, originally uploaded by moleitau.

Thanks to Justin McGuirk for the invitation to http://www.iconeye.com/iconminds/.

Below, my (very) raw unedited, incomplete notes from the morning session on ‘Ornament’ – Charles Jencks was most enjoyable, must admit I tuned out as the morning went on…:

icon minds event

the return of ornament: intro by Justin McGuirk

100 yrs since ‘ornament and crime’ aldolf loos- amazing that that is still so potent. digital tech in architecture schools is driving this – in icon office they joke about ‘return of victoriana’ – but then it was incredibly theorised where as no it is not…

charles jencks
farshi mousavi (check) foriegn office architects
marjan colleti, bartlett school of architecture

Charles Jencks
———————-
(shows front page of the FT, picture of hank paulson)
book ‘sense of order’
3 depths of ornament
‘all arts aspire to the condition of music’
rhythms that control and affect / effect us without us having to know to much about them
from simple to complex / abstract to meaningful
distinction between decoration and ornament
in the last ten year, ornament has been ornament as eye candy
paulson’s frown is a piece of decoration rather than ornament
i’m defining decoration as something you wear as a sign as a way to communicate in code to a group.
‘the blush on the face of a virgin in every novel is completely conventional’
(now frowns on the faces of capitalists is ‘the blush of the virgin’)
shows koolhaas morphing into zidane
(angry passionate reluctant – architect and designer’s ‘blush of the virgin’)
morphing is… one of the strongest influences on ornament today… morphing is somehow ‘musical’ – from Koolhaas to crescendo… of Zidane..
the construction / structural elements, repeated in a kind of ‘symphonic’ way in each fact of the OMA’s seattle library… organisational diagram informs the ornament – intersection, interlocking, ornamental use of colour for ciruclation to take you through a grey abstract concrete space… ornament is being used to underscore organisation
shows prada building in tokyo (?) herzog de merreon
rem: “dubai is vernacular zaha” – everyone is doing the same tricks with form – in adevrtising and magazines and academia… cliched images, rather than reality
venturi’s ‘dumb box’ / ‘decorated shed’ – done by FOA in spain… hexagonal tiles… that wobble nicely – ‘i call it the hexiwobble’
eberswalde library by H&dM – ornament not guaranteed to last 8-10 years by concrete manufrs
‘age of mechanical reproduction’ -photograph, but double – the facade is mechinaical reproduction
birds next stadium by h&dm – getting closer to mimicking nature
FOA work – pleats and plates of folded.
the 19th criticised construction – they said ‘don;t construct you ornament, instead decorate your construction’ – then poiret (?) teacher of corb said don’t do that… decoration always hides fault, and so the truth.
argument: philospophical/’moral’ – don’t think it is moral… we all ornament, we all decorate
transformational ornament is the 3rd degree
my own work based on fractals (cosmic garden in N. England?)
ornament should tell a story, should be narrative
shouldn’t stop at the level of semantics
the two great theories underlying nature:
plato – behind nature the underlying forms are regular solids (modernism) unbroken plato -> classical -> cezanne -> corbusier
based on the metaphysics of getting to the underlying forms of nature, the organisation of matter – self organisating relationships between them
1977: benoit mandelbrot: the fractal geometry of nature
things are more or less platonic when viewed from our scale, but in reality – mostly crinkly, self-similar, scale-free, always changing.
a symphonic scaling, between scales… recent work of FOA
gaudi – still the master of doing this… mediating between scale with ornament and structure.
the 4th degree of ornament is where there is an overall story that is seen in every element that the architect/designer/client has worked out whih gives it greater resonance.

Farshid Moussavi / FOA

book: ‘the function of ornament’

how do we define and construct ornament today?

it is part of how they ‘perform’ (structurally, environmentally) – they have a function
architecture has a very outmoded and narrow concept of function
sensorially roles should be part of function
opposition of function to ornament is representative of our dualist thinking between matter and mind
natural / symbolic
structural / symbols
louis sullivan was the last architect of ornament before modernism?
‘form follows function’ dictum reduced function to utility
related forms to culutre – often added inbetween structure and function – not considered together
but now they are – and start transforming each other
it’s no longer possible to isolate forces in the environment: cultural, societal, structural
cities are spaces where multiplicity rules, novelity emerges
materials are now joined by what she calls ‘supermaterials’ – economics, virology, systems, information
cinema
spinoza: affect / affectation

(I have to admit I tuned out at this point…)