Ornament and Crime

There was a clear difference in approach to ornament between Wright and the Modernist school of thought; understanding the reason for this difference is important, whether one is looking to understand its historical roots in the early 20th century or even today, to understand why ornament is again out of favor as the revival of modern design is in sway once again.   

As mentioned in the last article, early on, one could think that both Wright and the European modernists had the same attitude toward ornament.   Viennese architect Adolf Loos wrote in his 1908 essay, “Ornament and Crime,” which became a foundational text for the modern movement, “… the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.”  Loos’ admiration for Greek architecture (albeit a stripped down classicism) reflected his preference for ideal abstract forms. The  elimination of ornament was more than an issue of aesthetic taste to the modernist school.   Like Plato who felt that the ideal dwelt in pure undifferentiated forms (“Platonic solids”) rather than in the individual particulars, Modernism’s holy grail was in reducing all non-essentials from architecture and thereby revealing pure form to the sphere of intellectual contemplation.  Modernist painter Piet Mondrian stated that “the universal cannot be expressed purely so long as the particular obstructs the path.”  And Cubist painter Cezanne felt that artists should “interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” ie platonic forms.

Ornament expresses the particular whereas geometric abstraction was seen as a way to purify art by eliminating all vestiges of particular or individual objects, stripping form down to pure function, if that were possible.  Like Cezanne above, Wright also wrote about interpreting nature involving abstraction rather than a literal imitation of external form. So what’s the difference? Like the difference between Mondrian’s Composition II in Red and Wright’s “Tree of Life” stained glass pattern from the Martin house, the Mondrian pattern of rectangles has been reduced to platonic form whereas Wright’s designs reveal an inner growth pattern as seen in nature, a branching pattern in what would be seen as less abstract and more representational than that of the modernist painter. 

It is interesting to note that Wright, both in his 1908 In the Cause of Architecture and later 1931 Kahn lecture,  makes reference to a catharsis of ornament  for a time.  Whereas modernism had rejected ornament out of hand as a first principle, Wright took a much more nuanced position regarding ornament which he was consistent with from 1908 to the end of his life.  In The Natural House (1954), Wright speaks of integral ornament as the nature-pattern of actual construction.  He refers to ornament as a “subjective” element that is so hard to understand that “modern architects themselves seem to understand it the least well of all and most of them have turned against it with such fury as is born only of impotence.”  He continues in describing ornament as requiring a “most imaginative mind not without some development in artistry and the gift of a sense of proportion.” He then makes the comparison that poetry is to prose what ornament is to plain architecture.  Wright further defines integral ornament in The Natural House as “simply structure-pattern made visibly articulate and seen in the building as it is seen articulate in the structure of the trees or a lily of the fields. It is the expression of inner rhythm of Form.”  He goes so far as to say that this quality is what makes “essential architecture as distinguished from any mere act of building whatsoever.”  One wonders if he is intending to disqualify Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, for instance, as architecture since it does not adhere to the above definition.

Although more needs to be said about the philosophical differences between Wright and the modernists, one could outline Wright’s approach to ornament as follows: 1.) Ornament is not bad in itself.  2.) However, traditional architecture had lost any sense of the intrinsic meaning and expression of ornament and it became merely excess appliqué.  3.) Modern architecture served the purpose of providing a catharsis that corrected this problem but in doing so left a sterility worse than the sentimentality of traditional ornament.  4.) and by implication, Wright would show a middle way that provided an intrinsic (aka organic) ornament that grew out of the nature of the architecture itself that would also serve to inspire and nourish the human soul.