A short essay on ornament and fear in the nineteenth century

Ghoche, Ralph

English

Columbia University Academic Commons

-• _. . ✓ ••••• ... ► • , ., • • ' • -· .. • • • '" • . • -i - • ·~ • • ~ - . I • " . Covef !-: ; . • • • ' . , ~ * Q) cc Q) • N -· • No.·42-·S I S.2Q16 :, CD Run for Cover! 02 Dreadful Design Jennife r Sigler 06 Wide Open Nancy Etcoff 08 Fortress London: The Ne US Embassy and the Rise of Counter-Terror Urbanism Oliver Wainwright 14 Feeling Invaded John Kuo Wei Tchen 16 Gimme Shelter: Refugee Architecture in Germany Niklas Maa k 24 Phobia and the City: Rome Lars Lcrup 33 Holding Fear Sonja Diimpc lmann 34 Unsettling Unsettlements Mar ianne F. Potvin 36 Anthropocenophobia: The Stone Falls on the City Renata Tyszczuk 43 Solitary in Solidarity Danie l D'Oca 44 Fear Ebbs on the Skyline but Rises on the Ground Blair Kamin 46 Get Me Out of Here : The Solemn Geography of Women in Horror Film Caryn Co leman 52 Reading Jane Jabobs in th Era of #BlacklivesMatter Stuart Schrader 54 Un-War Krzysztof Wod iczko 57 Animal Eyes & Invisible Hunters Eugenic Shinkle 64 Fearful Asymmetry : Insurgency and the Architectures of Terror Joshua Comaroff No. 42 S/S 2016 72 i::>ie Noctuque Enrique Ramirez 74 A Certain Darkness Demdike Stare & Robert Gerard Piet rusko 79 Who's Afraid of the Covered Face? Maryam Monalisa Gharav i 80 Artifacts of Exclusion Inter boro Part ners 86 Fear Is in the Detail Francesca Hughes & Gerge ly Kovacs 94 The Iconic Ghetto and the Stigma of Blackness Elijah Anderso n 97 A Toxic Patrimony Dan Bore lli 98 The Green Zone: Architec-tures of Precarious Politics Amin Alsaden 104 How to Draw Medellin Alejandro Echeverri & Alejandro Valdivieso 114 Mortal Cities Arna Mackie 116 Bringing Back the Front: Relieving the Great War J ustin Fowler 123 Home Safe Geoff Manaugh 124 The Fall of Postmodernism and the New Empowerment Michae l Murphy 132 Building for the Total Breakdown Jacob Lillemose 138 A State of Emergency Leopo ld Lambert 146 Conflict Urbanism, Aleppo Laura Kurga n 148 Nuclear Pillowcases Andrew Wasserman 151 The Real Move Elizabeth Streb & Chelsea Spence r 160 Fear, Faith, and Disaster Preparedness Ar if Khan 162 The House of One: Facing Fear Lara Schr ijvcr 170 Pastiche of Ghosts Meta haven 173 Second Nature Ralph G hochc 174 Suspunk: Think ing with Suspicious Packages Javier Arbona, Bryan Finocki, Nick Sowers 180 The Horror, the Horror Bart Lootsma 182 Robert Smithson, Evel Knievel, and the Landscape of Reclamation Edwar d Eigcn 194 Kites Reginald Dwayne Betts 197 Feared Spaces, Feared Bodies Toni L. Gr iffin 198 Fear, Fire, and Forty-One Snakes: Notes on the Burning Theater Thomas A. P. Van Lee uwen 207 Ambiguous Thresholds Nutt inee Karnc hanaporn Second Nature Left: Georges Farcy, interior of the architect's house on rue Vill aret-Joyeuse, Paris, 1904. Right: H ector Gu imard, Paris Metro, detail, 1899. Ralph Ghoche is a historian of architecture and urbanism. His work focuses on 19th-century French architecture and its relationship to theories of orn~ment, archeology, and aesthetics. He holds profes sional and post-profe ssional degrees in architec-ture from McGill University and a PhD i~ a Architectural History and Theory from Columbia University. He teaches at Barnard College. No. 42 / Run for Cover! Imagine these bizarre garlands detached from the wall they are decorating and laid out on a table like a real object. It would send a shiver up one 's spine. - Paul Souriau, L 'Jmagination de /'artiste (1901) The 19th-century eye abhorred abstractions. The most taciturn of figures-a simple line-could bring to mind a legion of objects and resem-blances. "Form is always the form of something," the philosopher Victor Cousin was known to repeat. For the aesthetician Paul Souriau, even an object as impassive as a couch had an "expres-sive attitude, a physiognomy." He believed that ornamental ists could capitalize on the mind 's propensity to an imate objects, transforming, for example, the leg of a table into the claw of a predator. But he cautioned his readers: accidental patterns in wood or marble can easily transform into hallucinatory nightmares , unwit-tingly giving life to "a profusion of deformed and frightening monsters ." Fear played a critical part in conceptions of orn ament in the 19th century. In aesthetic circles, fear of ornament was matched only by the fear of lack of ornament-by what art historian Alois Rieg! termed a "horror vacui." By most accounts of the time, ornament first emerged as a re-sponse to a primitive terror of nature. It was a recoiling from the external world, a way to bring order to the dizzying chaos. Primitive man was seen to be possessed by an ornamental impulse that impelled him to adorn every available sur-face, from his own skin to objects of daily use. But the theorists who established these originary narratives were no doubt writing his-tory in their favor: no moment in time produced 173 Ralph Ghoche as much ornament as the 19th century. Archi-tecture , the non-mimetic art form par excellence, was overwhelmed by vividly figurative forms: fleshy shoots, corpu lent flowers, and coiled fronds. The "parasitic vegetation ," as Souriau termed it, took root most invasively in the dimly lit interiors of the bourgeois home , where the plush verdancy of furniture and wall coverings were made to contrast with the alienating surfaces of the modern metropolis. But if these interior decors had emerged to provide refuge from the street, they soon were seen as equally menacing. An important faction of designers perceived ornament as a special locus of vitalist disclosure , a conduit for a wholly new and potentially disruptive kind of metaphor. Ornament was a second nature , one that captured and focused the animate forces more potently than the living world itself. Ornamentalists quickly recognized that once mo-bilized, these forces inevitably took on demonic grimaces; they looked fearsome, unsettling, and they stared back. This is especially true when given three-dimensional form . The viscid coil of an unfurling leaf could be carved to appear so real it seemed wet to the touch. And so too the tongue, as Salvador Dali implied in his 1933 es-say "The Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Fin-de-Siecle Architecture. " "Eat me," Dalf captioned a photograph of one of Hector Guimard 's columns in the Paris Metro . Ornamental flesh was as delectable as it was repulsive. ~ 

Second Nature

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-a9sq-3g97/download

Second Nature

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