The symposium Natures of Ornament is convened as a Festschrift, in celebration of Kent Bloomer’s indispensable intellectual and pedagogical contribution to the Yale School of Architecture over the last fifty years. Bloomer’s dedication to the design and thinking of ornament in architecture has influenced academics, collaborators, and students that include architects, historians, musicians, artists, philosophers, and biologists, among others, many of whom will come together to explore the diverse meaning of ornament in contemporary discourses. What links ornament to the broader human sciences and the natural world? What are ornament’s theoretical stakes in the intellectual and material history of our own discipline? What is ornament’s place in the pedagogy of architectural education, its methods and practices? In addressing these questions, the symposium aims to reorient the discourse of ornament from a contentious vestige of modernity toward its active relationship to architecture, landscape, urbanism, and sense of place in the world.