Ornament

Architecture should evolve from and express its environment in addition to expressing its particular function and creation. Ornament should not be based on precedent but rather geometry and stylized forms of nature. Architecture is as much about the Nature and the social spirit as it is about building buildings.

Humans have a biological or evolutionary predisposition for ornamentation, and considering all pleasures as biological, in which ornamentation is a natural and preferred state. Biophila is a term that has stuck with me, which describes our instinctive preference for natural forms. Historically, ornament has appealed to nature whether by applying the laws of nature (such as symmetry, proportion, and directionality) or attempting to imitate it.  I became more interested in the process of how forms in nature emerge more than what they resulted to be. I have discovered that natural tendencies in the generation of form do not only exist for individual organisms but also complex systems, such as ecologies and urban environments.

In all cases, form is generated through a stepwise process of evolutionary transformations. Aesthetics is not applied, but emerges from a process. Architecture of this condition is not reducible to an object, but rather a set of relations. When seeing ornamentally, every piece created should connect to its immediately larger and smaller substructure, establishing a total environment. Such a step-wise process requires improvising from the preceding step.

That’s where I found creativity and imagination to be essential not just for the creator, but for the viewer as well. Every time one looks at a space he or she unconsciously assesses its safety and utility. The more complex an environment, the more resources there are to assess and potentially benefit. Accordingly, an ornamental space can provide more abundant resources than an entirely ‘blank’ space from which patterns can be recognized and used as a basis for the ability to make predictions and form expectations. Consequently, it should be encouraged to adorn the world through a variety of different temporal and spatial scales. Ornamentation, thus, can promote pattern-forming abilities that help increase the capacity to be aware of the scalar information and create connections.

Instead of beginning a drawing or design with a predictable outcome, I attempt to construct spatial relations by situational associations, or local conditions. This open-endedness in the generative process introduces an element of risk. There is not a guarantee as to what the outcome will be. Today, much of the environment is designed to say ‘everything is ok’, and society’s perception of the world remains unaffected. The trend of reducing risk and increasing efficiency has also resulted in the decline of imagination and intuition as a human condition. For this reason, Architecture should do less of trying to predict how users will interact with a space, but rather produce offerings or fragments of what might make sense and challenge the viewers to interpret or question its meaning. I challenge the fact that architects should produce a definite final object, but can rather something open and incomplete as a way to inject spontaneity and unpredictability into the world.