Word: ornamental
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...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...
...that opened last week at New York City's Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's national museum of design. The exhibition, which will run until Dec. 31, is an almost intimately informal survey of Wright's brilliant beginnings, from his tracing of a Louis Sullivan ornament in 1892 to his drawings for the Dorothy Martin Foster House in Buffalo in 1923, which marked a new direction in his work...
...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...
...highly developed sense of individual rights, social harmony, not personal justice, is the basis of their law. Litigation, never common, has actually decreased during the past 15 years. As the distinguished jurist Takenori Kawashima wrote in 1967, "We think of the law as a hereditary family sword . . . an ornament rather than a means for enforcing the power of the government to control the daily life of our society...
...mere celebrity. But the third was, quite simply, his ability to communicate his enthusiasm freshly and directly. At his best, as in his texts on Leonardo and Piero della Francesca, and parts of The Nude and Looking at Pictures, he had a lovely, supple prose style, short on ornament and full of sense, that guided the neophyte to the heart of the work...