The origins of architectural modernism

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What happened to decoration when modernism arrived? Alina Payne expertly guides the reader through an evolutionary history

From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism by Alina Payne

Alina Payne’s From Ornament to Object is a clearly written and generously illustrated book about the fluctuating status of the object within art, design and architectural histories. Challenging the widely held assumption that architectural ornament simply vanished in the early decades of the 20th century (following the death knell sounded by Austrian architect Adolf Loos’ 1908 essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’), Payne argues that the decoration on the exteriors of buildings did not disappear, but was either absorbed into the architecture itself or became the portable objects and furnishings of modern interiors.

Confidently leading her reader through a dense history of theories reaching as far back as the Renaissance, she traces the journey of ornament from its separation from architecture to its reintegration as indicators of style, function and process – the ‘nerve endings’ of culture. The study proposes that the roots of 20th-century modernist design are to be found in the rich and lively debates that took place in the previous century, especially in Germany, Austria and Britain.

The introduction opens with the example of Ferdinand Léger’s semi-abstract painting of a baluster that was included in Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s ‘Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau’at theParis Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. Here Payne highlights the persistence of ornament within modern architecture, and links this to a concept of ‘ornament-as-object’ that emerged within earlier European theories of art and craft. She considers its origins, identifying a gradual shift from decorative or sculptural ornament to a functional theory of objects in the work of architects, designers and art historians from the late 18th century onwards (and whose own ideas stem from a longer tradition of writing about ornament, from Vasari in the 16th century to Kant in the 18th). The book is ‘a history of the theory that developed around objects and drew them together with architecture’. More than that, it shows that underpinning this history is a longstanding fascination with human behaviour and the social production of ‘things’.

While an invaluable resource for students and scholars, Payne’s book is also an accessible introduction to art, design and architectural theories of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including a range of German-language texts. From the works of such thinkers as Gottfried Semper, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg and Le Corbusier, to those of lesser-known contemporaries such as Adolf Göller, Jacob von Falke, August Schmarsow and Richard Streiter, the study expertly teases out shared concerns and productive disagreements. Nearly all were concerned with the relationship of objects to their producers and modes of production, and turned to art and craft of ‘primitive’ cultures for examples. Payne identifies a strong anthropological (at times ethnographic) vein running through these and other object-oriented studies. She explores encyclopaedic volumes that include everything from tattoos and clothing to containers and tools – all material extensions of the human body and cultural activity.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to developments in Vienna and Berlin, recalling that ‘Kunstindustrie’ (objects of daily use)became the ‘rallying cry of the central European version of the [British] Arts and Crafts movement’. The mid-19th-century International Exhibitions, with their competitive commercial climate, influenced historians, architects, designers and theorists in Britain and France, as well as Germany and Austria.

Gottfried Semper, a German architect and art historian who moved to London in 1850 and became directly involved in the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, was to play a pivotal role in the shift ‘from ornament to object’. Suddenly exposed to craft and industry on a global scale, Semper, along with British design reformers such as Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser, was inspired to rethink the categories of art, design and architecture according to more universal principles of object-making. Semper’s Der Stil (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts) was published in 1878. It outlined his theory of ornament as a direct evolution of the materials and processes available to specific cultures throughout history. This allowed ornament to be considered in relation to architecture and building, as well as to portable domestic objects.

Payne follows the trajectory of Semper’s influence through the work of Riegl, Wölfflin and (in a very different way), Warburg, further exploring the complex relationship between humans and objects. The interdisciplinary spirit of the period is made apparent, with art historians and museum curators drawing on ‘aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, folk studies, history, psychology, economics, and the museum’ in order to effectively connect the spheres of art and life. Rather than stopping short at the turn of the century, Payne’s study reveals these earlier works as the bedrock of 20th-century architectural theory and practice. Joining two traditionally opposed schools, she overturns a simplistic reading of Hermann Muthesius, Loos, Le Corbusier  and the Bauhaus as proponents of a modernist rejection of architectural ornament. Instead, she sees their legacy as the culmination of thinking about objects in relation to the body, space and function.

From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism  by Alina Payneis published by Yale University Press 2012. 360 pp. 62 colour/108 mono illus. ISBN 9780300175332