assembly arms, and CNC mills, or sometimes con-
structed through conventional means.
The Function of Ornament
FARSHID MOUSSAVI and MICHAEL KUBO, editors
Harvard University Graduate School of Design and
Actar, 2006
190 pages, illustrated
$29.95 (paper)
Perhaps you have noticed—ornament is back. Not
kitsch classicism or postmodern heraldry but geo-
metric patterns etched into facades, punched into
rainscreens, and tessellated on tiled walls. Repetitive
or self-similar patterns are modeled in 3D software,
then output through lasers, waterjets, robotic
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What is the meaning of these patterns? How
can I make them? If you have been asking these
questions, you have probably noticed The Function
of Ornament, a handbook for architects and students
seeking to use and understand this new ornamental
work. An essay by Farshid Moussavi prefaces forty-
two case studies drawn primarily from contemporary
architecture and analyzed by students in a studio
Moussavi taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design. Each project is documented in a pair of
two-page spreads, the first a close-up elevation or
perspective and the second filled with annotated
diagrams and details including a sectional perspec-
tive. Sorted according to whether they consist of
form, structure, screen, or surface, and further by
what materials they employ and what effects they
produce, the case studies are presented as species in
a taxonomy of affective architecture.
The result is a handy primer on recent proj-
ects like the de Young Museum by Herzog & de
Meuron or the John Lewis Department Store by
Foreign Office Architects, the firm Moussavi heads
with Alejandro Zaera-Polo. The work of gathering
documentation of all these buildings in one conve-
nient place is valuable since there is no other single
source that so broadly covers the new phenomenon
of patterned facades. While the sectional perspec-
tives do not always contain enough detail for us to
understand precisely how these buildings come
together, some are detailed enough to be of real use
to students in advanced building systems courses and
design studios.
Less successful are the close-ups, which rarely
convey anything not found in the sectional per-
spectives. Instead, they establish a rhythm that
allows readers to oscillate between close study and
browsing. This choice reflects Moussavi’s interpre-
tive intentions: that these recent pattern projects
represent a renewed abstraction in which ornament
engages individuals, cities, and culture through
affective means. Moussavi characterizes ornament
as the means by which architects today produce
sensations and affects, in contrast to such prior
architectural modalities as modernist transparency
and postmodernist signification. By stimulating
new forms of experience, she asserts, affective
ornament allows architecture ‘‘to constantly engage
the city in new ways’’ and to ‘‘remain convergent
with culture.’’
Affect can refer to a mental state, an emotion,
or a mood, and affects can range from the mild, such
as the ennui we feel near the end of a long trip, to the
extreme, such as the bodily recoil provoked by rotten
food. The prominence of affect indicates the editors’
desire to reconceptualize architecture in terms
derived from the philosophical work of Deleuze and
Guattari, who characterized the artwork as a reconfi-
guration of material to produce a ‘‘compound of
percepts and affects’’ breaking free of signification.
The problem is that when Moussavi says ‘‘affect,’’
she seems to mean simply ‘‘effect.’’
Take the example of 30 St. Mary Axe, the office
tower Foster & Partners designed for reinsurance
company Swiss Re. Moussavi categorizes this build-
ing as a form that uses construction to create a spiral
affect. But in what sense of the term is ‘‘spiral’’ an
affect? And how does the building’s spiralness help it
engage the city or culture? There are richer percep-
tual and emotional resonances in this building, pop-
ularly known as the ‘‘erotic gherkin,’’ than those
evoked by the spiral pattern of its glazing. Diagrams
capturing the shape and facxade pattern of the tower
show how its spiraling atriums channel airflow, but
they strip the building of attributes important to its
cultural and urbanistic significance, such as the dis-
tinctive visual relationships its atriums create
between the interior and the city.
To talk about the building’s relation to culture,
we could start with its technocratic roots in the
ecological design practice of Buckminster Fuller, one
of Foster’s mentors. Or we could focus on the fact
that the building occupies a site cleared by an Irish
Republican Army bombing and so symbolizes the role
Swiss Re played in implementing a new system of
counterterrorism insurance. If you worked in
London’s financial district and walked past this
building on a daily basis, would not its combination
of standoff, structural heroics, transparency, and
geometric purity send a chill down your spine as you
felt vibrating through your body the play of anxiety
and confidence it inspires? Moussavi’s approach
obscures the building’s relation to culture and the
city and even to architecture’s affective capacities.
There are other instances where the limits of
Moussavi’s method become especially clear, such as
the Prada Aoyama Epicenter, the Atrium at Federa-
tion Square, Eberswalde Technical Institute Library—
even the Lewis Store, which relies for effect on the
counterpoint between arabesques in mirrored glass
and ceramic frit, and so uses perceptual sizzle to set
up a semiotic payoff. The Function of Ornament is
not a taxonomy of affects but a catalogue of visual
effects stripped of their emotional power. The book is
a great point of entry to a compelling territory of
contemporary architectural production, and it will
help you detail the rainscreen on your next project.
But it deflects attention from what is essential in
these innovative buildings, banalizing ‘‘affect’’ while
obscuring architecture’s rich array of urban, cultural,
and emotional impacts.
Jonathan Massey
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