Word: ornamentalism
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...result is visual gobbledygook. An example is the new crop of "postmodern" buildings. They are three-dimensional collages of discrepant ornament and styles. The design of most new interiors, furniture, cars, appliances and printed matter also continues to follow ill-mannered fads rather than good form. A confusion of design with mere styling, packaging or form-giving still haunts our culture...
...revolves around "movements" and historical groupings, a kind of seraphic misfit. He was not a joiner moved nowhere, did a little teaching, and spent most of the last 45 years of his life in a slightly musty, secluded flat in Bologna, the red-brick provincial city whose reluctant cultural ornament he had become. In all his life he stepped out of Italy only to cross the border for a few brief trips into nearby parts of Switzerland. Il Monaco, one critic nicknamed him, the Monk: a big heavy man, gray on gray, shuffling between the dark outmoded tall-boys, painting...
...International Style. The Grid, the load-bearing frame and light skin of the new buildings, came to Europe from the Chicago School, whose leader was Louis Sullivan. The Bauhaus ideal of the open plan was transmitted to Germany by Frank Lloyd Wright. Adolf Loos' messianic rejection of ornament in the early 1900s, which became such a fetish with the International Stylists, came straight out of his infatuation with American machine culture. Le Corbusier derived a good deal of his architectural syntax from the "functional" shapes of American grain elevators, docks and airplanes. And when European modernists in the early...
...position with real life, a little exalted and, at the same time, perpetually risking compromise. Cautionary romances, like William Wyler's 1953 film Roman Holiday, have alerted us to the restrictive, hermetic and sometimes suffocating side of royal life. A princess is required to be both an ornament and an exemplar, a rarefied high-wire act that calls for a lot more skill than a good sense of balance. Everyone waits for a false step, and there are even some who will shake the wire. Diana's older sister, Lady Sarah, was an earlier entrant in the nuptial...
...JIMMY said signs held by several people in the crowd of a thousand who greeted the President and his wife at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Ga. At Plains, they received an even warmer welcome from some 200 friends and neighbors. A boy gave Carter a Christmas tree ornament-a glass mouse. Several women kissed him. Then, grinning shyly and wiping lipstick from his cheek, Jimmy took Rosalynn's hand and they walked up the drive to their home...