Neal Leach Dessau Institute of Architecture, Germany, London, United Kingdom 451
12 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, New York: Dover Publications, 1992; Ste-
ven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, London:
Penguin, 2001; Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, London: Wolfram Media, 2002. On
Emergence, see also Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo and Guy Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence:
From Natural to Artificial Systems, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999;
John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, Oxford: OUP, 1998.
13 This somewhat disingenuous outlook echoes in part the criticism of ornament on the part
of Adolf Loos. Architecture, for Loos, is a question of function and not art, and in his
famous essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, he launches a tirade against ornament as some form
of decadent excess. Yet the very sumptuousness of his own architecture suggests that
ornament was still a primary concern for him.
14 ‘The Structure of Ornament’ in Digital Tectonics, p. 65.
15 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Neil Leach, Joseph Rykwert,
Robert Tavernor (trans.), Camb, MA: MIT Press, 1988, p. 183.
16 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, p. 25.
17 Here I need to question my own translation of Alberti’s treatise on architecture, de re
aedificatoria, on the subject of ornament: ‘Ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary
light and supplement to beauty. From this it follows, I believe, that beauty is some inherent
property, to be found suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful;
whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached
or additional.’ (Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, p. 156.) Joseph Rykwert and
I translated the Latin word ‘impactum’ as meaning ‘attached’. On subsequent reflection
- supported by the views of the Italian translator of the same work, Giovanni Orlandi – I
would suggest that this word should be translated as ‘embedded’ or ‘locked into’, as in
the case of impacted teeth. If so, the entire sentence would need revision. Ornament, for
Alberti, is therefore not attached, but integral to structural form.
18 For a contemporary theory of beauty and its social role as a mechanism of connectivity,
see Leach, Camouflage, Camb., MA: MIT Press, 2006.