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| A decoration which is <wholey because it cannot be broken into farts. |
Since none of the parts can be separated from their surroundings, because each part acts as figure and as boundary, at several levels, this ancient carpet is whole, to an extraordinary degree.
The main purpose of ornament in the environment—in buildings, rooms, and -public spaces-—is to vuike the world more whole by knitting it together in precisely the same zvay this carpet does it.
If the patterns in this language are used correctly, then these unifying boundaries will already come into existence without ornament at almost all the scales where they are necessary in spaces and materials. It will happen in the large spaces, like the entrance transition or the building edge. And, of course, it happens of its own accord, in those smaller structures which occur within the materials themselves—in the fibers of wood, in the grain of brick and stone. But there is an intermediate range of scales, a twilight zone, where it will not happen of its own accord. It is in this range of scales that ornament fills the gap.
As far as specific ways of doing it are concerned, there are hundreds, of course. In this balustrade the ornament is made entirely of the boundary, of the space between the boards. The boards are cut in such a way, that when they are joined together in the fence, they make something of the space between them.
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| ... A balustrade. |
Here is a more complicated case—the entrance to a Romanesque church.
The ornament is built up around the edge of the entrance. It creates a unifying seam between the entrance sface and the stone. Without the ornament, there would be a gap between the arch of the entry and the passage itself: the ornament works on the seam, between the two, and holds them together. It is especially lavish and developed in this place, because just this seam—the boundary of the entrance to the church—is so important, symbolically, to the people who worship there.
In fact, doors and windows are always important for ornament, because they are places of connection between the elements of buildings and the life in and around them. It is very likely that we shall find a concentration of ornament at the edges of doors and windows, as people try to tie together these edges with the space around them.
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| 249 ORNAMENT |
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| Nubian door. |
And exactly the same happens at hundreds of other places in the environment; in rooms, around our houses, in the kitchen, on a wall, along the surface of a path, on tops of roofs, around a column—in fact, anywhere at all where there are edges between things which are imperfectly knit together, where materials or objects meet, and where they change.
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| Early American stencilling. |
Most generally of all, the thing that makes the difference in the use of ornament is the eye for the significant gap in the continuum; the place where the continuous fabric of interlock and connectivity is broken. When ornament is applied badly it is always put into some place where these connections are not really missing, so it is superfluous, frivolous. When it is well used, it is always applied in a place where there is a genuine gap, a need for a little more structure, a need for what we may call metaphorically “some extra binding energy,” to knit the stuff together where it is too much apart.
Therefore:
Search around the building, and find those edges and transitions which need emphasis or extra binding energy.
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Corners, places where materials meet, door frames, windows, main entrances, the place where one wall meets another, the garden gate, a fence—all these are natural places which call out for ornament.
Now find simple themes and apply the elements of the theme over and again to the edges and boundaries which you decide to mark. Make the ornaments work as seams along the boundaries and edges so that they knit the two sides together and make them one.
repetition
boundaries
themes
Whenever it is possible, make the ornament while you are building—not after—from the planks and boards and tiles and surfaces of which the building is actually made—wall membrane (218), FRAMES AS THICKENED EDGES (225), LAPPED OUTSIDE WALLS (234.), SOFT INSIDE WALLS (235), SOFT TILE AND
brick (248). Use color for ornament—warm colors (250) 5 use the smaller trims which cover joints as ornament—half-inch trim (24.0) j and embellish the rooms themselves with parts of your life which become the natural ornaments around you— THINGS FROM YOUR LIFE (253) . . . .
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250 WARM COLORS**
. . . this pattern helps to create and generate the right kind of GOOD MATERIALS (2O7), FLOOR SURFACE (233), SOFT INSIDE walls (235). Where possible leave the materials in their natural state, just add enough color for decoration, and to make the light inside alive and warm.
.% .j.
The greens and greys of hospitals and office corridors are depressing and cold. Natural wood, sunlight, bright colors are warm. In some way, the warmth of the colors in a room makes a great deal of difference between comfort and discomfort.
But just what are warm colors and cold colors? In a very simple minded sense, red and yellow and orange and brown are warm; blue and green and grey are cold. But, obviously, it is not true that rooms with red and yellow feel good; while rooms with blue and grey feel cold. There is some superficial truth to this simple statement: it is true that reds and browns and yellows helf to make rooms comfortable; but it is also true that white and blue and green can all make people comfortable too. After all, the sky is blue, and grass is green. Obviously, we feel comfortable out in the green grass of a meadow, under the blue sky.
The explanation is simple and fascinating. It is not the color of the things, the surfaces, which make a place warm or cold, but the color of the light. What exactly does this mean? We can estimate the color of the light at a particular point in space by holding a perfectly white surface there. If the light is warm, this surface will be slightly tinted toward the yellow-red. If the light is cold, this surface will be slightly tinted toward the blue-green. This tinting will be very slight: indeed, on a small white surface it may be so hard to see that you need a spectrometer to do it.
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But when you realize that everything in that space is lightly tinted—people’s faces, hands, shirts, dresses, food, paper, everything—it is not so hard to see that this can have a huge effect on the emotional quality that people experience there.
Now, the color of the light in a space does not depend in any simple way on the color of the surface. It depends on a complex interaction between the color of the light sources and the way this light then bounces on and off the many surfaces. In a meadow, on a spring day, the sunlight bouncing off the green grass is still warm light—that is, in the yellowish reddish range. The light in a hospital corridor, lit by fluorescent tubes, bouncing off green walls is cold light—in the green-blue range. In a room with lots of natural light, the overall light is warm. In a room whose windows face onto a grey building across the street, the light may be cold, unless there is a very strong concentration of yellow and red fabrics.