Kent C. Bloomer
“[The Greeks] called it KOSMOS which means ornament.”
The title is a statement quoted from a translation of The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 615-630 AD. My talk will propose that the content of ornament is primordially derived from the eternal motions found in the macrocosm, a cosmology of ornament that looks beyond the extreme subjectivity that dominated modern art in the late 20th century. My findings are rooted in the history and major theories of ornament to be buttressed by examples of ornament-design throughout the ages. I will also review my own work in that light.
Kent Bloomer, founder of Bloomer Studio and Professor on the Faculty of Architecture at Yale. After physics and architecture at MIT, he studied sculpture at Yale, MFA, 1961. Mr. Bloomer has lectured at universities internationally as well as the British Psychoanalytic Society, Graham Foundation, Chicago, and American Craft Museum, New York City. His work has been exhibited widely, including MOMA in New York and is in permanent collections such as the Hirshhorn, Yale, and Carnegie Museum. He designed the lamps of Central Park. Large-scale ornament includes a trellis for the Reagan Airport, roof sculptures on the new Chicago Library, cresting-horse for the GPRA monument, Nebraska, the atrium of the Slover Library in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the principal author, with Charles Moore, of Body, Memory, and Architecture, Yale, 1977, author of The Nature of Ornament, Norton, 2000, and chapters in books on architects Charles Moore, Turner Brooks, and Robert Kerr.