CANCELED: Making Ornament: Past, Present, Future

What is the role of ornament in the contemporary built environment? The return of ornament to architectural discourse–and to building facades around the globe–also comes at a time of a vastly expanded scientific understanding of our complex world, from the neural networks that enable our perception and cognition to the vast ecological and cosmological structures we are embedded in. By bringing designers, neuroscientists, ecologists, musicians, and ornament fabricators into conversation with each other, the colloquium aims to lay out a role for ornament in the contemporary built environment as something more than a mere producer of “affect,” as Farshid Moussavi reductively implied in her recent book on The Function of Ornament. We see ornament as a rich language with a deep history that can act as an interdisciplinary intermediary, linking architecture with larger understandings of the world and our place in it. Each of the four lectures explores a different cosmology that ornament has the power to refract and project onto the built environment.
Refreshments and appetizers will be served.
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