Thesis update

I am in the process of restating my thesis topic. As expected it continues to evolve, and fluctuate between levels of specificity. As one of my advisors said, you should not expect your thesis to solve the worlds problems, and should view it as the beginning of a larger project. Actually he said that about dissertations, which in my mind means it applies even more to a masters thesis. This provides some relief, because I am beginning to realize that I may not reach any conclusion, or at least that I will not have a well formulated answer to the question I anticipate, "So what is and is not ethical ornament."

I'm offering up the latest draft of my blurb for comment.

The goal of this thesis is to clarify relevant ethical concepts as they relate to architectural ornamentation and demonstrate how misunderstanding and misapplication of ethical concepts have influenced architectural theory and practice past and present.

It is vague, I know. The rough outline is that within ethics there was a separation of telos, the idea of an end goal, from the Aristotelian idea of "things as they were-things as they are-things as they should be." In architecture this translated to a focus on truth and authenticity of things as they are, namely materials. Ruskin talked about "The Lamp of Truth" which paved the way for Loos' rejection of ornament as immoral and the celebration of materials and structural expressionism. The idea of materials and forms having meaning was denied by post-war modernists in favor of form and program. While they had socialist/utopian goals, they attempted to achieve those goals by drawing on the spirit of the age, celebrating the machine age and mass production. They were simutaneously arguing that 'things as they are' (the state of design at the turn of the century) needed to change to reflect 'things as they are' (the spirit of the machine age). In essence they were determining 'things as they should be' according to 'things as they are'. The rationale for rejecting ornament was based less on morality and more on expression of the zeitgeist. With Venturi we see how the idea of meaning was acknowledged by post-modernism, but without aknowledging the ethical implications of meaning. Venturi argues that while rejecting ornament modern architecture ironically became ornament.

In the present the legacy of the rejection of ornament is a tacit acknowledgement of meaning but a denial of ethical implications, or rather a reluctance to discuss meaning in terms of ethics. This is really the area that I need to understand better. What exactly is the legacy of the moral rejection of ornament, and the subsequent rejection of morality. While in practice buildings are designed to reflect the techniques and materials of architecture (in the same way that abstract expressionism focused on expression of the paint and canvas) by doing so they have inadvertently become ornaments imbued with meaning. Meanwhile in architectural theory ornament is still condemned. What we are left with is a hodgepodge of bits and pieces divorced from the ideas that created them.

It is a mess that I do not fully understand, which I'm sure is clear from my rambling attempts to communicate it. Maybe that explains why my earlier statement is so vague.