Name/Title
DECORATIVE TRADITIONEntry/Object ID
2025.100.1Description
Victorians delighted in variety, color, symbolic expression - the antithesis of the cold glass and steel modern aesthetic of today. Buildings, both homes and offices, were designed to function for utilitarian and pleasant purposes. To satisty this dual need, an enormous range of ornament, much of high quality, was produced by machine in England.
The Decorative Tradition surveys and evaluates this extraordinary English heritage, shared also in the United States, in a definitive, resourceful manner. As this book shows, the Victorians used the machine to produce decorative detail quickly and cheaply - hoping in this way to mitigate the grimmer aspects of the 19th-century industrial city.
That such decoration eventually produced excess is not disputed. But equally it is clear now that the modern movement went too far in the opposite direction.
People plainly do not like the kind of architecture that has emerged from the rejection of ornament - the stained concrete hulks, the windy plazas, the bleak uniformity of precast components.
And today's message of a hostility, expressed in vandalism and neglect, can no longer be ignored.
We cannot, of course, go back to Victorian architecture as such. But by showing how a humanly satisfying architectural style emerged from a time that was akin to ours in combining great social stresses with rich technical possibilities, it is feasible to offer some suggestions for what kind of decorative expression might be valid in the last years of our century.
Only by finding it, Julian Barnard argues, can architecture make its way back to being an art in which the public can participate visually.
The models of another age are all here
- in 350 black and white illustrations of excellent quality. In combination with a most readable text, they present the reader with a unique and valuable lesson from history.
Julian Barnard was educated at the West of England College of Art and the Architectural Association, London. He is the author of Victorian Ceramic Tiles and many articles on Victorian art and design.Create Date
May 24, 2025