| This dissertation examines the interplay of mysticism and technology in modern architecture through a monographic study of the system of “projective ornament” developed in 1915 by American architect, artist, and writer Claude Bragdon (1866–1946). Bragdon reformulated the organicist tradition of Louis Sullivan based on new conceptions of nature drawn from mathematics, idealist philosophy, Theosophy, and emergent technologies of extrasensory perception. Uniting disparate intellectual, technological, and social currents under the dispensation of the fourth dimension of space, Bragdon disembodied to build in “four-space,” Bragdon engaged it through the tropes of idealist philosophy, in particular the figure of phenomenality as the play of shadows, or projections, on a screen. Assigning ornament to the two-dimensional space of the image and structure to the three-dimensional space of the body, he systematized the relation between ornament and structure in terms of G. F. B. Riemann's 1854 definition of space as a manifold of variable dimensionality.; Bragdon drew on 19th-century textile paradigms of architectural representation to extend architectural figuration of order to the new media and modes of visual representation that were increasingly taking over tasks previously performed by building. He used projective ornament to encompass new techniques such as advertising graphics, x-ray imagery, electric signage, and film. Projective ornament also reflected Bragdon's spiritualized apprehension of the new experience of space and time inaugurated by electric communication technologies such as telephone, telegraph, and radio. By rendering projective ornament in colored patterns of electric light through a range of image technologies and electric media, Bragdon heralded an impending four-dimensional “involution,” a mystical concept describing an ethereal, higher-dimensional unification of consciousness. Bragdon's work helped to shape a range of subsequent modernisms that integrated mystical thinking into their apprehension of new technologies. By demonstrating that Bragdon's treatment of ornament, geometric formal vocabulary, and projection technique were integral to R. Buckminster Fuller's development of geodesics, I trace the survival of early-20th-century hyperspace philosophy and involutionary discourse in the mid-century mythos of cybernetic organization. |
