The values that are associated with colour (yellow and red, for instance, are called “gay,” black and deep blue “sombre”) are independent of materials and forms, and they give architects a range of expression not provided by other means at their disposal. A different expressive device is provided by the great range of light reflection in the colour scale. Colours that reflect light brilliantly appear to advance toward the viewer, and those that absorb light appear to recede; the degree of projection and recession of architectural forms may be altered, emphasized, or subdued by the colours of their surfaces. Environment
Architecture, unlike most of the other arts, is not often conceived independently of particular surroundings. The problems of design extend beyond the organizing of space and mass complexes to include the relating of the total form to its natural and architectural environment.
In site planning, a primary function of architectural design, the architect aims to create harmonies with preexisting elements in the landscape and “townscape.”
But the province of the architect is not limited to the conception of single structures in harmony with a given setting. Throughout history, architects have been employed in giving a new form to the environment itself: planning the natural surroundings by the design of parks, roadways, waterways, etc.; designing complexes of related buildings; and organizing the urban environment into areas of residence, recreation, assembly, commerce, etc., both to increase their utility and to give them unique expressive qualities through the interrelationship of groups of buildings to the open areas about them. James S. Ackerman Ornament
Although it would be difficult to cover in any single definition all conceptions, past and present, of what constitutes ornament in architecture, three basic and fairly distinct categories may be recognized: mimetic, or imitative, ornament, the forms of which have certain definite meanings or symbolic significance; applied ornament, intended to add beauty to a structure but extrinsic to it; and organic ornament, inherent in the building’s function or materials. Mimetic ornament
Although it is still found today, mimetic ornament is by far the commonest type of architectural ornament in primitive cultures, in Asian civilizations, and generally throughout antiquity. It grows out of what seems to be a universal human reaction to technological change: the tendency to reproduce in new materials and techniques shapes and qualities familiar from past usage, regardless of appropriateness. This tendency may be called the principle of mimesis. Most common building types in antiquity, both East and West (e.g., tombs, pyramids, temples, towers), began as imitations of primeval house and shrine forms. An obvious example is the dome, which developed as a permanent wooden or stone reproduction of a revered form originally built of pliable materials. In the mature stages of early civilizations, building types tended to evolve beyond primitive prototypes; their ornament, however, usually remained based on such models. Decorative motifs derived from earlier structural and symbolic forms are innumerable and universal. In developed Indian and Chinese architecture, domical and other originally structural forms occur often and lavishly as ornament. In ancient Egypt, architectural details continued to preserve faithfully the appearance of bundled papyrus shafts and similar early building forms. In ancient Mesopotamia, brick walls long imitated the effect of primitive mud-and-reed construction. In the carved-stone details of the Greco-Roman orders (e.g., capitals, entablatures, moldings), the precedent of archaic construction in wood was always clearly discernible.
papyrus columnsPapyrus columns from a temple at Karnak, Egypt.Katherine Young/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The prevalence of mimetic ornament in architecture may be explained in two ways. Some (perhaps most in primitive cultures) is religious in origin. Certain forms and shapes, through long association with religious rites, became sacred and were preserved and reproduced for their symbolic value. These forms continued to be understood even though they were often stylized into abstract or geometric patterns, unrecognizably removed from their naturalistic models. Much mimetic ornament, however, even in early times, can be ascribed simply to inertia or conservatism. People have generally tended to resist change; they find it reassuring to be surrounded by known and familiar forms. Reproducing them as ornament on newly introduced forms is a common reaction to the vague feeling of uneasiness that rapid social and technological change induces; it provides a satisfying sense of continuity between the past and the present. This resistance was a factor in the 19th- and early 20th-century practice of disguising new techniques of construction in metal and glass by an overload of ornament imitating earlier styles. Applied ornament
Architectural ornament in the 19th century exemplified the common tendency for mimetic ornament, in all times and places, to turn into mere applied decoration, lacking either symbolic meaning or reference to the structure on which it is placed. By the 5th century bce in Greece, the details of the orders had largely lost whatever conscious symbolic or structural significance they may have had; they became simply decorative elements extrinsic to the structure. The Doric frieze is a good case: its origin (i.e., an imitation of the effect of alternating beam ends and shuttered openings in archaic wood construction) remained evident, but it came to be treated as a decorative sheath without reference to the actual structural forms behind. In losing their mimetic character, the details of the Greek orders acquired a new function; they served to articulate or unify the building visually, organizing it into a series of coordinated visual units that could be comprehended as an integrated whole, rather than as a collection of isolated units. This concept of applied decoration was passed on through the Greco-Roman period. The triumphal arch of Rome, with its system of decorative columns and entablature articulating what is essentially one massive shape, is a particularly good illustration; the Colosseum is another. Most of the great architecture of the Renaissance and Baroque periods depends on it; to a large extent, the difference between these styles is the difference in decoration. The characteristic serenity and balance of Filippo Brunelleschi’s architecture in the 15th century, for example, is very largely effected by his treatment of pilasters (rectangular ornamental columns with bases and capitals) and entablatures applied to them, whereas, in 16th-century wall-surface designs such as Michelangelo’s Medici chapel or the dome of St. Peter’s, the same elements are used in different combinations to create a quite opposite effect of tension and release.
Marble tomb of Giuliano de' Medici by Michelangelo, 1520–34; in the Medici Chapel, San Lorenzo, Florence.Wojciech Stróżyk/Alamy
Judicious and intelligent use of applied ornament remained characteristic of most Western architecture until the 19th century, when the rationale of applied ornament frequently broke down, and an often indiscriminate and inappropriate use of decoration became characteristic. The reasons for this development are complex. In part it was a reaction to an overly rapid pace of social change during the period; partly, also, it was a logical outgrowth of the increasingly lavish decoration of late Baroque and Rococo architecture in the 18th century. Also, there was an overemphasis on the purely literary and associative values attached to the ornament characteristic of historical architectural styles. But compounding all these factors was the development of machinery, such as multiple lathes and jigs, which provided builders with cheap prefabricated ornament to give their often shoddy and ill-proportioned structures an illusion of elegance. Architectural ornament and architectural forms proper tended to part company and to be designed quite independently of each other. Organic ornament