‘Ornament is the language through which architecture communicates with a broader public’ | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/viewpoints/ornament-is-the-language-through-which-architecture-communicates-with-a-broader-public/8687822.article
https://www.architectural-review.com/pictures/2000x2000fit/1/5/8/1445158_Egyptian_lotus_capitals.jpg Minimalism may symbolise luxury, but it could be time to refamiliarise ourselves with our decorative roots
Ornament begins as luxury. The more ornamented a building, a piece of clothing or an item of jewellery, the more labour has gone into its production and the more expensive it is. The Industrial Revolution and machine production changed everything. Suddenly decoration became cheap. Which coincided with the economic need for growth - the manufacture of more and more (decorated) stuff. This, in essence, is the argument of Marx, Morris, Loos and Veblen. Decoration characterised as a mechanism for capital to produce and sell more useless crap to the masses.
Of course, as soon as ornament becomes cheap, elite taste moves on. If decoration is suddenly cheap, then the plainer an object, the more valuable it suddenly becomes. This is, effectively, the birth of Modernism as described by Pevsner and others, the stripped aesthetic of the Bauhaus or the Arts and Crafts where the effort now goes not into ornamentation but into making the building or the product so that it appears simple. But with the added dimension of morality. The stripping-off of ornament suddenly becomes an ethical duty, which leads to the moralising (rather than necessarily moral) arguments of the Modernists.