1 Ornament as products of unfolding
Ornament arises, naturally, when a person is making something and seeks to embellish this “something” while making it. The embellishing is spontaneous. It comes from the continued unfolding of the whole, going naturally from the broad wholeness of the thing to the microstructure where the chisel, hand, brush, and trowel make patterns in the thing, in order to continue and extend its wholeness. Most concretely, it arises as a result of the latent centers in the uncompleted thing requiring still more centers, requiring still more structure, in order to be complete. That requirement, when followed faithfully, creates ornament that grows from the whole.
This is a natural process, whenever the thing is being made. But if a building is “produced” — not made — in a technically divided situation where making is severed from design, the process of ornamentation cannot occur naturally. There, when an architect tries to draw the ornament or specify the ornament “within” the technical process, what happens becomes awkward, stilted, too stiff, not fundamental — and also not profound — because it does not arise from the joy of the making process itself. It cannot be profound because the maker is not reacting to the whole in its state as an unfinished thing, which may then be completed by the ornament. For the ornament to be profound, the motifs and disposition of the ornament must arise, naturally, from latent centers which are felt within the uncompleted thing.
Since (in any living process created by repeated application of the fundamental process) we understand that the creation of a building is in every case the creation of a system of centers which emerges naturally from the field which surrounds it, this understanding of the task of embellishment no longer distinguished between “function” and “ornament”.
The task of building is to produce a field of centers which makes itself complete. This gives us a clear and sensible way of understanding ornament precisely, one which tells us exactly what to do. At a certain stage in the making of the building we have produced a field of centers there. But the field still contains rough spots. It is not perfectly resolved. Some parts are not intense enough; the centers are not distributed to produce the most perfect field. At this stage, some additional “smaller” structure is necessary.
The so-called “ornament” is simply this smaller stuff. It is the stuff we have to create at this last stage, to complete and perfect the field of centers. Thus it is not something extra or extraneous; it is a continuation of the same process we have followed in creating the field up to this point. It is necessary in order to complete the field.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/18 Ornament as part of all unfolding#