THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT AND DECORATION.pdf
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1、INTRODUCTION Urban design, the art of city building, is concerned with the methods used to organize and structure the urban realm as distinct from the detailed design of the private domain. This book deals with one aspect of urban design: the role, function and form of ornament and decoration in the
2、 city. The book is written from the perspective that all development should be judged as an attempt to decorate the city. Alexander has suggested that each increment of development should aim to heal or make whole the city (Alexander, 1987). The thesis presented here accepts this notion but advocate
3、s the primacy of ornament and decoration in the process of unify- ing parts of the city into comprehensive wholes. The thesis that each increment of development should be seen as an attempt to decorate the city does not conflict with the idea that urban develop- ment results from consideration of su
4、ch practical matters as function, use, cost, economic location and available finance: the city would stagnate and die without due consideration being given to these prerequisites of development. However, having solved the practicalities of development, the ultimate criterion for evaluating any addit
5、ion to the city is whether that increment decorates the city. Ornament and decoration, when used to heal the city has three interrelated functions. They are: to go beyond the decoration of individual buildings and to enrich the decorative themes of a locality; to enhance the physical, social and spi
6、ritual qualities of location, that is, to strengthen the genius loci, and thirdly to develop the legibility and imageability of the city. Prior to the twentieth century, the conscious effort to decorate was an intrinsic part of large scale development (Figure 1.1). In the twenti- eth century, with e
7、xceptions, it would appear the primacy of decoration has been replaced in urban development by other, mainly economic interests. It may be that we have to look back to the past to rediscover the rationale for decoration. Without such a rationale, decoration and ornament in the city may be seen as fu
8、ssy, precious and florid, a veneer to cover cheap and shoddy development. For the purpose of this book, ornament and decoration will be taken to mean the ways in which the main elements within the city are arranged to form a pleasing and memorable pattern. The analysis of ornamentation and decoratio
9、n in the city will be structured around Lynchs notion of urban legibility (Lynch, 1960). The text will therefore be based upon the five components Lynch suggested as being key to imageability: the path, the node, the edge, the 1 THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT AND DECORATION 1 landmark and the dis
10、trict. The legible city, that is, the city easily visualized in the minds eye has, according to Lynch, a clearly defined, easily recognized and distinctive perceptual structure. To a certain degree the reading or understanding of a city is personal but with a clearly structured city, the result, it
11、is argued, is a city population with a shared set of images. It is this shared image which is one of the concerns of urban design. This book explores the possibility for ornament and decoration to emphasize and clarify the five components and so strengthen the citys image and enhance its attraction
12、for citizen and visitor. The two words decoration and ornament appear in the title of this book. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, both words have a similar meaning: embellishment. Decoration, however, has everyday associations: one decorates the home, the living room, the Christma
13、s tree, or the wedding cake. Ornament, on the other hand, has more formal overtones: the ornamental work associated with certain architectural styles or the work of individual architects. This book accepts this subtle difference in meaning and uses ornament to mean the installation of sculpture, fou
14、ntains, obelisks and similar features into the urban scene. Decoration is used to describe populist activities such as the placing of gnomes in the front garden, topiary work or decorating the city for festivals such as Christmas and Diwali. Obviously there are large areas of overlap: a precise boun
15、dary between formal ornamentation and informal decoration is not possible, nor indeed, would it be desirable. Figure 1.1 Decorative railings, Nancy U R B A N D E S I G N : O R N A M E N T A N D D E C O R A T I O N 2 Camillo Sitte, a Viennese architect writing in the 1890s, argued that the main ornam
16、ents of a city are its streets and squares (Sitte, 1901). Others would no doubt, add to Sittes list of city ornaments and include, for example, parks, waterways and its main civic buildings. Even within his apparently limited palette Sitte was deeply concerned with the embell- ishment of streets and
17、 squares. He made an exhaus- tive analysis of the location of sculpture and fountains in urban spaces. He was equally concerned with the badly sited public building which, in his view, debased the urban scene. The great piece of sculpture or elaborate fountain are not the only features that decorate
18、 the city streets and squares. More mundanely, but of great importance for the quality of the urban scene, are items of street furni- ture such as telephone boxes, railings, signs and seats, or soft landscape features such as trees and shrubs. Adshead writing in 1911 made this important point about
19、the furnishing of the street: We must bear in mind that all objects in the street utilitarian or otherwise are things to be seen parts of an organic whole, each having their respective part and place. Olympus, Athens and Rome were each crowded with such objects, arranged for the most part in picture
20、sque association (Adshead, 1911a). DECORATION FOR VISUAL PLEASURE The most obvious, and perhaps the most important, dimension of decoration is its contribution to formal qualities, such as visual order or unity, proportion, scale, contrast, balance and rhythm. Ornament and decoration also have the c
21、apacity to unleash feelings, trigger reactions, feed the memory and stimulate the imagination. Decoration at one level is an activity giving visual pleasure, a formal physical process for visual delight; an activity for its own sake requiring no outside or higher authority to justify its existence.
22、Attitudes to the embellishment of cities with ornament and decoration range from a puritanical iconoclasm which sees such embellishment as decadent and pernicious, to one of joyous pleasure in the experience of complex, intricate and extrava- gant patterning. The Modern Movement (or movements) in ar
23、chitecture, epitomized by the writings of Le Corbusier, the pronouncements of CIAM, the work of the Bauhaus together with the much criticized post-Second World War city devel- opments in Europe, collectively reflect a time when ornament and decoration in architecture was eschewed. In Britain, the Mo
24、dern Movement in architecture can be seen as a reaction to the over- elaborate, and some would say debased, work of the nineteenth-century architects and their twenti- eth-century followers. Pugin writing in the mid- nineteenth century attacked much that he saw as vulgar in works of his own day, des
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