The Principles of New Ornament

Oliver Domeisen

Ornament negotiates among several contradictory concepts, including antiquity and modernity, mechanical objectivity and artistic subjectivity, convention and expression, and the real and the ideal. – Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style, 2003

In 1892 a second edition of The Principles of Ornament by James Ward was published as an instruction manual for the students of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts. One year later, in Berlin, Alois Riegl released his seminal Stilfragen (Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, 1893). Whilst the training of architects in the artistic practice of ornamental design was commonplace in London at the time, Riegl identified an elementary human drive within precisely those ornamental practices: the Kunstwollen – the artistic impulse to adorn.

This year Dip13 will follow that impulse, once again battling our horror vacui. In view of a profession that is in danger of disintegrating into vacuous parametric accountancy, contract management and vapid environmentalism, we will reclaim the designing of architecture as an exhilarating artistic act. Dip13 will produce The Principles of New Ornament: Architectural Ornament and Ornate Architecture for the Twenty-first Century. Through ornament we will deliver architecture into the vibrant maelstrom of contemporary visual and material culture, fluctuating signification and transhistorical correspondences.

You will design iterations of potent iconographic, naturalist, materialist and geometric ornament for the London residence of one of the world’s foremost art collectors. In restoring the space of secular art to its domestic origin, and in rejecting the tyranny of the white cube, your system of ornament will fuse container and contained into a total work of art. Your ornament will manifest itself in exquisite drawings, models and material prototypes, all experimentally crafted within a painterly and sculptural sensibility that layers digital with traditional methods.

The unit will be accompanied by a Diploma History and Theory course and a series of lectures and talks by invited ornamentalists, art collectors and artists. Tristan Simmonds (founding member Arup AGU, consultant Studio Antony Gormley) will once again act as technical consultant. A Rococo monastery in Switzerland, an English castle and the Alhambra will be but a few of the pit-stops on our journey towards an architecture of beauty, meaning and complexity.

Image: James Ward – The Principles of Ornament, 1892

Unit Staff

Oliver Domeisen studied at ETH Zurich and the AA. Between 1997–2000 he worked as a project architect for Zaha Hadid; from 2000 as director of dlm ltd; from 2001/07 as AA Unit Master for Inter 9; and from 2007 for Dip 13; from 2005/07 as a Studio Master for AAVSP. He currently writes and lectures – and has curated an exhibition – on the topic of ornament. .