This document summarizes and reviews the book "The Function of Ornament" which catalogs 42 contemporary architecture projects using ornamental patterns on facades. It aims to categorize these projects based on their material, form, and intended "affective" experience. However, the review argues that the book reduces complex emotional responses to simple visual effects and fails to analyze how projects relate to their urban and cultural contexts. While a useful reference, it does not fully capture the rich perceptual and symbolic meanings of ornament in architecture.
This document summarizes and reviews the book "The Function of Ornament" which catalogs 42 contemporary architecture projects using ornamental patterns on facades. It aims to categorize these projects based on their material, form, and intended "affective" experience. However, the review argues that the book reduces complex emotional responses to simple visual effects and fails to analyze how projects relate to their urban and cultural contexts. While a useful reference, it does not fully capture the rich perceptual and symbolic meanings of ornament in architecture.
This document summarizes and reviews the book "The Function of Ornament" which catalogs 42 contemporary architecture projects using ornamental patterns on facades. It aims to categorize these projects based on their material, form, and intended "affective" experience. However, the review argues that the book reduces complex emotional responses to simple visual effects and fails to analyze how projects relate to their urban and cultural contexts. While a useful reference, it does not fully capture the rich perceptual and symbolic meanings of ornament in architecture.
What is the meaning of these patterns? How can I make them? If you have been asking these questions, you have probably noticed The Function of Ornament, a handbook for architects and students The Function of Ornament seeking to use and understand this new ornamental FARSHID MOUSSAVI and MICHAEL KUBO, editors work. An essay by Farshid Moussavi prefaces forty- two case studies drawn primarily from contemporary Harvard University Graduate School of Design and architecture and analyzed by students in a studio Actar, 2006 Moussavi taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of 190 pages, illustrated Design. Each project is documented in a pair of $29.95 (paper) two-page spreads, the first a close-up elevation or perspective and the second filled with annotated diagrams and details including a sectional perspec- tive. Sorted according to whether they consist of form, structure, screen, or surface, and further by what materials they employ and what effects they produce, the case studies are presented as species in a taxonomy of affective architecture. The result is a handy primer on recent proj- ects like the de Young Museum by Herzog & de Meuron or the John Lewis Department Store by Foreign Office Architects, the firm Moussavi heads with Alejandro Zaera-Polo. The work of gathering documentation of all these buildings in one conve- nient place is valuable since there is no other single source that so broadly covers the new phenomenon of patterned facades. While the sectional perspec- tives do not always contain enough detail for us to understand precisely how these buildings come together, some are detailed enough to be of real use to students in advanced building systems courses and design studios. Less successful are the close-ups, which rarely convey anything not found in the sectional per- spectives. Instead, they establish a rhythm that Perhaps you have noticed—ornament is back. Not allows readers to oscillate between close study and kitsch classicism or postmodern heraldry but geo- browsing. This choice reflects Moussavi’s interpre- metric patterns etched into facades, punched into tive intentions: that these recent pattern projects rainscreens, and tessellated on tiled walls. Repetitive represent a renewed abstraction in which ornament or self-similar patterns are modeled in 3D software, engages individuals, cities, and culture through then output through lasers, waterjets, robotic affective means. Moussavi characterizes ornament
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as the means by which architects today produce counterterrorism insurance. If you worked in sensations and affects, in contrast to such prior London’s financial district and walked past this architectural modalities as modernist transparency building on a daily basis, would not its combination and postmodernist signification. By stimulating of standoff, structural heroics, transparency, and new forms of experience, she asserts, affective geometric purity send a chill down your spine as you ornament allows architecture ‘‘to constantly engage felt vibrating through your body the play of anxiety the city in new ways’’ and to ‘‘remain convergent and confidence it inspires? Moussavi’s approach with culture.’’ obscures the building’s relation to culture and the Affect can refer to a mental state, an emotion, city and even to architecture’s affective capacities. or a mood, and affects can range from the mild, such There are other instances where the limits of as the ennui we feel near the end of a long trip, to the Moussavi’s method become especially clear, such as extreme, such as the bodily recoil provoked by rotten the Prada Aoyama Epicenter, the Atrium at Federa- food. The prominence of affect indicates the editors’ tion Square, Eberswalde Technical Institute Library— desire to reconceptualize architecture in terms even the Lewis Store, which relies for effect on the derived from the philosophical work of Deleuze and counterpoint between arabesques in mirrored glass Guattari, who characterized the artwork as a reconfi- and ceramic frit, and so uses perceptual sizzle to set guration of material to produce a ‘‘compound of up a semiotic payoff. The Function of Ornament is percepts and affects’’ breaking free of signification. not a taxonomy of affects but a catalogue of visual The problem is that when Moussavi says ‘‘affect,’’ effects stripped of their emotional power. The book is she seems to mean simply ‘‘effect.’’ a great point of entry to a compelling territory of Take the example of 30 St. Mary Axe, the office contemporary architectural production, and it will tower Foster & Partners designed for reinsurance help you detail the rainscreen on your next project. company Swiss Re. Moussavi categorizes this build- But it deflects attention from what is essential in ing as a form that uses construction to create a spiral these innovative buildings, banalizing ‘‘affect’’ while affect. But in what sense of the term is ‘‘spiral’’ an obscuring architecture’s rich array of urban, cultural, affect? And how does the building’s spiralness help it and emotional impacts. engage the city or culture? There are richer percep- Jonathan Massey tual and emotional resonances in this building, pop- ularly known as the ‘‘erotic gherkin,’’ than those evoked by the spiral pattern of its glazing. Diagrams capturing the shape and facxade pattern of the tower show how its spiraling atriums channel airflow, but they strip the building of attributes important to its cultural and urbanistic significance, such as the dis- tinctive visual relationships its atriums create between the interior and the city. To talk about the building’s relation to culture, we could start with its technocratic roots in the ecological design practice of Buckminster Fuller, one of Foster’s mentors. Or we could focus on the fact that the building occupies a site cleared by an Irish Republican Army bombing and so symbolizes the role Swiss Re played in implementing a new system of