AFA 18th Anniversary

18th Anniversary 110 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Wharton and Codman spent less than a few pages on the topic of color, which would be unthinkable in any literature on decoration today. Oftentimes, improving a room’s structure with good details is impossible, and color can be a most helpful decorating component. In this living area, bright squares of color were painted as backdrops to anchor groups of furniture. creating a void that was quickly filled by suppliers of voluminous curtains, tufted furniture, and bric-a-brac. In reaction, our authors proclaimed that interior architecture was not a branch of the upholsterer’s art. Also, they were writing in the midst of a widespread classical revival, just after the watershed of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the construction of fine municipal buildings across the country. As seen in city halls, public libraries, and state capitols, the classical vocabulary became, in many ways, the language of democracy. It’s true that their ideas for improving certain rooms, such as residential school rooms and ballrooms, may only be marginally useful to us in the early twenty-first century. Though some of their advice pertains to a lost world, they struck a chord that still resonates today, despite the dominant hold that modernism has on many. Wharton and Codman’s book is an elegantly stated argument about the primacy of function, quality, and simplicity, derived from the ancient tradition of classical design. Sometimes their prose, to contemporary ears, is a tad arch and vinegary, but that is one of the joys of the book. It’s worth quoting a still-relevant passage: Thus all good architecture and good decoration (which, it must never be forgotten, is only interior architecture) must be based on