An Interview with Antoine Picon in Architektura Murator

Text: Eszter Götz

Toyo Ito: Opera House, Taichung

In its 2014/4 issue, the Polish journal titled Architektura Murator published a long interview with Professor Antoine Picon, lecturer of architectural history with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who had published a volume titled Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity in 2013. Picon has studied the new role of ornamentation in postmodernist architecture. In his opinion the symbolic meaning of architecture is a kind of cognitive process. Surface today is inseparable from structure and has been endowed with a brand new role: this is what it actually communicates with in relation to its recipients.