Glenn Adamson argues that “the decorative,” as a concept, "suggests a fundamental way of thinking about form which has invited comment from many quarters, not only in design discourse, but in also in fields as diverse as architecture, art, rhetoric, and philosophy. Ornament’s many guises—as supplement, didactic sign, instance of base materiality, zone of animism, and so forth—make it an outstandingly flexible term"
"the founders of design history were very much historians of decoration—people like Gottfried Semper, Owen Jones, and Alois Riegl. But today it is art and architectural historians, rather than design historians, who have claimed these figures as their own intellectual forebears—and here I am thinking of scholars like Margaret Olin, Michael Ann Holly, or Kenneth Frampton."