1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  12. anxiety 9
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  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
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  26. Bell, Larry 3
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  28. Blake, William 5
  29. blogging 22
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  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
  42. business 15
  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 8
  45. Calvino, Italo 21
  46. Camus, Albert 13
  47. care 6
  48. Carruth, Shane 15
  49. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  50. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  51. chance 11
  52. change 16
  53. Chiang, Ted 4
  54. childhood 6
  55. Chimero, Frank 17
  56. choice 8
  57. cities 51
  58. Clark, Robin 3
  59. Cleary, Thomas 8
  60. Cleary, J.C. 8
  61. code 20
  62. collaboration 18
  63. collections 31
  64. Collison, Simon 3
  65. color 23
  66. commonplace 11
  67. communication 31
  68. community 7
  69. complexity 11
  70. connection 24
  71. constraints 25
  72. construction 9
  73. content 9
  74. Corbusier, Le 13
  75. Coyier, Chris 4
  76. craft 66
  77. creativity 59
  78. crime 9
  79. Critchlow, Tom 5
  80. critique 10
  81. Cross, Nigel 12
  82. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  83. css 11
  84. culture 13
  85. curiosity 11
  86. cycles 7
  87. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  88. darkness 28
  89. Darwin, Will 10
  90. data 8
  91. death 38
  92. Debord, Guy 6
  93. decisions 10
  94. design 131
  95. details 31
  96. Dickinson, Emily 9
  97. Dieste, Eladio 4
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  102. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  103. Duany, Andres 18
  104. Eatock, Daniel 4
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  106. efficiency 7
  107. Eisenman, Peter 8
  108. Eliot, T.S. 14
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  114. euphony 38
  115. Evans, Benedict 4
  116. evolution 9
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  120. features 25
  121. feedback 6
  122. flaws 10
  123. Flexner, Abraham 8
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  126. Fowler, Martin 4
  127. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  128. friendship 6
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  134. Garfunkel, Art 6
  135. geography 8
  136. geometry 18
  137. goals 9
  138. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  139. goodness 12
  140. Graham, Paul 37
  141. graphics 13
  142. Greene, Erick 6
  143. Hamming, Richard 45
  144. happiness 17
  145. Harford, Tim 4
  146. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  147. Hayes, Brian 28
  148. heat 7
  149. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  150. Herbert, Frank 4
  151. Heschong, Lisa 27
  152. Hesse, Herman 6
  153. history 13
  154. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  155. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  156. home 15
  157. Hoy, Amy 4
  158. Hoyt, Ben 5
  159. html 11
  160. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  161. humanity 16
  162. humor 6
  163. Huxley, Aldous 7
  164. hypermedia 22
  165. i 18
  166. ideas 21
  167. identity 33
  168. images 10
  169. industry 9
  170. information 42
  171. infrastructure 17
  172. innovation 15
  173. interaction 10
  174. interest 10
  175. interfaces 37
  176. intuition 8
  177. invention 10
  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
  180. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  181. iteration 13
  182. Ive, Jonathan 6
  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
  185. Jacobs, Alan 5
  186. Jobs, Steve 20
  187. Jones, Nick 5
  188. Kahn, Louis 4
  189. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  190. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  191. Keith, Jeremy 6
  192. Keller, Jenny 10
  193. Kelly, Kevin 3
  194. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  195. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
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  198. Klein, Laura 4
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  204. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  205. Krishna, Golden 10
  206. Kuma, Kengo 18
  207. language 20
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  209. life 59
  210. light 31
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  215. Luu, Dan 8
  216. Lynch, Kevin 12
  217. MacIver, David R. 8
  218. MacWright, Tom 5
  219. Magnus, Margaret 12
  220. making 77
  221. management 14
  222. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  223. Markson, David 16
  224. Mars, Roman 13
  225. material 39
  226. math 16
  227. McCarter, Robert 21
  228. meaning 33
  229. media 16
  230. melancholy 51
  231. memory 28
  232. metaphor 10
  233. metrics 19
  234. microsites 49
  235. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  236. Mills, C. Wright 9
  237. minimalism 10
  238. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  239. Mod, Craig 15
  240. modularity 6
  241. Mollison, Bill 31
  242. morality 8
  243. Murakami, Haruki 21
  244. music 16
  245. Müller, Boris 7
  246. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  247. names 11
  248. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  249. nature 51
  250. networks 15
  251. Noessel, Christopher 7
  252. notetaking 35
  253. novelty 11
  254. objects 16
  255. order 10
  256. ornament 9
  257. Orwell, George 7
  258. Ott, Matthias 4
  259. ownership 6
  260. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  261. Palmer, John 8
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  322. Simms, Matthew 19
  323. Simon, Paul 6
  324. simplicity 14
  325. Singer, Ryan 12
  326. skill 17
  327. Sloan, Robin 5
  328. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  329. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  330. Smith, Rach 4
  331. socializing 7
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  345. style 30
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  349. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
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  351. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
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Ornament & Decoration

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  • The final architectural embellishments

    The final architectural embellishments for the neighborhood should be the most exceptional, a kind of punctuation by relief, the last bursts of creative potential as the scene shifts.

    Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan
    • ornament
    • creativity
  • 249. Ornament

    Problem

    All people have the instinct to decorate their surroundings.

    Solution

    Search around the building, and find those edges and transitions which need emphasis or extra binding energy. Corners, places where materials meet, door frames, windows, main entrances, the place where one wall meets another, the garden gate, a fence—all these are natural places which call out for ornament.

    Now find simple themes and apply the elements of the theme over and over again to the edges and boundaries which you decide to mark. Make the ornaments work as seams along the boundaries and edges so that they knit the two sides together and make them one.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    • ornament
  • Fine arts and decorative arts

    The fine arts are conscious and essentially individual in tradition.

    The quantitative and economic aspects of the decorative arts, on the other hand, make them intrinsically repetitive. Because of this, their aesthetic qualities have a very intimate relationship to the technology of materials, and their design is thereby basically affected.

    In addition to the qualitative need for repetitive detail in design, the decorative arts have a quantitative requirement, namely the imperative of covering large areas or making large numbers of individual objects.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • art
    • ornament
  • Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, 1995–7

    Chapel of St Ignatius - Washington.JPG

    The exterior walls of the Chapel of St. Ignatius are made of large, complexly interlocking concrete slabs, a variegated golden-brown in color, and the roofs are clad in light grey metal. At the corners where the joints between the wall panels interlock are windows of various rectangular shapes and sizes, and the egg-shaped metal anchors that were used to lift the walls in place project slightly forward, casting small shadows.

    Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture
    1. ​​Bells​​
    • ornament

    Ornament as a relic of the object's own construction. Vestiges or Thomassons. Products that speak of their own making; material that speaks of the hands that shape it.

  • 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.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • ornament
    • function

    The inverse of Red Green's maxim:

    If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.

  • 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.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • function
    • ornament
  • Merely ornate

    There is nothing merely ornate about nature: every branch, twig, or leaf counts.

    Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
    • nature
    • ornament

    I might counter with the example of something like the birds of paradise‚ where being ornate and ostentatious is really the whole deal.

  • 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

    Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture
    • ornament
    • construction
  • The problem with ornament

    An Article
    www.architectural-review.com

    Contemporary 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.

    1. ​​It passes by the river​​
    • ornament
    • architecture
    • art

See also:
  1. function
  2. art
  3. construction
  4. nature
  5. creativity
  6. architecture
  1. David Pye
  2. Robert McCarter
  3. Juhani Pallasmaa
  4. Cyril Stanley Smith
  5. Donald Richie
  6. Christopher Alexander
  7. Murray Silverstein
  8. Sara Ishikawa
  9. Michael Sorkin