Sullivan’s Elevator Ornament: A Most Perfect Encapsulation

Nexus Network Journal, 1999

Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, 2016

2008

Architecture needs mechanisms that allow it to become connected to culture. It achieves this by continually capturing the forces that shape society. This book is a graphic guide to ornaments in the twentieth century. It unveils the function of ornament as the agent for specific affects, dismantling the idea that ornament is applied to buildings as a discrete or non-essential entity. Each case exploits specific synergies between the exterior and the interior, constructing an internal order between ornament and material. These internal orders produce expressions that are contemporary, yet whose affects are resilient in time. Initiated as a seminar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Farshid Moussavi is a partner in leading London-based firm Foreign Office Architects.

A HANDBOOK of ORNAMENT / MEYES ARCHITECTURAL BOOK PUBLISHING COMPANY New York ორნამენტის სახელმძღვანელო / СПРАВОЧНИК ОРНАМЕНТА

The Politics of the Impure, 2010

A shortened version of the second chapter of The Sympathy of Things as it was published in The Politics of the Impure (V2_NAI Publishers, 2010). It relates John Ruskin’s “Wall-Veil” to the better-known “Wall-Dress” (Gewand) of Gottfried Semper by understanding both as occurring at the intersection of matter and force. Matter tends to generate patterns in two ways, either downward or upward in dimensions, respectively surfaces breaking up into lines, or lines meshing together into surfaces. The first relates to tessellated ornament as we encounter it in the work of Owen Jones; the second to the ribboned ornamentation that we find in William Morris’s work.

Gülru Necipoglu and Alina Payne ed. Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, 2016

Crossroads: History of Science, History of Art, 2011

Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, ed. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)., 2013

Whether on clothing, furnishings, buildings, or even culinary dishes, ornament has often marked membership in particular grades and segments of society. It has distinguished sacred from profane, aristocrat from commoner, male from female, tribesman from stranger, high caste from low. Ornament is a relational device that differentiates and associates things and people, frequently marking social status by signaling affiliations and distinctions. Ornament orders.