Page 107 - ELEMENTS EUROPA (EN)

ELEMENTS EUROPA 103

3 FRONT SCENE AND
BEHIND THE SCENE

The architect wished for a unified setting. The same colour patterns
are displayed on the ceilings and carpets of conference halls, lift
shafts, suspended ceilings of the halls and corridors and on the doors
of delegation offices and the secretariat-general. Here, unity is both
controversial and doctrinal. Controversial because it is intended to thwart
decoration accessories which would certainly interfere with architecture as
opportunistic orders or improvised decisions come up; doctrinal because
it consists in defending the architectural part of the setting. Modernist
architecture rose up against ornamentation, calling it superfluous, costly
and arbitrary. Since then, ornamented settings have often been turned
down, which is an error. For an offensive against the arbitrary dimension of
ornaments only sought to save the setting of authenticity in its dual function
of expressing materials and exhibiting built space intimate qualities, as Adolf
Loos himself thought. For Loos, stating that “ornamentation is a crime”
basically meant that authentic setting had to proceed from architecture
only and not from ornamentation which fakes and distorts it. Yet, there is no
reference to Philippe Samyn, the great Viennese architect, particularly as the
conviction for a close and necessary link between colours, light reflection
qualities, material texture and the composition itself was formed on the
basis of noticeably different principles: the very order of architecture builds
up in a constant tie with the order of perception; and the order of measures
and dimensions must find its expression and even its translation in the order
of sensations.