`Ornamentation,’ says Ruskin, `is the principal part of architecture.’ It is that part, he says in another place, which impresses on a building `certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary.” Sir George Gilbert Scott amplified this surprising statement when he recommended to architects the use of the Gothic style, because its `great principle is to decorate construction.’
Modern movement has not grown from one root. One of its essential sources, it has been shown, is William Morris and the Arts and Crafts; another was Art Nouveau. The works of the nineteenth-century engineers are the third source of our present style, a source as potent as the other two.
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Engineering architecture in the nineteenth century was largely based on the development of iron, first as cast iron, then as wrought iron, later as steel. Towards the end of the century, reinforced concrete appears as an alternative.
The history of iron as a material of more than auxiliary usefulness in architecture begins when the inventiveness of the Industrial Revolution had found out how iron could be produced industrially, that is after 1750.p118
Morris was the first artist (not the first thinker, for Ruskin had preceded him) to realize how precarious and decayed the social foundations of art had become during the centuries since the Renaissance, and especially during the years since Industrial Revolution.
He had been trained as an architect and as a painter, first in the Gothic studio of street, and then in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites. But when in 1857he had to furnish his first studio in London, the thought struck him that before one can settle down to paint elevating pictures, one must be able to live in congenial surround…
….’ p 148
It is known that everywhere in English culture life a longing fresh air and gaiety expressed itself at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign.
The success of Liberty’s about 1890 depended largely on the Eastern silks in delicate shades and the other Chinese imports. The history of the part played by china and Japan in European art since 1860 has not yet been written. It would be very interesting to show the influence of the East appearing here in loose technique of painting, there in the greatest finesse of line and contours, there again in clear, soft, and pure colour, and yet other works in flat pattern effects. Owing to the unique synthesis of ornamental and `Impressionist’ qualities in Eastern art, both Impressionist and, at the opposite pole, the originators of Art Nouveau, could use what Japanese woodcuts and Chinese pottery had to teach them. P 150
