"The Beautiful Necessity" by Claude Fayette Bragdon. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Claude Bragdon (1866-1946) was a first-generation modernist architect, as well as an illustrator, critic, theorist and theater designer. Bragdon practiced architecture in Rochester, New York throughout the Progressive Era. Although his masterpiece, the New York Central Railroad Station, was demolished in the 1960s-70s, the First Universalist Church, the Bevier Memorial Building, the Peterborough Bridge near Toronto, and nearly 100 residences remain today. A prolific and influential writer, Bragdon published more than twenty books and hundreds of articles. He was nationally known for his graphic art, his writing on the fourth dimension, his Song & Light Festivals of 1915-1918, and his role in theater's New Stagecraft. He had technical and artistic expertise in many disciplines, making it difficult to categorize his work into a specific stylistic trend. Bragdon's work as an early modernist is important both in its own right and as a key to other 20th Century architects' work. The book includes a complete bibliography of Bragdon's published work, a timeline and an index. Contributors: Eugenia Victoria Ellis, Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein, Marie Frank, Jean France, Joscelyn Godwin, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Christina Malathouni, Jonathan Massey, Mary Nixon, Joan Ockman, Andrea Reithmayr and Richard Guy Wilson.
Few Americans have had as many creative lives as Claude Bragdon who designed theatrical sets and churches, who dabbled in theosophy and the occult, who wrote about it all with spirit, passion, and penetrating insight. Here, in delightfully effervescent prose, Bragdon tells the story of his life-or lives. From his Personal Life ("Born under the constellation Leo, the heart sign, I was never long out of love") to his Occult Life ("I frightened [my mother] by declaring that I was the chosen vessel for the pouring out of a new revelation upon mankind"), Bragdon is surprisingly frank, frequently hilarious, and always wonderfully self-deprecating. First published in 1917, this is an intimate dispatch from a true American character. Other works by Bragdon available from Cosimo Classics: The Beautiful Necessity, Architecture and Democracy, Episodes from An Unwritten History, and A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension). American architect, stage designer, and writer CLAUDE FAYETTE BRAGDON (1866-1946) helped found the Rochester Architectural Club, in the city where he made his greatest mark as a building designer with structures including Rochester Central Station, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the First Universalist Church; he also designed Peterborough Bridge in Ontario. In later life, Bragdon worked on Broadway as scenic designer for 1930s productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Hamlet, among others.
Silence and stillness have the effect of conserving all the bodily forces usually wasted in unnecessary speech and action. You become for the first time conscious of the rhythmic flow of life's forces, and are able to hear the faint music they make on the harp of the body. -from "Silence" One of the most extraordinary figures of the popular intellectualism of the early 20th century, Claude Bragdon was an architect and designer who turned his mathematically fueled artistic bent toward the metaphysical. Here, in wise, insightful prose, Bragdon offers an introduction-first published in 1943-to the philosophy of yoga as an aid to expanding the human consciousness. From mastering the art of concentration to finding new depth in sexuality, this is a frank, perceptive call to rethink how we live our lives in the modern world. Other works by Bragdon available from Cosimo Classics: The Eternal Poles, Four-Dimensional Vistas, Projective Ornament, The Beautiful Necessity, Architecture and Democracy, Episodes from An Unwritten History, and A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension). American architect, stage designer, and writer CLAUDE FAYETTE BRAGDON (1866-1946) helped found the Rochester Architectural Club, in the city where he made his greatest mark as a building designer with structures including Rochester Central Station, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the First Universalist Church; he also designed Peterborough Bridge in Ontario. In later life, Bragdon worked on Broadway as scenic designer for 1930s productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Hamlet, among others.
Seven illustrated essays by a noted American builder of the early 20th century examine ancient and modern structures, offering a master class in the architectural union of art, beauty, and science.
The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and ‘30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment. The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss’s Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into “master builders,” these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension. By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular “superman” discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America’s propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.
