an InviTe For mAking OrnAmentS

Friday 9 October 2009, 3.00pm until 5.00pm

Serpentine Pavilion (2009), Hyde Park

an InviTe For mAking OrnAmentS is a workshop, an intervention, a picnic, and a video taking place around the Serpentine Pavilion 2009 located in Hyde Park. The workshop is suited for artists, architects, kids, gardeners, and designers. There will some be readings and the participants can draw, develop shapes, objects and additions, patterns, pop-ups, and excessive forms that in a wider sense relate to the ornamental and ornaments. The theme of the ornament here refers to the labyrinthine, measured, controlled, repetitive and pattern-like architecture of Victorian Gardens. A reference from cinema is Last Year in Marienbad by Alain Resnais. Theoretically the ornament references the idea of “Das Ornament der Masse” (the mass ornament) as explored by Siegfried Kracauer (1927). This framework leads into contemporary thinking around the construction of “vast” and “full” spaces, and complex assemblages in architecture and technologically informed environments and networks.

The workshop is a site for practice, making and exchanging ideas, but underlying is the question of how concepts of imagination are potentially embodied in spaces of the controlled versus the un-controlled, and the constantly transforming. What does measure mean in mutating environments? Or intervention’s such as Bas Jan Ader’s falling projects, where the body performs a peculiar counter-movement to spatial settings and given environments? And, following Sven-Olov Wallenstein (2009) in Bio-Politics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture, is the imaginary some sort of resistance, when he claims that “The resistance to rationalisation and discipline cannot entail some pure affirmation of irrational forces, but rather a rediscovery of the multidirectionality and stratification of these processes?”

There will be a prize draw: Win two tickets for the Serpentine Pavilion Park Night New Music Action, Phill Niblock, Fri 9 Oct, 8pm.

Related Material

THOUGHTS ON ORNAMENT, Tokyo London September 2009
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa

QUESTIONS for SANAA Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa
by Verina Gfader, September 2009

[on plants and ornamental aspects in your work that at first seems so minimal, reduced, controlled or tamed]

What is the role of plants and organisms in your work/architecture?
Merce mentioned that you always fill your buildings with lots of scattered little colorful pots of plants and flowers (natural, often found in small residential Tokyo streets), and that one always finds in your photographs of domestic interiors lots of personal everyday objects (as well as the plants).
I am thinking about “little gardens” or garden arrangements in Tokyo, not gardens as such, but kind of plant lines around the house – border of plants. Linear pots, assemblages of scattered elements.
But also the space for plants seems much more blurred of being both in- and outside the house.

What is your approach to the “ornament”?
Maybe it appears on this ‘scattered’, everyday level, surrounding or even holding the architecture in some ways – a link to the plants as ornament on this small scale.
Do you see ornament as a certain translation of plantstructures?
[There might be a reference to the wallpaper designed for the Kanazawa museum with floral motives, or the intricate very thin steel carpet for the Comme de Garçon’s show.]

Do you have a favourite plant?

[imagination and measure]

Do you work with “imagination” ?
How are concepts of imagination potentially embodied in spaces of the controlled versus the un-controlled, and the constantly transforming?
What does measure mean to you in mutating environments?

[temperature in Serpentine Pavilion]

Does weather affect you?
Living on an island?

What were the limits when planning the Serpentine Pavilion?

[power and active elements]

Is complexity an issue for you ? - in relation to space, structures, your work, in Tokyo.
Your work is a lot about the desire for creating non-hierarchical space, in a way flattened architecture, and thereby flattening power structures? I am thinking about micro communities who might present power structures different to the “obvious hierarchical”?
In the essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927) by writer, sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, the ornament is connected to the formation of the mass of people in urban space and built environments that condition it, where the individual disappears into anonymity. Kracauer: “The ornament resembles aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them.”
Can you relate this thinking to your treatment of the ornament?

How is your work informed by technology and communities?
For Ryue Nishizawa: You made this series titled Competition Sketches where space is collapsed in a way, by juxtaposing varieties of scale, drawing outlines, and then inserting these huge black ‘walls’, blocks or elements. What do they express?
In ‘Glimpses of a Future Architecture’ Matthew Murphy (2006) mentioned “active elements” – what are these?

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Thoughts on Ornament, Tokyo London September 2009
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa

-New patterns 1-3
-Metal Carpet
-Scarf
-My curtain in Moriyama house
-Dior façade 1+2
-Zollverein façade
-New Museum mesh
-Bordeaux Table
-More flowers, hana han

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Thanks to Sam Chermayeff, SANAA team.