In architecture, ornament is a decorative detail used to embellish parts of a building or interior furnishing. Ornament can be carved from stone, wood or precious metals, formed with plaster or clay, or impressed onto a surface as applied ornament. A wide variety of decorative styles and motifs have been developed for architecture and the applied arts, including ceramics, furniture, metalwork and textiles.

In a 1941 essay, the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it "surface modulation". Decoration and ornament has been evident in civilizations since the beginning of recorded history, ranging from Ancient Egyptian architecture to the apparent lack of ornament of 20th century Modernist architecture.

Cultural heritage

Styles of ornamentation can be studied in reference to the specific culture which developed unique forms of decoration, or modified ornament from other cultures. The Ancient Egyptian culture is the first recorded civilization to add decoration to their buildings. Their ornament takes the forms of the natural world in that climate, decorating the capitals of columns and walls with images of papyrus and palm trees. Assyrian culture produced ornament which shows influence from Egyptian sources and a number of original themes, including figures of plants and animals of the region.

Ancient Greek civilization created many new forms of ornament, with regional variations from Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian groups. The Romans Latinized the pure forms of the Greek ornament and adapted the forms to every purpose.

Other ornamental styles are associated with these cultures:

• Arabian
• Aztec
• Byzantine
• Celtic
• Chinese

• French Renaissance
• German Renaissance
• Indian
• Persian
• Italian Renaissance

• Japanese
• Middle Ages
• Moorish
• Pompeian
• Turkish

Pattern Books

During the 19th century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise definition became the source of aesthetic controversy in academic Western architecture, as architects and their critics searched for a suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas Leverton Donaldson asked in 1847, "are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style of the 19th century?" . In 1849, when Matthew Digby Wyatt viewed the French Industrial Exposition set up on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain:

Both internally and externally there is a good deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If each simple material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of the construction so arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of grandeur, the qualities of "power" and "truth," which its enormous extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of expense.