Far from being a nebulous experience of pure affect, ornament across world cultures consistently utilizes a fundamental visual grammar to construct a system of meaning. In this lecture, Kent Bloomer, Yale’s ornament guru for the last half century, will share his latest research on the underlying linguistic structure of world ornament, defining basic visual tropes and how they are strung together to create a narrative and connection to a larger order, or cosmos. Kent will present the use of 19th century “grammars” of ornament as a tool for constructing ornament’s vocabulary.
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Series:
Ornament’s Refracted Cosmologies
A look at ornament through the lenses of design, science, and culture.
Wed April 7, 14, & 21, 2021
All lectures to be held remotely on Zoom at 6:30 PM EST.
Moderated by Misha Semenov and Kassandra Leiva
Sponsored by Yale School of Architecture, Whitney Humanities Center, and MacMillan Center at Yale
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. 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 or system of meaning that ornament has the power to refract and project onto the built environment.