ORNAMENT AND ORNAMENT AND MODERNISM MODERNISM As has been discussed until this point, ornament plays an integral role in architecture. Ornament is vital to the communication of a building’s purpose, status or function and even contributes to drawing forth sublime experience through embellished folds and monumental scale. Once conventionalised, ornament enjoyed a privileged position in architecture, perhaps even to the point where some imagined that such a position could not be jeopardised. After the Rococo style, one might have expected rebalance from over-embellishment to starkness; however, decorative and ornamental arts and practices continued to flourish in the periods that followed evident in the ongoing monopoly of the classical orders and new stylised shapes of Art Nouveau. A severe disruption was brewing. Now considered as one of the manifestoes for Modernism, Loos’ controversial and pithy essay “Ornament and Crime” 19 heralded the demise of ornament and the birth of a new style, known later as Modernism. Loos was responding to a period where “architecture had been seen as an overscaled abstract sculpture” 20 where excessive ornament had undermined its original position as a means to accentuate and highlight structural elements (except for the columnar orders, as noted by Payne, that “survived the modernist turn” 21). While Loos, "Ornament and Crime." From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, 15.. 21 Ibid. 19
20Payne,
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