Title: Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local
Abstract: ... Twenty-five insightful scholars have ‘ornamented’ Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local to offer alternative narratives to the mainstream definitions of what ornament is and can be. The editors, Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne, have divided the book into seven thematic parts encompassing twenty-six chapters that, despite their number, remain theoretically cohesive and highly interconnected. The chapters avoid an overarching definition of ornament to demonstrate the multitude of trajectories that have produced ideas of ‘ornament’ historically. It seems the authors intended to make Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect who claimed ‘ornament was a crime’ (p. 1), roll over in his grave. Authors often quote him and deal with him severely to explain not only that ‘ornament is back’ (p. 20), but also that it never really left (p. 334). The introduction by Necipoĝlu and Payne challenges the homogeneity implied by the categorization of ornament. They see this homogeneity linked to globalization and the limitations of the Euro-American perspective on ornament. Therefore, they have given special attention to Islamic ornament and the effects of global encounters with European ornament culture. They address the ‘imbrication of the two styles’ (p. 5) to show how Euro-American perspectives have restrained ornament within notions of the arabesque. In the book, the first and second chapters engage with the concepts of surface and ornament. The first chapter, ‘Ornament and Its Users: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital Age’, by Antoine Picon, questions the politics of ornament, while chapter two, ‘A Natural History of Ornament’, by Vittoria Di Palma, addresses the affective and communicative qualities of the topic. Both chapters draw from the work of Herzborg & de Meuron to exemplify the change in the semiotics of ornament that encourages viewers to go beyond the visual experience and brave tactile encounters with ornament. The third chapter, ‘Inscription: On the Surface of Exchange between Writing, Ornament and Tectonic in Contemporary Architecture’, by Hashim Sarkis, furthers the idea of surface by exploring the works of Zaha Hadid to show how ‘the lines are blurred between… architect and viewer’ (p. 43).
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-02-23
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 32
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