INTRODUCTION

TRACING ORNAMENT THROUGH BDES3011 Architectural History and Theory ARCHITECTURE: UNEXPECTED INSTANCES OF ORNAMENT IN Tracing Ornament Through BRUTALISM Architecture: Unexpected Instances of Ornament in Brutalism While once integral to the practice of architecture and design, ‘ornament’ has suffered since its apparent rejection during Modernism in the twentieth century, heralded by Adolf Loos’ essay Ornament and Crime, first published in 1908.1 Since then ornament has been “tainted by contemporary uses of the term itself” as it has “become loaded with conflicted and even negative meanings.”2 Associations with embellishment and decoration led ornament to be considered no more than a superficial appliqué, a superfluous and unnecessary frivolity attached to architecture. Before such a falling out of favour, however, ornament was engaged to express narratives and even social hierarchies, performing a key signalling role in architecture. According to Bloomer, conventionalisation of and the use of conventionalised ornament up until the nineteenth century facilitated a sort of ‘linguistic’ consistency and legibility in architecture, reinforcing the authority of the classical order.3 Similarly, during this period – i.e. pre-twentieth century

INTRODUCTION

1 Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime," in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed. Adolf Opel and Michael Mitchell (Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 1998 [first published 1908]). 2 Kent C. Bloomer, The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 15. 3 Alina Alexandra Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 15.

Figure 1. Claude Perrault. A treatise of the five orders in architecture.

Modernism – ornamentation mobilised the visual to heighten the experience and understanding of architecture. From this perspective, using ornament in architecture has been linked to the concept of the sublime, that is, its use to evoke a sublime response. Similarly, such evocation of the sublime feeling can also be linked to Deleuze’s notion of ‘the fold’, particularly when examining Baroque ornamentation.4 In its role as visually signalling architectural function, ornamentation also contributes to identifying monuments, which again can be related to the sublime, in the sense of architecture drawing forth a sense of being overwhelmed.

When considered in a classical and conventional sense, as posited by Bloomer, ornament is mobilised and expressed in a way that facilitates our interpretation of ornament in architecture as producing certain affects, effects and responses. Through Bloomer’s lens, Modernist architecture devoid of conventional ornamentation produces architecture and spaces that are confusing due to their seeming illegibility.5 Such a dearth of ornamentation suggests also that these projects are unable to evoke sublime and monumental responses.

An alternative perspective is put forward by Payne, who argues that the negative shift away from ornamentation in architecture led to the transfer of this attention to objects. Payne traces how as the conventional use of ornamentation to “make the basically beautiful architectural order more visible”6 dwindled in Modernist architecture, this part of “architecture’s

4 Gilles Deleuze, "The Fold," Yale French Studies 80 (1991). 5 Bloomer, The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture, 228. 6 Ibid., 20.

Figure 2. Narciso Tome. Toledo Cathedral Altar.

rhetorical apparatus…apparently ceased to exist”7 yet re-emerged in the objects of the time such as furniture and everyday objects, as evident in the flourishing of the Arts & Crafts movement.

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Perhaps, though, these perspectives are too deductive, and it is from this point of departure that this essay examines a similarly maligned area of architecture – Brutalism – and proposes that these projects mobilise novel, perhaps even unconventional, forms of ornamentation to elicit experiences of the sublime, the fold and monument. This essay seeks to go beyond Bloomer’s notion that ornament was largely absent in Modernism and challenges Payne’s proposition that the expressions of ornamentation merely transferred from architecture to objects, to argue that ornament enjoyed a transformation into a different form of expression in Modernism, with particular attention to Brutalism. In doing so, this essay discovers unexpected instances of ornament in Brutalism through examining Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building.

7 Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, 1. 8 Ibid., 196.

Figure 3. Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company. Chandelier. 1899.