The Grammar Of Ornament

Ornaments are omnipresent ? they can be found on buildings, fabrics, jewelry, tiles, ceramics and wallpaper. Scorned at the beginning of the modern age, ornament has long since returned to architecture and influences design drafts as much as tattoo motifs.00In New Grammar of Ornaments, Thomas Weil compares current ornamental objects with the results of archaeological research on ornamental artifacts and concludes that there is an anthropological constant. From the recurring arrangements of stripes, rectangles, triangles and dots and the frequency of the forms of floral ornaments used, he derives a new ?grammar of ornament.?00More than 160 years after Owen Jones' influential publication, New Grammar of Ornaments is a new standard work. It categorizes the variety of ornamental forms used worldwide and for the first time places them in a major art and cultural-historical context.

A complete and unabridged full-color edition of the classic sourcebook on ornamental design First published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament remains a design classic. Its inspiration came from pioneering British architect and designer Owen Jones (1809–1874), who produced a comprehensive design treatise for the machine age, lavishly illustrated in vivid chromolithographic color. Jones made detailed observations of decorative arts on his travels in Europe, the Middle East, and in his native London, where he studied objects on display at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 and at local museums. His aim was to improve the quality of Western design by changing the habits of Victorian designers, who indiscriminately mixed elements from a wide variety of sources. Jones's resulting study is a comprehensive analysis of styles of ornamental design, presenting key examples ranging from Maori tattoos, Egyptian columns, and Greek borders to Byzantine mosaic, Indian embroidery, and Elizabethan carvings. At once splendidly Victorian and insistently modern, The Grammar of Ornament celebrates objects of beauty from across time periods and continents, and remains an indispensable sourcebook today.