COVER PAGE Dr Christina Malathouni Lecturer in Architecture School of Architecture University of Liverpool Abercromby Square Liverpool, L69 7ZN United Kingdom www.liverpool.ac.uk/architecture E-mail:
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[email protected] Telephone: +44 (0)151 795 0639 Biographical note Dr Christina Malathouni is Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, UK. She is a qualified architect and holds a PhD from The Bartlett, UCL, UK. Her research focuses on the early history and cross-disciplinary origins of the notion of “architectural space”. Publications include articles in: Architecture and the Unconscious (Hendrix and Holm, eds.; 2016); The Journal of Architecture (2013); Claude Bragdon and The Beautiful Necessity (Ellis and Reithmayr, eds.; 2010); and From Models to Drawings (Frascari et al, eds.; 2007). Dr Malathouni also specialises in twentieth-century architectural heritage. She is full member of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation (UK) and associate member of ICOMOS’s International Scientific Committee on 20th-century Heritage. TITLE PAGE WITH ABSTRACT Claude Bragdon’s “Projective Ornament”: mineral, vegetable, animal, human Abstract This paper discusses the work of the American architect, mystic and theorist Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866—1946). It focuses on his “Projective Ornament” which, it is argued, puts forward a “higher” type of “organicism” that adds a fourth “step” – that of the human – to earlier theories that presented minerals, vegetables and animals as part of an evolutionary, hierarchical sequence. In this connection, Bragdon’s theories can be seen to develop a new type of “humanist” architecture that relates to the full scope of human nature, namely, embracing human consciousness, psychological attributes and spiritual qualities as well as its embodied presence.