Re-thinking the Concept of "Ornament" in Architectural Design

Abstract

The concept of ornament has emerged as a result of the existence of the human being and its relation to its environment. Ornament of objects, which aim at adding qualitative features to objects alongside their quantitative states, is a practice that is as old as humanity. Within this process of the individual's efforts in thinking, designing, creating, and communicating, one comes across ornament in every field of design, from little objects to urban planning. Discussions especially on architectural ornament has been popular in every age. Since the time of Vitruvius who set the stage for conceptual discussion of architecture, ornament, due to its social and psychological functions, has almost uninterruptedly been a major topic for discussion. This can be seen as the language's (that is used to perceive and narrate architecture as a spatial art) benefitting from formal-physical elements (which are mostly rather found on a more superficial and easily understood level) of artistic communication. Ornament, whose function-meaning and/or form go through changes according to ages, within the context of architecture, where it belongs to the highest level of artistic communication language, has been at the core of these discussions. The aim of this paper is to re-evaluate architecture-ornament relation within history and to re-discuss it in a rather popular way by drawing attention to the most controversial climaxes in new architectural perspective. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.