Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, and the Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in the class of Spring 2016. Papapetros’ Academy project, “World Ornament,” examines bodily and architectural adornment in the work of the German architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), who understood ornament as a means of attuning humans with the cosmos. From the 1850s until the early twentieth century, Semper’s ideas, Papapetros argues, gained increased currency; ornament came to be seen as having the ability to reunite a world ruptured by cultural, political, and ethnic divisions.