| 英文摘要 |
During the turn of the twentieth century, Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933) issued a thesis entitled Ornament and Crime, from which he put a serious warning that, whether in terms of aesthetics, economics, or socio-culture, the employment of ornament is criminal behavior and will cause mankind to devolve. Judging from the fact that the influential European bourgeois proclaimed the simplicity of form at that time, the motive behind the disclosure is understandable. However, is the proclamation objectively correct, or not? Theorist Joseph Rykwert (1926-) made an opposite assertion, Ornament is No Crime. The love for beauty is part of human nature. The main purpose of ornament is to attract the appreciator, in hopes of bringing forth the feeling of beauty, and to develop the sense of pleasure for oneself and the appreciator. For centuries, there have been innumerable ways developed, in terms of philosophy, psychology, and social science, etc., in order to define beauty. The appreciation of beauty, nevertheless, can only be evaluated objectively and cannot be explained subjectively. Therefore, as far as the physical existential value of architectural ornament is concerned, ornament basically cannot fulfill any functional and structural requirements, and the fulfillment of the aesthetic requirement remains uncertain. However, throughout the development of the formal history of Western architecture, all kinds of ornament have been articulated on façades, interior spaces and structural volumes. By inference, the result does not reach only from the simple reason that it is in human nature, but from deeply embedded religious and social meanings which fulfill its metaphysical existential value. The conclusion can also be justified in Loos’s perspective by acknowledging that ornament does possess essentially a metaphysical function. |
