ORNAMENT AND MODERNISM

ORNAMENT AND MODERNISM ORNAMENT AND 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

19 Loos, "Ornament and Crime." 20Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, 15.. 21 Ibid.

Figure 9. Poster advertising Adolf Loos lecture on Ornament and Crime.

probably not intentionally, Loos contributed to the blanket discarding of ornament from the vocabulary of architecture.22 As Payne summarises, “[i]n his view, ornament was the sexual smear of a degenerate culture, akin to primitive man’s tattoo, at odds with modern clothing, food, and objects of daily use…it represented a throwback to a nostalgic past that had long been superseded.”23 Loos seems to call for a shift to austerity where labour is spent only on what matters, as he sees ornament as “wasted labor and therefore wasted health…it also means wasted material.”

The “relegation” of ornament in modern architecture to the status of “mere accessory” was accelerated by another of the founding fathers of Modernism, Le Corbusier.24 In his publication Towards a New Architecture Le Corbusier adopts a similarly distasteful tone towards ornament as Loos, infamously likening previously ornamental styles to “a feather on a woman’s head; it is sometimes pretty, though not always, and never anything more.”25 Such blanket rejection of ornamentation is evident in the architecture designed by both Loos and Le Corbusier, as well as many others from the Modernist movement. The pared back appearance and priority of mass and surface over other elements of works such as Loos’ Villa Müller and Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau proved a stark contrast to highly ornamented buildings that had been the pinnacle of architecture until this time. In fact, Payne describes the disruption this “unit of

22 Ibid., 1. 23 Ibid., 217. 24 Picon, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity, 41. 25 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1986 [first published 1931]), 25.

Figure 10. Adolf Loos. Muller House. 1930.

architecture” – as it was intended to be one part of a larger urban development – caused as it was “seemingly parachuted behind the Grand Palais.”26 Payne continues that this building “offered an instructive glimpse into the pair’s (Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant) definition of modernity” with “the combination of volume and light [as] its primary message.”27

But to say that the Modernist period was completely devoid of ornament is myopic. As Payne demonstrates in From Ornament to Object, while ornamentation in architecture seemingly disappeared, she argues that such attention was transferred to the objects of the same period.28 For Payne, the “apparently simple” furnishings of the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau existed “in a dialogue with the paintings on the walls, a haunting gallery of similar objects.”29 Together the “purist paintings confronted purist interiors”30 and set up a new referential system of how architecture dealt with ornament. At this point in early Modernism, Payne acknowledges how objects emerged as the “principal actors”, implying that objects supplanted ornament.31 The focus on objects during this period seems anathema to the Modernist perspectives on labour, particularly as Loos decries the wasted labour and wasted health spent producing ornament.32 Nevertheless, Modernists concerned themselves with designing buildings for

26 Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism, 2-3. 27 Ibid., 3. 28Ibid. 29 Ibid., 3. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 4. 32 Loos, "Ornament and Crime," 171.

Figure 11. Le Corbusier. Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau. 1925.

space and light and populating them with well-crafted objects and art (as discussed above).

Similarly contradictory in this light is Le Corbusier’s desire to preserve the marking of wooden formwork on concrete in his later works “to make the viewer aware of the productive hand of the construction worker.”33 This contradiction is duly noted by Picon who suggests such a tactic was “strongly reminiscent of one of the key functions of ornament according to 19th -centurty English theorist John Ruskin.”34 While not conventional ornament, the beginnings of Brutalism as we now know it emerged at this point. Picon offers the term “neo-ornamental elements” to describe this category of material ornamentation, such as those drawn from the markings left by wooden concrete formwork.35 These elements highlight an attention to surface quality that perhaps demonstrates a preoccupation with or a desire to transform and reimagine instances of ornamentation in architecture.

33 Picon, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity, 21. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

Figure 12. Le Corbusier. Unité d’Habitation, Marseille. 1945.