Text: Péter Sugár

With the dominance of digital imagery, ornamentation has re-emerged and spread widely in the architectural scene after the „Modern” period, that is roughly since the turn of the millennia. Ornamentation has traditionally been identified with the associated decorative arts, which is rightly so. But its geometric structural systems have a significance and importance that goes well beyond the domains of decorative arts. The order and orderliness it manifests forms part of a more general context, linked to the mechanics and the psychology of vision. The phenomenon of ornamentation as such is usually identified with the patterns that appear on various surfaces. But it also has a deeper, structural link with architecture: it is related to spatial systems, to the organisation of space, to the patterns of horizontal plans and layouts. I am not stating hereby that „floor plans are ornamentation” themselves, but that the patterns of floor plans and geometric ornamentation are embedded in similar geometric-mathematical relations. This paper attempts to outline the common origins and simultaneous emergence of the two genres.