The ornamented narrative: Heritage, decoration and city making

From Asmara’s Art Deco to Lagos’s modernism to Singapore’s colonial hotels, cities all over the world resound with the contested meanings of what newer, mobile populations do when they bring their influences of ‘home’ to placemaking. Should London be so different, given how its established diverse communities contribute to procuring the city through local and central taxes?

Where are the expressions of those heritages and at what scale? Could these go on to inform a new creative vitality shared by everyone but unique to its context, as happens in music, fashion and film?

Architecture Doing Place have been exploring expressions and accents of diaspora heritage through motif, emblem, decoration, artifice and ornament in city and place making. We are fascinated about their potential to extend all citizens’ ornamented spatial narrative and so reflect myriad private realms, psychologies and concerns. We believe meaning can mutate and transform in the visual vernacular as it does, for instance, in the adaptive poetry of urban language.

What would London look like if there was more authorship from a broader range of its inhabitants with different allusions, reference points and readings, alongside the established sensibilities?

Pathfinders Series
The Temple Bar Trust’s Pathfinders series showcases and celebrates architects and urban designers exploring issues of identity and meaning in their work. We place a focus on practitioners’ engagement of diverse communities, narratives and languages – resilient and equitable cultural drivers of placemaking for London in the 21st century as it transitions through the COVID crisis into a new era.

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