ABSTRACT
As an integral part of architectural aesthetics, decoration allows attention to focus on moments of meaningful impact, it forms part of a fluctuation in attention with ornament. Maximum attention requires a diffusion of all peripheral stimuli, where maximum diffusion can allow attention to drift toward aspects that would typically be passed over. Architecture knows this, as it modulates and manipulates attention within the environment through aesthetics, beginning with its rendering of images. The primary function of the mosaique is the manipulation of attention. The discussion of ornament and decoration that follows is particular to the aesthetic discourse of nineteenth and twenty-first century European modernism. Decoration fills in the space left over by ornament. It is largely “received in a state of distraction and through the collective.” Distraction has long been part of human culture, typically registered alongside the disruptive acceleration of media technologies.
