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Ruskin's concerted effort to subsume ornament within architecture, condemned as it teas by modernist critics and scholars alike, was a strategic move to exert greater control over ornament. His hope was to overcome the inconsistencies and paradoxes in those aesthetic theories that choose the path of marginalization or exclusion of ornamentation. Nevertheless, his attempt to domesticate ornament eventually encounters the same inconsistencies and paradoxes it had hoped to resolve, the problem. I point out, is not ornament. Rather it is what architecture is desired and presumed to be: an autonomous, self-referential aesthetic object At stake in the domestication and/or marginalization of ornamentation is the power to sustain the pervasive and persuasive illusion of architecture's autonomy that ornamentation, domesticated and/or marginalized, sustains and denies at once.

Focusing on the influential 18th century text by Marc-Antoine Laugier—“Essay on Architecture”—what I trace in this essay is a certain affinity between ornamentation and theoretical writing on architecture. What I point out is that not only does theory play the same supplemental role with respect to its subject as ornamentation is said to play with respect to the aesthetic object, but also, the same paradoxes and inconsistencies that permeate the historic marginalization of ornamentation in architecture, permeate the self-marginalization of theoretical writing on architecture.