Word: ornamentation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...obscures the point of a brave, passionate and highly entertaining work of art. In the best movies, style reflects substance. And in this story of a wealthy man in 1920s China and the four women he keeps in pampered imprisonment, the decor underlines the sad fable of Woman as ornament. As the heroine says, "I'm just one of the master's robes. He can wear it or take...
...joint, said the American architect Louis Kahn, was the beginning of all ornament. Puryear's work accepts and celebrates this. In Thicket, 1990, his intersections run free variations on the notching, lapping and tenoning of practical carpentry in order to generate a curved form with straight balks of pine. The mysterious dark, shiny lump of Self, 1978, is one of those forms that would be banal in fiber glass or even bronze; but it is made of laminated and coopered wood, and its variations of sanding and cutting, the slight bumps and dimples of the black-painted skin, give...
...sure enough, he used it in his seminal book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, to describe one of his early buildings. Complexity and Contradiction was a galvanizing manifesto, liberating architects from Modernist, minimalist dogma. "Less is a bore," Venturi declared, meaning that it was time to begin using ornament in buildings again. And also, "Main Street is almost all right," meaning that familiar, off-the-shelf architectural forms also deserved to be revived. The past could be a rich source of inspiration for contemporary architects. Relax, Venturi told his snobbish profession, and enjoy the old-fashioned gewgaws, the color, even...
...similar conception brings together the 70 essays that make up the 550 pages of The Architecture of Western Gardens. The subject could easily lend itself to the production of a glorified coffee-table ornament, but Mosser and Teyssot have compiled a serious and dizzyingly erudite work that investigates both traditional areas of scholarly endeavor and more novel topics...
Pioneering Postmodernist Robert Venturi is still given to architectural wisecracks -- an ironic use of old-fashioned forms, a cartoony application of , classical ornament -- but for this most important job of his career, he (and partner Denise Scott Brown) behaved just enough. The new wing can speak the decorous language of the old museum: the facade is the same limestone block; the galleries, naturally lit John Soane-ish spaces. But the design is also quietly irreverent: pilasters, above, pile up on one another like so much extruded Play-Doh, and the Tuscan columns inside are impossibly faux...