Ornament (art)
A wide variety of decorative styles and motifs have been developed for architecture and the applied arts, including pottery, furniture, metalwork.
For example, in Central Asia among nomadic Kazakhs, the circular lines of the ornaments signalled the sequential perception of time in the wide steppes and the breadth and freedom of space.
[citation needed] Their ornament takes the forms of the natural world in that climate, decorating the capitals of columns and walls with images of papyrus and palm trees.
Assyrian culture produced ornament which shows influence from Egyptian sources and a number of original themes, including figures of plants and animals of the region.
[6] Jessica Powers' chapter primarily discusses the Casa Degli Amorini Dorati in Pompeii, where 18 wall ornaments were found, the most of any Pompeiian home.
A few medieval notebooks survive, most famously that of Villard de Honnecourt (13th century) showing how artists and craftsmen recorded designs they saw for future use.
From the 16th to the 19th century, pattern books were published in Europe which gave access to decorative elements, eventually including those recorded from cultures all over the world.
He took residence in the Alhambra Palace to make drawings and plaster castings of the ornate details of the Islamic ornaments there, including arabesques, calligraphy, and geometric patterns.
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?".
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.
At the time, such unornamented objects could have been found in many unpretending workaday items of industrial design, ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of electric lines.
This latter approach was described 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.
[13] 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.
With the work of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus through the 1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of modern architecture and equated with the moral virtues of honesty, simplicity, and purity.
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.
Furthermore, architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of establishing scale, signaling 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.
