Ornament & Decoration

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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