Ornament as Distinct
from Decoration
by
Kent C. Bloomer and
John Kresten Jespersen
INTRODUCTION
The
conflation between the terms "ornament" and "decoration"
has crippled our modern ability to understand, indeed to teach, the nature and
function of ornament. When wordsmiths
and librarians, an influential community who had no real knowledge of the
disciplines involved, defined these terms early in the twentieth century they
assigned lexicon definitions and subject headings which officially conflated
the identity of each. Although the two terms are intimately related, they are
neither synonymous nor interchangeable. Consider that the classical Latin
language originated and endowed Western culture with two different terms that
constituted primordial distinctions rather than correspondences between the definitions of ornament and
decoration.
Let
us visit Plato's ancient Academy and review the original usages of the terms. Isidore
of Seville, writing in the seventh century AD (the final century of the Academy)
stated that the Greeks compared their
word, "cosmos,"1 to
the Latin word" ornament" because the
beauty of ornament was manifested in the motions of the heavenly bodies.2 By so doing, the
ancient Academy provides us with a glimpse of the originating visual content of
ornament. Those words suggest that ornament presented visual attributes of
physical activity circulating in the 'world-at-large' in a place that is external or within the microcosm
of the body being ornamented.
By
comparison, according to Vitruvius, writing in the first century AD, "Decoration
should be treated with due regard to propriety".3
The term "Propriety" here is
implicated with the 'decorum' of the 'immediate
social world in which we live'. Therefore when we unite ornament and
decoration in a work of architecture we are expected to locate worldly ornament
in such a way that simultaneously exhibits local good taste and good manners
(decorum). This requires that the distribution of ornament be designed with decoration in mind.
Isidore
also declared that "decoration is
anything added to buildings for the sake of ornament [qua ornament]and
embellishment [qua decoration] such as ceiling panels set off in gold."4
Let us assume here that "added…for the sake" implies that Isidore's panels are installed over a crude utilitarian
surface to provide an intermediate and orderly armature for the sake of distributing ornament within an
interior space.
The ancient Greek linkage of "cosmos"
to ornament persisted through the middle ages albeit subject to being viewed
through the lens of the medieval quadrivium.
Consider that in 11th and 12th Gothic architecture the idea 'Cosmos' came to be identified within the theological
framework of 'neoplatonic' thought5
in which numbers and harmonies manifested ideal forms (such as elementary geometric
forms thought to order the stars and other heavenly bodies). Those forms were
present in rigid subdivisions of construction.
By contrast, in Alberti’s 15th century Ten Books on Architecture ,6 the term
"ornament" designated something "attached" to beauty [
i.e. attached to the harmonic
proportions that constituted the beautiful ]. His attachments included capitals, columns,
statues, and watchtowers. In Alberti's thesis beauty was regarded as the "reasoned harmony"7
of all parts within a body whereas ornament may be identified as a form of auxiliary
light . . . something "attached
or additional"8 to beauty. In so saying Alberti shifted the
medieval identity of ornament from 'being'
harmony to being 'attached' to
harmony. However it is noteworthy that Alberti did not use the term
'decoration' at all suggesting that he conflated the two terms into just one,
i.e. "ornament".
Yet
by the mid eighteenth century, into the heartland of the enlightenment, the term "ornament" is hardly
mentioned in Diderot's seminal Encyclopedia.9
The term was expelled from the lexicon of reasonable thought. It only
appears in Diderot as a discussion of the fleuron in typography [ which indeed
looks like a graphic figure of ornament]. By then "decoration"
dominated the architectural discussion. Indeed the scarcity of references to
'ornament' in the Encyclopedia and
the subsequent mainstream privileging of 'decoration' is remarkable.
However
in the nineteenth century the term "ornament" re-enters the academy
with vengeance to nearly dominate the discussion. Owen Jones, in his Grammar of Ornament,10 formulates
a modern understanding of ornament by
not limiting his study to the post classic European legacy and debate. He
draws from all the decorative arts and crafts throughout the world for his
examples in his search for an underlying formal typology belonging to ornament
as a universal category of visual
language. Curiously the most common illustrations of nature in ornament11
in his Grammar seem to incorporate
the sensual leaf-form (a foliation also
found in the fleuron). Jones proceeded to establish a theory of construction for both the basic figures of
ornament and for their distribution in space as decoration. He gives an example of the essential role of
geometry with respect to ornament in his introductory essay titled “Ornament of
Savage Tribes,” in which he refers to its extended arrangement, or orderly serial
distribution. The secret of success in
all ornament, Jones says," is the production of a broad general effect by the repetition of a few simple elements".12
This taxonomy differs entirely
from Alberti's ragbag of "ornament" as constituting all sorts of
things attached to beauty. Jones
also notes a specific psychological effect of ornament based on the concept of
repose, a condition associated by the seventeenth-century thinker, Blaise
Pascal13 with the supernatural. In Jones's view, ornament, with all
its mystery and ineffable depth, brings the 'super-nature' of the micro- and
macro-cosmos into the mundane world thus pointing once again to the cosmos or
the world-at-large as the principal 'content' of ornament.
In the sixty years between the publication of
Jones's seminal Grammar in 1856 and
Alfred Hamlin's History of Ornament
in 1916,14 an explosion of knowledge about the subjects of ornament
and decoration takes place in which Jones's visual, encyclopedic, and universal
approach is advanced by Racinet, Dolmetsch, Prisse d'Avennes, Audsley, Dresser
and Speltz, among others. Jones's theory
is also developed by Morris, Day, and Alois Riegl, as well as by anonymous
writers of correspondence-school textbooks at the turn of the century. Finally, there was sufficient knowledge about ornament and
decoration for Hamlin to write his two volume history. That extraordinary outburst of scholarship
was at its most creative and insightful because practitioners of ornament were
contributing to the theory of ornament, much as Jones had done earlier. All these
writers wrestled with the distinction between ornament and decoration adding to
the essential vocabulary the concept of "pattern" such as Joan Evans
did in her two volumes written in1931.15 They also granted that a
fundamental characteristic of ornament was the distribution, by repetition, of
a nucleus comprised of a rather small set of basic figures.
The confusion between ornament and
decoration at the turn of the century, when the Library of Congress was
developing its subject headings and classification systems to aid access to the
knowledge in the library, is understandable only to the extent that, as in
Diderot, decoration had taken the lead in the historic context of enlightenment
'rationalism'. The powerful French
academic Jacques-François Blondel's16 aversion to rococo (and its
'erotic' content), in concert with his biased discussion of decoration in
Diderot’s Encyclopedia, contributed
to demoting ornament's value to the inferior manual crafts and trades serving
the decorative arts. This ensured that the Library of Congress would give
precedence to decoration as the superior and
more comprehensive term.
SOME PRELIMINARY DISTINCTIONS
The
distinctions we are making in this essay are founded upon our understanding of
the ancient seminal use of the
terms. We also accept Owen Jones
'universal' positing of ornament as a particular type of visual grammar and
vocabulary. In those lights;
1.
Both ornament and decoration are added to, and dependent upon, the basic
utilitarian elements and forms of
practical structures and objects such as buildings, rooms, and bowls.
2.
"Decoration" arranges or visually modifies an entire ensemble of those additions, (an extreme example of
decoration would be to paint everything white). Rooted in decorum its function is to manifest good taste and the
manners held by a particular constituency.
3."Ornament" is made up of generative
figures that are distributed into a finite portion of the decorated body. The
classic function of ornament (Isidore) is to evoke natural forces that originate deeply beyond (in the cosmos)
or deeply within (the micro cosmos) of a body. By referencing the cosmos, rather
than specific societal values and local circumstances, the repeating figures of
ornament articulate the greater world physical forces in which the decorated
body is situated.
Thus,
like nature herself, the formations of ornament are natural (universal) rather
than specific to the social and practical formations of the particular body
being ornamented. Natural 'universality' is evident in the fact that same basic
figures of ornament, such as zigzags,
rhythmic repeats, and foliations, have persistently appeared as a distinct thread in the recorded beginning of visual
expression found in the diverse fabric of different types
of useful things such as bowls, columns,
wheels, fabrics, weapons, and walls. Despite all the different forms and shapes
of bodies into which ornament is embedded, forms to which ornament must
respond, it perseveres in its own historic function to evoke a more pervasive
(external) order than can be found in the utilitarian body being ornamented.
Yet it does so while remaining dependent upon the formal authority of mundane forms
of utility for its repository existence. Indeed, it is located, grounded, and
illuminated (its own 'cosmic' function made evident) by its implication with the
local and practical formations of necessity.
To
illustrate the systematic distinctions between ornament and decoration this
essay will review examples designed by
two of the greatest ornamenters in the modern age. We select Owen Jones because
he is the seminal modern encyclopedist, and historian of world ornament. He
also practiced ornament in the industrial architecture of the 19th
century. Louis Sullivan may be regarded as the premier ornamenter of architecture
in the twentieth century. The work and philosophies of both reveal the
following principles:
1. Ornament is generated by small figures (nuclei) which we will
occasionally describe as "phenomenal generators."
2. Such generators are augmented
and distributed by "decorative
fields"17 which are discreet parcels of decoration. Those
parcels may be considered as particular regions within the complete place being
ornamented or as "regions within regions" in which figures of
ornament are emplaced.
3. In architecture decorative
fields are very often situated within liminal zones and upon boundaries innate
to the places and structures, i.e. in the transitional space between things
such as column and beam, roof and sky, inside and outside. In colonizing those
zones and boundaries ornament finds a place that echoes its double
"inside-outside" nature.
4. Decoration, per se, is the
entire ensemble and arrangement of (a.) figures of ornament, (b.) the
decorative fields, (c.) figures and forms expressing utility, (d.) other
subordinate types of visual language such as writing, picture language, art
objects, etc. (e.) lineaments and the articulated numerology of proportions and
(f.) furnishings and fixtures such as water faucets, door knobs, etc.
The Decorative Field:
Owen Jones and the Lesson of the Persian Carpet
One consequence of distributing figures of
ornament throughout a decorative field is that the field itself, understood as
a discreet entity, may become "ornamental," (which is a qualifier,
i.e. the field evokes certain "qualities," such as sensation, intricacy,
terror, immensity and beauty, generated by the figures of ornament). However a
decorative field manifesting those qualities, i.e. the "ornamental"
field, is not ornament per se.
The
decorative field is a region originating in the utilitarian form of a body
being decorated. It is a particular
geometric, chromatic, material, or topological region that contains and
distributes content 'super-added' to
basic utilitarian form. The "super-added"18 material could
also be constellations of words, symbols, or light fixtures rather than figures
of ornament.
Figure 1 Simon Brothers,
Philadelphia. Sterling Silver Art Nouveau back. 1904
Figure 2 Indonesian Betel Nut
Container, n.d.
In
the Betel Nut Container (Fig. 2) the phenomenal generators are the primitive
keys or hooks and four lobed 'foliations' that appear in the center of the
diamond field as well as along the borders of the containers. The line work
perpendicular to the cylindrical shaft registers the basic geometry of the
container and marks the borders of the decorative field distributing the
ornament.
Perceiving or directly experiencing
the discreet figures of ornament requires strict attention. Those figures may
be perceived as mere texture at a certain distance and thus the field will
appear as only decoration or pattern bereft of ornament's particular content.
Figure
3 Detail of Owen Jones, Design for a Silk Scarf
The Warner
Scarf, designed by Owen Jones about 1870, illustrates the difference between
perceiving figures up close as
"ornament" and seeing the scarf from afar as
"decoration". Intimate
examination reveals the unit, 'phenomenal generator' of ornament, and the
'explosive' energy it contains. The intricate unit (Fig. 3) consists of nine
clusters (yellow and red) of circles in a square formation, each circle further
subdivided by diagonal markers. The central cluster (yellow) hovers over a
outward 'radiation' of foliation (blue) that ultimately spirals back inward.
Observe that the foliated elements are blue and their ground is green, separated
by slender yellow borders. Up close we can explore the basic visual structure
constituting Jones's figure of ornament.
Figure
4 Owen Jones, Design for a Silk Scarf, c. 1870
Now step back and observe the
intricate units from afar. The blue foliation and the green ground have
"bloomed"19 (optically interacted) into a vibrating
apparently homogenous background for clusters of circles. The circles remain
geometric figures of repetition upon a textured background. The background has become a 'sensational'
color field while its intricate foliation has disappeared from sight. It is
more relevant to our discussion to suggest that the figures which define
ornament have been appropriated or consumed by the dominating appearance of the
decorative field.
The phenomenon of ornament becoming decoration when
perceived at a distance occurs in all
designs incorporating ornament. A failure to consider the distance of viewing has also contributed to
the confusion between the identities of "ornament" and
"decoration." To perceive and experience ornament per se you have to
engage its intimate scale of visibility and pay close attention.
Owen
Jones, Conventionalization and Color Gravity
Decorative fields need
not have a geometric foundation. In the first volume of the Journal of Design and Manufacture (1849)
edited by Jones's friend and fellow liberal
Henry H. Cole, a position paper called
for the "distributive treatment" of ornament stated "Ornament is applied to large surfaces in two modes:
it is either gathered into groups
with the light and the dark, form and colour, contrasting strongly with the ground, on which the groups are sparingly
distributed, and which may be called
the individual or contrasted manner,
or it is spread equally
[geometrically] over the whole surface, the forms of the ornament nearly covering the ground, and the contrasts subdued and simple, which we may call
the dividual or distributive manner.".
Figure
5 A. W. N. Pugin. Aisle Wall Stencil, St. Giles, Cheadle, Staffordshire, 1845
The
Moors, Jones claimed in a lecture
publicizing the printing of the Grammar
of Ornament in December of 1856,20 teach us "the great
powers of geometrical combination,
and the immense value of the principle of
repetition of most simple elements." Pugin's emblematic design, which is extremely
geometric and "contrastive" in its execution , can be compared to Jones's “distributive” and sensationist
design based upon the subordination of the figures of ornament to both geometry and color (see
Figure 5). In Pugin’s heraldic
ornament at Cheadle in 1845 regular geometry is the means for disciplining and
flattening the ornament to produce a design that is truly two-dimensional,
iconic, and “individual.”
One of the greatest achievements of Owen Jones as a designer is the visible
perception of color gravity in interior decoration. In a design for Eynsham Hall’s Card Room[i]ii (Fig. 6) Jones has brought the sky of the
ceiling down to a Goethean black21 at the dado, compressing the
crimson line between the floor (the
earth itself) and the wall. This anchoring of the design in the weight of
compressed blackness allows the upper portion of the wall to float free of
constraint as it embellishes the transitional and liminal intersections of ground,
wall and ceiling.
Figure 6 Owen Jones. Eynsham Hall, Card Room, 1872
Finally Jones asserts
that all true [figures of] ornament and its decorative armature are "conventional". Jones’s Proposition 13 of the Grammar states that “[factual] flowers
or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional
representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the
intended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are
employed to decorate. Universally obeyed in the best periods of
Art, equally violated when Art declines.”
By the end of the century and into the beginning of the twentieth
century, conventionalization developed into a robust practice and theory in the
hands of designers like William Morris, George Aitchison, and Lewis F. Day in
England, and Frank Furness and Louis Sullivan in the United States. Aitchison’s
designs for the daughters of Queen Victoria are brilliant demonstrations of
color gravity in the interior.
Figure 7 George Atchinson. Interior Design, c. 1900
As Deborah Schafter22
has pointed out, Jones had a real influence on Alois Riegl, and their theories echo
in the aesthetic theory of Worringer, in the will to abstraction balanced by
the need for empathic and natural representation. Jones would never have
condoned total abstraction for that would void entirely the sensuality of the
phenomenal generator, and empathy would itself be emptied of its dialectical
role and its energetic content. In 1908, at the beginning of the 20th
century, Worringer23 appealed for an equipoise between abstraction
and empathy, employing the powers of both.
Sullivan
It is telling that Sullivan's System of Architectural Ornament,24
written at the end of his life, so profoundly echoes the procedures of
generation and distribution postulated by Owen Jones.
Both
developed their designs by subdividing the greater surfaces of rooms and
buildings for the sake of decoration. Primary subdivisions, whether articulated
by panels, geometry, color, materials, or conventional lineaments (such as
moldings), were claimed for further subdivision and regulation by subordinate
decorative fields for the sake of ornament.
Evidently
both Jones and Sullivan had certain figures of ornament in mind at the
inception of a design process to be imported and distributed in the
subdivisions. Sullivan suggests that was the case. Both designed ornament and
decoration simultaneously. Sullivan declared the germ seed, a stem and two
cotyledons, to be the "seat of power."[Fig. 8]
Fig. 8 Sullivan's "Germ Seed"
From that 'phenomenal generator' he
proposed there could be an efflorescence, a foliation, or an awakening of form
in ornament. He illustrated this in his drawing entitled "The Awakening of
the Pentagon." [Fig. 9]
Figure 9 The Awakening of the
Pentagon
We can postulate that a pure
pentagon is asleep (inert and without life). The act of subdividing and foliating
the geometry of the pentagon (and other basic polygons) can infuse the
evocative geometry of the germ seed. As the "seed" combines with the
pentagon a greater vitality appears. By further subdividing and tweaking the
combination figures appear as holes, tendrils, oak leaves, woven spirals, and
flowerets imagined to be found in the wilds of nature. The finale of the
'ornamenting process' appears the
awakening a small 'cosmos' within an greater inert field of decoration.
The
three axes of the seed's Y-form provides coordinates capable of forming continuity over an extended
range. Sometimes the extended coordinates
zigzag as they link or cross one unit to another over the terrain of the
decorative field. [Fig. 10] Observe that
some properties of Sullivan's "phenomenal generators" are 'explosive'
while others are 'connective'.
Figure 10 The Value of
Parallel Axes
THE
GETTY TOMB
Distinctions
between utility, ornament, and decoration are clearly expressed in Sullivan's
1890 design of the Carrie Eliza Getty Tomb in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. The
tiny building is a rectangular box with a square façade [Fig. 11] mounted on a
slab and capped with a slab-like roof. The three primary subdivisions of
decoration on the surface of the façade are immediately visible, i.e., the door
height base, the voussoir arch, and a decorated wall around the arch between
the base and the cornice. The type and ordering of construction is immediately
explicit as a load-bearing stonewall upholding a faceted arch made up of
seventeen nearly identical wedges.
Figure 11 Getty Tomb Façade
The
absence of ornament in the base is an expression of an earthly, prosaic, and
precisely crafted stone upon stone wall. The voussior wedges spanning an
opening in the wall are more delicate and partially admitting of ornament which
is distributed along three semi-circular bands. A regular octagonal grid on the
wall around the arch presents the idea of an infinitely extendable 'cosmos'
constituted by radiating ("exploding") peapods thus presenting the
tomb as a narrative of earth, sky, and an entrance into darkness. The
repetition of peapods also memorialize the many moments of life and death.
The
decoration and ornament of the bronze doors follow the same principle of
further subdivision into ornamented decorative fields. The tiniest examples of
the trilogy between expressions of construction, decoration, and ornament are
to be found on the four hinges.
THE
WAINWRIGHT
Coincident
with Getty Tomb, the office of Adler and Sullivan designed the eleven-story Wainwright
Building in St. Louis generally regarded to be a prototype of the modern
skyscraper. [Fig. 12]
Figure 12 Wainwright Façade
The
hierarchy of decoration is inherited from Western classicism in which there is
a vertical trilogy of bottom-middle-top or base, shaft, and pediment. Ornament
thrives in the lofty "attic" of the building while the base remains
mundane and earthly and thus the attic becomes the primary honorific region
while the base remains servile with a stark inert veneer of granite.
The
shafts, forming a colonnade between the base and the attic, are also divided
into trilogies of base, shaft, and capital in which the bases and capitals
become decorative fields for ornament. Spandrels, woven as horizontal bands
slightly behind the shafts, are decorative fields for subordinate ornament that
pays homage to each level of offices.
His
primary decorative fields dividing the façade into three parts are also articulated
by materials which mutate from hard granite at the base through brick in the
colonnade to soft terracotta in the attic to express the sculptural 'cosmic' intricacy of the turbulent
ornament aloft.
THE
GUARANTY BUILDING
Perhaps Sullivan discovered that distributing ornament along the upper
reaches of a tall building situated ornament at too great a distance for the
pedestrian viewer looking upward from the street. It could only be perceived as
decoration from afar. The fourteen-story Guaranty Building [Fig. 13] was built
in Buffalo in 1894-96 and Sullivan chose to distribute ornament consistently
over the entire surface. He did not hide the fact that the building was a steel
frame clad in terracotta, although he chose to reveal that physical reality by
only by alluding to a submerged frame
positioned behind a veil of decoration (somewhat like the ancient Greek
sculptor revealing a nude body under drapes of wet cloth). Simultaneously
"explosions" of ornament seem to be pushing outward from the main
body like eruptions from below the skin.
Navigating the sequence from physical
structure to decoration to ornament was being reconsidered in the entirely
uncharted 'tectonics' of the 1890s as buildings increased in height and adopted
steel frames while horses were about to be replaced with automobiles.
Figure 13 Guaranty Façade
Figure 14 Carson Pirie Scott
Building
Perhaps
there is no building that better defines a strategy for decorating and distributing
ornament into twentieth century urban space than the Carson Pirie Scott,
originally Schlesinger and Mayer Department Store, designed in 1899/1903-1904
in Chicago. The fourteen-to-eight-story building [Fig. 14] still stands as a
masterpiece of modern architecture while harboring one of the most powerful emplacements
of ornament into the street life of a modern city. Sullivan chose to locate a powerful field for
ornament at the base where people congregate, especially at the corner of the
rectangular block which addresses two streets simultaneously.
Although
the majority of the elevation above the base elevation appears to be unornamented
at first glance, it is actually delicately ornamented by two types of
narrow-band fields located in the reveals of the windows . [Fig. 15] As a
consequence viewing the city from within includes looking through a frame of
ornament.
Figure 15 Reveals of Carson Pirie
Scott Windows
Figure 16 Slender Bands of
Foliation
On the exterior there are slender bands of
delicate foliation distributed
immediately above and below each horizontal row of windows as well as on the
exterior surfaces of the window frames. [Fig. 16] Consider that all those slender bands of
ornament disappear when viewed from afar allowing the surface decoration to
appear as an unornamented regularized grid emblematic of the 'modern' age.
However
nothing disappears alongside the sidewalk and street. Sullivan's powerful
decorative field around the display windows distributes one of the most
memorable systems of ornament in the United States. [Fig. 14] In doing so he returned the spectacle of
nature, its winds, foliations, and microcosms, to the city. People, carriages,
lampposts, signs, trees, and very visible ornament congregate outside the
building to constitute a bubble of life in the engine room of Chicago. The base
of the Carson, Pirie, Scott, capped by a mezzanine level cornice, completes a
world picture by momentarily and appropriately by superpositioning a 'cosmos'
beneath rather than above the expansive geometric facade above.
CONCLUSION
Ornament provides meaningful building blocks for the
project of decorating bodies. But there
can be decoration without ornament. While color, proportion, materials,
texture, and pattern may be qualities found in ornament they are primarily
properties of decoration. As noted, the
modernist white wall or room is a common and homogenous condition of pure
decoration.
The
ancient Greek word for ornament, "cosmos," invites us to consider the
analogy between a system of ornament and systems of nuclear, molecular, and
astro- physical order. Ornament's basic figures and phenomenal generators might
be regarded as visual metaphors of the nuclei rooted in a greater system such
as the 'world'. Such nuclei, although seeming
to be autonomous 'things' are
fundamentally ambivalent and highly dependent on the activity of the bodies
being ornamented. Their ambivalent shapes must simultaneously address the
dimensions of the macro and the microcosm. Like the geometry of their spirals
and meanders they must push inward and outward as they navigate the body's
decorative field.
The
decorative fields allow ornament's nuclear generators to be reiterated and to
be situated adjacent to the unornamented regions of a physical body. Such reiteration often requires slight
variations of repetition (rhythm) which
is a defining property of ornament. Thus ornament claims space by a visually
dynamic rhythm rather than by a Cartesian extension (long range numerical
positioning).25 It is a homologous system in which its fundamental
elements tend to remain self-similar and operationally combinational in the
course of repetition. Such systemization
is neither typical nor essential to the ordering of decoration.
The
edges of ornament's decorative fields
establish the limits of ornaments iteration. As they fix ornament's
location upon the body being ornamented they also illuminate the critical unornamented portions of the body,
particularly the portions that define the body as a mundane and particular
thing.
The
primary authority of
decoration resides in its responsibility
to exhibit the local and conventional good manners, good taste, fashionable
artistry, and discrimination belonging to a particular constituency from the
court of Louis X1V to the casinos of Las Vegas. The primary authority of ornament derives from the life force of
matter itself. Its essential building blocks can be identified with visual
forms, shapes, and motions that we associate with the natural world-at-large.
Thus,
while the function of DECORATION, its "decorum," is to manifest good,
conventional, and esthetic societal standards,
the purpose of ORNAMENT is to momentarily locate ourselves in a much
larger place in order to achieve "repose"25 (Owen Jones) which allows respite from mundane arrest and
turmoil together with an affirmation of the
renewal of life. Or it is to bear witness to "equipoise"26
(Worringer) in which lifeless
abstractions are superpositioned with
the sensuality of corporeal empathy. For Sullivan ornament distributed into a
mundane body must manifest a "mobile27 equilibrium" by which
the emptiness of a basic 'shape' is
implicated with the forces of life.
In
all cases ornament belongs to a unique category of visual language in which there
can be simultaneous expressions of 'life- death', 'inside-outside', 'here-
there' and 'active-rigid' placed together within a visible whole.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1
Simons Bros., Philadelphia.
Sterling Silver Art Nouveau Mirror Back, 1904.
Figure
2 Indonesian Betel Nut Container, n.d.
Figure
3 Detail of Owen Jones, Design for a
Silk Scarf, c. 1879.
Figure 4 Owen Jones, Design for a
Silk Scarf, c. 1870.
Figure
5: A.W.N. Pugin, Aisle wall stencil, St. Giles, Cheadle,
Staffordshire, 1845.
Figure
6: Owen Jones, Eynsham Hall, Card Room,
1872.
Figure
7: George Aitchison, Interior Design. c.
1900. R.I.B.A.
THE
AWAKENING
Figure 8 Sullivan's "Germ
Seed."
He illustrated this in his drawing
entitled "The Awakening of the Pentagon." [Fig. 9]
Figure 9
Awakening the Pentagon.
Figure
10 Parallel Axes.
Figure 11 Getty
Tomb Façade.
Figure
12 Wainwright Façade.
Figure
13 Guaranty Façade.
Figure
14 Carson Pirie Scott Building.
Figure
15 Reveals of Carson Pirie Scott
Windows.
Figure 16
Slender Bands of Foliation.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1 Simons Brothers, Philadelphia. Sterling
Silver Art Nouveau Mirror Back, 1904 (author).
Fig. 2 Indonesian Betel Nut Container, n.d.
(author).
Fig. 3 Detail of
Owen Jones, Design for a Silk Scarf (Victoria and Albert Museum, E.33- 1945)
Fig. 4 Owen Jones, Design for a Silk Scarf, c. 1870. Given by Mrs.
Margaret Warner (Victoria and
Albert Musuem, E.33-1945).
Fig. 5 A. W. N.
Pugin, Aisle wall stencil, St. Giles, Cheadle, Staffordshire, 1845 (photo William H. Jordy)
Fig. 6 Owen Jones,
Eynsham Hall, Card Room, 1872 (Victoria and Albert Museum, )
Fig. 7 George
Aitchison, Interior Design for one of the daughters of Queen Victoria, c. 1900 (R.I.B.A.)
Fig. 8 Sullivan's "germ seed"
Fig. 9 Awakening the Pentagon
Fig. 10 Parallel Axes
Fig. 11 Getty Tomb façade
Fig.12 Wainwright façade
Fig. 13 Guaranty façade
Fig. 14 Carson Pirie Scott Building
Fig. 15 Reveals of Carson Pirie
Scott windows
Fig. 16 Slender bands of foliation
ENDNOTES
1. Isidore, of
Seville, Etymologies of Isidore of
Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney [et. al]
(Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
Book XIII, p.273.
2. Ibid, Book XIII, pp. 271-283. The substance of
"cosmos" found in the "mundos" is entirely inanimate.
3. Vitruvius. The Ten
Books of Architecture, trans. Morris Hickey Morgan (New York: Dover Press,
1960), Chapter IV, p.209.
4.
Isidore, Etymologies, Book
XIX, xi, p. 379.
5. Simpson, Otto von, The Gothic Cathedral (New York:
Bollingen Foundation Press, 1962), Chapter 2, pp. 21-58.
6. Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans.
by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Travener (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T.
Press, 1988).
7. Ibid, Book 6, p. 156.
8. Ibid, Book 6, p. 156.
9. The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert: Collaborative Translation
Project. Web 16 June 2013. The translation project can be accessed by
simple, proximity, or Boolean searches.
10. Jones, Owen, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and
Sons, 1856). Most of the major civilizations in history are represented in
color, except for the Yucatan and Japan.
A full 40% of the Grammar are Islamic
styles of ornament.
11. Jones, Owen, The Grammar is almost evenly divided
between geometric ornaments and leaf and flower conventions. The preponderant
weight is towards the geometric, but the
theoretical thrust of The Grammar is
towards leaf forms (see Chapter XX).
12. Jones, Owen, The Grammar of Ornament, p. 15.
13. Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, introd. T.S. Eliot, (London:
Dent and Sons, 1956), part 803, p. 238. "Two fundamentals; one inward, the
other outward; grace and miracles; both
supernatural." See also from part 674, p. 190: "nature is an image of
Grace, and visible miracles are images
of the invisible."
14. Hamlin, A. D. F., A History of Ornament, (New York: Cooper
Square Publishers, 1973).
15. Evans, Joan. Pattern, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.
16. Blondel, Jacques-François,
"Decoration," trans. by Ann-Marie Thornton, The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert: Collaborative Translation
Project, Wed 16 June 2013. Originally published as "Decoration,: Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences,
des arts et les metier, 4:703 (Paris, 1754).
17. Jespersen, John Kresten,
"Owen Jones's The Grammar of
Ornament of 1856: Field Theory in
Victorian Design at the Mid-Century," PhD. diss., Brown University, 1984.
Deals with The Grammar as a source of
modern architectural theory and discusses the "colored field" (p.
80), "conventional field design (p. 103), and "the decorative
field" (p. 110).
18. Dresser, Christopher, The Art of Decorative Design, (London:
Day and Son, 1862), p.1.
19. Jones, Owen, The Grammar of Ornament, p. 7,
proposition 22.
20. Jones, Owen, Lectures on Architecture and the Decorative
Arts, (London: Strangeways & Walden, printers, 1865), Lecture IV, p.
102.
21. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Goethe's Theory of Colours, trans. of Zur Farbenlehre, by Charles Lock
Eastwood, (London: J. Murray, 1840), The translation was in Owen Jones's
library at his death in 1874.
22. Schafter, Debra, The Order of Ornament, the Structure of
Style: Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 44-59.
23. Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Morris
Hickey Morgan, (New York: Dover Press, 1960), Chapter 3.
24. Sullivan, Louis H., A System of Architectural Ornament According
with a Philosophy of Man's Powers, facsimile ed., (New York: Press of the
American Institute of Architects, 1924), p. 4.
25. Bloomer, Kent, The Nature of Ornament, (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2000), Chapter 5, pp. 61-65.
26. Jones, Owen, The Grammar of Ornament, Proposition 3.
27. Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy, Chapter 3,
p.66.
28. Sullivan, Louis H., Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings,
(New York: Dover, 1979), p. 200.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alberti, Leon Battista. On
the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert
Travener. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1988.
Bloomer, Kent. The
Nature of Ornament, Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture. New York: W.
W. Norton, 2000.
Blondel, Jacques-François.
"Decoration." Translated by Ann-Marie Thornton. The
Encyclopedia of Diderot and
d'Alembert: Collaborative Translation Project.
Web 16 June 2013.
Dresser, Christopher. The Art of Decorative Design. London:
Day and Son, 1862.
Evans, Joan. Pattern. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe's Theory of Colours. Translated
from the German by Charles Lock
Eastwood. London: J. Murray, 1840.
Hamlin, A. D. F. A History of Ornament. New York: Cooper
Square Publishers, 1973.
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Jespersen, John Kresten. "Owen
Jones's The Grammar of Ornament of
1856: Field Theory in
Victorian Design at the Mid-Century." Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1984.
Jones, Owen. The
Grammar of Ornament. London: Day and Sons, 1856.
Jones, Owen. Lectures
on Architecture and the Decorative Arts. "Lecture IV."
London: Strangeways
& Walden printers, 1865.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Introduction by T.S. Eliot.
London: Dent and Sons, 1956.
Schafter, Debra. The Order of Ornament, the Structure of
Style: Theoretical Foundations
of Modern Art and Architecture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Simpson, Otto von. The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic
Architecture and the Medieval
Concept of Order. New York: Bollingen Foundation Press, 1962.
Sullivan, Louis H. Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings. New
York: Dover, 1979.
Sullivan, Louis H. A System of Architectural Ornament According
with a Philosophy of Man's
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New York: Dover Press, 1960.
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Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997.
