In architecture, ornament is decorative detail on buildings. In a 1941 essay the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it "surface modulation" (Summerson 1963). Ornament has been part of the tradition of architecture at all times and places in human history. The exception of 20th Century modern architecture, although familiar to this generation, is a historical aberration. The Parthenon on top of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece Architecture (from Latin, architectura and ultimately from Greek, αρχιτεκτων, a master builder, from αρχι- chief, leader and τεκτων, builder, carpenter) is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. ... Sir John Newenham Summerson (1904-1992) was one of the leading British architectural historians of the 20th century. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the... Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914. ...

During the 19th century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise definition, became the source of aesthetic controversy in academic Western architecture, as architects and their critics searched for a suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas Leverton Donaldson asked in 1847, "are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style of the 19th century?" (quoted by Summerson). In 1849, when Matthew Digby Wyatt viewed the Exposition of agriculture and industry set up on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain : Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1795-1885) was a prominent English architect during the 19th century. ... 1849 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... Sir (Matthew) Digby Wyatt (1820 – 1877) was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. ...

Both internally and externally there is a good deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If each simple material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of the construction so arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of grandeur, the qualities of "power" and "truth," which its enormous extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of expense.

[1].

Contacts with other cultures through colonialism and soon the new discoveries of archaeology expanded the repertory of ornament available to revivalists, until its sheer variety became burdensome; after about 1880, photographic illustration made details of ornament even more widely available than prints had done.

There were two available routes from this perceived crisis. One was to attempt to devise an ornamental vocabulary that was new and essentially contemporary. This was the route taken by architects like Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, or by the unique Antoni Gaudí. Art Nouveau, for all its excesses, was a conscious effort to evolve such a "natural" vocabulary of ornament. Louis Sullivan Louis Henry (Henri) Sullivan (September 3, 1856–April 14, 1924) was an American architect, called the father of modernism. He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, and was a mentor to Frank Lloyd... Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was one of the most prominent and influential architects of the first half of the 20th century. ... Antonio Gaudí i Cornet (25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926) was a Spanish architect famous for his unique style and highly individualistic designs. ... Art nouveau /É‘Ê€ nuvo/ (French for new art) is a style in art, architecture and design that peaked in popularity at the beginning of the 20th century. ...

A more radical route abandoned the use of ornament altogether, as in some designs for objects by Christopher Dresser. At the time, such unornamented objects could have been found in many unpretending workaday items of industrial design, if architects had thought to look: industrial ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of electric lines. Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) at first earned his living as a botanist, but is now widely known as Britain’s first independent, industrial designer. ...

This latter approach was militantly urged by architect Adolf Loos in his 1908 manifesto, translated into English in 1913 and polemically titled "Ornament and Crime", in which he declared that lack of decoration is the sign of an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is economically inefficient and "morally degenerate", and that reducing ornament was a sign of progress. Modernists were eager to point to American architect Louis Sullivan as their godfather in the cause of aesthetic simplification, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned ornament that articulated the skin of his structures. Adolf Loos (December 10, 1870 in Brno, Moravia–August 8, 1933 in Vienna, Austria) was an early-20th century Viennese modernist architect who is associated with the International Style. ... Ornament and Crime is an essay written by the influential Austrian architect Adolf Loos in 1908. ... Progress can refer to: The idea of a process in which societies or individuals become better or more modern (technologically and/or socially). ... Louis Sullivan Louis Henry (Henri) Sullivan (September 3, 1856–April 14, 1924) was an American architect, called the father of modernism. He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, and was a mentor to Frank Lloyd...

With the work of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus through the 1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of modern architecture. Lack of architectural ornamentation became equated with the moral virtues of honesty, simplicity, and purity. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock dubbed this the "International Style". What began as a matter of taste was transformed into an aesthetic mandate. Modernists declared their way as the only acceptable way to build. As the style hit its stride in the highly-developed postwar work of Mies van der Rohe, the tenets of 1950s modernism became so strict that even accomplished architects like Edward Durrell Stone and Eero Saarinen could be ridiculed and effectively ostracized for departing from the aesthetic rules. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887–August 27, 1965) was a Swiss architect famous for his contributions to what is now called modernism, or the International Style. ... Bauhaus (2003). ... Modern architecture is a broad term given to a number of building styles with similar characteristics, primarily the simplification of form and the elimination of ornament, that first arose around 1900. ... IDS Center in Minneapolis Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect. ... International style can refer to International style in ballroom dancing - see ballroom dance; International style in architecture - see international style. ... Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies) (March 27, 1886 - August 17, 1969) was an architect and designer. ... Edward Durrell Stone (1902 Fayetteville Arkansas - 1978 New York City), American modernist twentieth century American architect. ... Saarinens Gateway Arch frames The Old Courthouse, which sits at the heart of the city of Saint Louis, near the rivers edge. ...

At the same time, the law against ornament began to come into serious question. "Architecture has, with some difficulty, liberated itself from ornament, but it has not liberated itself from the fear of ornament," Summerson observed in 1941.

One reason was that the very difference between ornament and structure is subtle and perhaps arbitrary. The pointed arches and flying buttresses of Gothic architecture are ornamental but structurally necessary; the colorful rhythmic bands of a Pietro Belluschi International Style skyscraper are integral, not applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. Furthermore, architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of establishing scale, signalling entries, and aiding wayfinding, and these useful design tactics had been outlawed. And by the mid-1950s, modernist figureheads Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer had been breaking their own rules by producing highly expressive, sculptural concrete work. See also Gothic art. ... Pietro Belluschi (August 18, 1899 - February 14, 1994) was an architect, a leader of the Modern Architecture movement, and responsible for the design of over one thousand buildings. ... Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887–August 27, 1965) was a Swiss architect famous for his contributions to what is now called modernism, or the International Style. ... Marcel Breuer Marcel Lajos Breuer (May 21, 1902 Pécs, Hungary – July 1, 1981 New York City), architect and furniture designer, was an influential modernist. ...

The argument against ornament peaked in 1959 over discussions of the Seagram Building, where Mies van der Rohe installed a series of structurally unnecessary vertical I-beams on the outside of the building, and by 1984, when Philip Johnson produced his AT&T Building in Manhattan with an ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian pediment, the argument was effectively over. In retrospect critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist building. The Seagrams Building is a skyscraper in New York City. ... Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies) (March 27, 1886 - August 17, 1969) was an architect and designer. ... IDS Center in Minneapolis Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an influential American architect. ... Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ...

References

• Summerson, John, 1941. in Heavenly Mansions 1963, p. 217

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