Ornament in Architecture

Abstract

Abstract Academic authors such as Jacques‐François Blondel saw a clear division between ornament and architecture. Blondel understood ornament as sculptural decoration distinct from a building's essential forms that included the orders and their moldings. Previous writers had a different point of view, one in which ornament played a vital role in buildings. Vitruvius designated asornamentumthe three parts of the entablature, an essential component of trabeated buildings. Alberti understood ornament as the phenomenal manifestation of a building's geometric design. For eighteenth‐century rationalists, however, ornament was by nature excessive and needed to be regulated. They believed that ornaments should stem fromimitation, the doctrine according to which architectural forms originated in wooden construction. For these, they maintained, the architects of antiquity provided the best models. They also advocated thatdecorumshould guide architects in the handling of ornament, much as orators calibrated their vocabulary according to the purpose and audience of their speeches. Other authors, on the contrary, celebrated the auxiliary nature of ornament as a platform for unconstrained invention. Piranesi for instance claimed that designers should eschew the rationality of imitation and the strictures of decorum: like the designers of grotesques, he believed architects should forgo tectonic considerations and incorporate to their creations forms unknown to the Greco‐Roman tradition. Liberated from their historical underpinnings and their social purpose, ornaments became at the end of the century the exemplars of free beauty on which Kant grounded his aesthetic theory.

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