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find our way in unfamiliar buildings. We might ask, however,
whether the ideal spatial order is one that would reveal itself
fully at the outset, or whether it ought instead to follow the
> dramaturgy of an arc of tension by revealing itself only
gradually.
The necessity of finding one’s way in space is of existen-
tial importance; moreover, this necessity for orientation goes
beyond concrete spatiality to encompass social space as well.
An individual who enters a foreign town or home not only
must choose the right way, but also the appropriate behav-
iour, must penetrate not just spatial configurations, but social
ones as well – as registered in the structure and features of
spaces. Alongside built structures, it is social structures that
determine the appropriate orientation within a given situa-
tion. Patterns of spatial behaviour facilitate orientation.In addition to adorning architecture, ornamentation renders
its essential structure visible in the first place – even before
‘decoration’, the primary meaning of the Latin word ornare is
‘to equip’. Rejected by the Modernist movement of the early
twentieth century as a superfluous obscuring of structural
> readability or an instrument for imposing semantic access on
(naked) truths, ornamentation has meanwhile reacquired its
independent function of enriching and modulating perception.
In retrospect, it is clear that what the break of Modern-
ism achieved in relation to ornamentation was mainly to set
it free to accentuate architectural effects in ways that go be-
yond decorative tasks or symbolic allusions. Such functions
were mentioned already by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in his es-
say ‘The Members of Architecture’: ‘To delimit the whole or
its parts, to finish or to complete, to isolate the individual
element, to emphasize it more powerfully, in many instances,
to articulate the broad masses, or to connect separate masses
through girdling.’ (1979, 83) To be sure, ornamentation can
negate architectural structure, but when instead it clarifiesOrnamentation