Word: ornament
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...every piece, Memphis impudently employs the twin taboos of modernism: pattern and ornament. Many are covered with vividly hued plastic laminate or sport metallic-threaded fabrics, and some are decorated with colored light bulbs. Los Angeles Designer Peter Shire's ironing-board-shaped table, Brazil, is finished in sea green, pink and yellow lacquer. It could serve as an animated cartoon prop, the perfect background for Tom and Jerry. Memphis Founder Ettore Sottsass Jr. has gone further. His Park Lane'coffee table is strictly from Oz: a giant black marble aspirin resting on delicate emerald green feet...
...background of burbling saxophones, or punching out Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn's Five Minutes More in front of some antiphonal spitfire trumpets that would have made Gabrieli gladly forsake San Marco for the recording studio, Sinatra is a master of mood and vocal nuance. He can ornament a line, subtly altering its rhythm, or bend just a single note to startlingly expressive purpose; he sings the first word of Just One of Those Things with a momentarily indeterminate pitch that colors the entire song with tantalizing emotional ambiguity. As evoked by Sinatra on I Love Paris, the city...
...reject the "form" of modern design. It is the materials that they resist. People want objects that reflect warmth, texture and the patina that develops with use. These qualities are found in wood, not chrome, glass and polyvinyl. As a cabinetmaker, I believe that it is not ornament that is demanded, but natural materials and some evidence that a human hand has touched the piece...
...exhibition presents a world born in illusion and doomed to confusion. Modern design began with the notion that artists and craftsmen, rather than technicians, should shape products made by machines, giving beautiful form to rational function, "liberating" the toiling masses from the "crime" of ornament and clutter. By 1945, Bauhaus idealism was established in the U.S. Textile Designer Jack Lenor Larsen writes that the movement became "a cause, allied with the optimism of a world to be made over in the light of the Four Freedoms. The solution was so simple and clear-and naive...
...scale. Although some Prairie School designs appear monumental, they are still comfortably related to the mortals who view them and use them. Wright, a short man, managed to give grandeur to a chair or a room or a house without intimidating us with its size. Nor does Prairie School ornament appear in the self-conscious manner in which post-modernists now glue or paint it on their designs. Wright and the Prairie School's precise geometric decorations-the leading on the glass, the pattern of brick and wood panels and curtains, the carvings of wood or stone-all seem...