The Modern Movement in architecture had scarcely succeeded in abolishing ornament before people began to speculate about how and when it would return. In Britain, the historian Sir John Summerson, as a young journalist, found it hard to believe that architecture would be able to communicate without it beyond the initial period of purification which he and many others believed was a necessary transitional phase. In 1935, the Peter Jones store was fitted with outward-opening bronze casements in its ‘curtain wall’ with only sections of blank wall behind them, and the architects suggested that not only could the walls be repainted periodically in different colours, but also that patterned wallpaper could be used to dress up the building (it never happened, but it is not too late to try). Osbert Lancaster, more predictably, broadcast in 1951 to celebrate the death of modern architecture and the recovery of ornament in the Festival of Britain, and was denounced by the Architects’ Journal for this heresy. It seems he was far too far ahead of the slow-moving guardians of architectural righteousness.
It remains a paradox that a movement which allowed architects the freedom to do whatever they wanted put so many exclusions in the small print, ornament among them. If Post-Modernism in the 1970s looked as if it had torn up this contract, the shallowness of the messages associated with the movement was matched only by the poor quality of construction through which such messages were communicated.
The London architectural practice of Caruso St John, the subject of an exhibition at the Architectural Association (until 3 November), recently began a return to ornament that differs from the toy-brick simplifications of Post-Modernism. The results will be seen more in future projects than in anything so far visible, but it is potentially an exciting move from the heart of the compound of intellectual architecture. For their proposed front extension of the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, they have designed geometrical panels of marble veneer, evoking the mid-Victorian Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones. For an office building at King’s Cross, they propose that the side faces of the projecting vertical fins dividing the windows should carry a light-relief pattern based on plant forms. In their exhibition, they place reproductions of drawings for Clouds, a house by Philip Webb that matches their own rather solemn approach to design and construction.
The essays and building descriptions in an excellent new book, As Built: Caruso St John Architects (a+t ediciones, Vitoria-Gasteiz, £26, available from The Triangle Bookshop at the AA, 36 Bedford Square, WC1), explain that while they are interested in history, they do not contemplate stepping right into it. Such has been the view of many of the best modernist architects of the past 100 years, so that an alternative pantheon of Janus-faced heroes is already well populated. For Caruso St John, the selection of sources is defined partly by personal choice, but also by the context of each job. The relatively unchanging facts of building, combined with a love of materials, determines their suspicion of novelty for its own sake. The way the building is made is part of its meaning, and ornament is one way of extending that meaning. Without being overtly green, they are worried about the short-termism of so much current construction.
Their ‘Brick House’, squeezed into a backyard site in west London, is ingenious and nothing if not bricky. Their design for repaving the main square of Kalmar in Sweden avoids the tweeness to which cobblestones are prone, without resorting to the uniform banality which seems usually to be the only alternative on offer. Their largest building to date has been the New Art Gallery in Walsall (see Spectator, 10 October 1999). Their project for the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Lace Market in Nottingham (due for completion in 2008) is a latecomer in the sequence of recent gallery projects in Britain, but promises to be one of the best, and will have a delicate web of pattern across its surface.
On 2 November, Adam Caruso will be one of two architects discussing Architecture and Ornament at an evening event at the V&A. Does this mean that it has suddenly come in from the cold? While tolerance towards ornament is surely welcome, a sudden fashion for it could quickly become as self-defeating as Post-Modernism. If some lovers of older architectures regret that modern architecture ever happened, the fatal mistake was made much earlier, with the onset of rationalism and the Enlightenment, when ornament began to be conceived as separate from structure, and hence optional and secondary.
It will require a great effort of imagination to cease thinking of ornament as an add-on to buildings, when it should be as natural as the flower on the end of its stem. Without such a conceptual shift, ornament will last no better than cut flowers, for the enduring quality found in ornament comes from an internalisation of the processes that make form in nature rather than a reproduction of a model — the vital difference between William Morris and Owen Jones, both of whom Caruso St John ‘quote’ visually. Although apparently still enamoured of mechanical form, they seem ready to take this further step into the water.
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