For more than a century, ornament in architecture was anathema in the Calvinist Netherlands—and elsewhere too. In his book Building as Ornament: Iconography in Contemporary Architecture, Michiel van Raaij, who is the editor in chief of the online architecture platform Architectenweb, interviews 10 well-known architects and architectural historians to reveal how this attitude has changed since the 1990s.
The moralism of modernism, though, has not yet completely disappeared: “A successful ornament,” writes van Raaij, “represents a virtue and explains the function, status, structure and context of the building.” An entire building on the scale of an ornament is one thing, but ornament for its own sake, in other words, is still not accepted by many practitioners.
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