A return to ornament for ornament’s sake

I’m wishy washy when it comes to ornament in design. I mean to say that I can appreciate both the craft of William Morris as well as the restraint of the Bauhaus school of design — not that they are mutually exclusive, in retrospect. But at the time, the simplified forms of the Bauhaus were a direct reaction to the overly ornamental Victorian era 40 years previous.

In 2025, I appreciate what the past has given us. Regarding architecture, I fully love ornament. The craft of a simple idea, like turned bricks to form patterns that demarcate a building facade, lend texture to a roofline cornice, or the more obvious carved details in sandstone, marble, or even granite.

In design school, I was drawn to the Swiss style of simple forms, geometry, and an adherence to the grid. That was my own personal style as well, gravitating towards the likes of Neville Brody and Rudy Van Der Lans. At the same time, I appreciated the freeform, painterly and sometimes abstract design of David Carson, though I personally could not successfully emulate his style.

In a recent article about Ornament and Culture, the author reviews the turn of the century, and how the creatives at the time viewed the future from the perspective of someone at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th:

…the industrial revolution had thrown labor, economics, politics, and yes, even art and design, into a delirium. The value of what it meant to be a human was up for debate. What was the value of a human when these machines could do all the work? What was a craftsperson’s role when industrial factories could make well-designed chairs, shoes, posters at a scale heretofore unheard of?

Indeed, the culture moved from handmade craft to mechanization, and with it, ornamentation was thrown aside as inefficient and unnecessary. Some at the time must have thought that because machines could replicate work, that machines could also replicate ornament. But economics made ornamentation for its own sake obsolete. Where a person might have had one well-made and often repaired garment, now they could have many. Not only fashion started to become fast, but all consumer goods. And a hundred years later, here we are, with an abundance of cheap things and very little value placed on any of it.

In a similar vein, I watched a video recently lamenting the loss of ornament as a sense of craft or care. The video is called “How did everything get so ugly?” and is worth a watch. The centerpiece of the argument is a Victorian-designed South East London sewer pumping station, and it is gorgeous. By any standards, it is over the top and certainly not an efficient way to build a piece of infrastructure. But that was not the point. The point was to celebrate the work of the people who worked there every day. Why not make their lives feel meaningful by giving them an inspiring place to work?

The anti-ornament thoughts of the post-industrial world were of efficiency, not inspiration. Ornamentation takes too long for workers to make at scale, and gives no real value, they said. Further, ornamentation was pleasing to the wrong people — it represented an old way of thinking. It was not “modern.” But now we are left with so little ornament or decoration, we have allowed these human skills to become undervalued and quaint, they only survive in niche creative circles. We have lost part of our soul, or at very least, a way to express that we have a soul.

All of these thoughts rattle around in my head as we enter what many think is a new Industrial Revolution. The AI-age could free up more time for us to become interested in ornament again. To shun “form follows function” modernity in favor of something that expresses our human dignity, skill, and soul. But we all know each technological advancement doesn’t give us more free time, it accelerates the expectations of what we should be doing with our non-free time, making us exhausted and easy prey to low-friction passive entertainment instead of the lure of a craft.

So what will AI allow us to do? What will be the societal reaction to a technology that can feign creativity and either add ornament or remove it at our whim? What space does it leave open for humans to express their soul?