flush with the face of the walls; next, as this had an ugly look to them, they fastened boards, shaped as triglyphs are now made on the ends of the beams, where they had been cut off in front, and painted them with blue wax so that the cutting off of the ends of the beams, being concealed, would not offend the eye. Hence it was in imitation of the arrangement of the tie-beams that men began to employ, in Doric buildings, the device of triglyphs and the metopes between the beams. 3. Later, others ... allowed the projecting principal rafters to run out till they were flush with the triglyphs, and the triglyphs from the arrangement of the tie-beams, the system or mutules under the coronae was devised from the projections of the principal rafters. Hence generally, in buildings of stone and marble, the mutules are carved with a downward slant, in imitation of the principal rafters. 5. Just as mutules represent the projection of the principal rafters, so dentils in the Ionic are an imitation of the projections of the common rafters. And so in Greek works nobody ever put dentils under mutules, as it is impossible that common rafters should be underneath principal rafters. Therefore, if that which in the original must be placed above the principal rafters, is put in the copy below them, the result will be a work constructed on false principles. Neither did the ancients approve of or employ mutules or dentils in pediments, but only plain coronae, for the reason that neither principal nor common rafters tail into the fronts of pediments, nor can they overhang them, but they are laid with a slope towards the eaves. Hence the ancients held that what could not happen in the original would have no valid reason for existence in the copy.

The 3 Classical Orders - PGA

For Vitruvius

and all those w ho follow ed his documentation of the classical style, ornament and design itself revolved around imitation. Strict rules w ere set up regardless of the context of a given site, the technology available at a given time, or the functional requirements for a given client. These rules effectively stopped innovation because preconceptions (having solutions before even seeing the problem to be solved) prevented harmonious ornamentation of all the parts.

Like Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti (A.D. 1404-1472), an architect w hose On The Art of Building in
T e n Books had a great influence on all the arts in the Renaissance, considered ornament as something additional or applied: "...ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty. From this it follow s, I believe, that beauty is some inherent property, to be suffused all through the body of that w hich may be called beautiful; w hereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional." But he is notew orthy because of his definition of beauty, w hich he considered objective: "W hen you make judgements on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the w orkings of a reasoned faculty that is inborn in the mind."

For Alberti, beauty w as to be found not only in nature - it w as the main purpose for building:
"Most noble is beauty, therefore, and it must be sought most eagerly by anyone who does not wish what he owns to seem distasteful. Nature herself, as is everywhere plain to see, does not desist from basking in a daily orgy of beauty-let the hues of her flowers serve as my one example."
"Beauty is or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter; all our resources of skill and ingenuity will be taxed in achieving it; and rarely is it granted, even to nature herself, to produce anything that is entirely complete and perfect in every respect." "Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline, and position, as dictated by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in nature. This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, authority, and worth." that reasoned harmony of all the parts be nothing may within a body, so that added, taken away,

But questions arise in reading Alberti: since ornamentation as a process is carried out on the
w ork, and ornament as a product of the process is part of the w hole, how could he have considered ornament separate from the beauty of the w hole? If beauty is self-contained in that nothing can be added or taken aw ay w ithout detriment, how can ornament that is "attached or additional" be beautiful?

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), w as one of the first to understand that the means -the ornamentation
o f a building - is crucial to achieve the end result of beauty. He set out to create an architecture dependent on a project's context, w ith integral ornament. He searched for "the rule so broad as to adrnit of no exception," emphasizing principles of design as opposed to preconceived rules. In accordance w ith his famous slogan, "Form follow s function," Sullivan strove to integrate his unique naturalistic ornament w ith the fabric of the building. Both Sullivan and his young apprentice Frank Lloyd W right rebelled against the increasingly popular non-integration of classicism.

Another reaction against Classicist Academic design w as launched by the young Viennese architect
Adolf Loos. In an article entitled "Ornament is crime," Loos declared: "... the evolution of culture marches w ith the elimination of ornament from useful objects." He demonstrated his thesis w ith his 1910 Steiner House, a building entirely devoid of ornamentation.

Adolf Loos' Steiner House, Vienna, 1910. - MA

In 1923 Walter Gropius, one of the Bauhaus' founding fathers, stated: "Architecture in the last few
generations has become w eakly sentimental, aesthetic and decorative ... this kind of architecture w e disow n." But the culmination of his and others' ideas only led to a modern version of the ruleencoded approach of classicism: The International Style. W ith "the avoidance of applied decoration" as one of the rules, landmarks such as Flood & Fouilhoux's New York McGraw Hill Building of 1931 w ere created. Add to that Mies van der Rohe's design principle of "less is more," embodied by his Seagram building set.

in

New York, and the evolution of non-ornamentation in modern building had been

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building, New York, 1957. Photo: MW

Although

Frank Lloyd W right (1869-1959) also reacted against "applied" ornament as used in classicist academic design, he opposed this non-ornamentation trend w ith a further evolution in Sullivan's concept of "integrated" ornament:

"... But here now ornament is in its place. Ornament meaning not only surface qualified by human imagination but imagination giving natural pattern to structure. Perhaps this phrase says it all without further explanation. This resource - integral ornarnent - is new in the architecture of the world, at least insofar not only as imagination qualifying a surface - a valuable resource - but as a greater means than that; imagination giving natural pattern to structure itself. Here we have new significance indeed! Long ago this significance was lost to the scholarly architect. A man of taste. He, too soon, became content with symbols." "Evidently then, this expression of structure, as a pattern true to the nature of the materials out of which it was made, may be taken much further along than physical need alone would dictate."

Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Falling Water' house for Edgar Kaufmann Sr., Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1936. Photo: FCG

"... of the building as a whole, or the manifest abstract pattern of structure itself. Interpreted. Integral ornament is simply structure pattern made visibly articulate and seen in the building as it is seen articulate in the structure of the trees or a lily of the fields. It is the expression of inner rhythm of form."

So,

in the

same

uncommon

sense

integral

ornament

is

the

Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Hollyhock' house for Aline Barnsdall, Hollywood, 1921. Photo: FCG

(quotes from The Natural House)

Thus w e understand ornamentation as the process of harmonizing the various elements inherent
in the architectural w ork. The standard used for judging this harmony is the theme of the building, and the product of the process is a non-contradictory, unified w hole.

All art can

perform a vital function by creating in a directly perceivable form the manifestation of ideas in the w orld. The primary difference betw een art and architecture is that architecture doesn't only show how the w orld can and ought to be; it actually makes a part of the w orld the w ay it should be and is . I n w alking through architecture, then, as opposed to mere buildings, w e can experience a w orld that reflects the deepest thoughts and emotions of the designing architect. W hen architecture is at its highest level of harmony, beauty is attained. As an example, consider the very distinctive top of W illiam Van Allen's Chrysler building, w hich could have been a very simple box if purely functional concerns had been driving the design. Here the thematic goal, w hich w as achieved brilliantly, w as not only to make the building soar in a beautiful transition from the base of the building to the sky but also to celebrate the cause of the building. The curving forms and stylized shimmering stainless steel ornament w ithin the top, reminiscent of hubcaps, hint at the greatness of the automobile w hile glorifying the climax of this soaring tow er.

William Van Alen's Chrysler building, New York, 1930. Photos: MW

The
potential

Temple of Triumph presents an example of ornamentation on a smaller scale. The purely functional requirements of the temple alone w ould generate a simple box through w hich visitors w ould move. But because the purpose of the temple is not simply to give shelter but to create a space w here one experiences triumph the freedom of action and the face of danger and risk, the driving force behind the design of the temple is almost purely thematic. The temple is stylized and integrated to such an extent that to strip the ornament off it w ould be to remove it entirely from the cliff.

of

achieving values in

The Temple of Laughter project, by Frederick Clifford Gibson, San Francisco, 1995. Rendering by FCG.

In agreeing w ith Alberti that w e should value beauty in our lives and in our buildings, w e see that
ornamentation in architecture must strive to reach the highest levels of beauty possible. We also see that those w ho w ould abolish ornament as a superficial gesture w ere partly right, because the problem w ith applied ornamentation is not the nature of ornament itself but its non-necessity. In nature, as in our buildings, the highest levels of beauty are attained w here all elements act together in harmony, w here parts are integrated into a unified w hole.

To reach this level of virtue w e cannot abandon ornamentation, but instead must recognize its true
function as a vital and necessary means for reaching ever-higher levels of beauty in architecture. We must move forw ard in architecture by learning from the past, but w e must be careful not to apply preconceived solutions to w hat can be very complex problems. To attain beauty that inspires, a building must be designed specifically for its ow n context, not that of another place, another time, or must another culture. It be as individual as the one w ho designs it.

must

be

as individual as its ow n function and place, and its

Frederick C. Gibson
San Francisco - December 17, 1997

Reprinted with permission from the Volume Four Number Three issue of ART Ideas Magazine:
Copyright 1997 Published by ART. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, electronic/computerized scanning, recording, taping or infomation storage and retrieval systems - without written permission from the publisher.

References
OED

Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press 1971

ARCHITECTURE
AHA FCG

A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, Spiro Kostof, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1985
Frederick Clifford Gibson, Architect

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PGA SCEA SCCW TAFW TAI TNH VTBA

1985

Frank Lloyd Wright: Preliminary Studies 1933-1959, vol. 11, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo Co., Ltd, 1985 Frank Lloyd Wright: In His Renderings 1887-1959, vol. 12, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo Co., Ltd, 1985 Modern Architecture since 1900, William J R Curtis, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs (Phaidon Press Ltd., Oxford), New Jersey, 1982 On The Art of Building in Ten Books, Leon Battista Alberti, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1472.
Simon and Schuster's Pocket Guide to Architecture , Patrick Nuttgens, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1980. Santiago Calatrava, Engineering Architecture , Santiago Calatrava, Birkhuser Verlag, Basel-Boston-Berlin, 1990. Santiago Calatrava: Complete Works, Sergio Polano, Electa, Milan, 1996 The Architecture of Frank Lloyd W right: A Complete Catalog , W illiam Allin Storrer, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA & London, England, 1982 The Autobiography of an Idea, Louis H. Sullivan, Dover Publications, Inc, New York, 1924. The Natural House, Frank Llyod W right, New American Library, New York, 1970. Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture , Vitruvius, Morris Hicky Morgan, PH.D., LL.D. trans., Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1914

PHILOSOPHY
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Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Republic, by Robert Mayhew, Row man & Littlefield, 1997.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , by John Locke (Roger Woolhouse), Penguin Classics, 1689 (1998 reprint) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), Ayn Rand For the New Intellectual (1961), Ayn Rand
Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged (1957), Ayn Rand

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979), Ayn Rand The Ominous Parallels (1982), Leonard Peikoff Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), Leonard Peikoff Philosophy: W ho Needs It (1982), Ayn Rand The Romantic Manifesto (1975), Ayn Rand The Virtue of Selfishness : A New Concept of Egoism (1964), Ayn Rand

PHOTO CREDITS
MW Michael W ilkinson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 1995-2010 by Frederick Gibson + Associates Architecture, San Francisco, California

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