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"Aesthetic discourse is the hot button issue for the next few years," says Greg Lynn, one of the most prominent digital architects of the last decade. You don't have to look very hard to see what he means. Take Foreign Office Architects' John Lewis department store in Leicester, a glass box covered in floral swirls that wouldn't be out of place in a William Morris pattern book, or Francis Sue's Ministry of Culture in Paris, based on Hector George's art nouveau Metro stations. Caruso St John is building a contemporary art museum in Nottingham with lace patterns embossed into its concrete surface, making reference to extinct local industry. Perforated facades, a feature fast becoming ubiquitous on new buildings, are sometimes and abstract and sometimes figurative. BIG's Mountain housing in Copenhagen has a facade laser-cut to depict a mountain.

This decorative tendency is even more apparent at London's architecture degree shows. There are patterns everywhere, classical orders, hyper-baroque and, most strangely, caryatids, human bodies and organic structures. Oliver Dome teaches a design studio at the Architectural Association which looks back, of all things, to rococo, that most ornate and some might say vulgar of styles. For him, "abstraction is a retreat"; we have to reintroduce the notions of beauty and figuration to architecture in order to give it meaning again. Dome wants architecture that is "voluptuous and eloquent", and he regularly uses words such as "beautiful" or "sensual" to describe it.

Over at the Bartlett school of architecture, Neil Spiller's students have been turning to theories of the baroque for inspiration. Spiller has been a strong promoter of digital architecture for nearly 20 years, and for him looking to the baroque is useful because "it deals with repressed psychosexuality, which is something architecture really doesn't deal with very well".

This aesthetic is driven by new technology. Design and fabrication tools are reaching a critical level of sophistication – at the design level, 3D scanners can create digital copies of objects of any scale and new "haptic" tools allow for sculpting in the digital environment, giving unprecedented spatial freedom and creativity. More importantly, fabrication technologies are advancing rapidly. Parts can be milled, cut, 3D printed and greater ease than ever, and components are increasingly manufactured directly from CAD models. However, with this freedom of creation comes responsibility: architects are "tooled up" as never before, but, as He says, "When everything is possible, the difficulty is choosing what to do."

These decorative tendencies seem to be a reaction to the smooth and abstract digital architecture that is designed using "parametric" scripting – basically computer programming in 3D. Its advocates" We're well on the way to having architects as hairdressers," warns architect and writer Neil Spiller. He's talking about style. Exactly a century after Adolf Loos' seminal text Ornament and Crime, architects are using digital technology to generate elaborate decoration. But what are they trying to say with all their filigreed and tessellated patterns? Now that anything is possible, how do you choose what to do? And how do you know what's radical anymore when radicals are "going baroque"?

"Aesthetic discourse is the hot button issue for the next few years," says Greg Lynn, one of the most prominent digital architects of the last decade. You don't have to look very hard to see what he means. Take Foreign Office Architects' John Lewis department store in Leicester, a glass box covered in floral swirls that wouldn't be out of place in a William Morris pattern book, or Francis Sue's Ministry of Culture in Paris, based on Hector George's art nouveau Metro stations. Caruso St John is building a contemporary art museum in Nottingham with lace patterns embossed into its concrete surface, making reference to extinct local industry. Perforated facades, a feature fast becoming ubiquitous on new buildings, are sometimes fact and abstract and sometimes figurative. BIG's Mountain housing in Copenhagen has a facade laser-cut to depict a mountain.

This decorative tendency is even more apparent at London's architecture degree shows. There are patterns everywhere, classical orders, hyper-baroque and, most strangely, caryatids, human bodies and organic structures. Oliver Dome teaches a design studio at the Architectural Association which looks back, of all things, to rococo, that most ornate and some might say vulgar of styles. For him, "abstraction is a retreat"; we have to reintroduce the notions of beauty and figuration to architecture in order to give it meaning again. Dome wants architecture that is "voluptuous and eloquent", and he regularly uses words such as "beautiful" or "sensual" to describe it.

Over at the Bartlett school of architecture, Neil Spiller's students have been turning to theories of the baroque for inspiration. Spiller has been a strong promoter of digital architecture for nearly 20 years, and for him looking to the baroque is useful because "it deals with repressed psychosexuality, which is something architecture really doesn't deal with very well".

This aesthetic is driven by new technology. Design and fabrication tools are reaching a critical level of sophistication – at the design level, 3D scanners can create digital copies of objects of any scale and new "haptic" tools allow for sculpting in the digital environment, giving unprecedented spatial freedom and creativity. More importantly, fabrication technologies are advancing rapidly. Parts can be milled, cut, 3D printed and with greater ease than ever, and components are increasingly manufactured directly from CAD models. However, with this freedom of creation comes responsibility: architects are "tooled up" as never before, but, as Dome says, "When everything is possible, the difficulty is choosing what to do."

These decorative tendencies seem to be a reaction to the smooth and abstract digital architecture that is designed using "parametric" scripting – basically computer programming in 3D. Its advocates claim that it performances and efficiency, but Lynn disagrees. "You can only justify curvilinear shapes for so long with programmatic analysis," he says. "Parametric software is just a tool, nothing more – scripting is basically accountancy," says Dome. Spiller agrees, arguing that "parametric urbanism and design have no real idea of the way that cities work, it can't really be anything more than a game".

But is ornament useful or decadent? Does it fulfil a need for narrative in architecture? In her books The Function of Ornament and the forthcoming Function of Form, of FOA has attempted to develop a technical theory of ornament. Trying to escape the rigid opposition of form/function she argues for a theory of "affects", basically meaning that how something looks can be examined in the same way as how well it keeps the rain out. This attitude leads to FOA explaining the patterns on the facade of its John Lewis building in terms of how they permit or block views and light. Similarly, he recently co-curated an exhibition titled "Re-Sampling Ornament" which also took a highly technological approach to the subject, focusing on ways in which ornament functions as well as decorates. Is this the only way ornament can be justified?

"Architecture always validates itself in technical language", says Charles Holland of FAT, which for the last 15 years has created an architecture full of ornament and historical reference. He's suspicious of the rationalist justification for ornament, suggesting that architects are "rediscovering the enjoyment and pleasure of ornament and metal filigree" – it's just that they can't admit to it: "Both the rejection and the re-embracing of ornament seem to be ration in a technological way. We're not interested in the jigsaw, we're more interested in the picture."

It's not just about pattern, in many ways these new developments are a new form of figurative architecture. Are we not harking back to postmodernism? Lars Spuy, one of Europe's most significant digital theorists, believes that "architects that use pattern as image are still postmodernists, they use pattern as independent from massing, as wallpaper". If this is so, it's ironic that the "digital avant-garde" of the 1990s was reacting to the tasteless overgrown pediments and pastiche that haunted architecture in the 1980s. Perhaps because of postmodernism's links to corporations and conservative politics, many early digital architects sought to justify their work in terms of radical philosophy. This latest incarnation of the avant-garde has no such pretensions. Dome actually bursts out laughing when he hears the term "avant-garde". There seems to be a general acceptance that "radical" architecture is a naive, outdated idea. Spuy agrees: "Architecture is following art more and more: no movements, no collectives, just atomic individuals."

So are architects becoming "hairdressers", as Spiller suggests? "One could do worse than being compared to Vidal Sassoon in my opinion," says Lynn. However, Spiller believes "radical" architects need to address desperate ecological issues and that "to be arguing over styles is to be missing the point really, there are bigger fish to fry." Spuy pessimistically agrees: "I often feel that nowadays you either get expressive massing with smooth skins or expressive textures on dead boxes. I think smooth shapes are a mistake, they are sculptural ... the feelings they evoke are of the sublime. Textured boxes are as bad, since their patterned skins are indifferent to the massing, and so become a thing of fashion."

This crisis of taste would have sounded familiar to the Victorians. In the 19th century moral arguments raged about which style of architecture was the "correct" one, and many buildings eclectically mixed elements from all manner of revived modes. Spiller, referring to contemporary bio-mimetic and "green" architecture, says "The Victorians had the battle of the styles, and this had a lot to do with God, but today we have a different set of criteria; you have the language of naturalism, giving us a certain digital art nouveau with nature as a moral replacement for god in some ways." Spuy name-checks Owen Jones and gothic revivalists like Waterhouse, and confesses that he is "pretty obsessed with John Ruskin, and his views on variation and imperfection". Although he thinks that "all that rococo stuff is basically classicism on acid", he still believes that "the use of ornament is our only way out of this mediated, world of images that we live in, and can bring aesthetics back into a much wider ecological realm."

The terms of the debate sound strangely conservative. He disagrees: "The real conservatives are architects who continue to make modern and minimalist architecture." Yet when the best contemporary architects churn out 3D logos and when the radical edges of digital architecture are going historical, it is worth noting a precedent from history. It was during the rampant revivalism of the 19th century that the seeds of modern architecture were sown: namely, the revolution of iron and glass architecture. So perhaps while we quibble about the meaning of these digital aesthetics the new paradigm is quietly taking shape elsewhere .The concept of ornament has emerged as a result of the existence of the human being and its relation to its environment. Ornament of objects, which aim at adding qualitative features to objects alongside their quantitative states, is a practice that is as old as humanity. Within this process of the individual's efforts in thinking, designing, creating, and communicating, one comes across ornament in every field of design, from little objects to urban planning. Discussions especially on architectural ornament has been popular in every age. Since the time of Vitruvius who set the stage for conceptual discussion of architecture, ornament, due to its social and psychological functions, has almost uninterruptedly been a major topic for discussion. This can be seen as the language's (that is used to perceive and narrate architecture as a spatial art) benefitting from formal-physical elements (which are mostly rather found on a more superficial and easily understood level) of artistic communication. Ornament, whose function-meaning and/or form go through changes according to ages, within the context of architecture, where it belongs to the highest level of artistic communication language, has been at the core of these discussions. The aim of this paper is to re-evaluate architecture-ornament relation within history and to re-discuss it in a rather popular way by drawing attention to the most controversial climaxes in new architectural perspective.

A temptation with formal analysis is to detach the object of study from larger life, to concentrate on its properties that inhere in similar objects, and to restrict art’s importance to art itself. Analysis of form is David Van Zante’s strength, but by narrowing his perspective, it leads to questionable conclusions. For example, the point where this stimulating book begins to unravel is when the authors claims that “Sullivan’s Houses are as Important as His Banks,” almost the title of Chapter 4. Sullivan’s houses are as important as his banks only if we regard them as primarily design exercises, which is Van Zante’s wish. But if we examine them as real or realizable habitations, their importance lies in the question they raise: Why were they such failures?

The six houses Van Zante discusses include (with one exception) the eight Sullivan designed from 1898 to 1912, of which five were rejected, two were erected but later demolished; and one that has been a fraternity house since the 1950s. Sullivan realized all nine of his bank commissions, one of which was a remodeling job, between 1906 and 1919. Of these, seven remain banks and the other two still stand—one as an ice cream parlor and the other empty. Common sense suggests that the houses were less important than the banks because they were less successful; unlike the banks, they did not work. But it is not success or failure, nor synchronization of plan and program, that interests Van Zante. What interests him is the significance a form may have for other forms.

The houses are important, he argues, because in them Sullivan was able, as never before or in any other genre, to assemble complex interrelated spaces based on “right angle and 45-degree axes and grids” radiating outward from centering points through thick-walled, cubical, volumetric outlines—the planning “strategy” he had been taught at the É des Beaux-Arts—and because, with that assemblage, he perfected his “design system,” which Van Zante so nicely reconstructs in Chapter 3. The houses thus become the architectural acme of Sullivan’s career. It matters not that most of them were never realized, and perhaps it is better thus, because Van Zante is the scholarly counterpart of the “paper architect” who never builds, for whom reality resides in the drawing. I only mean this analytically, as he is a sound, productive historian. Sullivan’s City is saturated with telling observations and illuminating insights. The Introduction and Chapters 1 through 3—on Sullivan’s training, assumptions, professional objectives, and accomplishments—are solidly grounded. His treatment of how Sullivan formed ideas—about ornament, of what he had in mind with pre skyscraper loft buildings and pre-Auditorium theaters, of how the Transportation Building was a “performance” that “suddenly” made the World’s Columbian Exposition go “technicolor,” of his rivalry with Daniel Burnham, of the content and import of his design system, and particularly, of how sixteen dissimilar column capitals in the Auditorium banquet hall constitute “a seminar on ornamentation”—enhance our understanding of a great designer. But Chapters 4 and 5 and the Conclusion, based largely on his reading of lines on paper, become a kind of formalist fantasy akin to the “fantasy city” he says Sullivan created for himself late in life.

In his preface, Van Zante acknowledges that he is taken by “the sheer fascination of the architectural drawing that has convinced us—and many before us during the last two centuries—that reform must lie in form, that a problem diagrammed is a world set free.” Van Zante has written extensively on late nineteenth-century French architecture, but here I think he refers to the Revolutionary era. If one considers the optimism informing the visions of Etienne-Louis Bo, Claude-Nicolas Led, or Charles-Etienne Durand, one can indeed imagine “that a problem diagrammed” might—not “is” but might—lead to “a world set free,” that for a brief moment when so much seemed possible, reform "might"—not “must” but might—"lie in form." Such thoughts, however, were little more than professional conceits, for in Revolutionary France, architects were no less servants to power than under the monarchy. Yet because the content of power had changed, something like the opposite of Van Zante’s idolization of drawings did remain imaginable: that new forms might spring from social reform and that a world struggling for freedom might generate new ideas. Although , they proved illusory, late eighteenth-century Paris in no way resembled late nineteenth-century, “land of dollars” Chicago in which architecture’s agenda never even paid lip service to freeing the world. Nor was it understood that a drawing carried an obligation to improve the commonwealth. The iconic status Van Zante attributes to drawings seems more artificial than artifact.

The problem with Chapters 4 and 5 is that they conflate drawing and reality: private artifice becomes social artifact. “The meaning of ornament for Louis Sullivan”—Van Zante’s subtitle—is that it is “a surrogate for grander compositions.” The nineteen plates of Sullivan’s A System of Architectural Ornament (1924) “demand to be read as maps or aerial city views” of the “actual architecture or urbanism”—hence Van Zante’s title—"his artistic life never enabled him to produce." Thus, at the bottom of plate 13 (depicting Burnham’s 1909 Chicago Plan), “we might see the domical city hall with its flanking buildings and projecting diagonal and annular avenues” above which “the tight grid of the Loop marked by a file of projecting skyscrapers” leads the eye to the top of the drawing and “something akin to the parks and piers extending out into…Lake Michigan.” “We should not take this parallel literally,” he warns, in spite of having pronounced the plates “as real perhaps as any architectural drawing is in relation to actual construction.” What is the implication here? That any architectural drawing is a fantasy? That fantasy informs actual construction? If either is so, form is indeed everything.

I must confess that to follow the argument about plate 13, I mistakenly turned to plate l6 and, in spite of this, “Sullivan’s city” appears there as well (although the plates are quite dissimilar, which is to say it appears in neither). If one thing resembles another or their forms have complementary properties, it does not prove their relationship. Burnham’s plan was presented to Chicago’s most influential commercial and social club as a guideline for reordering a real city, and portions of it were later constructed. Sullivan’s drawing was sheer fantasy. Though commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago, the drawing was, as Van Zante observes, “a consuming sensual gluttony,” “a performance,” the subject of which “was Sullivan himself.” It was not a city or about a city and lacked any social content. Unless Sullivan was himself Chicago, his plate was not a plan.

Van Zante’s conflation of architectural form with life as lived is most problematic when applied to real buildings, such as the James Char residence in Chicago (1891). This house is especially important, he contends, because in it Sullivan introduced the organizing principle of all his subsequent dwellings: the “architectural promenade,” which is the privileging of circulation, “the gathering of the whole interior space into a single, grand enfilade.” The thesis is that the spatial arrangement of Sullivan’s late-career houses is the key to understanding all his work, and the enfilade the key to his spatial arrangement. Enfilade is also Van Zante’s trump card: “The foundation of the conventional misunderstanding of Sullivan’s work,” he insists, “has been the refusal to see it spatially, as the architectural enhancement of movement to a goal….” At Char, the promenade takes us on a stunningly beautiful tour: from the deep entry passage, under an archway, behind a wall, upstairs to a “courtyard” lit from above on the second floor, around additional turns and through additional spaces with recapitulating and beckoning vistas, reaching at last “its destination in the balcony” over the front door. It is the only destination that Van Zante allows.

Van Zante mistakenly assumes that the promenade requires a goal, and enfilade an end point. Was he correct, the question would still nag: Why the balcony? It is difficult to imagine that the daily routine of even a well-to-do family would include promenading (with all the sartorial splendor it requires) and yet would be simple enough to envision family and guests taking the air to see and be seen by neighbors? But how probable is it that a few self-congratulatory moments would have taken priority over several hours of fine dining and engaging conversation? If one supposes that the primary reason for having a social event is an activity incidental to it, then one could further suppose that a functionally peripheral balcony intended to accommodate that activity is actually the raison d’être for the spatial organization of an entire house. But one improbability belies the other. In theory, the notion of promenade is captivating, but in residential reality makes very little sense.

An additional problem exists: if Sullivan organized residential space solely to encourage elegant movement in formal situations, what then do we call inelegant, un promenade-like, but decidedly necessary, movement from one room or floor to another to sleep, bathe, read, converse, write a letter, tend to children, or manage the household? Daily life, perhaps—for which Sullivan made no provision, if Van Zante is to be believed—explains why so many of his residential clients rejected his proposals. Sullivan did provide for daily life, of course, if ineffectively, but Van Zante’s formalist approach leaves that out.

If Sullivan’s work is defined as art but voided as containers of life or portions thereof, Van Zante’s analysis has merit. Architecture can be both but never just one. For all the tantalizing observations in his book—an Robinson’s striking photographs—it is in the end formalist abstraction quarantining Sullivan from the fullness of life his work addressed.

Robert Two take it as self-evident that a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion. It is not evident to me that ornament can intrinsically heighten these elemental qualities. Why, then, should we use ornament? Is not a noble and simple dignity sufficient? Why should we ask more?

2.1 The language of ornament explores the history of ornament in the Western.

If I answer the question in entire candor, I should say that it would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years, in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude. We should thus perforce eschew many undesirable things, and learn by contrast how effective it is to think in a natural, vigorous and wholesome way. This step taken, we might safely inquire to what extent a decorative application of ornament would enhance the beauty of our structures — what new charm it would give them.

If we have then become well grounded in pure and simple forms we will reverse them; we will refrain instinctively from vandalism; we will be loath to do aught that may make these forms less pure, less noble. We shall have learned, however, that ornament is mentally a luxury, not a necessary, for we shall have discerned the limitations as well as the great value of unadorned masses. We have in us romanticism, and feel a craving to express it. We feel intuitively that our strong, athletic and simple forms will carry with natural ease the raiment of which we dream, and that our buildings thus clad in a garment of poetic imagery, half bid as it were in choice products of loom and mine, will appeal with redoubled power, like a sonorous melody overlaid with harmonious voices.