Charles Robert Cockerell's architecture and the language of ornaments

Abstract

As a defining feature of the architecture of C. R. Cockerell (1788–1863) in an age dominated by historicism, his classical allegiance remains secondary to his conception of ornaments in his attempts to balance the reciprocity of history and human inventiveness. According to Cockerell, ornaments compounded representative and communicative rôles. This dual consideration of ornaments can be traced to two prevailing analogies: the book metaphor and the language metaphor. The analogy between architecture and the book primarily concerned the representative rôle of architecture as a bearer of meaning. In the age of printing, this comparison also brought issues of legibility and accessibility to the fore. In the face of the fast and far-reaching dissemination of books, Cockerell adopted a kinetic approach to architectural legibility. Searching a contemporary language that preserved the rôle of architecture as a cultural signifier, Cockerell attempted to democratise traditional symbolism by emphasising participatory movement and the rôle of immediate experience. Interested in ornaments that successfully communicated their expressive content to a wide audience, he reformulated the rhetorician's distinction between res and verba and approached ornament as life-bearing elements that effectively activated architecture. Studying Cockerell's approach to ornament as it emerged in his Royal Academy lectures and his architecture, the present paper reveals a two-hundred-year-old conception of architecture as action.