The tender detail : ornament and sentimentality in the architecture of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The tender detail : ornament and sentimentality in the architecture of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022
- : pbk
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Note
"First published in Great Britain 2020"--T.p. verso
"Paperback edition first published in Great Britain, 2022"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. [256]-267) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The Tender Detail tells a story about repression, sentimentality, sexuality, and ornament in architecture. The protagonists are Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, two of the most important architects and designers in American history.
Interweaving close readings of their buildings and writings with wide-ranging discussions across the fields of architecture, sexuality, gender, and philosophy, the book explores how both men worked to solve the problem of ornamentation. It shows how their solutions, while widely different, were both intimately rooted in the tender emotions of sentimentality. Viewing ornament in this way sheds new light on Sullivan and Wright’s artistic intentions, and reveals much about the role of affect, the value of beauty in architecture, and the agency and ontology of objects.
Illuminated by personal stories from their respective autobiographies, which add a level of human interest unusual in an academic work, The Tender Detail is a readable and rigorous architectural history which sheds fresh light on Sullivan and Wright’s relationship, their work, and on the nature of ornament itself.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Introduction: Frank Lloyd Wright, “sentimentalizing over the dead”
Part One: Louis H. Sullivan
2 “the plastic decorations are distinctly architectural in conception”
3 “that object he became”
4 “feminity”
Part Two: Frank Lloyd Wright
5 “no damned sentimentality either”
6 “Integral Ornament at Last”
7 “‘like a man’”
Part Three: Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright
8 “that supreme erotic adventure of the mind”
9 Ornament “purely as such”
10 Epilogue: “when we are dead”
Bibliography
Index
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