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In 1946, House Beautiful's editor-in-chief Elizabeth Gordon launched the Pace Setter House Program, an annual series of exhibition houses that proposed a new modern architecture for postwar America. Set in direct opposition to Arts & Architecture's Case Study Houses, the Pace Setter houses criticized orthodox modernism, and offered a "livable" and distinctly American alternative. Organic design, particularly the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, further informed this new concept of American modernism, adding a rich layer of humanism, naturalism, and democratic idealism. Rejecting the Case Study prototype of universal solutions and prefabrication, the Pace Setter houses advocated a solution in which the craft of building guaranteed regional variation, artistic quality and individual expression. House Beautiful's Pace Setter Program, with its implicit organic roots, underscored one of the most charged architectural debates of the postwar period: the renewed tension between the specific and the general, the regional and the international, the individual and the collective. With the establishment of the Pace Setter House Program, Gordon developed a mature paradigm for the postwar house -- and simultaneously created a dynamic public forum for architectural debate. With the Pace Setters as counterpoint, she lashed out against the architectural current to attack what she viewed as the greatest threat to American design: the unlivable, autocratic, and foreign modernism of the International Style. Gordon's role in the larger architectural debate was critical, not only in her vociferous opposition to what she viewed as a blind continuation of an oppressive modernist lineage, but in her stalwart support of alternative design tropes. The Pace Setter Houses and their architects -- ranging from Cliff May to Alfred Browning Parker to Harwell Harris -- represented one battlefield in the aesthetic and philosophical struggle between the emerging modernisms of the postwar period. Accompanied by Gordon's insistent voice and publications, the Pace Setters became ammunition in an architectural revolution that, for House Beautiful, lasted nearly twenty years. The Pace Setters chronicled the emergence of a vital strand of American modernism, and provided a lens through which to view the ultimate integration and acceptance of modernism within the mainstream of middle-class America.

This document is an examination of the millwork industry in the nineteenth century and its influence upon the residential built environment. This study explores influences and results in relation to the development of millwork in the United States. The first is the technological divergence that developed between the United States and Europe, as America introduced different technologies to exploit the vast amounts of timber accessible to the New World. The second development occurred as the New World slowly developed a taste for the type of elaborate millwork previously associated with wealthy patrons. Low cost of materials and new technologies made more complicated wood finishes available to those of modest means. The third situation reflects the struggle between an elite class of architects and pattern book designers, who advocated restraint in design, and carpenter-builders and their clients, who wanted to display their talent or status through the use of a high level of ornamental millwork. / Department of Architecture

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This study looks at the degree to which Emile Galle's theories of symbolic ornamentation are observed in contemporary landscape architecture design. Galle's theories consist of three components: the first relates to the functional aspects of design, and the last two relate to the aesthetic aspects. These three components are used to evaluate three case studies. In the case studies, Bicentennial Commons in Cincinnati and Canal Walk in Indianapolis show a partial though apparent utilization of Galle's theories, while Riverwalk in Milwaukee comes closest of the three to demonstrating the application of Galle's theories in Landscape Architecture. However, none fully exhibit Galle's theories. Nonetheless, the case studies, and in particular Riverwalk, exhibit the initial stages of a renewed interest in ornamentation in which culture is symbolically represented through nature. Landscape Architects, more than ever, are being called upon to embody the meaning of the land through a cultural synthesis in an expression of past/present and man/nature. / Department of Landscape Architecture