The Importance of the Unnecessary

It's a truism of Modern design that ornamentation is at best unnecessary, and at worst a kind of offense. Ornamentation is what you do to an insufficiently thoughtful form to disguise the fact that it's boring, like the icing florets and trim that keep your birthday cake from being a simple squat cylinder.

Didn't used to be that way, of course.  One of the highlights of Venice was the exuberance of materials, the ways in which even the smallest details were made to be more than simply structural.  Here, for instance, is a short connector street in Padua.

Just a cobbled lane.  Easy to do in rank-and-file, rectilinear.  Whole blocks, no cutting.  But no, someone has decided that their fellow Italian, Leonardo Fibonacci, had a great idea with this mathematical pattern of nested spirals, and so hundreds of years of Italian stone craftsmen have learned how to make small adjustments that result in these gorgeous textures.

Why bother to make a street beautiful?  Because we live with streets every day, and the things we live with can ennoble or demean us.

This is one small apse on one neighborhood parish church, the Basilica dei Frari.  It could have been a simple rectangular or cylindrical silo and accomplished the function it had been assigned -- to be a small side chapel and to let in more filtered light.  But no, this building segment has literally thousands upon thousands of small decisions, places where bricks and medallions and small stone carvings had to be fitted together in appealing ways.  It is an ennobling space.

Everywhere you go in Venice, you'll find examples of the unnecessary, of ornament, of delight.  And that's one of the reasons why we take 119 photographs per second, and why four million people per year go there.  We feel ennobled, privileged to be in such a care-filled place.