| Summary: | While the return of the ornament to architecture is not an altogether recent phenomenon, it seems that in the last two decades some transformations in architectural conceptualisation have offered it new incentives. This "comeback" has also been favored by a rich historiographical context, emphasizing the fruitfulness of theories of ornament from the second half of the nineteenth century. This article elaborates the hypothesis that these theories can help to elaborate an analytical apparatus useful to the understanding of contemporary works. Indeed, they offer conceptual tools that are applicable to a vast variety of productions. Nourished by pedagogical ambitions and motivated by a context of esthetic uncertainty, these works question recent technological evolutions, changes in the field of materials, and interactions between the functional, technical and symbolical aspects of forms. The analysis of the use of ornament by several contemporary architects brings to the fore the resurgence of an architectural poetics that has to do with constructive motives and with their memorial potential.
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