Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England. IN RESPONSE TO ORNAMENT Subject: response to your ornament number SIR: It is good to see the AR stirring up a debate on ornament, but what  an unreconstructed view of Modernism is shown by the participants!  They all seem to have assumed (a) that Modernists succeeded in  producing functional buildings, (b) that the pursuit of functions  necessarily excluded ornament, and (c) that Modernist buildings  therefore managed to avoid being ornamental. I would challenge all  three notions. Many modernist buildings were far from being efficiently functional,  not least those of Mies and his followers which avoided functional  specificity in the name of flexibility, ending up as jacks of all  trades and masters of none. On the other hand, those who pursued  functionalism most sincerely, like Hugo Häring, were not interested  merely in functional efficiency but rather in a kind of rhetoric: the  exploiting of functions to signal a building's identity. This could  be construed as less a case of opposition to ornament than a transfer  of ornament's role to larger scale building forms. Concerning the Modernists' presumed avoidance of ornament, Louis  Kahn's remark that 'ornament is the adoration of the joint' should be  warning enough: but who better than Carlo Scarpa to put that idea  into practice? The poetry of Scarpa's 'adored joints' reminds us of  the role of the craftsman, forced to display the manual skills of the  industrial age, but no longer allowed to express his own spirit,  obliged to follow the architect's drawing. Simultaneoulsy nostalgic  about the loss of direct making and anachronistic in the new age of  mass-production, Scarpa's work gave a new twist to Ruskin's still  resonant claim that to be valid, ornament has to be hand-made. Ornament, it seems to me, has two roles. One is about the  transmission of meaning through form by deliberate or accidental  association; the other is about the act of making, the nature of  materials and putting things together. Neither is altogether  avoidable in building, and both present architectural opportunities  which may be exploited or denied. PETER BLUNDELL JONES, Sheffield