The human urge to add ornament to buildings and indeed our own bodies, goes back millennia, and is evident in a wide range of different cultures. In many architectural traditions ornament conveyed important symbolism and a deeper cultural significance. In the hands of adept designers, it was also often an integral part of the articulation and vocabulary of architecture – used to provide relief, shadow, meaning and sometimes humour.

And yet from the late nineteenth-century onwards, the Western architectural tradition increasingly coalesced around a belief that ornament on buildings was not just to be discouraged, but was perhaps even immoral.

Louis Sullivan was highly skilled in architectural ornamentation, and had a huge influence on Frank Lloyd Wright’s often highly ornate early buildings. But in 1892 he wrote that “it would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years”. He was articulating a growing view at the time that architectural ornamentation had become debased by the overblown eclecticism of much nineteenth-century design. 

…