PROJECTIVE ORNAMENT

The reason for this failure of invention is that while common sense, and a feeling for fitness and proportion, serve to produce the clothing of a building, the faculty for originating appropriate and beautiful ornament is one of the rarest in the whole range of art. Those arts of space which involve the element of decoration suffer from the same lack, and for a similar reason.

Three possible sources of supply suggest themselves for this needed element in a new form language. Ornament might be the single-handed creation of an original genius in this particular field; it might be derived from the conventionalization of native flora, as it was in the past; or it might be developed from geometry. Let us examine each of these possibilities in turn.

The first we must reject. Even supposing that this art saviour should appear as some rarely gifted and resourceful creator of ornament, it would be calamitous to impose the idiosyncratic space rhythm of a single individual upon an entire architecture. Fortunately such a thing is impossible. In Mr. Louis Sullivan, for example, we have an ornamentalist of the highest distinction (quite aside from his sterling qualities as an architect), but from the work of his imitators it is clear that his secret is incommunicable. It would be better for his disciples to develop an individual manner of their own, and this a few of them are doing. Mr. Sullivan will leave his little legacy of beauty for the enrichment of those who come after, but our hope for an ornament less personal, more universal and generic, will be as far from realization as before.