PROJECTIVE ORNAMENT

Consider the present status of architecture, which is preeminently the art of space. Modern architecture, except on its engineering side, has not yet found itself: the style of a building is determined, not by necessity, but by the whim of the designer; it is made up of borrowings and survivals. So urgent is the need of more appropriate and indigenous architectural forms with which to clothe the steel framework for which some sort of protective covering is of first importance, that some architects have ceased searching in the cemetery of a too sacredly cherished past. They are seeking to solve their problems rather by a process of elimination, using the most elementary forms and the materials readiest to hand. In thus facing their difficulty they are re-creating their chosen art, and not abrogating it.

The development of new architectural forms appropriate to the new structural methods is already under way, and its successful issue may safely be left to necessity and to time; but the no less urgent need of fresh motifs in ornament has not yet even begun to be met. So far as architecture is concerned, the need is acute only for those who are determined to be modern. Having perforce abandoned the structural methods of the past, and the forms associated with these methods, they nevertheless continue to use the ornament associated with what they have abandoned: the clothes are new, but not the collar and necktie.