Contemporary Ornament for Circularity: Exploring Synergies Through Digital Design and Fabrication
Date
2019-09-22
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Abstract
Contemporary design practices have enhanced the potential of architectural ornament to be innovative, beautiful, and highly sustainable. Historically, ornament has been known to express character and reveal relationships between materiality, technological advances, and societal evolution. Though ornament rapidly declined in the late 1800s, it has recently returned in contemporary design as a critical and discursive topic, while a new theme in sustainability, entitled “Circular Design,” has begun to gain popularity in the past few years. Circular Design goals aim to address the tremendous consumption of materials and energy present in the building industry by proposing the efficient management of both the energy embodied in building materials and the energy consumed in buildings during operation; although, circularity in design struggles to be widely adopted by the building industry largely due to its lack of a social dimension. Contrastingly, contemporary forms of ornament strive to participate in the expression of social values, hierarchies, and order - considerations that Circular Design could adopt to enhance its contribution to subjective wellbeing. Furthermore, contemporary ornament’s close link to advancements in digital design and fabrication have brought a wave new applications of architectural ornament along with capabilities for generating and producing building products that perform socially as well as work to overcome some of the inefficiencies and waste production currently present in traditional manufacturing methods. Contemporary Ornament for Circularity thus aims to effectively intersect research into Circular Design, ornamentation, and digital design and fabrication, in order to ask why buildings that aspire to be environmentally sensitive and technically advanced can’t also operate through aesthetic and cultural dimensions.
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Ornament, Circular Design, Digital Design, Digital Fabrication
Citation
Forward, K. M. (2019). Contemporary Ornament for Circularity: Exploring Synergies Through Digital Design and Fabrication (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.