Ornament & Decoration
249. Ornament
Fine arts and decorative arts
Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, 1995–7
- Bells
Presentable
I have sometimes wondered whether our unconscious motive for doing so much useless work is to show that if we cannot make things work properly we can at least make them presentable.
Sine qua non
What we see of a device is rarely the essential part, the sine qua non, but nearly always the superstructure which economy has imposed on it.
It seems that the work we call purely utilitarian is not more useful than its more ornamental counterpart. It is merely more economical.
Merely ornate
There is nothing merely ornate about nature: every branch, twig, or leaf counts.
Errors & Crimes
"A builder who hides any part of the building frame, abandons the only permissible and, at the same time, the most beautiful embellishment of architecture. The one that hides a loadbearing column makes an error. The one who builds a false column commits a crime."
— Auguste Perret
The problem with ornament
An ArticleContemporary architects are, however, increasingly engaging with ornamentation. The zenith was Grayson Perry and Charles Holland of FAT’s fairytale House for Essex (p64), but it does not serve as an indicator because the involvement of an artist has allowed an enhanced engagement with ornament until it surpasses mere decoration and becomes embodied in the architecture in a way that architects do not allow themselves to do. Think of FAT’s old work: the ornament is all contained within a surface - a facade - which allowed them to separate out the (Modernist) architecture from the (kitsch) superficiality of the elevation. Like Venturi before them, their ornament allowed them to have their ornamentally iced cake - and eat the Minimal Modernist sponge underneath.
On the "Building" of Software and Websites
I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
You are agreeing to make a Thing
When you sign the contract for the construction project, you are agreeing to make a Thing—app, website, whatever. And you will have agreed to deliver this Thing on a certain date, also known as a deadline. From this point forward, the goals of shipping the Thing on time and actually solving the client’s problem will be in competition with each other.
The Thing-deadline calculus
Now, I understand deadlines. I understand that the plane will take off whether or not I’m on it, or the importance of beating the holiday retail rush, or that "the show must go on". It is perfectly clear to me how people use timekeeping technology to coordinate social activity. It’s actually quite remarkable when you step back and look at it. But, over the years, I have observed that there is a difference between those examples and the ones around the delivery of Things, which tend to be completely arbitrary. When you wrap an arbitrarily complex endeavor up in a neat launch date, the goal seems to be more about coercing the people beneath you to absorb the overhead of all the details you left out—that or sweating it yourself. As a tool for coordinating human activity, I have come to believe that the Thing-deadline calculus is, considering more sophisticated alternatives, unnecessarily crude.
Trees and graphs
A tree is a kind of graph, but a graph can be considerably more complex than a tree.
I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things.
Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city.
Content as value
The most important consideration for any software or web excursion is content: the content of the text and other communicative media, as well as the content of the code that executes the business processes. The ability to tick off a page or piece of functionality as being done only produces a nominal successful result; the careful crafting of what one of these objects says produces a real one.