Podcasts
Neil Forrest NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
This podcast is intended for educational use only.
Ornament has re-emerged as a legitimate artistic framework, but its historical appearance is no longer relevant for contemporary expression. Today's architecture has revived ornament's prerequisite: diversity and variance. By reaching beyond formal design and construction issues, contemporary architecture can be a crucible for innovation in craft media.
Ornament has been a cultural prosthetic, a visual language that implies action and replaces movement and words. The ornaments of traditional architecture were slender organizational layers of beautifully crafted materials, which mediated vistas and enclosures, and fashioned remarkably hybrid and complex spaces. Roaming from narrative to abstract, ornament provided the fundaments of rhythm, measurement and speech in the precincts of practical objects and in our buildings. The next incarnation of ornament will not use imagery, but involve a dramatic transformation of the media, its functionalities and content from craft perspectives.
Today, reflexive, kinetic and experimental architectures proliferate, and craft practice is in an opportune position to contribute. Collaborations should reach beyond the studios of craft and architecture to embrace relationships with ecologists, botanists, ornithologists, biologists, physicians, engineers and other specialists.
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L'auteur explore la tradition ornemantale dansl'architecture du passé, et la ré-émergence de l'ornementation dans l'architecture d'aujourd'hui. Il adresse certaines des charactéristiques distinctives et fondamentalement différentes de cette ornementation dans l'architecture contemporaine.