Word: ornamentalism
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...Personal Ornament and the Gilded Age--Neil Harris. Downstairs seminar room, Robinson Hall...
...named, in 1976, postmodernism was just revealing its jolly don's face to the world. The newly anointed 40 (54 men and women, in fact, eight of whom are 40 or older) tend strikingly in a different direction: stripped-down, scrupulous, refined but seldom fancy, unafraid of ornament but almost never giddy. There is an unabashedness about construction and materials, but this lightly worn constructivism is a matter of instinct, not doctrine. Much of the new generation's architecture recalls the best buildings of the 1910s and '20s, buildings on the cusp between the neoclassical and the modern -- early, excitingly...
...highlight of the mission for Chief Archaeologist Scott Sledge, 38, was the discovery of a brass regimental facing plate, a shieldlike ornament from a soldier's bearskin cap, with the word royal clearly distinguishable. After gingerly brushing away some silt, Sledge recalls, "I came across something shiny right underneath." It was embedded in the surrounding coral, which he had to chip away carefully. Just as he was about to give up for the day and return to the surface, the plate loosened, and he was able to slide it out of the coral in perfect condition. Says Sledge: "That...
...clarity and balance just after the century turned, an aesthetic blip that coincided with the fruitful first few years of the Werkstatte. Hoffmann, Moser and its other founders, repelled by the residual fairy-tale flourishes of aging Jugendstil (literally, Youth Style, the German Art Nouveau), sloughed off applied ornament and embraced elemental geometries -- the right angle, the circle, the sphere. In his thoughtful, gracefully written catalog for MOMA, Adjunct Curator Kirk Varnadoe says that Moser and Hoffmann were out "to recover richness from reduction." The result, briefly, was a deluxe austerity, furniture and objects stripped down and spare but still...
...stick rather intently to a naked neoclassicism. His supposed apotheosis, the Palais Stoclet (1905-11), is handsome in elevation but ponderously classical in plan and, in all, fussy and overrich. Loos used lavish materials too, but with a redeeming simplicity. He was a hard-liner about tarting up facades: "Ornament equals crime," he wrote. And though Loos' polemical celebration of yeoman-like unoriginality was a bit disingenuous, his own architecture -- as in the controversial Goldman & Salatsch building -- was indeed relaxed, restrained, simple-seeming...