Ornament: A Modern Perspective

Modernism never managed to kill off ornament completely, but it did cause massive trauma to the historical vocabularies of architecture. Trilling, like many, likes historical ornament, and has written this here book to talk about why ornament has for the most part gone the way of the dodo. I read the intro, skimmed the first half, and read the second half. He focuses on analyzing the various theories and writers, along with exploring some of the pyschological reasons modernism jettisoned ornament. All in all, I found it interesting and pretty good, but thats probably because I am interested in this very specific topic. This book is probably for architectural historians and students only, though anyone interested in the history of design might find it interesting.