For over a century, architecture has labored under the austere condemnation that “ornament is crime,” a modernist maxim that relegated surface decoration to the non-essential, the frivolous, or the symbolically redundant. But what if ornament was not an added layer, but an intrinsic function of the building’s interaction with the world? Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo’s landmark text, The Function of Ornament, is an essential attending for architects, designers, and thinkers who wish to pluck this loaded term from the wreckage of history and redefine it for the digital professional age. The book’s goal is to educate, simplify, and inspire a new approach to the façade, proving that surface treatment is not about symbolic messaging, but about generating affect and greatly enhancing a building’s material delivery.
🖼️ The Preload: Why the Old Definition Fails Today
Moussavi and Kubo politely dismantle the traditional view of ornament as symbolic decoration. In our hyper-globalized, culturally diverse society, a single symbol can no longer carry a universally understood concentration of meaning. This book argues that the afterload of trying to communicate through fixed, local symbols has dissipately led to superficial, historicist architecture (Postmodernism) or overly simple, blank modern boxes. The architectural challenge today is to create a connection to culture that operates through timeless, sensory experience rather than codified language.
The Distinction: Ornament vs. Decoration
The authors make a chaste but crucial distinction:
- Decoration is contingent; it is applied to the building and serves purely representational purposes. It is non-essential.
- Ornament is necessary; it is the figure that emerges from the material substrate, the expression of embedded forces through processes of construction, assembly, and growth.
The key takeaway here is that true ornament is an aggregate of performance and material organization. It is through this rigorous organization that material transmits affects—direct, non-verbal sensations like depth, shadow, or visual tempo.
📐 The Tempo of Material: Classifying New Types of Ornament
The great value of the book lies in its step-by-step, graphic taxonomy of contemporary ornamental strategies. It moves beyond simple visual analysis to categorize 42 case studies according to three classifications—depth, material, and affect—which respectively describe how the ornament is integrated, what forces shape it, and the perceptual results it delivers.
Case Study: Ornament of Shear Materiality (Texture)
Many examples illustrate that the shear quality of a material’s arrangement is a functional form of ornament. Consider a façade where bricks are extruded or recessed slightly according to a shifting pattern. The types of forces governing this design are not aesthetic whim but potentially programmatic or environmental.
- Function: The shifting texture, or pattern, greatly modifies the interaction of light and shadow across the day, giving the building a dynamic tempo that changes with time and the viewer’s movement.
- Affect: This movement produces an affect of softness, density, or vibration, bypassing the need for symbolic reading. The concentration of detail is focused on sensory delivery.
Vie: This focus on surface texture and material effects is linked to the ideas explored in Sanford Kwinter’s writings on “The Deep Surface” (a theory often discussed in contemporary architectural schools about the expressive potential of non-linear surfaces), positioning Moussavi’s argument as a practical, built-work demonstration of these concepts.
💻 Actionable Tips for the Digital Professional
The book is an absolute must for the digital professional because contemporary ornament is intrinsically linked to computational and fabrication processes. The delivery of complex, non-repetitive patterns is only feasible due to the rates of CNC milling, laser cutting, and parametric design software.
Checklist: Designing Colerrate Ornamental Systems
For the contemporary designer, ornament is not a drawing problem but an organization problem. Use this practical framework to refer to Moussavi’s method:
- Define the Force (Preload): Identify the non-aesthetic force that will shape the surface. Is it sun-shading angles? Wind shear? Acoustical absorption? This is the preload that makes the pattern necessary.
- Organize the Material (Rank): Use computational tools to rank the material elements (panels, louvers, tiles) according to the varying intensity of the defined force (e.g., panel aperture size changes relative to solar exposure).
- Generate Affect (Results): The results are an ornamental façade where every element has a functional purpose, yet the overall pattern generates a unique sensory experience or affect—the building feels cool, heavy, or reflective. The system is designed to colerrate performance with sensation.
- Embrace the Afterload: Recognize that the ornament’s true meaning is the afterload—the shifting, contingent resonance it creates over time as different cultures and individuals experience it.
🚀 Conclusion: Act Upon the New Necessity
The Function of Ornament by Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo is not a call to decorate; it is a rigorous manifesto demanding that we lay hold of the material surface as a functional, performative, and affective entity. The key takeaway is that ornament is not a matter of choice, but an inevitable necessity born from the aggregate of structural, technological, and cultural forces acting on a building today. By embracing this view, architects can seize control of the façade and elevate its rank from a simple mask to a responsive instrument that truly connects our buildings to the dynamic tempo of modern life.
It’s time to reflect on the forces that shape your design and act upon the principle that function and ornament are one and the same.
❓ FAQs: Referring to Common Architectural Queries
Q1: How does this greatly differ from Postmodernism’s return to ornament? A: Postmodernism used ornament (decoration) to refer to historical or symbolic meaning (e.g., a cartoon column). Moussavi’s approach rejects this. She advocates for an austere ornament that emerges from the rigorous organization of material to produce affect (sensory experience), not meaning (symbolic communication). The results are functional, not purely aesthetic.
Q2: What role does technology play in this “New Ornament”? A: Technology is the engine. Digital modeling allows designers to lay hold of non-standard, intricate patterns derived from complex data (rates, forces, etc.). Fabrication technology (CNC, 3D printing) enables the delivery of these patterns into built reality, managing the aggregate complexity that would have been impossible with traditional construction.
Q3: Is the book simple enough for a beginner to understand? A: Yes, because the concepts are presented step-by-step through highly graphic, clear diagrams and analytical drawings of actual buildings. While the introduction is theoretically dense, the 42 case studies provide practical visual examples that greatly simplify the application of the theory, making it accessible for any student or beginner.