This absorbing study surveys the developments in decorative design from the 1830s to the 1950s, showing how the modern age has affected the status of decoration and examining the role of ornament in a rapidly changing industrial society. Arranged in three sections, the book opens with an introductory essay which looks at the cultural background of the discourse of decoration, bringing into play two major strands of decorative theory, and looking at the changing natures of modernism and traditionalism. The central section of the book is composed of pictorial examples, arranged in order of...

A study of the effects upon design, principally architecture, of the Reformation and the associated rejection of imagery in worship. The Plain Style examines both the development of aesthetic theory and its practical applications in a number of different environments. The Author traces the way in which ideas about simplicity, clarity and lack of ornamentation expressed themselves in art and architecture, and uses an extensive range of examples, from the British Isles, and particularly Northern Ireland, and from North America. In doing so he shows how Protestant, and especially iconoclastic...

Between 1896 and 1906, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 1928) produced a series of buildings and interiors in and around Glasgow of such startling invention that he immediately established himself as one of the truly great figures in early twentieth-century architecture and design. David Brett argues that Mackintosh's originality was grounded in a highly subjective "poetics of workmanship," in which the structure, features, interiors and furnishings of each individual building became subject to a unifying system of forms, metaphors and unconscious associations. The system Mackintosh evolved...