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Function
of Ornament, edited by Farshid Moussavi
and Michael Kubo.
Any book that purports to be "a
graphic guide to ornaments in the twentieth century"
is bound to be looked at not only in terms of what it includes
but what it omits. The 42 building facades presented in
this thoroughly- and beautifully-illustrated book (produced
from a 2006 studio in the Harvard
GSD) do an excellent job in giving a broad overview
of the various materials and affects achieved by mostly
contemporary buildings, while not being (or pretending to
be) completely thorough. Not surprisingly, Herzog &
de Meuron top the list of repeaters with eight designs featured
(almost a fifth of the total), and Toyo Ito follows with
three. Those with two designs featured include Jun Aoki,
Foreign Office Architects, Jean Nouvel, Eero Saarinen, SOM,
and Frank Lloyd Wright. This list -- and the format of the
book that breaks the projects into four categories: form,
structure, screen, and skin -- shows a contemporary preference
or progression from facades dictated by form or structure
to those independent of the building behind, veering from
layered transitions between outside and inside to total
independence.
Farshid Moussavi's introduction frames
the consistent representations
of affects, sections, and diagrams that follow within the
architect's increasingly-diminished responsibilities (in
many cases solely the facade) and the responsibility
of architects to confront head on the culture in which they
work. Therefore, based on what designs are included,
this book addresses basically a Western culture, one that
extends to Japan but features only two other projects outside
Europe and the United States. If the importance of cultural
expression is as important as Moussavi states in her introduction,
perhaps a broader range of contexts should have been presented
to illustrate how that goal can be addressed and achieved
successfully. A fitting example would be Geoffrey Bawa's
deeply-layered
facades in his native Sri Lanka, facades which balance
Modernism and local materials, crafts, and traditions. This
is less an absolute critique of the book than a suggestion
for potential future studio projects, as one of the wonderful
aspects of this book is its repeatability and the hope for
future editions or volumes that expand on this very promising
beginning.
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