“In childhood,” Loos wrote in “Ornament and Crime,” “man goes through all changes corresponding to the stages in the development of humanity.” (1)  It is then fitting that a building dedicated to man’s formative years creates an accelerated palimpsest of motifs from the past. Caruso St John’s project for Victoria and Albert (V&A)’s Museum of Childhood, comprising the refurbishment and extension of a late-19th century building, inevitably deals with history. Its statement is the serious encounter with an architecture generally seen as eclectic and historicist.
Put in context, Loos’ comparison between the ages of man and of humankind led to the denunciation of ornament in the modern age. Just as bodily ornament could be justified for the young child, or for the corresponding primitive man, essentially amoral beings, other kinds of decoration could only be acceptable if grounded in anonymous tradition. The shoemaker’s primal pleasure in making ornate shoes could not be genuinely replicated by he who could find solace in Beethoven. Modern man’s sophistication barred him from populist manifestations of the need for beauty, as unadulterated surfaces and pure forms became associated with a sense of moral integrity.
Loos’ eloquence marked modern architecture’s attitude towards ornament as a symptom of decadence. And yet, his buildings purport a usage of ornament that is hardly “criminal”. Decoration is linked not to the primitive, but the more mature junctures of modernism, as defined by Mies van der Rohe’s opulent materials, Le Corbusier’s frescoes, Aalto’s timberwork. (2) Haefeli Moser Steiger’s Kongresshaus in Zurich marked a coming of age for Swiss modernism precisely with the rehabilitation of décor. (3)
Ornament’s ambivalence is a matter of taste and circumstance, of appropriateness and abuse. Robert Venturi could be seen as the opposite of Loos, advocating ornament as the guarantor of a deeper, symbolic intelligibility, while his  “decorated sheds” disconnected the appearance of buildings from their interior workings and the larger context of life in which they operated. In fact the two are sides of the same coin, caught between man’s reliance on, and abuse of, convention, representation, and decorum.
Presently, “ironic” tendencies to separate pattern from meaning border on cynicism. The philosophy of art shows how, if devoid of significance, ornament’s representational value bears upon ornament itself, re-entering the aesthetic domain. (4). The laissez-faire attitude of architectural pluralism, customarily restricted to arbitrary forms, includes now arbitrary decoration. When ornament is nothing more that the visual expression of a wrapping then its best justification, as some kind of branding, is inadequate.
These considerations governed Caruso St John’s approach when bringing resolution to the Museum of Childhood, one of the original decorated sheds of the 19th century. Rather than a critique of Victorian ambivalence, their attitude mixes an attentive re-enactment of the original intentions with radical intervention. Reacting appropriately to each aspect of the building led to a collection of atmospheric essays, uniting the historic fabric and its contemporary reinterpretations.
This is a new direction in Caruso St John’s production, usually a combination of rich material expression and tectonic correctness. The project featured in their “Cover versions” exhibition (2005), which advocated “both a barbed and respectful response to the past.” (5)  The exhibition revealed relationships between works and their historical sources of inspiration, focusing on the potential communicability of ornament. The design for the Museum of Childhood was inspired by the decorative motifs used in Victorian and Arts and Crafts architecture, including Owen Jones’ plates for the historical pattern book The Grammar of Ornament (1856). This link is intentional as J W Wild, the original architect, was a friend and collaborator of Owen Jones.
The museum’s unconventional history frames this approach. A delicate example of cast iron construction, the structure was erected in 1857 in South Kensington to house objects from the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was dismantled to allow the construction of Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) present headquarters, then re-assembled in 1872 in Bethnal Green.
The area, historically characterised by deprivation and change, is the cultural reservoir of successive immigrant communities. In the early 19th century, a sharp demographic rise due to industrialisation led to a wave of building, with John Soane’s St. John church consecrated in Bethnal Green in 1828. When, as part of a typically Victorian programme of social improvement, V&A donated the museum, a park was established between the two institutions, providing a civic centre for the dense industrial slum.
The museum reflected this ambition. In its first location, as a prefabricated prototype, the structure had been clad in corrugated metal sheets. Wild designed a new brick enclosure and a raised, mosaic-tiled floor to anchor it in its current place. V&A’s classicist aspirations were suggested in the rhythm and registers of the façades, the use of stone courses and mosaic friezes. However, lack of funds prevented the construction of a front colonnade surrounded by pavilions, which Wild had envisaged. This left the building with unsatisfactory front-of-house provisions and an ambiguous physiognomy, more railway station than classicist temple.
In spite of its curtailed scope and eccentric location, the museum remained in operation as part of the V&A. In 1975, it was dedicated to V&A’s toys collection and began attracting a younger audience as the Museum of Childhood.
Caruso St John’s involvement with the building began from the inside out. A refurbishment stage familiarised them with the building’s operational shortcomings but also its intrinsic character. The original fabric of the building was revealed, with the iron structure re-painted a faint pink, reminiscent of Victorian interiors. A visual relationship was re-established between the mosaic floor’s original fish-scale pattern and the filigree trusses above. New displays were provided for the collection and the light levels re-adjusted.
Alongside with more efficient services and orientation, the new addition fulfils the original need for a representative foreground. Adding this structure on the existing façade was, in Peter St John’s words, a “brutal act,” softened by making it “more precious, more ornamental”. The project constantly oscillates between the practice’s contemporary discourse and responsiveness to Victorian sensibilities.
The addition stretches across the front of the existing building. A rectangular volume with a recessed entrance, it achieves a complex spatial proposition through the illusion of tectonic expression. The cladding visually re-enacts a loggia, with the red porphyry stone reminiscent of the colonnade. The impression of depth is contrasted by the flush façade that compresses windows and wall in one unbroken surface. The extension’s double height is visible from the sunken courtyards on both sides on more freely composed elevations, hinting to the concrete frame beneath.
If the sides are more revealing of the existing conditions, the front is all about representation. The access to the raised entry level is resolved as a slope of paving stones, whose concentric pattern has a subliminal funnel effect. The artificial topography mirrors the eventful entry to other Victorian institutions - a procession-like movement, imbued with physical presence.
This sense of the theatrical, while directly related to the historicist constructs of Victorians, belongs to a classical tradition dating back to Renaissance churches and the Golden Age of Roman architecture. Alberti’s Santa Maria Novella in Florence provided the model of a flat façade with elaborate coloured stone inlays, hiding a more ordinary construction. The laconic recess recalls the monumental withdrawn entrance of San Andrea in Mantua.
The addition’s frontality could easily lend it to an abstract or distorted use of decoration, acknowledging it as a wrapping. A playful surface pattern could have easily been justified as representative of the brief. However, the architectural statement resides precisely in the rejection of fashionable tendencies and simplistic programmatic interpretations. Caruso St John’s sophisticated use of ornament recreates in a serious manner Wild’s original intentions, the solemnity of a civic institution.
The stones, delivered cut on site, were assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, creating a thin, self-supporting wall that is clamped back to the concrete structure. Thus the old and new projects follow the same principles. The structure is clad in an independent skin, whose representational role is articulated by the use of ornament.
Internally an intense, if controlled, use of colour reflects the original character. Caruso St John expanded their palette with colours derived from Philip Webb’s Arts and Crafts interiors. Their use is deliberately architectural. The green foyer interior establishes a direct link to the mature trees outside, complementing the view. The anticipation of the airy roof structure in the main space dictated a lightweight, visually elaborate ceiling for the new foyer. The steel I-beams and MDF panel infills have an equivalent thickness, which painted yellow generate an ambiguous, paper-like effect. To introduce airiness to the mezzanine soffitt this too was painted with a delicate geometric configuration, replicating the dialogue between the original roof tracery and the terrazzo floor pattern in the main hall. These decisions relate implicitly to the contents of the building adding, in St John’s words, a sense of “measured exuberance.”
The relation between representation and programme takes us back to the contemporary justification of ornament. For Hans Georg Gadamer decoration implied a double mediation, attracting attention to itself only to reflect it back onto the world, to illuminate the life context of the architectural object.  Accordingly decoration cannot be justified aesthetically, as an end in itself, but only as the appropriate representation of the decorated object.
This insight applies here. Those decorations ambiguously poised between figurative and abstract, such as the terrazzo panels on the façade, can be seen to absorb too much of the viewers’ attention, bordering on aesthetic autonomy. Yet overall Caruso St John’s project is significant for its almost didactic use of ornament as something that points beyond itself, to the museum as a cultural and social asset. The building’s bespoke familiarity is at once provocative, dignified and affecting, offering the model of a principled re-interpretation of artistic motifs throughout history, a contemporary “cover version” of architectures past.

1  Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime (1929)," in Ornament and Crime. Selected Essays (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998), p 167.
 2 Christoph Grafe, Mark Pimlott, and Mechtild Stuhlmacher, "Editorial: Ornament," Oase, no. 65 (2004): p 2.
3  Karsten Harries, "Decoration and Decadence," in The Broken Frame (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989).
4 Adam Caruso, Peter St John, “Cover Versions,” in Cover Versions Exhibition Guide, Architectural Association Gallery, October-November 2005.
5 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum Publishing, 2004): 153.

Aus der Ausgabe 11-2007