Kristen Forward: Contemporary Ornament for Circularity

Contemporary design practices have escalated the potentials of architectural ornament to become innovative, beautiful, and highly sustainable. Historically, ornament has been known to express character and reveal relationships between materiality, technological advances, and societal evolution. Though ornament rapidly declined in the late 1800s, it has recently returned in contemporary design as a critical and discursive topic, while a new theme in sustainability, entitled “Circular Design,” has begun to gain popularity in the past few years. Ornament’s return is closely linked to advancements in computational design and digital fabrication, which brought a wave of new perspectives and applications of architectural ornament; however, while these advancements offer the ability to create expressive architecture, their potential contribution to the improvement of sustainable architecture has largely been overlooked (Agusti-Juan & Habert, 2017, p. 2781). The aim of this research is therefore to effectively intersect research into ornamentation, digital design and fabrication, and Circular Design, asking why buildings that aspire to be environmentally sensitive and technically advanced can’t also operate on aesthetic and cultural dimensions.

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