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Tools & Craft #71: The Casual Decoration of Objects Before the 1930s

The vocabulary of ornament contains many different elements of design, all of which have been used at one time or another to decorate objects. The most obvious are the basic ogee and cove moldings we find on furniture and architectural items going back centuries. Other bits of that vocabulary include Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns which date back to Roman and Greek times. We don’t call those elements “classic” without cause.

The Tudor Rose is another classic bit of decoration dating from at least the 16th century and the Tudor Dynasty (1485 - 1603) - Henry VII - Elizabeth I. The photo below is of a tudor rose I carved following instructions in E. J. Tangermans wonderful book “Whittling and Woodcarving”. I just did the one but the design is a standard decoration that you routinely see in rows and rows all over Tudor and Neo-Tudor era buildings.

Up until the 1920’s when architecture became more about the overall silhouette of a building (IE the scale model of the building could impress a client) than the details (the things that catch our eye on a daily basis) buildings and furniture were covered in all sorts of decoration. Below you have a picture of a random older school building with really wonderful carved scrollwork at the entrance.

So here I am, on my way to the Museum of the City of New York (entry on that forthcoming) and I am standing in the IRT Union Square station - built in 1904 - and I noticed that in a cast lintel supporting a staircase we have a modified Tudor Rose (top picture). There is absolutely no reason for the rose to be there. You can even say that the decoration is inconsistent with the surrounding area, but them 1904 station builders could not resist. The detail is cast in, so it doesn’t cost much to do. It is an exposed surface, so why the heck not decorate it. And what we end up with is a late Victorian subway station with their take on a sixteenth century design element. And if that’s not cool I don’t know what is!

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This “Tools & Craft” section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.