Dynamic Patterns by M'Closkey Karen VanDerSys Keith

Author:M'Closkey, Karen,VanDerSys, Keith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317401414
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

> 8. Loktak Lake in northeast India. Phumdis are naturally occurring mats of organic matter. The circular shapes in this image have been artificially created with phumdis for use in fish farming.

Ornament and Style

By style people meant ornamentation.18

— Adolf Loos (1910)

The “styles” are a lie.19

— LeCorbusier(1923)

In Western cultures, ornament was banished for a significant part of the twentieth century. It was considered an outdated form of expression, irrelevant in light of emerging technologies of mass production, and excessive in view of the social needs of the majority. Once affiliated with imperialism, religion, and colonialism, ornament came to be seen as a representation of individual class and wealth. As it became associated with taste and social “correctness” (decor, decorum, decoration) ornament lost its agency.20 Some critics of ornament believed that the modern lack of decoration was a “middle-class trait to be celebrated for its rejection of aristocratic pomp and representation of status.”21

Architect Adolf Loos is best known for his fervent dismissal of ornament in his 1908 lecture “Ornament and Crime.” Several decades later, Christopher Tunnard, in his influentia Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938), cited Loos’s famous quote: “Progress in taste goes hand in hand with the elimination of ornament in everyday things.”22 Rejecting ornament as irrelevant and wasteful, Tunnard, along with American mid-twentieth-century landscape architects Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley, and James Rose, adapted functionalist arguments from architecture to modern landscape design. Tunnard went so far as to call ornament deceitful: “Ornamentation has in itself a suggestion of disguise, of what is, in fact, a tangible form of lying and … the decoration of useful objects is a confession of failure in [the] original design.”23 He argued that the use of ornament would naturally wane with a proper emphasis on efficiency and that functional planning “automatically becomes that which is good and the need for space filling or accentuating decoration disappears.”24 In this view, ornament is seen as something applied to the site rather than derived from it. Along the same lines, James Rose endorsed a more efficient use of plant material by maintaining that massing plants together to define space was “unscientific.” He argued that the use of individual specimens was more resourceful because all sides of a plant are used, resulting in the need for fewer plants.25 Calling for a minimalist aesthetic Rose claimed, “Ornamentation with plants in landscape design to create ‘pictures’ or picturesque effect means what ornamentation has always meant: the fate call of an outworn system of aesthetics.”26

Despite the harsh rhetoric, however, ornament did not disappear altogether from modernism. Rather than being expressed via historical styles, ornament was articulated through the careful use of materials with inherent patterns, or as an outward expression of underlying structure.27Thus, for example, Thomas Beeby suggested in 1977 that ornament had found its way into the organization of urban form and buiIdings, in that a basic grid or proportioning system was set in place to control the manipulation of elements for ornamental purposes.28 According to Beeby, the only types of ornament

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