Opinion - Meaningful Decoration

Meaningful decoration is more than just complicated wallpaper, says Patrick Lynch.

Most work claiming to be ornamental is actually crude pattern-making based on logarithms rather than metaphor. Ornament is one aspect of decoration, and is designed to tell us things. Decoration is closely associated with decorum, the appropriate manner of representation suited to the task at hand. Which usually means, in the abstracted language of modern architecture, the character of a building.
What guides character? Is it programme? Is it site? Or is it the character of the clients? Well, much of what passes for 'ornament' today has nothing to do with any of the above problems and is simply another version of the introverted discourse of architects copying each other. We are mostly not even aware that we are repeating the same old arguments between craft and mechanical means of fabrication (for steam presses think CAD and CAM), except without all of the cultural and political associations that these terms held for our great-grandparents. The 'digital design revolution' is a rehashing of the Victorian argument between William Morris and John Ruskin on the one hand and Owen Jones on the other, without any of the social rhetoric. Morris' patterns are visual, symbolic, habitual, linguistic, spatial, vernacular; Jones' patterns involve simple geometry repeated to appear complex, possess no true pictorial quality, have no depth and thus depict no spaces. They are
field-like, entopic, and in sum, analytical. Entopic means seeing with your eyes closed. I'm sure that we can all think of modern equivalents.
What might be an antidote to wallpaper ornament? It's hard to think of many examples, since Modernist designers seemed to distrust the idea of communication in their work, perhaps because representation is too closely linked to the history of architecture, and thus, presumably, to conservative ways of living. Norwegian practice Jensen and Skodvin's book Processed Geometries (Unipax, 2007) shows how programme, site, budget and climate conspire to allow the architectural
imagination to elaborate and become meaningful. The directors learned from their teachers at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Sverre Fehn and Christian Norberg-Schulz, that typological principles establish a vocabulary that needs to be adjusted each time to continue to make sense.
They realise that an interest in 'the formal imagination' needs to be tempered by 'the material imagination'; both typologies and materials have potential for rearrangement through the structural and formal capacities that spring from their location in use.
Jensen and Skodvin's monastery on the Norwegian island of Tautra, a cloister village made of engineered timber and clad in stone panels, was shortlisted for the Mies van der Rohe Award last year. The stark contrast of light and shadow in the chapel – ornamental because they are meaningful in this context, are the result of a decision made to use only timbers 250 x 250mm in varying lengths.
They share an attitude towards the symbolic qualities of material construction reminiscent
of Sigurd Lewerentz's refusal to cut a brick at St Peter's in Klippan, Sweden. Allowing cross bracing to occur in response to the wider spans of the chapel produces major shifts in
the spatial characteristics of larger and smaller volumes, between the sacred and profane realms, resulting in legible, rich and economic architecture – an economic poetry of means.