Posts from — June 2009

Staring into the reds, whites, and blues of the Iznik tiles in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul I was struck by the concept of American ornament.  Do we have a recognizable American ornament? Turkish ornament felt embedded. Beyond its religious definitions and cultural expressions it felt made from the place; as though it were weaving between the people, the architecture, and the history of the land.  Somehow inviting foreigners to recognize its beauty while simultaneously limiting our deeper knowledge.  You can see the Topkapi Palace but you can’t really know.

(ornament in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey)

(Topkapi Palace Istanbul, Turkey)

Did Louis Sullivan know this kind of ornament? I’ve seen his incredible hand on State St. in the Carson Pierre Scott facade.  But that seems to be  an eccentric expression; an individual presentation.  Frank Lloyd Wright certainly learned this expression from Loius Sullivan but never mastered it in the way Sullivan did. Wright’s work was controlled by geometry in a greater extent than Sullivan’s.  The geometry (and perhaps calculus in later work) was certainly adorned but rarely ornamental.

(ornament from the Carson Pierre Scott building in Chicago, IL by Louis Sullivan; photograph by Tim Samuelson)

Ornament seems to have disappeared from American architecture. Or did we have an American ornament? In the Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones published greater than 2,000 classic patterns in 1856; none of them of American origin.

I have seen glimpses of it in complex modeling from software such as Maya and Rhino but it is rarely controlled and even less embedded in any idea of place or culture.

The sustainable architecture movement has relied on the honesty of materials and a focus on local (whether materials, people, economics, etc.) but seems to have largely ignored the potential of ornament.  Might landscape provide a new inspiration for an extensive vocabulary of American ornament?  The American landscape is certainly visible in Wright’s stained glass and Sullivan’s facades.  But does an American Landscape still exist to derive ornament from? Must it be unearthed from decades of disrepair?

Perhaps our ornament is alive? Perhaps our ornament lives and dies. Instead of cast in terra cotta or hammered out of iron maybe the new american ornament can grow under walls, beneath ceilings, and into buildings? Perhaps it can grow from the polluted soil, acid drenched waters, and concrete horizons into something as beautiful as the Iznik tiles.