I ordered this book when a friend of mine went to see the last exhibition of Tauba Auerbach in New York. He thinks that she is one of the most important American artist today so I decided to take a look at her first inspiration : Beautiful Necessity by  the American architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon.

Using Bragdon’s methodology as a point of departure, Auerbach empowers projective geometry, recasting Ornament as Instrument.

I am myself as an architect very close to Adolf Loos (in his essay “Ornament and Crime“), his chief antagonist, who describes ornament as a sign of wasted time and a marker of evolutionary lag but what  I understand from reading this book is that Bragdon engaged with the argument by proposing that architects put aside historical and natural pastiche and look to geometry for a new style of decoration.

Link to Bragdon work here :

http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/g/geom/cb.htm

Picture of Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition,  taken by my Friend S.I in NY last Januray 2016.