Adolf Loos'
Ornament and Crime holds a favourite ammunition of mine in defense of immateriality:
I have therefore evolved the following maxim, and pronounce it to the world: the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.
How would I define what ornament is today? Ornament, a constant in decoration culture, is surprisingly a very competent shape-shifter, constantly changing form and material. For centuries ornament has been paint on the body, beads around the wrist, embroidery on a collar. It has also seen itself as reindeer and snowflakes on holiday mugs and useless objects in modern homes.
The stripping away of ornament lead to the International Style and what is essentially known as Modernism and it's further stripped down Minimalism. But all these styles are rather funny when they are defined by objects, because objects are mere ornaments. Ornamentation is giving style to a very basic necessity. When a simple stoop to rest your legs becomes the
Barcelona chair, sadly, regardless of the absolute admiration and desire that I have for it, it becomes an
ornamental mode of sitting. Therefore, objects that exceed providing the bare minimum in order for us to achieve a desired state, are ornament, and ultimately the crime of our materiality.
The desperate and depressing question of What Happened to Nature becomes irrelevant if our culture evolves to eliminate ornament
and unnecessary objects. We must shift our perception of what we
need to create for survival to what is
already there for us to survive on. Learning to live
with our natural environment—as opposed to live
off of it—is where our focus should be.
The greater evolution of our kind is a paradigm shift from what we perceive space and architecture to be, to what it can be—or actually in the sense I intend to use it, to what it can 'not be'. There is no need to build solid, oversized ornaments for our egos. There is no need for our mortal beings to leave a disastrously lasting mark for posterity. If we look at nature, everything is made of its environment and goes back to its environment after its life-cycle. Everything is self-sufficient or hyper-efficient in the use of its environment.
To move towards that same intrinsic understanding as other life-forms in nature, means we need to move towards immateriality and the acceptance of being a part of nature. We need to accept that we are in possession of lost qualities that make it possible for us to survive without the materials we make and build around ourselves. We need to accept that architecture should not define space, but is space and that space can be made of immaterials. This is as much a mental re-conditioning as well as physical. It is not achievable immediately and it will not be realized unless we have the guts to let go and start from somewhere. That is the ultimate evolution of our species... to return to nature.
A good book to make us think about our relationship with our environment and to put us back in touch with the reality of our horribly excessive materialist lives is
Janine Benyus' Biomimmicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Here is her talk at
TED.