For other uses of the term, see: Ornament

In architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

 and decorative art

Decorative art

The decorative arts is traditionally a term for the design and manufacture of functional objects. It includes interior design, but not usually architecture. The decorative arts are often categorized in opposition to the "fine arts", namely, painting, drawing, photography, and large-scale...

, ornament is a decoration used to embellish parts of a building or object. Large figurative elements such as monumental sculpture

Monumental sculpture

The term monumental sculpture is often used in art history and criticism, but not always consistently. It combines two concepts, one of function, and one of size, and may include an element of a third more subjective concept. It is often used for all sculptures that are large...

 and their equivalents in decorative art are excluded from the term; most ornament does not include human figures, and if present they are small compared to the overall scale. Architectural ornament can be carved from stone, wood or precious metals, formed with plaster or clay, or painted or impressed onto a surface as applied ornament; in other applied arts the main material of the object, or a different one such as paint or vitreous enamel

Vitreous enamel

Vitreous enamel, also porcelain enamel in U.S. English, is a material made by fusing powdered glass to a substrate by firing, usually between 750 and 850 °C...

 may be used. A wide variety of decorative styles and motifs have been developed for architecture and the applied arts, including pottery

Pottery

Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery . Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery...

, furniture

Furniture

Furniture is the mass noun for the movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping in beds, to hold objects at a convenient height for work using horizontal surfaces above the ground, or to store things...

, metalwork. In textiles, wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste...

 and other objects where the decoration may be the main justification for its existence, the terms pattern or design are more likely to be used.

In a 1941 essay, the architectural historian Sir John Summerson

John Summerson

Sir John Newenham Summerson CH CBE was one of the leading British architectural historians of the 20th century....

 called it "surface modulation". Decoration and ornament has been evident in civilization

Civilization

Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...

s since the beginning of recorded history, ranging from Ancient Egyptian architecture

Ancient Egyptian architecture

The Nile valley has been the site of one of the most influential civilizations which developed a vast array of diverse structures encompassing ancient Egyptian architecture...

 to the apparent lack of ornament of 20th century Modernist architecture

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

.

History

The detailed study of Eurasian ornamental forms was begun by Alois Riegl

Alois Riegl

Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History...

 in his formalist

Formalism (art)

In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...

 study Stilfragen

Stilfragen

Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik is a book on the history of ornament by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. It was published in Berlin in 1893. The English translation renders the title as Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament, although this has...

: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) of 1893, who in the process developed his influential concept of the Kunstwollen. Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical world to the arabesque

Arabesque

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements...

 of Islamic art

Islamic art

Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...

; while the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic analysis of the development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of examples known today. Jessica Rawson

Jessica Rawson

Jessica Rawson, DBE, FBA is an English art historian, curator and academic administrator, specializing in Chinese art. After many years at the British Museum, she was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, from 1994 until her retirement in 2010...

 has recently extended the analysis to cover Chinese art

Chinese art

Chinese art is visual art that, whether ancient or modern, originated in or is practiced in China or by Chinese artists or performers. Early so-called "stone age art" dates back to 10,000 BC, mostly consisting of simple pottery and sculptures. This early period was followed by a series of art...

, which Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese decoration back to the same tradition; the shared background helping to make the assimilation of Chinese motifs into Persian art after the Mongol invasion harmonious and productive.

Styles of ornamentation can be studied in reference to the specific culture

Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations...

 which developed unique forms of decoration, or modified ornament from other cultures. The Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...

ian culture is arguably the first civilization to add pure decoration to their buildings. Their ornament takes the forms of the natural world in that climate, decorating the capitals of columns and walls with images of papyrus and palm trees. Assyria

Assyria

Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur...

n culture produced ornament which shows influence from Egyptian sources and a number of original themes, including figures of plants and animals of the region.

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 civilization created many new forms of ornament, with regional variations from Doric

Doric order

The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.-History:...

, Ionic

Ionic order

The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian...

, and Corinthian

Corinthian order

The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order...

 groups. The Romans Latinized

Romanization (cultural)

Romanization or latinization indicate different historical processes, such as acculturation, integration and assimilation of newly incorporated and peripheral populations by the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire...

 the pure forms of the Greek ornament and adapted the forms to every purpose.

Pattern Books

From the 15th to the 19th century, "Pattern books" were published in Europe which gave access to decorative elements, eventually including those recorded from cultures all over the world. Andrea Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura

I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura

I quattro libri dell'architettura is an Italian treatise on architecture by the architect Andrea Palladio . It was first published in four volumes in 1570 in Venice, illustrated with woodcuts after the author's own drawings. It has been reprinted and translated many times...

 (Four Books on Architecture) (Venice, 1570), which included both drawings of classical Roman buildings and renderings of Palladio's own designs utilizing those motifs, became the most influential book ever written on architecture. Napoleon had the great pyramids and temples of Egypt documented in the Description de l'Egypte (1809)

Description de l'Egypte (1809)

The Description de l'Égypte was a series of publications, appearing first in 1809 and continuing until the final volume appeared in 1829, which offered a comprehensive scientific description of ancient and modern Egypt as well as its natural history...

. Owen Jones

Owen Jones (architect)

Owen Jones was a London-born architect and designer of Welsh descent. He was a versatile architect and designer, and one of the most influential design theorists of the nineteenth century...

 published The Grammar of Ornament in 1856 with colored illustrations of decoration from Egypt, Turkey, Sicily and Spain. He took residence in the Alhambra Palace

Alhambra

The Alhambra , the complete form of which was Calat Alhambra , is a palace and fortress complex located in the Granada, Andalusia, Spain...

 to make drawings and plaster castings of the ornate details. Interest in classical architecture

Classical architecture

Classical architecture is a mode of architecture employing vocabulary derived in part from the Greek and Roman architecture of classical antiquity, enriched by classicizing architectural practice in Europe since the Renaissance...

 was also fueled by the tradition of traveling on The Grand Tour, and by translation of early literature about architecture in the work of Vitruvius

Vitruvius

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer, active in the 1st century BC. He is best known as the author of the multi-volume work De Architectura ....

 and Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...

.

During the 19th century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise definition became the source of aesthetic controversy in academic Western architecture, as architects and their critics searched for a suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas Leverton Donaldson

Thomas Leverton Donaldson

Thomas Leverton Donaldson was an English architect.He was born in Bloomsbury Square, London, the eldest son of architect, James Donaldson...

 asked in 1847, "are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style of the 19th century?". In 1849, when Matthew Digby Wyatt

Matthew Digby Wyatt

Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge.-Life:...

 viewed the French Industrial Exposition

French Industrial Exposition of 1844

The French Industrial Exposition of 1844, held in a temporary structure on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, was one in a series of eleven French national industrial expositions held to encourage improvements in progressive agriculture and in technology, that had their origins in 1798...

 set up on the Champs-Elysées

Champs-Élysées

The Avenue des Champs-Élysées is a prestigious avenue in Paris, France. With its cinemas, cafés, luxury specialty shops and clipped horse-chestnut trees, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées is one of the most famous streets and one of the most expensive strip of real estate in the world. The name is...

 in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain:

Both internally and externally there is a good deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If each simple material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of the construction so arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of grandeur, the qualities of "power" and "truth," which its enormous extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of expense.

Contacts with other cultures through colonialism

Colonialism

Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...

 and the new discoveries of archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 expanded the repertory of ornament available to revivalists. After about 1880, photography made details of ornament even more widely available than prints had done.

Modern ornament

Modern architecture

Modern architecture

Modern architecture is generally characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. It is a term applied to an overarching movement, with its exact definition and scope varying widely...

, conceived of as the elimination of ornament in favor of purely functional structures, left architects the problem of how to properly adorn modern structures. There were two available routes from this perceived crisis. One was to attempt to devise an ornamental vocabulary that was new and essentially contemporary. This was the route taken by architects like Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Henri Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an...

 and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...

, or by the unique Antoni Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was a Spanish Catalan architect and figurehead of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí's works reflect his highly individual and distinctive style and are largely concentrated in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, notably his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família.Much of Gaudí's work was...

. Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

, for all its excesses, was a conscious effort to evolve such a "natural" vocabulary of ornament.

A more radical route abandoned the use of ornament altogether, as in some designs for objects by Christopher Dresser

Christopher Dresser

Christopher Dresser was an English designer and design theorist, now widely known as one of the first and most important, independent, designers and was a pivotal figure in the Aesthetic Movement, and a major contributor to the allied Anglo-Japanese branch of the Movement; both originated in...

. At the time, such unornamented objects could have been found in many unpretending workaday items of industrial design, ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of electric lines.

This latter approach was described by architect Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos

Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was a Moravian-born Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau...

 in his 1908 manifesto, translated into English in 1913 and polemically titled Ornament and Crime

Ornament and Crime

Ornament and Crime is an essay written in 1908 by the influential and self-consciously "modern" Austrian architect Adolf Loos under the German title Ornament und Verbrechen...

, in which he declared that lack of decoration is the sign of an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is economically inefficient and "morally degenerate", and that reducing ornament was a sign of progress. Modernists were eager to point to American architect Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Henri Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an...

 as their godfather in the cause of aesthetic simplification, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned ornament that articulated the skin of his structures.

With the work of Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

 and the Bauhaus

Bauhaus

', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...

 through the 1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of modern architecture

Modern architecture

Modern architecture is generally characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. It is a term applied to an overarching movement, with its exact definition and scope varying widely...

 and equated with the moral virtues of honesty, simplicity, and purity. In 1932 Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect.In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and later , as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture...

 and Henry-Russell Hitchcock

Henry-Russell Hitchcock

Henry-Russell Hitchcock was the leading American architectural historian of his generation. A long-time professor at Smith College and New York University, he is best known for writings that helped to define Modern architecture.-Biography:...

 dubbed this the "International Style

International style (architecture)

The International style is a major architectural style that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the formative decades of Modern architecture. The term originated from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style...

". What began as a matter of taste was transformed into an aesthetic mandate. Modernists declared their way as the only acceptable way to build. As the style hit its stride in the highly-developed postwar work of Mies van der Rohe, the tenets of 1950s modernism became so strict that even accomplished architects like Edward Durrell Stone and Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen

Eero Saarinen was a Finnish American architect and industrial designer of the 20th century famous for varying his style according to the demands of the project: simple, sweeping, arching structural curves or machine-like rationalism.-Biography:Eero Saarinen shared the same birthday as his father,...

 could be ridiculed and effectively ostracized for departing from the aesthetic rules.

At the same time, the unwritten laws against ornament began to come into serious question. "Architecture has, with some difficulty, liberated itself from ornament, but it has not liberated itself from the fear of ornament," Summerson observed in 1941.

One reason was that the very difference between ornament and structure is subtle and perhaps arbitrary. The pointed arches and flying buttresses of Gothic architecture

Gothic architecture

Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

 are ornamental but structurally necessary; the colorful rhythmic bands of a Pietro Belluschi

Pietro Belluschi

Pietro Belluschi was an American architect, a leader of the Modern Movement in architecture, and was responsible for the design of over one thousand buildings....

 International Style skyscraper are integral, not applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. Furthermore, architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of establishing scale, signaling entries, and aiding wayfinding, and these useful design tactics had been outlawed. And by the mid-1950s, modernist figureheads Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

 and Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Lajos Breuer , was a Hungarian-born modernist, architect and furniture designer of Jewish descent. One of the masters of Modernism, Breuer displayed interest in modular construction and simple forms.- Life and work :Known to his friends and associates as Lajkó, Breuer studied and taught at...

 had been breaking their own rules by producing highly expressive, sculptural concrete work.

The argument against ornament peaked in 1959 over discussions of the Seagram Building

Seagram Building

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper, located at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd Street and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with Philip Johnson. Severud Associates were the structural engineering consultants. The building...

, where Mies van der Rohe installed a series of structurally unnecessary vertical I-beams on the outside of the building, and by 1984, when Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect.In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and later , as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture...

 produced his AT&T Building in Manhattan with an ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian pediment, the argument was effectively over. In retrospect, critics have seen the AT&T Building

Sony Building (New York)

The Sony Tower, formerly the AT&T Building, is a tall, 37-story highrise skyscraper located at 550 Madison Avenue between 55th Street and 56th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It was designed by architect Philip Johnson and partner John Burgee, and was completed in 1984...

 as the first Postmodernist building.